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More "Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I'm confident, to write plays—strong plays. Does he ever write except ephemeral space stuff for ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... heart bleed,—we may well understand how all these causes may have given rise to some moments of misanthropy, such as are betrayed by a few expressions in his journal; but it was a misanthropy that existed only in words, a plant without roots, of ephemeral growth, and most natural to a fine nature. We feel, notwithstanding all these real palpable causes of ennui, that his principal sufferings ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... wiser than we are; they were certainly less informed, and probably were, on that account, in the general case, less judicious. But time has swept away their follies, which were doubtless great enough, as it has done the worthless ephemeral literature with which they, as we, were overwhelmed; and nothing has stood the test of ages, and come down to us through a series of generations, of their ideas or institutions, but what had some utility in human feelings and necessities, and was on the whole expedient at the time when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a means?" asked he; "the holiest tie on earth only as a means, and for what? For a pitiable and ephemeral chase after happiness, which you call honour and freedom. Poor, deceived Sara! Are you so misled, so turned aside from the right? Is it possible that the miserable book of a writer, as full of pretension ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... times of deep reflection, of slowly maturing thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between excited passions ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... that bundles of pale strawlike beams radiated around them in the shape of a fan. Some were large and near, glowing scarlet-red from the shade, like wounds in a black hide. Some were Maenades, with winy faces and blown hair. These tinctured the silent bosom of the clouds above them and lit up their ephemeral caves, which seemed thenceforth to become scalding caldrons. Perhaps as many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds of the district; and as the hour may be told on a clock-face when the figures themselves are invisible, so did the men recognize the locality of each fire ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... adjuncts of modern tuition;" but if we are to consider that the condition of the human intellect at any particular juncture is worth studying, it is certainly of importance to know on what food its infancy is fed. And so of children's play-books as well as their work-books; these are as ephemeral as their other toys. Retaining dear recollections of some that were the favourites, and desiring to awaken from them old recollections of careless boyhood, or perhaps to try whether your own children inherit the paternal susceptibility to their beauties, you make application to the bookseller—but, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... by poem, has passed under | | the educated criticism and scholarly eye of WILLIAM CULLEN | | BRYANT, a man reverenced among men, a poet great among | | poets. | | | | This is a Library of over 500 Volumes in one book, whose | | contents, of no ephemeral nature or interest, will never | | grow old or stale. It can be, and will be, read and re-read | | with pleasure as long as its leaves hold together. Over 800 | | pages beautifully printed, choicely illustrated, handsomely | | bound. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... literary coquetry may be permissible to retailers of the marvelous, the sober chronicler is bound to forego such advantage as he may reap from an odd-sounding name, on which many ephemeral successes are founded in these days. Wherefore the present writer gives the following succinct statement of the reasons which induced him to adopt the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... applauded by those they entertain or amuse. The chess master receives no applause; over the board, however, he enters into conversation with amateurs, and is rewarded by friendships that far outweigh the wildest ephemeral outbursts of approval. The friendships so formed by Zukertort have now been snapped, and his removal has caused, in the words of the old player Bird, "a severe blank." Bird himself is an interesting character. He is by far the oldest chess master, does the chess ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... long scan of waves, myself call'd back, resumed upon myself, In every crest some undulating light or shade—some retrospect, Joys, travels, studies, silent panoramas—scenes ephemeral, The long past war, the battles, hospital sights, the wounded and the dead, Myself through every by-gone phase—my idle youth—old age at hand, My three-score years of life summ'd up, and more, and past, By any grand ideal tried, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... advancement. In his profession, however, he did not succeed; and meeting with no encouragement in any other quarter, he devoted himself henceforward to the service of the booksellers. More novels, translation, historical compilation, ephemeral criticism, were the multifarious employments which they laid on him. Nothing that he afterwards produced quite came up to the raciness of his first performances. In 1753, he published the Adventures of Ferdinand ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... of an author whose characters speak in the argot proper to their surroundings, the necessity for revision is even more imperative; the change in the cultured speech of a language is a process that requires years to become pronounced, the evolution of slang is rapid and its usage ephemeral. For example Stephen Gaselee, in his bibliography of Petronius, calls attention to Harry Thurston Peck's rendering of "bell um pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... their coming and going more trace than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... resume in this our exile, and with more prospect of continuity, the emotions which were so agreeable in our former state? So agreeable—although, as you justly say, too ephemeral [coming a little closer]. Can you not teach us to moderate ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... immediate pleasures of sense, as well as such positive gains, however ill-gotten, as could be made the means of procuring them, and throwing aside all thought both of honor and of long-sighted advantage. Life and property being alike ephemeral, there was no hope left but to snatch a moment of enjoyment, before the outstretched hand of destiny should fall ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... Tartars, they never would have had much to do with the history of the world. In that case, they would have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis; they might have swept over the face of the earth, and scourged the human race, powerful to destroy, helpless to construct, and in consequence ephemeral; but this would have been all. But this has not been all, as regards the Turks; for, in spite of their intimate resemblance or relationship to the Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential barbarism to ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Constitution in other schools, and under other teachers. She looks upon it with other regards, and deems more highly and reverently both of its just authority and its utility and excellence. The history of her legislative proceedings may be traced. The ephemeral effusions of temporary bodies, called together by the excitement of the occasion, may be hunted up; they have been hunted up. The opinions and votes of her public men, in and out of Congress, may be explored. It will all be in vain. The Carolina doctrine can derive ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... recollected the best things. Now, it is not everybody can remember a thousand disconnected facts and recall them apropos. He was various, fluent, and, above all, superficial; and such are your best conversers. They have something good and strictly ephemeral to say on everything, and don't know enough of anything to impale their hearers. In my youth there talked in Pall Mall a gentleman known as "Conversation Sharpe." He eclipsed everybody. Even Macaulay ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... spiritual power resulting in crimes, which were "a sin unto death." Another abuse of secrecy has been manifested in means heretofore employed in the constant effort to obtain and maintain worldly power. This was by affecting the imagination and blinding the reason of the masses. Some time ago, an ephemeral work was published, even the name of which is not recollected by this writer, wherein was a picture showing the section of a handsome tent with curtains closely drawn. Within, is a man eating and feasting like other mortals. Without, is a stand on which ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... as much contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular, sprang from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth." ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... a consistent and simultaneous view of the general field of British politics in an hour of fateful decision. I have exercised full freedom in compression and in verbal correction necessary to make them easier to read. Facts and figures have been, where necessary, revised, ephemeral matter eliminated, and epithets here and there reconsidered. But opinions and arguments are unaltered; they are hereby confirmed, and I press them earnestly ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... lost their influence. The traditions of European mythology, the revelations of Asia, the time-consecrated dogmas of Egypt, all had passed or were fast passing away. And the Ptolemies recognized how ephemeral are forms ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... still forego Thy heritage and high ambition, To lie full lowly and full low, Adjusted to thy new condition? Not hidden in the drifted snows, But under ink-drops idly spattered, And leaves ephemeral as those That on ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... enfold a legion of children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. He ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... theatricals at Bridgewater House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor Hugo's play of "Hernani," ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... called in America travelling side- shows'; and the inexperienced foreigner could never imagine the possibilities of a Japanese side-show. On certain great holidays the showmen make their appearance, put up their ephemeral theatres of rush- matting and bamboos in some temple court, surfeit expectation by the most incredible surprises, and then vanish as suddenly as they came. The Skeleton of a Devil, the Claws of a Goblin, and 'a Rat as large as a sheep,' were some of the least extraordinary displays which I saw. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... invisibility. A gentle breeze was astir in the woods, and it set the leaves to whispering. The treetoads and the locusts were trolling a chorus. So loudly vibrant, it was! So clamorously gay! Some subtle intimation they surely had that summer was ephemeral and the season waning, for the burden of their song was, Let us now be merry. The scarlet head of a woodpecker showed brilliantly from the bare dead boughs of a chestnut-oak, which, with its clinging lichens of green and gray, was boldly projected against the azure sky. ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... returned to Valparaiso on the 3rd of June, 1822, having been absent more than twenty months. An enthusiastic welcome awaited him. Medals were struck in his honour, and in various ephemeral ways the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... cannot be disobeyed: we have order in the seasons, in the tides, in the movement of the heavenly bodies, in the instinct of animals, in the duration of life assigned to each; from the elephant who lives more than a century, to the ephemeral fly, whose whole existence is ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and the notion of being obliged to forego this advantage and triumph, and the perplexity into which he was thrown between doubt whether it really was worth while, and fear of sacrificing a great and permanent, to an accidental and ephemeral interest, threw him into an uncertainty and embarrassment which disturbed his equanimity. It is at all events fortunate that I did not go to him myself, for I should have been met with a cold austerity of manner which would have disconcerted me, and I should have most certainly quitted ...
— 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
... after our unsuccessful attempt to see the tombs of these ephemeral rulers we received another message, naming an hour for our visit; and this time the Pasha's representative was waiting in the archway. We followed his lead, under the openly mistrustful glances of the Arabs who hung about the square, and after picking our ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... was before this question was mooted, and without which there can be no happiness or security to the community. A thousand mushroom orators and politicians have sprung up all over the country, each big with his own ephemeral importance, and every one of whom fancies himself fit to govern the nation. Amongst them are some men of active and powerful minds, and nothing is less probable than that these spirits of mischief and misrule ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... pen had superseded the sword, for Victor and Eugene were scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to founding ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... prevail at last! Surely ye shall prevail! Your silence and austerity shall win at last: Desire and mirth, the world's ephemeral lights shall fail, The sweet star of your queen ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... less judgment than if Mr. Dutton had been at hand. Being without natural taste for intellectual pursuits, unless drawn into them by his surroundings, he had dropped them entirely, and read nothing but the ephemeral controversial literature of his party, and not much of that, for he was teaching, preaching, exhorting, throughout his spare time; while the vicar was in too great need of help to insist on deepening the source from which his zealous assistant ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from time to time with passionate adoration; for, thanks to the singular conformity of character, mind, and taste between him and the Bacchanal Queen, their attachment had deeper and stronger roots than generally belong to ephemeral connections founded upon pleasure. Cephyse and Jacques were themselves not aware of all the power of a passion which till now had been surrounded only by joys and festivities, and not yet been ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... their very long course, perish as though from weariness in the unfeeling ocean."[80] Elsewhere, the great folio begets the octavo, "which becomes the parent of the small volume, of booklets, of ephemeral pamphlets, invisible spirits flying in the night, creating under the very eyes of tyrants the circulation of liberty." The descending process materializes abstractions, gives them body, makes them ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the spot that the successor of "Tosca" had been found. Signori Illica and Giacosa, librettists in ordinary to Ricordi & Co., took the work of making the opera book in hand. Signor Illica's fancy had roamed in the Land of Flowers before; he had written the libretto for Mascagni's "Iris." The ephemeral life of Cho-Cho-San was over in a few months, but by that time "Madama Butterfly," glorified by music, had lifted her wings for ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... James Frederick Dillingham was one and the same person who sailed the Charlotte to India, China, South America, or some other ephemeral port. How paradoxical was this dual role, ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... devoted to their culture. For our own part, we scarcely consider the tulip as in any way justifying the praise which is lavished upon it even in the present day, because its beauty is, to say the least, ephemeral, whilst its showiness is far from being either chaste or delicate. It will be, however desirable to have six or even a dozen bulbs, which only cost about a penny apiece. They can be planted any time during the present month, from two to three inches below ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... trees and fields are beautiful. The flashing aurora, the golden clouds, the sapphire sky, are beautiful. The circling planets, the blazing sun, the starry canopy, are beautiful. But what are they compared to a human soul? What is an ephemeral flower or an age-lasting star compared with glorious reason, with eternal love, with deathless benevolence, and conscience? What were the material universe with all its sublime grandeur and awe-inspiring ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... ephemeral in any event, was about to be rudely removed, permitting to flourish in unrestrained vigor the natural tendency to compel admiration and secure advantage by the spell of physical beauty, and by the exertion of natural aptitudes for pleasing in the only path ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic literature—that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of inherited ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... tarpaulin—that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown—and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house read the certificates, and seized my luggage as contraband. I was too old a traveler ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... of ephemeral essays to you in recognition of your worth as a man and a scientist, and as ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of the ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... of Nature as she appears in all times and places, but of particular and eccentric manners and characters, the excressences of overloaded society, they have made a short cut to the favour of the public, and inundated the stage with a torrent of ephemeral productions, to the depravation of public taste, and in defiance of classical criticism: their highest praise that they do no moral mischief, and that if they possess not the bold outline and faithful colouring of nature which distinguished ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... and Mademoiselle de Puymandour was entirely deficient in that brief, ephemeral light that shines over the honeymoon. The icy wall that stood between them became each day stronger and taller. There was no one to smooth away inequalities, no one to exercise a kindly influence over two characters, both haughty and determined. After his father's death, when Norbert ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He only seems to have made them in order that they may reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and then die like ephemeral insects. I said, reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and I adhere to that expression. What is there, as a matter of fact, more ignoble and more repugnant than that filthy and ridiculous act of the reproduction of living ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... published in England at the same moment that a good novel appeared, the American publishers would have given us immediately a horrid reprint of the novel; but we should have heard nothing of Abbott's book, till its success had been abundantly tried abroad; nor even then, if some ephemeral novel had started up which promised ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the dream that the stone which was despised by the architect has become the corner-stone. The acorn of the dream, of the ephemeral and inconsiderable product of our soul, dates from the earliest times. Before that, men saw in the dream a prophecy for the future, a warning spirit, a comforter, a messenger of the gods. Now we ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... friend. Hampton did not contain him,—of this she was sure; and in her efforts to visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so indifferently across the ephemeral ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fellowship, more excellent than the aristocratic idea, that of born master and of born serf! And both that welcome of the accomplishment of a signal act of justice, and that desire to participate in the eternal strength of the children of labour as against the ephemeral and fictitious strength of the children of idleness and wealth, found strange confirmation in ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... wide of the truth than certain theories now almost unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. That such may be the case with literature, particularly the more ephemeral kinds thereof, is very likely, since literature, save in the great complex structures of epos, tragedy, choral lyric, is but the development of daily speech, and possibly as upstart, as purely passing, as ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... zeal, and almost as much ability. But I predict that the popularity of their doctrines will not last; and if ever you visit the moon again, you will find that their glory, now at its height, like the ephemeral fashions of the earth, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... may be permissible. It is a mistake to take the extremer forms of this reaction too seriously, although at the present time this is very frequently done. One must remember that such a spirit as this is to be found in every age, and that it always creates an ephemeral literature which imagines itself to be a lasting one. It is nothing new. It is as old and as perennial as the complex play of the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... these, filled full of days, divine and dead, Sages and singers fiery from the god, And such as loved their land and all things good And, best beloved of best men, liberty, Free lives and lips, free hands of men free-born, And whatsoever on earth was honourable And whosoever of all the ephemeral seed, Live there a life no liker to the gods But nearer than their life of terrene days. Love thou such life and look for such a death. But from the light and fiery dreams of love Spring heavy sorrows ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... an endless number of works poured from Sacher-Masoch's pen. Many of these were works of ephemeral journalism, and some of them unfortunately pure sensationalism, for economic necessity forced him to turn his pen ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... became strong and impressive, yet still holding all his former qualities. The first year of his new residence in Boston saw the production of The Dandelion Girl, a light-hearted, careless creature, full of a life that had no touch of responsibility, and descriptive of a joyous and ephemeral mood. A long step forward was taken in The Romany Girl, which immediately followed,—a work full of fire and freedom, strongly personal in suggestion, and marked by a wild and impatient individuality which revealed in the girl the impression of a lawless ancestry, that somehow ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... his hand, and urged him not to say anything further, but Marston, whose eyes were now lightened by that ephemeral light so often seen in the eyes of the ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... in a mirror will be still more ephemeral than fame in a dream. That fine splendour will fleet how soon! Make no further allusion to embroidered curtain, to bridal coverlet; for though you may come to wear on your head a pearl-laden coronet, and, on your person, a jacket ornamented with phoenixes, yours will not ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... set down as an axiomatic statement that no large publishing house in this country could possibly live exclusively from what are known as miscellaneous books, by which is meant current fiction and other ephemeral publications. The worst thing about such books is that they create no assets; their life is short, and once it is ended, the plates have value only as old metal. A house, therefore, in publishing this class of books ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but among ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... oligarchic polity, the very silence of the English has arrested the eyes of France. By a law which is universal where bodies are bound in one system, an extreme of separation has wrought its own remedy and the return towards a closer union is begun. I do not refer to such ephemeral and artificial manifestations as a special and somewhat humiliating need may demand; I consider rather that large sweep of tendency which was already apparent fifteen years after the Franco-Prussian War. An approach ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... lips were red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too ephemeral-looking to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... like." Dr. Newman therefore learned that musically he was only an ordinary folk, and he would have been the first to laugh down the notion that he was anything else; for a modest estimate of himself in many things was a very marked characteristic with him, and made him call his beautiful verse "ephemeral effusions" to Badeley, and write in May, 1835, apropos of a suggested uniform edition of his revised Latin plays, "I have not that confidence in my own performance to think I can compete with a classical Jesuit" (i.e. Father Jouvency). In 1828 he had contemplated ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... these essays, at the time, as purely ephemeral. The success of the 'Review' suggested republication long afterwards. The first collection of articles was, I presume, Sydney Smith's in 1839; Jeffrey's and Macaulay's followed in 1843; and at that time even Macaulay thought it necessary to explain that the republication ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... to do; he had to establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now, more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... flit, pass away, fly, gallop, vanish, fade, evaporate; pass away like a cloud, pass away like a summer cloud, pass away like a shadow, pass away like a dream. Adj. transient, transitory, transitive; passing, evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous^. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... triumphant entry of Nero, is vigorous and animated. Nero's boasting is pitched in just the right key; bombast and eloquence are equally mixt. If he had been living in our own day Nero might possibly have made an ephemeral name for himself among the writers of the Sub-Swinburnian School. His longer poems were, no doubt, nerveless and insipid, deserving the scornful criticism of Tacitus and Persius; but the fragments preserved by Seneca shew that he had ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... granite, a third marble, most of us wood or clay. Our task is to fashion these substances. Everyone knows that the most precious material may be spoiled, and he knows, too, that out of the least costly an immortal work may be shaped. Art is the realization of a permanent idea in an ephemeral form. True life is the realization of the higher virtues,—justice, love, truth, liberty, moral power,—in our daily activities, whatever they may be. And this life is possible in social conditions the most diverse, and with ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... buried in the files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... clung to this as a sacred dogma for over a hundred years, because it did not affect unfavorably any interest. It is untrue. Governments get their powers from the historical fact of their existence. They are all ephemeral, subject to change. When a change takes place it is controlled by the ideas and interests of the time of change, when the popular element in self-government may be much greater than when the constitution was last previously established. In 1898 the popular will, in the United States, was to take ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... true and final position, or to rally to its standard all who were in fact its friends. Old parties encumbered the ground. Men were slow to give up old associations and leave the discussion of obsolete, immaterial, or ephemeral issues. ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... one shadow of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... supper, whereupon she stole out of the house as quietly as a kitten, and was out of sight of it as quickly. Not a creature was to be seen. The gutters were all choked and the streets had become river-beds, already torn with the rush of the ephemeral torrents. But through it all she dashed fearlessly, bounding on to ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... tears He writes upon his parents' tomb, And thus ancestral dust reveres. Oh! on the fields of life how bloom Harvests of souls unceasingly By Providence's dark decree! They blossom, ripen and they fall And others rise ephemeral! Thus our light race grows up and lives, A moment effervescing stirs, Then seeks ancestral sepulchres, The appointed hour arrives, arrives! And our successors soon shall drive Us from ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... that curious and certainly ephemeral vagary of the human mind which has appeared before now in human history, which is called "Sophistry," and which consists in making up "systems" to explain the world; in contrast with Philosophy which aims at the answering of questions, ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts;—faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions;—faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour of goodwill ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... close mathematical study of analogy—of probability—that we exclude error little by little from our observations—we improve more and more our instruments of precision—we count out the errors of our observation; and we are constantly seeking those laws which are not transient and ephemeral only, but which are eternal and immortal. Upon those laws, finally, must rest all our real, certain knowledge; and it is the endeavor of the anthropologist to apply those laws to man and his development; and such, indeed, is the recognized and highest mission of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... years ago, there have been manifestations of personal animosity, indications of an eagerness to seize the opportunity of venting long secreted venom. This has appeared as well in books as in more ephemeral publications, and upon both sides, and even between writers on the same side. On every hand there has been a most deplorable impeachment of motive, accompanied by a detraction of character by imputation which is quite shocking. Petty personal slights have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... one; and besides this, however the power of the performer, once attained, may be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to popular passion or childishness, and spend itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral (like Michael Angelo's snow statue in the other art), or else in vicious difficulty and miserable noise—crackling of thorns under the pot of public sensuality—still, the attainment of this power, and the maintenance of it, involve always in the executant some virtue or courage of high kind; ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... date at which the Englishman's historical education has commonly come to an end; and if by chance it has gone any further, it has probably been confined to purely domestic events or to foreign episodes of such ephemeral interest as the Crimean War. It may be well, therefore, to pass lightly over these matters in order to sketch in brief outline the development of the empire and the problems which it involves. European affairs, in fact, played a very subordinate part in English ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... our excuse or pretext of to-day is fraught with the more peril to our morality inasmuch as it reposes on a law, or at least a habit, of Nature, that is far more real, more incontestable and universal than the will of an ephemeral and local god. ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... side of many. It was the all-absorbing interest; it embraced not only worship and prayer, but what we call philosophy, morality, law, and government—all was pervaded by religion. Their whole life was to them a religion—everything else was, as it were, a mere concession made to the ephemeral requirements ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... our friend the Pope, and they will say of us, Prostant venales apud Lambeth et Whitehall. God forbid it should ever be said of us with justice. It is pleasant to loll and roll and to accumulate—to be a purple-and-fine-linen man, and to be called by some of those nicknames which frail and ephemeral beings are so fond of accumulating upon each other;—-but the best thing of all is to live like honest men, and to add something to the cause of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... religion of this ancient town. He used the church as a necessary foundation, or stay, for the raising of the rampart; and he preserved it by covering it with feudal fortifications as with a mantle. Issoudun was at that time the seat of the ephemeral power of the Routiers and the Cottereaux, adventurers and free-lancers, whom Henry II. sent against his son Richard, at the time of his rebellion as Comte ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... familiar as it already was to Carroll, struck him that afternoon as looking more than usually unreal, ephemeral, and unsubstantial. The Moorish arches, of the thinnest white pine; the arabesque screens and lattices that looked as if made of pierced cardboard; the golden minarets that seemed to be glued to the shell-like towers, and the hollow battlements that ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... him to leave that evening free. And, Mr. Steele, if you will be so good, give me the names of some of those halfhearted ones—critical people who have to see in order to believe. I shall have them at my table—I shall let them see that the shadow which enveloped me was ephemeral; that a woman can rise above all weakness in the support of a husband she loves and honors as I do ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue. It was in the company of Mr. Edward ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... from peat (sphagnol), Swedish wood tar, permanganate of potash, perborates and percarbonates of soda and ammonia, chlorine compounds, but none of these has at present come much into favour, and some had only ephemeral existence. Of the many drugs that it has been suggested to admix in soap for use in allaying an irritable condition of the skin, the majority are obviously better applied in the form of ointments, and we ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... of science. This "holy" being, our relation to which is to take the place of our relation to an Eternal Father, by the adoration of which we are to be sustained and controlled, if it exist at all, is as ephemeral compared with eternity as a fly. We shall be told that we ought to be content with an immortality extending through tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years. To the argumentum ad verecundiam there is no reply. But will this banish the thought ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... care of man on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the accumulations ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... save the shock Of young years widow'd, and the pain When single state comes back again To the lone man who, reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark, And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, Why human buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral That has his day; while shrivell'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss: Rites, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... When all the brood have disappeared, the aperture of the nest is thus hung with a branch of fine, short threads, twisted and knotted together, like dried white of egg. Each thread is expanded into a tiny cup at its free end. These are very delicate and ephemeral relics, which perish at a touch. The least wind ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... which he would not long submit without, it might be, losing his reason and taking his life. Strong, black and fragrant, he would die without that beverage for which—and for Racine, by the way—Madame de Sevigne prophesied an ephemeral popularity. Taken immediately after meals, it removes the fumes of the claret and champagne he has drunk, and leaves him feeling as clear-headed as Plato and grateful as a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... reservation. Doctor Holland regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... shifts and expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way. How should she have distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... and our public men bewildered, by a similar dogma. The merest fabric of human contrivance, a particular form of political society, is impiously clothed with an essential attribute of God alone; and ephemeral politicians are announcing, as an eternal law of Providence, that "a State cannot die." The mischiefs that result, in the management of human affairs, from enthroning dogmas over reason, truth, and fact, are, as they ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of Babylonia and Assyria. Each exercised an influence on the Israelites and their neighbours, though in a different way and with different results. The influence of Assyria was ephemeral. It represented the meteor-like rise of a great military power, which crushed all opposition, and introduced among mankind the new idea of a centralised world-empire. It destroyed the northern kingdom of Samaria, and made Palestine once more what it had been in pre-Mosaic ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... nothing of him but amusement, promptly forgetting him; and asking divine great deeds of those before whom she bends the knee. Everything is judged by laws of its being; the diamond must be flawless; the ephemeral creation of fashion may be flimsy, bizarre, inconsequent. So Lucien may perhaps succeed to admiration in spite of his mistakes; he has only to profit by some happy vein or to be among good companions; but if an evil angel crosses his path, he will go to the very depths ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... not a mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over and over again expressed in addresses to the Governor ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... to the celebrated Council of Five Hundred. During their ephemeral reign, these very rooms were designed for their halls of audience, and levees, the rich mouldings, and cornices of which were half gilt, and covered with silver paper to preserve them: the poor council were never ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... contrasted in subject matter, reveal the same profound understanding of American life which makes Mr. Cobb almost our best interpreter in fiction to readers in other countries. Like Mark Twain, Mr. Cobb is quite uncritical of his own work, and two of these stories are of merely ephemeral value. I should like no better task than to edite a selection of Mr. Cobb's stories in one volume for introduction to the English public, and I think that such a volume would be the best service American letters could render to English letters at ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... realize the bitter and venomous hatred with which I am regarded by the very politicians who at Utica supported me, under dictation from masters who were influenced by political considerations that were national and not local in their scope. I realize very thoroughly the absolutely ephemeral nature of the hold I have upon the people, and the very real and positive hostility I have excited among the politicians. I will not stay in public life unless I can do so on my own terms; and my ideal, whether lived up to or not, is rather a high one. For very ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... "Too ephemeral," says Caligula. "I'd want ham and eggs, or rabbit stew, anyhow, for a chaser. What do you consider the most edifying and casual in the way ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... Nash died of a disease attributed to coarse and unwholesome cheap food. His fame proved to be singularly ephemeral. So far as I am aware, no book of his was reprinted after his death, with the single exception of "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," which was issued again in 1613. His name was mentioned and some interest in his writings was awakened ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... decidedly Egyptian, solid and expressive, but dreadfully compact. No arabesques, those offshoots of lazy, dreamy hours and pleasantly disconnected thoughts, disgrace the solemnly even tenor of these fathers of 'Ephemeral Literature,' as some 'rude Iconoclast' has irreverently styled the butterfly journeyings of our magazine age. But we, O merry souls and brave, are still young and frivolous: we still look at pictures with as much zest as before our dimly remembered teens; and we belong to that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... disregard to chronology, in not precisely stating the year, or rather the months, during which flourished one of a race, who, like the flowers of the Cistus, one morning in all their splendour, on the next, are strewed lifeless on the ground to make room for their successors. Speaking of such ephemeral creations, it will be quite sufficient to ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... all, which of those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to the Hebrides" ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Perez Codex and Stela P at Copan, the merits of their execution alone, weighed simply in comparison with observed history elsewhere, would prove that we have to do not with the traces of an ephemeral, but with the remains of a wide-spread, settled race and civilization, worthy to be ranked with or beyond even such as the Roman, in its endurance, development and influence in the world, and the beginnings of whose culture are still totally unknown. As to ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... source of reading for the majority. Practically all the papers are published in the cities of Santo Domingo, Santiago and Puerto Plata, and all are of modest dimensions. Many newspapers have been founded in the Republic and after leading an ephemeral existence have succumbed, some because their editors were persuaded by threats or rewards on the part of the government to cease publication, and the greater portion because of financial embarrassment. Notwithstanding the constitutional precept guaranteeing ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... that the living standard is going down all the time, isn't it?" asked Mr. Tanter, keeping his ephemeral smile. "What about those three thousand ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... of the metropolis, much less take notice of our dependencies:—the existence of places without the London radius is seldom brought home to the readers of our daily metropolitan papers, except some "Frightful Murder," or "Painful Accident," or "Dreadful Calamity" occurs, to fasten ephemeral attention on ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the Great Salt Lake, where, as he told his followers, he was instructed by divine revelation to plant the City of the Saints. It proved more permanent than might have been expected, as zion—cities usually are quite ephemeral affairs. ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... and the dash of waters make a deep undertone, and one comes away with the feeling—not exactly that the scene is too good to last, but—of regret that the result of such lavish care should be ephemeral. In a few months all on the left side of the river may again be parade-ground, and the thirty thousand troops which can be readily man[oe]uvred upon it be getting ready for another conflict, while the palace which the Genius ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... intending to go to America were now gathered in one vessel. Whatever previous disposition of them had been made, or whatever relations they might have had in the disjointed record of the exodus, were ephemeral, and are now lost sight of in the enduring interest which attaches to their final and successful ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... communicate them freely to Madeline as they walked. No; there was no longer the slightest touch of hypocrisy in her pleasant manner and eager voice as she answered, "No, papa, I have not heard. Was it Mr. So-and-so?" and she named an ephemeral literary giant of the day. "No," said the judge, "it was not So-and-so; but yet you might guess, as you know the gentleman." Then the slight shade of hypocrisy came upon her again in a moment. "She couldn't guess," she said; "she didn't know." But as she thus spoke the tone of her voice was ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... thou the image of a thought that fares Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead, Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares, To where our lives are but the ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... and the highest walks in life have the hardiest weeds, she knew what love should be. Here was a love—it may be modern, advanced, chic, fin-de-siecle, up-to-date, or anything the coming generation may choose to call it—but it was eminently cheap and ephemeral because it could not make a little sacrifice of vanity. For the sake of the man she loved—mark that!—not only the man to whom she was engaged, but whom she loved—Millicent Chyne could not forbear pandering to her own vanity by the sacrifice of her own modesty and purity of thought. There ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of keeping or winning for ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... mind the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it suggested—absurdly and abominably—a certain cheap drink of sudden and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined, extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably wandering about ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... and oppressive weight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be the poet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to do the amazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral and shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepened and matured and increased in stature; he has not even stood still, remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadily deteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... you from the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her. Adrian's book had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... And sees the tide of Life roll calm along, Where glittering phantoms rise, a luring throng; And voiceful Fame holds out the laurel bough: Where rapturous applause is loud and long, Frail guerdon for the heart!—which lights the brow With the ephemeral smile of Mind's ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... and boy should go on to the hard and unlighted life that inevitably awaited them, if neither had the opportunity of development. She would be at forty a later edition of the Widow Miller. He had seen the widow. Sally's charm must be as ephemeral under the life of illiterate drudgery and perennial child-bearing as her mother's had been. Her shoulders, now so gloriously straight and strong, would sag, and her bosom shrink, and her face harden and take on that drawn misery of constant anxiety. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... wasp and tutored bee sing sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; with broad coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts alee. Beside a brown coated stone in the shadowed stream a brown trout watches for the puffs that slay the May-flies. Their ephemeral wings were made for a more exquisite life; they endure but one sun; they bear not the touch of the water; they die like a dream dropping into the river. To the amethyst in the deep ditch the wind comes; no petal ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Posthumus to Tetricus, its connections with Italy ceased, and it maintained its own emperors and its own legions. This was in sympathy with the rising spirit of nationalities, awakened throughout the empire by Septimus Severus, but in this ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille Jullian before the Academie des Inscriptions in 1896, "as we would willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening of the third century, it was entirely superficial, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... westward, came to the Great Salt Lake, where, as he told his followers, he was instructed by divine revelation to plant the City of the Saints. It proved more permanent than might have been expected, as zion—cities usually are quite ephemeral affairs. ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... pains and croissants for breakfast, the order having gone forth that bakers, being short-handed, are to make only pain de menage. Similarly, because the majority of journalists and popular writers are under arms, Paris does without its accustomed daily refreshment of ephemeral literature, its comic and illustrated press, its literary and artistic causeries, its feuilletons, and chroniques. It does without its theatres, its music halls, without politics, art, and social amenities, without barbers, florists, and motor cars, partly because there are not men enough ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... Coleridge, and that T. E. Chivers probably influenced Poe, it seems that in a study of this sort minor writers have a place. In addition, where the views of one minor verse-writer might be negligible, the views of a large group are frequently highly significant, not only as testifying to the vogue of ephemeral ideas, but as demonstrating that great and small in the poetic world have the same general attitude toward their gift. It is perhaps true that minor poets have been more loquacious on the subject of their nature than have greater ones, but ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... bitter a hatred of fools. He has suffered, as Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is, indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be justified, by the correctness of his judgment. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... above the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of the little chapel or the walls of the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth." ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... explained the matter. The explanation brought Lionel relief. But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... not resume in this our exile, and with more prospect of continuity, the emotions which were so agreeable in our former state? So agreeable—although, as you justly say, too ephemeral [coming a little closer]. Can you not teach us to moderate and ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... is debarred me. I will not sit even at your table with a muzzled tongue. When you are gone, Caroline, I shall devote myself to what, after all, must be the work of my life, and I shall finish the biographical history of our great hero in verse,—which I hope may at least be not ephemeral. From month to month I shall send you what I do, and you will not refuse me your friendly criticism,—and, perhaps, some slight meed of approbation,—because you are dwelling beneath the shade of a throne. Oh, Caroline, let it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... because its motif has been singing itself of its own accord in his heart, and its rhythm was the dream nightingale to which he bade Her hearken. Behind the tradition lies the fact. The expression may be ephemeral, the song flat, the motto conventional, but the feeling which prompted it is true. Else it could not have survived. And it has more than survived. It has grown with growth. For centuries it lodged in the nature of man, lulled in acquiescence, then, when the sense of recognition awoke, back in those ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... thought; but time has washed it out as it has washed out mountains and continents." She raised herself on her elbow. "And what if we could help mankind, and leave the traces of our work upon it to the end? Mankind is only an ephemeral blossom on the tree of time; there were others before it opened; there will be others after it has fallen. Where was man in the time of the dicynodont, and when hoary monsters wallowed in the mud? Will he be found in the aeons that are to come? We are sparks, we are shadows, we are pollen, ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... was phlegm personified. Never, either from anger or passion, had any emotion whatever hastened the beating of this man's heart, or flushed his face; never had his pupils contracted under the influence of any irritation, however ephemeral. He invariably wore good clothes, neither too large nor too small, which he never seemed to wear out. He was shod with large square shoes with triple soles and silver buckles, which lasted so long that his shoemaker was in despair. Upon his head he ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... these propositions may at first seem strange, but they are founded. The quantity of trash I have received as books is incalculable, and neither amused nor instructed. Reviews and magazines are at the best but ephemeral and superficial reading: who thinks of the grand article of last year in any given Review? In the next place, if they regard myself, they tend to increase egotism. If favourable, I do not deny that the praise elates, and if unfavourable, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... and the Methodist Connexion were much too well adapted to human needs to disappear with their authors. On the other hand, movements and systems which depend wholly upon one man do not often prove to be more than ephemeral. But none would deny that there is much to be learnt from The Salvation Army and from the earnest, strenuous, and resourceful personality of the man who made it. Let us hope that, if The Army as an Organisation should ultimately fade away, the great ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... their force is not contained in these few brilliant and striking exceptions, but in the millions of mere ordinary paragraphs which meet the eye from day to day, in the columns of the daily and weekly press, and which have apparently but an ephemeral existence. The dashing torrent and the mighty river are the more noticeable objects to the casual observer. But it is the minute myriad drops of the rain and the dew that cause the real wonders of vegetation. ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... product of the United States from 1815 to 1830 is contained in magazines rather than in books. Prose and verse which could never have found a publisher separately appeared in periodicals of every description. Most of these were ephemeral publications. The more serious reviews, like the American Biblical Repository, the American Law Journal, and the religious reviews, had a longer life; but the lighter magazines, like the Ladies' Literary Cabinet, the Young Ladies' Parental Mentor, and the Casket: ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... wore when dancing with him, and she remembered him specially in her prayers. Henceforward, one devouring desire occupied her mind. She wished—and praiseworthily—to be Burton's wife. To him, on the other hand, she was but an ephemeral fancy—one of the hundred and fifty women—his fair cousins in England and the softer and darker beauties of France and Italy—to whom he had said tender nothings. Later, when Miss Arundell saw him flirting with another girl, a certain "Louise" [100] (not to be confused ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the use of the poor papers were restricted to newspapers and other ephemeral literature, but when, as is often the case, paper of very poor quality is used for books of permanent literary interest, ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... distribution of the volcanoes which have been in a state of activity during historical times, the great number of insular and littoral volcanic mountains, and the occasional, although ephemeral, eruptions in the bottom of the sea, early led to the belief that volcanic activity was connected with the neighborhood of the sea, and was dependent upon it for its continuance. "For many hundred years," says Justinian, or rather Trogus Pompeius, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the first step towards its composition, on Weber's part, was the study of the English language itself, the right understanding of which, Weber justly considered as preliminary to any attempt to marry Mr. Planche's ephemeral verses to his own immortal music. These exertions increased his weakness so much, that he found it necessary to resort to a watering-place in the summer of 1825. In December he returned to Berlin, to bring out his Euryanthe there in person. It was received, as might have been anticipated, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as "An Irish Folk Song." Like "O Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wouldn't suppose now, my young Clive, that the same hand which pens the Art criticisms, occasionally, when His Highness Pendennis is lazy, takes a minor theatre, or turns the sportive epigram, or the ephemeral paragraph, should adopt a grave theme on a Sunday, and chronicle the sermons of British divines? For eighteen consecutive Sunday evenings, Clive, in Mrs. Ridley's front parlour, which I now occupy, vice Miss Cann promoted, I have written the Pencillings—scarcely ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... everything is arranged in accordance with a most purposeful plan and is most strictly subjected to laws and rules. And the very strict order, on account of which the existence of your creations is so short lived, and, I may say, ephemeral, is full of the profoundest wisdom. Allowing you to perfect yourself in your art, it wisely guards other people against the perhaps injurious influence of your productions, and in any case it completes ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... case of ordinary stars these changes no doubt occupy many millions of years, which represent the average duration of solar life; but the temporary stars run through similar changes in a few months: they resemble ephemeral insects — born in the morning and doomed to perish with the going down of ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... are subdivided into ephemeral fevers, which last but a short time and terminate by critical phenomena; intermittent fevers, in which there are alterations of exacerbations of the febrile symptoms and remissions, in which the body ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... Life was an ephemeral preface to the interminable and actual existence of immortality. Temporal things were transient and only of probationary value. The tomb was the ultimate and hoped-for, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... and now he has produced "Les Corbeaux" at the Odeon, where it has been definitely accepted and consecrated as a masterpiece. I could not refrain from going to Paris specially to see it. It was years since I had been in the Odeon. Rather brighter, perhaps, in its more ephemeral decorations, but still the same old-fashioned, roomy, cramped, provincial theatre, with pit-tier boxes like the cells of a prison! The audience was good. It was startingly good for the Odeon. The play, too, at first ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... may assert the presence of a foreign body, or may even volitionally swallow or aspirate objects. It is a mistake to do a bronchoscopy in order to cure by suggestion the delusion of foreign body presence. Such "cures" are ephemeral. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former days. As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the recalcitrant. "If you don't stop eating that mustache you'll have stomach trouble that no Scotch whisky will ever cure. The whole thing is in a nutshell," a sly humor creeping into his eyes. "I am tired of writing ephemeral things. I want to ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... still intending to go to America were now gathered in one vessel. Whatever previous disposition of them had been made, or whatever relations they might have had in the disjointed record of the exodus, were ephemeral, and are now lost sight of in the enduring interest which attaches to their final and successful "going forth" as ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... once told me that the paper was regarded with but little encouragement by the occupants of an omnibus in which he was riding, one gentleman, after looking gravely through its pages, tossing it aside with the remark, "One of those ephemeral things they bring out; won't last a fortnight!" Dr. Thompson, Master of Trinity, informed Professor Herkomer that he, too, was riding in an omnibus on the famous 17th of July, when he bought a copy from a paper-boy, and began to look at it ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... was set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor; the stupid good, the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... been contained inside of the citadel but hid from the view by its towering walls. This castle was beautiful beyond description. It was fairer far than the castles of the kings seem to be, except when "distance lends enchantment to their view." But the second scene was as ephemeral as the first. We beheld its fascinating beauties only a few seconds when its four walls again dropped into the abyss below, and there issued from its inner apartment a host of beautiful little actresses such as I did not see upon any other stage in Europe. These little ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... glorious revolution; upon his attempts afterwards to improve the government of his own country and to place some check upon the despotic power of a selfish, calculating ministry; upon his uniform resolute, and fearless opposition to the wild projects of factious men, who obtained ephemeral influence in France, but whose conduct was equally hostile to the rights and welfare of the people as that of the agents of an absolute monarch; upon his steady and firm support of the constitution, formed by the deputies of the people, and designed to guarantee ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... stolidly. "By their own bulk—like a big snowball. And by their own badness. People are rolling back to the country—the country they came from. Improved transportation will do it." The troubles of the town were ephemeral—he waved them aside. But his face was set in a frown—doubtless at the thought of the perdurable ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without mischief—they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning sand, and leave depression ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... smiling radiance, Through orifice, through rift and aperture, Invades the storm, and dissipates the clouds, Which scatter, cowering and ephemeral, Hugging the cliffs, and o'er the dire abyss Hover, in fleecy, ever changing form, And in a transient season disappear; Vanish, as man must vanish, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... it carried in its bony, glowing hand a great, nicked scythe. Its rattling tread echoed hollowly on the floor. Stooping walk, shuffling gait, the great metal scythe scraping on the floor, half seen as the gray, luminous cloak blew open in some unfelt breeze of its ephemeral world, revealing bone; dry, gray bone. Only the scythe seemed to know Life, and it was red with that Life. Slow running, ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... allotted to the celebrated Council of Five Hundred. During their ephemeral reign, these very rooms were designed for their halls of audience, and levees, the rich mouldings, and cornices of which were half gilt, and covered with silver paper to preserve them: the poor council were never indulged in a ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... restoration of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He soon mixed with the gayest society, and became well known as a prolific writer of songs, prologues, epilogues, masques, and the lighter dramatic fare. Much of this work is not lacking in wit and volatile smartness, but it is all far too ephemeral to have any permanent value as literature. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, but is perhaps best remembered for his translation of Don Quixote, and his concluding Urquhart's version ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... character depicted; the charm of an almost unequaled simplicity and directness. He possessed the rare gift of being able to envelop every topic that he touched with an atmosphere of elegance and distinction. His productions are not ephemeral, but are of the kind ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... actions, or when his environment is still very ignorant and superstitious, the crowd of believers increases still more rapidly, and thus one sees even at the present day in less-civilized countries new sects or religious guilds, more or less ephemeral, in which the spirit of the prophet sometimes stirs ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the Ministry here, three groups are represented: one declines to take Lenin seriously, regarding him as an ephemeral personage, the second does not take this view at all, but is nevertheless unwilling to treat with a revolutionary of this sort, and the third consists, as far as I am aware, of myself alone, and I will treat with him, despite the possibly ephemeral character of his position and the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... discern his nature that she might educate him wisely. It seemed at times as if she had but that one child. Diard, seeing that the eldest, Juan, was in a way neglected, took him under his own protection; and without inquiring even of himself whether the boy was the fruit of that ephemeral love to which he owed his wife, he made him ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... must have some joy, natural or merely manufactured, in order to go on living, it forced me to cultivate other interests, which, perhaps, had I been happy, I should have neglected for brighter but more ephemeral joys. So I am not frightened of my own society, and that, though a rather dreary achievement, is by no means to be despised. It enables me to wander about alone and yet be happy; it permits me to travel with no ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... their gaiety and daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language: and there were other strange words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral existence. ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... object that M. France—attestedly, indeed, since he remains unjailed-cannot himself believe all this, and that it is with an ironic glitter in his ink he has recorded these dicta. To which the obvious answer would be that M. France (again like all great creative writers) is an ephemeral and negligible person beside his durable puppets; and that, moreover, to reason thus is, it may be precipitately, to disparage the plumage of birds on the ground that an egg has no feathers... Whatever M. France may believe, our concern ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... the novel "Fathers and Children" rises above a picture of Russian politics in the sixties, and remains forever an immortal work of art. For the greatness of this book lies not in the use of the word Nihilist, nor in the reproduction of ephemeral political movements; its greatness consists in the fact that it faithfully portrays not merely the Russian character, nor the nineteenth century, but the very depths of the human heart as it has manifested itself in all ages and among ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... produces while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can recall nothing but a succession of flavors. It is not to be expected that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning are impressional. He is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the mistletoe of English literature whose roots are not in the soil ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... and her look and tone were both solemn. "You ask me what good it can do? Reflect! If the history of a single leaf is so vast and yet ephemeral, what may not be the history of a single world? What, after all, are we when such an infinitesimal space can contain such wonderful transactions in ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... leaf-cloak, the solitary erect bud slowly rises from its embrace, sheds its sepals, expands into an immaculate golden-centered blossom that, poppy-like, offers but a glimpse of its fleeting loveliness ere it drops its snow-white petals and is gone. But were the flowers less ephemeral, were we always certain of hitting upon the very time its colonies are starring the woodland, would it have so great a charm? Here to-day, if there comes a sudden burst of warm sunshine; gone tomorrow, if the spring winds, rushing through the nearly leafless ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... aside and scorned the Moslem menace as a bogey. What was the result? Troubles in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India. Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral, entente between the two great ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... is not a mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over and over ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... dusk complexions, shed around them a rich barbaric lustre. Not that they eschew adventitious means to blanch their sun-shadowed tints. For days some of the senoras and senoritas have worn a mask of a white clayey mixture to give them an ephemeral whiteness for this occasion. Those who could procure nothing else have worn a pasty vizard kneaded of common clay, to effect in some degree a like result by protecting their faces from the sun and wind. Should you visit New Mexico, and as you ride along slowly in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... all ephemeral, and freaks; they produced, however, somewhat of the same effect on me as on my father, in persuading me that he was born for the sphere he occupied, and rendering me rather callous as to the sources of ways ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... than forty miles north of Liyang. At this point Gordon experienced his first serious rebuff at the hands of Fortune, for the earlier reverse at the Soochow stockades was so clearly due to a miscarriage in the attack, and so ephemeral in its issue, that it can ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... may be inadvertently classed with those ephemeral fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue and the incidents are veritable creations. It may here be asked how could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... superiority. Among the terms stipulated, the Dominion was to assume the colonial debt of British Columbia, amounting to over two million dollars; the building of a road from the Atlantic to the Pacific within a stipulated time. The alliance, however, contained more advantage than the ephemeral assistance of making a road or the assumption of a debt, for with confederation came the abolition of the "one-man system of government" and in its place a responsible one, with freedom of action for enterprise, legislation to encourage development, and assist budding industries; the permanent ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... in Brahmanism and Buddhism. But in Hinduism and Buddhism you will look in vain for any parallel to the Jewish doctrines of "a nothing quickened into life," or of "a world made in time," which cannot be humble enough in its thanks and praises to Jehovah for an ephemeral existence full of ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Clagny was admitted, after requesting an interview, the story of the announcement was known to all Paris. Some persons regarded it as one of those waggish calumnies, a sort of stab to which every reputation, even the most ephemeral, is exposed; others said they had read the paper and returned it to some friend of the La Baudraye family; a great many declaimed against the immorality of journalists; in short, this last remaining specimen was regarded as a curiosity. Florine, with whom Nathan was living, had shown it about, stamped ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the trail of ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... lone man who, reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark, And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, Why human buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral That has his day; while shrivell'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss: Rites, which custom does impose, Silver bells, and baby ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... nation, however small, that has not possessed the right of withdrawing, and that has not withdrawn itself, from the disgrace of obeying a prince imposed upon it by an enemy temporarily victorious. When Charles VII. re-entered Paris, and overturned the ephemeral throne of Henry VI., he acknowledged, that he held his crown from the valour of his brave people, and not from the Prince ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... of Moldavia and Wallachia. During the interval between the death of John Sigismond Zapolya in 1571, and the election of Michael Abaffi in 1661, not fewer than thirteen princes, besides nearly as many ephemeral pretenders, had occupied the throne; and, though at one time the family of Batthori, and, subsequently, that of Racoczy, established a kind of hereditary claim to election, their tenure was always precarious; and, on more than one occasion, the prince was imposed on the states ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... veiled, is at bottom neither more nor less than Atheism. On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... and ephemeral, but it comes from the home world of the spirit and though so fleeting it is recognized by the spirit as a soul-speech fresh from the celestial realms, an echo from the home whence we are now exiled, and therefore it touches a cord in our ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... might not utter a syllable that would jeopardize the interests or safety of her father. The word analyzed is a dead thing; the word in use is a living thing. The word merely analyzed is apt to be ephemeral; the word in use is abiding and increasingly significant. As the child puts more and more content into the word, he, himself, expands at the same rate in the scope and power of his thinking. Words are the materials out of which ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... neck-ribbons round their snowy throats and coquettish patches on their delicate skin and bouquets of flowers in their high-dressed hair and sheeny bodices. They look at us with arch eyes and smile with melting mouths, more frivolous than depraved; sweet, ephemeral, irresponsible in every relation of life. Older men and women there are, too, when those artificial years have produced a succession of rather dull, sodden personages, kindly, inoffensive, but stupid, and still trifling heavily with ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... position, or to rally to its standard all who were in fact its friends. Old parties encumbered the ground. Men were slow to give up old associations and leave the discussion of obsolete, immaterial, or ephemeral issues. ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... straightforward, effective way, without fuss or feathers, and I suppose that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause of the pit. But nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause of education a vast amount of harm. I know a principal who won ephemeral fame by introducing into his school a form of the Japanese jiu-jitsu physical exercises. When I visited that school, I was led to believe that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the American people. Whole classes of girls and ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... discipline of trying to make allowance for those making none, to be charitable to their want of charity, and cool without being cold. But I don't know when I have felt such an aversion to my environment, and prayed so earnestly day by day,—"O, Eternal! purge from my inmost heart this hot haste about ephemeral trifles," and "keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... freely; but not that he should allow himself to be stuck up as a ninepin only to be knocked down! There are politicians for whom such occupation seems to be proper;—and who like it too. A little office, a little power, a little rank, a little pay, a little niche in the ephemeral history of the year will reward many men adequately for ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... and expense in which, when aware what my income was, I indulged myself freely was the purchase of Martial literature. Only ephemeral works are as a rule printed in the phonographic character, which alone I could read with ease. The Martialists have no newspapers. It does not seem to them worth while to record daily the accidents, the business incidents, the prices, the amusements, and the follies of the day; and politics ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... and—not to put too fine a point of it—sell. His books have a regular market value, and this value increases rather than diminishes with years. This is, we confess, rather a suspicious circumstance. Did Milton sell? Did Wordsworth sell? Must not the fame that is instantaneous prove hollow and ephemeral? Are we not acquainted with a certain volume of poems that shall be nameless, the whole edition of which lies untouched and unclaimed on the publisher's shelves? And are we not perfectly well aware that those poems—well, we can wait. If Mr. Saxe would only put ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... that had been long undisturbed and that yielded reluctantly to that candle's intrusion, a darkness that properly became the place and was a part of it and had long been so, in the face of which the candle appeared an ephemeral thing devoid of grace or dignity or tradition. And indeed there was room for darkness in that chamber, for the walls went up and up into such an altitude that you could scarcely see the ceiling, at which mine host's eyes glanced, and Rodriguez ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... you now am no more than the record contained in a book. In terms of personality, Homer is the hidden structure giving strength and substance to a false facade. 'I' am the false facade, faithfully copied from another structure. 'I' am a superimposure of ephemeral data, governing its own employment by a mind that has been restricted from developing its own data. The 'I' that speaks to you has no real existence, though its pattern is being subtly and continuously altered by that which it ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... crowned and installed." Thus concluded this remarkable ceremony. Those who remember having beheld it, must now doubt whether they were waking, or whether fancy had framed a vision so dazzling in its appearance, so extraordinary in its origin and progress, and so ephemeral in its endurance. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... textural change; and though her hair had not lost colour it was considerably thinner than heretofore. She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a widow. Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about eighteen, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... and weighing all the various opinions concerning Nathan's book; and while he was in the humor, he hit off another of his short sketches for Lousteau's newspaper. Inexperienced journalists, in the first effervescence of youth, make a labor of love of ephemeral work, and lavish their best thought ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Evening is another charming thing; the skit on how Rossini's Stabat Mater came to be composed is amusing, and is cruel with a cruelty that was justified. The other articles are of no particular value, save, perhaps, that on the overture; they are of an ephemeral character and were evidently concocted when the writer was fully aware he was writing for French readers, and if he hurt French feelings or vanity, a French editor wouldn't print, wouldn't publish, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... with several others of ephemeral interest, was composed by Lockhart, to be sung at the mess of the Mid-Lothian Yeomanry, of which he was a member. Of the songs produced for these festive occasions, a collection for private circulation was printed in 1825, at the Ballantyne press, with the title, "Songs of the Edinburgh Troop," ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... superseded the sword, for Victor and Eugene were scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to founding a periodical of ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... larva. When all the brood have disappeared, the aperture of the nest is thus hung with a branch of fine, short threads, twisted and knotted together, like dried white of egg. Each thread is expanded into a tiny cup at its free end. These are very delicate and ephemeral relics, which perish at a touch. The least ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... of pleasure is equally ephemeral. Time and experience rob even amusement of its charm, and the night before is not worth next morning's headache. Practical success alone makes early middle-age the most pleasurable period of a man's career. What has been worked for in youth then comes ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... this favour, declaring the revenues from the abbacy were indifferent to him, as he would only use them to restore to its pristine splendour the falling church in which reposed the holy relics of SS. Gratian, Fidelius, and Carpophorus. The peace between the two countries was too ephemeral to permit the ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... assumed and gladly laid aside; for he was one of those exceptional Americans who have no love of political distinction or public office. A lawyer's life leaves little to be recorded; the triumphs of the bar are proverbially ephemeral, and lawyers themselves are willing to forget the cases they have tried and the verdicts they have won. Had Mr. Choate been merely and exclusively a lawyer, the story of his life could have been told in half a dozen pages; but though he was a great lawyer and advocate, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between excited ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... merrily about so long as the sun of opportunity shines upon them. A piece like the Despair of Jocrisse, which, after a lapse of years, may be still occasionally brought out, passes justly among the ephemeral productions for a classical work that has gained the crown of immortality. We must, however, see it acted by Brunet, whose face is almost a mask, and who is nearly as inexhaustible in the part of the simpleton as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... scenical and dramatic life of the diary of a man of genius, like Swift, who wrote one, or even of a lively observer, who lived amidst the scenes he describes, as Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, which form a regular diary, only show that they are better acquainted with the more ephemeral and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... and expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way. How should she have distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have profited its ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... do. I reason on the most honorable hypothesis. What hindered me from concealing, for some years to come, the abstract theory of the equality of fortunes, and, at the same time, from criticising constitutions and codes; from showing the absolute and the contingent, the immutable and the ephemeral, the eternal and the transitory, in laws present and past; from constructing a new system of legislation, and establishing on a solid foundation this social edifice, ever destroyed and as often rebuilt? Might I not, taking up the definitions of casuists, have clearly ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... to the uncertainties of a world to come, the minds of others have dwelt on the prospect of a life beyond the grave till the thought of it has risen with them to a passion, almost to an obsession, and has begotten a contempt for the fleeting joys of this ephemeral existence by comparison with the hoped-for bliss of an eternal existence hereafter. To the sceptic, examining the evidence for immortality by the cold light of reason, such peoples and such individuals may seem to sacrifice the substance for the shadow: to adopt a homely comparison, they are like ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... in the folds of Gertrude Sinclair's annual letter to Mrs. Robson. As Claire had grown older she had grown also impatient of the memory of her mother squandering what should have gone for thick shoes and warm plaid dresses upon the ephemeral joys of a Christmas tree. But now she suddenly understood, and she felt glad for a mother courageous enough to lay hold upon the beautiful symbols of life at the expense of all that was hideously practical. Shoes wore out and plaid dresses finally found their way to the rag-bag, ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... hasten their decay to allow seeds to ripen, but materially enfeebles the entire plant. It is wise to secure as much beauty as is possible just now from your gardens, as a single and unexpected frosty night will destroy almost everything; nothing is more ephemeral than floral beauty. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... as it shapes itself the straight road to her desires. She is a carpet adventurer—an explorer amongst the nerves of moral sensation, to whom the discovery of an untrodden mental tract is a pure delight, and the more delightful the more ephemeral. She flits from guest to guest, shooting out to each a little proboscis, as it were, and happy if its point touches a speck of honey. She gathers from all, and stores the sweet agglomerate, let us hope, to feed upon it in the winter of her ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... without leaving by their coming and going more trace than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... generous ambition. If Columbus had found rivals and enemies resembling Amerigo, I should not see, as now, the magnificent scene of his triumph so suddenly changed into mourning and horror, the gloomy night of ignominy and mockery succeed the brief light of ephemeral happiness, and that invincible leader, who redoubled the power and dominions of ungrateful Castile, groaning under the weight of infamous chains, while he asks for nothing but liberty to carry her arms to the most ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... there was ephemeral fever on the twelfth day, it is right to make a deduction, and to estimate the number of beats in that day as midway between the twelfth and twenty-third days, or 18,432. Adopting this, the mean daily excess of beats during the alcoholic days was 14,492, or ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... provinces or from other lands; the next floor had been divided into a succession of private rooms, comfortably furnished, where, screened behind thick curtains, dined somewhat "irregular" patrons: lovers who were in either the dawn, the zenith, or the decline of their often ephemeral fancies. On the top floor, spacious salons, richly decorated, were used for large and elaborate receptions ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... The result is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable body of workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with new groups of acquaintances, with whom the relations established are transient or ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none the less for the time being. The human proclivity to ostentation, reenforced by sentiments of good-fellowship, leads them to spend freely in those directions which will best serve these needs. Here as elsewhere prescription ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... EMPIRE OF THE WORLD, not only at the present time, but since the beginning of human history. Neither the artificial combination of Alexander of Macedonia nor the ancient Roman Empire, neither Spain of Charles V. nor Napoleon's ephemeral dominion were nearly so great as the British Empire of to-day. Never has a nation possessed so much sea and so much land as the British. This wonderful Empire includes people of every race, countries ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... most precious lessons are moral ones. It expands the range of our vision, and teaches us in judging the true interests of nations to look beyond the immediate future. Few good judges will deny that this habit is now much wanted. The immensely increased prominence in political life of ephemeral influences, and especially of the influence of a daily press; the immense multiplication of elections, which intensifies party conflicts, all tend to concentrate our thoughts more and more upon ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... has felt of the white beaver hat of Sir Walter Scott knows that he has touched part—and a very considerable part—of Sir Walter. The hat, the boots, the waistcoat are far less ephemeral than the body they protect, and indicate almost as much of the wearer's character as his hands and face. So I am not ashamed of my silk pajamas or of the geranium powder I throw in my bath. They are ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... a hive, or swarm, is from fifteen to twenty thousand bees. Nineteen thousand four hundred and ninety-nine are neuters or working bees, five hundred are drones, and the remaining one is the queen or mother! Every living thing, from man down to an ephemeral insect, pursues the bee to its destruction for the sake of the honey that is deposited in its cell, or secreted in its honey-bag. To obtain that which the bee is carrying to its hive, numerous birds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... competitor who has gone to college will, perhaps, not be doing this. He will probably be "resting his mind" with an ephemeral novel or the discursive hop-skip-and-jump reading of current periodicals. Thus he will day by day be weakening his strength, diminishing his resources. At the very same time you, by the other method, will hourly be adding to your powers, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... In France the Mayor is appointed by the State, and he is the tool of the Ministry. In Great Britain the City Fathers are honorary and unpaid. In Germany they are salaried servants, and yet elected by the people. In Great Britain magistrates are temporary, ephemeral figure-heads. They are not even allowed time to serve their apprenticeship. They remain in office one, two, or at most three years, receive a knighthood in the larger provincial towns, and retire into private life. In Germany the Burgomaster and Aldermen are permanent servants, at ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... gallop, vanish, fade, evaporate; pass away like a cloud, pass away like a summer cloud, pass away like a shadow, pass away like a dream. Adj. transient, transitory, transitive; passing, evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c. v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous[obs3]. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, insecure; impermanent. brief, quick, brisk, extemporaneous, summary; pressed for time &c. (haste) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... curious and certainly ephemeral vagary of the human mind which has appeared before now in human history, which is called "Sophistry," and which consists in making up "systems" to explain the world; in contrast with Philosophy which aims at the answering of ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... at Bridgewater House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... as for his other excesses at the table. Many sober minds make coffee and tea the pis a tergo of their daily intellectual labor; just as a few of greater imagination or genius seek in opium the spur of their ephemeral efforts. In the United States, the young imbibe them from their youth up; and it is quite as possible that a part of the nation's nervousness may arise from this cause, as it is probable that our wide-spread dyspepsia begins ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... were the people I should be virtuous"? It is from England that we obtain the precedent which husbands should adopt in their houses. Those who have eyes ought to see that when the government is running smoothly the Whigs are rarely in power. A long Tory ministry has always succeeded an ephemeral Liberal cabinet. The orators of a national party resemble the rats which wear their teeth away in gnawing the rotten panel; they close up the hole as soon as they smell the nuts and the lard locked up in the royal ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... fits thee not to augur, quick-eared Shade. Ephemeral at the best all honours be, These even more ephemeral than their ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... wrote articles on all the living topics of the day, from the arrival of the last new singer to the death of the last criminal. Things trivial and non-important, grave and gay, of lasting import and the most ephemeral, all came ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... the course of the world at large, and in particular from the ephemeral and mock existence of men as they follow each other in rapid succession, to the detail of life, how like a comedy ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... is Heaven-sent, because he came to proclaim not what is ephemeral and perishing, but what is permanent and everlasting. He came to proclaim not the latest theory of gravitation, of molecular vibration, of modes of heat and manners of cold, nor of struggle for existence, nor ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... opprobrious epithets of the day; and well do I remember, the man who had earned by his politics the prefix of jacobin to his name, was completely shunned in society, whatever might be his moral character: but, as might be expected, this was merely ephemeral, when parties ran high, and were guided and governed more by impulses and ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... a life eternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to produce a merely ephemeral result. But since then another argument has occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race was beginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality were coming in with the family, when society was taking its first start, there came into the human ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... freely to Madeline as they walked. No; there was no longer the slightest touch of hypocrisy in her pleasant manner and eager voice as she answered, "No, papa, I have not heard. Was it Mr. So-and-so?" and she named an ephemeral literary giant of the day. "No," said the judge, "it was not So-and-so; but yet you might guess, as you know the gentleman." Then the slight shade of hypocrisy came upon her again in a moment. "She couldn't guess," she said; "she didn't know." But as she thus spoke the tone of her voice was altered. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise Omar Khayyam's ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the exhibition occupies a bare, disconsolate, shabby suite of rooms. They resemble much the editorial offices of those ephemeral daily papers which, commencing with very small capital, after a spasmodic career of a few months fall despairingly into the arms of the sheriff. I had once occasion to visit the commission on a little matter of business. What that was I have forgotten: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... secret of love and the power of love's continuance. None of these secrets can be disclosed to worldlings— by which term I mean those who allow themselves to be moved from their determination, and distracted by a thousand ephemeral matters. I do not say you are such an one,—but you, like all who live in the world, have your friends and acquaintances—people who are ready to laugh at you and make mock of your highest aims—people whose delight would be to block the way to your progress—and the question with ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Palace, familiar as it already was to Carroll, struck him that afternoon as looking more than usually unreal, ephemeral, and unsubstantial. The Moorish arches, of the thinnest white pine; the arabesque screens and lattices that looked as if made of pierced cardboard; the golden minarets that seemed to be glued to the shell-like towers, and the ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... a momentary thing. It is a passing state. It is ephemeral and flitting. It is made up in part of present sense-impressions and in part of past experiences. These past experiences are brought forth from subconsciousness. Some are voluntarily brought forth. Some present themselves without ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton
... to signify some idea content, wish content, etc., return and become a persistent or typical form. And the more such a typical form is established and is impressed, the farther it is removed from its first ephemeral meaning, and the more it becomes a symbolic representative of a whole group of similar experiences, a spiritual capital, so to speak, till finally we can regard it simply as the representative of a spiritual current (love, hate, tendency ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... said: "When you see him, tell him to leave that evening free. And, Mr. Steele, if you will be so good, give me the names of some of those halfhearted ones—critical people who have to see in order to believe. I shall have them at my table—I shall let them see that the shadow which enveloped me was ephemeral; that a woman can rise above all weakness in the support of a husband she loves and honors as I do ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... has been manifested in means heretofore employed in the constant effort to obtain and maintain worldly power. This was by affecting the imagination and blinding the reason of the masses. Some time ago, an ephemeral work was published, even the name of which is not recollected by this writer, wherein was a picture showing the section of a handsome tent with curtains closely drawn. Within, is a man eating and feasting like other mortals. Without, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... idioms, and phrases, many of them of ephemeral duration, which are thus invented by the young and old in various classes of society, in the nursery, the school, the camp, the fleet, the courts of law and the study of the man of science or literature, could all be collected together and put on record, their number in one or two centuries might ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... long-winded Letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners, dining repartees, and other ephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remind us of what we knew well already: that however it may be with Metaphysics, and other abstract Science originating in the Head (Verstand) alone, no Life-Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... interests as those over which we have a fancied control, than on those which confessedly transcend our understanding. Thus is it ever with men. The wonders of creation meet them at every turn, without awakening reflection, while their minds labor on subjects that are not only ephemeral and illusory, but which never attain an elevation higher than that the most sordid ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... in action or in sleep. Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all! Thou that in all and over all, and through and under all, incessant! Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm, Holding Humanity as in the open hand, as some ephemeral toy, How ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... curtly answered with a "Did I suppose these gnats were intended to be shrined in amber? these mere minnows to be treated with the high consideration due only to potted char and white bait? these fleeting thoughts fixed in stone before that Gorgon-head, the public? these ephemeral fancies dropped into the true elixir of immortality, printer's-ink? these——" I stopped him, for this other mighty mouthful of images betrayed the hypocrite—"Yes, I did." An involuntary smile assured me he did too, and the cause proceeded thus: first, a promise ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... hart my life hath fled, A shadow'd dream; one winged glance hath seen Its only good; its hours (how few serene!) The sweet and bitter tide of thought have fed: Ephemeral world! in pride and sorrow bred, Who hope in thee, are blind as I have been; I hoped in thee, and thus my heart's loved queen Hath borne it mid her nerveless, kindred dead. Her form decay'd—its beauty still survives, For in high heaven that soul will ever bloom, With which ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the lesson of the dead: Sudden the rich bells chorussed overhead: "O be not of the throng ephemeral To whom to-day is fame, to-morrow fate, Proud of some robe no statelier than a pall, Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral— A phantom generation fatuate. Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save, Virtue ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the dining room was a library, very carefully kept, the contents of which were a curious mixture. Besides great folio editions of the classics and the Christian Fathers, were collections of the ephemeral literature of the days of Charles II, notable among which were lampoons on Nell Gwyn and her royal lover—works which the Archdeacon certainly never bought, and which must have come to him through his mother from the Cavalier family of Copplestone. In the hall was a marble table bearing ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... trees about their huts and for the forest-flowers. The natural images and similes so common in their wild, abrupt, unrhymed chants and songs showed how closely they watched and sympathised with nature. The hoar-frost, which vanishes with the sunrise, stood with them for ephemeral fame. Rank without power was "a fountain without water." The rushing stream reminded the Maori singer, as it did the Mantuan, of the remorseless current of life and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... of those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... memoirs, after having so long refused to do so, and at even increasing their apparent egotism by my style, instead of sheltering myself under cover of the third person; but I will not yield a half compliance to the request of that tender friendship which is far more valuable to me than the ephemeral success which a journal might obtain. It is sufficient for me to know that this relation, intended for a few friends only, will never extend beyond their circle: it even possesses two very great advantages over many celebrated books: these are, that the public not being concerned ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over and over again expressed ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of the vesper bell. In Christabel we float dreamily through scenes as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of magic beauty. The opening of the poem creates a sense of foreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtly suggested through her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints at ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... scandalized George III and elicited Liberal pamphlets from Catherine II. Statesmen are afraid of the suburbs, of the newspapers, of the profiteers, of the diplomatists, of the militarists, of the country houses, of the trade unions, of everything ephemeral on earth except the revolutions they are provoking; and they would be afraid of these if they were not too ignorant of society and history to appreciate the risk, and to know that a revolution always seems hopeless and impossible the day before it breaks out, and indeed never does ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... envelope of words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and its covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as when in Kosciusko Freedom is made to look as if, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... of the people. In France the Mayor is appointed by the State, and he is the tool of the Ministry. In Great Britain the City Fathers are honorary and unpaid. In Germany they are salaried servants, and yet elected by the people. In Great Britain magistrates are temporary, ephemeral figure-heads. They are not even allowed time to serve their apprenticeship. They remain in office one, two, or at most three years, receive a knighthood in the larger provincial towns, and retire into private ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... listening to the speeches of county members, and dining diligently in warm weather with mayors, and people with corporations. He endeavoured to detect the root of all evil, investigated the ramifications of radical reform, and exposed the ephemeral bulbous roots of speculation. Prejudice he found too deeply rooted to be dug up very easily, whilst the fashions and follies of the day seemed to him to lie so entirely on the surface of the soil, and to be so shortlived, that to throw away ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... and all its environing scenes disappeared behind Mousehole and St Clement's Isle, Baptista's ephemeral, meteor-like husband impressed her yet more as a fantasy. She was still in such a trance-like state that she had been an hour on the little packet-boat before she became aware of the agitating fact that Mr Heddegan was on board ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... the same words of faith, are indications of supreme wisdom, are a supreme force. For all the faithful who sang there came from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but soft resignation to coming destruction. Living of the present hour, they lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting entireties, of almost infinite duration, which ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... provided with a conducting terminal, though it be of aluminium, the brush has but an ephemeral existence, and cannot, unfortunately, be indefinitely preserved in its most sensitive state, even in a bulb devoid of any conducting electrode. In studying the phenomenon, by all means a bulb having no leading-in wire should be used. I have found it best to use bulbs constructed as indicated in ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... chiefs of these knaves and the personification of all the treachery and stupidity in the world... In 1794 our inmost, serious sentiment was wholly contained in this idea: to be useful to our country; all other things, our clothes, our food, advancement, were poor ephemeral details. As society did not exist, there was no such thing for us as social success, that leading element in the character of our nation. Our only gatherings were national festivals, moving ceremonies which nourished in us the love ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the other mushrooms, especially the boletes, are of ephemeral duration and lacking in consistency. I made the attempt with the edible bolete (Boletus edulis, BULL.), the famous cepe of our kitchens, so highly esteemed for its flavor. I was wondering whether it would not be possible to obtain from ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Irish Folk Song." Like "O Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... natural result of enterprise, progress, and development, and not the offspring of foreign action, at Mr. Tazewell's death, exceeded, in a large degree, the business of Norfolk in 1802, puffed up, as it was, by ephemeral causes, and that the present wealth of our people immeasurably surpasses ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... is screwing out a little ephemeral fame from instituting a jubilee for Thomson.(826) I fear I shall not make my court to Mr. Berry, by owning I would not give this last week's fine weather for all the four Seasons in blank verse. There is more nature in L'Allegro and Penseroso, than in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded down ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... and the song could be heard clearly enough. As Caroline peered in vain through the glass dimmed by heat and human breath, the sentimental words floated out over her head; and the heavy organ-like accompaniment of the ground-swell made them more than ever ephemeral. A few bars of music, sounding so thin and strange against the booming of the sea, and then the ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... shouts, that bull among mighty car-warriors, viz., Karna, then addressed the great car-warriors (of the Kaurava army) and said words which caused them great delight: "In this transient world everything is continually flitting (towards the jaws of Death). Thinking of this, I regard everything as ephemeral. When, however, all of you were here, how could Bhishma, that bull among the Kurus, immovable as a hill, be thrown down from his car? When that mighty car-warrior, viz., the son of Santanu, hath been overthrown, who even now lieth on the ground like the Sun himself dropped (from the firmament), the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Valparaiso on the 3rd of June, 1822, having been absent more than twenty months. An enthusiastic welcome awaited him. Medals were struck in his honour, and in various ephemeral ways the public gratitude ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... pro Clero, A.D. 1584. Sparrow, 194. I admit, indeed, that Protestant canons have but a fleeting and ephemeral authority even among themselves, and that the canons must yield to the spirit of the times, not the times to the canons. I dare say that even few Protestant theologians are familiar with the canons to which ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... said of the dream that the stone which was despised by the architect has become the corner-stone. The acorn of the dream, of the ephemeral and inconsiderable product of our soul, dates from the earliest times. Before that, men saw in the dream a prophecy for the future, a warning spirit, a comforter, a messenger of the gods. Now we join forces ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... alas! miserable comforters were they all! It was impossible to look upon such a picture without beholding in it the realisation of those solemn and affecting passages of Holy Writ which speak to us of the ephemeral nature of all earthly pleasures and of the mournful insignificance of human life, even in its most palmy state, when its views and actions, its hopes and desires, are confined to this sublunary sphere: "Whence then cometh any wisdom, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... and learned professional pride have been overbalanced by a democratic press. The whole nation writes, and the individual writer is either swallowed up in the mass or gains but ephemeral fame. Every writer, almost without exception, affects a popular style. But, in this rich literary field, all springs up freely without connection or guidance. No party is concentrated or represented by any reigning journal, but each individual writes for himself, and the immense ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Holland, and scores of acres are now entirely devoted to their culture. For our own part, we scarcely consider the tulip as in any way justifying the praise which is lavished upon it even in the present day, because its beauty is, to say the least, ephemeral, whilst its showiness is far from being either chaste or delicate. It will be, however desirable to have six or even a dozen bulbs, which only cost about a penny apiece. They can be planted any time during the present month, from two to three ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... at a time when political and social conditions are a bit chaotic, and it is a little difficult to distinguish between the symptoms that are ephemeral and those which are permanent. What we must do is to try to make things better and to save from the past the things which are good. It is often true that a movement that is excessive and destructive in one way, ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... it, and inhale its brief perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... late D. L. Moody was specially steeped in the love of God. It is for want of a vision of the inevitable fate of the godless and disobedient, that much of our present-day preaching is so powerless and ephemeral. You cannot get crops out of the land merely by summer showers and sunshine; there must be the subsoil ploughing, the pulverizing frost, the wild March wind. And only when we modern preachers have seen sin as God sees it, and begin ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... persevere in this generous determination, though it engender repeated acts of self-denial, I cannot but be recompensed in the end. My new home and friends will distract me greatly from my broodings, and by and by all these ephemeral sorrows will have passed away, as young sorrows always do, leaving but ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... subordinates abroad copies of the President's Message, accompanying it with a score of terse and sparkling paragraphs regarding the rebellion; yet, in those few paragraphs, demonstrating the illusory and ephemeral advantages which foreign nations would derive from any connection they might form with any 'dissatisfied or discontented portion, State, or section of the Union.' In this connection, he refers to the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into him and pained him. He was nearly thirty-five, and hitherto all had been admiration, vague aspiration and despair; he had produced in painting nothing but a few sketches and studies, and in literature only a few ephemeral articles, a collection of youthful letters and a pamphlet on the Resurrection; moreover, to none of his work had anyone paid the slightest attention. This was a poor return for all the money which had ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... were patches of alluvial deposit now along the sides of the watercourse, covered by fields of cactus loaded with "apples," the prickly leaves compelling us to keep the trail the prospectors had made by their passage to and from the ephemeral Eldorado. After a time we emerged from the lower canyon into a wider one in the way previously described; that is, like going from one floor to another by an incline between narrow walls. The little stream having vanished, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the Language of the World The Latin of the Common People The Poetry of the Common People of Rome: I. Their Metrical Epitaphs II. Their Dedicatory and Ephemeral Verses The Origin of the Realistic Romance Among the Romans Diocletian's Edict and the High Cost of Living Private Benefactions and Their Effect on the Municipal Life of the Romans Some Reflections on Corporations and Trade-Guilds A Roman Politician, Gaius Scribonius Curio Gaius Matius, ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... odd to the girl that in this Alpine solitude life should be encountered at all. And as for life's emotions, the frail, frivolous, ephemeral fury of these white-winged ghosts of daylight, embattled and all tremulous with passion, seemed exquisitely amazing to her here between the chaste and icy immobility of white-veiled peaks and the terrific twilight of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... say, his way to deride grave subjects. You wouldn't suppose now, my young Clive, that the same hand which pens the Art criticisms, occasionally, when His Highness Pendennis is lazy, takes a minor theatre, or turns the sportive epigram, or the ephemeral paragraph, should adopt a grave theme on a Sunday, and chronicle the sermons of British divines? For eighteen consecutive Sunday evenings, Clive, in Mrs. Ridley's front parlour, which I now occupy, vice Miss Cann promoted, I have written the Pencillings—scarcely allowing a drop ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not matter if the use of the poor papers were restricted to newspapers and other ephemeral literature, but when, as is often the case, paper of very poor quality is used for books of permanent literary interest, the matter ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... cling on to rocks, there emerge these peerless aristocrats of the flower-world, finished, polished, immaculate, and reigning supreme through sheer distinction and excellence at every point—and also because theirs is clearly no ephemeral convolvulus-like beauty which will fade and vanish away in a twinkling, but is a beauty intensely matured, strong and ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... ideals is to be found in the fierce competition of luxury and ostentation which characterises the more wealthy cities of Europe and America. It is no exaggeration to say that in a single festival in London or New York sums are often expended in the idlest and most ephemeral ostentation which might have revived industry, or extinguished pauperism, or alleviated suffering over a vast area. The question of expenditure on luxuries is no doubt a question of degree which cannot be reduced to strict rule, and there are many who will try to justify ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... "to wash our dirty linen at home," but good patriots cannot be expected to profit by the counsels of a tyrant. So the columns of the Commune papers are devoted to the daily and mutual pulling to pieces of the Commune's members. But where will these ephemeral sheets be in six months, in one month, or in a week's time perhaps? The wind which wafts away the leaves of the rose and the laurel, will be no less cruel for the political leaves. Let us then, for the sake of posterity, offer a specimen ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... correct by his account of my father's resignation in January, 1855, on the notice of Mr. Roebuck's motion for a Committee of Inquiry. I do not wish to apply to his account the same measure which he applies by quoting an ephemeral observation of Mr. Greville to my father's speech, but I do maintain that "the general effect ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... Algeria was then transferred from Algiers to Paris. The ministry of Algeria was entrusted first to Prince Napoleon, and afterwards to the marquis J. N. S. P. de Chasseloup-Laubat (1805-1873). But this office, created at the least prematurely, soon disappeared without causing any regrets. This ephemeral regime lasted from the 24th of June 1858 to the 24th of November 1860. The decree of the 24th of November 1860 transferred the services from Paris back to Algiers, and re-established the functions of governor-general, which were exercised at the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for the sacrifice. Since that time much bad gunpowder has been burned over the heads of the trees, and the roots have been shaken by the discharge of the cannon of the castle at every change of rulers, as one ephemeral government succeeded another, but these cypresses still remain unharmed, and may outlive many ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... trimmings, until we have the pitiful spectacle of girls who earn barely enough to keep body and soul together spending their money for garments neither suitable nor durable—sleazy, shabby after a single wearing, short-lived—yet for a few ephemeral minutes "up to date." ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... others have a degree of pathos which touches the heart; still none of their music has the nerve, the depth, the sterling solidity of the German, nor the elegance nor grace of the Italian. Yet some composers they have whose works will have more than an ephemeral fame, amongst whom may be cited Aubert, whose music is not only admired in France but throughout all Europe; another author of extreme merit is Onslow, whose productions are not so voluminous or so extensively ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... the fifties the sight of a Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... nothing can stand completely still and changeless. All must vary, must progress or retrograde; the very rocks in the bowels of the earth undergo organic alterations, while the eternal hills that cover them increase or are worn away. Much more is this obvious in the case of ephemeral man, of his thoughts, his works, and everything wherewith he has to do, he who within the period of a few short years is doomed to appear, wax, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... fleeting I must needs take care of my beauty. We poor women are like the butterflies and the roses. We have as brief a summer. You men, who value us only for our outward show, should pardon some vanity in creatures so ephemeral." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... growing entirely out of circumstances and interests of a local character, and in no way tending to impeach the acknowledged fidelity of the mass of French Canadians,—whatever, we repeat, may be the ephemeral differences that occasionally spring up between the governors of those provinces and individual members of the Houses of Assembly, they must, in no way, be construed into a general feeling of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... unsuccessful attempt to see the tombs of these ephemeral rulers we received another message, naming an hour for our visit; and this time the Pasha's representative was waiting in the archway. We followed his lead, under the openly mistrustful glances of the Arabs who hung about the square, and after picking our way through a ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... beauty, man to express strength. We detest weakness in a man, and a homely woman is a crime. And so De Brissac passed violently? And his oaths of vengeance were breaths on a mirror. Ah well, I had ceased to hate him these twenty years. Did he love yonder woman, or was his fancy like mine, ephemeral? And he married Mademoiselle de Montbazon? That is droll, a kind of ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... group, even the most ephemeral, will ordinarily have (a) some relatively formal method of defining its aim and formulating its policies, making them explicit, and (b) some machinery, functionary, or other arrangement for realizing its aim and carrying its policies into effect. Even in the family there is government, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with the most untiring industry until his mental faculties at last failed him some thirty-six years later. During this period he produced above a hundred volumes in poetry and prose, besides numerous scattered articles and other papers. Most of these were of merely ephemeral interest, but the Life of Nelson, published in 1813, may be said to have set a standard of simplicity, purity, and dignity in English prose which has been of permanent value. Bentham's style, on the contrary, was so wanting ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... to occupy its true and final position, or to rally to its standard all who were in fact its friends. Old parties encumbered the ground. Men were slow to give up old associations and leave the discussion of obsolete, immaterial, or ephemeral issues. ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... of high compassion, strong to scorn Ephemeral monsters, who with tragic pain Purgest our trivial humours, once again Through thine own Paris have ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... in biting and scornful words, in the language of sadness and despair, developed the need and the misfortune of the land. The king gave the chief minister of police strict injunctions to send him all these ephemeral publications. He wanted to read them all, wanted to find the kernel of wheat which each contained, and, from his enemies, who assuredly would not flatter, he wanted to learn how to be a good king. And ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... never written a single verse, this Essay alone would be sufficient to place him in the highest rank of English poets.... Enough has been quoted to show that the Essay on the Convention of Cintra was not an ephemeral production, destined to vanish with the occasion which gave it birth. If this were the case, the labour bestowed upon it was almost abortive. The author composed the work in the discharge of what he regarded a sacred duty, and for the permanent benefit of society, rather than with a view to any ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs; for the first time they are being prized more for their labor power than for their innocence, their tender beauty, their ephemeral gaiety. Society cares more for the products they manufacture than for their immemorial ability to reaffirm the charm of existence. Never before have such numbers of young boys earned money independently of the family life, and felt ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the matter. The explanation brought Lionel relief. But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. In his eyes it ceased to be a risk; it became ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... immense fortune, concluded to round out his political career by inaugurating a reform that would in some manner atone for his past excesses, and did succeed in giving India more than a Roman peace and abating some of the worst abuses; but the reform was ephemeral. In his essay on Warren Hastings, Lord Macaulay—who wonders that the conquest of India is "distasteful" reading to Englishmen—gives us the following pen-picture of conditions under ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to apostles. These leaders are often subtle rhetoricians, seeking only their own personal interest, and endeavouring to persuade by flattering base instincts. The influence they can assert in this manner may be very great, but it is always ephemeral. The men of ardent convictions who have stirred the soul of crowds, the Peter the Hermits, the Luthers, the Savonarolas, the men of the French Revolution, have only exercised their fascination after ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... have been voted under the old system, were not ordered, when it was known that they would be almost certainly broken up after fifty years, and in the second, public sculptors knowing their work to be so ephemeral, scamped it to an extent that made it offensive even to the most uncultured eye. Hence before long subscribers took to paying the sculptor for the statue of their dead statesmen, on condition that he did not make it. The tribute of respect ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... other schools, and under other teachers. She looks upon it with other regards, and deems more highly and reverently both of its just authority and its utility and excellence. The history of her legislative proceedings may be traced. The ephemeral effusions of temporary bodies, called together by the excitement of the occasion, may be hunted up; they have been hunted up. The opinions and votes of her public men, in and out of Congress, may be explored. It will ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... last. Loving affection in a mirror will be still more ephemeral than fame in a dream. That fine splendour will fleet how soon! Make no further allusion to embroidered curtain, to bridal coverlet; for though you may come to wear on your head a pearl-laden coronet, and, on your person, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... all: they are merely philosophies, or systematised accounts of God, the world, and of man, which have obtained large support in earlier stages of the world's history. Religion itself is a thing apart from these ephemeral forms in which it has been made to take shape. It is the great sun of reality, whose pure and authentic radiance has been decomposed in the spectrum of the human brain, each man seizing on an individual ray of broken ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... American publisher has been found who shares my faith in the democratic future of the American short story as something by no means ephemeral, this year-book of American fiction is assured of annual publication for several years. It is my wish annually to dedicate whatever there may be of faith and hope in each volume to the writer of short stories whose work during the year has brought ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... must be told. Adam had entirely forgotten that in the intricacies of his mechanical lurked the papers that might overthrow a throne! Magnificent Incarnation was he (in that oblivion) of Science itself, which cares not a jot for men and nations, in their ephemeral existences; which only remembers THINGS,—things that endure for ages; and in its stupendous calculations loses sight of the unit of a generation! No, he had thoroughly forgotten Henry, Edward, his own limbs and ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... certain subjects, restrained as a rule by his dislike to unveiling his heart too freely and yet making itself perceptible in some forcible phrase and in the general temper of mind implied. The great mass of such work is necessarily of ephemeral interest; and it is painful to turn over the old pages and observe what a mould of antiquity seems to have spread over controversies so exciting only thirty years ago. We have gone far in the interval; though it is well to remember that we too shall soon be out of date, and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the regions of Southern Russia in the third and fourth centuries of our Era, the predominant power seems to have been held by the Ostrogothic nation. In the third century, when a succession of weak ephemeral emperors ruled and all but ruined the Roman State, the Goths swarmed forth in their myriads, both by sea and land, to ravage the coast of the Euxine and the AEgean, to cross the passes of the Balkans, to make their desolating presence felt at Ephesus and at Athens. ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... Apparently ephemeral in wood, growing quickly and perishing as quickly, the willows nevertheless supply us with an important preservative element, extracted from their bitter juices. Salicylic acid, made from willow bark, prevents change and arrests decay, and it is an ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... from an uncontrollable body; and even in peaceful moments the memory of the discomfitures so inflicted may distort a man's whole view of the world around him. He is impatient of the wit which demands a versatility in response beyond his powers, and persuades himself into contempt of those ephemeral arts to which his nature cannot be constrained. Irritated at the injustice which places so high in the general scale of values accomplishments which he cannot practise, shrinking from the suave devices of gesture and expression which in his ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... embracing with avidity the immediate pleasures of sense, as well as such positive gains, however ill-gotten, as could be made the means of procuring them, and throwing aside all thought both of honor and of long-sighted advantage. Life and property being alike ephemeral, there was no hope left but to snatch a moment of enjoyment, before the outstretched hand of destiny should fall ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... all, whatever may be the name with which they are decorated, tainted with the same original weakness—"What the majority has made, the majority has the right to unmake." In fact—as somebody said in a speech—a perpetually provisional arrangement Under these ephemeral forms of rule, our national inferiority in face of other stable and far-sighted governments is flagrantly evident. The sense of duty wears away, devoted service is never given without a mental reservation touching the morrow—that unknown ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... evening; they often sting, but they fly merrily about so long as the sun of opportunity shines upon them. A piece like the Despair of Jocrisse, which, after a lapse of years, may be still occasionally brought out, passes justly among the ephemeral productions for a classical work that has gained the crown of immortality. We must, however, see it acted by Brunet, whose face is almost a mask, and who is nearly as inexhaustible in the part of the simpleton as Puncinello is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... five ephemeral and insignificant dynasties, with the fate of which we need not long detain the reader. In less than sixty years they all vanished from the page of history. The struggle for power between Chuwen, the founder of the so-called ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now, more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy to rank ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... as the body cools down. In the case of ordinary stars these changes no doubt occupy many millions of years, which represent the average duration of solar life; but the temporary stars run through similar changes in a few months: they resemble ephemeral insects — born in the morning and doomed to perish with the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... My youth has been lost, bound hand and foot to this tomb."[308] It was decreed apparently that Michael Angelo should exist for after ages as a fragment; and such might Pheidias among the Greeks have been, if he had worked for ephemeral Popes and bankrupt princes instead of Pericles. Italy in the sixteenth century, dislocated, distracted, and drained of her material resources, gave no opportunity to artists for the creation of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... life will be recorded in his cases. But with Mr. Choate, the dramatic genius and large scope and vision which made him superior to other great advocates at the same time prevented his overestimating the value of his work in kind or degree, showed him how ephemeral are the actual triumphs and how small the real value of nearly all the questions he thus vitalized into artistic reality, when compared with the great outlying truths and principles to which he allied them. Feeling this all through his cases, at the same time that he ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... with an abundance of periodicals of all sorts and upon all subjects at hand, it seems hardly possible that this wealth of ephemeral literature was virtually developed within the past two centuries. It offers such a rational means for the dissemination of the latest scientific and literary news that the mind undeceived by facts would naturally place the origin of the periodical near the invention of printing itself. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus, though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only that Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... that no saddening shadows can any more trouble the enjoyments of the future,—no moments of reflection retard its activities; and that the new-born population of a world without a record and without a ruin may, in the fullness of ephemeral felicity, dispose itself to eat, and to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... point. She vehemently disapproved; a gift of techniques should be withheld until she had examined their cultural traditions. But Martin Lord was a trade agent, and he had no intention of allowing his mission to be wrecked by the ephemeral doubts of a teacher. Here at the onset was the time to make it clear that he was in command. He gave ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... great truth beneath this fiction, which appears too far-fetched because we perceive only material and ephemeral realities. The dead live and move in our midst far more really and effectually than the most venturesome imagination could depict. It is very doubtful whether they remain in their graves. It even seems increasingly certain that they never allowed themselves to be confined there. Under ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... opinions concerning Nathan's book; and while he was in the humor, he hit off another of his short sketches for Lousteau's newspaper. Inexperienced journalists, in the first effervescence of youth, make a labor of love of ephemeral work, and lavish their best thought ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... itself to be indissolubly bound up with forces which will give it the victory over prejudice, ill-will, and adverse accident. Thus alone would proof be given that the work in which we are engaged is something more than the ephemeral fruit of fallible human ingenuity—that rather those men who gave it the initial impulse and watched over its development were acting simply as the instruments of the universal force which, if they had not done the work, would have found other instruments and ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... deemed it advisable to submit the papers to a somewhat rigorous verbal revision. Errors have been corrected, chronological ambiguities due to lapse of time have been removed, passages have been excised in order to avoid repetition, and reference to ephemeral events which deserve no permanent chronicle have been omitted. But, substantially, the articles retain the shape in which they were originally penned. The point of view has undergone no modification. In ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... after bestowed it upon John Stuart, Lord of Aubigni, and Constable of Scotland.—Under Henry Vth, our countrymen took the city in 1417, but we were not long allowed to hold undisturbed possession of it; for, in 1424, it was recaptured by the French. Their success, however, was only ephemeral: the battle of Verneuil replaced Evreux in the power of the English before the expiration of the same year; and we kept it till 1441, when the garrison was surprised, and the town lost, though not without a vigorous resistance.—Towards the close of the following century, the ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... ingredients, or that the colouring matter of a flower is soluble in acid and not in alkali, is thought by some a foundation for chemical celebrity. I once began to attend a course of chemical lectures and to read the journals containing the ephemeral productions of this science; I was dissatisfied with the nature of the evidence which the professor adopted in his demonstrations, and disgusted with the series of observations and experiments which ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... the dim impressiveness of a mediaeval church, that seems reared with a view to Heaven rather than Earth, and whose arches, massive or soaring, neither gain nor lose by the accidental presence of ephemeral human creatures below them. No, the building seemed to cry out for a congregation, and the mind's eye involuntarily peopled it with its Sunday complement of substantial ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to die, let us then enjoy to its full relish the remnant of our lives. Sordid care, avaunt! menial labours, and pains, slight in themselves, but too gigantic for our exhausted strength, shall make no part of our ephemeral existences. In the beginning of time, when, as now, man lived by families, and not by tribes or nations, they were placed in a genial clime, where earth fed them untilled, and the balmy air enwrapt their reposing limbs with warmth more pleasant than beds of down. The south is the native place of ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... shadow of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the trail of ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... to their high spirits by chasing each other among the rocks, gathering shells and seaweed for the construction of those ephemeral little ornaments—fair, but frail—in which the sex delights, singing, laughing, quoting poetry, attitudinizing upon the peaks and ledges of the fine old boulders—mossy and weedy and green with the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... vigorously as we will against this infamous troth-mongering which is destructive of international relations, and indirectly of social intercourse, but no responsible government can afford to ignore the necessity of guarding against its consequences. For it is no ephemeral manifestation of temperament, nor the passing whim of a political party or a class. The law of double citizenship, coupled with a plenary indulgence for treason and perjury in the cause of the Fatherland, is but the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... appreciation of the large qualities and negligence of the small which he had insisted on considering the function of criticism; and they became a fact in literature which determined to some degree the attitude taken toward ephemeral ideas. Newman notes the popularity of Scott's novels as one of the influences which prepared the ground for the Tractarian movement, for Scott enriched the visions of men by his pictures of the past, gave them noble ideas, and created a ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... back upon myself, and since all of us must have some joy, natural or merely manufactured, in order to go on living, it forced me to cultivate other interests, which, perhaps, had I been happy, I should have neglected for brighter but more ephemeral joys. So I am not frightened of my own society, and that, though a rather dreary achievement, is by no means to be despised. It enables me to wander about alone and yet be happy; it permits me to travel with no one but my own company and the chance acquaintances I pick ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... actions. Her lips were red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too ephemeral-looking ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... strife where there was nothing for him to gain, but everything to lose. He denounced the brutality of her husband, but her letters to him always addressed him as "my dear child." In writing to her he confides small love-secrets and ephemeral flirtations—which he would scarcely have done, had the countess viewed him with the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... On the contrary the real action of the game consists in running down, tripping up, smashing into, and falling on whomever has the ball. As a consequence, men wear a soft armor. There are fashions in sports which demonstrate the ephemeral quality of the American love for sport. A while ago "wheeling" was popular, and everybody wheeled. Books were printed on the etiquette of the sport; roads were built for it and improved; but suddenly the working class took it up and ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... and worm-eaten? James was willing now to float along the stream, sociably, with his fellows, and had no doubt that he would soon find a set of high-sounding phrases to justify his degradation. What importance could his actions have, who was an obscure unit in an ephemeral race? It was much better to cease troubling, and let things come as they would. People were obviously right when they said that Mary must be an excellent helpmate. How often had he not told himself that she would be all that a wife ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... that this is not an unusual arrangement amongst engaged couples in the class to which Elizabeth belongs; nevertheless I felt it was the moment for judicious advice, knowing how ephemeral are the love-affairs of Elizabeth. No butterfly that flits from flower to flower could be more elusive than her young men. Our district must swarm with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... are confounded. He hates and envies every thing that rises above the vulgar level: all superiority, all individual grandeur, seems to him an iniquity, an injury towards that chaos of undistinguished and ephemeral beings whom he calls humanity. When we have been assailed by these base doctrines, and the shameful passions which give birth to or are born from them; when we have felt the hatefullness of them, and measured the peril, it is a lively delight to ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... sides of the room, to the height of some ten feet, ran a continuous picture, an oil painting, divided into long sections by narrow panels of black oak. The painting represented the personages in the Romaunt de la Rose, and was conceived in an atmosphere of the most delicate, most ephemeral allegory. One saw young chevaliers, blue-eyed, of elemental beauty and purity; women with crowns, gold girdles, and cloudy wimples; young girls, entrancing in their loveliness, wearing snow-white kerchiefs, their golden hair unbound and flowing, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction. The fact that for years her friends had been the small group of the momentarily fashionable required, in her eyes, no explanation. So simple was her creed that she believed people were fashionable for the same reason that they were her friends, ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... God's hands, must look into every fibre of his heart and brain, must be able to take the magnificent work to pieces, and to reconstruct it. When this labour is completed, let him throw himself composedly on the earth, and care little how many of its ephemeral insects creep over him. In regard to these allegories of Plato, about which I have heard so much, pray what and where are they? You hesitate, my fair cousin Timotheus! Employ one morning in transcribing ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... menace of immediate war, the people of plain common sense recognized that the friendship of Great Britain was more dangerous than the enmity of France. They dreaded the fixed power of an organized aristocracy far more than the ephemeral anarchy of an ill-ordered democracy; they were more averse to class distinctions protected by law than even to military despotism which destroyed all distinctions, and they preferred, as man always has preferred and always will prefer, personal to political equality. ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... curious brown fowl, the ciganas. The sun was flaming on the majestic assembly of the storm. The warm air, broken by our steamer, coiled over us in a lazy flux.... Sometimes we passed single habitations on the water side. Ephemeral huts of palm-leaves were forced down by the forest, which overhung them, to wade on frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a toy jetty, and on the jetty a sad woman and several naked children would stand, with no show of emotion, to watch us go by. Behind them was the impenetrable ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... brazenly enough, and without considering the moral side at all, it is sport to attack him. To get myself into a position to attack him, I had to serve an apprenticeship. You know what that means—the daily digging for ephemeral facts. But I stuck to it. I saw the day when I should be the most feared man on the coast, wielding a pen as efficacious as a surgeon's knife. Unfortunately, my knife first struck a politician named Mulligan, who owned some stock in the paper. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... improbable kind. Indeed Theodore's novels, like his stage-pieces, are gone out of date in an age so practical that even in romance it will not allow of the slightest departure from reality. Their very style was ephemeral, and their interest could not outlast the generation to amuse which they were penned. This first novel was written when Hook was one-and-twenty. Soon after he was sent to Oxford, where he had been entered at St. Mary's ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... between. Then to the left there, impressive to look on and conducive to solemn thoughts, the mountains rear their crests against the sky, and, crowned with the gathered snows of the centuries whose monuments they are, from aeon to aeon gaze majestically out over the wide plains and the ephemeral ant-like races who tread them, and while they endure think themselves the masters of their little world. And over all—mountain, plain, and flashing stream—the glorious light of the African sun and the Spirit of Life moving now as it once ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... song, with several others of ephemeral interest, was composed by Lockhart, to be sung at the mess of the Mid-Lothian Yeomanry, of which he was a member. Of the songs produced for these festive occasions, a collection for private circulation was printed in 1825, at the Ballantyne press, with the title, "Songs of the Edinburgh ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... difficulty in reading my handwriting." And in fact the whole business was absurd, for if there's anything I pride myself on it's the gracefulness and legibility of my penmanship. Typewriters might well be mandatory for the ephemeral news item, but I had been hired as a special correspondent and someday my manuscript would ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... much given to reading for its own sake, and perhaps inclined to think ephemeral literature the more trifling because his little daughter was a great light there, was anything but a dull man, and had an excellent judgment. So Bessie, with all the comfort of a woman still with a wise father's head ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... satisfied that her gaolers were at supper, whereupon she stole out of the house as quietly as a kitten, and was out of sight of it as quickly. Not a creature was to be seen. The gutters were all choked and the streets had become river-beds, already torn with the rush of the ephemeral torrents. But through it all she dashed fearlessly, bounding ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... intoxication—there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building—its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... slays its hours and dies Weeps, laughs, and lightens on our eyes, And sees and hears not: smiles and sighs As flowers ephemeral fall and rise About its birth, about its way, And pass as love and sorrow pass, As shadows flashing down a glass, As dew-flowers blowing in flowerless grass, As ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... it. Life is so fragile and so ephemeral a thing, that it is beautiful to be able to concentrate it, to sum it up by remembrance, in one hour that marks it and gives it its scope. Such an hour is this one, which passes while I speak ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... our legend. The rabbis mentioned before have given accounts of Saul's position, of his power, and the splendor of his life. Negative signs, it is true, exist, arguing against the historical value of the legend. Polish history has not a word to say about the ephemeral king. In fact, there was no day fixed for the session of the electoral diet. Moreover, critics might adduce against the probability of its correctness the humble station of the Jews, and the low esteem in which the Radziwills were then held by the Polish nobility. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... away to the blue country, that wonderful country whither one may go at will, without thought of any infirmity. The name "Frantz," uttered mechanically by her mother, because of a chance resemblance, represented to her a whole lifetime of illusions, of fervent hopes, ephemeral as the flush that rose to her cheeks when, on returning home at night, he used to come and chat with her a moment. How far away that was already! To think that he used to live in the little room near hers, that they used to hear his step on the stairs ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... cutting off all possibility of reconciliation, rather gave further edge to the popular revolutionary side of the movement than otherwise. The whole progress of the change in public feeling is plainly traceable in the mass of ephemeral literature that has come down to us from this period, broadsides, pamphlets, satires, folk-songs, and the rest. The anonymous literature to which we more especially refer is distinguished by its coarse ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... of honor. To be seen, therefore, accompanying the king, would be effectually to quarrel with three great and influential princesses—whose authority was unbounded—for the purpose of supporting the ephemeral credit of a mistress. The unhappy Saint-Aignan, who had not displayed a very great amount of courage in taking La Valliere's part in the park of Fontainebleau, did not feel any braver in the broad day-light, and found a thousand defects in the poor girl which he was most ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Varese, at that time the lover of the Duchesse Cataneo, and became, for a while, the mistress of that descendant of the Memmis: the ruined palace of Varese, which Cataneo hired for Tinti, was the scene of these ephemeral relations. [Massimilla Doni.] In the winter of 1823-1824, at the home of Prince Gandolphini, in Geneva, with Genovese, Princesse Gandolphini, and an exiled Italian prince, she sang the famous quartette, "Mi ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... mean the Abode of Fancy. Latterly the various tea-masters substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tea-room, and the term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical. It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... that her gaolers were at supper, whereupon she stole out of the house as quietly as a kitten, and was out of sight of it as quickly. Not a creature was to be seen. The gutters were all choked and the streets had become river-beds, already torn with the rush of the ephemeral torrents. But through it all she dashed fearlessly, bounding on to ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... unchanged, unfaded, as alive and complete as when they represented the real world, and the people below were the unreal and ephemeral pageant! Then the reality was the Queen of Heaven on her throne in the sanctuary, and her court in the glass; not the queens or princes who were prostrating themselves, with the crowd, at her feet. These people knew the Virgin as well as they knew ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... given to reading for its own sake, and perhaps inclined to think ephemeral literature the more trifling because his little daughter was a great light there, was anything but a dull man, and had an excellent judgment. So Bessie, with all the comfort of a woman still with a wise father's head over her, decided to commit the matter to him. He was somewhat disappointed ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... acres are now entirely devoted to their culture. For our own part, we scarcely consider the tulip as in any way justifying the praise which is lavished upon it even in the present day, because its beauty is, to say the least, ephemeral, whilst its showiness is far from being either chaste or delicate. It will be, however desirable to have six or even a dozen bulbs, which only cost about a penny apiece. They can be planted any time during the present month, from two to three ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... surviving for a time that body to which it does not appear to be as indissolubly bound as is our conscious existence. Is it necessary to add that this survival of a part of ourselves which we hardly know and which besides seems incomplete, incoherent and ephemeral is wholly without prejudice to nor fate in the eternity of the worlds? But this is a question which we are not called ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of the follies and vices of high life. It is true that the notion of vulgarity is affixed, in the fine world, to many trifling modes of dress and deportment, which in themselves have no demerit whatever, except that something opposed to them has acquired an ephemeral propriety from the fancy of the great. But in real good breeding there is always a reason. It is far too little attended to in England in any class, though, from acting as a continual corrective to selfish and unsocial affections, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... with the best of what had gone before, being liable to be dazzled and misled by novelty of form and other qualities which, whatever might be the real worth of the substance, were, in themselves, purely ephemeral. I had taken down a last-century edition of the poems of the brothers Fletcher, and, having begun to read a lovely passage in "Christ's Victory and Triumph," had gone into what I can only call an intellectual rage, at the impudence of the editor, who had altered innumerable words and phrases ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... Marleigh's," Crispin muttered. "Heigho! Life is precarious as the fall of a die at best an ephemeral business. To-night you say the house that was Roland Marleigh's; presently men will be saying the house that the Ashburns lived—aye, and died—in. Give you good ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... really. I have the vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral.' It is for this bird-like quality of song, it seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a woman of the East, finding expression ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... I breathed the lesson of the dead: Sudden the rich bells chorussed overhead: "O be not of the throng ephemeral To whom to-day is fame, to-morrow fate, Proud of some robe no statelier than a pall, Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral— A phantom generation fatuate. Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save, Virtue alone revives ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... to the murmuring wave until the troubled spirit sinks to rest, and in the little sail that vanishes on the illimitable sea, we may find the type of the voyage which he is so soon to take, when, his ephemeral existence closed, he embarks for that better state which lies ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... widow'd; and the pain, When Single State comes back again To the lone man who, 'reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark; And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, Why Human Buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral, That has his day; while shrivel'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss. Rites, which custom does impose, Silver bells and baby clothes; Coral redder than ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... forefathers—if he crops, by way of salad, some wide-spreading beech or hoary patriarchal oak, which had flung its shade over the tombs of countless generations, and, as it stood forming a link between the present and the past, won men's reverence by force of contrast with their own ephemeral existence—yet atones for his delinquencies by softening the bitterness of grief, blunting the sharp edge of pain, and affording to the broken-hearted the rest, and to the slave the freedom, of the grave;—old Time, I say, who should be praised ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... gone, as he so often did, over the moor to the Four Stones; he chose that place partly because of the Stones themselves and partly because of the wonderful view. It seemed to him that the whole heart of Cornwall—its mystery, its eternal sameness, its rejection of everything that was modern and ephemeral, the pathos of old deserted altars and past gods searching for their ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... Atherton and Captain Jamie kill me. I was always so innately urged to live that sometimes I think that is why I am still here, eating and sleeping, thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative of my various me's, and awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an ephemeral period ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... and she remembered him specially in her prayers. Henceforward, one devouring desire occupied her mind. She wished—and praiseworthily—to be Burton's wife. To him, on the other hand, she was but an ephemeral fancy—one of the hundred and fifty women—his fair cousins in England and the softer and darker beauties of France and Italy—to whom he had said tender nothings. Later, when Miss Arundell saw him flirting with another girl, a certain "Louise" [100] (not to be ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... am stoned as though I had crucified Christ. My youth has been lost, bound hand and foot to this tomb."[308] It was decreed apparently that Michael Angelo should exist for after ages as a fragment; and such might Pheidias among the Greeks have been, if he had worked for ephemeral Popes and bankrupt princes instead of Pericles. Italy in the sixteenth century, dislocated, distracted, and drained of her material resources, gave no opportunity to artists for the creation of monuments colossal ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... it is so fleeting I must needs take care of my beauty. We poor women are like the butterflies and the roses. We have as brief a summer. You men, who value us only for our outward show, should pardon some vanity in creatures so ephemeral." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... brilliant eye, a figure as graceful and elastic as that of a fairy, and with words of wonderful wisdom flowing, as it were, instinctively from her lips, she seemed effectually and almost unconsciously to have enthralled the king. All his previous passions were boyish and ephemeral. But Mary was very different from any other lady of the court. Her depth of feeling, her pensive yet cheerful temperament, and her full-souled sympathy in all that was truly noble in conduct and character, astonished ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... mutual interests the {92} various races who inhabited the peninsula, each ruling on the principle of temporary superiority, each falling as soon as a greater power presented itself, had not only introduced a conviction of the ephemeral character of the successive dynasties, and of the actual dynasty for the time being. It had also left scattered all over the country, from Bengal to Gujarat, a number of pretenders, offshoots of families which had reigned, every one of whom regarded the Mughal as being only a temporary occupant ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... genre, beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... another letter, she writes: "I am not a poet really. I have the vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral." It is for this bird-like quality of song, it seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and under partly ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... meaning of the duet, when Siegfried adventures through the fire-surrounded mountain and wakes Brunnhilde with a kiss. That duet meant the joy of life, the rapture of awakening to the adventure of life, the delight of the swirling current of ephemeral things. And the duet that she was going to sing; she knew what that meant too. It meant the desire to possess. Desire finding a barrier to complete possession in the flesh would break off the fleshly lease, and enter the great darkness where ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting the fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of the snow and ice, two beings crossed the fiord and flew along the base of the Falberg, rising thence from ledge to ledge toward the summit. What were they? human creatures, or two arrows? They might have ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... himself might ascend the throne of the latter. A desperate struggle ensued. Several battles were fought, in all of which the victory is historically assigned to Oiwa, but if he really did achieve any success, it was purely ephemeral, for he ultimately abandoned the campaign and returned to Japan, giving another shock to his country's waning reputation in the peninsula. If the Yamato Court took any steps to punish this act of lawless ambition, there is no record in ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fine edition of our greatest and most poetical of novelists will attain, if it has not already done so, the high popularity it deserves. To all Scott's lovers it is a pleasure to know that, despite the daily and weekly inrush of ephemeral fiction, the sale of his works is said by the booksellers to rank next below Tennyson's in poetry, and above that of everybody else ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... such abundance towards the close of the eighteenth century spurred them on to higher efforts. Dussek had lived an irregular, aimless sort of life; he had wandered from one country to another, and had acquired the ephemeral fame of the virtuoso. Perhaps he was a disappointed man; there is a tinge of sadness about these last sonatas which supports such a view. Perhaps a feeling that his life was ebbing away made him serious: his ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;—but the wars of whist were comparable to the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... less to the character of the meeting than to the sincere and fervid eloquence of the speakers—to place upon our pages an authentic record of the whole proceedings of the day. This "great national gathering," as it was aptly denominated, must be of enduring and not ephemeral interest, and will be remembered, and spoken of, and quoted, long after events of greater apparent importance have passed away into oblivion. The outpourings of a nation's heart are immortal. The tributes that were paid, in the ages long since gone by, to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... under him expanded to embrace the empire. Where is there another conqueror in the annals of the world who has such solid claims to everlasting renown? Alexander overthrew many nations; but he set up nothing permanent. Julius Caesar instituted the Roman Empire; but its duration was ephemeral in comparison with that of the empire founded by Shi-hwang-ti, the builder ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... while he omits to tell us that the Democrats of any slave State agree with him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded down his ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... people. In France the Mayor is appointed by the State, and he is the tool of the Ministry. In Great Britain the City Fathers are honorary and unpaid. In Germany they are salaried servants, and yet elected by the people. In Great Britain magistrates are temporary, ephemeral figure-heads. They are not even allowed time to serve their apprenticeship. They remain in office one, two, or at most three years, receive a knighthood in the larger provincial towns, and retire into private life. In Germany the Burgomaster and ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... account for those variations observable m different MSS.; which arose, not only from the common mistakes or inadvertencies of transcribers, but from the liberty which the original writers themselves sometimes assumed in this country, of computing the current year according to their own ephemeral or local custom. Some began with the Incarnation or Nativity of Christ; some with the Circumcision, which accords with the solar year of the Romans as now restored; whilst others commenced with the Annunciation; a custom which became ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... of hundreds of thousands of Laura Jadwins. Yes," she continued, her brows bent, her mind hard at work, "what I am, the little things that distinguish me from everybody else, those pass away very quickly, are very ephemeral. But the type Laura Jadwin, that always remains, doesn't it? One must help building up only the permanent things. Then, let's see, the individual may deteriorate, but the type always grows better.... Yes, I think one ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... morning by morning its hip-reaching abundance was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an intricate structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again in ruins, just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers rebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done thoughtfully and calmly, as though it were a religious rite, as though it were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... want of charity, and cool without being cold. But I don't know when I have felt such an aversion to my environment, and prayed so earnestly day by day,—"O, Eternal! purge from my inmost heart this hot haste about ephemeral trifles," and "keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; let them not have ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... on quests divine, So let them pass, these songs of mine. They soar, or sink ephemeral— I care not greatly ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... innumerable. Add to the reckoning all whom thou hast known, one after another. One man after burying another has been laid out dead, and another buries him; and all this in a short time. To conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... ordinance, but there was nothing said about summer-time and winter-time. There was but one Time, and even as Life only stained the white radiance of eternity, as the gifted but, alas! infidel poet remarked, so, too, did Time. But ephemeral as Time was, noon in the Bible clearly meant twelve o'clock, and not one o'clock: towards even, meant towards even, and not the middle of a broiling afternoon. The sixth hour similarly was the Roman way of saying twelve. Winter-time, in fact, was God's time, and though there was nothing wicked ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... governed by party agents, who persuade you to your own and your country's destruction! The voice of the People can no longer be heard in a purchased Press;—let it echo forth then, in stronger form than ephemeral print, which to-day is glanced at, and to-morrow is forgotten;—wherever and whenever you are given the chance to meet, and to speak, let your authority as the workers, the ratepayers, and supporters of the State be ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... lunch-time, for many years, he avoided, when possible, even answering a note. But he always counted a day lost on which he had not written something; and in those last years on which we have yet to enter, he complained bitterly of the quantity of ephemeral correspondence which kept him back from his proper work. He once wrote, on the occasion of a short illness which confined him to the house, 'All my power of imagination seems gone. I might as well be in bed!' He repeatedly determined to write a poem every day, and once succeeded ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Roman missionaries knew full well the significance of these symbols, and we are given to understand that "a few of the more spiritual of the Christian sects made war upon them and all their ephemeral substitutes, such as Maypoles, holy-trees, real crosses, etc." It is declared also that, as "later" Christians were unacquainted with the significance of these emblems, "they adopted them as their own, employing them as the mystic ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... gaiety and daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language: and there were other strange words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral existence. ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise Omar ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... All must vary, must progress or retrograde; the very rocks in the bowels of the earth undergo organic alterations, while the eternal hills that cover them increase or are worn away. Much more is this obvious in the case of ephemeral man, of his thoughts, his works, and everything wherewith he has to do, he who within the period of a few short years is doomed to appear, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... courtesies—flowers, music, a Havana dog, or the loan of a horse. It was all vivid and real enough now. Those men were not to me mere historical figures of whom one reads. They fought historic battles, they founded a historic though ephemeral empire; their defeats, their triumphs, their "deals," their blunders, were now matters of history: but for all that, they were of common flesh and blood, and the strange incidents of a strangely picturesque episode in the existence ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... as the old beliefs are losing their influence to a greater and greater extent, they are ceasing to shape the ephemeral opinions of the moment as they did in the past. The weakening of general beliefs clears the ground for a crop of haphazard opinions without a past or ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... races, and never desire to repeat my visit at that season. Blacklegs and whitelegs prevail; and the next morning the course was strewed with the bodies of drunken vagabonds. It appears to me very strange that the gentry of the neighbourhood suffer a very small modicum of ephemeral newspaper notoriety to get the better of their good sense. The patronage of such a racecourse as that of Niagara, so far from being an honour, is the reverse. It is too near the frontier to be even decently respectable; nor is the ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... dragons of untruth and corruption. The beast stalks forth brazenly enough, and without considering the moral side at all, it is sport to attack him. To get myself into a position to attack him, I had to serve an apprenticeship. You know what that means—the daily digging for ephemeral facts. But I stuck to it. I saw the day when I should be the most feared man on the coast, wielding a pen as efficacious as a surgeon's knife. Unfortunately, my knife first struck a politician named Mulligan, who owned some stock in the paper. You know ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... desired to be acquainted with the Abbe; but the Abbe had really hitherto passed him over as a mere young man of fashion, a mere Milord Anglois, one of the ephemeral race, who appear in Parisian society, vanish, and leave no trace behind. But now he did him the honour to enter into conversation with him. The Abbe peculiarly disliked all affectation of sentiment and exaggeration: they were revolting to his good sense, good taste, and feeling. Ormond ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... lessons are imparted in simple and concise language. This is just what a text-book should be.... The treatise is certainly most useful, and bears internal evidence of being the results of actual work in a busy manufactory and not of ephemeral cramming in a technical school. The chapter arrangement is good, the index satisfactory, and the book is altogether one which the practical chemist should keep as accessible to his crucibles ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... neither more nor less than Atheism. On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... little Japanese girl who deliberately bit through her tongue that she might not utter a syllable that would jeopardize the interests or safety of her father. The word analyzed is a dead thing; the word in use is a living thing. The word merely analyzed is apt to be ephemeral; the word in use is abiding and increasingly significant. As the child puts more and more content into the word, he, himself, expands at the same rate in the scope and power of his thinking. Words are the materials out of ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... nothing for him to gain, but everything to lose. He denounced the brutality of her husband, but her letters to him always addressed him as "my dear child." In writing to her he confides small love-secrets and ephemeral flirtations—which he would scarcely have done, had the countess viewed him with the eye ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... epithets of the day; and well do I remember, the man who had earned by his politics the prefix of jacobin to his name, was completely shunned in society, whatever might be his moral character: but, as might be expected, this was merely ephemeral, when parties ran high, and were guided and governed more by impulses and ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... and had a numerous family, most of whom died young. Her eldest daughter, Georgiana, married Mr. Henry Trevanion. The fourth, Medora, had an unfortunate history, the nucleus of an impertinent and happily ephemeral romance. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... with a deadly hatred,' and already, even in 1887, had got the upper hand. Count Bismarck himself had resisted—and successfully—the desire of the military party to annex Bohemia in 1866 after Sadowa. The permanent exclusion of Austria and the House of Hapsburg from Germany was also no sudden or ephemeral policy. In the middle of the seventeenth century, as the author of the Holy Roman Empire had reminded his readers, it had been proposed by the famous publicist Philippe Chemnitz, who wrote under the name of 'Hippolytus a Lapide,' as the surest means of securing ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... only, are there two or three. Fortunately for the present moment, most of these are worthy of appointments. But we should look forward to future times, when there may happen to be no native citizens in a port, but such as, being bankrupt, have taken asylum in France from their creditors, or young ephemeral adventurers in commerce, without substance or conduct, or other descriptions, which might disgrace the consular office, without protecting our commerce. To avail ourselves of our good native citizens, when we have one in a port, and when there are none, to have yet ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... satisfied her completely. Sure that the heart of Djalma had never ceased to belong to her, she ought, according to the customs and opinions of the world, to have cared little if, in the effervescence of an ardent youth, he had chanced to yield to some ephemeral caprice for this creature, who was, after all, very pretty and desirable—the more especially as he had now repaired his error by separating ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... current, they concealed themselves on deck under a black tarpaulin—that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown—and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... its attendant body of tradition did its work by a sort of quiet pressure on that portion of the community just beneath it—on a special class peculiarly subject to its influence. To-day we have added to this effect that of a moving multitude of more or less ephemeral books, which appear, do their work, and pass on out of sight. They are light, but they make up for their lack of weight by the speed and ease with which they move. Owing to them the use of books is becoming less and less limited to a class, and more and more familiar to the masses. ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... room, that same undefinable, easily recognizable something which proclaims the presence of non-readers. The traces of three or four days, at the most a week, which John occasionally spent at Thornby Place, were necessarily ephemeral, and the weakness of Mrs Norton's sight rendered continuous reading impossible. Sometimes Kitty Hare brought a novel from the circulating library to read aloud, and sometimes John forgot one of his books, and a volume of Browning still ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Church. They created a liquidating junta or commission, as they called it, which should change all immovable ecclesiastical properties that were not already confiscated into national rent. Such national rent, as is well known, had only an ephemeral value. It was, at best, variable; and Italy, which was partially bankrupt when it reduced the interest due to its creditors, will, sooner or later, according to the opinion of the ablest writers, land in complete bankruptcy. The rents substituted by force, instead of real property, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... successive impressions might come to be, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being identical in character with the first. One, one, one, would be the monotonous response for ever. Just so generations of ephemeral insects that succeeded one another without transmitting experience might repeat the same round of impressions—an everlasting progression without a shadow of progress. Such, too, is the idiot's life: his liquid brain transmits every impulse without resistance and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... you, that you desire to hear them. Nay; that cannot be so, for the living people will themselves tell you about passing matters much better in their writings than in their careless talk. Yet I admit that this motive does influence you, so far as you prefer those rapid and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings—books, properly so called. For all books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction—it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... course, reviewed with some care, and with deference to public opinion. Without this, the journals would not sell; and it is convenient to be able to quote such articles as instances of impartiality. Under shelter of this, a host of ephemeral productions are written into a transitory popularity; and by the aid of this process, the shelves of the booksellers, as well as the pockets of the public, are disencumbered. To such an extent are these means employed, that some of the periodical ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... Fashion is ephemeral. Taste and public opinion having no corporal identity, are nothing but the passing fancy of a ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... father was a member of the Kildare Street Club in Dublin. Inquiry found the father, and it was then learned that the father had already received an independent message in Dublin to say that an inquiry was coming through from London. I do not know if the earth name is a merely ephemeral thing, quite disconnected from the personality, and perhaps the very first thing to be thrown aside. That is, of course, possible. Or it may be that some law regulates our intercourse from the other side by ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the ether or rhigolene ceases, the tissue operated on ceases to be frozen, so ephemeral is the degree of the cold obtained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... with snowy lace, lightly embroidered at the edges, and looped with cords of blue and silver—tables with marble tops, supporting porcelain vases filled with flowers, were placed between the windows, for these ephemeral children of sunshine were dear to the heart of the dying one. Beside one of these stood a large cushioned chair, in which reclined a young man of delicate features and wasted form. He appeared in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... he should allow himself to be stuck up as a ninepin only to be knocked down! There are politicians for whom such occupation seems to be proper;—and who like it too. A little office, a little power, a little rank, a little pay, a little niche in the ephemeral history of the year will reward many men adequately ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... South African employer would take an early opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" in that way before, and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... mass of marble. It was not always a mountain. It floated invisibly in the sea. Invisible animals took it up, particle by particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves. The ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead shells to make limestone masses at the bottom of the sea. It will not always remain rock. Air and water disintegrate it once more. Little rootlets seize upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants. It becomes ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... as if it were a fine summer's day, mild and warm. Fresh and green he spread out his mighty crown; the sunbeams played among the twigs and the leaves; the air was full of the fragrance of herbs and blossoms; gay butterflies chased each other to and fro. The ephemeral insects danced as if all the world were created merely for them to dance and be merry in. All that the tree had experienced for years and years, and that had happened around him, seemed to pass by him again, as ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... solitudes of sand, sometimes scudding across ephemeral tracts of shallow sea. Again, we were creeping gingerly round the deeper arteries that surround the Great Knecht, examining their convolutions as it were the veins of a living tissue, and the circulation of the tide ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... life might well appear to the gnat as long as the period of a month to a man. Indeed, we have reason to suppose that to even the shortest-lived insect life does not appear short at all; and that the ephemeral may actually, so far as felling is concerned, live as long as a man—although its birth and death does occur between the rising and ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... in him, I'm confident, to write plays—strong plays. Does he ever write except ephemeral space stuff ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, with ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... equally ephemeral. Time and experience rob even amusement of its charm, and the night before is not worth next morning's headache. Practical success alone makes early middle-age the most pleasurable period of a man's career. What has been worked for in youth ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... town of Kintang, rather more than forty miles north of Liyang. At this point Gordon experienced his first serious rebuff at the hands of Fortune, for the earlier reverse at the Soochow stockades was so clearly due to a miscarriage in the attack, and so ephemeral in its issue, that it can ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... reflection, of slowly maturing thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between excited passions ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... thoughts, the mountains rear their crests against the sky, and, crowned with the gathered snows of the centuries whose monuments they are, from aeon to aeon gaze majestically out over the wide plains and the ephemeral ant-like races who tread them, and while they endure think themselves the masters of their little world. And over all—mountain, plain, and flashing stream—the glorious light of the African sun and the Spirit of Life moving ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... Cataraqui, [157] Kilgraston, [158] Kirk-Ella, [159] Meadow Bank, [160] Ravenswood, [161] Dornald, [162] until, after a nine miles' drive, Redclyffe closes the rural landscape—Redclyffe, [163] on the top of Cap Rouge Promontory. There, many indications yet mark the spot where Roberval's ephemeral colony wintered as far back as 1542. You can now, if you like, return to the city by the same route, or select the Ste. Foye Road, skirting the classic heights where General Murray, six months after the first battle ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... together in the shadow of the awnings, panted with weariness. The water and the air, even the very light above, had a dull, crushing splendour; and the fadeless glory of those elements were as a very mockery of the human beings whose physical lives are so ephemeral. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... nothing in it but the glory—and little of that. We contrive and scheme and run about all day getting a story. And then we write it at fever heat, searching our souls for words that are cleancut and virile. And then we turn it in, and what is it? What have we to show for our day's work? An ephemeral thing, lacking the first breath of life; a thing that is dead before it is born. Why, any cub reporter, if he were to put into some other profession the same amount of nerve, and tact, and ingenuity and finesse, and stick-to-it-iveness that he expends in prying a single story out ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... he had practised in his lifetime. Being made of stucco, woodwork, plaster, and such perishable materials, it was unfortunately destined to decay. But Florence had always been liberal, nay, lavish, of her genius in triumphs, masques, magnificent street architecture, evoked to celebrate some ephemeral event. A worthier occasion would not occur again; and we have every reason to believe that the superb structure, which was finally exposed to view upon the 14th of July, displayed all that was left at Florence of the grand style in the arts of modelling and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... fact, regarded these essays, at the time, as purely ephemeral. The success of the 'Review' suggested republication long afterwards. The first collection of articles was, I presume, Sydney Smith's in 1839; Jeffrey's and Macaulay's followed in 1843; and at that ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... ambassador succeeded him. Sometimes a man less well-known, but elegant and sought after, one of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during his ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration towards the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife towards the other and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... after, one of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of the "beautiful ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... about in the air, and finally skurry off into invisibility. A gentle breeze was astir in the woods, and it set the leaves to whispering. The treetoads and the locusts were trolling a chorus. So loudly vibrant, it was! So clamorously gay! Some subtle intimation they surely had that summer was ephemeral and the season waning, for the burden of their song was, Let us now be merry. The scarlet head of a woodpecker showed brilliantly from the bare dead boughs of a chestnut-oak, which, with its clinging lichens ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... all the Colonel's "best" articles—i.e., best-liked, most popular: the kind that Major Brooke and Mr. Bylash, or even Miss Miller, were apt to talk about at the supper-table—dealt with topics of a purely local and ephemeral interest. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... hundred louis, to complete everything of which I have spoken before the end of the summer, that is to say, in July. I shall then have on hand two works which should surely be worth a thousand louis to me. This is a low estimate, for even ephemeral pieces and literary ventures are paid at this price. You can easily make the calculation. They allow three louis for each plate with the accompanying text; my fossils will have about two hundred plates, and my fresh-water fishes about one hundred and fifty. This seems to me plausible. ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... pursued Abner stolidly. "By their own bulk—like a big snowball. And by their own badness. People are rolling back to the country—the country they came from. Improved transportation will do it." The troubles of the town were ephemeral—he waved them aside. But his face was set in a frown—doubtless at the thought of the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Robbers' made an epoch in German dramatic literature. Not only is it the strongest and completest expression of the eighteenth-century storm and stress, but it proved a highly effective stage-play. Nor was its success ephemeral. Its author quickly outgrew it, but it maintained itself during the entire period of Germany's leadership in matters of dramatic art, and even to-day it preserves much of its old vitality. It is true that when a modern audience assembles to see a performance of 'The ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... man on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the accumulations ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... illusion, instantly dissipated by appeal to biological fact, nor would a biologist-statesman look for permanent stability in a multiplication of competing communities, some vigorous, others worthless, but all growing in population. Rather must a people familiar with science see how small and ephemeral a thing is the pride of nations, knowing that both the peace of the world and the progress of civilisation are to be sought not by the hardening of national boundaries but in the substitution ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... a certain literary coquetry may be permissible to retailers of the marvelous, the sober chronicler is bound to forego such advantage as he may reap from an odd-sounding name, on which many ephemeral successes are founded in these days. Wherefore the present writer gives the following succinct statement of the reasons which induced him to adopt the unlikely sounding ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... your literature, at any given time, is ephemeral; indeed, it has ever been so since the discovery of printing; and this portion it is which is most influential, consequently that by which most good or mischief ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... her poor little romance, builded upon so slight a foundation as an impulsive boy's ephemeral interest, was over. He would not come again—and she cared. She put her hand to her throat. It ached with the lump in ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... carpenters for the ten-hour day. The Baltimore sailors were successful in advancing their wages through strikes in the years 1795, 1805, and 1807, but their endeavors were recurrent, not permanent. Even more ephemeral were several riotous sailors' strikes as well as a ship builders' strike in 1817 at Medford, Massachusetts. Doubtless many other such outbreaks occurred during the period to 1820, but left no record ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... Corbeaux" at the Odeon, where it has been definitely accepted and consecrated as a masterpiece. I could not refrain from going to Paris specially to see it. It was years since I had been in the Odeon. Rather brighter, perhaps, in its more ephemeral decorations, but still the same old-fashioned, roomy, cramped, provincial theatre, with pit-tier boxes like the cells of a prison! The audience was good. It was startingly good for the Odeon. The play, too, at ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... if the use of the poor papers were restricted to newspapers and other ephemeral literature, but when, as is often the case, paper of very poor quality is used for books of permanent literary interest, the ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... to find that the brothers parted on good terms. The elder was beholden to the younger for the acquiescence that removed the odium of tyranny from the expulsion, and when the one great disturbance had silenced the ephemeral dissensions that had kept both minds in a constant state of irritation, Henry wanted, by kindness and consideration, to prove to himself and the world that Leonard's real interests were his sole object; and Leonard rejoiced in being at peace, so long as his pride and resolution were not sacrificed. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and inspiring acquaintance with the heroes of the nations. If we wish our children to be fine types of men and women, we must form their tastes in these large directions before they are overwhelmed by what is so ephemeral and worthless in literature and drama ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... military state, whose territories would have given him a sure base for his attack upon the colossal power of Russia, he founded his enterprise upon the co-operation of a brave and enthusiastic but fickle people, and besides, he neglected to turn to the greatest advantage this ephemeral enthusiasm. ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... to pay much heed to the uncertainties of a world to come, the minds of others have dwelt on the prospect of a life beyond the grave till the thought of it has risen with them to a passion, almost to an obsession, and has begotten a contempt for the fleeting joys of this ephemeral existence by comparison with the hoped-for bliss of an eternal existence hereafter. To the sceptic, examining the evidence for immortality by the cold light of reason, such peoples and such individuals ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... years of fighting Godfrey of Bouillon, ephemeral king of Jerusalem, took his homeward road back to France, accompanied by three cavaliers, in all, 'then, four horses, one more than Rashi had predicted. Godfrey remembered the rabbi's prophecy, and determined ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... essential difference. Materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and lasting, it sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy. The brutal aspects overlap and outwear; refinement has the feebler and more ephemeral hold ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... denomination to Mercurius Publicus. On the last day of this year, too, a journal of native growth budded forth, with the title of Mercurius Caledonius. But the canny Scots either could not or would not spare their bawbees for the encouragement of such ephemeral literature, for Chalmers tells us that only ten numbers of this publication appeared, and they were 'very loyal, very illiterate, and very affected.' Dublin appears to have produced a Dublin News Letter in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... for a moment, either now or later, suspect what troubles had resulted to him from letting her go; it never once seemed to cross her mind, and she had received no news whatever from Shaston. They talked on slight and ephemeral subjects, and when his tea was brought up he told the amazed little servant that a cup was to be set for Sue. That young person was much more interested in their history than they supposed, and as she descended the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Ethiopic West Indian subjects cared to come forward to perform this work in the more permanent shape that I felt to be not only desirable but essential for our self-vindication. [16] I also realized the fact that the "Bow of Ulysses" was not likely to have the same ephemeral existence and effect as the newspaper and other periodical discussions of its contents, which had poured from the press in Great Britain, the United States, and very notably, of course, in all the English Colonies ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... resurrection of memory, completely deserted, sharing in the universal decay,—unnamed, separated from life forever. From the beehive close by, no one came to give new life with tears and offerings to the ephemeral personality they once had, to the name which ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... deceive Lady Mary, who had seen the men and manners of very many climes; it did not deceive Gibbon, who was not especially prone to overvalue things English, and who could look down from twenty centuries on things ephemeral. It deceives, indeed, I am told, some excellent persons at the present day, who think Fielding's microcosm a "toylike world," and imagine that Russian Nihilists and French Naturalists have gone beyond it. It will deceive no one who has lived for some competent space of time a life during ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... impossible, except by an inefficiency of the enemy which was not to be presumed. These battles therefore are important, militarily, in a sense not at all dependent upon their consequences, which were ephemeral. They are significant as extreme illustrations of incompetent action, deriving from faulty traditions; and they have the further value of showing the starting point, the zero of the scale, from which the progress of the century is to be measured. In describing ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... moss-grown, had in comparison an ephemeral, modern aspect. For a hundred years its inmates had come and gone and lived and died. They took no heed of the crag, but never a sound was lost upon it. Their drawling iterative speech the iterative echoes conned. The ringing blast of a horn set astir some ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... entertainment at which men hazard their fortunes and degrade their morality. It was a vast shell of planks and shingles, with skeleton joists and rafters bare overhead, built hastily and crudely to serve its ephemeral day. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... its editor, at New York, deserves much more than this ephemeral encomium, for he has done more than all the orators upon loyalty in the Canadas towards keeping up a true British spirit in it. The Albion, in fact, in Canada is a Times as far as influence and sound feeling go; and although, like that autocrat of newspapers, it differs often from ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... and certainly ephemeral vagary of the human mind which has appeared before now in human history, which is called "Sophistry," and which consists in making up "systems" to explain the world; in contrast with Philosophy which aims at the answering of questions, the solution of problems ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... world, and would communicate them freely to Madeline as they walked. No; there was no longer the slightest touch of hypocrisy in her pleasant manner and eager voice as she answered, "No, papa, I have not heard. Was it Mr. So-and-so?" and she named an ephemeral literary giant of the day. "No," said the judge, "it was not So-and-so; but yet you might guess, as you know the gentleman." Then the slight shade of hypocrisy came upon her again in a moment. "She couldn't guess," ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... politics and public thought of our time. This alone would have attested his energy and abilities; but this is secondary praise. It is the use he made of his journal when he had created it, the moral ends to which (besides making it a vehicle of news and the discussion of ephemeral topics) he devoted it, that will give him his peculiar place in history. If he had had no higher aim than to supply the market for current intelligence, as a great merchant supplies the market for dry-goods, he would have deserved to rank ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... forms, which are the outgrowth of the moment—creatures of caprice, posing and pranking their brief and inglorious season, to be superseded by some newer favorite, born of some newer accident or fancy. A fair type of these ephemeral dances—the comets of the saltatory system—in so far as they can have a type, is the now familiar Can-Can of the Jardin Mabille—a dance the captivating naughtiness of which has given it wide currency in our generation, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... in the pages of the periodical a theatre of special activity, a way to the entertainment and instruction of the many; and though much of what is thus produced may bear, as we have hinted, a character more or less ephemeral, we are sometimes presented also with the earlier blossoms and the fresher odors of a rich and perennial growth of genius, everywhere known and acknowledged in the realms of belles-lettres, philosophy, and science, crowded here as in a nursery, to be soon transplanted to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... holds as strange tenets as he, which she supports with as much zeal, and almost as much ability. But I predict that the popularity of their doctrines will not last; and if ever you visit the moon again, you will find that their glory, now at its height, like the ephemeral fashions of the earth, will have ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... happy to have had Mademoiselle de G——, for a mistress, I think, by choice, I should have liked her, better as a confidante; be that as it may, I felt on leaving them as though I could not live without either. Who would have thought that I should never see them more; and that here our ephemeral amours ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of Kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of learning and of the arts; faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions; faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour of good ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... impossibilities, particularly as the first step towards its composition, on Weber's part, was the study of the English language itself, the right understanding of which, Weber justly considered as preliminary to any attempt to marry Mr. Planche's ephemeral verses to his own immortal music. These exertions increased his weakness so much, that he found it necessary to resort to a watering-place in the summer of 1825. In December he returned to Berlin, to bring out his Euryanthe ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
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