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More "Disillusionment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... songster chants with livelier tone, And lambkins leap and cloudless skies are blue, And all is gay and cheerful:—I alone Am singularly sad; Mine erstwhile happiness and calm content Yields to a sense of sorrowful surprise: Things that I thought were thus, are otherwise: And all is grief, and disillusionment. ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... own bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... responsibility. It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs—the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... There are moments of disillusionment in the lives of men from which the sensitive recorder shrinks. Suffice it to say that the good thing fell down. Sleeve-links finished in the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hotel in Charleston. On the second morning following the happenings of the foregoing chapter they were having breakfast served in Irene's little sitting-room. In the light from the window he was struck, as he had been struck before, by her listless mien and the thickening shadows of disillusionment in her eyes. He had to remind her that the coffee-urn was at her elbow, and that he would not take his coffee from any hand but hers before she filled his cup. Her eggs and bacon she had barely touched. He saw her hands quiver as she passed his cup. He tried to enliven her ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the shocks of early disillusionment! It was not until long after the hare was skinned, roasted, served as CIVET and as PUREE that I discovered the truth. I was not at all grateful to the gentlemen of the chateau whose dupe I had been; was even wrath with my dear old 'Maman' for treating them with extra ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the scenes, disgusted and angry with the players because their performance is not spontaneous. If she had stopped to reason about the matter she would have been less uncompromising. But in the shock of disillusionment she felt only that the man was working upon his audience like a sleight-of-hand performer; and the longer she observed, and the stronger his spell over the others, the deeper became her contempt for the "charlatan." He seemed to her like one telling a lie—as that one seems, while telling ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Later, when some wonderful children's parties were given in the villa where she lived, which were arranged with great skill and were veritable works of art, she became still more restless and cynical, almost as if she were suffering from some disillusionment. One day she called an orphan child from Messina, who was one of our children who had come from the school in the Via Giusti, and took her away into a quiet corner, asking her to repeat the Lord's Prayer. The orphan recited it, while the rich child gazed at her eagerly. Then, as if in obedience ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking. Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an "everlasting farewell" of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest. Hamlet dreads "the undiscovered country"; but unsentient ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... turned his back on Germany at the first opportunity. Each met in Italy with bitter disillusionment and an untimely fate. ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires, to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities of life can be built—duty. When this rock has been faithfully clung to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a broken trust or another's pain, I have over and over again known the, most imperfect marriage prove ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. Therein, everything so carefully built up during the preceding four centuries was tried as by fire, and each failed—save the indestructible qualities of personal honour, courage and fortitude. Nothing corporate, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... soon as she had seized the significance of Monjardin's verses, had grown deathly pale; stricken by sudden disillusionment, she felt a glacial chill overwhelm her body to the very marrow; she feared that she would faint straightway and provide a spectacle for the guests, who were all drinking her health, their eyes focussed upon her. A veil of tears spread before her sight.... In vain she tried to repress ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... streets had been magic-built. Was it his youth, or had Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment? She had gone, and he was older—but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in himself. It was in the atmosphere about him—in the stale air, stamped on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps the ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment, finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come over into a wilderness," says the kindly Bradford, "in which much labour and servise was to ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... the ground. Sydney Smith caricatured the delusive hopes excited by the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, when he said that all the unmarried young women thought that they would at once get husbands, and that all the schoolboys expected a heavy fall in the price of jam tarts. A process of disillusionment may confidently be anticipated in Ireland if the Home Rule Bill becomes law, and the fairy prospects held out to the Irish people by Mr. Redmond and the other stage managers of the piece are chilled by ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... true, what you tell me—if Manley himself is another disillusionment—if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a drunken brute whom I can't even respect, then I'm done with my ideals. I want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I have kept shining all these months. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... in her mind all her life since she ceased to be a child—fifty years of disillusionment and suffering. She thought first of her happy, peaceful childhood, her grandfather's blind affection, the pure joys of her days of innocence, the exciting games with her little sister and tall cousins. Then she shuddered at the earliest thought of marriage, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... you," he said appreciatively. "I certainly am enough of a wizard to save your Peter man any disillusionment ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the primitive, accounting for the phenomena by devising a mind more powerful than his own. The childhood view of the omnipotent parent, reality's disillusionment, the parent substitute, the creation of a god in his parent's image without the weakness of his parent, so that he might go on in perpetual irresponsibility since he could now place ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness, and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being, over the suffering and weariness ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... nature was to be studied, enjoyed, and used, but it was not as to Keats a realm of enchantment; or as to Wordsworth the realm where alone the divine and the human could pass the boundaries of sense and meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment. Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental, straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... That's all I can do! And I do it, Nina," said Richard in a softer tone, "I do it to hasten the inevitable, my dear! I do it to bring you back to your father sooner instead of later; to give you only one year of disillusionment and suffering, instead ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... trains of thought, the outcome of characteristic moods, by the babblings and wayward wanderings of brooks and rivulets. The appeal, therefore, is to a wide experience. Can we be satisfied to join with Tylor in his sense of disillusionment? Or shall we strive to get yet nearer to the heart of things? If we cling to the deeper view, to us, as to the men of old, the running stream will sing of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the great disillusionment!" laughed Will. "Hassan! Go forward, and show us where that hoard of ivory ought ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... watching her carelessly in the dimly lighted room, began to think.... "Disillusionment already. The dream has died in her. A child's brain overstuffed with slogans, it begins now to ache and grow confused. Tyranny, injustice, seem far away and vague. The revolution in the streets has blown the revolution out of her heart. There will be many like that to-morrow. The over-idealized ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... 1821, and the missionaries of Kerikeri soon realised that they had a different Hongi to deal with. For a time he held aloof from them, and when he did speak he showed great reserve. Some allowance must of course be made for the inevitable disillusionment of such a return. After the palaces of the bishops by whom he had been entertained in England, the mission stations must have appeared even startlingly humble. But the real grievance was the cessation of the trade in firearms. The ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a most quaint and unpleasant disillusionment. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... mystified her friends and her foes. She had foes. Men, and women, too, who looked askance at her. The less they knew, the more they had to invent. The proprieties of the Forest were being outraged. The women who envied Mary-Clare her daring fell upon her first. From their own misery and disillusionment, they sought to defend their position; create an atmosphere of virtue around their barren lives, by attacking the woman who ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... should read in the words "fed up" a sign that our tenacity is giving out, he reads it wrong; grim will be the disillusionment of any hopes he may build upon his misreading, and even grimmer the anger of those ...
— Fragments From France • Captain Bruce Bairnsfather
... Lincoln's first call for volunteers, issued on April 15, 1861, limited the number to 75,000, put their term of service at three months, and prescribed their duty as the enforcement of the law against combinations too powerful to be overcome by ordinary judicial process. Disillusionment swiftly followed. The terrible defeat of the Federals at Bull Run on July 21 revealed the serious character of the task before them; and by a series of measures Congress put the entire man power of the country at the President's command. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... enough after this to see Will Crooks fathering one of those very Bills for the interference with family life which Chesterton most hated. But, indeed, the years that followed the 1906 election are a story of a steadily growing disillusionment with the realities of representative government ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... his puzzled stare as he watched Miss Deane, and struggled to fix that tantalising suggestion of likeness to some one he knew; his flash of illumination as he solved the puzzle and turned with that gentle, winning smile of his to herself; and then the progress of his disillusionment as, day by day, he realised more plainly the intriguing similarities of expression and gesture, until he felt that he was making love to the spirit of an aged spinster temporarily disguised behind the appearance ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... eyes, made wholesome by the fires of patriotism, stalked the grim God of War. Knowing nothing yet of the motive that inspired these people, I could feel no enthusiasm, but only disillusionment at this discovery of the ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... man's face, as he sat sipping his ginger-ale in the club-house smoking-room, there was a look of disillusionment. "Never again!" ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... know just what kind of a father he has had and just how worthy of respect and veneration that father has been. A little boy is credulity itself and everything tends to make him believe in his father. But as he grows older he will surely know. Woe be it to the parent who when disillusionment comes falls below the standard the child has set. Some time the boy will know. If he has never had the pleasure that was his due, if he has never had the fun in his home that he had a right to expect, his estimate of his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... recognition of the facts that the Earth continued to exist, and that the Roman Empire and not the New Jerusalem was the dominant power therein. But though the Church as a whole was guided safely through the crisis of disillusionment, it nevertheless remains unfortunate that the compiler of the Sermon on the Mount should have made the false assumption. For the picture which he presents of the perfect man and the ideal society ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... rights and privileges are vouchsafed to all men without regard to nationality, position, or possessions; where there is no faintest hint of the caste system; and where there are no possible lines of demarcation. Their disillusionment on that train was swift and severe, and the observer could not but wonder what was their conception of a democracy as they walked about the streets of the city or gave attention to their bruised faces. Their dreams of freedom and equal rights ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... youth does not listen and cannot listen, but just goes on its eager way, trying its own experiments, believing in the delight of triumph and success, determined, at all events, to test all for itself. All this confession of disillusionment and disappointment is true, but only partially true. The struggle, the effort, the perseverance, does bring fine things with it—things finer by far than the shining crown and the loud ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... amount to a row of pins in civil life." Something of that sense of bitter disillusionment, of blasted idealism, which is the immediate aftermath of war, had crept into his voice. "The only thrill I ever got out of its possession was in the service. My colonel was never content merely with ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... absolute reserve amid all his amiability. Therefore Frank would have done anything to win his esteem, while Beatrice was deferential to him. Mr Allport was tall and broad, and thin as a door; he had also a remarkably small chin. He was naive, inclined to suffer in the first pangs of disillusionment; nevertheless, he was waywardly humorous, sometimes wistful, sometimes petulant, always gallant. Therefore Vera liked him, whilst Beatrice mothered him. Mr Holiday was short, very stout, very ruddy, with black hair. He had a disagreeable voice, was vulgar in the grain, but officiously ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a "bad sign when they took no notice." Gradually, very gradually, his features settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young. Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter. He was Tyson's ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... through poor adaptation." I have known several immigrant young men as well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in America. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent to the hospital for the insane. He only recovered after a group of his young countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises of work, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbroken association. I also ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... last the disillusionment that precedes death came to him. The artificial slipped from both men and a nearness like that of brothers, joined them. They spoke not of the future but of the past. Years slipped aside and left them back in the midst ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Each man is a sieve through which life sifts experiences, leaving the garnering of grain and the blowing away of chaff to the man himself. Peter had garnered courage to face with a quiet heart things as they are. He had never accepted the general view of things as final, therefore he escaped disillusionment. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... of historical and biblical interest did we see in our wanderings, but I think the memory of our first real glimpse of the Land of Goshen will ever remain the most vivid. Disillusionment came later, as it does everywhere in the East, yet on that spring morning Khan Yunus, shining like an emerald, came as balm to eyes weary with the aching ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... first moment of wakening she could not distinguish realities from dreams. All the experiences of the night before seemed for the moment only the adventures of a nightmare. But disillusionment came quickly. She opened her eyes to view the cabin walls, and the full dreadfulness of her situation swept ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... lived over like a vivid nightmare her married life down to the least detail,—the time of golden hopes and aspirations, Paris and Europe, her disillusionment, the futile scurry of their life in New York, which she realized was a compromise without much result.... It ended in a choke rather than a sob. ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... disillusionment. With a partial return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Zoology and chemistry will be just as far from their end as now, and all contemporary scientific work consists in increasing these numbers. I saw through this trick when I discovered the 35,001-st and felt no satisfaction. Well, I had no time to suffer from disillusionment, as I was soon possessed by a new faith. I plunged into Nihilism, with its manifestoes, its 'black divisions,' and all the rest of it. I 'went to the people,' worked in factories, worked as an oiler, as a barge hauler. Afterwards, ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... The unknown El {108} Dorado is always invested with a fabulous glamour that draws to ruin the reckless and the unfit. Before the road was built adventurers had arrived in Cariboo expecting to pick up pails of nuggets at the bottom of a rainbow. Their disillusionment came; but there was an easy way back to the world. They did not stay to breed crime and lawlessness in the camp. 'The walking'—as Begbie expressed it—'was all down hill and the road was good, especially for thugs.' While there were ten thousand ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... the little band along the path of disillusionment, and gives some brilliant flashes of light on one side ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... play at the time, and was rehearsing its successor. Meanwhile, I—fell in love with her, I suppose, and she certainly encouraged me in the belief that she might accept me. I did eventually propose marriage. Then she told me she was married already. It was a painful disillusionment—at the time. I only saw her, to speak ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... and far happier, in her eternal youthfulness of heart, in that divine life of the imagination where he must always be with her as she had known him briefly at his best, than in the blunt commonplaceness of daily existence, the routine and disillusionment of the world. Perhaps—who knew?—he had, after all, given her the best that man can offer to a woman of exalted nature; instead of taking again with his left hand what his right had bestowed; completed the great gift of life with the priceless ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... 22nd I awoke, as I had lain down to sleep, in high hopes. No evil foreboding of coming events had visited me in dreams; but it was not many hours later that the disillusionment began. I started by motor in the very early hours of a beautiful August morning to visit General Lanrezac at his Headquarters in the ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... Wedekind is said to figure as Robert, who is a reclame agent—was attached to circuses, variety theatres, and fairs, was an actor in tingletangles, cabarets, and saw life on its seamiest side, whether in Germany, Austria, France, or England. Such experiences produced their inevitable reaction—disillusionment. Finally in 1905 Director Reinhardt engaged him as an actor and he married the actress Tilly Niemann-Newes, with whom he has since lived happily, the father of a son, his troubled spirit in safe harbour at last, but not in the least changed, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... are those extraordinary verses under the title Colloque Sentimental which trouble one's imagination with so penetrating a chill of shivering disillusionment. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... thought of this undying loveliness he contrasted bitterly with our feverishly sad and short life. When, by the power of imagination, he had left the world behind him and was absorbed in the vision of beauty roused by the bird's song, he longed for death rather than a return to disillusionment. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... was not a poem, but an eloquent and extravagant composition in prose, in which Evelyn invested Charles II with every conceivable virtue and all wisdom. This was no doubt written with sincere enthusiasm, though Evelyn suffered a profound disillusionment in later years; and if he ever read his effusion again it must have caused him some distress. The Panegyric is now reprinted for ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... exchequer, the second son procured an extension of furlough and sped to Paris. There at the close of 1787 he spent several weeks, hopefully endeavouring to extract money from the bankrupt Government. It was a season of disillusionment in more senses than one; for there he saw for himself the seamy side of Parisian life, and drifted for a brief space about the giddy vortex of the Palais Royal. What a contrast to the limpid life of Corsica was ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... response from Coralie. I was obliged to conclude that she considered her marriage a success; at least that it was doing what she had expected from it. At this moment she yawned in her old, pretty, lazy way. Certainly there were no signs of romantic misery or tragic disillusionment about her. Again I asked myself whether my sympathy were not more justly due to Struboff—Struboff, who sat now smoking a big cigar and wobbling his head solemnly in answer to the emphatic taps of Wetter's forefinger on his waistcoat. The question was whether human tenderness ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... forgotten cap pistols. He told of lions, tigers, elephants, bears, and buffaloes, all of enormous size and strength of lung, so that before many days had passed he had debarred himself, by whole-hearted lying, from the very possibility of joining the expedition and seeing the disillusionment of his public. With true artistic spirit he omitted all mention of confining house or cage and bestowed the gift of speech upon all the characters, whether brute or human, in his epic. The merry-go-round he combined with ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditions differ from European, and the process of disillusionment will probably follow a different course. American labour is very largely immigrant labour still separated by barriers of language and tradition from the established thought of the nation. It will be long before labour in America speaks with the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... returned home. The need for chaperonage was over, and it was abundantly evident that Pixie was in no need of consolation. The first shock of disillusionment over, it was pre-eminently relief that she felt—relief from a bond which had weighed more and more heavily as time passed by. If Stanor had come home, looking his old self, caring for her, depending on her as he had done during the days of their brief ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... dealing with the establishment of a Socialistic Colony upon a deserted island off the coast of California. The way of disillusionment is the course over which ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets". He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering through the night, "alone". So the faith that broke its chrysalis in the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best", beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphant with the ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... Young Remington's groan of utter disillusionment came a sound from the street, formless and clumsy, but brought to a sharp climax with the crash of ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... she sat by the fire, half undressed, her immature thin arms hanging loosely, her sombre eyes staring at the fire. She wished this night might go on for ever, this time of ecstasy between a promise and its fulfilment. She had seen disillusionment in another and did not laugh at its possibility for herself; it would come to her, she thought, as it had come to her mother, who had hoped her daughter would find happiness in love; and Henrietta wondered if that gentle spirit was aware of what ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... for me. Things might then have adjusted themselves quite naturally. The idea, however, of a sensitive woman suffering on my account was exceedingly distasteful to me. If, I decided, I could bring about her complete disillusionment my conscience would be at rest. Also there would then be no necessity to cut myself off from the Warringtons, and give up my pleasant discourses with Henry. Thus, I felt, I was taking the most ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... thoughts she revolved towards the vanishing point of life which is the total loss of sympathy. She felt with no one but herself. She belonged to that, alas, numerous type which, with large expectations unrealised, cannot accept disillusionment with the gentle laughter it deserves. She resented the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... ripe lips drooped with a child's pathos of disillusionment. Her nose delicately marked disgust at the heavy air and the discord of scents around her. Having lost her money she could afford to survey with scorn the decorous yet sordid greed of the crowded table. There was not a gleam of gaiety ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... at her with a question in his eyes, and it cost Agatha an effort to meet them. She was not prudish or over conscious of her own righteousness, but once or twice after the shock of her disillusionment in regard to him had lessened she had dreamed of the possibility of enduing him little by little with some of the qualities she had once fancied he possessed, and, as she vaguely thought of it, rehabilitating him. Now, however, the thing seemed impossible, and, what was more, the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... desolation, disaster, disillusionment overwhelmed me. I sat on the bench and burst out crying and Narcisse jumped up and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... proposition, the present writer is disagreeably aware that in this matter he has expressed views entirely opposed to those he now propounds; and in setting forth the following body of considerations he tells the story of his own disillusionment. At the outset he took for granted—and, very naturally, he wishes to imagine that a great number of other people do also take for granted—that the future of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to a sort of rule-of-three sum. If in one hundred years the population ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... is interesting to note that Euphues embodies many of the characteristics of the Byronic hero—his sententiousness, his misogyny, his cynicism born of disillusionment, and his rhetorical flatulency; but he is no rebel like Manfred because he finds consolation in his own pre-eminence in a world of platitude. Conscious of his dearly bought wisdom, he makes it his continuous duty, if not pleasure, to rebuke the over-amorous Philautus, who was at least human, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... her for his office she missed him, and her heart warmed toward him till he came home again. He always brought new disillusionment with him. He spent his hours out of office in bewailing his luck, celebrating the hardness of the times, and proclaiming the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... recall that crowd! It took much time to get our train, and, as we waited, almost unconsciously I began to take mental notes of what I saw. Soon my interest was fastened. I observed individuals with quickened attention from the very sharpness of my disillusionment. Incidents burnt themselves into my memory, not in themselves of great importance, but surely significant. I was being dragged back face to face with many questions difficult to solve. What impressed me ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... British workingman has gone in for political action and will have a try at that before he listens to the Anarchists. Slow of thought and used to compromise, he is a stern taskmaker and will exact a rigid account of the stewardship entrusted to those who sought his suffrage. When the disillusionment comes, as it surely will, real progress may come. The process of disillusionment does not come with geometrical precision. To some it comes over night, to others it is a process of years, and to some it is denied altogether. For years the Anarchists have been scoffed ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... angry with me for my hazarded demur. In an atmosphere of disillusionment and moral miasma she clung undauntedly to her ideals. Never was such a brave spirit, so determined in goodness, so upright in purity, and I blessed her for her unfaltering words. "May such sentiments as yours," I prayed, "be ever mine. In doubt, despair, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... has been a tendency both in England and in America to look at this history upside down. The epoch of the Revolution and the Constitution has been regarded as a heroic age—wherein lived the elder Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Claelia and the rest—to be followed by almost continuous disappointment, disillusionment and decline. A more pleasing and more bracing view is nearer to the historic truth. The faults of a later time were largely survivals, and the later history is largely that of growth though in the face of terrific obstacles and many influences that favoured decay. The nobility of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the only countries that were showing signs, in 1914, of having indulged too freely in the opportunities given them by the eagerness of English and French investors to place money abroad. It looked as if in many parts of the earth a time of financial disillusionment was dawning, the probable result of which would have been a strong reaction in favour of investment at home. Then came the war with a short sharp spell of financial chaos followed by a halcyon period for young countries, which enabled them to ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... shock, to the present, to the weeping walls, the discoloured deal table, the ghastly breakfast litter—all the visible symbols of the life I had pledged myself to. Disillusionment was making rapid headway when Davies returned, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... conventional unctuous voice, and gestures to suit; and the apathy of the people who, dressed out in their best, came to listen,—how early I divined its hollowness,—and how deep was my disappointment, and how cruel the disillusionment—oh! the disheartening formalism of it all! The very appearance of the church disconcerted me: it was a new cityfied one, meant to be pretty without, however, meaning to be too much so; I especially recall certain little efforts at wall decoration which I held in the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... sure, the pessimists do not depend wholly upon such general arguments, but point out in great detail that there is much suffering in the world, and that the fulfillment of desire, when it is attained, often results in disillusionment. But the fact remains that life, such as it is, is desired by men and other creatures generally; desired not as an exception, and under a misapprehension, but, as a rule, even by ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... had known had developed since the last time they had met, Amy now took Ethel about to get her "clothes fit to be seen in." And as with intent little glances she kept studying "Ethel's type" in order to set off her charms, the slightly bored expression, the look of disillusionment left Amy's pretty countenance. For Ethel's freshness had given to Amy new zest and belief in her own life, in its purpose and importance. To get Ethel clothes, to show her about, to find her friends, to ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... with a rather weary interest. He was, indeed, trying to put himself in Graham's place, at Graham's age. He remembered once, at twenty, having slipped off to see "The Black Crook," then the epitome of wickedness, and the disillusionment of seeing women in tights with their accentuated curves and hideous lack of appeal to the imagination. The caterers of such wares had learned since then. Here were soft draperies instead, laces and chiffons. The suggestion was not to the eyes but to the ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Ten days after Skippy Bedelle had seen the gilded fabric of his future greatness collapse with the failure of the Foot Regulator to revolutionize the bathtub industry the spirit of invention had risen triumphantly from the ashes of first disillusionment. After all, there were other services to render to humanity, and the mind that at the age of fifteen could have reasoned so brilliantly in theory must inevitably express itself with profit to the race and to his own individual ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... gradual discovery of what he was—or of what he wasn't—this truer estimate, this partial disillusionment, merely served to deepen and intensify the feeling he had aroused in her; to heighten, likewise, the sense of her own value by confirming a belief in her possession of certain qualities, of a kind of fibre he needed in a helpmate. She dwelt with a woman's fascination upon the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is often called disillusionment; and it is a sad enough business for people who only look at one side of the medal, and who brood over the fact that they have been disappointed and have failed. For such as these, there follow the faded years of cynicism and dreariness. But that disillusionment, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Liane flatly to understand that he saw through her and couldn't be taken in by all her blandishments. At the end of twenty-four hours, however, the conviction seemed somehow to have insidiously penetrated that only a man of his ripe wisdom and disillusionment could possibly have any appeal to a woman like Liane Delorme. It wasn't long after that the engine room was illuminated by Liane's pretty ankles and Mr. Mussey was beginning to comprehend that there ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... to be the latest victim of The Great Aviation Hoax, and we shall watch the progressive stages of its disillusionment with sympathetic interest, or the development of its newest cult with sincere commiseration. Like many other phenomena, good and bad, this gigantic flam, it will be remembered, took its rise in the east. Its genesis was ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... indifferent air, but what the butler had told him was in the nature of a great shock. He felt suddenly quite sick with disillusionment. Had he been a fool all along, completely wrong in his estimate of this girl? Was she simply like so many others, possessed of two sides, one which she kept for him, and the other, perhaps, not quite so restrained? ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... sharp impression—content us. Many a beautiful picture is spoilt by the artist who cannot be satisfied that he has made the best of his subject, and retouching his canvas to bring out some subtle charm which made the work a success loses it altogether. So in going back, the result of the inevitable disillusionment is that the early mental picture loses something of its original freshness. The very fact that the delightful place or scene was discovered by us made it the shining place it is in memory. And again, the charm we found in it may have been in a measure due to the mood we were in, or to the peculiar ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... and we may excuse him if, at the last, he was no less embittered than his younger rival. He was not cursed, it is true, with Tasso's incurable idealism; but, if in consequence he exposed himself less to the buffets of disillusionment, he likewise lacked its sustaining and ennobling power. Tasso used the pastoral machinery to idealize the court; Guarini accepted the pastoral convention of the superiority of the 'natural' life of the country, and used it as a means of pouring out his bitterness of soul. The Aminta, it should ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... otherwise have gone to the Republican candidate for President went in 1892 to Grover Cleveland, who ran on an anti-protective tariff issue. It is not unlikely that the latter's victory was materially advanced by the disillusionment brought on by the ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... accompanied by the Reverend John Carroll, whose twelve days of disheartening experience with the leading French-Canadian clergy had convinced him that they were impervious to any arguments or blandishments emanating from the Continental Congress. It was a sad disillusionment for the commissioners, who had expected to be settling the affairs of a fourteenth colony instead of being obliged to leave the city from which they were to have enlightened the people with a free press. In their first angry ignorance they laid the whole blame ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... figure on foot like ourselves, leading his horse. He was in armour, yet unarmed. His steel glittered cold and blue; his fingers hung ungauntleted; and on his pale face dwelt a look never happy warrior wore yet. He seemed a man Mars lends to Venus out of war to unhappy idleness. The disillusionment of age was in his face: yet he was youthful, I suppose; scarce older than Mercutio, and once, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... Mother, had no root in fact. These early weeks only served to reduce, bit by bit, her belief in her own knowledge. How slender this was, and of how little use to her in her new state, she did not dare to confess even to herself. Her disillusionment had begun the day after her arrival, when Dr Pughson, the Headmaster, to whom she had gone to be examined in arithmetic, flung up hands of comical dismay at her befogged attempts to solve the mysteries of long division. An upper class was taking a lesson in Euclid, and in the intervals between ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... group of learned men, that a sudden outburst of surprise and amusement will break into the recital of the tale; but in the room upstairs they are wont to grow quiet and speak in lowered voices, for they seem to feel the pathos there of the final disillusionment. It is the room where at the end of a laborious day Mrs. Alcott, with tired eyes, sewed and sewed, night after night, by the light of her one flickering lamp, and where Bronson Alcott, deserted by his followers, lay in his bed, with his face turned to the wall, and in his despair over the bitter ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... treaty stipulations and the solemnly pledged words of the great Christian nations of the world to imagine that their own whole national existence and liberty could be jeopardized overnight, and on a pretext so shallow and farcical as to excite world-wide ridicule. Their disillusionment came too late. The trap had been unwittingly set by hands that made unexpected moves on the European chessboard, and the Bear's paw had this time been skilful enough to spring it at the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... out of all this except as one of us after another reaches the Metanoia, the new point of view as regards God. Other ways have been sought, and have been found no more than blind alleys. Much reference is made nowadays to the disillusionment of those who hoped that the war would lead to social and spiritual renovation; but any such hope was doomed in advance, so long as the Caucasian concept of God was unchanged. When you cannot trust God you cannot trust anything; and when you cannot trust anything you get the condition of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... "Oh!—disillusionment again. I thought my troubles were over. Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... preceding that ill-omened day, a few moments after Frantz had stealthily left his room on Rue de Braque, the illustrious Delobelle returned home, with downcast face and that air of lassitude and disillusionment with which he ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... pay for a while, it will, I am sure, prove a disastrous policy in the long run. The poet unborn shall, I am certain, rue it. The next generation of poets (or, indeed, writers generally) will reap a sorrowful harvest from the gratuitous disillusionment with which the present generation is so eager to indulge the curiosity, and flatter the mediocrity, of the public. The public, like the big baby it is, is continually crying 'to see the wheels go round,' and for a time the exhibition of, so to say, the 'works' ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... Daniel's disillusionment with regard to Richard Mutimer did not affect his regularity of attendance at the Socialist lectures, in most things a typical English mechanic, he was especially so in his relation to the extreme politics ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the Women's Foreign Mission Committee was also a disillusionment. Her friend, Dr. Robson, was in the chair, and his opening prayer was an inspiration, and lifted the proceedings to the highest level. Nothing could have been kinder than her reception, which delighted ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... dim distance the white, pontifical figures moving gravely through the ritual, to hear the low tones, enthralled and stirred him; but he shrank from entering the sacristy, with its loud-voiced priests describing perfunctorily the relics: that was a disillusionment not to be ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... I had found now seemed to me of infinitely greater value than that yellow metal I had missed finding, with all its possibilities. My wish now was to rest for a season at this spot, so remote and lovely and peaceful, where I had experienced such unusual feelings and such a blessed disillusionment. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... do live in a beautiful dream; but that dream is the actual, the present,—not cold, but warm; not bare, but furnished with a thousand blessings. The very evil which the poet supposed would be a cruel disillusionment is necessary to the fullest knowledge of joy. Only by contact with evil could I have learned to feel by contrast the beauty of ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights—What? And all that is now to be at an end? And the DISENCHANTMENT of woman is in progress? The ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of the Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his real position and opportunities for accomplishing something for China. He began more ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... accustomed to triumph over Chief Secretaries, rejoicingly welcomed a new victim in Mr. Balfour. They found, for the first time, a master. Never was such a tragic disillusionment. He armed himself with anew Crimes Act, which had the special merit of not expiring at a fixed period, but of enduring till it should be repealed, and he soon taught sedition-mongers, Irish and English, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... weakness and discontent had yielded her a ready victim to the showy promises and good looks of Hervey Garstaing. But the road they had had to travel since had been by no means easy. It had been full of disillusionment for the silly woman. They had lived in fear of the law, in fear of Steve, for over two years. And the grind of it, for the pleasure-loving wife who had buoyed herself with dreams of gaiety and delight which her life in the North had denied her, had driven her ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... very severe critics of the doings of their family; and Balzac, cursed with the sensitiveness of genius, and smarting under the bitter disappointment of disillusionment and of thwarted and compressed powers, was not likely to be an indulgent critic; but making due allowance for these facts, it does not appear that his home was a particularly comfortable place at this time. Old M. de Balzac ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... fountains of learning, | nay to have such a fountain of | learning in himself, in a king, | and in a king born, is always a | miracle.' And it would appear | that he hopes at the beginning | of James's reign—long before | he suffers disillusionment | respecting his sovereign's | interest in the advance of | 'solid' knowledge—that, | whether or not he can obtain a | greater position of state | beyond that alloted to him by | Elizabeth, he may ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... thing and called down blessings and kisses upon our heads; and for a time we even deceived a small boy who had been watching us eagerly. But only for a time. "Lumme," he said aloud to himself, "there's anuvver of 'em wiv knock-knees," and disillusionment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... very real love can survive smiling through that period when, from almost maudlin appreciation, a husband gradually sinks into the commonplace mood of taking his soul's mate "for granted." Only real friendship can live through the disillusionment of irritable temper, lack of imagination, and boredom so often revealed while travelling in the company of friends. More than half the mutual life of lovers and friends is spent behind masks—for masks ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... His own dream is of a beautifully centralised control, directing all our traffic agencies (save tramways and shipping) into the most convenient channels; and he won't be happy till he gets it. But judging by some of the speeches that followed he too may have a frigid disillusionment when the Bill comes up against the "interests" in Committee. Mr. T.P. O'CONNOR, on behalf of Liverpool, described it as the product of "an old bureaucracy and a young Parliamentarian," and Mr. RENWICK declared that, if it passed, the Manchester Ship Canal would be "between ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... interests it intensely. It pretends to be a physical disease, when primarily it has nothing to do with the body; and the person most deluded is the one who "owns" the symptom. Its purpose is to avoid the pain of disillusionment and to furnish relief to a distracted soul which dares not ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... times The marble which was chiseled for me— A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. In truth it pictures not my destination But my life. For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment; Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid; Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life. And now I know that we must lift the sail And catch the winds of destiny Wherever they drive the boat. To put meaning in one's life may end in ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... to be a little hard on the women of Elisabeth's type, who idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality; for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their etherealized acquaintances out of their sight; and to give instead, to the fond, trusting souls, half-hearted lovers, semi-sincere friends, and acquaintances who care for them only ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... view, if not actually beautiful. Goodliness being largely contingent upon apparel, it follows that Mary dresses for John—up to the marriage-day. He who descries signs of slatternliness in his beloved prior to that date, may well be shocked to disillusionment. As a girl in a home where the mother takes upon herself the heaviest work, and spares her pretty daughter's hands and clothes all the soil and wear she can avert, Mary must be indolent or phenomenally indifferent to ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... princes, have respectfully kept silence on the subject of their discomfiture—it appears that terrible mortifications were in store for the militant royalists who approached the emigrant leaders. D'Ache did not escape disillusionment, and though he did not disclose the incidents of his stay in London, we know that at first he was thrown into prison, and that for two months he could not succeed in obtaining an interview with the Comte d'Artois, much ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... palaces I had built up for myself have turned out to be pasteboard, gilt, and rubbish; I have been robbed of all my jewels, or they have shown themselves to be shingle stones. In this condition of shame and disillusionment I am now resolved to escape at the same time from the world and from myself, for I am tired of both alike, and already I feel as if a great weight had been lifted ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... with an amiable smile. "Keep on. But I doubt if you'll be so well amused as you may imagine. Going to the devil isn't as it's painted in novels by homely old maids and by men too timid to go out of nights. A few steps farther, and your disillusionment will begin. But there'll be no turning back. Already, you are almost too old ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... sufferings which exceptional natures must needs derive from too close a contact with this commonplace world. It was not his lot—as it has been the lot of so many poets—to move amongst mankind at once as an intimate and a stranger; to travel from disillusionment to disillusionment and from regret to regret; to construct around him a world of ideal beings, who crumble into dust at his touch; to hope from them, what they can neither understand nor accomplish, to lavish on them what they can never repay. Such pain, indeed, may become ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... had very glorious times after that return. They determined they would not go to a Pleasure city nor waste their days rushing through the air from one part of the world to the other, for in spite of one disillusionment, their tastes were still old-fashioned. They furnished their little room with quaint old Victorian furniture, and found a shop on the forty-second floor in Seventh Way where printed books of the old sort were still ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... involuntarily cried out that he did not love her! But that made things no easier for her. She sat perfectly still; it seemed as though waves of darkness without a ray of light had closed over her head, and she had gone down cold and dumb to the depths. The first disillusionment is painful for every one; but for a sincere heart, averse to self-deception and innocent of frivolity or exaggeration, it is almost unendurable. Natalya remembered her childhood, how, when walking in the evening, she always tried to go in the direction of the setting sun, where ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... and eight months old to-day," Eleanor wrote, "and I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread, and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and villainess. Let me begin at the beginning. For nearly a ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... Carmela was quite an important event in its way. At first sight it bore the semblance of a mere disillusionment such as any girl might experience under like circumstances. She had been taken from Las Flores to occupy a palace at Rio de Janeiro, and was driven from the palace to the hotel life of the Continent. During two years she had not seen either father or lover; and lovers of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... flimsy. Only two of the Ward Leaders were in their room, when presently he repaired thither, the Hall of the Atlas seemed empty. He fancied a change in the bearing of the attendants in the outer rooms. A sombre disillusionment darkened his mind. She looked at him anxiously when he ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... We all expected disillusionment. Brown, who was under no delusion as to his share in the venture, scoffed openly at the idea of finding anything buried, in a land where every living "crittur," as he put it, was a thief from birth. But Hassan led on in, fearless now that ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the inevitable disillusionment FitzGerald delighted in the company of the illiterate fisherman. Whether he took his protege cruising with him on the Scandal, or sat with him in his favourite corner of the kitchen of the old Suffolk Inn at Lowestoft, or played "all-fours" with him, or sat and "mardled" with him and his wife ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... who followed Sir John French, inherited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his general headquarters at St.-Omer, and afterward at Montreuil, near the coast, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... glad he had told her about that story, even if it revealed him in an unfavourable light. "If she ever cares for me, and God help me if she doesn't—she must care for me as I really am, an ugly devil with some brains and a queer temper. I'll risk no disillusionment afterwards. She must see plenty of other chaps first—confound them; but if any one out of the lot shows signs of making a dart I'll cut in first, I won't wait another minute, I'm damned if ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... Marcia began then changed her mind. Disillusionment would do no good. She must play on the man's illusion that he was the master of his own will. "Very well," she went on, "Yours be the decision! No woman can decide such issues. We are all in your hands— Cornificia and Galen—all of us—aye, and Rome, too—and even Sextus ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... face took on an expression of deep disappointment, disillusionment, and sorrow, until seeing his own sorrow mingled with alarm reflected on his wife's face, he presently announced that they would depart on their wedding journey by boat for Mackinac ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... temperament corresponded to his own in gravity, he conceived that radiant and romantic conception of Courts, as the only fit places of abode for men of noble birth and eminent abilities, which no disillusionment in after life was able to obscure. We cannot blame him for this error, though error it indubitably was. It was one which he shared with all men of his station at that period, which the poverty of his estate, the habits ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... different keys, and each time her blood jumped. Her eyes had not tricked her, then—though it was not the first time she had trembled to see a sorrel horse gallop down that hill, and then turned numb when came disillusionment. Would those children never start home? By degrees their shrill voices sounded further away, and the place grew still. But the schoolma'am ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... all that she said, there was not even the slightest mention made of love; on the contrary, her language seemed rather to express an austere feeling with regard to the allurements of the passions, and to breathe the accents of disillusionment ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... than to seek confirmation, that is, reinforcement or guidance, at all events, companionship. That Frederick von Kammacher's new intellectual companion was Max Stirner, was the result of a profound disillusionment. He had been disillusioned in his deep-seated altruism, which until ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... make necessary small talk, to arrange for breakfast and other household details. Now she was alone, and the floods of her bitterness were unloosed. She broke down and wept passionately, for she was facing her first great disillusionment. She had lost a friend, one in whom she ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... forgotten, she could never forget, she had merely been successful temporarily in banishing from mind that bitter disillusionment which had poisoned what should have been ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Obligation The Arbiter of the World Arbitration versus War The Challenge of Thor The Conflict of War and Peace A Congress of Nations The Cost of Militarism The Cost of Peace The Crucial Parallelism The Dawn of Peace The Dawn of Universal Peace Democracy and Peace Diplomacy and Peace Disillusionment The Dominant Ideal The End; and the Means The Evolution of a Higher Patriotism The Evolution of Justice The Evolution of Law The Evolution of National Greatness as a World Peacemaker The Evolution of World Peace The Fallacy of the Economics ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... must not be astonished to find a disparity between the hero's private life and his "elevating" art or romantic and idealistic gospel. As long as people will admire heroic attitudes more than heroism, such disillusionment is bound to be the price of their error. In a truly great man, life-theory and life-practice, if seen from a sufficiently lofty point of view, must and do always agree, in an actor, in a romanticist, in ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... devil of a laugh, mostly made of chuckles that seem to bubble off a Bell-brew of disillusionment, and you get the impression that he is laughing at himself—cynically laying bare the vanity and fallibility of his own ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... beliefs would bring chaos into our spiritual and moral life, that it would extinguish hopes which often alone make life bearable, that it would issue for society at large in such a grey, meaningless, uninspired existence as Mr. F. W. Myers prognosticates in his admirable essay on "The Disillusionment of France," [2] all this and much more makes it our interest, if not our duty, to cling to such convictions at all costs. "If these things are not true, it might be said, then life is chaos; and if life be chaos, what does truth matter? Why may not such useful ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... horse, and rubbed his nose with her small and gentle hand. The creature drooped under the caress and let its lower lip, with a few stiff white hairs, hang and quiver bitterly. It half-closed its one useful eye, a pale eye of intense, colorless disillusionment. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... ultimatum which preceded the preliminary Treaty of Buftea had also to be altered chiefly on the Dobrudsha question, as Bulgaria was already talking of the ingratitude of the Central Powers, of how Bulgaria had been disillusioned, and of the evil effects this disillusionment would have on the subsequent conduct of the war. All that Count Czernin could do was to obtain a guarantee that Roumania, in case of cession of the Dobrudsha, should at least be granted a sure ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... no lamp! Crestfallen, I returned to my guru. He was now laughing heartily, without compunction for my disillusionment. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... colours and conditions our experience, but draws us inevitably towards those works of art in which it scents sympathy and approval. To a reflective moralist Wordsworth will always mean more than a yellow primrose meant to Peter Bell. In our moments of bitter disillusionment it is such a comfort to jest with Pope and His Lordship that we lose all patience with the advanced politician who prefers Blake. And, behold, we are in a world of personal predilections, a thousand miles from ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... that followed on that double disillusionment were like one long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not merely that everybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also that everybody believed that anything happening was even duller than nothing ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... alone. Clayton was, finding his club a more comfortable place than his home, in those days of his wife's disillusionment and hesitation about the future. Many weak creatures are curiously armed for the unequal conflict of existence—some with fleetness of foot, some with a pole-cat weapon of malignance, some with porcupine quills, some with a 'possumlike instinct for "playing dead." Of these ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... eating habits of the American people has been brought about by disillusionment respecting the importance of meats. Fifty years ago, every physiologist taught that the liberal consumption of meat was essential. This idea was based, first, upon the supposition that protein, the chief constituent ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... autobiography, as it appeared in serial form, have been made the subject of a grave editorial in a Boston newspaper, in which the writer regretted Miss Keller's apparent disillusionment in regard to the value of her college life. He quoted the passages in which she explains that college is not the "universal Athens" she had hoped to find, and cited the cases of other remarkable persons ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... vibrate. He could not bring back, even in retrospect, the emotions inspired by Josephine Derry. Those strings had been tuned to other love-harmonies. To remember Fran's mother was to bring back not the rapture of a first passion, but the garrish days of disillusionment. He even felt something like resentment because she had remained faithful—her search and unending love for him made so much more of his desertion ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... it was true. He knew that Anne loved him, and always would love him. But he also knew that every vestige of love and respect for her had gone out of his heart long ago and that he now felt only the bitterness of disillusionment so far as she was concerned. He was not afraid of her. She had lost all power to move a single drop of blood in his veins. But he ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a fresh branch of knowledge much followed quickly. Under my questionings, Messer Gambara very readily made me acquainted through his unsparing eyes with that cesspool that was known as the Roman Curia. And my horror, my disillusionment increased at every word ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... are people who take salt in their coffee. They say it gives it a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment which you must experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is like the weakness in the character ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... she had so much time mapped out before her during which she must put up with this man's society; as if each moment were another inch torn in the rags of disillusionment which had got to be destroyed thoroughly before she could ever hope to gather up the broken threads of ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... compliment to Conward was a personal matter concerning his partner, or whether it was to be taken as a courtesy to the firm. In either case he rather resented it. He wondered what Irene would think of this "ennobling" business in the drab days of disillusionment that must soon sweep down upon them. But Irene apparently ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... with half a dozen men declaiming at once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he understood that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his disillusionment, Jurgis had sworn to trust no man, except in his own family; but here he discovered that he had brothers in affliction, and allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so the struggle became a kind of crusade. Jurgis had always been ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... impressive. All that he had he gave. What also strikes the reader of his writings is the broad national spirit which he manifested. He had an immense respect for the dignity of America; he was perhaps fortunately saved from disillusionment by his distance from home. But be this as it may, the way in which he felt and therefore genuinely talked about his nation and his country was not without its moral effect ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... eight months old to-day," Eleanor wrote, "and I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread, and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... out that the world is as vain as soap-bubbles, and your heart is full of disillusionment, ready to despair, then remember that you have a father and a home to return to,' said father. 'Until that time you cannot count yourself one of us. We are standing on two different paths: the one we go on is narrow and leads high; the other, which you have chosen, ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... do not depend wholly upon such general arguments, but point out in great detail that there is much suffering in the world, and that the fulfillment of desire, when it is attained, often results in disillusionment. But the fact remains that life, such as it is, is desired by men and other creatures generally; desired not as an exception, and under a misapprehension, but, as a rule, even by the enlightened and ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... "real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts. Profits for the few: disaster—or at least disillusionment—for the many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did) flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit; the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose—onions ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... immigrant young men as well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in America. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent to the hospital for the insane. He only recovered after a group of his young countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises of work, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbroken association. I also recall a Polish ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... time found himself flattered, indulged, and made the centre of the company. The contrast to his life of subjection at Donnaz; the precocious initiation into motives that tainted the very fount of filial piety; the taste of this mingled draught of adulation and disillusionment, might have perverted a nature more self-centred than his. From this perversion, and from many subsequent perils he was saved by a kind of imaginative sympathy, a wondering joy in the mere spectacle of life, that tinged his most personal ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... but it was not as to Keats a realm of enchantment; or as to Wordsworth the realm where alone the divine and the human could pass the boundaries of sense and meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment. Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental, straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made between Wordsworth's ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... to the little restaurant round the corner from the market, and each time we had something good. The food we ate there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment awaiting us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn, to get some of that wonderful provincial cookery that through all our reading days we had been hearing about. You will doubtless recall the description, as so frequently and graphically dished up by the inspired writers of travelogue ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... party, accustomed to triumph over Chief Secretaries, rejoicingly welcomed a new victim in Mr. Balfour. They found, for the first time, a master. Never was such a tragic disillusionment. He armed himself with anew Crimes Act, which had the special merit of not expiring at a fixed period, but of enduring till it should be repealed, and he soon taught sedition-mongers, Irish and English, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... significant fact that of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment, finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come over into ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... come back to my remarks at the beginning of this chapter, that there is a painful disillusionment awaiting the man who comes to dig in Egypt in the hope of finding the golden cities of the Pharaohs or the bejewelled bodies of their dead. Of the latter there are but a few left to be found. The discovery of one of them forms the subject of ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... true fountains of learning, | nay to have such a fountain of | learning in himself, in a king, | and in a king born, is always a | miracle.' And it would appear | that he hopes at the beginning | of James's reign—long before | he suffers disillusionment | respecting his sovereign's | interest in the advance of | 'solid' knowledge—that, | whether or not he can obtain a | greater position of state | beyond that alloted to him by | Elizabeth, he may be enabled to | have the modern ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... from its white waistcoat, and prepare to develop your theme (if legible) a little more fully. Possibly it does not seem so brilliant in the cold light of morning as it did after that fourth glass of Bollinger. If this be so, you can then make another note—say, for a short article on "Disillusionment." One way or another a notebook and a pencil will keep you well supplied ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... let us be thankful, you and I, that to us this parting, and the inevitable pain of it, comes while love is still in its full strength, having endured nothing unworthy, no shame, or diminution, or disillusionment. The more bitter the wrench, the finer the memory, and the more desirable the meeting which lies ahead, however far distant in time it may be and in difference ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... thwarted in so unexpected a fashion. The skeleton of Signora Laurentina was the least that could be expected as a reward for suspense so patiently endured. But long ere this disclosure, we have learnt by bitter experience to distrust Mrs. Radcliffe's secrets and to look for ultimate disillusionment. The uncanny voice that ominously echoes Montoni's words is not the cry of a bodiless visitant striving to awaken "that blushing, shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom," but belongs to an ordinary human being, the prisoner Du Pont, who has ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... formless, undefined, without set bounds; and it is often a sore experience to discover that it is circumscribed, and limited like everything human. At first to speak of it as having qualifications was a profanation, and to find them out came as a disillusionment. ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... rightly pleasing to nice children, and good for them. But it is totally valueless, for all that. I can no more write a story than compose a picture." The final statement may be taken for what it is worth, written as it was at a time of disillusionment. The first part of Ruskin's analysis is certainly true and has been thus expanded by his biographer, Sir E. T. Cook: "The grotesque and the German setting of the tale were taken from Grimm; from Dickens it took its tone of pervading kindliness and geniality. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... process of disillusionment and decay of ideals shall have gone far enough among the common run to afford no secure footing in popular sentiment for the contemplated Imperial enterprise,—this time is doubtless far in the future, as compared with the interval of preparation required ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... prince whose temperament corresponded to his own in gravity, he conceived that radiant and romantic conception of Courts, as the only fit places of abode for men of noble birth and eminent abilities, which no disillusionment in after life was able to obscure. We cannot blame him for this error, though error it indubitably was. It was one which he shared with all men of his station at that period, which the poverty of his estate, the habits of his father, and his ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... for in it was the beauty of a poet's dream, and the eternal loveliness of that vision which men have glimpsed in all ages if ever so faintly. And when he had finished, the eyes of Colombo were wet with tears, for into this poem had he woven the dreams of his disillusionment. And somewhat ironical to Colombo was the applause of those fine ladies who ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... young man's face, as he sat sipping his ginger-ale in the club-house smoking-room, there was a look of disillusionment. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... Ashton take it? Could she ever forgive him if it were possible for Langhorne to turn the tables and point with scorn at the man who had once been his rival for her hand? What might be the effect on her of any disillusionment, of any ridicule that Langhorne might artfully heap up? As we left Carton, I shared with Kennedy his eagerness to get at the truth, now, and win the ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... primitive, accounting for the phenomena by devising a mind more powerful than his own. The childhood view of the omnipotent parent, reality's disillusionment, the parent substitute, the creation of a god in his parent's image without the weakness of his parent, so that he might go on in perpetual irresponsibility since he could ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... of an old glow—the hopefulness of their lost youth. Not content to live over in memory the high hopes that were theirs when life was new—because of the gap between expectation and realization—they close their eyes to the new disillusionment they are heading for, and think only to shut out their sense of inadequacy in their present association by steering full steam ahead for another encounter, in which the odds are even more ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... but her heart instead of recoiling from the sinner after all she had heard, warmed with sympathy towards him. She could not help a feeling of pity and tolerance for the unfortunate victim of deception who through disillusionment and wounded ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... him at a few yards' distance. With woful disillusionment Mini threw himself face downward on the rock, and wept hopelessly, sorely; wept and wept, till his sobs became fainter than the up-borne long notes of a hermit-thrush far below on the edge of ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... Latin pupils. If I were a soldier I should want to wear one of those enormous three-story military hats to render me tall and impressive. I have no desire to see a drum-major minus his plumage. The disillusionment would probably be depressing. Liking to wear my shako, I must continue to talk of objective complements instead of using ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... had got less conviviality than they wanted, and more of the drink that should have been only its excuse; but as they are never introspective, so the disappointment goes unnoticed, and leads to no disillusionment. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... He lost his cheerful red hue and grew thin; he was indifferent to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a "bad sign when they took no notice." Gradually, very gradually, his features settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young. Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter. He ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... realised that it was not a poem, but an eloquent and extravagant composition in prose, in which Evelyn invested Charles II with every conceivable virtue and all wisdom. This was no doubt written with sincere enthusiasm, though Evelyn suffered a profound disillusionment in later years; and if he ever read his effusion again it must have caused him some distress. The Panegyric is now reprinted for the ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... growing sense that concrete programs by themselves will not insure any profound regeneration of society. H. G. Wells has been savage and often unfair about the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli" he touched, I believe, the real disillusionment. Remington's history is in a way symbolic. Here was a successful political reformer, coming more and more to a disturbing recognition of his helplessness, perceiving the aimlessness and the unreality of political life, and announcing his contempt ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... had involuntarily cried out that he did not love her! But that made things no easier for her. She sat perfectly still; it seemed as though waves of darkness without a ray of light had closed over her head, and she had gone down cold and dumb to the depths. The first disillusionment is painful for every one; but for a sincere heart, averse to self-deception and innocent of frivolity or exaggeration, it is almost unendurable. Natalya remembered her childhood, how, when walking in the evening, she always ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... they saw further than the flesh. In their remorse and disgust it was not mere physical disillusionment that so crushed them. They saw further. They were overcome by an impression of bleak truth, of aridity, of growing nothingness, at the thought that they had so many times grasped, rejected, and vainly grasped again ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and sad disillusionment. ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... band along the path of disillusionment, and gives some brilliant flashes of light on one side of ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... planning to abandon McGraw, my new friend must have blocked me. He regarded me as his property. He installed me in the bare little room which for four years was to be my home. He took me to his own quarters and there gave me such a glimpse of my new life as to make me forget my momentary disillusionment. While he dressed, arrayed himself more impressively than ever in evening clothes, I divided my eyes between him and the pictures on the wall. Here Boller, in foot-ball clothes, sat on a fence, wonderfully dashing, with a foot-ball ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the establishment of a Socialistic Colony upon a deserted island off the coast of California. The way of disillusionment is the course over which Mr. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... lest some sinister design was still intended, he cast constant glances of cunning suspicion at Courthope. As for Madge, she appeared grave and pre-occupied beyond all that was natural to her, suffering, he feared, from the pain of her first disillusionment. This was a suffering that he was hardly in a position to take seriously, and yet his heart yearned over her. He thought also that she was pondering over the problem of her next responsibility, and the evidence of this came sooner than he ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... all I lay in the upper berth and recalled all the unhappy nights of the past seven years; disappointment, heartache, disillusionment, disgust; they followed each other in silent review. Every tender memory and early sentiment that might have lingered in my heart was ruthlessly murdered by some stronger memory of pain. The storm without ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... the collector's lot, and not always without their secret compensations. Certainly they did not wholly explain my friend's attitude; and for a moment I wondered if it were due to some strange disillusionment as to the quality of his treasures. But no! the Daunt collection was almost above criticism; and as we passed from one object to another I saw there was no mistaking the genuineness of Neave's pride in his possessions. The ripe sphere ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... monosyllable voiced disillusionment. With a partial return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, not to say Micawberesque; ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... looked at the laughing Speranski with astonishment, regret, and disillusionment. It seemed to him that this was not Speranski but someone else. Everything that had formerly appeared mysterious and fascinating in Speranski suddenly became ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... took a turn or two on the hearth-rug, from which wisdom had temporarily taken flight. He thought now he could see a way to avoid open rupture, and he believed, quite rightly, that his son was in no mood to accept further disillusionment. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... pressing all the energy of the nation into one channel had the effect of imposing on political life a simplicity which does not belong to it. But all that is over and past. The Ireland of to-day does not pay herself with words. She is safe from that reaction and disillusionment which some prophets have discerned as the first harvest of Home Rule, because she is already disillusioned. Looking into the future we see no hope for rhetoricians; what we do see is a strong, shrewd, indomitable people, at once clear-sighted and idealistic, going about ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... content with a system that concedes them no responsible control over the issues of peace and war. This is not to say that our own governmental machinery is perfect. Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling. It is only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary disillusionment can shake, that it is founded on enduring principles which are not political but moral. To compare a system which aims at freedom and seeks to attain that aim through the working of responsible self-government with systems, however logically perfect ...
— Progress and History • Various
... finds employment successively with an alchemist and an astronomer, only to find their promises out of all proportion to their performances. The wonderful prospects held out before him, and his disillusionment, afford scope for much sarcastic wit at the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... trance. Never had she felt surer of life and the full fruition of every hope and faith. Just how this marvelous blossoming would come, she could not guess. Her chances of meeting her Fate were no better than at any moment of the past years of drab disillusionment, and yet, for some reason, her foolish ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... of the unhappy Scrap. Her inside grew hoary with disillusionment, while her gracious and charming outside continued to make the world more beautiful. What had the future in it for her? She would not be able, after such a preparation, to take hold of it. She was fit for nothing; she had wasted all this time being beautiful. Presently she ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... youth there can be no compensation, and that in youth alone happiness could be found. And so he had decided to spend his life in company with high hopes and smiling faces. There were times when an immense sadness came over him, when he thought that disillusionment was waiting for so many of them and that there were few who would "carry their looks or their truth to the grave." But on the whole he was as happy as his temperament could allow him, and Gordon, although in a sense he was the very antithesis of all that he admired ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... that ill-omened day, a few moments after Frantz had stealthily left his room on Rue de Braque, the illustrious Delobelle returned home, with downcast face and that air of lassitude and disillusionment with which ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... will know just what kind of a father he has had and just how worthy of respect and veneration that father has been. A little boy is credulity itself and everything tends to make him believe in his father. But as he grows older he will surely know. Woe be it to the parent who when disillusionment comes falls below the standard the child has set. Some time the boy will know. If he has never had the pleasure that was his due, if he has never had the fun in his home that he had a right to expect, his estimate of his parent ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... a slight disillusionment. The dining-room in Shamrock House is in the basement; chill and dreary of aspect, its windows always dirty and unopenable, because at the slightest excuse of an open window the small boys of the neighbourhood will make it ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... should grow rich except by the free preference of a great following of customers. Such is still the American theory, and directly the intelligent young American grows up to hard facts he finds almost as much disillusionment as the intelligent young Englishman. He finds that in practice the free choice of a constituency reduces to two candidates, and no more, selected by party organizations, and the free choice of the customer to the goods proffered ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... strange theories worked out by this group of learned men, that a sudden outburst of surprise and amusement will break into the recital of the tale; but in the room upstairs they are wont to grow quiet and speak in lowered voices, for they seem to feel the pathos there of the final disillusionment. It is the room where at the end of a laborious day Mrs. Alcott, with tired eyes, sewed and sewed, night after night, by the light of her one flickering lamp, and where Bronson Alcott, deserted by ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... unarmed. His steel glittered cold and blue; his fingers hung ungauntleted; and on his pale face dwelt a look never happy warrior wore yet. He seemed a man Mars lends to Venus out of war to unhappy idleness. The disillusionment of age was in his face: yet he was youthful, I suppose; scarce older than Mercutio, and once, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... Outside she could hear them shouting, "Hello, Weary!" in a dozen different keys, and each time her blood jumped. Her eyes had not tricked her, then—though it was not the first time she had trembled to see a sorrel horse gallop down that hill, and then turned numb when came disillusionment. Would those children never start home? By degrees their shrill voices sounded further away, and the place grew still. But the ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... sat at his deal table, fighting with a growing sense of disillusionment that was like nothing so much as a child's first discovery that its beautiful doll is stuffed with straw, he would wish passionately, vehemently for the return of those days when he had sat in his little bedroom writing "Reuben ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... self-deception was ripe for disillusionment when Sally took its victim out for a walk round to show him the place. It had the feeblest hold on existence during the remainder of the day, throughout which our medical friend went on dram-drinking, knowing the dangers of his nectar-draughts, but as helpless against them as any other dram-drinker. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... awake Fred Starratt felt next morning. He was full of tingling reactions to the sharp chill of disillusionment. At the breakfast table he met his wife's advances with an air of tolerant aloofness. In the past, the first moves toward adjusting a misunderstanding had come usually from him. He had an aptitude for kindling the fires of domestic harmony, but he had discovered overnight the futility of fanning ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... dressing-gown, while, with each flutter of her garments, the grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and gibbered behind her. And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if the end of life, with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at life in the pride ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... more than the usual sinking of heart that Jasper let himself that evening into the beautiful house which Betty and he called their home. Joan's too expressive look had stung the old soreness of his disillusionment. He knew that the house was empty of welcome. He took off his hat and coat dejectedly. There were footsteps of his man who came from the far ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... all his amiability. Therefore Frank would have done anything to win his esteem, while Beatrice was deferential to him. Mr Allport was tall and broad, and thin as a door; he had also a remarkably small chin. He was naive, inclined to suffer in the first pangs of disillusionment; nevertheless, he was waywardly humorous, sometimes wistful, sometimes petulant, always gallant. Therefore Vera liked him, whilst Beatrice mothered him. Mr Holiday was short, very stout, very ruddy, with black hair. He had a disagreeable ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... effort at playwriting. Ludicrous. And so immoral, too. I had always imagined that Margaret had a perfectly flawless sense of honesty. Yet here she was asking me deliberately to impose on the credulity of some poor, trusting theatrical manager. The dreadful disillusionment of ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... different now. Her woman's weakness and discontent had yielded her a ready victim to the showy promises and good looks of Hervey Garstaing. But the road they had had to travel since had been by no means easy. It had been full of disillusionment for the silly woman. They had lived in fear of the law, in fear of Steve, for over two years. And the grind of it, for the pleasure-loving wife who had buoyed herself with dreams of gaiety and delight which her life in the North had denied her, had driven her back upon the elemental that ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... The police-control, judiciously mingled with assassinations, which was now put in full vigour was hardly the administration to make room for which the Manchus had been expelled; and the country secretly chafed and cursed. But the disillusionment of the people was complete. Revolt had been tried in vain; and as the support which the Powers were affording to this regime was well understood there was nothing to do but to wait, safe in the knowledge that such a situation possessed no elements ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... was this wave of despondency, this suggestion of impending disillusionment, that he started to his feet. He stood and pressed his clenched fists into his eyes, and so for a moment remained, fearing to open them again and see, lest the dream should already ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... to vibrate. He could not bring back, even in retrospect, the emotions inspired by Josephine Derry. Those strings had been tuned to other love-harmonies. To remember Fran's mother was to bring back not the rapture of a first passion, but the garrish days of disillusionment. He even felt something like resentment because she had remained faithful—her search and unending love for him made so much more of his desertion than ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... his ears in floods of music, and the silver and black streets had been magic-built. Was it his youth, or had Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment? She had gone, and he was older—but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in himself. It was in the atmosphere about him—in the stale air, stamped on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps the spirit which had driven them into these dark ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... elements of his nature. He would write a chapter or two in a fine fury of composition, and then would read what he had written with intense disgust. He felt that his second book ought to be better than his first, and he doubted whether he would even be able to write anything half so good. In his hour of disillusionment he recalled the anonymous critic who had treated "The Improbable Marquis" with such scant respect, and he wrote to him asking him to expand his judgment. He was prepared to be wounded by the answer, but the form it took surprised him. In reply to his temperate and courteous letter ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... prospect to which so many adventurers had responded in 1609. To the modern student all this seems so unrealistic as to be almost unbelievable, but unless one grasps the reality of the original dream he cannot hope to comprehend the extent of a later disillusionment. ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... adequate response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. [Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's passion is the theme of Alice Meynell's The Poet and his Wife. On the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr, Anne Hathaway's ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... making and repeal of law. In destroying the old position of the Trade Unions, the judges created the modern Labour party and cemented its alliance with Liberalism. Meanwhile, the aftermath of Imperialism in South Africa was reaped, and Conservative disillusionment unlocked the floodgates for the advancing ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... impression of Beatrice dancing about us during the affair in a state of unladylike appreciation, but I was too preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she certainly backed us both, and I am inclined to think now—it may be the disillusionment of my ripened years—whichever ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... assurance of speedy promotion, which she had given Mother, had no root in fact. These early weeks only served to reduce, bit by bit, her belief in her own knowledge. How slender this was, and of how little use to her in her new state, she did not dare to confess even to herself. Her disillusionment had begun the day after her arrival, when Dr Pughson, the Headmaster, to whom she had gone to be examined in arithmetic, flung up hands of comical dismay at her befogged attempts to solve the mysteries of long division. An upper class was taking a lesson in Euclid, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... had endured them better than he could possibly have hoped. He began chatting about the farm again, not now as an incubus but as a hopeful possibility. Both the boys had real mettle in them and might be expected to buckle down and show it. Rush would forget the disillusionment of his holiday hopes when the necessities of the case were really brought home to him. And ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the trader. "For too much knowledge of another's inmost thoughts brings only disillusionment and regret, as my tale will show. The story takes us among humble people, but human nature is the same everywhere—the same in the hut of the rayat as in the ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... 1837 beginning with the words 'Oh, that 'twere possible after long grief'. His friend, Sir John Simeon, urged him to write a poem which would lead up to and explain it; and the poet, adopting the idea, used Maud as a vehicle for much which he was feeling in the disillusionment of middle life. The form of a monodrama was unfamiliar to the public and has difficulties of its own. Tennyson has combined action, proceeding somewhat spasmodically, with a skilful study of character, showing ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... love-scenes Max is always a man,—no trace here of sentimental weakness, or of any leaning to Quixotic folly. In his relation to Wallenstein, to Octavio, and to Thekla, his character is firmly and naturally drawn. And when his great disillusionment comes and he is forced to choose between love and duty, he makes a man's choice and his career ends as it must end—in ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... ideal poor, grateful and resigned, proved cross and greedy old harridans. The world of peace, of nobleness, of serenity, died into a parish of bustle and scandal and worry. Out of this wreck of hope arises the parson's wife. Disillusionment is her ordination for a clerical position none the less real that it is without parallel in the ecclesiastical history ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... weaker daily. At last the disillusionment that precedes death came to him. The artificial slipped from both men and a nearness like that of brothers, joined them. They spoke not of the future but of the past. Years slipped aside and left them back in the midst of active, brain-satisfying ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... one which offered an escape from all her earthly troubles. Girls of her type often did. Nellie was made for laughter and for happiness. He had known her innocent as a sunbeam and as glad. Now that she was in the pit, facing disgrace and disillusionment and despair, the horror and the dread of existence to her would be a ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... upside down. The epoch of the Revolution and the Constitution has been regarded as a heroic age—wherein lived the elder Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Claelia and the rest—to be followed by almost continuous disappointment, disillusionment and decline. A more pleasing and more bracing view is nearer to the historic truth. The faults of a later time were largely survivals, and the later history is largely that of growth though in the face of terrific obstacles and many influences that favoured decay. The nobility of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... ago Oliver would have surrendered at once before the terror in her eyes; but in those twelve long months of effort, of hope, of balked ambition, of bitter questioning, and of tragic disillusionment, a new quality had developed in his character, and the generous sympathy of youth had hardened at thirty-four to the cautious cynicism of middle-age. It is doubtful if even he himself realized how transient such a state must be to a nature whose hidden springs ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Disillusionment had come to her an instant too late. He tore himself out of his stupor, rushed to the edge of the cliff, threw himself on the ground recklessly, and ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... passionate plea, a sense of injury, of disillusionment, overran the girl. She revolted from the touch of his head against her knee. "You must not talk to me that way—you belong to her." She pushed him away. "Get up. Go away from me. I ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... prayers, written in advance and spoken with conventional unctuous voice, and gestures to suit; and the apathy of the people who, dressed out in their best, came to listen,—how early I divined its hollowness,—and how deep was my disappointment, and how cruel the disillusionment—oh! the disheartening formalism of it all! The very appearance of the church disconcerted me: it was a new cityfied one, meant to be pretty without, however, meaning to be too much so; I especially recall certain little efforts at wall decoration which I held in ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... own dream is of a beautifully centralised control, directing all our traffic agencies (save tramways and shipping) into the most convenient channels; and he won't be happy till he gets it. But judging by some of the speeches that followed he too may have a frigid disillusionment when the Bill comes up against the "interests" in Committee. Mr. T.P. O'CONNOR, on behalf of Liverpool, described it as the product of "an old bureaucracy and a young Parliamentarian," and Mr. RENWICK declared that, if it passed, the Manchester Ship Canal would be "between the ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... But it was not this alone, as his sister Varvara supposed, that influenced him. There was also in him something else—a sincere religious feeling which Varvara did not know, which intertwined itself with the feeling of pride and the desire for pre-eminence, and guided him. His disillusionment with Mary, whom he had thought of angelic purity, and his sense of injury, were so strong that they brought him to despair, and the despair led him—to what? To God, to his childhood's faith which had never been ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... Haig, who followed Sir John French, inherited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his general ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... that she was to understand he had forgiven her and was incapable of the bad taste of making pointed allusions. This was not a form of revenge, of course; she had no suspicion of his wishing to punish her by an exhibition of disillusionment; she did him the justice to believe it had simply occurred to him that she would now take a good-natured interest in knowing he was resigned. It was the resignation of a healthy, manly nature, in which sentimental ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... imaginations rise to profit. Ten days after Skippy Bedelle had seen the gilded fabric of his future greatness collapse with the failure of the Foot Regulator to revolutionize the bathtub industry the spirit of invention had risen triumphantly from the ashes of first disillusionment. After all, there were other services to render to humanity, and the mind that at the age of fifteen could have reasoned so brilliantly in theory must inevitably express itself with profit to the race and to his own individual ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... What disillusionment the year had brought him since he had begun his term as volunteer! His father, once sergeant-major in a regiment of Guard Cuirassiers, had often described to him a soldier's life in vivid colors, and had expressed his hope to see, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... derive from too close a contact with this commonplace world. It was not his lot—as it has been the lot of so many poets—to move amongst mankind at once as an intimate and a stranger; to travel from disillusionment to disillusionment and from regret to regret; to construct around him a world of ideal beings, who crumble into dust at his touch; to hope from them, what they can neither understand nor accomplish, to lavish on them ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... had not forgotten, she could never forget, she had merely been successful temporarily in banishing from mind that bitter disillusionment which had poisoned what should have been her time of ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... that they were being used for military observation by the Belgian army.] These small towns of Flanders had a simple dignity of their own which was of great attraction to the tourist, who could, without disillusionment, imagine himself back in the dim past. In the wayside inns or estaminets one could extract amusement and profit listening to the peasantry or admiring the sunlight dancing upon the array of bottles and glass on the leaden counters, or watch the peasants kneel ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... came the period of distress and of disillusionment. Three Lusitania notes were sent and were evasively answered, and Washington still seemed to be marking time. The one event in this exciting period which gave Page satisfaction was Mr. Bryan's resignation as Secretary of State. For Mr. Bryan personally Page had a certain fondness, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... Mockery is the price he must pay for a hearing. Or has he calculated to a nicety the power of reaction? Does he seek to drive us to aspiration by the portrayal of sordidness, to disinterestedness by the picture of selfishness, to illusion by disillusionment? It is impossible to believe that he is unconscious of the humor of his dramatic situations, yet he stoically gives no sign. He even dares the charge, terrible in proportion to its truth, which the most serious of us shrinks from—the lack of a sense of humor. Men ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... that ambition is a hectic dream; to all of which ejaculations youth does not listen and cannot listen, but just goes on its eager way, trying its own experiments, believing in the delight of triumph and success, determined, at all events, to test all for itself. All this confession of disillusionment and disappointment is true, but only partially true. The struggle, the effort, the perseverance, does bring fine things with it—things finer by far than the shining crown and the loud trumpets ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sense of the romantic possibilities of life. Alas, as the days move on and the crisis delays, as life brings the need of labour, the necessity of earning money, as love and friendship lose their rosy glow and settle down into comfortable relations, the disillusionment spreads and widens. I do not say that the nearer view of life is not more just, more wholesome, more manly. It is but the working of some strictly determined law. The dreams fade, become unreal and unsubstantial; ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... minute she had crumpled them both fiercely and cast them from her, flinging herself across her bed in a paroxysm of bitter grief and disillusionment. ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... sympathetic response from Coralie. I was obliged to conclude that she considered her marriage a success; at least that it was doing what she had expected from it. At this moment she yawned in her old, pretty, lazy way. Certainly there were no signs of romantic misery or tragic disillusionment about her. Again I asked myself whether my sympathy were not more justly due to Struboff—Struboff, who sat now smoking a big cigar and wobbling his head solemnly in answer to the emphatic taps of Wetter's forefinger on his waistcoat. The question ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... been appreciated and loved by Plato and his friends. Plato's own most promising pupil, whom he had marked out for his successor, was killed in action in a particularly aimless recrudescence of the war. Plato's political disillusionment and perversity are easy to understand. But it is curious and interesting to watch the clash between his political bitterness and his intellectual serenity. In the intellectual and artistic sphere—as a writer, musician, mathematician, metaphysician—he stood consciously at the zenith of Greek ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... her the symbols of dearer things. She saw shadowy shapes sitting at the table and breaking bread together, saw moving figures in the service of the house, and generations upon generations weaving their webs of hope and pain and disillusionment and hope again. In the shed they stood looking out at the back door through the rolling field, where at last a fringe of feathery yellow ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... studio, or editor's sanctum, and all that keeps the operations which consume the bulk of the worker's time in any of these places from being drudgery is that he keeps before him the end for which they are performed. The first disillusionment comes, then, when she faces the necessity of a long steady pull for years if she ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... the last degree of despair; it is the conception of the intolerable. Nevertheless it is good for mankind now and again to have a plain speaker, a "mar feast," on the scene; a wizard who devises for us a spectacle of disillusionment, and lets us for a moment see things as he honestly conceives them to be, and not as we would have them to be. But in estimating the value of a lesson of this sort, we must not be carried too far, not be altogether ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Allies had gone to pieces everywhere except in the distant spheres of South Africa and Mesopotamia, while the German offensive was carrying all before it in Galicia. The first great disillusionment of the war was at hand, and its promised beginning in May looked uncommonly like a repetition of the previous August. Popular discontent focused itself on the lack of munitions, and especially of ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... was slowly reviewing in her mind all her life since she ceased to be a child—fifty years of disillusionment and suffering. She thought first of her happy, peaceful childhood, her grandfather's blind affection, the pure joys of her days of innocence, the exciting games with her little sister and tall cousins. Then she shuddered at the earliest thought of marriage, the constraint, the loss of liberty, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the stage I found my way in safety. Pausing for a moment and glancing round, my impression was not so much disillusionment concerning all things theatrical as realisation of my worst forebodings. In that one moment all glamour connected with the stage fell from me, nor has it since ever returned to me. From the tawdry decorations of the auditorium to the childish make-belief littered around on the stage, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the common people of all lands, did not understand the significance of what had happened. They saw only that hard, unlovely Prussian peace, and the great hope died in their hearts. The great disillusionment took its place. The most receptive mood for a new start the world had been in for centuries passed away. Faith in their governors and leaders was largely destroyed and the foundations of the human government were shaken in a way which will be felt for generations. The Paris peace lost an opportunity ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... the accessories of the scene, left me for a few moments fairly dazed. Not only were my highly wrought expectations as to the present interview brought to humiliating discomfiture, but the influence of the disillusionment instantly retroacted with the effect of making the entire noble and romantic cult which had led up to this unlucky confrontation seem a mere farrago of extravagant and baseless sentiment. What on earth had Regnier been thinking of, to plan deliberately a situation calculated to turn ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Wagner's much discussed "pessimism." At first sight it might seem a strange contradiction to speak of pessimism in a man who composed Die Meistersinger, whose love of all things beautiful was a passion, whose faith in human nature, unshaken by every disillusionment, would almost seem like madness, did we not know that it was that very faith which finally carried him through to victory. Wagner's pessimism was not borrowed from Schopenhauer, but was his own, as it is, in one form or another, the creed of every thinking man, the foundation ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... face of this defeat, which seemed to everybody the sudden crumbling of an edifice of effrontery, the astonishment and disillusionment were immense. There was a moment of excitement on the benches, the tumult of a vote taken on the spot, which the Nabob saw vaguely through the glass doors, as the condemned man looks down from the scaffold on the howling crowd. Then, after that terrible pause which ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... age she had been married to a man twenty-one years her senior. It was a "mariage de convenance"—arranged by her parents and a notary in a powdered wig. It is somewhat curious to find how many great women have contracted just such marriages. Grim disillusionment following, true love holding nothing in store for them, they turn to books, politics or art, and endeavor to stifle their woman's nature with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... satisfactorily to ourselves we must be artists, and I resolved to go in for music and become a second Liszt. When my father offered to take us to Italy, the artist's Mecca, for a couple of years, we were wild with delight. We went, and disillusionment began. It may perhaps seem absurd, but we suffered acutely that first summer. Our villa was quite on the beach, the lowest of its flight of steps being washed by the Mediterranean. At the back were grounds which seemed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
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