"Disenchantment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crescent spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam was the favorite poet of many of us, that introspection, which sometimes deepened into pessimism, was in vogue, and that a spiritual or philosophic languorous disenchantment sicklied o'er the somewhat mottled cast ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... which charms those who do not look at it too closely into ardent championship. Even Mr. Russell, so long as he looked into white faces in South Carolina, was fascinated, and only when he came to look into black faces along the Mississippi found the disenchantment. The decisive difference is, that the North is purposing to settle and possess this land according to the law of right, and the South according to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... half her vast estates, ended in a brief reunion. A secret marriage, a swift discovery that her idol was of very common clay, abuse so violent that she was obliged to forbid him forever her presence, and the disenchantment was complete. The sad remnant of her existence was devoted to literature and to conversation; the latter she regarded as "the greatest pleasure in life, and almost the only one." When she died, the Count de Lauzun wore the deepest mourning, had portraits of her everywhere, and adopted ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... a discerning taste. But his general air, none the less,—the expression of his figure and his motions, as well as of his face and voice,—was somehow that of an indolent melancholy, a kind of unresentful disenchantment, as if he had long ago perceived that cakes are mostly dough, and had accommodated himself to the perception with a regret that ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... with a gross complacency. At last Love awakes and looks about him; find his hero sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and, in the flash of that first disenchantment, flees ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with which to enjoy the gathered sweetness. Haste in cooking the dinner has destroyed the appetite. We are told that "moderation and poise are the secrets of all successful art," as they are of all successful life. Give the rein to appetite and passion, and satiety, disenchantment, and the grave quickly come. Health, happiness, and character are through restraint. Thus truly, habit and trait in the individual or the generation become a mark in the body that is the revelator ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... morning; now he had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and looked long in the face of the sleeping Huish, drinking disenchantment and distaste of life. He nauseated himself with that vile countenance. Could the thing continue? What bound him now? Had he no rights?—only the obligation to go on, without discharge or furlough, bearing the unbearable? Ich trage unertraegliches, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... money. But the love inspired or bestowed by a woman disinherited of the frail advantages pursued by the sons of Adam, is true love, the mysterious passion, the ardent embrace of souls, a sentiment for which the day of disenchantment never comes. That woman has charms unknown to the world, from whose jurisdiction she withdraws herself: she is beautiful with a meaning; her glory lies in making her imperfections forgotten, and thus she ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... could we feel the world recede from us as we poised on bright wings of fancy; never again compare our joy with that of the heaven-born; never again welcome that pure ideal that comes to youth alone, and that pitifully dies in the disenchantment of graver days. We could sacrifice all things for each other; joy and grieve for each other; live and die for each other,—but the Hope, the Dream, the exaltation of love's dawn, the peerless white glory of it—had gone from ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... mean that M. Venizelos had as yet lost caste altogether. On that fateful 5th of October his reputation as a serious statesman among his countrymen had received a severe blow. The idolatrous admiration with which he had been surrounded until then gave way to disenchantment, disenchantment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to dismay: the national prophet from whom fresh miracles had been expected, was no prophet at all, but a mere mortal—and an uncommonly fallible mortal at that. Nevertheless, while many Greeks found it hard to pardon the Cretan ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... simply ignored and overlooked; but among the hills I fear no harsh, no indifferent word: each treasure of beauty breathes to me of One who knows my every heart-beat, One whom I can love without fear of wound or disenchantment. The mountain clefts have no unkind words, no fault-finding, no ridicule, no rash judgments for the sons of men. They offer clear springs, fresh fruits, and festal flowers, peace and rest and ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... would cease to be life. From an enchanted man we must not expect a narrative of his enchantment; for if he could speak to us reasonably, and like one of ourselves, in that case he would be a man in a state of disenchantment, and then would perhaps yield us no better account than we may trace by ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... had fallen from the skies; but he did his best not to show his disenchantment, and this, from a kind and amiable way he always had and a constant wish to please, was ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... knew how old I felt! I am sure this is what age brings with it - this carelessness, this disenchantment, this continual bodily weariness. I am a man of seventy: O Medea, kill me, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is evil and disenchantment old. Man's ancient heart is bitter, his hard eyes doubt of a sign. Blown hair beneath that banner that floated in folds of gold, In spirit I see you standing first ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... and shall remain free. If you remain, I shall esteem you much; if you depart, I shall do so no less; for I hold that amorous impulses run with a loose rein, until they are brought to a halt by reason or disenchantment. I would not have you be towards me like the sportsman, who when he has bagged a hare thinks no more of it, but runs after another. The eyes are sometimes deceived; at first sight tinsel looks like gold; but they ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... drums beating, colors flying, till the last column had turned the hill, and then evening came on all at once, and we felt a dreary sense of disenchantment creeping over us. It was as if we had been dreaming during the last few weeks, and now we were waked, indeed! Dominique recalled us to ourselves with ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... think her disenchantment did not diminish the rapture at finding herself once more in the intimacy of Honoria Armstrong. Sir Petworth, when he ran over on leave from the Army of Occupation, thought her enormously improved, though he had the tact not ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... longing to visit the scene where for Pallas Athene "the hundred altars glowed with Arabian incense, and breathed with the fragrance of garlands ever fresh," found disenchantment when I spent the night in the cabin of a Greek priest—not a priest of the goddess, but of the Greek church—where there was but one room for man, priest, and beast. A few days after, our brigantine ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... found to invade the sovereignty of a pretty woman with any disagreeable tidings; or, as Junius says, "to instruct the throne in the language of truth." Harry was brought up to this point only by such a concurrence of circumstances. He was in love with another woman,—a ready cause for disenchantment. He was in some sort a family connection; and he saw Lillie's conduct at last, therefore, through the plain, unvarnished medium of common sense. Moreover, he felt a little pinched in his own conscience by the view which Rose seemed to take of his part in the matter, and, manlike, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... occupation for the weary hours that dragged slowly along between the rising and the setting of the sun. The gossipings of Manette, the hunting stories of Claudet had no interest for young de Buxieres, and the acquaintances he endeavored to make outside left only a depressing feeling of ennui and disenchantment. ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... manner is far more restrained. Mark Twain was then master of his method, sure of himself, secure of his popularity; and he could do his best and spare no pains to be certain that it was his best. Perhaps there is a slight falling off in 'Following the Equator'; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author's possession of a pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest predecessor. The first ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... in proportion than Ponto—still in full vigour of mind and body, but old in disenchantment, and not without the traces of her forty-seven years. The auburn hair was still in rich masses of curl; only on close inspection were silver threads to be detected; the cheek was paler, the brow worn, and the gravely handsome dress ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... electrical rings, which vulgar credulity supposes to be traces of the Fairy revels. Here, they say, were placed the stands of milk, and of water, in which Tamlane was dipped, in order to effect the disenchantment; and upon these spots, according to their mode of expressing themselves, the grass will never grow. Miles Cross (perhaps a corruption of Mary's Cross), where fair Janet waited the arrival of the Fairy train, is said to have stood near the duke of Buccleuch's seat of Bowhill, about half ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... not with these. A little frown shaded her eyes, and her mouth was curved by a smile more sad than sweet. The happiest woman in the world! Yet, as she stood there, she felt an utter disenchantment with life seize upon her; she felt an overwhelming weariness in the battle that was not yet over. For Julia knew now that life to her must be a battle; whatever the years to come might hold for her, they could not hold more than an occasional heavenly interval of peace. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... will not admit that our sentiments towards each other can totally change in a moment, and yet certain it is, that two lovers not seldom fly apart even more quickly than they drew together. In Mme. de Bargeton and in Lucien a process of disenchantment was at work; Paris was the cause. Life had widened out before the poet's eyes, as society came to wear a new aspect for Louise. Nothing but an accident now was needed to sever finally the bond that united them; nor was that blow, so terrible ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... and she was glad they knew it. Jeffrey did not go so far as to think she wanted inevitably to turn them into beasts, but he knew she was virtually telling them she had the power. That had been one of the first horrors of his disenchantment, when she had placed herself far enough away from him by neither writing to him nor visiting him; then he had seen her outside the glamour of her presence. Once he had been proud when the eyes of all men followed her. That was in the day of his lust for ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... society is to blame. I am not sending the letters back to discourage or hurt you; only that you may see how, with each adventure, you have started with the same sentimental illusions and ended with the same pitiable disenchantment. ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... of the '60's of the nineteenth century ended in a reaction which took possession of society as a whole during the '70's. Apathy, dejection, disenchantment superseded the previous exultation and enthusiastic impulse to push forward in all directions. Dull discontent and irritation reigned in all classes of society and in all parties. Some were discontented with the reforms, regarding them as premature, and even ruinous; others, on the contrary, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... which grumbled at the tightening of the reins so dear to Metternich,—all formed a fitting commentary on the proclamations by which the Sovereigns had hounded on their people against the man they represented as the one obstacle to the freedom and peace of Europe. In gloom and disenchantment the nations sat down to lick their wounds: The contempt shown by the monarchs for everything but the right of conquest, the manner in which they treated the lands won from Napoleon as a gigantic "pool" which was to be shared amongst them, so many souls ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... however, and did not say anything to Mamma Stirling, but worked as he had done in the past, and mastered himself with superhuman energy, so as to hide the grief that was gnawing at his heart and killing him, and the disenchantment with everything that was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of the preaching of Solomon; but it is also the lesson which is taught by all the records of the past, and all the experiences of mankind. Yet it is not sad when one considers the dignity of the soul and its immortal destinies. It is sad only when the disenchantment of illusions is not followed by that holy fear which is the beginning of wisdom,—that exalted realism which we believe at last sustained the soul of the Preacher as he was hastening to that country from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... songs of battle no less than of worship, and the combined ardours of conviction and conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their own. As we read them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock of disenchantment. It is something like the difference between the Marseillaise sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the closet, or ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... season during the springtime of our youth. Then autumn would come, sad and harsh. Our illusions would vanish like the swallows in romances, and we should find, with alarm, that we had taken the dream of a day for eternal happiness! Forgive my speaking plain words of disenchantment," added Serge, seeing Jeanne rising abruptly, "but our life is being settled at this moment. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the unreserve of a last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life; went on full of love's delight and love's anguish, facing them in open-eyed exultation, without bitterness and without repining, from the first hour ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... hurry to leave his friends in Pingaree. The fat little King had to walk wherever he went and so missed Bilbil more and more; but he seldom walked far and he was so fond of Prince Bobo that he never regretted Bilbil's disenchantment. ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... drinking purposes was therefore supplied by convoys from the Apollinaris and other foreign wells, and it was thought that, if a war broke out, the natives of England would die of thirst. This was not the only disenchantment of Queen Mab. She found that in Europe she was an anachronism. She did not know, at first, what the word meant, but the sense of it gradually dawned upon her. Now there is always something uncomfortable about being an anachronism; ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... the memories of his youthful amours. Deception. Disenchantment. How pitilessly base a woman is while she ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... little, Jeanne's regrets for those happy, distant lands vanished; she began to get resigned to her life, to feel an interest in the many unimportant details of the days, and to perform her simple, regular occupations with care. A disenchantment of life, a sort of settled melancholy gradually took possession of her. What did she want? She did not know herself. She had no desire for society, no thirst for the excitement of the world, the pleasures she might have had possessed no attraction for her, but all her dreams and illusions had ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights—What? And all that is now to be at an end? And the DISENCHANTMENT of woman is in progress? The tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which was always most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever again threatening thee! Thy old fable might once more become "history"—an immense ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... there a little while, then went home with a vague feeling of disenchantment, injury, and irritation. There was something especially humiliating to him in the thought that to the two girl bathers he was merely a possibility ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... a sort of apprehension that Renouard looked forward to seeing Miss Moorsom. And strangely enough it resembled the state of mind of a man who fears disenchantment more than sortilege. But he need not have been afraid. Directly he saw her in a distance at the other end of the terrace he shuddered to the roots of his hair. With her approach the power of speech left him for a time. Mrs. Dunster and her aunt were accompanying her. All these people sat down; it ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Don Quixote had read the inscription on the parchment he perceived clearly that it referred to the disenchantment of Dulcinea, and returning hearty thanks to Heaven that he had, with so little danger, achieved so grand an exploit as to restore to their former complexion the countenances of those venerable duennas, now no longer visible, he advanced towards the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... inherent and acquired, had shattered themselves futilely against the reserve he had set between them. Why had he offered her that kiss on board The Tigress? Perhaps that had been his hour of disenchantment. She hadn't measured up; she had been stupid; she hadn't known how to ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... see how precious she still was to me. My sufferings had not lessened my love for her; wretched as I was because she refused me a certain sort of affection, I did not condemn her for lavishing that affection upon another. As a matter of fact, until those fatal letters had done their work of disenchantment, of what was she guilty in my eyes? Of having married again? Of having chosen, being left a widow at thirty, to construct a new life for herself? What could be more legitimate? Of having failed to understand the relations of the child who remained to her with the man whom she had chosen? ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... or Prussia; that his or her merits had roused the attention of rival impresarios; the Parisian manager was cautioned at all costs to retain in his theatre ability and promise so remarkable. But with the signing of a new engagement, at an advance of salary, came disenchantment. M. Auguste's services were now withdrawn, for the performer's object was attained; and the management for some time to come was saddled with mediocrity, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... him and his heart arose between the two. It was fought with very different weapons, and Cleopatra conquered. The revel, the dream began again. Then came Actium, the disenchantment, the awakening, the fall, the flight from the world. Our object was not to let him relapse into intoxication, to rouse the hero's strength and courage from their slumber, render him for love's sake a fellow-combatant in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... The disenchantment was appalling; my brothers in Christ, the grave and reverend professors, were cold as icebergs, evidently caring nothing for the souls or bodies of their Christian or pagan students; the preacher at the college church was an ecclesiastical icicle, who, in his manner at least, continually ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... was rude and disrespectful and even disobedient to her parents; cross and sarcastic with her brothers and sisters; selfish and indolent in all matters pertaining to the work of the household. What a disenchantment was my experience! That great and good man, who has written so many noble precepts about the conduct of life, Mr. Emerson, in speaking of and praising a noble citizen, says: "Never was such force, good meaning, ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... reality was very far from blessed. He remained long enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still almost ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... "unending sadness," came, Mazzini thought from looking at human life only from the individual point of view. And a poem by Browning, "Cleon" would have afforded him another example of "the disenchantment and discouragement of life," ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... misgivings. It was the vision of a squat tower-like building, almost hemmed in by a monster gas reservoir, fantastic wooden galleries, and the gigantic silhouettes of strange machinery, that relieved his mind. But this house and its surroundings soon repelled him. His reception was the final disenchantment. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... regathers, never quite dissolves. And ah that life, ah that the heart and brain Might keep their mist and glamour, not to know So soon the disenchantment and the pain! But one by one our dear illusions go, Stript and cast forth as time's slow ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... recollection of the past—of the short and secret courtship with its illusions, greater and more perilous than love's illusions commonly are—of her first days of married life, when, in spite of her rash disobedience, she was feverishly happy; of the awaking, and total disenchantment, and the wretched years that followed, all came to her in a floating, broken vision, filling her with emotions which had, at last, lost their bitterness. She yielded to them without resistance and without effort, and sank into a long silence, which was broken ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... not merely surprised, he was disgusted. Her beauty had so completely fascinated him when he first saw her that the idea of associating any want of refinement and good breeding with such a charming creature never entered his mind. The disenchantment to him was already so complete that he was even disagreeably affected by the tone of her voice; it was almost as repellent to him as this exhibition of unrestrained bad temper which she seemed perfectly careless ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... of that country, a scrap of the blue sky, the eccentric costume and the bulrushes of the Tiber, and the large swing nets of the Ponte Rotto; in fact the frame with the picture. Then he would have been spared the cruel disenchantment he experienced when, having settled in a modest flat on the fourth storey, on the heights of Montmartre, he saw his handsome Transteverina decked out in a crinoline, a flounced dress, and a Parisian bonnet, ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... each new man in the morning of his being utters it in no doubt of its fulfilment in his own destiny. He loves mankind, and would be beloved; he loves nature, and perceives no relentless purpose in her variable moods; and perhaps most of all he loves his own soul with a love whose disenchantment is to be the sorest agony that ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... note of disenchantment, of escape from the spell of conventionalism and the shores of romance. Colonel Esmond, who tells his own tale, wishes the Muse of History to disrobe, to discard her buskins, and to deliver herself like a woman of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of disenchantment is one of the saddest and one of the commonest things in life; whether the cause of it be the golden youth who, apparently a very Bayard before marriage, after marriage gradually reveals himself to be hopelessly selfish, or develops ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... his attention from the 'water Gipsies' to their brethren ashore. He has already began to busy himself with the condition of 'our roadside arabs,' as he calls them. We fear Mr. Smith in prosecuting this good work of his is doomed to perform a serious act of disenchantment. The ideal Gipsy is destined to be scattered to the winds by the unvarnished picture which Mr. Smith will cause to be presented to our vision. He does not pretend to show us the romantic, fantastically-dressed creature whose prototypes ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of that. My meaning is that I don't want you to be ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... ask to perish in high noon: I'd have refractions of the fallen day, And heavings when the gale hath flown away, And this slow disenchantment: since too soon, Too surely, comes the death of my poor heart, Be it inured to pain, in mercy, ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... romance; four stars of varying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There was also a via lactea, from which a well-directed glass can easily disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the Vie, Poesies et Pensees de Joseph Delorme; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the Consolations and the Pensees d'Aout; a virtuoso always ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... in a heap. He wasn't playing the game at all as she had expected. He was avoiding her. She was dismayed for an instant, and then laughed outright quite frankly at her own disenchantment. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... true as Browning's, as full as either's of the fine and bitter sweetness of a pungent and fiery fidelity. But who can forget the horror of inward collapse, the sickness of spiritual re-action, the reluctant, incredulous rage of disenchantment and disgust, with which he came upon the thrice-unhappy third part? The two first volumes have all the intensity and all the perfection of George Sand's best work, tempered by all the simple purity and interfused ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... high-water, spring tides," Heemskirk struck in, with a vindictive, exulting violence which flashed and expired. He paused, as if weary, fixing upon Jasper his arrogant eyes, over which secret disenchantment, the unavoidable shadow of all passion, seemed to pass like a saddening cloud. "On the very top," he repeated, rousing himself in fierce reaction to snatch his laced cap off his head with a horizontal, derisive flourish towards the gangway. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... so long ceased to be my friend?... But, after all, was he ever my friend? What a disenchantment! What a lesson!' ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Scribe I had learnt from M. Duval; the naturalistic school had taught me to scorn tricks, and to rely on the action of the sentiments rather than on extraneous aid for the bringing about of a denouement; and I thought of all this as I read "Disenchantment" by Miss Mabel Robinson, and it occurred to me that my knowledge would prove valuable when my turn came to write a novel, for the mise en place, the setting forth of this story, seemed to me so loose, that much of its strength had dribbled away before it had ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... him yet. But the beauty that had blinded and dazzled her had lost its power to charm. She had been married to him a year—quite long enough to be disenchanted. That handsome face might fascinate other foolish moths; it had lost its power to dazzle her long, long ago. Perhaps the disenchantment was mutual; for the pretty, rose-cheeked, starry-eyed girl who had captivated his idle fancy had become a dream of the past, and his wife was a pale, sickly, peevish invalid, with ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... would have returned from the office, and it would be the prodigal's cue to enter. He strolled westward by Albany Street, facing the sunset embers, pleased, he knew not why, to move in that cold air and indigo twilight, starred with street-lamps. But there was one more disenchantment waiting him by ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The despised youngest son wins the reward with the help of an enchanted princess in the form of a cat, rat, frog, lizard, monkey, or as a doll, or night-cap, or stocking. At last she regains her human form. The disenchantment is sometimes accomplished by a kiss, or by beheading, or by the hero's enduring for three nights in ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... myrrh. But his heart I would encase with the scales of a monster, then fill with pride, with beastliness of desire, with recklessness, with hypocrisy, with death. Then I would have him touched with some rod of disenchantment until his two eyes would become the cold orbs of the adder; and on his lip would come the foam of raging intoxication; and to his feet the spring of the panther; and his soft hand should become the clammy hand ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... no close scrutiny, a battered politician, half visionary, half demagogue (for he did not spare himself in his thoughts)—till she had made of him an ideal statesman and a man worthy of all she had to give. A swift and gentle disenchantment was the best that could be wished for her: so he told himself, but he did not wish it. Time had not altogether changed him, and a woman's smile was to him still a force in his life, as much as it had been, or almost, when it led the boy of twenty-three to do all those ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... such disguises could not conceal from Phillida's utterly sincere spirit the thoroughly worldly standpoint of Mrs. Frankland's suggestions. The effect of this line of talk upon her mind was very marked, nevertheless. It produced a disenchantment, rapid, sudden, abrupt, terrible. Mrs. Frankland, the oracle upon whose trustworthiness she had ventured her all, had proven herself one of the most fallible of guides. The advice given yesterday with an assurance ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... Disenchantment came with the second visit of the artist to the stream. There; young Murdoch had met her and told her that "Mister Jan" was going to write her a letter. Upon which she had sung glad songs in a sunlit world ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... to an exposition of the teachings of von Hartmann and a final essay, "Is Life an Affliction?" which query the author seems to answer in the affirmative. One of the best-known of the Saltus books, "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" is written in a clear, translucent style without the iridescence which decorates ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... and his colouring of very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail, his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the signs of an extremely alert intellect who regards life prosaically and with a lassitude and disenchantment which are only consoled by the passion for truth. Certain water-colours of his heightened by pastel, and certain landscapes, are somewhat disconcerting through the preciousness of his method; others are surprisingly spontaneous. All his work has ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... over their port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old, even in a physical sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life; it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his youth. And though A Tale of Two Cities is full of sadness, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... entirely with his new duties and to live at Corte. Fesch, as the eldest male, the mother's brother, and a priest at that, expected to assume the direction of the family affairs. But he was doomed to speedy disenchantment: thenceforward Napoleon was the family dictator. In conjunction with his uncle he used the whole or a considerable portion of the archdeacon's savings for the purchase of several estates from the national domain, as the sequestrated ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Buddha exaggerates the splendour and luxury by which he was surrounded in youth and produces the impression that his temperament was something like that reflected in the book of Ecclesiastes, the weary calm, bred of satiety and disenchantment, of one who has possessed everything and found everything to be but vanity. But this is not the dominant note of the Buddha's discourses as we have them. He condemns the pleasures and ambitions of the world as unsatisfying, but he stands before us ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... not only the bitterness that springs from disenchantment in individuals, the sense of the miserable insufficiency of human love to satisfy her spiritual aspirations producing "that widely concluding unbelief which," as her sister in greatness has said, "we call knowledge of the world, but which ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... shall certainly by that time have had enjoyment enough to feel that it would be unwise to tempt the inevitable decree which makes all pleasure and happiness short-lived here, and which, when we strive to retain or detain them, makes us wise through some disappointment or disenchantment, which it is still wiser to anticipate ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... multiparty system and a new constitution in the early 1990s. However, the low turnout and allegations of electoral fraud during the most recent local elections in 2002-03 have exposed the weaknesses of formal political structures in Gabon. In addition, recent strikes have underscored the popular disenchantment with the political system. Presidential elections scheduled for 2005 are unlikely to bring change since the opposition remains weak, divided, and financially dependent on the current regime. Despite political conditions, a small population, abundant natural ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... at will was certainly not to be despised; rather, he should be cultivated. Nor was her esteem for Dee lessened by the success with which, by astrological calculations, he named a favorable day for her coronation; and, a little later, by solemn disenchantment warded off the ill effects of the Lincoln's Inn Fields incident, when a puppet of wax, representing Elizabeth, was found lying on the ground with a huge pin ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... accomplished. How it came to have this power is a question on which I never ventured an opinion. If, then, Matter starts as 'a beggar,' it is, in my view, because the Jacobs of theology have deprived it of its birthright. Mr. Martineau need fear no disenchantment. Theories of evolution go but a short way towards the explanation of this mystery; the Ages, let us hope, will at length give us a Poet competent to ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the 12th of September, the cumbersome old omnibus rattled over the unpaved streets, both to myself and fellow traveller came a feeling of disenchantment. We had apparently reached one more of those sleepy little chefs-lieux familiar to both, places of interest certainly, the sleepiest having some architectural gem or artistic treasure. But ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... barbarisms, but held his peace to escape a scolding or reminders of his stuttering. To increase the illusion of approaching maternity she became whimsical, dressed herself in colors with a profusion of flowers and ribbons, and appeared on the Escolta in a wrapper. But oh, the disenchantment! Three months went by and the dream faded, and now, having no reason for fearing that her son would be a revolutionist, she gave up the trip. She consulted doctors, midwives, old women, but all in vain. Having to the great displeasure of Capitan Tiago ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... correct of life as of ear, never sought to undeify his divinities by pursuing them from the heaven of the stage to the purgatorial intermediacy of the coulisses, still less to the lower depth of disenchantment into which too many of them sunk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... disenchantment by coming in contact with these coarse and violent people. How much do the pictures of contemporary England given us by the novelists stand in need of correction by a visit to the land! How different is the thing from the abstract! Or, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... judging the position, he took up his conjugal career with ample precaution; indulgence and perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it. Mothers of families ought to seek such men for their daughters. A good mind protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage. All that his past career had taught to Felix de Vandenesse, the observations of a ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... see myself through your eyes, as, thank God, I have done since. And I DID NOT TRUST YOUR LOVE TO STAND THE TEST. It seemed to me, I was saving both of us from future disappointment and misery, by bravely putting away present joy, in order to avoid certain disenchantment. My beloved, it will seem to you so coolly calculating, and so mean; so unworthy of the great love you were even then lavishing upon me. But remember, for years, your remarkable personal grace and beauty had been a source of pleasure to me; and I had pictured you wedded to Pauline Lister, for ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... their presence from one of the millionaire toy-shop keepers. For a wondering moment they looked from their beds, sputtering, gibbering, gasping, with cautious calls one to the other. Then having proved speech to be no disenchantment they shouted and laughed crazily. There followed a scramble from the beds and a swift return from the cold, each bearing such of the priceless bits as had lain nearest. And while these were fondled ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... impressively, "that you were different—a woman-hater, honest, gruff, a little cynical. Yet those are the speeches of your salad days. What a disenchantment!" ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... half-past four, under a spell which banished fatigue. The main point was that the actors BELIEVED in what they represented; there was nothing in it like that vague, wearisome exhibition of "religiosity'' which, in spite of its wonderful overture, gave me, some years afterward, a painful disenchantment—the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Terutak'—sat in front, now drooping over the box like a mother over a cradle, now lifting her face and directing her song to heaven. A passing toddy-cutter told my wife that she was praying. Probably she did not so much pray as deprecate; and perhaps even the ceremony was one of disenchantment. For the box was already doomed; it was to pass from its green medicine-tree, reverend precinct, and devout attendants; to be handled by the profane; to cross three seas; to come to land under the foolscap of St. Paul's; to be domesticated within the hail ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aches, and a poignant yearning pains My pulse, as though from revel I had waked To find sore disenchantment. Oh for the simple ways of childhood, And its joys! Why have I grown so cold and cynical? My life seems out of tune; Its notes harsh and discordant; The crowded thoroughfare doth fret me And make lonely. Darkling I muse and yearn For those glad days of yore, When my ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... singing is lovely! Do you know a thought I often have? When I hear her singing it seems to me as if she were not quite the same person as at other times; she affects me, I can't quite tell you how; it's a sort of disenchantment to talk ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... inner buoyancy of youth, hope, and faith in the joy of life. After the marriage of Nathalie, and his subsequent precipitation, had come those wild rebellions of the soul, the violent protestations, the young and petted cynicisms, that are the inevitable accompaniment of the inevitable hour of disenchantment. This phase, however great its length, must, nevertheless, resolve itself at last into one of two others: the quiet complacency of a renewed but gentler optimism; or a cynicism tried, real, deep-rooted, unhappy but irresistible. Be this state a sign of weakness ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... faculty: to be secure against disappointment in reliance upon the righteous purposes of God, which must prevail at last: to have a sure escape from personal grief in the largeness of human sympathy and the vista of universal hope: to feel, as life wears away, no disenchantment of purpose, no stealing languor upon the will, no freezing chill upon the heart, but only a passionate desire to live to the last in the full glow of service, and an absolute completeness of self-renunciation—then are these strong souls happy. They cannot but find life good, because everywhere ...
— Strong Souls - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... creasing the watered silk of the Channel, hoist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours. Or perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which knows not truth," he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, "that land of infinite fiction makes bad reading for any boy; and is certainly not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... several places the animal simply puts its feet together and toboggans down the smooth face of a slanting rock, bringing up at the bottom with a jerk that makes the tourist see a large variety of constellations, and even causes his beast to belch forth an involuntary roar of disenchantment, or else to try to pulverize his immediate successor. In such a place as this Nature seems pitiless and cruel; and one is impressed with the reflection that a million lives might be crushed out in any section of this maze of ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inner or outer life in 1833 and 1834. It was a secretive, not a productive period. One by one certain pinnacles of his fair snow-mountain of Titanic aim melted away. He began to realise the first disenchantment of the artist: the sense of dreams never to be accomplished. That land of the great unwritten poems, the great unpainted pictures: what a heritance there for the enfranchised spirits ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... repented it as an indiscretion, and was properly sympathetic, and "hoped the poor little thing would soon be better," Amy's uncle could not forget the jarring impression. It completed a process of disenchantment which had long been going on; and as hearts are sometimes caught at the rebound, Mrs. Ashe was not so far astray when she built certain little dim sisterly hopes on his evident admiration for Katy's courage and this sudden awakening ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... circumstances, a too cruel blow—one of those mean acts which a man never lets a woman know of unless he believes himself to be her assured master—puts the crowning touch to her revulsion and disenchantment, the moment has come for the intervention of the friend who undertakes the cure. Madame Piedefer had no great difficulty now in removing the film from ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... his admiration he drew near and went on his knees beside her. At the same moment, the hour of disenchantment having come, the princess awoke, and bestowed upon him a look more tender than a first glance might seem ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... crushed, long ago, by a rich man, who did not pride himself on any great delicacy in his love affairs. The day when, as a young girl, in all the radiance of her beauty and all the triumph of her life, she suffered, at the cost of her heart and her sweet illusions, the disenchantment which falls on us so slowly and yet so quickly—for we try to postpone as long as possible our belief in evil, and it seems to come too soon—that day was a whole age of reflection, and it was also a day of religious thought and ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... based in a measure on one of his own unfortunate love affairs at Wetzlar. Both of these early works achieved instant success. "The Sorrows of Werther" inaugurated in German literature what is known as the period of storm and stress. Disenchantment of life, or "Weltschmerz," became a fashionable malady. The romantic suicide of Goethe's sentimental hero Werther was aped by a number of over-susceptible young persons. Wieland drew the attention of the Duke of Weimar to Goethe, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... mind for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux clattering their bones on Paris gibbet. Alas, and with so pitiful an experience of life, Villon can offer us nothing but terror and lamentation about death! No one has ever more skilfully communicated his own disenchantment; no one ever blown a more ear-piercing note of sadness. This unrepentant thief can attain neither to Christian confidence nor to the spirit of the bright Greek saying, that whom the gods love die early. It is a poor heart, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is Caesar that draws all eyes, and not the chariot in which he rides, or the throng which is but the reverberation of his supremacy. If not, how explain the charm with which he dominates in all tongues, even under the disenchantment of translation? Among the most alien races he is as solidly at home as a mountain seen from different sides by many lands, itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and domesticated in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... ladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it would be necessary to break the enchantment, and that might be impossible if one failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment. And hazardous, too; for in attempting a disenchantment without the true key, you are liable to err, and turn your hogs into dogs, and the dogs into cats, the cats into rats, and so on, and end by reducing your materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gas which you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that a naked woman is such a fright "that Don Juan himself were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." How thankful Cupid must be that he was born blind! Still the most of us are willing to risk one eye on the average "altogether" model. Du Maurier—who is a somewhat better artist than ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... him." The people said that he was a god, and had gone back to heaven, where his star had been seen ascending;[5] his spirit remained on earth, and the vain blows of the assassins had been but "malicious mockery." "We have killed the king," exclaimed Cicero in the bitterness of his disenchantment, "but the kingdom is with us still;" "we have taken away the tyrant: the tyranny survives." Caesar had not overthrown the oligarchy; their own incapacity, their own selfishness, their own baseness had overthrown them. Caesar had been but the reluctant instrument of the power which ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... whose origin was seen to lie in an excess and abuse of esprit in a society that based all its pleasures and happiness upon the mind without any higher interest than the self, infected a whole century with an "irremediable disenchantment of others and one's self." This self-cult, or life in and for the mind, developed sagacity, justness of views, and an incomparable penetration, but it neglected all the elements necessary to contentment and those other pleasures, of which the first is love for one's fellow beings. Mme. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... society to a degree much above the present. The simple circumstance that all bashful prudery and affectation of secrecy regarding natural matters will have vanished is a guarantee of a more natural intercourse of the sexes than that which prevails to-day. If incompatibility, disenchantment, or repulsion set in between two persons that have come together, morality commands that the unnatural, and therefore immoral, bond be dissolved. Seeing, moreover, that all the circumstances and conditions, which until then condemned large numbers of women to celibacy and to prostitution, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... so he credited her with thinking the more. She agreed with everything he said, so he considered her the cleverest woman he knew. He discovered his error, no doubt, in sackcloth and ashes, poor fellow; but mercifully he had not to endure many years of disenchantment. I can't imagine a worse fate than being tied for ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... is Pitre, No. 56, "The Serpent." To Pitre's copious references may be added: Comparetti, No. 9 (Monferrato), in which the prince resumes his shape after his third marriage without any further means of disenchantment; No 66 (Monferrato), the prince takes off seven skins, and from a dragon becomes a handsome youth. In both these stories the prince is enchanted and not born in accordance with mother's wish. Gianandrea, p. 15, is a version of Comp., No. 9. Corazzini, p. 429 (Benevento), belongs ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... the scene were conducive to melancholy. We had walked a good fifteen miles into the open country and back again under chilly clouds, and were now paying for it with an empty sense of weariness and disenchantment. There is nothing so depressing as a bare room lit up by flaring gas-jets against the gloom of a late afternoon of rain; and the lights in Scipione's little cellar restaurant flared away in the most outrageous manner. Harding, across the table from ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction. In losing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the Iliad lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... thought Episcopacy good enough for England, for Englishmen were incapable of any better constitution; or he may have modified his judgment of Episcopacy,—who knows all that Cromwell came to think in his latter days, a time when most men revise their opinions? He may have felt the disenchantment which ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantment of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is capable of serving as ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the Santa Fe trains running to the edge of the Grand Canon of Arizona, I was troubled with thoughts of the disenchantment likely to follow. But last winter, when I saw those trains crawling along through the pines of the Cocanini Forest and close up to the brink of the chasm at Bright Angel, I was glad to discover that in the presence ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... to do—I thought it very beautiful. It was our secret, do you see? But she seems to have taught the marchese—and it is a secret no more, and not beautiful at all." He begins to wonder to himself, and grows suddenly homesick under disenchantment. He has many artless, touching things to say concerning his happiness with his sister in his own country, there far away on ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett |
