"Illusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such fancies, illusive and destructive, be banished henceforward from your thoughts for ever. Resolve, and keep your resolution; choose, and pursue your choice. If you spend this day in study, you will find yourself still more able to study to-morrow; not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of the situation, in which in spite of Shakespeare and the rest poor modern sceptics still find themselves, is an indication of how hopelessly illusive all talk of "progress" is. Between Calvin on the one hand and the Sorbonne on the other, Montaigne might well shuffle home from his municipal duties and read Horace in his tower. And we, after three hundred odd years, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... watch-tower's loftiest platform now we gain. Departed spirit! fruitless is the prayer, We see alone thy long-deserted chair;[63] And never more, or in the storm of night, Or by the glimmering moon's illusive light, Or when the flash, with red and hasty glance, Sudden illumes the sea's remote expanse, 260 The shores, the cliffs, the mountain, till again Deep darkness closes on the roaring main, Shalt thou, dread Angel, with unaltered mien, Sublime upon thy ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... with great, blue-eyed interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the escritoire she climbed up suddenly into a chair and with the fluffy broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling wildy off into space after an illusive cobweb. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... grave. Eva's step was again in the garden,—in the balconies; she played and laughed again,—and her father, in a transport, declared that they should soon have her as hearty as anybody. Miss Ophelia and the physician alone felt no encouragement from this illusive truce. There was one other heart, too, that felt the same certainty, and that was the little heart of Eva. What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret instinct of ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of parliament for the borough of Liskeard. I took my seat at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America, and supported, with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not, perhaps, the interest, of the Mother Country. After a fleeting, illusive hope, prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute. But I listened to the attack and defence of eloquence and reason; I had a near prospect of the characters, views, and passions of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Thlinget myth and legend, croaked spasmodically from the white branch of a dead spruce behind them. The damp air had in it the freshness of new-cut hemlock boughs, a wild, vigorous fragrance that stirs the imagination with strange, illusive promises of the wilderness. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... corroborative of the Hebrew accounts of the Egyptian captivity of the Jewish people.* The Egyptian word-treasury being at last unlocked, it was hoped that much new light would be thrown on Hebrew history. But the hope proved illusive. After ardent researches of hosts of fervid seekers for half a century, scarcely a word of reference to the Hebrews has been found among ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... his dignified reserve was overcome, he had the faculty of narrating these adventures with wonderful eloquence, working up his descriptive sketches with such intuitive perception of the picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward with a positively illusive effect, like matters of your own visual experience. In fact, they were so admirably done that I could never more than half believe them, because the genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact themselves so artistically. Many of his scenes were ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at almost every page they read an intense and singular experience. The curtain drawn between ourselves and reality, enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusive folds, seems of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, and display to the mind depths of light till then undreamt, in which reality itself, contemplated face to face for the first time, stands fully revealed. The revelation is overpowering, ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... a decanter on the sideboard. The doctor poured some spirit into a glass. "Drink this," he said. Theophil drank it raw, as though it had been water; and presently a certain illusive hope began to stir like an opening rose in his brain, and when the doctor had gone he turned to that decanter again. Perhaps if he drank enough he would find that Jenny was not to die, after all. At all events, the spirit gave him nerve, which else he could not have ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... illusiveness rather than emotional blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. His nuances are perhaps too finely adjusted to give forth the sense of overwhelming magic either in intention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with Twachtman with seldom or never a dramatic gesture. He is as illusive as a phrase of Mallarme and it will be remembered that he is of the period more or less of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. He does recall in essence at least the quality of pastels in prose, though the art intention is a sturdier one. It is ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... soon the heart, unblest, Unsated, turns from these illusive charms Back to the haunting dream of heav'n once known: It pines for those soft eyes, that throbbing breast, Those sweet life-giving lips, those circling arms— The breath, the touch, the warmth ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... represented in miniature on the retina of the eye, seems to have given rise to this illusive oratory! It was forgot that this representation belongs rather to the laws of light, than to those of life; and may with equal elegance be seen in the camera obscura as in the eye; and that the picture vanishes for ever, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... being a theatrical man, has drawn the long bow in his effort to impress us," said Patsy. "I've been thinking over some of the pictures I've seen recently and I can't imagine a moral, however intangible or illusive, in connection with any of them. But perhaps I wasn't observant enough. The next time I go to a picture show I shall study the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... ground having hidden it from sight. Now, as he turned half way about, looking down into the shallow hollow between him and the curve of the creek, he saw them very plainly. The fringe of the herd was some two hundred yards distant, but its farther side, in that illusive shimmer of hot surface air, seemed miles away. The sheep were spread out roughly in the shape of a figure eight, two larger herds connected by a smaller, and were headed to the southward, moving slowly, grazing on the wheat stubble as ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... which started the whole thing. Auber must have taken the suggestion it contained much more seriously than any of us for several years imagined; nor did we connect the long contemplativeness of the man with any definite purpose. The thing was too vague and illusive to become ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... treatment? The answer was simple enough—in the first place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at great length ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... now come to the end of our difficulties? Not yet; for Berlioz is the most illusive of men, and no one has helped more than he to mislead people in their estimate of him. We know how much he has written about music and about his own life, and what wit and understanding he shows in his shrewd criticisms and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... with his dream, and spoke of it very seriously to his mother, who only laughed at it. "My son," said she to him, "would you go into Egypt on the faith of an illusive dream?" "Why not, madam," answered Zeyn, "do you imagine all dreams are chimerical? No, no, some of them are mysterious. My preceptors have told me a thousand incidents, which will not permit me to doubt of it. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... is not merely a protest and a program, but also a divine promise. The ideal of the Kingdom of heaven to which our consciences respond is for us a religious inspiration, and has behind it a faithful God who would not deceitfully lure us to follow an illusive phantom. "According to His promise we look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." The city of our hope has not been designed by us, but has been already thought out in God's ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... plentiful than the Spaniards had yet seen, but they were still lured on to distant places, with the illusive hope that this precious metal might there be found in quantities. Yet Columbus felt forced to cease, for a time, the quest of the precious metal, and sail for home with the story of the new world he had found. ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... when all the crimson colour faded And wanton Autumn's lips and cheeks were pale; And when the sorrowing year had slowly waded, With failing footsteps, through the snow-filled vale. I woke and knew the glamour of a season Had lent illusive lustre to a dream, And looking in the clear calm eyes of Reason, I smiled and said, "Farewell to things that seem." 'Twas but a red leaf from a lush September The wind of dreams across my pathway blew, But oh! my love! the whole round year remember, With all its seasons ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dungeons and its lace-work. But after all, in his secret soul of souls, he had longed to eat of the omelette. Dieu! how often during those slow, quiet years in the little hamlet yonder on the plain, had its sweetness and lightness mocked his tongue with illusive tasting! Little wonder, therefore, that the good cure's praises were sweet in madame's ear, for they had the ring of truth—and of envy! And madame herself was only mortal, for what woman lives but feels herself uplifted by the sense ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... seems strange that it took nearly two thousand years for this principle to be discovered and applied. Many times the inventors appeared to be almost upon it. They worked all around it, but the idea seemed illusive and ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... we interpret such illusive predications except by cultivating our literary perceptions, by reading the most significant authors until we are at home with them? But, no doubt, to disentangle the compound propositions, and to expand ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... over his cup of muddy coffee he had a curious sense that his mind was intent on keeping at bay some half-formulated fear. He felt pursued, as by an indistinct dream. Yet he was cunning enough to pretend that this something was too illusive to capture outright, so he turned his thoughts to all manner of remote things. But there are times when it is almost as difficult to deceive oneself as to cheat others. In the midst of his thoughts he suddenly realized that under the stimulating influence of a second cup of coffee he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tender souls, who love the melting mood, Suck from your work their melancholy food; Now this one, and now that, you deeply stir, Each sees the working of his heart laid bare. Their tears, their laughter, you command with ease, The lofty still they honour, the illusive love. Your finish'd gentlemen you ne'er can please; A growing mind alone will ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... in the bright, tendril-curling hair, the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet round form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated, ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of some lovelier ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... blue where the sky is yellowing up behind them; and in the darkening hollows of nearer mornes strange shadows gather with the changing of the light—dead indigoes, fuliginous purples, rubifications as of scoriae,—ancient volcanic colors momentarily resurrected by the illusive haze of evening. And the fallow of the canes takes a faint warm ruddy tinge. On certain far high slopes, as the sun lowers, they look like thin golden hairs against the glow,—blond down upon the skin of ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... suffers can lessen his anguish by knowing whence it comes. By thought he can locate it in a certain portion of his body which can be cured, or, if necessary, torn away. He fixes the bounds of it, and separates it from himself. A child has no such illusive resource. His first encounter with suffering is more tragic and more true. Like his own being, it seems infinite. He feels that it is seated in his bosom, housed in his heart, and is mistress ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... by memory, seem "Like yon' illusive meteor's glancing light; "That o'er the darkness threw its instant gleam, "Then sunk, and vanish'd in the ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... out and over the dump and along the tote road that led through the straggling shacks and across the river into the forest beyond. But of neither river nor forest was he aware. Before his eyes there floated an illusive vision of masses of fluffy golden hair above a face of radiant purity, of deft fingers moving in swift and sure precision as they wound the white rolls of bandages round bloody and broken flesh, of two round capable arms whose lines suggested strength ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... paused athirst And suddenly across the wastes of heat, He saw cool waters gleaming, and a sweet Green oasis upon his vision burst. A tender dream, long in his bosom nursed, Spread love's illusive verdure for his feet; The barren sands changed into golden wheat; The way grew glad that late had ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that Maurice, there in the darkness that was instinct with life, became conscious that a great duty lay before him. He ceased to beguile himself with the illusive prospect of great victories to be gained; the march to Verdun was a march to death, and he so accepted it, since it was their lot to die, with brave and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... to resemble a very ordinary phenomenon: the principle that things as they are farther off appear to us to be smaller. Logical reflection assures us that they are not so, but the effect upon our senses is completely illusive; and, what is more, we act as though they were smaller; we act as if what they gained in distance they lost in size; we aim at a target which is many feet high and broad as if it was but a few inches; we say the sun is about as big as a soup-plate, and having ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... despatch to Arago, and then I utilised the last days I was to spend on French soil in studying the defensive works ordered by my brother in view of that war, imminent perhaps, during which, soldiers before all as we were, we expected, in the illusive hopes of our youth, to be allowed to keep our place as ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... expected to be generous. His good humor was regarded as an echo of his prosperity, and a lucky negro, winning at dice, would strive to imitate his manner. At planting, at plowing and at gathering, no detail was too small or too illusive to escape his eye. His interests were under a microscopic view and all plans that were drawn in the little brick office at the corner of the yard, were rigorously carried out in the fields. In the one ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... storm appear to us brooding over that doubtful sea. But something of prophetic vision is required of us. We are told that all perils which seem to threaten the first stages of our course are entirely illusive—that they will vanish as we approach—that we shall soon arrive in halcyon waters, and regions where wisdom, peace, and purity reign supreme. If we cautiously inquire after some assurance of such results, we are ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... It was a vision! A picture of an Indian camp, not painted on canvas nor yet written. It was dream-stuff, suspended in the thin air, filling the inclosure of the cedar wood container. As she looked upon it, the picture grew more and more real, exceeding the proportions of the chest. It was all so illusive a breath might have blown it away; yet there it was, real as life,—a circular camp of white cone-shaped tepees, astir with Indian people. The village crier, with flowing head-dress of eagle plumes, mounted on a prancing white pony, rode within the arena. Indian men, women and children stopped ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... mother of the tribe, by offering a substitute for the dead in the person of a captive. There was relief, to picture the face of the laughing cherub in the clouds, or to listen to its light footstep in the empty halls of the dwelling; for in these illusive images of the brain, suffering was confined to her own bosom. But when stern reality usurped the place of fancy, and she saw her living daughter shivering in the wintry blasts or sinking beneath the fierce heats of the climate, cheerless in the desolation of female ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... of my grief was subsided, I desired to retire from a world which had tempted me only with illusive visions of happiness, and to remove from those scenes which prompted recollection, and perpetuated my distress. My father applauded my resolution, and I immediately was admited a noviciate into this monastery, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... is like the sunlight That sets the world ablaze. And love is like the moonlight With soft illusive rays. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... sort; but I was glad to learn it. I drew Minnie out a little more about the Athletics and my visit to Berry Pomeroy. She wouldn't tell me much: she was too illusive and indefinite: she never could get the notion out of her head, somehow, that I remembered all about it, and was only pretending to forgetfulness. But I gathered from what she said, that Dr. Ivor and I must have flirted a great deal; or, at least, that he must have paid me a good lot ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... this misconception of reality. Any contradictory fusion of Truth with error, in both theory and practice, prevents one from healing scientifically, and makes the last state of one's patients worse than the first. If disease is real it is not illusive, and it certainly would contradict the Science of Mind-healing to attempt to destroy the realities of Mind in order ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... the child in the cradle, whose innocence and helplessness makes its appeal all the stronger. The liquor traffic is a tangible, definite thing that we can locate without difficulty. Many of the causes of poverty and sin are illusive, indefinite qualities such as bad management, carelessness, laziness, extravagance, ignorance and bad judgment, which are exceedingly hard to remedy, but the liquor traffic is one of the things we can speak of definitely, and in removing it we are taking ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... also of the North—the North as it is tonight; soft air, balmy with the incense of growing things; illusive dark, half concealing, half revealing, blurring distant outlines. A placid North, whose black waters flowed silent, smooth, deep. A benign and harmless North, upon its surface; and yet, withal, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... still were they amazed to learn that Earl Grey seriously professed that by sending all the convicts to Van Diemen's Land he substantially realised dispersion. He indeed promised to provide an equal amount of emigration, but they knew that these projects were illusive. They had before them the addition of convict ticket holders, by hundreds, to thousands and tens of thousands already in the colony; there to struggle with their predecessors for bread. Such was ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... spiritualistic type and is radically opposed to the materialism of the Sankya school. In one school the Divine Being is nothing and materialism has full sway; while in the other Brahm is everything, and all that appears to men—the phenomenal—is false and illusive. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... rationally balanced mind. She is a being of feeling and impulse,—loving, ardent, proud, sensitive and strong-willed. Knowing this, it was madness in me to chafe instead of soothing her; to oppose, when gentle concession would have torn from her eyes an illusive veil. Oh that I could learn wisdom in time! I was in no ignorance as to her peculiar character. I knew her faults and her weaknesses, as well as her nobler qualities; and it was for me to stimulate the one ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... two surfaces are alike; that the final result of human inquiry is the absolute demonstration that man is incapable of knowledge; that, even if the truth be in his possession, he can never be certain of it; that the world is an illusive phantasm, and ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train or steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations, the old illusive impression will quiver back about you for a moment,—not as if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly, touchingly, as if pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a tenderness may come to you, as one knows after reconciliation with a friend misapprehended ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... eye of the fading wife of the man who had taught him all the English and the white man's etiquette that he had ever mastered. Night after night he would return from day-long hunting trips, his game-bag filled with delicate quail, rare woodcock, snowy-breasted partridge, and when the illusive appetite of the sick woman could be coaxed to partake of a morsel, he felt repaid for miles of tramping through forest trails, for hours of ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... skill, and have drawn fanciful pictures of a pious frugal household, of a gallant frontiersman endowed with a long catalogue of noble qualities, and of a mother like a Madonna in the wilderness.[17] Yet all the evidence that there is goes to show that this romantic coloring is purely illusive. Rough, coarse, low, ignorant, and poverty-stricken surroundings were about the child; and though we may gladly avail ourselves of the possibility of believing his mother to have been superior to all the rest of it, yet she ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... psychological changes reputed to be known in self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that there is no knowing except by perception—this is ever reiterated as self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By invincible necessity ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... thee with thy full beam, And bless thee, Oh love-giving star! For life's sweet, sad, illusive dream Fruition, though in Heaven afar— "A silver lining" hath the cloud Through dark and stormiest night, And there are eyes to pierce the shroud And ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... story credible. She could no longer disbelieve, so simply did he tell his tales, his white teeth showing, and his dark eyes rapidly brightening and clouding as he mentioned different spells and their effects. But so illusive were his narratives that she never quite understood; he seemed always a little ahead of her; she often had to pause to consider his meaning, and when she had grasped it, he was speaking of something else, and she had missed the links. To understand him better she attempted to argue with ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the conversation of this seductive creature. He recalled the legends of temptations to which the Evil One used to subject the anchorites of old, by causing to appear before them the attractive but illusive forms of the heathen deities. He wondered whether he were not becoming the sport of the same baleful influence; if, like the Lamias and Dryads of antiquity, this queen of the woods were not some spirit of the elements, incarnated in human form and ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... "one who abhors and forswears the sex; one who has dashed his rose-coloured spectacles from his eyes, and sees woman as she really is, with no illusive glamour; one who has found her out. Yes, I think I shall become a misogynist. It is the only way of rendering yourself invulnerable, 't is the only safe course. During my walk this afternoon, I recollected, from the scattered pigeon-holes of memory, and arranged in consequent order, at least ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the time, and, though he tried hard, he had been unable to stay far from Nell's vicinity. He believed she cared for him; but he could not catch her alone long enough to verify his tormenting hope. When alone she was as illusive as a shadow, as quick as a flash, as mysterious as a Yaqui. When he tried to catch her in the garden or fields, or corner her in the patio, she eluded him, and left behind a memory of dark-blue, haunting ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... footfalls. The room was so high and large that its stiff gilt and brocade furnishing appeared insignificant. Three long windows faced the Lungarno, but two were screened with green slatted blinds and heavily draped, and the light within was silvery and illusive. A small man in correct English clothes, with a pointed bald head and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... magic of language, without the formality of an after all impossible description; to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarme has consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible to avoid ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... To Baals illusive and specious, Till chance had there voiced me That one I loved vainly in nonage Had ceased her ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... She felt for her good-looking, helpless patient a profound and honest pity. I do not know whether she had ever heard that "pity was akin to love." She would probably have resented that utterly untenable and atrocious commonplace. There was no suggestion, real or illusive, of any previous masterful quality in the man which might have made his present dependent condition picturesque by contrast. He had come to her handicapped by an unromantic accident and a practical want of energy and intellect. He would have to touch her interest anew if, indeed, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... only pretends to be a chronological and, quite incidentally, a critical survey of George Gissing's chief works. And comparatively short as his working life proved to be—hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for nearly ten more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire—the task of the mere surveyor is no light or perfunctory one. Artistic as his temperament undoubtedly was, and conscientious as his writing appears down to its minutest ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... as a teaspoonful of cold spinach was wasted in these days. Justine's "left-over" dishes were quite as good as anything else she cooked; her artful combinations, her garnishes of pastry, her illusive seasoning, her enveloping and varied sauces disguised and transformed last night's dinner into ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... Forbearance, Silence and Good Humor. Her heroic efforts to keep her four friends with her in spite of the plots of Snobbery, Gossip, Jealousy, Frivolity and Treachery, and her readiness to extend a helping hand to Diffidence, Poverty and Misunderstood, result in the creation of an illusive being known to her only as the Spirit, a white-robed apparition which visits her more frequently as she approaches the end of her pilgrimage. At the termination of Senior Lane, which is separated from the Highway of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Turnus hastens up and sends his spear whistling from far on it; it gives back and turns its footsteps. Then indeed Turnus, when he believed Aeneas turned and fled from him, and his spirit madly drank in the illusive hope: 'Whither fliest thou, Aeneas? forsake not thy plighted bridal chamber. This hand shall give thee the land thou hast sought overseas.' So clamouring he pursues, and brandishes his drawn sword, and sees not that his rejoicing is drifting ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... be something more than a custodian of the books in his collection. He should also exercise perpetual vigilance with regard to their safety and condition. The books of every library are beset by dangers and by enemies. Some of these are open and palpable; others are secret, illusive, little suspected, and liable to come unlooked for and without warning. Some of these enemies are impersonal and immaterial, but none the less deadly; others are personally human in form, but most inhuman in their careless and brutal ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... am unborn, and my nature is eternal, and I am the Lord also of all creatures, yet taking control of my nature-form, I am born by my illusive power. For whenever piety decays, O son of Bharata, and impiety is in the ascendant, then I produce myself. For the protection of good men, for the destruction of evildoers, for the re-establishment of piety, I am born ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... somehow different from any of the other girls I had met. She was not at all like those with whom I had danced at the hotel hops, and to whom I gave my brass buttons in Flirtation Walk. She was more fine, more illusive, and yet most fascinating, with a quaint old- fashioned manner that at times made her seem quite a child, and the next moment changed her into a worldly and charming young woman. She made you feel she was much older than yourself in years and in experience and in knowledge. That is ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... they were usually so thin and sallow that one had to look at them twice to see them clearly. At best, they looked vague and illusive. ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... years we discern the brilliant heiress to be a person of infinitely inferior importance to the ill-dressed and overworked Vicar's daughter. Imperial Shirley, no need to wave your majestic wand, we have bowed to it long ago unblinded; and all its illusive splendours are not so potent as that worn-down goose-quill which you used to wield in the busy kitchen of ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... water sweeping up the blackness on the vessel's lee, or breaking and boiling to windward. It was sheer blind chaos to the sight, and you might have supposed that the brig was in the midst of some enormous vaporous turmoil, so illusive and indefinable were the shadows of the storm-tormented night—one block of blackness melting into another, with sometimes an extraordinary faintness of light speeding along the dark sky like to the dim reflection of a lanthorn flinging its radiance ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... scoria that have accumulated in the vicinity of the iron works give the place an illusive air of antiquity; bit it is neither ancient nor picturesque. The oldest and most pictorial thing in Stillwater is probably the marble yard, around three sides of which the village may be said to have sprouted up rankly, bearing here and there an industrial blossom in the shape ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured to him all high aims as possible of realization through talk. Often he was so happy that he could have danced like a child; and he laughed merrily like one; and the quick, upward lift of his head, which his great height induced him to hold, as a rule, slightly ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... speech transferred from one to the other. And many other words used in early poetry or in sacred writings to express the works of mind have a materialistic sound; for old mythology was allied to sense, and the distinction of matter and mind had not as yet arisen. Thus materialism receives an illusive aid from language; and both in philosophy and religion the imaginary figure or association easily takes the place of ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... remarkable than any or all of his achievements was the fact that Booker Washington was a gentleman. It would be difficult to find a man who better conformed to the exacting yet illusive requirements of that term. He had not only the naturalness and the goodness of heart which are the fundamentals, but he had also the breeding and the polish which distinguish the finished gentleman from the "rough diamond." This fact about Booker Washington has ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... a conveyance of property, knowing it to be illusive and fraudulent, is as wicked as the principal; and as much meaner, as the tool and subordinate of villany is meaner than the master ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... declared the girl delirious, and would not now be reciting a story, the conclusion of which never fails to catch my breath. But mine is an empirical science. We deal not so much with weights and measures as with illusive inaccuracies. To be exact is to be a failure. To reject the unknown is to remain a poor doctor, indeed. The issue in this case was defined. Either the congestion of the membranes in the spinal cord ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... led to the scaffold. At twenty-six the vocation of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... is languid with pleasure and love, Lulling the sense to dreams Elysian, Making life seem a glorious trance, Full of bright visions of heaven, Safe from the touch of reality, Toil none—woe none—pain, Wild and illusive as sleep-revelations. Time to be poured like wine from a chalice Sparkling and joyous for aye, Drained amid mirth and music, The brows circled with ivy, And the goblet at last like a gift Thrust in the bosom ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... an illusive "imagining," as the poets of the nineteenth century unaffectedly express themselves. Messrs. Fudge & Fidget were never out to such clients as the Marquis of Castleton; with a deep sigh, and an altered ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... new world. Their small stature, as I said, does not prove them infants, but only new-born into that other life, and contrasts their helplessness with the powers, the great presences, now around them. A cow, far enough from Myron's famous illusive animal, suckles her calf. She is [275] one of almost any number of artistic symbols of new-birth, of the renewal of life, drawn from a world which is, after all, so full of it. On one side sits enthroned, as some have thought, the Goddess of Death; on the opposite side the Goddess of Life, with her ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... himself up to the plaything of the hour. Not having, from the very first, been chary of the sidelong glance and the winning smile, and whatever grace of style or manner could tempt him to pursuit, as an illusive appearance of success seemed to beckon her onward, her heart at times grew desperate with the apprehension that all had been in vain. For Sergius, content that the wife whom he neglected did not disturb his repose with idle ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... intensity, in the over-emotion of his self-centered passion, so terribly driven to prove to himself something vague yet all-powerful, illusive yet imperious, divined what these Blue Devil soldiers had been through. His mind was more than telepathic. Almost it seemed that souls were bared to him. These soldiers, quiet, intent, made up a grim group of men. They seemed slow, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... of you are immersed in the illusive delights of the honeymoon, your wife, as one devoted to you, would constantly carry out your will. She was happy in the power of showing the ready will, which both of you mistook for love, and she would have liked for you to have asked her to walk on the edge of the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... series of contests and truces, during which treacherous wars alternated with still more treacherous and illusive periods of peace, neither party, on the whole, gaining any decided victory. The Danes, at one time, after agreeing upon a cessation of hostilities, suddenly fell upon a large squadron of Alfred's horse, who, relying on the truce, were moving across the country too much off their guard. ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... go, one bends to take a flower, That so may be embalmed their happy hour, And in another day, a kindred mood, Haply together, or in solitude, Recovered what the teeth of Time devour, The joy, the bloom, and the illusive power, Wherewith by their young blood they are endued To move all enviable, framed in May, And of an aspect sisterly with Truth: Yet seek they with Time's laughing things to wed: Who will be prompted on some pallid day To lift ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Khubilghan. Both are translations of the Sanskrit Nirmana and the root idea is not incarnation but transformation in an illusive form.] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... its own sake has not proceeded pari passu with the requisite exercises for the development of the powers of the voice and with the study of the principles of vocal interpretation, has resulted in a meretricious accomplishment of very illusive value. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker as you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character, sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be half illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement. Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there are seven Rounds, of which we have passed three, and are now in the fourth; and who are taught that there are seven dawns and seven twilights, or fourteen Manvantaras; that at the beginning of every Round and at the end, and on and between the planets, there is "an awakening to illusive life," and "an awakening to real life," and that, moreover, there are "root-Manus," and what we have to clumsily translate as the "seed-Manus"—the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming Round (a mystery divulged but to those who have passed the 3rd degree in initiation); those who ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... is a dainty custom to choose one favorite scent and to use that, and that only, so that in time the sweet, illusive odor becomes almost ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... worthlessness of every such rebirth, considered as an end in itself, is perceived, as well as the paramount need of adopting a course of life by which the necessity for such repeated rebirths can be abolished. Ignorance also begets the illusive and illogical idea that there is only one existence for man, and the other illusion that this one life is followed by states of unchangeable pleasure ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... But I see in it the greater reason why men like yourself should take up the investigation of these illusive and disturbing problems. These phenomena, as Flammarion says, introduce us into uncharted seas, and we need the most cautious and clearest-sighted scientists in this world as pilots. Will you ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... ravished throne, Gapes the foul flatteries of a fawning train, And fatuous mock'ries, which themselves disdain, A fancied monarch, but the witless sport Of adulation, and a practiced court, Vaunts to his broad realms and Timour-like proclaims Illusive titles of barbaric names, Cheats his own nature, and now generous grown,[18] Dispenses souls and empires not his own, Draws the deep purple round his royal seat, Lifts his low crest, affects the God complete, By giving with light breath, oh, shame to tell! These heirs ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... southern extremity of the strait. Summoning a couple of thousand field labourers, he sets them to work; here a small canal is dug—there rollers come into play; and in a few hours his small fleet is safely transported to the open water on the south side of the island. Calling off his men from the illusive battery, the Corsair is off for the Archipelago: by good luck he picks up a fine galley on the way, which was conveying news of the reinforcements coming to Doria. The old Genoese admiral never gets the message: ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... eagerly longed-for region, the terribly unattainable Causses. Our project at last began to wear the look of a nightmare, a harassing, feverish dream. We seemed to be fascinated hither and thither by an ignis fatuus, enticed into quagmires and quicksands by an altogether illusive, mocking, malicious ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... just as you, viz. that the idea and contemplation of enjoying future life was absolutely necessary to present enjoyment; but I am now fully convinced, yea, more, it is absolutely known to be a fact, that the idea is altogether visionary and illusive. I admit that a knowledge of the truth, so far as the truth may be known, is perfectly congenial with the present happiness of mankind: though it is often the case that a partial knowledge of the truth, in relation to any particular subject, ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... deem thee a deceiving, Illusive mockery of human feeling, A body organized, by fond caress Warmed into seeming tenderness; A mere automaton, on which our love Plays, as on puppets, when their wires we move. No! when that feeling quits thy glazing eye, 'Twill live in some blest ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... as to aver that he, the thinker and father of his philosophy, has no real existence—is only illusion, concerning which real existence can only be assumed for practical purposes. What must be said of the philosophy begotten by such an illusive being? Shall it not also be doomed to vanish with him into the nothingness whence he came and which he now really is, if he only knew it? Sir Monier Williams aptly remarks,—"Common sense tells an Englishman that he really exists himself and that everything ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... city the balance of the year. Wayne occupied the time in urging active operations and trying to infuse a more aggressive spirit into the management of affairs. At this time public affairs were very much hampered by a feeling of indifference as well as an illusive notion that peace would soon follow. This affected the nation and the army. Wayne baffled these false ideas with all his powers. He urged the Government to forward needed supplies of clothing and food. He could not be inactive; fervid, earnest, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... day she opened the door to come out, Tommy was standing there—she saw him there waiting for Reddy. Dry-eyed this sorrowful woman had heard the sentence pronounced, dry eyed she had followed the little coffin to its grave; tears had not come even when waking from illusive dreams she put out her hand in bed to a child who was not there; but when she saw Tommy waiting at the door for Reddy, who had been dead for a month, her bosom moved and she ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Lady of Sorrows" stands upon the crescent moon behind a row of lighted candles raised in relief of white, gold and silver. Her little face with wide-set eyes looks down upon you from an elaborate silver crown set against a radiant halo of fine and illusive design, and her two beautiful hands clasp to her heart the shining swords that typify the Seven Sorrows. The dignity of her pose, the submission and pathos of her haunting eyes waken you to a new sense of the majesty of ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... laborious pace, I hasten and beguile By fancies, which I backwards trace To things I loved erstwhile; The weary sweetness of your face, Your faint, illusive smile. ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... label it "an enthralling story of domestic and stage life." To which my comment must be, that the domesticity supplied by the hero's family and their quite uninteresting hesitations between town and suburban residence are entirely nebulous and illusive, that the stage as background has no significance one way or other, but that the impropriety upon which (I must say frankly) the appeal of the book seems to depend is given without stint, in a measure that certainly may, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... underneath the trees In that old garden of the Tuileries, Watching the dust of twilight sifting down Through chestnut boughs just toucht with autumn's brown— Not twilight yet, but that illusive bloom Which holds before the deep-etched shadows come; For still the garden stood in golden mist, Still, like a river of molten amethyst, The Seine slipt through its spans of fretted stone, And, near the grille that once fenced in a throne, The fountains still ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... had again to the old, illusive device of compromise, Clay being the leader as usual. He brought forward his "Omnibus Bill," so called because it threw a sop to everybody. It failed to pass as a single measure, but was broken up and enacted piecemeal. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... supposed to be above Nature; whom he mistakingly imagined to be the authors of his pleasures, and the cause of his misfortunes. From hence it appears that to his ignorance of Nature, man owes the creation of those illusive powers; under which he has so long trembled with fear; that superstitious worship, which has been the source of all his misery, and the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... out over the ocean. Far away, a dark fringe broke the sea-line—a suggestion of foliage—an island, or a mirage? Tantalizing, it lay like a shadow, illusive, unattainable as the "forgotten isles." The man staggered to his feet; his garments were torn; his hair hung over his brow. He shook his arms at the island;—this phantasy, this vain, empty vision, ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... afforded him, that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the continuity of the world of youth and passion. His being able to see it so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his dreams, missed them both ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... sketching from nature. She could not follow the drawing, it seemed to escape her. It did not exist in lines which she could measure, which she could follow. It seemed to have grown out of the canvas rather than to have been placed there. The faces were leaned over—illusive foreshortenings which she could not hope to catch. The girl in front of her was making, it seemed to Mildred, a perfect copy. There seemed to be no difference, or very little, between her work and Reynolds's. Mildred felt that she could copy ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... can be but a fancy? Clancy could not be there, either in the trees, or on the earth. She knows it is but a deception of her senses—an illusive vision—such as occur to clairvoyantes, at times ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... loneliness and craving for company. In his sleep he had seen fleeting visions of forms and faces like his reflection in a pool—like, yet unlike; soft, curving outlines, tinted cheeks, eyes that beamed, and white, caressing hands appeared and disappeared—fragmentary and illusive. He could not distinctly remember them when he wakened, but their influence made him strangely happy, strangely miserable; and while the mood lasted he could ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... of the night, from Heaven it seemed, there came stealing into her sense a sound. Or was it a sound? It was so delicate, so illusive. It did not stop knocking at the portals of the ear as other sounds must do. It seemed, rather, to steal past the clumsy senses directly into ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... have this mental alembic for turning grief into a poetic melancholy can seldom be reduced to a state of absolute despondency. Poetry, or rather the poetic sentiment, exalts all our pleasures and soothes all our afflictions by some illusive charm, whether it be turned into the channel of religion or romance. Without this reflection of light from the imagination, what is the passion of love? and what is our love of beauty and of sweet sounds, but a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... a veil, she now perceived, had always hung between herself and life. It had been like the stage gauze which gives an illusive air of reality to the painted scene behind it, yet proves it, after all, to be no more than ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... smoothness of its sides, and the swell produced by its undulating motion. This was one of the largest we saw, and Mr. Hood ascertained its height to be one hundred and forty-nine feet; but these masses of ice are frequently magnified to an immense size, through the illusive medium of a hazy atmosphere, and on this account their dimensions have often been ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... illusive dream that bantered us, only a fata morgana formed by the moonbeams? Or does the serpent of evil really lurk about this paradise? Will destruction find its way into this charmed garden? Ah, no solitude and no wall can afford protection ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... on the bare floor, exact representations of a new quill pen and a very expensive-looking sable brush, lying all ready to be trodden upon by entering feet. Fresh visitors constantly attested the skillfulness of these imitations by involuntarily stooping to pick up the illusive pen and brush; Mr. Blyth always enjoying the discomfiture and astonishment of every new victim, as thoroughly as if the practical joke had been a perfectly new ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... condition of either our agriculture, commerce, or manufactures. The operation of the tariff has not proved so injurious to the two former or as beneficial to the latter as was anticipated. Importations of foreign goods have not been sensibly diminished, while domestic competition, under an illusive excitement, has increased the production much beyond the demand for home consumption. The consequences have been low prices, temporary embarrassment, and partial loss. That such of our manufacturing establishments ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... and the old man bears it in his trembling hands to the carefully prepared furnace where fire must add to its beauty of form the illusive, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... no experiences of my own to relate on this subject. But I could fill a book with the experiences of my friends. How many poor widows, in the hope of sustaining their families and educating their children, have tried the illusive, and, at best, doubtful experiment of taking boarders, to find themselves in a year or two, or three, hopelessly involved in debt, a life time of labor would fail to cancel. Many, from pride, resort to this means of getting a ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... The impression might be from within, not from without. Perhaps, after all, it was nothing but a dream, a miasma, a mirage, drawn by his own burning thought from the wastes and marshes of his mind peopled with illusive hopes and waterlogged by memories. Or it might be true and real; as yet he could not ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of hay might be driven," if there were ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... wave of stupendous altitudes, each range cutting into the sky with a purple saw-tooth edge. The landscape seems to contain nothing but rocks and towering crags, a treasure-house for those who mine. But this is illusive. Between these purple heights charming valleys wind and meadows lie in which rich grasses grow ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... victory Would make us slaves; and we, Who in our blindness struggle for the prize Of this illusive state Called Life, do but frustrate The higher ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... is no less illusive. The following passage occurs in the edition of 1795 of Lyson's Environs of London: "Henry Fielding, the celebrated Novelist, resided at Barnes, in the house which is now the property of Mr Partington." [2] In the edition of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... recognized by the Convention. Neal Dow, as President and as a man of gallantry, decided on receiving Miss Antoinette's credentials, and for a time victory appeared to smile on the Amazons. The triumph, however, was only ephemeral and illusive. The motion was put and carried that none but the officers and invited guests of the Convention should be permitted to occupy places on the platform, and so, by this indirect movement, Miss Brown saw ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... supernatural, and this will rank among the very best of them. She shares with Algernon Blackwood that gift for making spiritual illusion real which is so rare in contemporary work. What is specially distinctive is her gift of selection, by which she brings out the most illusive psychological contrasts. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is illusive, may be thus defined: Marriage is a mere compact, and means diversity. Each family, therefore, must have a separate individual representation, out of which arises diversity or division, and discord is the corner-stone of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... about him, Miss Reed," said Mark. "It is good of you to give me this interview, for we are up against a curious problem and the situation, as it appears at present, may be illusive and quite unlike the real facts. Captain Redmayne, I hear, had suffered from shell shock and a breath of poison gas also. Did you ever notice any signs that these troubles had ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... asunder, For ingress to a world of wonder; A gay saloon, with waters dancing Upon the sight wherever glancing; One loud cascade in front, and lo! A thousand like it, white as snow— Streams on the walls, and torrent-foam As active round the hollow dome, Illusive cataracts! of their terrors Not stripped, nor voiceless in the mirrors, That catch the pageant from the flood Thundering adown a rocky wood. What pains to dazzle and confound! What strife of colour, shape, and sound In this quaint medley, that might seem ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... going to do a dangerous thing if Daly was hiding near, but something must be risked and he struck a match. It sputtered, throwing an illusive gleam on the wet rock a yard or two in front, and then went out. Foster struck another with a hoarse exclamation and touched the wick of a small, flat, metal lamp, such as Western miners hook on their hats. Candles are not common in Canadian towns where ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... almost unseeingly at the grass slopes before him—from exactly the opposite side. Then, they had seemed to him the only realities, these tangible physical things, and all else illusion: now it was the physical things that were illusive, and something else that was real. Once again the two elements of life lay detached—matter and spirit; but it was as obviously now spirit that was the reality as it had been matter a day or two before. It was obviously absurd to regard these outward things on ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... it to be their opinion that the Norwegian Cabinet had made too many concessions in the last Consular negotiations. To begin with, it was intimated in the Norwegian papers, that the matter referring to the Consular Service and Diplomatic Department would be settled by treaty with Sweden, a most illusive moderation, considering Norway, as previously mentioned[55:1], by fixing the date when the laws would first be in force, had alone the power of considering the basis of the possible agreement. But this intimation was ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... took my seat at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America, and supported, with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not, perhaps, the interest, of the mother country. After a fleeting illusive hope, prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute. I was not armed by Nature and education with the intrepid energy ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... over which trees leaned dangerously or hung out fantastically by a few roots. In the dell below there stood a small green painted table, and the young people leaning on the protecting railing wondered at this mysterious piece of furniture. There was in them and about them an illusive sense of death and the beauty of life. One slight push would hurl them headlong hundreds of feet down to the ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... By no sudden fever, such as insidiously steals from the Roman marshes and poisons the blood of its victims,—by no violent epidemic, like those which have again and again devastated the cities of Europe,—by no illusive decline, whereby vital power is sapped unconsciously and with mild gradations, and which, in that soft clime, has peopled with the dust of strangers the cemetery which the pyramid of Cestius overshadows and the heart of Shelley consecrates,—by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... picture, from the highest light to the deepest shadow. Note the tenderness of that white cap, the white lace cuffs, the certainty, the choice, and think of anything if you can, even in the best Japanese work, more beautiful, more delicate, subtle, illusive, certain in its handicraft; and if the lace cuffs are marvellous, the delicate hands of a beautiful old age lying in a small lace handkerchief are little short of miraculous. They are not drawn out in anatomical diagram, but appear and disappear, seen here on the black dress, lost ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... knowledge. If knowledge breaks down, there is no law of action which he can obey. The moral law that must be apprehended, and whose authority must be recognized by man, either sinks out of being or becomes an illusive phantom, if man is doomed to ignorance or false knowledge. To extinguish truth is to ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... parley; listening oft, and oft Gazing with reckless passion, while its garb The spectre heightens, and its pompous tale Repeats, with some new circumstance to suit That early tincture of the hearer's soul. And should the guardian, Reason, but for one Short moment yield to this illusive scene His ear and eye, the intoxicating charm Involves him, till no longer he discerns, Or only guides to err. Then revel forth 470 A furious band that spurn him from the throne, And all is uproar. Hence Ambition climbs With sliding ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... the window, then paused and looked again into the sky. The Moon was up, a round, white will-o'-the-wisp in the clear blue afternoon sky. He stared at it and the old feeling of affinity swept over him, stronger than ever. The Moon was, for him, both a goal and a tonic. Sight of its illusive form could always sweep away his doubts; ...
— The Big Tomorrow • Paul Lohrman
... their illusive Devachan, an ideal, a mere mystical sentiment to gush over, but a something they do not in reality comprehend. Therefore, we shall do our utmost to explain this universal law, and to point out wherein its first principles ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... commanded a battery in the army engaged in the conquest of New Mexico. His command encamped near the base of the mountain which now bears his name. Deceived by the illusive effect of the atmosphere, he started out for a morning stroll to the supposed near-by elevation, announcing that he would return in time for breakfast. The day passed with no sign of Captain Fisher, and night lengthened ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... never been narrowly British, but now she realized her nationality over-keenly; she felt herself almost grotesquely English, and had a sense of insular clumsiness amidst a uprightly, dexterous people. Conscious of a thousand illusive, but very real differences in point of view, and in nature, between the two nations, she had a baffled impression of walking among mysteries and novelties that she could not grasp. She began to be painfully conscious of the effects of the narrow ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the space of a few weeks Margaret knew Falkner more intimately than Isabelle had ever known him or ever could know him. Two beings meeting in this illusive, glimmering world of ours may come to a ready knowledge of each other, as two travellers on a dark road, who have made the greater part of the stormy journey alone. It would be difficult to record the growth of that inner intimacy,—so much happening ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... gained, he turned, not to the left, but to the right, ran up the bank and threw himself flatly down upon it, lying close to the hedge and watching the entrance to the lane. Nothing appeared; nothing stirred. He knew the silence to be illusive; he blamed himself for having ventured upon such a quest without acquainting himself with ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... came rushing across the new-born blue, and shook the high stars from their places. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as the illusive wreaths of sleep brood upon a pain-racked mind, causing it to forget its sorrow. From the east to the west sped the angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain-top to mountain-top, scattering light with both their hands. On they ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... lamps before we saw more of Manzanares than an illusive church spire which kept appearing and disappearing like a will-o'-the-wisp. But the petrol held out, and the Gloria's breathing was regular, despite the weight she had to tow over ruts and across gutters. Once, however, Ropes looked back at me with an expressive ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... found ready. He signs the Oath, as well as audibly swears it: whereupon his sword is restored to him, and his prison-door opened. He steps forth to the Town Church with his Commissioners; takes the sacrament; listens, with all Custrin, to an illusive Sermon on the subject; "text happily chosen, preacher handling it well." Text was Psalm Seventy-seventh, verse eleventh (tenth of our English version), And I said, This is my infirmity; but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Host High; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle |
