"Hollowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stands out from the mighty historical episode touched on in the last chapter, is this: Was the fact that these despised men were so entirely right and their triumphant adversaries so entirely wrong a mere fluke, or was it due to the soundness of one set of principles and the hollowness of the other; and were the principles special to that case, or general to international conflict as ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... was possible to see that sinister red streak that follows the firing of a gun at night. The rain gave a peculiar hollowness to the concussion. The Belgian ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth, so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in belief he himself waned. ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... besides, Atterbury, and Pope, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Prior, and Tickell, and Swift. Pope's face, as given in Kneller's portrait, (which recalls the poet's stolen complimentary verse to the painter,) has a sad and weary look, and is marked by that pallor, and that peculiar hollowness of eye and cheek, which often accompany bodily deformity. Swift's face betrays but little of the bitterness of his soul; but it was painted in his best days, before the cloud of darkness had begun ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... said the proud mother; "you will now be all I have ever predicted for you;" and, in her joy at the moment, she forgot the hectic of his cheek, and the hollowness ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... presidential year and the air was thick with politics. Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general. Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in outspoken and rather ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... presented to him. It is also but too certain that, destined as he was to endless disenchantment, from that singular and painful union which existed in his nature of the creative imagination that calls up illusions, and the cool, searching sagacity that, at once, detects their hollowness, he could not long have gone on, even in a path so welcome to him, without finding the hopes with which his fancy had strewed it withering away beneath him at ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that if the increasing and unblushing materialism of our times shall at last call for such scathing rebukes as the Jewish prophets launched against the sin of idolatry, or such as Christ himself employed when he exposed the hollowness of the piety of the men who took the lead in religious instruction in his day, then the loftiest characters—those whose example is most revered—will again disdain and shun a style of life which seriously conflicts with the triumphs of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... resentment. He bore this state of things for about a week, when his engagements to lecture in Ohio suddenly called him away. Abel and Miss Ringtop were left to wander about the promontory in company, and to exchange lamentations on the hollowness of human hopes or the pleasures of despair. Whether it was owing to that attraction of sex which would make any man and any woman, thrown together on a desert island, finally become mates, or whether she skilfully ministered to Abel's sentimental vanity, I will not undertake to decide: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... lifeless corpse. The society might have been waked up if Mr. Lowell, then returning from England, could have been induced to co-operate. He was approached on the subject, but would not respond,—he only said that he desired rest! Alas for the hollowness of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... consequence—of his abasement, forlornness, and unworthiness, he showed a dignity and impressiveness which were novel in him. The boyishness, vivacity, and motion, had quite vanished. There were a depth and hollowness in his eyes which gave a singular power to his face. There must have been a vein of genuine strength and nobleness in the man, or he would have been too much crushed to show any thing but weak despair or brutal sullenness. Had Professor ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... wool still flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam slips in detached snow-flakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the water circles slowly like black oil; a little butterfly lies on its back, the wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish arises, and it is gone. Lower down the ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... is the hand of Prussianism which offers this peace to America. As long ago as last June you exposed the hollowness of peace offered under such conditions as are now set forth by the German Chancellor. Referring to the German Government, you said: "It wishes to close its bargain before it is too late and it has little left to offer for the pound of flesh ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... sumptuous with gilt and florid carving. He wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of exquisite lace, but he wears them as though their weight was more than he could bear; and in the meagre trembling hands, and in the white, ashen face, in the dark hollowness of the eyes, there is a bodily corruption that is terrifying. He seems to hold together with difficulty the bonds of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the soul to burst its prison, only with despair; it is as if the Lord Almighty had forsaken him and the ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... going away sorrowful, and so should His messengers do. The sorrow tells of real desire, and the departure will sooner or later be exchanged for return with a deeper and more thorough purpose, if the earlier wish had any substance in it. If it had not, better that the consciousness of its hollowness should be forced upon the man, than that he should outwardly become what he is not really,—a Christian; for, in the one case, he may be led to reflection which may issue in thorough surrender; and in the other he will be a self- deceived ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... warm-hearted old Chevalier, "one whom I love. There is something frank in your eyes which raises memories of my dead son. In you I see both my offspring's and my own youth recalled to me. You are Canadian—in you I can banish the coldness, hollowness, and degeneracy of Europe. Replace my boy. Let me ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... however, at the back, they fancied that they detected a suggestion of hollowness, still not enough to make Roy determine to have ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends. Therefore, what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... these beautiful traditions of whatever nation or clime; at the zenith of success, in the spring-time of youth and hope, on the very eve of joy unutterable, there often seizes on the soul of man an overwhelming sense of the hollowness and fleetingness of life. It is this touch of the spiritual which raises these old heroic poems to such sublime beauty and power. Poetry of this kind implies a nation, one which is still, or has been, great; ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Niger fled to Antioch, the seat of his late government, and was there decapitated. Meantime Albinus, the British commander-in-chief, had already been won over by the title of Caesar, or adopted heir to the new Augustus. But the hollowness of this bribe soon became apparent, and the two competitors met to decide their pretensions at Lyons. In the great battle which followed, Severus fell from his horse, and was at first supposed to be dead. But recovering, he defeated his rival, who immediately committed suicide. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... preponderated over all the animal qualities for strength in character and success in life. The eyes were soft, dark, and brilliant, but dreamlike and vague; the features in youth must have been regular and beautiful, but their contour was now sharpened by the hollowness of the cheeks and temples. The form, in the upper part, was nobly shaped, sufficiently muscular, if not powerful, and with the long throat and falling shoulders which always gives something of grace and dignity to the carriage; but it was ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he waited for the tardy justice of the French court. When his suit became too urgent, he was told that he had offended the Most Christian King by attacking the fur posts under the protection of a friendly monarch, King Charles. The hollowness of that excuse became apparent when the French government sanctioned the fitting out of two vessels for Radisson to go to Hudson Bay in the spring. Lord Preston, the English ambassador, was also playing ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... made himself remember that his house had yet to be built, and aware of the hollowness of his stomach, he said to Amos: "Must be lunch time. Let's go down to the creek ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... electoral votes, it would have been a plain and easy matter for the letter of the Constitution to have expressed this spirit, or indeed to have done away altogether with this machinery of a sham election. The Jackson men had only to state their argument in order to expose its hollowness; for they said substantially that the Constitution established an election without an option; that the electors were to vote for a person predestined by an earlier occurrence to receive their ballots. But besides their unsoundness in argument, their statistical ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... themselves. As things were, Mr. Pryme envied the sparrows, who were ready clothed by Providence, and had no rates and taxes to pay, as well as the clerks, who, at all events, had plenty to do and no time to soliloquize upon the hardness and hollowness of life. To have plenty of brains, and an indefinite amount of spare time to use them in; to desire ardently to hasten along the road towards fortune and happiness, and to be forced to sit idly by whilst ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... reality of the spiritual world, and the duty of living for it, as also the certainty of holding intercommunion with the spirits. The 'Other worldliness' of the mediaeval monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its passive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in the world of spirit, any more than we ought to live wholly ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... are heard in the air, as of pipes, trumpets, and drums, which are caused perhaps by the vehement motions of these fiery exhalations, as we see in many experiments wrought by fire, air, and wind. The hollowness also, and various reflections and breakings of the clouds, may be great causes thereof, besides the great coldness of the middle region of the air, by which these fiery exhalations, when they ascend there, are suddenly driven back with great force. Daily ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... HAROLD. Bring not thy hollowness On our full feast. Famine is fear, were it but Of being starved. Sit down, sit down, and eat, And, when again red-blooded, speak again; (Aside.) The men that guarded England to the South Were scatter'd to the harvest.... ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... inquiries of the statistician. They consisted in the utter discredit of the royalist cause throughout France, the resentment that ever follows on clumsy or disloyal co-operation, and the revelation of the hollowness of the imposing fabric of the First Coalition. In the south of France four nations failed to hold a single fortress which her own sons had placed ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... his innocent, trustful love for a girl that even in her humble station was far beyond his hopes, and I pitied myself in him. Home, fortune, friends, I no longer cared for—all were forgotten. And now they are returning to me—only that I may see the hollowness and vanity of them, and taste the bitterness for which I have sacrificed you. And here, on this last night of my exile, I am confronted with only the jealousy, the doubt, the meanness and selfishness that is to come. Too ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall. No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too there was no want of trimmers. Cicero for instance, although in prose one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency, revered nevertheless the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... larger portion of the best minds, whose early youth his writings have powerfully influenced, will look back upon the period of such subjection as the most miserably morbid period of their life. On awaking from such delirium to the sane and healthful realities of manful toil, they will discover the hollowness of that sneering, scowling, wailing, declamatory, egotistical, and bombastic misanthropy, which, in the eye of their unripe judgment, wore the air of a philosophy so profound."[166] The time will also come when Carlyle will be revealed to ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the human family the hairs are tubular, the tubes being intersected by partitions, resembling in some degree the cellular tissue of plants. Their hollowness prevents incumbrance from weight, while their power of resistance is increased by having their traverse ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... shy, unaccustomed endearment. Gordon was stereotyped, commonplace; he was certain that even she must recognize the hollowness of his protestations. But she never doubted him; she accepted the dull, leaden note of his spurious passion for the clear ring of unalloyed ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the association of his name as a traitor in scurrilous ballads with those of Watson and Brooke. But they had seen him in the dock. He had compelled them to weigh the proofs against him and recognise their hollowness and inconclusiveness. The manliness with which he had stood at bay against Coke's insolence, Cobham's perfidy, and Cecil's damaging apologies for estrangement had brought over to him the sympathy of public opinion. The tide of popular feeling turned, and ceased henceforth ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... father's door that day stung with a burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social canker ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... leaves at last? And if, as in Catherine's case (a case, how common!), the truth come too late—if the tomb is closed—if the heart you have wrung can be wrung no more—why the truth is as valueless as the epitaph on a forgotten Name! Some such conviction of the hollowness of his own words, when he spoke of service to the dead, smote upon Philip's heart, and stopped the flow ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ambitions to Him. You will probably hear much and be told much at this time. I have nothing to say that you have not heard and will not hear said far better by others. Our Church gives the keynote in the collect for Sunday: 'We have no power.' I never realised my weakness, my pride, my hollowness so much as I did at my ordination. God has been teaching me, even in the short time since I was ordained, wonderful lessons—lessons of strength being perfected in weakness. He alone knows the depths of our ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... creativity has gone into the artistic improvement of ancient archetypes. My family has re-created a bit of the Spanish past, as others have re-created bits of the Mayan, Early American, or Oceanic past. And yet, the essential hollowness is obvious. Our automatized factories produce the same goods for us year in and year out. Since everyone has these same goods, it is necessary for us to change the factory product, to improve and embroider it, to express ourselves through it, to rank ourselves by it. That's how ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... A gentleman! The cant word, the fetish of this ring of idle aristocrats—she knew the hollowness of the whole farce. The democrat in her made her walk off with erect head and bright eyes, leaving a penitent boy behind; while all the time a sick, longing heart drove her to ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... from the neighborhood of Trebizond to Dioscurias and the confines of Circassia. Both the soil and climate are relaxed by excessive moisture: twenty-eight rivers, besides the Phasis and his dependent streams, convey their waters to the sea; and the hollowness of the ground appears to indicate the subterraneous channels between the Euxine and the Caspian. In the fields where wheat or barley is sown, the earth is too soft to sustain the action of the plough; but the gom, a small grain, not unlike the millet or coriander seed, supplies ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... whereon he kept his favorite corn. I am not sure that it was not the stepping of an awkward visitor upon one of these same glass eyes, while these slippers for the first time covered his feet, that set Mr. Carraway to cogitating upon the hollowness of "Christmas as She is Celebrated." Indeed, it is my impression that at the very moment when that bit of adornment was pressed down upon Mr. Carraway's corn he announced rather forcibly his disbelief ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... his appointment, he began to circulate in that society which by his family connexions he was entitled to mix in. To say he was not fascinated with the polish, gaieties, and pleasures of a fashionable town life, would be to conceal the truth: though, at the same time, we must say their hollowness soon became apparent to his mind; and he, instead of following the example of most men in similar circumstances, and making himself the slave to the pleasures and dissipations of the fashionable world, looked calmly on the allurements of society, and preserved ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... 200 millions of miles.[292] It was narrow, and bounded by nearly parallel and nearly rectilinear lines, resembling—to borrow a comparison of Aristotle's—a "road" through the constellations; and after the 3rd of March showed no trace of hollowness, the axis being, in fact, rather brighter than the edges. Distinctly perceptible in it were those singular aurora-like coruscations which gave to the "tresses" of Charles V.'s comet the appearance—as Cardan described it—of "a torch agitated by the wind," and have not ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... committee, which repeatedly met and deliberated, but never brought the question to any definitive conclusion. Still, when the new authorities looked around the house, and observed the empty benches, they were admonished of their own insignificance, and of the hollowness of their pretensions. They claimed the sovereign authority, as the representatives of the people; but the majority of those representatives had been excluded by successive acts of military violence; and the house had been reduced from more than five hundred members, to less than ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... country are everywhere built of beams of fir-trees; the lower beams do so receive the round hollowness of the uppermost, that by the means of the building thereupon they resist and expel all winds that blow, and where the timber is joined together, there they stop the chinks with moss. The form and fashion of their houses in all places is four-square, with ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... lines in Spenser's "Colin Clout's come home again,"[3] on the instability and hollowness of patronage, may ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... much as they can do, with all their nimbleness, to find a secure foot-hold. The huge wooden columns that support the double veranda display jagged edges at top and bottom, and no longer make even a pretence of hiding their grim hollowness. The well, hospitably placed within arm's reach of the highway, for the benefit of the dead and buried congregation that long ago met and worshipped at Bethesda meeting-house, is stripped of windlass, chain, and bucket. All the outhouses have disappeared, if they ever had an existence; and ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... all, to tenderness at home, And sweet security of kind concern Even from those who seem most truly ours. Who would resign all this, to be approached, Like a sick infant by a canting nurse, To spread his arms in darkness, and to find One universal hollowness around? Forego, a little while, that bane of peace. Love may ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... follow the course of contemplation thus traced in the psalm, we have these three points brought before us—first, the thought of life common to both clauses; second, the gloomy, aimless hollowness which that thought breathes into life apart from God; third, the blessedness which springs from the same thought when we look at it in connection ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Dawn. How your hands tremble. So, look at me. You would like Vienna, Kindchen. You would like the gayety, and the brightness of it, and the music, and the pretty women, and the incomparable gowns. Your sense of humor would discern the hollowness beneath all the pomp and ceremony and rigid lines of caste, and military glory; and your writer's instinct would revel in the splendor, and ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... what a high price I put on myself! Why do I talk about such things, which I am eager to throw aside, and to devote myself heart and soul to philosophy. That, I tell you, is my intention. I could wish I had done so from the first. Now, however, that I have found by experience the hollowness of what I thought so splendid, I am thinking of doing business exclusively with the Muses. In spite of that, please give me in your next some more definite information about Curtius and who is intended to fill his place, and what is doing about P. Clodius, and, in fact, take your time and tell me ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and refused to grant reforms or concessions. Consequently a strike was declared in 1900 by which the mine workers obtained a ten per cent increase in wages and the promise of semi-monthly wages in cash. But they had not resumed work before they discovered the hollowness of these concessions. Two years of futile application for better conditions passed, and then, in 1902, 150,000 men and boys went on strike. This strike lasted one hundred and sixty-three days. The magnates were generally regarded as arrogant and defiant; they contended ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... I felt it most. The awful tediousness of some of the Sunday sermons; the emptiness of the prayers, written in advance and spoken with conventional unctuous voice, and gestures to suit; and the apathy of the people who, dressed out in their best, came to listen,—how early I divined its hollowness,—and how deep was my disappointment, and how cruel the disillusionment—oh! the disheartening formalism of it all! The very appearance of the church disconcerted me: it was a new cityfied one, meant to be pretty without, however, ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... hearts. The hazards of trade, the changes of political life, cause them to forget themselves, and so they are rocked into oblivion of internal disquiet by the toss of the ocean waves. They forget the hollowness of their own hearts, and cheat themselves into the belief that they are on their way ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... the outside, and white within like Milk, and in the end of Summer becometh hard and woody. Whether this be the very same kind, I cannot affirm, but both the Picture and Description come very neer to that I have, but that he seems not to take notice of the hollowness or Worm, for which 'tis most observable. And therefore 'tis very likely, if men did but take notice, they might find very many differing Species of these Nuts, Ovaries, or Matrixes, and all of them to have much the same designation and office. And I have very lately found several kinds of Excrescencies ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... from his cottage, on society low and high and on nature homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmest heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human existence; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases of books, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with a directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, and ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... it is well to return to our thin diet, and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you, would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend, if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly enterprise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean's spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness. This is melancholy, indeed, and many such wrecks of religious life are around us. But with Enoch, the increase of life's cares brought an access of fresh devotion. New gifts of Providence roused new feelings of gratitude, and he grappled himself the closer in attachment ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... Peter walked into a kind of roofed over-room, open only at the front, and examined the floor with his lantern, stamping occasionally to detect any hollowness in ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... it; so he gave order that the soldiers should throw a great number of burning torches upon it: accordingly, as it was chiefly made of wood, it soon took fire; and when it was once set on fire, its hollowness made that fire spread to a mighty flame. Now, at the very beginning of this fire, a north wind that then blew proved terrible to the Romans; for by bringing the flame downward, it drove it upon them, and they were almost in despair of success, as fearing their machines would be burnt: but ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... four thin buttress-like projections on each face. These provide the slight entasis to the outline which is found in so many spires, as it is in classic columns, and is designed to correct the appearance of hollowness which would occur in so long a straight line. The upper two-thirds of the spire has triple angle rolls, and, just halfway in the total height, are eight canopied panels of which four are pierced. The beauty of the steeple and its pre-eminence among those belonging to parish churches (even if such ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... blunders in grammar and spelling, the terse thought, and the concise form, are all characteristic of Napoleon. The right of petition, the recital of unjust acts, the illegal action of the council, the use of force, the hollowness of the pretexts under which their request had been refused, the demand that the troops be withdrawn and redress granted—all these are crudely but forcibly presented. The document presages revolution. Under a well-constituted and regular authority, its writer and signatories would ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over just exactly what it was before. Not at first, perhaps—oh, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... delicately malicious pleasure in exhibiting characters drawn from humble and rustic life performing the ceremonies and professing the sentiments of a good breeding foreign to their social position, so the scandal-mongering authors like Mrs. Haywood helped to make apparent the hollowness of the aristocratic conventions even as practiced by the aristocracy and the incongruity of applying exalted ideals derived from an outworn system of chivalry to everyday ladies and gentleman of the Georgian age. Undoubtedly the writers of romans a ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... his writings. There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... spoke and smiled her heart ached to see the hollowness of his cheeks and the lines of pain about his young mouth. She guessed that his poor body was all twisted and deformed under the rug that covered it. Signora Aurelia took her out on to their little ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... a willingness to work was a condition of admission, and that work to be done in public? What could bring about so strange a reversal of thought and habit? One of her sisters had recently died, after a protracted illness, during which her heart had been mercifully smitten with a conviction of the hollowness and sinfulness of her previous life. Its idle, trifling, aimless tendency had been set before her in all its emptiness. She saw that she had been living without God, bound up in the love of temporal things, and so effectually ensnared by worldly pride that her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... hollowness of their days with an extraordinary amount of running about. There was incessant shifting of interest from one focal point to another of the colony, a perpetually restless swarming hither and yon to some new centre of distraction, a continual kaleidoscopic ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... play now to be considered, we have, in the character of the titular king, an extraordinary piece of psychological analysis. The king, is young, physically delicate, and of highly sensitive organization. When he comes to the throne he realizes the hollowness and the hypocrisy of the existence that prescription has marked out for him; he realizes also that the very ideal of monarchy, under the conditions of modern European civilization, is a gigantic falsehood. For a time after his accession, he leads a life of pleasure seeking and revelry, ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... recognize the existence of a deep and abiding curiosity, at least among the women of our country, about all that relates to royalty and its doings, in spite of the labor expended for nearly a century by orators and editors in showing up the vanity and hollowness of monarchical distinctions. In fact, if the secrets of American hearts could be revealed, we fear it would be found that the materials for about a million of each order of nobility, from dukes down, exist ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... of "Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities." Even among these intimates of his own generation were doubtless some who, with F. Tennyson again, believed him to be "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who yet held "his school of poetry" to be "the most grotesque conceivable." This was the tone of the 'Fifties, when Tennyson's vogue was at its height. But with the 'Sixties there began to emerge ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much as ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... second-selves—women young, modest, sincere, pure in heart and life, with feelings all fresh and emotions all unworn, and bind such virtue and vitality to their own withered existence, such sincerity to their own hollowness, such disinterestedness to their own haggard avarice—to think this, troubles the soul to its inmost depths. Nature and justice forbid ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... two months after the flight to Palermo, the condition of affairs for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was seemingly critical to the verge of desperation; for neither the preparations of the Coalition, nor the hollowness of the French successes, were understood, and news was slow to reach the remote city where the Court now dwelt. The republican movement extended, though superficially, to the toe of Italy, many of the towns in Calabria planting the tree of liberty, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... have. A strange, unhappy life he lived upon the world, uncomforted, unfriended. He looked at the stars and comprehended them not; and at the graves, and they said nought. He walked alone under heaven's wide hollowness. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... Caesars, furnishes many facts. Becker's Gallus is a fine description of Roman habits and customs. Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities should be consulted, as it is a great thesaurus of important facts. Lucian does not describe Roman manners, but he aims his sarcasms on the hollowness of Roman life, as do the great satirists generally. Tillemont is the basis of Gibbon's history, so far as ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... autumn of 1828, he was coldly received and his offers of further service, though not openly rejected, were not accepted. Throughout ten weeks he was treated with contemptuous indifference, or formal compliments, the hollowness of which was transparent. On his arrival, the President found it difficult to grant him an interview. When that interview was granted, the only subject allowed to be discussed was the accuracy of the accounts that had been ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... sinewy long neck, long arms, and large hands, long legs, and big feet. A giant physically—and yet somehow he gave the impression of excessive gauntness and about his face there dwelt a strange impression of sadness and spiritual anguish. The hollowness of his cheeks accented by his swarthy ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... the tie cutter's cabin, and for many minutes he stared and listened, while Peter seemed to stand without breathing. Then making a wide megaphone of his hands, he shouted. It was an alarming thing to do and Peter started as if struck. For there were only ghosts to answer back and the hollowness of a shriven pit for the cry to travel in. Nothing was there. Even the great sawdust piles had shrunk into black scars under the scourge of ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... had offered to abdicate and give up the imperial dignity to Henry VIII. for a good round sum; but the King of England's envoy, Dr. Cuthbert Tunstall, a stanch and clearsighted servant, who had been sent to Germany to deal with this singular proposal, opened his master's eyes to its hollowness and falsehood, and Henry VIII. held himself aloof. Francis I. remained the only rival of Charles of Austria; Maximilian labored eagerly to pave the way for his grandson's success; and at his death the struggle between ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... man caught his breath, and leaned on his cane for support. He realised now the hollowness of his previous anger. He had never for a moment believed the boy was going to the bad. Down underneath his crustiness was a deep love for his son and a strong faith in him. He had allowed his old habit of domineering to get the better of him, and now in ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... is no such thing as matter, there is only holes in the ether." The World is made out of Nothing, and all Supernal Beauty would seem to be an approach to the Divine Mystery of Nothingness. "Clay is fashioned, and thereby the pot is made; but it is its hollowness that makes it useful," said the first and greatest of the Mystics. "By cutting out doors and windows the room is formed; it is the space which makes the room's use. So that when things are useful it is that in them which is Nothing which makes them useful." Use is the symbol ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... another divine, Middleton's equal in learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business, to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages" [60] by the present [1889] Roman Cardinal, but then Anglican ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to expose the hollowness of the allegation, then current in Liberal circles, that Ulster's repugnance to Home Rule was less uncompromising than it formerly had been. On the contrary, he believed that "there never was a moment at which men were more resolved than at the present, with ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... him. He did not want any more to do the things that offered. Something dead within him just refused to respond to any suggestion. He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no-one for ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... figures—warriors on horseback, foot-soldiers with lance and shield, dancing maidens, animals, trees and fruits, and in fine, says the old chronicler, "all things that could delight the eye and the heart;" the hollowness having the further advantage that men could stand inside these hyperbolic tapers and whirl them continually, so as to produce a phantasmagoric effect, which, considering the towers were numerous, must have been calculated to produce dizziness on a ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... however I mocked it gayly, And guessed at its hollowness, Still shone, with each bursting bubble, One star in my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... that the Nautilus had bumped the underbelly of the Ice Bank, still quite thick to judge from the hollowness of the accompanying noise. Indeed, we had "struck bottom," to use nautical terminology, but in the opposite direction and at a depth of 3,000 feet. That gave us 4,000 feet of ice overhead, of which 1,000 feet emerged above water. So the Ice Bank was higher ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... the difference in her was a whiteness and tightness of skin, a hollowness of eye, ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... unreconciled, we must not think to work ourselves up into a degree of goodness or pious feeling without God. There is no strength where there is no confidence, where there is nothing to lean on, where there is hollowness within. We ought to come at once to God. We ought to lift our hearts to him, not saying, "Who shall go up to heaven for us, to bring him to us? Who shall go over the sea for us?" For his word is very nigh, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... 1802, to May, 1803) afforded the only breathing space in all these twenty-two years of warfare. Napoleon, now first consul, was soon to change that republican mask for the honest and ambitious title of emperor. The hollowness of the peace soon became evident. Under its cloak French ships were building and French armies mustering in the channel ports for the invasion of England. The character of the strife had now radically changed. At the outset, ten years before, England had joined hands with the continental monarchies ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... responded quietly, and there was a curious remoteness, a hollowness in the sound of the words. "When one comes to see things as they are, nothing really matters. It ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... threw fresh light upon the contention that at most and at worst Japan had only taken over German rights, and that since we had acquiesced in the latter's arrogations we had no call to make a fuss about Japan. It revealed the hollowness of the claim that pro-Chinese propaganda had wilfully misled Americans into confusing the few hundred square miles around the port of Tsing-tao with the Province of Shantung with its thirty millions of ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... become me to make idle reflections on the hollowness of Court life: withal, seldom have I known it better exemplified than in the scene then displayed before me. The sun was low, but its warm beams falling aslant on the gay group at the gates and on the flowered terraces and grey walls behind them seemed to present a picture at once peaceful ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... his family was exterminated. Alone in the world, he was sighing bitterly, when he awoke with a start. All had taken place in so short a space of time that Han Chung-li's wine was not yet hot. This is the incident referred to in Chinese literature in the phrase 'rice-wine dream.' Convinced of the hollowness of worldly dignities, he followed Han Chung-li to the Ho Ling Mountains at Chung-nan in Shensi, where he was initiated into the divine mysteries, and became ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Mrs. Gresley, "it has always been our aim to be independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to them ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... it, where he came off second best. His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it. Three empty bottles of Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... one hand, the members of the company became gradually more distasteful to me, and on the other I was growing discontented with the management. With regard to the staff of the theatre, I very soon found out the hollowness, vanity, and the impudent selfishness of this uncultured and undisciplined class of people, for I had now lost my former liking for the Bohemian life that had such an attraction for me at Magdeburg. Before long there were but a few members of our company ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... said to be a hard man, and in some respects this was certainly the case; but a faint flush crept into his grim face. Perhaps he had noticed the weariness in Nasmyth's voice or the hollowness ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... done in many weighty matters) and go by his advice still, and in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness; for he would answer with his life his judgment that Lear's youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honor was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him whose life was already at his service? That should not ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... reading of Stephens is unquestionably correct. The reading of the latest Editors is as certainly corrupt. This is a case therefore where the value of Patristic testimony becomes strikingly apparent. It affords also one more crucial proof of the essential hollowness of the theory on which it has been recently proposed by Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles and the rest to reconstruct the text ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... but an unsatisfactory work to clear it away, if we had no positive truth to offer in its room. But the thousands of good men whom it has beguiled, because it professed to meet the earnest craving of their minds for a restoration of Christ's church with power, need not fear to open their eyes to its hollowness; like the false miracles of fraud or sorcery, it is but the counterfeit of a real truth. The restoration of the church, is, indeed, the best consummation of all our prayers, and all our labours; it is not a dream, not a prospect to be seen only in the ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... flash in the pan, vox et praeterea nihil[Lat]. shadow; phantom &c.(fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c. (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c. (luminary) 423[Lat]; " such stuff as dreams are made of " [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c. 353; " baseless fabric of a vision " [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c. (absence) 187. inanity, fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c. 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... knew herself to be a woman could not interest herself in these things to which she tried to give attention. She felt that in giving herself to these things she would betray Life. She felt the hollowness, the shallowness, the emptyness of it all in comparison with that which is divinely committed to womankind. She could not but wonder: what would be the racial outcome? When women have long enough substituted other ideals for the ideals of motherhood—other ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... set his ear with the air of a man who had experience in discriminating such sounds. "Hartigan," said he, "you'll condescend to kiss the book, sir, if you please: there's a hollowness in that smack, my good fellow, that can't ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... was a creature that had no falsetto in a single fibre of his being, no shadow of affectation. He kept like this through all our complicated existence in this artificial world, absolutely unconscious of the hollowness and pretension and sham that surrounded him—tolerant, too, and kind to all. Then why mourn for him? He is gathered in—he ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... and head of a human body, being solid parts, are specifically somewhat heavier than fresh water, as the trunk, particularly the upper part, from its hollowness, is so much lighter than water, so the whole of the body, taken altogether, is too light to sink wholly under water, but some part will remain above until the lungs become filled with water, which happens when a person, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... the farcical nature of public meetings, and the hollowness, worthlessness, and accidental character of popularity, than the circumstances of Durham's arrival here. He has done nothing in Canada, he took himself off just as the fighting was going to begin, his whole conduct has been visited ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... And the hollowness of hell Sounded as its master fell, And the mourning echo rolled Ruin through his kingdom old. Tyranny and terror flown Left a pair of friends alone, And beneath the nether sky All that stirred ...
— Last Poems • A. E. Housman
... to observe how the ideas of Christian learning came into direct competition with the arrogant self-assumption and the hollowness of the selfish teachings of the old Graeco-Roman schools. The Christian doctrine, advocating the development of the individual life, intimate relations with God, the widening of social functions, with its teachings of humility, and humanity, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... speak what I think, and ever will do so; I will be no party man. I don't attempt, like Vincent, to unite opposites. He is of all parties, I am of none. I think I see pretty well the hollowness of all." ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... the abdomen, especially in its lower third, with slight falling in beneath the loins and hollowness of the back are significant symptoms, though they may be entirely absent. Swelling and firmness of the udder, with the smoothing out of its wrinkles, is a suggestive sign, even though it appears only at ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... gone upon its extensive journeys; something temporary is done, we suppose, with a pad. But the Bosom was at the Banquet, and the proprietor was there to thump it, until it must have sounded and reverberated; and if Mr. DOUGHERTY had also thumped his head, there would have been equal evidence of hollowness within. "May my tongue never prove a traitor!" cried the orator. Mr. PUNCHINELLO hastens to reassure him. The tongue is well enough, and is likely to be. It's something a little higher up that is likely ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... a part, he may through the labours and superintendence of the sovereign be able to enjoy the rest in peace. As to the right to tax being only commensurate with direct representation, it is a fable, falsely and treacherously brought forward by those who know its hollowness well enough. You may show its weakness in a moment, by observing that not even the universal suffrage of the Benthamites avoids the difficulty;—for although it may be allowed to be contrary to decorum that women ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... wholesome as such thoughts are, they are not all the truth. So the prayer changes in tone, even while its substance is the same. He rises from the shows of earth to his true home, driven thither by their hollowness. "My hope is in Thee." The conviction of earth's vanity is all different when it has "tossed him to Thy breast." The pardoned sinner, who never thereafter forgot his grievous fall, asks for deliverance ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... say that if you do not like your life, it is your own fault. How can a man of your age talk of being melancholy, or of the hollowness of existence? Are you consumptive? Are you subject to hereditary insanity? Are you deaf, like Aunt Bluebell? Are you poor, like—lots of people? Have you been crossed in love? Have you lost the world for a woman, or any particular woman for the sake of the world? Are you feeble-minded, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... unmistakable look of age which is quite as distressing to bonnets as it is to women, and the flowers themselves were battered and faded. She had long black ringlets on each cheek, hanging down much below her face, and brought forward so as to hide in some degree the hollowness of her jaws. Her eyes had a peculiar brightness, but now they left on those who looked at her cursorily no special impression as to their colour. They had been blue,—that dark violet blue, which is so rare, but is sometimes so lovely. ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... alternating with the recess, it has a decoration peculiar to itself. We have often, in the preceding chapters, noted the fondness of the Northern builders for deep shade and hollowness in their mouldings; and in the second chapter of the "Seven Lamps," the changes are described which reduced the massive roll mouldings of the early Gothic to a series of recesses, separated by bars of light. The shape of these recesses is at present a matter ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... who could say whether it might not be her's to tread it? Affliction, sickness, sorrow, death, certain at last,—there was but one stay in them; and what if she should lose it,—if she was losing it already? I She thought of bearing them with him,—of the hollowness, the fallacy, the utter misery of trying to be sustained by aught that had not its foundations firmly fixed beyond the grave,—of not looking as sorrow as fatherly chastisement. (Caroline hardly yet entered ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the drum warned him; the singing had ceased. And this bitter idealist, this preacher of the hollowness of the real, wondered where were the sable trappings of woe, the hideous envisagement of them that are condemned with mortuary symbols in garbs of painted flame to the stake, faggot, axe, and headsman. None of these were visible, and the gentle spirit of the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... might be known to what a height the impudence was rising." Certainly the King and the ecclesiastic, like the Roman soothsayers, would have laughed in each other's face, could they have met, over the hollowness of such demonstrations. Granvelle's letters were filled, for the greater part, with pictures of treason, stratagem, and bloody intentions, fabricated mostly out of reports, table-talk, disjointed chat in the careless freedom of domestic intercourse, while at the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... his traditional beliefs, and each failed to give him a satisfactory goal for life. Socialism concerned itself with external social relations, but it gave life no soul. Then individualism confined man to his own resources, and there resulted an inner hollowness which became painfully evident. Socialism and individualism fail to provide a sure footing. Instead of finding certainty, man has fallen into a still deeper ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... irresolutely from one foot to the other. A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed wits. Now and then he weakly attempted ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... hollowed; to make this hollowness, a Square must be made, whose Side must be equal to the Pan, in which the Channelling is to be made, and having put one foot of the Compass in the middle of the Square, make a crooked Line from one Angle of the Channelling to the ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... circumstances, might have seemed almost ridiculous. It was full of indifferent gossip about society, it contained a few sarcastic remarks about his own approaching failure, with some rather youthfully cynical observations on the instability of things in general and the hollowness of all aspirations whatsoever. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... have all felt the brazenness of words without emotion, the hollowness, the unaccountable unpersuasiveness of eloquence behind which lies no love. The Greatest Thing in ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... and allure your pupils to walk in the paths which you tread. But no clearness and faithfulness in religious teaching will atone for the injury which a bad example will effect. Conduct speaks louder than words, and no persons are more shrewd than the young to discover the hollowness of empty professions, and the heartlessness of mere pretended ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as we take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will appear clearly in the following instance. "Any one," he writes,[3] "who has ever practised literary composition knows very well that, after he has devoted long study to the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... renounce a life of fashionable gayety and wealth for Mr. Leslie. It was a sudden realization of the truth, a sudden conviction of the strength of her own feelings, a sudden horror of the wickedness of falsifying them, and a sudden appreciation of the hollowness of worldly ambition when brought face to face with death. There was no hesitating vacillation in Sibyl's character. She had been self-deceived, but, as soon as she felt the truth, she threw aside errors with all her might, and gave herself up boldly, wholly and ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... stood guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves and grass to make a "smudge." His suspicions regarding the hollowness of the tree proved true, for the draft through the hollow hole acted like a chimney and sucked the smoke upward. It began to wreathe out between the first limbs, some thirty feet or more ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster |
