"Unsubstantial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but Lovers ask no more— And thousands enter daily at his door! Hence it was ever, and it e'er will be The trade most suited to his faculty:— Fed by the vapours of their heart's desire, No other food his Votaries require; For, that they seek—The Favour of the Fair, Is unsubstantial as the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... for a mess of Romany pottage. Under the luminous sweep and rush of this vision, Abel laughed suddenly at the thought of his marriage to Judy. Obstacles which had appeared insurmountable at sunrise, showed now as unsubstantial and ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... facilities afforded in obtaining loans from European capitalists, who were seized with the same speculative mania which prevailed in the United States, and the large importations of funds from abroad—the result of stock sales and loans—no one can be surprised at the apparent but unsubstantial state of prosperity which everywhere prevailed over the land; and as little cause of surprise should be felt at the present prostration of everything and the ruin which has befallen so many of our fellow-citizens in the sudden withdrawal from circulation of so ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was inclined to agree with Gorman. Mere recognition, though agreeable to any king, is unsubstantial, and the support suggested ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... lightning, to assume quaint and vast mimicries of human or of monster shapes, striding across the gloom, hurtling one upon the other, and vanishing swiftly into the turbulent abyss of shade; so that, to the eyes and fancies of the affrighted wanderers, the unsubstantial vapors were as the bodily forms of gigantic foes—the agents of terror ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... acknowledgment of such deceit, or will you? Where would be my honor, then, stripped of my fair estates—my son—myself—beggars—dependent on the bounty of an upstart? Does honor ask you to bear this? It is a phantom sense of honor, unsubstantial as your father's shade, of which you just now spoke, that would prompt you ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... encounter his boundless resources; his dangerous subtlety and acuteness in detecting flaws, and raising objections; his matchless art in concealing defects in his own case; and building up, with easy grace, a superstructure equally unsubstantial and imposing, and defeating all attempts to assail or overthrow it. Even very strong heads would be often at fault, conscious that they were the victim of some subtle fallacy, which yet they could not then ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... politic bargain, but always resulting from the steady pressure of a national instinct, so powerful and so accurate that statesmen of every school, willing or unwilling, have found themselves carried along by a tendency which no individuality can resist or greatly modify. Both unsubstantial rumor and incautious personal utterance have suggested an impatient desire in Mr. Gladstone to be rid of the occupation of Egypt; but scarcely has his long exclusion from office ended when the irony of events signalizes his return thereto by an increase in the force of occupation. Further, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... that He dignified the body and glorified human faculties, these facts seemed to the monophysite mind improbable, and, if true, devoid of religious significance. It came natural to him to explain Christ's body as a phantom. He was prepared to regard the human nature as unsubstantial. The mystic's view of matter, of sense and human existence characterises the ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... in place of the bureau which stood opposite to him, and of the Oriental china which was the detective's special pride, and on which his eyes seemed to be fixed, some vision of the past which was far more real than the unsubstantial present. Presently he went on talking ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... "Maerchen,"—the fairy tales. They take us into a lovely world of unreality where magic and luck hold sway and where the child is safe from human problems and from scientific laws alike. I have already said in talking of the younger children that I feel it unsafe to loose a child in this unsubstantial world before he is fairly well grounded in a sense of reality. Once he has his bearings there is a good deal he will enjoy without confusion. The common defense that the mystery of fairy tales answers to a legitimate need in children, I believe holds good for children of six or seven, or even five, ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... musical rhymes, of a nature known as the vers de societe. The lines presented a series of playful defences of the supposed strategy of womankind in fascination, courtship, and marriage—the whole teeming with ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial, yet forming a brilliant argument to justify the ways of girls to men. The pervading characteristic of the mass was the means of forcing into notice, by strangeness of contrast, the single mournful poem that the book contained. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... be better. I learned, love, that something had been said or done during your journey,—or perhaps only something thought, that had made you melancholy, and filled your mind for a while with those unsubstantial and indefinable regrets for the past which we are all apt to feel at certain moments of our life. There are few of us who do not encounter, now and again, some of that irrational spirit of sadness which, when over-indulged, drives men to madness and self-destruction. ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... is an arch deceiver," rejoined Mistress Nutter; "and cannot perform his promises. They are empty delusions—profitless, unsubstantial as shadows. His power prevails not against any thing holy, as I myself have just now experienced. His money turns to withered leaves; his treasures are dust and ashes. Strong only is he in power of mischief, and even his mischief, like curses, recoils ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and ACTIVE RESISTANCE. If the interposition of the State legislatures be necessary to give effect to a measure of the Union, they have only NOT TO ACT, or TO ACT EVASIVELY, and the measure is defeated. This neglect of duty may be disguised under affected but unsubstantial provisions, so as not to appear, and of course not to excite any alarm in the people for the safety of the Constitution. The State leaders may even make a merit of their surreptitious invasions of it on the ground of some temporary ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... praise him as the greatest general living, he placidly returns the puff from his regalia; and if you tell him he should run for the Presidency, it does not disturb the equanimity with which he inhales and exhales the unsubstantial vapor which typifies the politician's promises. While you are wondering what kind of man this creature without a tongue is, you are suddenly electrified with the news of some splendid victory, proving that behind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... drugged, had kept sounding its alarm to rise and seek Romley; and though at length she obeyed in a panic, she went as one walking in sleep. The front of the cathedral, as she came beneath its shadow, overhung her as a phantom drawn upon the morning sky, its tall towers unsubstantial, trembling against the light, but harmless even should they fall upon her. She entered as one might pass through ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... substance,' to quote from the preface to the 'House of the Seven Gables,' this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he strays in the unsubstantial realm of fantasy. In no one's writings is this better exemplified than in Hawthorne's; not even in Poe's. There is a propriety in Hawthorne's fantasy to which Poe could not attain. Hawthorne's effects are moral ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... attributes and characteristics! Strong drinks, the passion of the Northern races in all ages, are of course found in their old mythic heaven, in their fabled Hereafter,—and even boar's flesh also. The ancient Teuton could not have endured a heaven with mere airy, unsubstantial joys. There must be celestial roasts of strong meat for him, and flagons of his ancestral ale. His descendants to this day never celebrate a great occasion without a huge feed and corporation dinners, thus establishing their legitimate descent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... had Sidney Richmond's name printed on the title-page instead of written on the flyleaf. It was a thick little volume of poems, published in his college days—musical, unsubstantial, pretty little poems, every one of which the girl Sidney ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sought to seize them, unsubstantial.8 Some of these people, however, fixed the site of paradise in the sky, and regarded the aurora borealis as the playing of happy souls. So ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the theories of Plato were taken out of their context, and either asserted or refuted with a provoking literalism; the Socratic or Platonic element in his teaching was absorbed into the Pythagorean or Megarian. His poetry was converted into mysticism; his unsubstantial visions were assailed secundum artem by the rules of logic. His political speculations lost their interest when the freedom of Hellas had passed away. Of all his writings the Laws were the furthest removed from the traditions of the Platonic school in the next generation. Both his ...
— Laws • Plato
... quoted. His wit is the wit of the Londoner—the wit that Dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the wit of the street boy. It is racy, it is understood, and the illustrations are always concrete and massive, never vague or unsubstantial. Apt Shakespearian quotations, familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. Personality, vital personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. The speaker must be alive to his audience, he must convince by his presence no less than by his arguments. And Mr. Burns is so obviously ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... lamer in his suggestion of remedies than he is in his inquiry after causes. The Federal Government, he thinks, can do little or nothing in the premises,—a fatal admission at the outset,—and we are coolly turned over to the most unsubstantial and impracticable of all reliances, "the wisdom and patriotism of the State legislatures"! Why cannot the Federal Government do anything in the premises? The President tells us that the Constitution has conferred ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... together. To Waad's hopeful fancy they appeared, he told Cecil, to have gravely implicated Ralegh, as well as Cobham. Investigated with a view to a positive arraignment, the pile broke up and evaporated. Watson's and Brooke's stories proved as unsubstantial as the astonishing romance adopted by grave de Thou. According to the French annalist, Ralegh, in disgust at the loss of his Captaincy of the Guard, had joined in a plot to kill the King, started by a band of Englishmen incensed at the Scottish irruption. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind. Consuming their reason in these deep but unsubstantial meditations, their minds were exposed to illusions of fancy. They flattered themselves that they possessed the secret of disengaging the soul from its corporal prison; claimed a familiar intercourse with demons and spirits; and, by a very singular revolution, converted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the high mountains is of little value for oeconomic purposes. Though of considerable dimensions, it is too unsubstantial to be serviceable for building or domestic uses; and perhaps, it may be regarded as an evidence of its perishable nature, that dead timber is rarely to be seen in any quantity encumbering the ground, in the heart of the deepest forests. It seems to go to dust almost immediately ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... conflagration flared afresh with formidable intensity, a last great flame shot up from Paris, illumining its entire expanse, and even its hitherto hidden suburbs. Then it seemed as if a grey, ashy dust were falling; and though the clustering districts remained erect, they wore the gloomy, unsubstantial aspect of coals which had ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... equivalent to saying—he walks in the character or likeness of a shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud which darkens leagues of the mountains' side in a moment, and ere a man can say, 'Behold!' is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have thought you could be only a very distant relation of anything so unsubstantial,' said Arthur, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... at Turin, universally lamented on account of his great and amiable qualities. The earl of Warwick and Holland, who accompanied him as a volunteer, shared his fate in being wounded and taken prisoner; but he soon recovered his health and liberty. This victory was as unsubstantial as that of Landen, and almost as dear in the purchase; for the confederates made an obstinate defence, and yielded solely to superior number. The duke of Savoy retreated to Moncalier, and threw a reinforcement ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... comforted herself. Perhaps it would have comforted Betty too, whose hopes rested on the very faint possibility of another summer's gathering at Seaforth. That was a very doubtful possibility; the hope built upon it was vaporously unsubstantial. She debated with herself whether the best thing were not to take the first passable offer that should present itself, marry and settle down, and so deprive herself of the power of thinking about Pitt, ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... planned and a malice unfair, Improvising a scare unsubstantial as air— Now it's "war," now "disease," and the world must prepare For the death of, say, GOULD, or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... noon are a delight; The clouds a wonder in their varying play, And beautiful when from their mountainous height The lightning's hand illumes the wall of day:— The noisy storm bursts down—and passing brings The rainbow poised in air on unsubstantial wings. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... of suspicion so abominable. Besides, of what avail would be a denial without evidence to disprove a suspicion which had arisen without evidence? It was a thing too impalpable to contend with. As well fight a fog as seek to destroy by mere denial suspicion so vague, unsubstantial, and subtile, as that which enveloped him. Silas would, of course, eagerly accept his denial; he well knew how he would spring to his side, how warm and firm would be his hand-clasp, and how great, perhaps, his momentary relief. But he was, after all, but human, and ...
— Two Days' Solitary Imprisonment - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... bird singing, or a leaf fluttering, that might not tend to direct his destiny or give warning of what was in store for him; and he watches the world of nature around him as the astrologer watches the stars. So closely is he linked with it that his guardian spirit, no unsubstantial creation of the fancy, is usually embodied in the form of some living thing—a bear, a wolf, an eagle, or a serpent; and Mene-Seela, as he gazed intently on the old pine tree, might believe it to inshrine the fancied guide and protector of ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence of death, 'the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,' he keeps his head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him; he embraces the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst; for him 'the worst returns to laughter.'[172] 'Bear free and patient thoughts,' he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than patient, they are 'free,' even joyous, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... son, how have I trembled for you as I have watched your career!" To which Aeneas replied, "O father! your image was always before me to guide and guard me." Then he endeavored to enfold his father in his embrace, but his arms enclosed only an unsubstantial image. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... it is not the size or glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to its place, that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails are as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and more so than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth. I hate to see a load of bandboxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. A person who does not deliberately dispose of all his thoughts alike in cumbrous ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Julia and her father—a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories—Julia and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons, who would not expect to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... ridicule as having led to anarchy, destitution, and bankruptcy, must be attributed to the exigencies of debate; for he was an advocate as well as a statesman, and occasionally gave way to the temptation of making showy but unsubstantial points. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... in the world that this testimony of the coincident burning of the woman and the toad was regarded as damning proof, nor is there any reason to believe that the court deemed it necessary to go behind the mere say-so of a single witness for the fact. Along with this sort of unsubstantial testimony there was presented a monotonous mass of spectral evidence. Apparitions of the witches were the constant occasions for the paroxysms of the children. In another connection it will be observed that this form of proof was becoming increasingly common in the last part of ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... longest,' and Mrs Pulchop, of Carthage Cottage, Richmond, was an excellent illustration of the truth of this saying. Thin, pale, with light bleached-looking hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes to match, she looked so shadowy and unsubstantial, than an impression was conveyed to the onlooker that a breath might blow her away. She was often heard to declare, when anything extra-ordinary happened, that one might 'knock her down with a feather', which, as ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Knight; "these are but figments of the imagination—fond dreams as unsubstantial as morning mist, and deceitful as the wandering fire, which lures the ignorant traveller ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... in God. He was as persuaded that there was a God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living, breathing—occasionally coughing—reality of Phoebe, God was something as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem.... ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... harbor on the other; no one ever climbed the hill from the city to gaze over into that hidden valley without feeling a pleasurable surprise at finding it still there. We are accustomed to think of perfect beauty as unsubstantial, evanescent; but the Yumuri never changed, and in that lay its ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... open rupture with my colleagues and this man's friends, and succeeded for a time, but they obliged me at last, either to sanction what I felt to be wrong, or openly to protest against their proceedings. I protested. And now the unsubstantial peace which had existed between us for a time was followed by a very unhappy rupture, which left deep and angry wounds in the hearts of ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness, unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself. Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry, every line of which, as he ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... moving fled before me, and I was compelled to begin an active chase after the unsubstantial wanderer. The eager desire to be released from the perplexities in which I stood armed me with unusual strength. It fled to a distant wood, in whose obscurity it necessarily would have been immediately lost. I saw it—a terror pierced my heart, kindled my burning desire, and gave ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... manner of a bon vivant; he uses his napkin gently and frequently; he glances blandly at the surroundings; watching him, you would suppose the viands were the choicest of the season, exquisitely prepared, while, in reality, they are poor and unsubstantial stuff, the refuse, perhaps, of better restaurants. Having finished the edibles, he calls for a 'gloria,' that is, black coffee and cognac; and, sipping this, he communes with his fancies which come and vanish in the blue waves of cigarette smoke. His aspect bespeaks perfect complacency—Fate ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... spectacle. Against the background of the enormous room, drowned in shadow and hardly lighted save through the round window from without, where the moon was climbing upward in a deep blue sky, a typical operatic sky, the famous dancer's figure stood out all white, a light, airy unsubstantial ghost, flying, rather than springing, through the air; then, standing upon her slender toes, upheld in the air by naught but her outstretched arms, her face raised in a fleeting attitude in which nothing was visible but the ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... now to be more unsubstantial than the fabric of a dream. I cannot think of Clara or of my mother without despair. For oh, Herbert, between me and them there seems to yawn a dishonored grave! Herbert, they talk, you know, of an attack upon the Molino-del-Rey, and I almost hope ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... whereby people—sensible women and men—were sent at his will into a curious torpor, which was neither sleep nor yet wakefulness, and which produced a yet more strange sense of unreality and dreaminess, and visions of things unsubstantial and unearthly. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... and very human spirit which especially reveals itself in the attitude of the contending parties towards each other. The Fates display throughout a proper contempt for what they regard as the showy but unsubstantial personality of the young god; and the natural antagonism of light and darkness, hope and despair, is as amusingly parodied in the mock deference and ill-disguised aversion with which he approaches them. Apollo finally ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... was working. Shadows began to fill the room, and the fragrance of the flowers and the aromatic beverage mingled in the air; the outlines of the surrounding objects melted into one vague form, harmonious, dim, unsubstantial. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... conclude that Newton thought him a Being. Here, however, matter stops the way; for the idea of Being is in all of us inseparably associated with the idea of substance. When told that God is an 'Immense Being,' without parts, and consequently unsubstantial, we try to think of such a Being; but in vain. Reason puts itself in a quandary, the moment it labours to realise an idea of absolute nothingness; yet marvellous to relate, Newton did distinctly declare his Deity 'totally destitute of body,' and urged that fact as a reason why He cannot ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... look as if you lived on roses; but you can't thrive long on such unsubstantial diet. It was real good of you to read to those children so long. If I had been an artist, I would have made a sketch of you three. You and that little dark-eyed ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... records of evanescent impressions as numerous, fickle, and unfounded as those of the most ordinary mortal. It is when urgency presses and danger threatens, when the need for action comes, that his mental energies are aroused, and he begins to speak, as it were, ex cathedra. Then the unsubstantial haze rolls away; and the solid features of the scene one by one appear, until, amid all the unavoidable uncertainties of imperfect information, it becomes plain that the man has a firm grasp upon the great ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... he might fasten Hamlet's lead, then, slowly pushing back the heavy door, he passed inside. The Cathedral was utterly quiet. The vast nave, stained with reflections of purple and green and ruby, was vague and unsubstantial, all the little wooden chairs huddled together to the right and left, leaving a great path that swept up to the High Altar under shafts of light that fell like searchlights from the windows. The tombs and the statues peered dimly from the shadow, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... as he answered her, for he saw that she could be fanciful, too. "Unsubstantial moonlight, glamour, mystery—perhaps other things as well," he said. "If you are curious, why shouldn't we ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... have accrued. If these results had been the consequences of a long war—if they had been the results of a struggle like that we underwent in the Crimea—I do not think they would have been even then unsubstantial or unsatisfactory. My Lords, I hope that you and the country will not forget that these results have been obtained without shedding the blood of a single Englishman; and if there has been some expenditure, it has been an expenditure which, at least, has shown the resources and ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... His patience with thee, of His trust of thee; think of the Love of the Redeemer, Who gave Himself for thy life; think of the great objective truths of religion—righteousness, joy and peace in the Holy Ghost. Or if these seem unsubstantial thoughts, that flash and fade again like clouds on the western sky at evening, come out among the flesh-and-blood proofs of them which walk our own day. Frequent the pure, strong men and women who are ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... was only Mrs. Manstey; and she was dying, as she had lived, lonely if not alone. The doctor had sent a trained nurse, and Mrs. Sampson, with muffled step, came in from time to time; but both, to Mrs. Manstey, seemed remote and unsubstantial as the figures in a dream. All day she said nothing; but when she was asked for her daughter's address she shook her head. At times the nurse noticed that she seemed to be listening attentively for some sound which did not come; then ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... for the moment see nothing in the shape of either figure or form, from which he could resolve what he had heard into a natural sound. At length, as he stood almost dissolved in terror, he thought that an indistinct, or rather an unsubstantial figure stood at the carriage-door, looked in for a moment, and then bent his glance at him, with a severe and stem expression; after which, it began to rub out or efface a certain portion of the armorial bearings, which he had added to his heraldic coat in right of his wife. The ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Laurentum. Then the goddess, strange and ominous to see, fashions into the likeness of Aeneas a thin and pithless shade of hollow mist, decks it with Dardanian weapons, and gives it the mimicry of shield and divine helmet plume, gives unsubstantial [640-673]words and senseless utterance, and the mould and motion of his tread: like shapes rumoured to flit when death is past, or dreams that delude the slumbering senses. But in front of the battle-ranks the phantom dances ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... into the appearance of ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon, we find, as we should expect, that they are a vague, unsubstantial copy of their former selves on earth. In Homer[12] the shade of Patroclus, which visited Achilles in a vision as he slept by the sea-shore, looks exactly as Patroclus had looked on earth, even down to the clothes. Hadrian's famous "animula ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing-place. We both saw a large pale light—as large as the human figure, but shapeless and unsubstantial—move before us, and ascend the stairs that led from the landing into the attic. I followed the light, and my servant followed me. It entered to the right of the landing, a small garret, of which the door stood open. I entered in ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Emily's color rushed back. Satisfied, Bailey led the way to the tiers of seats, almost empty at this hour. Pearly, unsubstantial in the young light, lay the huge oval meadow and the track edging it. Of the fourteen cars starting, nine were still circling their course, one temporarily ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... wicked. Right or wrong, in all acts, something of both is seen. Subjecting animals to castration, their horns again are cut off. They are then made to bear weights, are tethered, and chastised. In this world that is unsubstantial and rotten with abuses and rendered painful, O monarch, do thou practise the ancient customs of men, following the rules and analogies cited above. Perform sacrifices, give alms, protect thy subjects, and practise righteousness. Slay thy foes, O son ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... anguish, a whirlwind of rage and indignation roused her torpid pulse. One recollection with frightful velocity following another, threatened to fire her brain, and make her a fit companion for the terrific inhabitants, whose groans and shrieks were no unsubstantial sounds of whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a romantic fancy, which amuse while they affright; but such tones of misery as carry a dreadful certainty directly to the heart. What effect must they then have produced ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... hereafter, and earth was to be their eternal home. I have thought that as our Blessed Redeemer's arms were extended wide on the cross to embrace perishing sinners, so do these short-sighted mortals extend their arms and their wishes in grasping unsubstantial vanities, and that craving one of Mammon, the most fascinating of all, as ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... and the shadow of the shade of what was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this projection of a man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot! This precarious tenure ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... easier to know that a cake is bad than to make a good one." I had a tiny quantity of material which, by dint of much rolling, I might have expanded into a broad, flat, unsubstantial whole; I preferred, however, to make of my little piece of dough a little cake, small and therefore less pretentious. I am afraid that even in this concentrated form it will prove flavorless and indigestible, but the cook must be ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... conspicuous as his limitations. Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life, seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power'; Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of delightfulness, and, to those ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... on the most discordant principles, which, though announced as permanent and unchangeable, had successively given way to newer doctrines, that they considered the splendid representation before them as an unsubstantial pageant, which would fade away in its turn. Bonaparte himself seemed absent and gloomy, till recalled to a sense of his grandeur by the voice of the numerous deputies and functionaries sent up from all the several departments of France, to witness the coronation. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... is, in that particular Shadow, eternally a boy at Hull; his life to me is a series of shadows, but there is no "was" in the case. If I choose to go to his manhood, I can. These shadows don't change as realities do. No phase of his existence passes away, if I choose to bring it to this unsubstantial and delightful life, the only death of which, to me, is my death, and thus he is immortal to unnumbered thousands. If I am right, will you look at the proof through the first third or half of the papers, and see whether the Factor comes before us in that ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... the recovery of an Asiatic Empire, which Psamatik may have cherished, and of which Neco attempted the realization. The defeat of Carchemish shattered the unsubstantial fabric into atoms, and gave a death-blow to hopes which no ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... mass, and then roll away, as Mr Kohl says, "like a huge giant in his seven-league boots." Thousands of them are annually blown into the Black Sea, and here, once in contact with water, in an instant lose the fantastic grace belonging to their dry, unsubstantial texture.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... of which treat nothing but the nineteenth century, only six contain his name, and these simply mention him either as a member of the Dresden group of pseudo-romanticists, or as one of those Afterromantiker who did yeoman service by way of bringing real romanticism into disrepute through their unsubstantial, imitative, and formless works. And this is true despite the fact that Loeben was an exceedingly prolific writer and a very popular and influential man in. his day. Concerning his personality, Muncker says: "Die Tiefe ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... master-piece of the great genius of his age—one which he could never hope to equal, nor even rival—and yet the infinite superiority, so far from crushing him, only elevated his feeling, for he saw realized those conceptions which had floated before him, dim and unsubstantial; in every line and touch he felt a spirit immeasurably superior yet kindred, and he is reported to have exclaimed, with dignified humility, "And I too am ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... vain upon Sir Ulick, but that, fortunately for her passion, at one and the same time, the Irish ministry were turned out, and an Irish canal burst. Sir Ulick losing his place by the change of ministry, and one half of his fortune by the canal, in which it had been sunk; and having spent in unsubstantial schemes and splendid living more than the other half; now, in desperate misery, laid hold of the Widow Scraggs. After a nine days' courtship she became a bride, and she and her plum in the stocks—but not her messuage, house, and lands, in Kent—became the property of Sir Ulick O'Shane. "Love ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the Place de Mer, and soothed myself with some terrestrial harmony; till, my eyes growing heavy, I fell fast asleep, and entered the empire of dreams, according to custom, by its ivory portal. What passed in those shadowy realms is too thin and unsubstantial to be committed to paper. The very breath of waking mortals would dissipate all the train, and drive them eternally away; give me leave, therefore, to omit the relation of my visionary travels, and have the patience to pursue a sketch ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from the burthen of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty, came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... ridiculous. There was nothing after all to be interested about! There was simply this! The dreariness of my mood was indescribable, and corresponded so closely to the scene before me that I found myself wondering which was effect, which cause. The silence, the tracts of unformed space, the unsubstantial river, the ceaseless vibration along its surface of infinite moving points, all this was a reflex of my thoughts and they of it. My misery was Intolerable; to escape became my only object; and with this in view I rose and began to ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the spot in which he lay and the uniform which hung upon the wall, he was frank to admit that the beautiful and rich heiress of whom his family dreamed was a very unsubstantial vision indeed, and that, to be honest with himself, he had nothing to offer for ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... often thrust before my path; but although they are most unsubstantial, it is not easy to destroy them. There is not a more difficult feat known than to cut through a cushion ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... towards the library, and seeing the door wide open walked in, and I, still gazing, saw his figure pass through that of the woman in the doorway as you may walk through a wreath of mist or smoke—only, don't misunderstand me, the figure of Maud till that moment had had nothing unsubstantial about it. She had looked to me, as she stood there, literally and exactly like a living woman—the shade of her dress, the colour of her hair, the few ornaments she wore, all were as defined and clear as ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... that a bench, covered with purple cloth and plentifully loaded with session papers, does to some Gothic throne, rough with barbaric pearl and gold. But what would you have?—SUA QUEMQUE TRAHIT VOLUPTAS. And my visions of preferment, though they may be as unsubstantial at present, are nevertheless more capable of being realized, than your aspirations after the Lord knows what. What says my father's proverb? 'Look to a gown of gold, and you will at least get a sleeve of it.' Such ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the midst of all kinds of wealth and enjoyment, yet, if blessed with intelligence, one does not live in them: while he that is destitute of intelligence lives wholly in objects of enjoyment that are even unsubstantial.[1559] Sin cannot attach to a man of wisdom even as water cannot drench the leaves of the lotus. Sin adheres more firmly to him who is without attachment even as lac and wood adhere firmly to each other. Sin, which ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... opinions: namely, that during so large a part of his life he has been wont to discuss subjects with himself and not with other men; that he has, therefore, come to worship idols of his own creation, and often very unsubstantial idols, and to look with misgiving and distrust on the ideas of others. Very rarely during our conversations did I hear him speak with any real enthusiasm regarding any human being: his nearest approach to it was with reference to the writings of the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... indolence and the unsubstantial nature of their food, they were comparatively strong and robust, as they proved in many a personal tussle with ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... the truth of this theory, I think there can be no doubt that its rival gains an enormous advantage by being able to explain why the facts are such as they are instead of being obliged to take refuge in hypothetical possibilities of a confessedly unsubstantiated and apparently unsubstantial kind. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... circumspect, for the boy was already too deeply steeped in those Acherontic waters. His mother, like many other women, had loved to wander along the dreamy paths of sentimental theology, clothing from her own beautiful mind the dim, unsubstantial spectres that beckoned her, and accepting all their mystic utterances, in blind faith, for genuine oracles of God. Into these by-ways he had followed her, and his clearer vision had just sufficed to reveal to him the ghosts, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... laugh at them at any other time, he makes it stumble over anything he likes. The soul, laid in fetters, loses all control over itself, and all power of thinking of anything but the absurdities he puts before it, which, being more or less unsubstantial, inconsistent, and disconnected, serve only to stifle the soul, so that it has no power over itself; and accordingly—so it seems to me—the devils make a football of it, and the soul is unable to escape out of their hands. ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... friends will tell us), the work on these beautiful porches has exquisite grace; the fourteenth-century sculptor gave free scope to his fancy, his hands have played about the soft white stone till it took forms so delicate and strange, so unsubstantial and yet so permanent, that it is a ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... had no goods to barter; her society ceased to revel, for her people were called upon to preserve themselves. Her arts were forgotten; only religion held its own and that from very fear. Egypt was on her knees, but the gods were aghast and helpless in the face of the hideous power of the unsubstantial, unimaged God of Israel. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... be some men who would say these things are not natural; but if we could see all the fine relationships of one being to another, if the mortal eye refined could view the unsubstantial as well as the substantial world, could mark the keen sympathies and near associations, and all the essences which fill up the apparent gaps between being and being, we should see, undoubtedly, that these things are most natural, and wonder at the blindness with which ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... encountered in the dim regions of twilight, where realities blend inextricably with mere phantoms, and the mind confers only a kind of provisional existence upon the 'airy nothings' of its creation. Apollyon does not appear armed to the teeth and throwing fiery darts, but comes as an unsubstantial shadow threatening vague and undefined dangers, and only half-detaching himself from the background of darkness. He is as intangible as Milton's Death, not the vivid reality which presented itself ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the morrow, the Finns cast snow upon the ground and made it look like a mighty river. So the Swedes, whose eyes were utterly deluded, were deceived by their misjudgment, for it seemed the roaring of an extraordinary mass of waters. Thus, the conqueror dreading the unsubstantial phantom of the waters, the Finns managed to escape. They renewed the war again on the third day; but there was no effective means of escape left any longer, for when they saw that their lines were falling back, they surrendered to the conqueror. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... which, though of noble quality, have not yet been moulded to any exquisite refinement by the perfecting of the virtues—I mean, the love of glory—and fame for high services rendered to the commonweal. And yet consider with me how poor and unsubstantial a thing this glory is! The whole of this earth's globe, as thou hast learnt from the demonstration of astronomy, compared with the expanse of heaven, is found no bigger than a point; that is to say, if measured by the vastness of heaven's sphere, it is ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... were Vail's, but the face was plowed and pitted fearfully as with the smallpox. All this Charley saw, while seeing through the ghost and beyond—the carving on the rosewood dressing case was quite as visible through the unsubstantial apparition as before. Charley was not ordinarily superstitious, and he quickly reasoned that his excited imagination had confounded the features of Harry Vail's face with the pock-marked visage of the Huckleberry Street Irish woman. So he shook himself, rubbed his eyes and looked again. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, they attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind. Consuming their reason in those deep but unsubstantial meditations, their minds were exposed to illusions of fancy. They flattered themselves that they possessed the secret of disengaging the soul from its corporeal prison; claimed a familiar intercourse ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... and left a scarred track of memory behind it. It had been a windless day, filled with glittering blue lights that darted like birds down the long ash-coloured roads, and spun with a golden web of air which made the fields and trees appear as thin and as unsubstantial as dreams. The children were with Marthy in the park, and Virginia, attired in the old waist with the new sleeves, was leaning on the front gate watching the slow fall of the leaves from the gnarled mulberry tree at the corner, when Mrs. Pendleton appeared on the opposite ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place; That is fit home ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... with a dreary glimmer of gas among them all; so that they serve well enough to represent the dim, unsatisfactory remembrances that dead people might be supposed to retain from their past lives, mixing them up with the ghastliness of their unsubstantial state. I dwell the more upon these trifles, and do my best to give them a mockery of importance, because, if these are nothing, then all this elaborate contrivance and mighty piece of work has been wrought in vain. The Englishman has burrowed under the bed of his great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such as modes of dress, formalities of conversation, rules of visits, disposition of furniture, and practices of ceremony, which naturally find places in familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and unsubstantial, that they are not easily retained or recovered. What can be known will be collected by chance, from the recesses of obscure and obsolete papers, perused commonly with some other view. Of this knowledge every man has some, and none has much; but when ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... refinement, and has at least an external conscience; but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are precisely those to which he cannot respond. When at last you come close to him you find him chill and unsubstantial,—a mere vapor." ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... declared the One Thing to be Fire, but Fire of a mystical nature, "self-kindled and self-extinguished," the vital quickening power of the universe. It was that Universal Life, by participation in which all things have their being, and apart from which they are unsubstantial and unreal. This is the "Tree of ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... who would shed every drop of blood in his veins for me, will not open up before me the least corner in his heart. Friendship, I repeat, is nothing but an unsubstantial shadow—a lure, like everything else ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... author cannot drop into conversation more easily than by here venturing upon the expression of a purely personal feeling—his own enjoyment in the weaving of the unsubstantial webs of improbable adventure that fill the preceding pages. With an ironic satisfaction was it that a writer who is not unaccustomed to be called a mere realist here attempted fantasy, even though the results of his effort may reveal invention only and not imagination. It may even ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... inquiries to which literature gives rise probe for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues to the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to think of idealism as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters intimately into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at all except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neither speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter, universal in interest, and ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... by a brake of flowering furze (Above it shivering aspens play) He sees an unsubstantial creature, His very self in form and feature, Not four yards from the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... fingered the dented shoulder to make certain it was not leaking. The dueling machine and its rules seemed so very remote and unsubstantial, compared to this ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... limbs extending. There her very griefs, "Pour'd with her tears, still musically sound. "Mourning, her words in a soft dying tone "Are heard, as when of old th' expiring swan "Sung his own elegy. Wasted at length "Her finest marrow, fast she pin'd away; "And vanish'd quite to unsubstantial air. "Yet still tradition marks the spot, the muse "Of ancient days, still Canens call'd the place, "In honor of the nymph, and ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... transcendentalists (who under one name or another have their share in all the current literature of the world), and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy and unsubstantial, in his mode of development, to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to a satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the former, he must necessarily find himself without ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... work, and his religion, and none of them held. The factory, to which he had given the best of his brain and his body, for which he had dreamed and aspired and planned, was a nightmare to him. Mrs. Purdy and the church activities, which had loomed so large in his life, were but fleeting, unsubstantial shadows. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... M. Joyeuse had had the courage to say no. Was it not better to die of hunger than to enter the service of an unsubstantial house whose books he might some day be called upon to examine as an expert ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Real except THE ALL, no matter what terms we may use in thinking of, or discussing the subject. Whether the Universe be created of Matter, or whether it be a Mental Creation in the Mind of THE ALL—it is unsubstantial, non-enduring, a thing of time, space and change. We want you to realize this fact thoroughly, before you pass judgment on the Hermetic conception of the Mental nature of the Universe. Think over any and all of the other conceptions, and ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... corridor and cloister seems to preserve the souvenir of his sombre and imperious genius. For two and a half centuries his feeble successors have trod these granite halls; but they flit through your mind pale and unsubstantial as dreams. The only tradition they preserved of their great descent was their magnificence and their bigotry. There has never been one utterance of liberty or free thought inspired by this haunted ground. The king has always been absolute here, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... forces of secular interests combined with intellectual progress had not as yet set limits on ecclesiastical encroachment. The dread lest Europe should succumb to Rome, now proved by subsequent events an unsubstantial nightmare, was real enough for this Venetian friar, who ran daily risk of assassination in down-trodden servile Italy, with Spanish plots threatening the arsenal, with France delivered into the hands of Florentines and casuists, with England in the grip of Stuarts, and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... as they consumed into vapour and tinder, regarded them with a smile upon her compressed lips, and an exultation in her steady eye, which showed her confidence that the hopes of the writers should soon be rendered equally unsubstantial. ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... she cared for now above all price. She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, 'All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!' And when the morning dawned, cool and gray, like many a happier ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... doubtful way clear before him. He saw, with a thrill of exultation, that henceforth he had really nothing to fear from such womanly defences as he had counted on,—coldness, prejudice, disdain,—that all he had taken for these were but unsubstantial shadows. Still he showed no premature triumph in word or look, but remained silent and humble, waiting the reply to his passionate appeal, as though life or death, in very truth, were depending upon it. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... directions, and from every part of the State came back responses showing that the whole people felt as deeply as the citizens of San Francisco, the loss they had sustained: But sorrow was not suffered to expend itself in respectful but unsubstantial mourning emblems; and while a great multiture, from five o'clock in the afternoon to a late hour in the night, were slowly and sadly passing through the room in Montgomery Block in which their friend lay cold in death, taking a last look at that face long so familiar upon the streets, but ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... mist, or rather as a mist with dissolving outline; and as he saw the thing as a mist, so he ever and anon mistakes a mist for the thing. But Erasmus and Saavedra were equally indistinct; and shallow and unsubstantial to boot. In fact, till the appearance of Kant's 'Kritiques' of the pure and of the practical Reason the problem had never been accurately or adequately stated, much ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hoofs which are made of iron; and they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust. For they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial ...
— The Republic • Plato
... powwow, who parted with them to the old witch for a gill of strong waters, at one of their dances in the forest. Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk stockings, and put them on the figure's legs, where they showed as unsubstantial as a dream, with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself miserably apparent through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead husband's wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin, and surmounted the whole with a dusty three-cornered hat, in which was stuck ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... still half ashamed, to the dream that she might yet be somehow weaned from him, and leave his conscience free. By constantly building upon this thought, and putting aside all others, he made room upon the waste of his life for a house of cards, glittering, unsubstantial, lofty,—until there came some sudden breath that swept it away; and then he began ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... natures such as hers lose their self-reliance, life becomes as unsubstantial as an opium dream. If they cannot count upon themselves, what then may ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... arms and deposited on the doorstep a figure enveloped in a cloak. It was evidently a woman; or, rather,—judging from the ease with which he lifted her, and the little space which she seemed to fill in his arms, a slim and unsubstantial girl. As she showed some hesitation about entering the door, Hollingsworth, with his usual directness and lack of ceremony, urged her forward not merely within the entry, but into the warm and ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... what fame is?" exclaimed the romantic boy. But he paused, convinced in a moment of the perfect futility of attempting to convey an idea of the unsubstantial phantom to the old man's intellect. Perhaps the old farmer was the better philosopher of ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... that, he hoped that Helen herself would be impressed by the deep regard in which these fair disciples evidently held him and his work. Miss Heatherton was to pour the tea, and Miss Long was to distribute the thin lettuce sandwiches which formed its somewhat unsubstantial accompaniment. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet? O, what more favour can I do to thee Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain To sunder his that was thine enemy? Forgive me, cousin!—Ah, dear Juliet, Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe That unsubstantial death is amorous; And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that I still will stay with thee, And never from this palace of dim night Depart again: here, here will I remain With worms ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... for there are things which are more real than reality, and being so, must be couched in different words from such as describe the things that one's bodily eyes behold of the grim reality of this world. Such things, being so told, may seem as strange and as unsubstantial as that which is unreal, instead of like that which ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... better reason on your side, Edith," replied her husband, his manner very much subdued. "But it is difficult for me to unclasp my hand to let fall therefrom the natural good which I can see and estimate, for the seemingly unreal and unsubstantial good that, to your purer vision, looms ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... hour later he was in a pitiable state; and had begun even to question Jenny's loyalty. He had turned to the thought of her as a last resort for soothing and reassurance, and now, in the chilly dawn, even she seemed unsubstantial. ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... did; and tasked all my powers of argument and persuasion to convince her how unsubstantial was the ground of her anxiety. The little boy was perfectly well, and, even were he to die before his sister that event might not occur for seventy years to come. I could not, however, conceal from myself that there was something odd and unpleasant in the coincidence; and ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... when the moon lay upon them; and sometimes as if they appeared suddenly in the streets of the city after the people had passed by and the houses had gone to sleep. They were as light as thistle-down, as unsubstantial as mists upon the mountain, as wayward and flickering as will-o'-the-wisps. But there was something immortal about them, and the man knew that the world would be nothing to him without ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... ineffectual passion, and it argued a great nature in him, that at the moment when his wishes were to be crowned, he should look with such slight touches of spleen at the gorgeous composite fabric of Parisian cookery and Roman antiquities crumbling into unsubstantial mockery. Assuredly very few even of the philosophers would have turned away uncomplainingly to meaner ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the street." The thing happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the street and average sensual men and economic men and womanly women and what not, all of them imaginary Atlases carrying imaginary worlds on their unsubstantial shoulders. ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... named; the title conferred a new dignity at once; but when the learned man added that it was familiarly called the "fairy shrimp," I felt a deeper pleasure. Fairy-like it certainly was, in its aerial, unsubstantial look, and in its delicate, down-like means of locomotion; but the large head, with its curious folds, and its eyes standing out in relief, as if on the heads of two pins, were gnome-like. Probably the fairy wore a mask, and wanted to appear terrible to human eyes. Then the creatures ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... revealing untold wonders and giving an added stimulus to the leader's lively imagination. And indeed the forest was a place in which anyone might expect to meet a fairy or a goblin behind every tree. The happy sense of unreality lent by the uncertainty of distances, the airy unsubstantial appearance of the leaf-grown earth; the dazzling splashes of golden light on the green, the sudden appearance of open glades choked with blossoms; and through all the ringing harmony of a hundred songsters combined to make the ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... right or the left, or straight before them, dash through the enemy's front, or scour the flanks, or sweep the rear, perambulate squares, and perforate encampments, just as if the serried ranks of the Sikhs had been unsubstantial creatures of the imagination, or mist-wreaths from the "wet nullah," which a lively fancy had invested with human form and warlike panoply. But one hundred and fifty-one gallant men killed, and four hundred and thirteen wounded, sufficiently proved that "one of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... either described at some length or indicated by a masterly allusion. All kinds of girls are depicted, as all kinds of girls go to college—girls poor and rich, clever, dull, and commonplace, refined and unrefined, the unsubstantial and the dilettante, and those with genuine talent, and the life among them seems very real, for nothing is forced or strained in the stories. The trial scene in Professor Lamont is one of the cleverest bits of ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that there may have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... he succeeded. Certainly there was no break of emotion in his cold, even voice, and at the same time no possibility of evading its deadly earnestness. McCormick, whose means of livelihood were frequently more unsubstantial than real, listened to the offer of pecuniary reward for his services with something like shock. Fifty dollars a day for his time, and an additional five thousand dollars if he found the ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... State authority; but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him, or to others, by what authority it is done. And should any one, in any case, be content that his oath should go unkept, on a mere unsubstantial controversy as to how ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... even when sense was slipping away, but of the blanks between those conditions I know nothing. They may have been long or they may have been short—I cannot tell. All remains on my memory now like the unsubstantial ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capt Towers, the gorgeous Palaces, The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself, And all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by other spirits." At this point the soul is an unsubstantial essence inhabiting a body, it has its life and activity only in connection with the body; but the step was easily taken to the further belief in spirits like the souls, but not attached to any body. The spirits moved about freely, like the genii, demons, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... soul to be an unsubstantial dweller in material forms, and man to be material instead of spiritual. Immortality is not bounded by mortality. 302:1 Soul is not compassed by finiteness. Principle is not to be found ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune and even more unsubstantial than usual. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... said he, sadly; "you wish to erect this sisterly love into an impassable barrier separating me from you, and to pour this cool and unsubstantial affection like a soothing balm upon my sufferings. How little do you know of love, Elise; of that passion which desires every thing, which is satisfied with nothing less than extreme happiness, or, failing that, extreme wretchedness, and will accept no pitiful compromise, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... they rise above the dead level of the delta like mounds. Many of these villages have probably occupied the same site since the days of the Pharaohs, the debris and rubbish of centuries have accumulated and been built upon again and again as the unsubstantial mud dwellings have crumbled away, until they have gradually developed into mounds that rise like huge mole-hills above the plain, and on which the present houses are built. Near each village is a graveyard, also forming a mound-like excrescence ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... while all Europe was openly arming against him, he had leisure for the affairs of the negroes? This display of philanthropy was set down universally for a stage-trick; and men quickened their eyes, lest such unsubstantial shows in the distant horizon might be designed to withdraw their ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... effect of this magical illumination. The mosque, with its taper minarets, its airy galleries, and its great central dome, is built of compact, transparent flame, and in the shifting of the red and yellow fires, seems to flicker and waver in the air. It is as lofty, and gorgeous, and unsubstantial as the cloudy palace in Cole's picture of "Youth." The long white front of the arsenal is fused in crimson heat, and burns against the dark as if it were one mass of living coal. And over all hangs the luminous canopy of smoke, redoubling ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... son! For a while Jane had the sensation of walking upon unsubstantial floors, of seeing unsubstantial objects. The encounter did not seem real, human. Father and son, and they had not rushed into each other's arms! No matter what had happened in the past, there should have been some human sign other than astonishment. At the very ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... with sad feelings from a spot which memory had held sacred for twenty years; but which, in its change, could be sacred no longer. Material things are called substantial; but it is not so. Change and decay are ever at work upon them; they are unsubstantial. A real substance is the mind, with its thoughts and affections. Forms built there do not decay. How perfectly had I retained in memory the home of my childhood! Not a leaf had withered, not a flower ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done; and should any one, in any case, be content that this oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... their all, to gain only a soldier's grave. Looking at these shapeless forms, coffined in a regulation blanket, the pride of race, the pomp of empire, the glory of war appeared but the faint and unsubstantial fabric of a dream; and I could not help realising with Burke: "What shadows we are and what shadows ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... here and there a light gleaming near the shore above, and more faintly glimmering under water,—all perfect, but somewhat more hazy and indistinct than the reality. There were many clouds flitting about the sky; and the picture of each could be traced in the water,—the ghost of what was itself unsubstantial. The rattling of wheels heard long and far through the town. Voices of people talking on the other side of the river, the tones being so distinguishable in all their variations that it seemed as if what was there said might be understood; ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
