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More "Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spurge, live-for-ever, star of Bethlehem, money-vine,—all have seen better days, but now are flower-tramps. Even the larkspur, beloved of children, the moss-pink, and the grape-hyacinth may sometimes be seen growing in country fields and byways. The homely and cheerful blossoms of the orange-tawny ephemeral lily, and the spotted tiger-lily, whose gaudy colors glow with the warmth of far Cathay—their early home—now make gay many of our roadsides and crowd upon the sweet cinnamon roses of our grandmothers, which ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor Hugo's ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... decay to allow seeds to ripen, but materially enfeebles the entire plant. It is wise to secure as much beauty as is possible just now from your gardens, as a single and unexpected frosty night will destroy almost everything; nothing is more ephemeral than ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... things about Browning's admirable career as poet and man is that he wrote not to please the critics, as Tennyson often did, not to please the crowd, as the vast horde of ephemeral writers do, but to please himself. The critics and the crowd professed that they could not understand him; but he had no difficulty in understanding them. He knew exactly what they wanted, and declined to supply it. Instead of giving them what he thought they wanted, he gave them what he thought ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... resting upon us. The difficulty is, however, that the results are not permanent; the facts learned do not have time to seek out and link themselves to well-established associates; learned in an hour, their retention is as ephemeral as the application which ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... literature of Canadians—indeed the chief literary aliment of large numbers—is the newspaper press, which illustrates necessarily the haste, pressure and superficiality of writings of that ephemeral class. Canadian journals, however, have not yet descended to the degraded sensationalism of New York papers, too many of which circulate in Canada to the public detriment. On the whole, the tone of the most ably conducted journals—the Toronto Globe, and the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... nation into their dispute. At another they join hands to divide the spoil of ruined provinces. Great generals with armies at their backs start into being from apparent nothingness, dispute the sovereignty of Italy in bloodless battles, found ephemeral dynasties, and pass away like mists upon a mountain-side beneath a puff of wind. Conflict, ruin, desolation, anarchy are ever yielding place to concord, restoration, peace, prosperity, and then recurring with a mighty flood of violence. Construction, destruction, and reconstruction ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life" for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses unlimited "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... in the last Section of this treatise. Venus and Helen, Liber and Lyaeus, are but the current coin of poetic diction common to the whole student class. These Olympian deities merge without a note of discord into the dim background of a medieval pothouse or the sylvan shades of some ephemeral amour, leaving the realism of natural appetite ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... already known to the public by the two novels announced in her title-page, and both, the last especially, attracted, with justice, an attention from the public far superior to what is granted to the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering-places and circulating libraries. They belong to a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more immediately from ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... radiated around them in the shape of a fan. Some were large and near, glowing scarlet-red from the shade, like wounds in a black hide. Some were Maenades, with winy faces and blown hair. These tinctured the silent bosom of the clouds above them and lit up their ephemeral caves, which seemed thenceforth to become scalding caldrons. Perhaps as many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds of the district; and as the hour may be told on a clock-face ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... latter were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... deceptive and contrary views in different portions of the country." As for the charge of sectionalism, Judge Douglas was himself fast becoming sectional, for his speeches no longer passed current south of the Ohio as they had once done. "Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded down his ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Napoleon cautioned us long ago "to wash our dirty linen at home," but good patriots cannot be expected to profit by the counsels of a tyrant. So the columns of the Commune papers are devoted to the daily and mutual pulling to pieces of the Commune's members. But where will these ephemeral sheets be in six months, in one month, or in a week's time perhaps? The wind which wafts away the leaves of the rose and the laurel, will be no less cruel for the political leaves. Let us then, for the sake of posterity, offer a specimen of what is—or as we shall soon say, what was—the ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... social group, even the most ephemeral, will ordinarily have (a) some relatively formal method of defining its aim and formulating its policies, making them explicit, and (b) some machinery, functionary, or other arrangement for realizing its aim and carrying ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... embroidery or silver spangles. They are unfastened across the chest, and, by a narrow opening which descends to the girdle, disclose the amber-coloured flesh, the median swell of bosoms of pale bronze, which, during their ephemeral youth at least, are of a perfect contour. The faces, it is true, when they are not hidden from you by a fold of the veil, are generally disappointing. The rude labours, the early maternity and lactations, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... sir. The history of the ephemeral insect is the history of a day,—that of a man means a whole life; the history of nations means centuries, that of the world eternity; and in eternity justice comes to each one ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... intimation, in most cases, that the public receives of any charge against him will be from his own answer to it. Neither does the evil rest here;—for the calumny remains embalmed in the defence, long after its own ephemeral life is gone. To this unlucky sort of sensitiveness Mr. Sheridan was but too much disposed to give way, and accordingly has been himself the chronicler of many charges against him, of which we should have been otherwise wholly ignorant. Of this nature ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... bitter ingloriousness! ... O speechless degradation of all the higher capabilities of Man! to love one's own ephemeral Shadow-Existence so utterly as to exclude from thought and sympathy all other things whether human or divine! And was it not possible that this Spectre of Self might still be clinging to him? Was it dead with the Dream of Sah-luma? ... or had ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... client, had assured Jane the South African employer would take an early opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... every noise, but waits till its presence is desired—cannot, indeed, garnish the house, but can sweep it clean. Were there enough of such wise criticism, there would be ten times the study of the best writers of the past, and perhaps one-tenth of the admiration for the ephemeral productions of the day. A gathered mountain of misplaced worships would be swept into the sea by the study of one good book; and while what was good in an inferior book would still be admired, the relative position of the book would be altered ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... disappointment. The second scene which shows us the citizens hurrying to witness the triumphant entry of Nero, is vigorous and animated. Nero's boasting is pitched in just the right key; bombast and eloquence are equally mixt. If he had been living in our own day Nero might possibly have made an ephemeral name for himself among the writers of the Sub-Swinburnian School. His longer poems were, no doubt, nerveless and insipid, deserving the scornful criticism of Tacitus and Persius; but the fragments preserved by Seneca shew that ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... between Norbert and Mademoiselle de Puymandour was entirely deficient in that brief, ephemeral light that shines over the honeymoon. The icy wall that stood between them became each day stronger and taller. There was no one to smooth away inequalities, no one to exercise a kindly influence over two characters, both haughty and determined. After his ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... ideographs for Sukiya mean the Abode of Fancy. Latterly the various tea-masters substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tea-room, and the term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical. It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch as it is consecrated ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... wise and good people in the past, to excite us by example; and of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right. And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so if the writers chose! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as the body cools down. In the case of ordinary stars these changes no doubt occupy many millions of years, which represent the average duration of solar life; but the temporary stars run through similar changes in a few months: they resemble ephemeral insects — born in the morning and doomed to perish with the going ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... in trickery and peculation. It was a corrupting influence in the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have profited ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... strove for the knowledge to give it nourishment, and the field to give it exercise. He read and wrote, as well as worked and talked. It would be a task for antiquarian research to recover his very earliest lucubrations scattered among the ephemeral periodicals of that day. Plays of his might be dug out, whose very names are unknown to his most intimate friends. He scattered his early fruit far and wide,—getting little from the world in exchange. Literature was then a harder struggle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... sought after, one of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... absolute. An audience is entitled to say, "What care I how good he be if he seem not good to me?" A performance that does not move the spectators is not only a failure but to some extent a culpable failure, since the actor's art is more utterly ephemeral than any other—possibly by aid of gramophone, biograph, and the like some fairly effective records will be made in the future—but, this consideration apart, he may not even take heed for the morrow. At the moment his mission ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... to join the others, and the Minister then had to share the honours of triumph with him. For was not this banker the master? Was he not money personified—money, which is the only stable, everlasting force, far above all ephemeral tenure of power, such as attaches to those ministerial portfolios which pass so rapidly from hand to hand? Monferrand reigned, but he would pass away, and a like fate would some day fall on Vignon, who had already had a warning that one could ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... equally ephemeral. Time and experience rob even amusement of its charm, and the night before is not worth next morning's headache. Practical success alone makes early middle-age the most pleasurable period of a man's career. What has been worked for in youth ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... thoughts—well, why should the ecstatic young bride, full of the delight of her title and the Feodoreff sapphires, take the least interest in the fate of a miscreant with whom, in the period of his success, she had indulged in an ephemeral flirtation? ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... apart from their foreign rivals, and may be roughly classified according as they deal with the affairs of State or Church. The original flavour has gone from many of them, like the scent from dried flowers, with the dispute or ephemeral motive that gave rise to them; but a new flavour from that very fact has taken the place of the old, of the same sort that attaches to the relics of extinct religions or of bygone forms ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however, that this claim is so modest as it sounds, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... moment, either now or later, suspect what troubles had resulted to him from letting her go; it never once seemed to cross her mind, and she had received no news whatever from Shaston. They talked on slight and ephemeral subjects, and when his tea was brought up he told the amazed little servant that a cup was to be set for Sue. That young person was much more interested in their history than they supposed, and as she descended the stairs she lifted her eyes and hands in grotesque ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... towards its composition, on Weber's part, was the study of the English language itself, the right understanding of which, Weber justly considered as preliminary to any attempt to marry Mr. Planche's ephemeral verses to his own immortal music. These exertions increased his weakness so much, that he found it necessary to resort to a watering-place in the summer of 1825. In December he returned to Berlin, to bring out his Euryanthe there in person. It was received, as might have been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... something like publicity we find him attended by a brilliant company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his teaching and attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been a very ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the most, it had ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its founder had left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849 Rossetti had exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... have been added to the University treasury by the various Michigan Union Operas, of which not a few have survived the ephemeral popularity of the generations which witnessed the performances. These include, "When Night Falls, Dear," from "Michigenda," by Roy Dickinson Welch, '09, who also furnished the music for "A Faithful Pipe to Smoke," from "Culture," the words for ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... lord of high compassion, strong to scorn Ephemeral monsters, who with tragic pain Purgest our trivial humours, once again Through thine own Paris have I ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral.' It is for this bird-like quality of song, it seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a woman of the East, finding expression through ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... room; the young man exchanged a smile with her and gave her a glance full of gentle meaning. However uncertain the future might seem, however ephemeral their union, the promises of their sudden love were only the more endearing to them. Rapid as the glance was, it did not escape the sagacious eye of Madame du Gua, who instantly understood it; her brow clouded, and she was unable to wholly conceal ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... guns. But the Virgin, the Daughter of Roma, She hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn,—The Daughter of Tiber, She hath shaken her head and built barricades against thee! Will they fight? I believe it. Alas! 'tis ephemeral folly, Vain and ephemeral folly, of course, compared with pictures, Statues, and antique gems!—Indeed: and yet indeed too, Yet, methought, in broad day did I dream,—tell it not in St. James's, Whisper it not in thy courts, O Christ Church!—yet did I, waking, ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the exhibition occupies a bare, disconsolate, shabby suite of rooms. They resemble much the editorial offices of those ephemeral daily papers which, commencing with very small capital, after a spasmodic career of a few months fall despairingly into the arms of the sheriff. I had once occasion to visit the commission on a little matter of business. What ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... sort of force. All failed, and nearly all died a violent death, after a short-lived guardianship of a fabric that was crumbling to pieces in every part, but still under the grand name of Roman Empire. Gaul had her share in this series of ephemeral emperors and tyrants; one of the most wicked and most insane, though issue of one of the most valorous and able, Caracalla, son of Septimius Severus, was born at Lyons, four years after the death of Marcus Aurelius. A hundred years later ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... process, looked back and reviewed the past. On such occasions I have been half inclined to make the reflection, common to all journalists, when they survey the monumental works of our brethren in the superior ranks of the literary profession: "Have I not cast my life and energy away on things ephemeral and unworthy? Have not I preferred a kind of glorified pot-boiling to the service of the spirit?" In the end, however, like the painter with the journalist's heart in Robert Browning's poem, I console myself for having enlisted among the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Napoleon and the Methodist Connexion were much too well adapted to human needs to disappear with their authors. On the other hand, movements and systems which depend wholly upon one man do not often prove to be more than ephemeral. But none would deny that there is much to be learnt from The Salvation Army and from the earnest, strenuous, and resourceful personality of the man who made it. Let us hope that, if The Army as an Organisation should ultimately ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... morning when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting the fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of the snow and ice, two beings crossed the fiord and flew along the base of the Falberg, rising thence from ledge to ledge toward the summit. What were they? human creatures, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... in a similar orbit, move in quite another plane,—who have found in the pages of the periodical a theatre of special activity, a way to the entertainment and instruction of the many; and though much of what is thus produced may bear, as we have hinted, a character more or less ephemeral, we are sometimes presented also with the earlier blossoms and the fresher odors of a rich and perennial growth of genius, everywhere known and acknowledged in the realms of belles-lettres, philosophy, and science, crowded here as in a nursery, to be soon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... Greek by birth, but an Italian by training and sympathies, seems to have lost the secret of the delicate imagination which nearly made 'Flora Mirabilis' a European success, though his 'Martire,' a work of crude sensationalism, enjoyed an ephemeral success in Italy. Franchetti, the composer of 'Asrael,' 'Cristoforo Colombo,' and other works, conceived upon a scale grandiose rather than grand, appears anxious to emulate the theatrical glories of Meyerbeer, and to make up for poverty of inspiration by spectacular magnificence, but ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... fields are beautiful. The flashing aurora, the golden clouds, the sapphire sky, are beautiful. The circling planets, the blazing sun, the starry canopy, are beautiful. But what are they compared to a human soul? What is an ephemeral flower or an age-lasting star compared with glorious reason, with eternal love, with deathless benevolence, and conscience? What were the material universe with all its sublime grandeur and awe-inspiring ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Angela and me. "It is not in my power to bequeath you a fortune, in the ordinary sense of the word, for money I have none, yet so long as the mission prospers you will be better off than if I could give you millions. But everything human is ephemeral and I cannot disguise from myself the possibility of some great disaster befalling you. Those mountains contain both gold and silver, and an invasion of treasure-seekers, either from the sea or the Cordillera would be the ruin of the mission. ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... than the things ephemeral and the strange changes going on in the city, wherein were very few old men, but only the young and strong of many nations, were the stabilities of life. Carleton found time to examine and write about education, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... would communicate them freely to Madeline as they walked. No; there was no longer the slightest touch of hypocrisy in her pleasant manner and eager voice as she answered, "No, papa, I have not heard. Was it Mr. So-and-so?" and she named an ephemeral literary giant of the day. "No," said the judge, "it was not So-and-so; but yet you might guess, as you know the gentleman." Then the slight shade of hypocrisy came upon her again in a moment. "She couldn't guess," ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... without considering the moral side at all, it is sport to attack him. To get myself into a position to attack him, I had to serve an apprenticeship. You know what that means—the daily digging for ephemeral facts. But I stuck to it. I saw the day when I should be the most feared man on the coast, wielding a pen as efficacious as a surgeon's knife. Unfortunately, my knife first struck a politician named Mulligan, who owned some stock in the paper. You know the result. I could direct my caustic ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... ephemeral. They will roll away, and we shall once more gladly recognise the lineaments of an essentially lofty character, of one who, though a man of genius and of letters, neither outraged society nor stooped to it; was ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... modern life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... great genius. Had his work been less witty and bright, he would be charged with superficiality; that which saves him from the accusation is the marvellous display of mental acuteness and a perfect mastery of the French language. The thought in his productions is as ephemeral as that in a morning newspaper; but his composition will serve to this day as a model of the possibilities of the French tongue. In ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... point of it—sell. His books have a regular market value, and this value increases rather than diminishes with years. This is, we confess, rather a suspicious circumstance. Did Milton sell? Did Wordsworth sell? Must not the fame that is instantaneous prove hollow and ephemeral? Are we not acquainted with a certain volume of poems that shall be nameless, the whole edition of which lies untouched and unclaimed on the publisher's shelves? And are we not perfectly well aware that those poems—well, we can wait. If Mr. Saxe would only put forth a volume that should prove, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... governed. They clung to this as a sacred dogma for over a hundred years, because it did not affect unfavorably any interest. It is untrue. Governments get their powers from the historical fact of their existence. They are all ephemeral, subject to change. When a change takes place it is controlled by the ideas and interests of the time of change, when the popular element in self-government may be much greater than when the constitution was last previously established. In 1898 the popular will, in the United ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... of infinitesimal changes, and emphasizes the permanence of a modification once produced long after the causes for it cease to act. The mesas of Arizona, the earth sculpture of the Grand Canyon remain as monuments to the erosive forces which produced them. So a habitat leaves upon man no ephemeral impress; it affects him in one way at a low stage of his development, and differently at a later or higher stage, because the man himself and his relation to his environment have been modified in the earlier period; but traces ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... lands, and in the pages of books to have an intimate and inspiring acquaintance with the heroes of the nations. If we wish our children to be fine types of men and women, we must form their tastes in these large directions before they are overwhelmed by what is so ephemeral and worthless in literature and drama of ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood's thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners must have their immediate termination. These old friends were the plague-infected clothes he flung off his body. But the Cross where it lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the sun, with smiling radiance, Through orifice, through rift and aperture, Invades the storm, and dissipates the clouds, Which scatter, cowering and ephemeral, Hugging the cliffs, and o'er the dire abyss Hover, in fleecy, ever changing form, And in a transient season disappear; Vanish, as man must vanish, and ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... intercession. For when they heard the words, "I am the Eternal, thy Lord," the understanding of the Torah became deep-rooted in their hearts, so that they never forgot what they thus learned. But they forgot some of the things Moses taught, for as man is a being of flesh and blood, and hence ephemeral, so are his teachings ephemeral. They hereupon came to Moses, saying: "O, if He would only reveal Himself once more! O that once more He would kiss us with the kisses of His mouth! O that understanding of the Torah might ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... question of Woman's Rights is a practical one. The notion has prevailed that it was only an ephemeral idea; that it was but women claiming the right to smoke cigars in the streets, and to frequent bar-rooms. Others have supposed it a question of comparative intellect; others still, of sphere. Too much has already been said and written about woman's sphere. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... composite photograph of hundreds of thousands of Laura Jadwins. Yes," she continued, her brows bent, her mind hard at work, "what I am, the little things that distinguish me from everybody else, those pass away very quickly, are very ephemeral. But the type Laura Jadwin, that always remains, doesn't it? One must help building up only the permanent things. Then, let's see, the individual may deteriorate, but the type always grows better.... Yes, I think one can ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... you only as Bedelia," he made haste to explain. "Bedelia will stick to you forever, you see, while Miss Guile is almost ephemeral. It cannot live long, you know, with so many other names eager to take its place. But Bedelia—ah, ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... is true that the living standard is going down all the time, isn't it?" asked Mr. Tanter, keeping his ephemeral smile. "What about those three thousand starvation ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but among them are William ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... a comfort to find that the brothers parted on good terms. The elder was beholden to the younger for the acquiescence that removed the odium of tyranny from the expulsion, and when the one great disturbance had silenced the ephemeral dissensions that had kept both minds in a constant state of irritation, Henry wanted, by kindness and consideration, to prove to himself and the world that Leonard's real interests were his sole object; and Leonard rejoiced in being at peace, so long as his pride and resolution were not sacrificed. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were hurried across the vast untroubled sky—shepherdless, futile, imponderable—and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... up, alive to action. Death, then, was but an ephemeral part of this big game; he was fighting not only for today, but for the future; fighting for the peace and righteousness of years to come, long, long after he, in any case, would have been dead! He turned impulsively to the staring eyes, and whispered: "Thanks, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... that Theology made the mistake of degrading sex-union and of limiting it to the ephemeral life of the body only, we shall come to later. For the present, a brief resume of the types of marriage ceremony, which have been universal, will convince us that Nature has always sought to convey to the human mind this great secret of eternal ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... character of the meeting than to the sincere and fervid eloquence of the speakers—to place upon our pages an authentic record of the whole proceedings of the day. This "great national gathering," as it was aptly denominated, must be of enduring and not ephemeral interest, and will be remembered, and spoken of, and quoted, long after events of greater apparent importance have passed away into oblivion. The outpourings of a nation's heart are immortal. The tributes that were paid, in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... to wait. He recognized the fact that no girl with self-respect would speak to a "beast," and he determined to be patient until in another twelvemonth he should have become a full-fledged third-class man himself. The other engagements had proved ephemeral, why not that with Saunders? Fortunately this new sentiment of Sam's did not interfere with his military work. Instead of that it inspired him with new fervor, and he now strove to be a perfect soldier not only for its own sake, but for ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... himself to be stuck up as a ninepin only to be knocked down! There are politicians for whom such occupation seems to be proper;—and who like it too. A little office, a little power, a little rank, a little pay, a little niche in the ephemeral history of the year will reward many men ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... work on fossil ichthyology. I hope, if I can command another hundred louis, to complete everything of which I have spoken before the end of the summer, that is to say, in July. I shall then have on hand two works which should surely be worth a thousand louis to me. This is a low estimate, for even ephemeral pieces and literary ventures are paid at this price. You can easily make the calculation. They allow three louis for each plate with the accompanying text; my fossils will have about two hundred plates, and my fresh-water fishes about one ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... God is not confined to any one method, the preaching of the late D. L. Moody was specially steeped in the love of God. It is for want of a vision of the inevitable fate of the godless and disobedient, that much of our present-day preaching is so powerless and ephemeral. You cannot get crops out of the land merely by summer showers and sunshine; there must be the subsoil ploughing, the pulverizing frost, the wild March wind. And only when we modern preachers have seen sin as God sees it, and begin to apply the divine standard to the human conscience; only when ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... What was the result? Troubles in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India. Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral, entente between the ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... that always made his heart bleed,—we may well understand how all these causes may have given rise to some moments of misanthropy, such as are betrayed by a few expressions in his journal; but it was a misanthropy that existed only in words, a plant without roots, of ephemeral growth, and most natural to a fine nature. We feel, notwithstanding all these real palpable causes of ennui, that his principal sufferings still came from ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... mishaps of the most ludicrous but improbable kind. Indeed Theodore's novels, like his stage-pieces, are gone out of date in an age so practical that even in romance it will not allow of the slightest departure from reality. Their very style was ephemeral, and their interest could not outlast the generation to amuse which they were penned. This first novel was written when Hook was one-and-twenty. Soon after he was sent to Oxford, where he had been entered at St. Mary's Hall, more affectionately ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... with the gayest society, and became well known as a prolific writer of songs, prologues, epilogues, masques, and the lighter dramatic fare. Much of this work is not lacking in wit and volatile smartness, but it is all far too ephemeral to have any permanent value as literature. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, but is perhaps best remembered for his translation of Don Quixote, and his ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... something of that breathlessness among the trees one finds in Watteau and in Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for he, also, was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think of Redon as among those who transvaluate all earthly sensations in terms of a purer element. We think of him as living with his head among the mists, alert for all those sudden bursts ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Ministry here, three groups are represented: one declines to take Lenin seriously, regarding him as an ephemeral personage, the second does not take this view at all, but is nevertheless unwilling to treat with a revolutionary of this sort, and the third consists, as far as I am aware, of myself alone, and I will treat with him, despite ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... will lack nothing of what can charm man or woman. Though effeminate in your caprices, your intellect is manly. I have dreamed all things of you; I forgive you all. You have only to speak to have your ephemeral passions gratified. I have aggrandized your life by introducing into it that which makes it delightful to most people—the stamp of political influence and dominion. You will be as great as you now are small; but you must not break the machine by which we coin money. I grant you all you will ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... as much zeal, and almost as much ability. But I predict that the popularity of their doctrines will not last; and if ever you visit the moon again, you will find that their glory, now at its height, like the ephemeral fashions of the ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... suited to the needs of those who cannot fix their attention long upon any subject. We regret to see in it marks of that extravagance and affectation in the use of language which are such common blemishes of style in our ephemeral literature. For example: a very sensible and much needed plea for the preservation of birds, is called "The Massacre of the Innocents;" and we are told that "a St. Bartholomew of birds has been inaugurated." Miss ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... second or two later that ephemeral fit of remorse did its final vanishing; he had once more encountered the pleasant smile, the laughing if ashen-pale ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Herculaneum, and others innumerable. Add to the reckoning all whom thou hast known, one after another. One man after burying another has been laid out dead, and another buries him; and all this in a short time. To conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... and brutal, but below all this surface beats a heart full of true instincts and honest impulses. I am certain the recording angel will blot out many of his sins, as he did those of Uncle Toby. His means exhausted, he abdicates his ephemeral kingdom, and, uncomplaining, takes his pick and shovel, his frying-pan, bacon, and flour, and starts over the mountains for new diggings. Yet he gains no wisdom by experience. The same bacchanalian orgies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... between. Then to the left there, impressive to look on and conducive to solemn thoughts, the mountains rear their crests against the sky, and, crowned with the gathered snows of the centuries whose monuments they are, from aeon to aeon gaze majestically out over the wide plains and the ephemeral ant-like races who tread them, and while they endure think themselves the masters of their little world. And over all—mountain, plain, and flashing stream—the glorious light of the African sun and the Spirit of Life moving now as it once moved ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... voyage was a pleasant experience, broken by fleeting visits to startled friends in Ceylon and at Singapore, and enlivened by the close ephemeral intimacies of life ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... AND COMPANY publish, under the above title, a series of books designed especially for boys and girls who are laying the foundation of private libraries. The books in this series are not ephemeral publications, to be read hastily and quickly forgotten, both the authors and the subjects treated indicate that they are ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... House of Representatives, and in similar speeches in the Senate, defined as they had not been defined before, the views of that body of Conservatives whose refusal to accept the defeat of 1800 as anything more than an ephemeral incident, led to the far-reaching results achieved by other parties which their ideas brought into existence. It was said of Bayard, as their representative and leader, that "he was distinguished for the depth of his knowledge, the solidity of his reasoning, and the perspicuity of his illustration." ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... back for a moment, however. George had married—a year afterward I had imitated him. My wife was an angel upon earth—she is an angel in heaven now—and in comparison with the deep affection which I felt for her, the ephemeral fancy for the young lady whom my rival had married, appeared the veriest trifle. William Conway had also married, and he and George, with their wives, were living at Five Forks. William was judge of the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... with a muzzled tongue. When you are gone, Caroline, I shall devote myself to what, after all, must be the work of my life, and I shall finish the biographical history of our great hero in verse,—which I hope may at least be not ephemeral. From month to month I shall send you what I do, and you will not refuse me your friendly criticism,—and, perhaps, some slight meed of approbation,—because you are dwelling beneath the shade of a throne. Oh, Caroline, let it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the shape of a ten-dollar bill tucked away in the folds of Gertrude Sinclair's annual letter to Mrs. Robson. As Claire had grown older she had grown also impatient of the memory of her mother squandering what should have gone for thick shoes and warm plaid dresses upon the ephemeral joys of a Christmas tree. But now she suddenly understood, and she felt glad for a mother courageous enough to lay hold upon the beautiful symbols of life at the expense of all that was hideously practical. Shoes wore out and plaid dresses finally found their way to the rag-bag, ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He only seems to have made them in order that they may reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and then die like ephemeral insects. I said, reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and I adhere to that expression. What is there, as a matter of fact, more ignoble and more repugnant than that filthy and ridiculous act of the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... will of the gods a law superior to the justice of man. But our excuse or pretext of to-day is fraught with the more peril to our morality inasmuch as it reposes on a law, or at least a habit, of Nature, that is far more real, more incontestable and universal than the will of an ephemeral and local god. ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... and it was indeed an 'all star' cast. It had a tremendous ovation but in spite of its great merit did not become a stock play, probably owing to the intensely political nature of much of its satirical wit, a feature necessarily ephemeral. It seems, however, to have been presented from time to time, and there was a notable revival on 10 July, 1707, at the Haymarket, for the benefit of Husband and Pack. Sir Timothy was played by Cross; Tom Wilding, Mills; Sir Anthony, Bullock; Foppington, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... taken the upper hand within the last few days. Remember the fortunes of factionists are ephemeral." ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... is the springtide with its dewy dawns and its beautiful nights; if sometimes a storm clouds the sky, it gathers, mutters and disperses, leaving the sky bluer, the atmosphere purer, and Nature more smiling than before. What use is there in reflecting on this storm that passes swift as a caprice, ephemeral as a fancy? Before we have discovered the secret of the meteorological enigma, the storm will ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... not the most skilled technician among the Spaniards who discuss, through the drama, the burning problems of the day. Linares Rivas excels him in this rather ephemeral branch of dramaturgy. But Galds has the great advantage of breadth. He is never didactic in the narrow sense. He sometimes hints at a moral in the last words of a play, but he is never so lacking in artistic feeling as to expound his thesis in set terms, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... character of the disturbing force. The permanence or evanescence of the spot would indicate the sun or earth as being the locality of such derangement. The more permanent form being developed at the sun, and the more ephemeral at the earth. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... this issue the party was unable to obtain the support of all the forces of discontent, radicalism, and reform which had been engendered by the economic and political conditions of the times. The Greenback movement was ephemeral. Failing to solve the problem of agricultural depression, it passed away as had the Granger movement before it; but the greater farmers' movement of which both were a ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... proper to apostles. These leaders are often subtle rhetoricians, seeking only their own personal interest, and endeavouring to persuade by flattering base instincts. The influence they can assert in this manner may be very great, but it is always ephemeral. The men of ardent convictions who have stirred the soul of crowds, the Peter the Hermits, the Luthers, the Savonarolas, the men of the French Revolution, have only exercised their fascination after having been ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... of this crowd had been living in tents round the inclosure, and laid the foundations of a town which has since been called "Ardan's Town." The ground bristled with huts, cabins, and tents, and these ephemeral habitations sheltered a population numerous enough to rival ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... people to reach the very best elements of their being, and then, having reached them, there to abide as an indigenous principle, you must imbue the womanhood of that people with all its elements and qualities. Any movement which passes by the female sex is an ephemeral thing. Without them, no true nationality, patriotism, religion, cultivation, family life, or true social status, is a possibility. In this matter it takes two to make one—mankind is a duality. The male ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... and tunes among those omitted in this chapter will cry out against the choice that passed them by. Others are of the more ephemeral sort, the phenomena (and the demand) of a generation. Carols of pious joy with inordinate repetition, choruses that surprise old lyrics with modern thrills, ballads of ringing sound and slender verse, are the ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... in other schools, and under other teachers. She looks upon it with other regards, and deems more highly and reverently both of its just authority and its utility and excellence. The history of her legislative proceedings may be traced. The ephemeral effusions of temporary bodies, called together by the excitement of the occasion, may be hunted up; they have been hunted up. The opinions and votes of her public men, in and out of Congress, may be explored. It will all be in vain. The Carolina doctrine can derive from her neither countenance nor ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Arthur Foote gave fame as "An Irish Folk Song." Like "O Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of Nature as she appears in all times and places, but of particular and eccentric manners and characters, the excressences of overloaded society, they have made a short cut to the favour of the public, and inundated the stage with a torrent of ephemeral productions, to the depravation of public taste, and in defiance of classical criticism: their highest praise that they do no moral mischief, and that if they possess not the bold outline and faithful colouring of nature which distinguished the productions of their ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... "Teach-'em-everything-in-no-time-Society" as if its natty laws were a library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without mischief—they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning sand, and leave ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... in the usage of the ephemeral press, the term "Sioux" was applied sometimes to one but oftener to several of the allied tribes embraced in the first of the principal groups of which the stock is composed, i.e., the group or confederacy styling themselves Dakota. Sometimes the term was employed in its simple form, but as explorers ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... only source of reading for the majority. Practically all the papers are published in the cities of Santo Domingo, Santiago and Puerto Plata, and all are of modest dimensions. Many newspapers have been founded in the Republic and after leading an ephemeral existence have succumbed, some because their editors were persuaded by threats or rewards on the part of the government to cease publication, and the greater portion because of financial embarrassment. Notwithstanding ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... the gayest society, and became well known as a prolific writer of songs, prologues, epilogues, masques, and the lighter dramatic fare. Much of this work is not lacking in wit and volatile smartness, but it is all far too ephemeral to have any permanent value as literature. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, but is perhaps best remembered for his translation of Don Quixote, and his ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria. Each exercised an influence on the Israelites and their neighbours, though in a different way and with different results. The influence of Assyria was ephemeral. It represented the meteor-like rise of a great military power, which crushed all opposition, and introduced among mankind the new idea of a centralised world-empire. It destroyed the northern kingdom of Samaria, and made Palestine once more what it had been in pre-Mosaic days, the battle-ground ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... hobby," said the curate, mincingly, as he indicated the treasures of cloisonne and of porcelain; "he does not frivol away his money as so many do, on idle dissipations and ephemeral pleasures. On the contrary, he devotes it ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... and trees about their huts and for the forest-flowers. The natural images and similes so common in their wild, abrupt, unrhymed chants and songs showed how closely they watched and sympathised with nature. The hoar-frost, which vanishes with the sunrise, stood with them for ephemeral fame. Rank without power was "a fountain without water." The rushing stream reminded the Maori singer, as it did the Mantuan, of the remorseless current of ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... society or social group, even the most ephemeral, will ordinarily have (a) some relatively formal method of defining its aim and formulating its policies, making them explicit, and (b) some machinery, functionary, or other arrangement for realizing its aim and carrying its policies into effect. Even in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... a stronger differentia from the work of the mere playwright, who invariably thinks first of the temporary conditions of success, and accordingly loses the success which is not temporary. But the second great difference of Shakespere is, that even what may be in comparison called the ephemeral and perishable parts of him have an extraordinary vitality, if not theatrical yet literary, of their own. The coarser scenes of Measure for Measure and The Comedy of Errors, the satire on fleeting follies in Love's Labour Lost, the uncomelier parts of All's Well ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... it—sell. His books have a regular market value, and this value increases rather than diminishes with years. This is, we confess, rather a suspicious circumstance. Did Milton sell? Did Wordsworth sell? Must not the fame that is instantaneous prove hollow and ephemeral? Are we not acquainted with a certain volume of poems that shall be nameless, the whole edition of which lies untouched and unclaimed on the publisher's shelves? And are we not perfectly well aware that those poems—well, we can wait. If Mr. Saxe would only put forth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... Never since the ephemeral season of their courtship had she been on such fond terms with him, and all his fears of hostile designs entertained against him by her immediate followers were stilled at last. Yet not for long. Into his fool's paradise came Lord Robert ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... confessed he began to wonder whether his services to the nation were worth so much hardship, such complete isolation. The stream sang of the eternities, and his own short span of life (half gone already without any permanent accomplishment) seemed pitifully ephemeral. The guardians of these high places must forever be solitary. No ranger could rightfully be husband and father, for to bring women and children into these solitudes would ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... seemed as if it were a fine summer's day, mild and warm. Fresh and green he spread out his mighty crown; the sunbeams played among the twigs and the leaves; the air was full of the fragrance of herbs and blossoms; gay butterflies chased each other to and fro. The ephemeral insects danced as if all the world were created merely for them to dance and be merry in. All that the tree had experienced for years and years, and that had happened around him, seemed to pass by him again, as in ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the Serbs has been the fact that right through the middle of it from south to north there had been drawn a line of division more than two centuries before their arrival. Artificial boundaries are proverbially ephemeral, but this one has lasted throughout the centuries, and it has been baneful to the Serbs. This dividing line, drawn first by the Emperor Diocletian, has been described on p. 14; at the division of the Roman Empire into East and West it ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... to say that the characters of the corps de ballet, as also those of actors and actresses, are superior to the snarlings of dyspeptic libellers, or the spiteful attacks and brutum fulmen of ephemeral authors. ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drove me back upon myself, and since all of us must have some joy, natural or merely manufactured, in order to go on living, it forced me to cultivate other interests, which, perhaps, had I been happy, I should have neglected for brighter but more ephemeral joys. So I am not frightened of my own society, and that, though a rather dreary achievement, is by no means to be despised. It enables me to wander about alone and yet be happy; it permits me to travel with no one but my own company and the chance acquaintances I pick up en route, and yet not ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... elect to regard Irving in the abstract, when called upon to suggest a fitting monument, than to promise a faithful portrait?... Let us be grateful, however, that a great artist is to be commemorated at all, side by side with the effigies of great Butchers of mankind, and ephemeral statesmen, the instigators of ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... invisibility. A gentle breeze was astir in the woods, and it set the leaves to whispering. The treetoads and the locusts were trolling a chorus. So loudly vibrant, it was! So clamorously gay! Some subtle intimation they surely had that summer was ephemeral and the season waning, for the burden of their song was, Let us now be merry. The scarlet head of a woodpecker showed brilliantly from the bare dead boughs of a chestnut-oak, which, with its clinging lichens of green and gray, was boldly projected against the azure sky. ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... most untiring industry until his mental faculties at last failed him some thirty-six years later. During this period he produced above a hundred volumes in poetry and prose, besides numerous scattered articles and other papers. Most of these were of merely ephemeral interest, but the Life of Nelson, published in 1813, may be said to have set a standard of simplicity, purity, and dignity in English prose which has been of permanent value. Bentham's style, on the contrary, was so wanting in beauty and perspicuity that one at least of his chief works is best ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... valuable. O foolish sponge! I am compelled to tell you that at afternoon teas it is especially difficult for a mortal gentleman to believe that he has any immortal soul to look for. It is a gathering essentially mundane and ephemeral. For it we put on our most worldly garments. For it we practise our most worldly smirks in dumb rehearsal before our mirror and an audience of one silly, attentive image, thinking that this time, this time—But it is always the same: ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... He felt genius stirring in him, and he strove for the knowledge to give it nourishment, and the field to give it exercise. He read and wrote, as well as worked and talked. It would be a task for antiquarian research to recover his very earliest lucubrations scattered among the ephemeral periodicals of that day. Plays of his might be dug out, whose very names are unknown to his most intimate friends. He scattered his early fruit far and wide,—getting little from the world in exchange. Literature was then a harder struggle than in our days. Jerrold did ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... upon the susceptible heart of his client, had assured Jane the South African employer would take an early opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" in that way before, and gone with her bleeding ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick. But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but there is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to crush her, to produce a result; the coster does not argue ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... citizens hurrying to witness the triumphant entry of Nero, is vigorous and animated. Nero's boasting is pitched in just the right key; bombast and eloquence are equally mixt. If he had been living in our own day Nero might possibly have made an ephemeral name for himself among the writers of the Sub-Swinburnian School. His longer poems were, no doubt, nerveless and insipid, deserving the scornful criticism of Tacitus and Persius; but the fragments preserved ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... photograph of hundreds of thousands of Laura Jadwins. Yes," she continued, her brows bent, her mind hard at work, "what I am, the little things that distinguish me from everybody else, those pass away very quickly, are very ephemeral. But the type Laura Jadwin, that always remains, doesn't it? One must help building up only the permanent things. Then, let's see, the individual may deteriorate, but the type always grows better.... Yes, I think one ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... nothing in the world so ephemeral as popularity. The individual who is to-day a hero may be an outcast to-morrow. There is nothing harder to hold than the esteem of a set of school-boys. He who is regarded as an idol in the fall may be supplanted by a rival in the spring, and may find himself unnoticed and neglected. Having ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... his father had done, but when we come to compare the moral character of the two men we must admit that the obstinacy of the father deserves the recognition which we cannot give to the spasmodic and ephemeral self-assertion of the son. Nobody for a moment believed that George the Fourth had the slightest idea of actually abdicating his royal position in England and betaking himself to perpetual boredom in ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... would not have been necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... round a second or two later that ephemeral fit of remorse did its final vanishing; he had once more encountered the pleasant smile, the laughing if ashen-pale face of his ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Pamphlets and other ephemeral productions usually make their first appearance in the Palais du Tribunat; and strangers may rely on being plagued by a set of fellows who here hawk about prohibited publications, of the most immoral tendency, embellished with correspondent engravings; such as Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... three groups are represented: one declines to take Lenin seriously, regarding him as an ephemeral personage, the second does not take this view at all, but is nevertheless unwilling to treat with a revolutionary of this sort, and the third consists, as far as I am aware, of myself alone, and I will treat with him, despite the possibly ephemeral ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... Excubitor, (one of our antagonists in the question of novel-reading,) after a very pious argument on the hostility of novels to a religious frame of mind, proceeding to observe that he was shocked to hear a young lady who had displayed extraordinary knowledge of modern ephemeral literature own herself ignorant of Dryden's fables! Consistency with a vengeance! The reading of modern poetry and novels excites a worldly disposition and prevents ladies from reading Dryden's fables! There is a general disposition ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded down his ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... run about all day getting a story. And then we write it at fever heat, searching our souls for words that are cleancut and virile. And then we turn it in, and what is it? What have we to show for our day's work? An ephemeral thing, lacking the first breath of life; a thing that is dead before it is born. Why, any cub reporter, if he were to put into some other profession the same amount of nerve, and tact, and ingenuity and finesse, and stick-to-it-iveness ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... seeds to ripen, but materially enfeebles the entire plant. It is wise to secure as much beauty as is possible just now from your gardens, as a single and unexpected frosty night will destroy almost everything; nothing is more ephemeral than ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... girl and boy should go on to the hard and unlighted life that inevitably awaited them, if neither had the opportunity of development. She would be at forty a later edition of the Widow Miller. He had seen the widow. Sally's charm must be as ephemeral under the life of illiterate drudgery and perennial child-bearing as her mother's had been. Her shoulders, now so gloriously straight and strong, would sag, and her bosom shrink, and her face harden and take on that drawn misery of constant anxiety. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... with false colouring? Shall we describe things as they are, or as they are not? Shall we draw with the pencil of nature, or of art? Do we indeed paint life as it is, or as it is not? Cast thine eyes, reader, over the ephemeral circle of passing and fortuitous events; view the change of contingencies; mark well the varied and shifting scenery in the great drama of time;—seriously contemplate nature in her operations; minutely examine the entrance, the action, and the exit of characters ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... loyalty to her than those of Canada; and whatever may be the transient differences,—differences growing entirely out of circumstances and interests of a local character, and in no way tending to impeach the acknowledged fidelity of the mass of French Canadians,—whatever, we repeat, may be the ephemeral differences that occasionally spring up between the governors of those provinces and individual members of the Houses of Assembly, they must, in no way, be construed into a general feeling of disaffection towards the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... notes and bits of doggerel sent to accompany small courtesies—flowers, music, a Havana dog, or the loan of a horse. It was all vivid and real enough now. Those men were not to me mere historical figures of whom one reads. They fought historic battles, they founded a historic though ephemeral empire; their defeats, their triumphs, their "deals," their blunders, were now matters of history: but for all that, they were of common flesh and blood, and the strange incidents of a strangely picturesque episode in ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... have begun in January, but London, as it happened, was suffering from one of those unreasoning rivalries which made a part of Handel's career so miserable, and helped to immortalize the names of Gluck and Piccini. It is hardly worth reviving the details of such ephemeral contests now. In the present case the factionists were to some extent swayed by financial interests; to a still greater extent by professional jealousies. The trouble seems to have arisen originally in connection with Gallini's preparations for the opening of a new Opera House ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... coquetry may be permissible to retailers of the marvelous, the sober chronicler is bound to forego such advantage as he may reap from an odd-sounding name, on which many ephemeral successes are founded in these days. Wherefore the present writer gives the following succinct statement of the reasons which induced him to adopt the unlikely sounding ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... observes periodical phenomena in the transfer of typographical honours from one school of authors, or one group of subjects, to another. The most recent auctioneers' catalogues reflect the sentiment of the day in lavishing capitals on trifles from the pens of more or less ephemeral modern writers, and registering with corresponding brevity much of the old English literature, which a few years since was in the ascendant. A rare volume of Elizabethan verse or prose halts after an insignificant ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... described as his own son and at others as Caesar's. Giovanni had already been invested with the title of Nepi, and Francesco Borgia, Cardinal of Cosenza, as the child's guardian, administered these estates. There are coins of this ephemeral Duke ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... of a new kingdom entered Florence on the 12th of April 1801; but the reception given him by the Tuscans was not at all similar to what he had experienced at Paris. The people received the royal pair as sovereigns imposed on them by France. The ephemeral kingdom of Etruria lasted scarcely six years. The King died in 1803, in the flower of his age, and in 1807 the Queen was expelled from her throne by him who had constructed it ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... upon the Earth who has not been struck by the phosphorescent lights that glide through the somber night, leaving a brilliant silver or golden track—the luminous, ephemeral trail ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... may well understand how all these causes may have given rise to some moments of misanthropy, such as are betrayed by a few expressions in his journal; but it was a misanthropy that existed only in words, a plant without roots, of ephemeral growth, and most natural to a fine nature. We feel, notwithstanding all these real palpable causes of ennui, that his principal sufferings still came ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... a foreign body, or may even volitionally swallow or aspirate objects. It is a mistake to do a bronchoscopy in order to cure by suggestion the delusion of foreign body presence. Such "cures" are ephemeral. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... improbably arise, even in England itself. These are, in fact, the results which have accrued. Without doubt, it was difficult to foresee them, but it is worthy of note that, in spite of all adverse and possibly ephemeral appearances, symptoms are not wanting which encourage the belief that the prescience of the early Free Traders may, in the end, be tardily vindicated. It is the irony of current politics that at a time when England is meditating a return to Protection—but is as yet, I am glad to say, very ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... all in all; Time, birth and death, ephemeral— Point where a little bird alighted, Then fled ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... much royal as he will ever be. In the same sense the divinity of man represents potential possibilities rather than an obvious fact of the moment. Man is an embryo god and, in time, he shall evolve faculties and powers that his present limited consciousness can not even comprehend. He is not an ephemeral creature of physical origin that lives a brief span to catch a glimpse of immortality and perish, but the deathless son of the living God, and by right divine he walks the upward ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... his recitals touched her risibility was extravagant. She laughed at danger, laughed at the weaknesses and foibles of men, when he told of the political and social ambitions which stirred mankind in the outside world. But he knew that her merriment proceeded not from an ephemeral sense of the ludicrous, but from a righteous appraisal of the folly and littleness of those things for which ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... have but one word to add. I have written in support of no political movement, nor for any ephemeral purpose. I have written only to express a deep conviction which is the result of more than twenty years of study, and reflection ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... in your veins, and fair women's faces shall seem fairer to you than ever, their embraces more tender, their kisses more tempting! Spin the ball of Society like a toy in the palm of your hand! I see your life stretching before me like a brilliant, thread-like ephemeral ray of light! But in the far distance across it looms a shadow—a shadow that your power alone can never lift. Mark me, Ivan! When the first dread chill of that shadow makes itself felt, come to me—I shall yet be ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too ephemeral-looking to play one. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... magnificently that he was a poet. So Follete lives in a golden zone of a certain sort—a golden, or rather torrid zone, whence he issues twice daily purple as to his face—and all these clouds and vapours and ephemeral winds pass far below him and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the sincere and fervid eloquence of the speakers—to place upon our pages an authentic record of the whole proceedings of the day. This "great national gathering," as it was aptly denominated, must be of enduring and not ephemeral interest, and will be remembered, and spoken of, and quoted, long after events of greater apparent importance have passed away into oblivion. The outpourings of a nation's heart are immortal. The tributes that were paid, in the ages long ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... himself occasionally with lighter composition, in which many an antiquated custom served as the butt for his biting satire. In his youth he had a penchant for poetry, and his poem on the flight, or expulsion, of the French from Russia was complimented by the Government. His muse dealt with ephemeral themes, but his bons mots are current among his countrymen to this day. A novel sort of plagiarism was the fashion of the time. Authors attributed their work to others, instead of claiming the product of others as their own. Levinsohn's Hefker Welt, ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... or Kiu-shih, with two capitals. It was destroyed in 60 B.C. by the Chinese general Cheng-Chi and eight small principalities were formed in its place. In the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. Turfan had some connection with two ephemeral states which arose in Kansu under the names of Hou Liang and Pei Liang. The former was founded by Lu-Kuang, the general who, as related above, took Kucha. He fell foul of a tribe in his territory called Chu-ch'u, described as belonging to the Hsiung-nu. Under their chieftain Meng-hsun, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... pamphlets the order of the day. In Paris alone, the year 1860 has given birth to hundreds of these writings of circumstance,—political squibs, visionary remodellings of European states,—vying with each other for ephemeral celebrity. They fill the windows of the book-shops, and are spread by scores along the stands in the numerous galleries which the Parisian population throngs of evenings. Those issued in the early part of the year have gradually descended from the rank of new publications, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... "Fathers and Children" rises above a picture of Russian politics in the sixties, and remains forever an immortal work of art. For the greatness of this book lies not in the use of the word Nihilist, nor in the reproduction of ephemeral political movements; its greatness consists in the fact that it faithfully portrays not merely the Russian character, nor the nineteenth century, but the very depths of the human heart as it has manifested itself in all ages and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... all the (Buchanan) subordinates abroad copies of the President's Message, accompanying it with a score of terse and sparkling paragraphs regarding the rebellion; yet, in those few paragraphs, demonstrating the illusory and ephemeral advantages which foreign nations would derive from any connection they might form with any 'dissatisfied or discontented portion, State, or section of the Union.' In this connection, he refers to the 'governments' of J. Davis, Esq., as 'those States of this Union in whose name a provisional ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... superseded the sword, for Victor and Eugene were scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to founding a periodical of ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... impressive to look on and conducive to solemn thoughts, the mountains rear their crests against the sky, and, crowned with the gathered snows of the centuries whose monuments they are, from aeon to aeon gaze majestically out over the wide plains and the ephemeral ant-like races who tread them, and while they endure think themselves the masters of their little world. And over all—mountain, plain, and flashing stream—the glorious light of the African sun and the Spirit of Life moving now as it once ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... 'Climatology' has been remarkably favored by the extension of European civilization to two opposite coasts, by its transmission from our western shores to a continent which is bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean. When, after the ephemeral colonization from Iceland and Greenland, the British laid the foundation of the first permanent settlements on the shores of the United States of America, the emigrants (whose numbers were rapidly increased in consequence either of religious persecution, fanaticism, or love of freedom, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... constant and close mathematical study of analogy—of probability—that we exclude error little by little from our observations—we improve more and more our instruments of precision—we count out the errors of our observation; and we are constantly seeking those laws which are not transient and ephemeral only, but which are eternal and immortal. Upon those laws, finally, must rest all our real, certain knowledge; and it is the endeavor of the anthropologist to apply those laws to man and his development; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... drawn by an impulse into a strife where there was nothing for him to gain, but everything to lose. He denounced the brutality of her husband, but her letters to him always addressed him as "my dear child." In writing to her he confides small love-secrets and ephemeral flirtations—which he would scarcely have done, had the countess viewed him with the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... philosophy.[19] And on yet a further height, above the nightingales, under the solitary stars alone, Ptolemy as he traces the celestial orbits is lifted above the touch of earth, and recognises in man's mortal and ephemeral substance a kinship with the eternal. /Man did eat angels' food: he opened the doors ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... position will be in a box of light soil, and the young seedlings may be protected from the severity of winter by the box containing them being placed in a cold frame, which should be covered by straw or other litter during very hard frosts. Although the majority of annuals are of a very ephemeral character, few things are more showy or more floriferous. Among many others we may particularise the fragrant white-flowered alyssum, the blue, dark purple, spotted, and white varieties of nemophila, white and pink virginian stock, and the large yellow ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... experienced what advantages are afforded in such cases by conversation? But conversation is ephemeral; and while the results of a mutual development are imperishable, the memory of the means by which it was reached disappears. Letters preserve better the stages of a progress which friends achieve together; every moment of growth is ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... classes of mortals, without our being able to assign, or even conjecture, the slightest reason for such experiments! I acknowledge freely, all, at we can give no reasons for them; but it is to mock miserable humanity to give such reasons as these; doubly to mock it, if men be the ephemeral creatures which Mr. Newman's theology leaves in such doubt: since in that case we see not only (what we see at any rate) that physical evil does not always, nor even in many instances, produce a salutary moral effect, but that it ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... during the third the conditions are reversed, and the guest is lord of all he is willing to survey. It is conducive to comfort to approach these resorts during the last stage,—unless, of course, they happen to be those ephemeral caravansaries which close in confusion on the flight of the crowd; they ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... annals of the world who has such solid claims to everlasting renown? Alexander overthrew many nations; but he set up nothing permanent. Julius Caesar instituted the Roman Empire; but its duration was ephemeral in comparison with that of the empire founded by Shi-hwang-ti, the builder of ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... merits may be unequal, their talent various, their pieces sometimes uninteresting; but, taken as a whole, their works exhibit the greatest efforts of human genius. What has the Romantic school to exhibit, after its inimitable founder, as a set-off to this long line of greatness? The ephemeral and now forgotten lights of the British stage—the blasting indecencies of Beaumont and Fletcher; the vigorous ribaldry of Dryden; the shocking extravagances of the recent French and Spanish stage; the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... benevolence. We hold that the life of brutes perishes with their breath, and that they are never to be clothed again with consciousness. The inevitable shortness then of their existence should plead for them touchingly. The insects on the surface of the water, poor ephemeral things, who would needlessly abridge their dancing pleasure of to-day? Such feelings we should have towards ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... we will against this infamous troth-mongering which is destructive of international relations, and indirectly of social intercourse, but no responsible government can afford to ignore the necessity of guarding against its consequences. For it is no ephemeral manifestation of temperament, nor the passing whim of a political party or a class. The law of double citizenship, coupled with a plenary indulgence for treason and perjury in the cause of the Fatherland, is but the solemn consecration ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... however, he did not succeed; and meeting with no encouragement in any other quarter, he devoted himself henceforward to the service of the booksellers. More novels, translation, historical compilation, ephemeral criticism, were the multifarious employments which they laid on him. Nothing that he afterwards produced quite came up to the raciness of his first performances. In 1753, he published the Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. In ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... Experience, life, man, seem to me ever higher and more awful; and though there is constantly intervening the crushing thought of what a poor thing I am, and my life is, and I am sometimes disheartened and tempted to be reckless, and to say, "It's no matter what this ephemeral being, this passing dust and wind, shall come to,"—yet ever, like the little eddying whirlwinds that I see in the street before me, this dusty breath of life struggles upward. I am very sad and glorious by turns; and sometimes, when mortality is ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... for and planned this misery, escape the ephemeral justice of man, there is yet the inexorable tribunal of the Hereafter, which no transgressor, small or great, humble or mighty, may in ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... condition of France, and, in biting and scornful words, in the language of sadness and despair, developed the need and the misfortune of the land. The king gave the chief minister of police strict injunctions to send him all these ephemeral publications. He wanted to read them all, wanted to find the kernel of wheat which each contained, and, from his enemies, who assuredly would not flatter, he wanted to learn how to be a good king. And the first of ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... velvet neck-ribbons round their snowy throats and coquettish patches on their delicate skin and bouquets of flowers in their high-dressed hair and sheeny bodices. They look at us with arch eyes and smile with melting mouths, more frivolous than depraved; sweet, ephemeral, irresponsible in every relation of life. Older men and women there are, too, when those artificial years have produced a succession of rather dull, sodden personages, kindly, inoffensive, but stupid, and still ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... and Rastignac, by du Tillet and Blondet, gave his support ostentatiously to the "doctrinaires" of their new and ephemeral cabinet. But in order to show himself pure of all bribery he refused to take advantage of certain profitable enterprises which were started by means of his paper,—he! who had no reluctance in compromising friends or in behaving with little decency to mechanics under certain circumstances. ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... household. A draught of wine cannot go round to the mourners, but he must minister it. A chair may hardly be restored to its place by a less solemn hand than his. He takes upon himself all functions, and is a sort of ephemeral major-domo! He distributes his attentions among the company assembled according to the degree of affliction, which he calculates from the degree of kin to the deceased; and marshals them accordingly in the procession. He himself is of a sad and tristful countenance; yet such as ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with it, as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as may ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... moss-grown, had in comparison an ephemeral, modern aspect. For a hundred years its inmates had come and gone and lived and died. They took no heed of the crag, but never a sound was lost upon it. Their drawling iterative speech the iterative echoes conned. The ringing blast of a horn set astir some phantom chase in the air. When the cows ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... not due to any such considerations. Justly or unjustly he felt bitterly aggrieved at certain personalities which, he thought, were to be detected in "Vivian Grey." Mr. Disraeli was also suspected of being concerned in an ephemeral publication called The Star Chamber, to which he undoubtedly contributed certain articles, and in which paragraphs appeared giving offence in Albemarle Street. The story of Vivian Grey (as it appeared in the first edition) is transposed from ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... illusion, instantly dissipated by appeal to biological fact, nor would a biologist-statesman look for permanent stability in a multiplication of competing communities, some vigorous, others worthless, but all growing in population. Rather must a people familiar with science see how small and ephemeral a thing is the pride of nations, knowing that both the peace of the world and the progress of civilisation are to be sought not by the hardening of national boundaries but in the substitution of ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... stellar atmosphere as the body cools down. In the case of ordinary stars these changes no doubt occupy many millions of years, which represent the average duration of solar life; but the temporary stars run through similar changes in a few months: they resemble ephemeral insects — born in the morning and doomed to perish with the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... Posthumus to Tetricus, its connections with Italy ceased, and it maintained its own emperors and its own legions. This was in sympathy with the rising spirit of nationalities, awakened throughout the empire by Septimus Severus, but in this ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille Jullian before the Academie des Inscriptions in 1896, "as we would willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening of the third century, it was entirely superficial, and doubtless slightly ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... upon the comforts, liberties, and little gracefulnesses of our modern life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of at least ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Hoe vaart uwe? How do you sail? adopted no doubt in the early periods of the Republic, when they were all navigators and fishermen. The usual salutation at Cairo is, How do you sweat? a dry hot skin being a sure indication of a destructive ephemeral fever. I think some author has observed, in contrasting the haughty Spaniard with the frivolous Frenchman, that the proud steady gait and inflexible solemnity of the former were expressed in his mode of salutation, Come esta? How do you stand? ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of theology. Already, however, it was apparent that the ecclesiastical party would, in the end, get the upper hand, and that the reluctance of some of the emperors to obey its behests was merely the revolt of individual minds, and therefore ephemeral in its nature, and that the popular wishes would be abundantly gratified as soon as emperors arose who not merely, like Constantine, availed themselves of Christianity, but absolutely and sincerely ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... contemporaries, but whose true intellectual measure cannot, from the lack of the necessary materials on which to form a judgment, be now taken anew; and that many of the others employed fine faculties in work, literary and ministerial, which, though important in its consequences, was scarce less ephemeral in its character than even the labours of the newspaper editor. The mind of Chalmers was emphatically a many-sided one. Few men ever came into friendly contact with him, who did not find in it, if they had really anything good in them, moral or intellectual, a side that suited themselves; and ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the special work he elected to do; he had to establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now, more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy to rank ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Bulwer Lytton, who once said to me, "I think more of my poems and 'The Lady of Lyons' and 'Richelieu' than of all my novels, from 'Pelham' to 'What will he do with it?'" (which was the last he had then written). "A poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's; and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... sea life when I served ship-owners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the well-known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian Transport Company. A death leaves something behind, but there was never anything tangible left from the F. C. T. C. It flourished no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... These dark clouds are ephemeral. They will roll away, and we shall once more gladly recognise the lineaments of an essentially lofty character, of one who, though a man of genius and of letters, neither outraged society nor stooped to it; ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... question. And there are good physiological reasons for this. We learn names only after many other parts of speech—which means that the brain-cells corresponding thereto are laid down or brought into conscious activity last; they are therefore more ephemeral and less fundamental than others—hence the first to "go." This accounts for the increasing difficulty in the aged for remembering names—theirs is a physiological rather than a psychological defect. By analogy, therefore, there ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... proper to their surroundings, the necessity for revision is even more imperative; the change in the cultured speech of a language is a process that requires years to become pronounced, the evolution of slang is rapid and its usage ephemeral. For example Stephen Gaselee, in his bibliography of Petronius, calls attention to Harry Thurston Peck's rendering of "bell um pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this was well enough for 1898; but we would ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... had entirely forgotten that in the intricacies of his mechanical lurked the papers that might overthrow a throne! Magnificent Incarnation was he (in that oblivion) of Science itself, which cares not a jot for men and nations, in their ephemeral existences; which only remembers THINGS,—things that endure for ages; and in its stupendous calculations loses sight of the unit of a generation! No, he had thoroughly forgotten Henry, Edward, his own limbs and life,—not only York and Lancaster, but Adam Warner and the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... real nature of the malady to which M. Jules Noriac, the witty, humorous, and observant writer of "The Hundred and First Regiment," the essay on "Human Stupidity," and numerous dramatic pieces of a more or less ephemeral kind, has just fallen a victim. It has been generally understood that M. Noriac died from a mysterious malady which has not long since been recognised by French physicians as the "smoker's cancer." It is alleged that the deceased man of letters suffered for ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... indefinite leisure which had hitherto been so wholly lacking, for the events of ephemeral lives occur at indeterminate hours, at unexpected moments, and are of ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... explained the matter. The explanation brought Lionel relief. But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. In his eyes it ceased to be a risk; it became ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... going more trace than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... is trenched by a number of crossed gullies, well seen when the E. wall is on the morning terminator. Just beyond the N. glacis is a large irregular dusky enclosure with a central mound, and another smaller low ring adjoining it on the S.E. The visibility of these objects is very ephemeral, as they disappear soon after sunrise. Aristillus is also the centre of ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... mercantile firm of Messrs. Lecky and Mark, and in 1817 he appeared as an exhibitor in the second exhibition of the Cork Society, for he had already displayed considerable talent as an artist. In 1818 he contributed to an ephemeral production called 'The Literary and Political Examiner:' on the 22nd March of that year his father died, and he left Ireland, not to revisit it until he made a short excursion there in 1821 with Alfred Nicholson and Miss Nicholson (who afterwards became Mrs. Croker), ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... the flowers of the morning glory. They bloom and smile every morning, fade and die in a few hours. How fleeting and ephemeral their lives are! But it is that short life itself that makes them frail, delicate, and lovely. They come forth all at once as bright and beautiful as a rainbow or as the Northern light, and disappear like dreams. This is the best condition for them, because, if ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... stating that in the reading-room at Albany, near Washington, he perused English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. To be popular in a rising and far country has a kind of posthumous feel, very different from the ephemeral eclat and fete-ing, buzzing and party-ing compliments of the well-dressed multitude. I can safely say that, during my reign in the spring of 1812, I regretted nothing but its duration of six weeks instead of a fortnight, and was heartily ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows. My wanderings were directed towards the valley of Chamounix. I had visited it frequently during my boyhood. Six years had passed since then: I was a wreck, but nought had changed in ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... thou, foundling, still forego Thy heritage and high ambition, To lie full lowly and full low, Adjusted to thy new condition? Not hidden in the drifted snows, But under ink-drops idly spattered, And leaves ephemeral as those That on ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... looked back and reviewed the past. On such occasions I have been half inclined to make the reflection, common to all journalists, when they survey the monumental works of our brethren in the superior ranks of the literary profession: "Have I not cast my life and energy away on things ephemeral and unworthy? Have not I preferred a kind of glorified pot-boiling to the service of the spirit?" In the end, however, like the painter with the journalist's heart in Robert Browning's poem, I console myself for having enlisted among the tradesmen of literature ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... obliged to withdraw the prefaces formerly published, in response to essentially ephemeral criticisms, I will retain only ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... of these propositions may at first seem strange, but they are founded. The quantity of trash I have received as books is incalculable, and neither amused nor instructed. Reviews and magazines are at the best but ephemeral and superficial reading: who thinks of the grand article of last year in any given Review? In the next place, if they regard myself, they tend to increase egotism. If favourable, I do not deny that the praise elates, and if unfavourable, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... a too long-winded Letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners, dining repartees, and other ephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remind us of what we know well already: that however it may be with Metaphysics, and other abstract Science originating in the Head (Verstand) alone, no Life-Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), such as this of Clothes pretends to be, which ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of deep reflection, of slowly maturing thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between excited passions and ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... goals; by the end of the century, a dynamic, more physiological attitude was apparent, and theories of development derived from an entirely different philosophic base. During this time, English investigators contributed much, some of ephemeral, some of lasting importance to the development of embryology. For this discussion, we will divide the seventeenth century into three overlapping, but generally distinct, periods; and, without pretence of presenting an exhaustive exposition, we will concentrate upon the ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... to augur, quick-eared Shade. Ephemeral at the best all honours be, These even more ephemeral than their kind, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... say "conscience"—that is, an intimate knowledge through identity: the intuition of a thing which is one with the knower—I do not say "The Catholic Aspect of History." This talk of "aspects" is modern and therefore part of a decline: it is false, and therefore ephemeral: I will not stoop to it. I will rather do homage to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic "aspect" of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all of these look ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... my faith, sir. The history of the ephemeral insect is the history of a day,—that of a man means a whole life; the history of nations means centuries, that of the world eternity; and in eternity justice comes to each one ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... profession, at least—as a promising writer; and was already, to more than a few, personally known as a very agreeable, gentlemanly fellow, so that in the following season he had a good many invitations. It was by nothing beyond the ephemeral that he was known; but may not the man who has invented a good umbrella one day build a good palace? His acquaintance was considerably varied, but of the social terraces above the professional, he knew for ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... mistaking shadow for substance, the accidental for the essential. He "disproves" religion without in the least comprehending it. He hammers away at the Immaculate Conception and the miracles with a vigor that amuses those who realize that cults and creeds are but ephemeral, while faith in the Almighty endures forever. And of all the Atheists and Agnostics Bob Ingersoll is the most insupportable. He is but a mouthful of sweetened wind, a painted echo, an oratorical hurdy-gurdy that plays the music of others. He's ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... see her facts in another light. Those things that had been wont to be considered as axioms and irrefutable postulates in her daily acceptance were suddenly seen as the most ephemeral hypotheses. The desirability of Bloomfield and the lustre about the name "McCallum"—two rocks upon which she had builded the edifice of her confidence—were found of a sudden to be but shifting sands, hard-packed enough on the ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would have left any but a most ephemeral mark apart from ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... to receive punishment proportionate to his transgressions. He was especially severe upon those who, puffed up with wealth and authority, were expecting an almost reverential treatment; he could not away with their ephemeral presumption and superciliousness, their failure to realize the mortality of themselves and their fortunes. Stripped of all that made them glorious, of wealth and birth and power, there they stood naked and downcast, reconstructing their worldly blessedness in their minds like a dream that ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... exhilarating, whilst others have a degree of pathos which touches the heart; still none of their music has the nerve, the depth, the sterling solidity of the German, nor the elegance nor grace of the Italian. Yet some composers they have whose works will have more than an ephemeral fame, amongst whom may be cited Aubert, whose music is not only admired in France but throughout all Europe; another author of extreme merit is Onslow, whose productions are not so voluminous or so extensively known as those of Aubert, but possessing ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... condition of life than your daughter, that I am sorry to think of the observations it may excite. The whole scheme has appeared to me from the beginning most foolish, and if you knew what I know of the state and fortune of our ephemeral literature, you would use what influence you have with her to induce her to condemn her 'contributions' to the adorning of a private annual rather than the purpose in unhappy question. I wish I dared to appeal through my true love for her ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... just that, frankly, we feel they're getting too far away from reality. Trips to Mars and Venus—strange creatures.... It's not real—it's not dignified. Frankly, we question whether an institution like ours can afford to be connected with anything so—so ephemeral. ...
— Reel Life Films • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... spending a royal income with beggarly meanness, had backed one of COBBYN'S bills for L1,000. Sir PAUL PACKTHREAD, one of the greatest of the local magnates, had lent him L500 without a scrap of security, and Colonel CHUTNEY had put L300 into the Ephemeral Soapsuds Company, Limited, of which COBBYN was to have been the managing director. I cannot go through the whole long list. He had fleeced all that was fleeceable in Dansington, and had vanished into the clouds. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... thou the image of a thought that fares Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead, Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares, To where our lives are ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... viewed, his answer was, "in the light of the public square." A statue which will not bear the criticism of that place is assuredly untrue. Shakespeare wrote for the public square, not for exhibition in the gallery of some ephemeral school of taste, nor for the private collection of some self-elected critic, who holds a pouncet-box while he applies his ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... breathed the lesson of the dead: Sudden the rich bells chorussed overhead: "O be not of the throng ephemeral To whom to-day is fame, to-morrow fate, Proud of some robe no statelier than a pall, Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral— A phantom generation fatuate. Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save, Virtue ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... were one day discussing the question of the permanency of fame, how ephemeral for example was that reputation which depended upon the living presence of the artist to make good its claim; how an actor, an orator, a singer, was bound to enjoy his glory while it lasted, since at the instant of his death all tangible evidence of greatness disappeared; he could ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... example; and of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right. And if, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... destination, but swift to destruction." And the Heavy Review, whose motto was "Stemus super turnpikes," offered "to back old Father Thames against the Woolwich railway for any sum. And Black Will, who drove the next heaviest ephemeral in the island, told a schoolboy, who now writes these pages, "there's nothing can ever be safe at twenty miles an hour, without 'tis a bird in the air;" and confirmed it with an oath. Briefly, buzz! ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... has given of the City of Palaces, and of its inhabitants, prove how accurately she had seized their characteristic features. Here her pen was called into incessant activity; besides various contributions to Annuals and other ephemeral works, Miss Roberts undertook the formidable task (doubly formidable in such a climate) of editing a newspaper, and the Oriental Observer, whilst under her direction, was enriched by some valuable articles written by herself, indicating ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be predicted ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... We are presently to die, let us then enjoy to its full relish the remnant of our lives. Sordid care, avaunt! menial labours, and pains, slight in themselves, but too gigantic for our exhausted strength, shall make no part of our ephemeral existences. In the beginning of time, when, as now, man lived by families, and not by tribes or nations, they were placed in a genial clime, where earth fed them untilled, and the balmy air enwrapt their reposing limbs with warmth more pleasant than beds of down. The south is the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... lady you saw at his table. She holds as strange tenets as he, which she supports with as much zeal, and almost as much ability. But I predict that the popularity of their doctrines will not last; and if ever you visit the moon again, you will find that their glory, now at its height, like the ephemeral fashions of the earth, will ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen. But scarcely is the ink dry on the page of his last known political pamphlet, when Fielding reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral politician, but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for English literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... tempting field of operations for an ambitious ruler. Otto first crossed the Alps in 951, married the widow of one of the ephemeral Italian kings, and, without being formally crowned, was generally acknowledged as king of Italy. The revolt of his son compelled him to return to Germany, but a decade later the pope called him to his assistance. ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... these knaves and the personification of all the treachery and stupidity in the world... In 1794 our inmost, serious sentiment was wholly contained in this idea: to be useful to our country; all other things, our clothes, our food, advancement, were poor ephemeral details. As society did not exist, there was no such thing for us as social success, that leading element in the character of our nation. Our only gatherings were national festivals, moving ceremonies which nourished in us the love of our country. In the streets ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... every person who knows him. Living in the midst of a cheerful and contented tenantry, the chieftain as it were of a devoted clan, the proprietor of Nannau may be truly termed a happy man. The empty blandishments of the world have no charms for him, nor have its ephemeral pleasures any allurement; for, like the gallant knight of Peugwern, when invited by Henry the Seventh to share the honors of his court, for services rendered at Bosworth Field, he would meekly but promptly reply, "Sire! I love to dwell among mine own people." Such is Sir Robert Vaughan ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... stolidly. "By their own bulk—like a big snowball. And by their own badness. People are rolling back to the country—the country they came from. Improved transportation will do it." The troubles of the town were ephemeral—he waved them aside. But his face was set in a frown—doubtless at the thought of the perdurable ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Seth lay upon his pallet in the shanty, the sound of Langley's horse's hoofs reached him with an accompaniment of a clear, young masculine voice singing a verse of some sentimental modern carol—a tender song ephemeral and sweet. As the sounds neared the cabin the lad sprang up restlessly, and so was standing at the open door when the singer ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that indefinite leisure which had hitherto been so wholly lacking, for the events of ephemeral lives occur at indeterminate hours, at unexpected moments, and are of ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... man less well-known, but elegant and sought after, one of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during his ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration towards the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife towards the other and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral.' It is for this bird-like quality of song, it seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and under partly ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... hoax, or as our merry ancestors would have called it, a flam, is usually the most ephemeral and evanescent of human devices. Like a boy's soap bubble, it glitters for a brief moment in iridescent rotundity, then ceases to be even a film of air. It is unsubstantial as the tail of Halley's comet. On rare occasions, it is true, its existence is prolonged; ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the crowd—that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no echo, upon a ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to date the number of German newspapers with an ephemeral existence published in Brazil is legion. Excepting those above mentioned, we shall only concern ourselves with the ones which had a continual existence from the time of their founding and appearing to ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... for others' thoughts—well, why should the ecstatic young bride, full of the delight of her title and the Feodoreff sapphires, take the least interest in the fate of a miscreant with whom, in the period of his success, she had indulged in an ephemeral flirtation? ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... evergreen, ever-splendid Nature consumes the results of human endeavor so swiftly, buries memories so profoundly, distorts the labors of generations so grotesquely, that one feels here, as nowhere else, how ephemeral man is, how intense and how tireless the effort necessary to preserve his frail creations even a little while from the vast unconscious forces antagonistic to all stability, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... present incumbent of regal authority, who had only part therein for the brief space of his mortal journey. Louis's words are pathetic indeed, as he calls himself a sojourner in France, en voyage through life, as though the fact itself of his likeness to the rest of ephemeral mankind was novel to his audience. He reiterated the statement that the interests involved were theirs, ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... slightest reason for such experiments! I acknowledge freely, all, at we can give no reasons for them; but it is to mock miserable humanity to give such reasons as these; doubly to mock it, if men be the ephemeral creatures which Mr. Newman's theology leaves in such doubt: since in that case we see not only (what we see at any rate) that physical evil does not always, nor even in many instances, produce a salutary ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... was astonished: an entirely new field of literature appeared to be opened to my view. It was a discovery, but I confess rather an unpleasant one; for I said to myself, if literary talent is so very common in London, that the journals, things which, as their very name denotes, are ephemeral, are written in a style like the article I have been perusing, how can I hope to distinguish myself in this big town, when, for the life of me, I don't think I could write anything half so clever ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... limited. The newspapers, therefore, furnish the only source of reading for the majority. Practically all the papers are published in the cities of Santo Domingo, Santiago and Puerto Plata, and all are of modest dimensions. Many newspapers have been founded in the Republic and after leading an ephemeral existence have succumbed, some because their editors were persuaded by threats or rewards on the part of the government to cease publication, and the greater portion because of financial embarrassment. Notwithstanding the constitutional ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... air was at this season filled with what is called the Green Bay fly, a species of dragon-fly, with which the outer walls of the houses are at times so covered that their color is hardly distinguishable. Their existence is very ephemeral, scarcely lasting more than a day. Their dead bodies are seen adhering to the walls and windows within, and they fall without in such numbers that after a high wind has gathered them into rows along the sides of the quarters, ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group solidarity; in which the accredited ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... then advanced north to attack the town of Kintang, rather more than forty miles north of Liyang. At this point Gordon experienced his first serious rebuff at the hands of Fortune, for the earlier reverse at the Soochow stockades was so clearly due to a miscarriage in the attack, and so ephemeral in its issue, that it ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... and enemies resembling Amerigo, I should not see, as now, the magnificent scene of his triumph so suddenly changed into mourning and horror, the gloomy night of ignominy and mockery succeed the brief light of ephemeral happiness, and that invincible leader, who redoubled the power and dominions of ungrateful Castile, groaning under the weight of infamous chains, while he asks for nothing but liberty to carry her arms to the most distant shores of ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... and, in her aloof genre, beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Music is intangible and ephemeral, but it comes from the home world of the spirit and though so fleeting it is recognized by the spirit as a soul-speech fresh from the celestial realms, an echo from the home whence we are now exiled, and therefore it touches a cord in our being, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... shape they had made, whether by argument or not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they fell. Then Jacob was left ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... of her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction. The fact that for years her friends had been the small group of the momentarily fashionable required, in her eyes, no explanation. So simple was her creed that she believed people were fashionable ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... Though "of the day" is a recognized expression for "ephemeral" or "transitory," yet to use "day" for a short time, and "hour" for a longer, is objectionable. Write moment for day. Else write future for hour. (b) "—this gentleman ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... in a too long-winded Letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners, dining repartees, and other ephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remind us of what we knew well already: that however it may be with Metaphysics, and other abstract Science originating in the Head (Verstand) alone, no Life-Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), such as ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... to dwell on such interests as those over which we have a fancied control, than on those which confessedly transcend our understanding. Thus is it ever with men. The wonders of creation meet them at every turn, without awakening reflection, while their minds labor on subjects that are not only ephemeral and illusory, but which never attain an elevation higher than that the most sordid ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... genius stirring in him, and he strove for the knowledge to give it nourishment, and the field to give it exercise. He read and wrote, as well as worked and talked. It would be a task for antiquarian research to recover his very earliest lucubrations scattered among the ephemeral periodicals of that day. Plays of his might be dug out, whose very names are unknown to his most intimate friends. He scattered his early fruit far and wide,—getting little from the world in exchange. Literature was then a harder ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... personification of all the treachery and stupidity in the world... In 1794 our inmost, serious sentiment was wholly contained in this idea: to be useful to our country; all other things, our clothes, our food, advancement, were poor ephemeral details. As society did not exist, there was no such thing for us as social success, that leading element in the character of our nation. Our only gatherings were national festivals, moving ceremonies which nourished in us the love of our country. In the streets ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... large numbers of students, and the concourse was often so great that the lectures were delivered in the churches and in public squares. Those republics which still existed, and the princes who had risen on the ruins of the more ephemeral ones, rivaled each other in their patronage of literary men; the popes, who in the preceding ages had denounced all secular learning, now became its munificent patrons; and two of them, Nicholas V. and Pius II., ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... or the little Japanese girl who deliberately bit through her tongue that she might not utter a syllable that would jeopardize the interests or safety of her father. The word analyzed is a dead thing; the word in use is a living thing. The word merely analyzed is apt to be ephemeral; the word in use is abiding and increasingly significant. As the child puts more and more content into the word, he, himself, expands at the same rate in the scope and power of his thinking. Words are the materials ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Frederick Dillingham was one and the same person who sailed the Charlotte to India, China, South America, or some other ephemeral port. How paradoxical was this dual role, ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... is so slight," he said, "one of those ephemeral productions that are forgotten in a day, that it will serve our purpose well. We must have a password—the less noticeable the better. When do you return ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... Melrose stared with dreamy eyes, and Susy remembered her drifting disorganised life, a life more planless, more inexplicable than that of any of the other ephemeral beings blown about upon the same ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... whether the Pope of Rome, who sells indulgences, is a heretic. And as the Pope is likely to outlive Messrs. Shaw, etc., by perhaps a thousand years, it is possible that Chesterton has been attacking the ephemeral heresies, while leaving the major ones untouched. In effect, Chesterton tells us no more than that we should shout with the largest crowd. But the largest crowd prefers, just now, not to ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... been discussed among the British critics and editors. From the very beginning, eight years ago, there have been manifestations of personal animosity, indications of an eagerness to seize the opportunity of venting long secreted venom. This has appeared as well in books as in more ephemeral publications, and upon both sides, and even between writers on the same side. On every hand there has been a most deplorable impeachment of motive, accompanied by a detraction of character by imputation which is quite shocking. Petty personal slights have been insinuated as the ultimate cause ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who was not in posse or in esse a good critic of the highest and most enduring literature. The writer ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... affectation of the follies and vices of high life. It is true that the notion of vulgarity is affixed, in the fine world, to many trifling modes of dress and deportment, which in themselves have no demerit whatever, except that something opposed to them has acquired an ephemeral propriety from the fancy of the great. But in real good breeding there is always a reason. It is far too little attended to in England in any class, though, from acting as a continual corrective to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of the hardships and privations of their younger days, as the veteran loves to discourse of his marches, battles, scars, and sieges. It would be too much to say that these persons viewed the more ephemeral part of the population with distrust, for their familiarity with changes accustomed them to new faces; but they had a secret inclination for each other, preferred those who could enter the most sincerely into their own feelings, and naturally ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... actions. Her lips were red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too ephemeral-looking to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... deformed disciples, who succeed in entangling their false pretensions with the claims of true merit. So much dust is puffed into the eyes of the public, that it can hardly distinguish between works of durable importance and the ephemeral productions of empirics; and those who would otherwise disdain the notoriety acquired by advertisement, end in adopting the system as the only means to avoid the mortification of seeing their own ideas appropriated and uttered in another form ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... effect, but the lessons are imparted in simple and concise language. This is just what a text-book should be.... The treatise is certainly most useful, and bears internal evidence of being the results of actual work in a busy manufactory and not of ephemeral cramming in a technical school. The chapter arrangement is good, the index satisfactory, and the book is altogether one which the practical chemist should keep as accessible to his crucibles ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... Shabby dance-halls, ephemeral Thespian efforts, cheap dens of the most brutal vice, and dark lairs abound, where sailors, laborers, and crowding criminals lurk, ready for their human prey. Their female accomplices are only the sirens watching these great strongholds ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the problem of population that is being worked out now, not the mere spontaneous and ephemeral struggle ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... heart of his client, had assured Jane the South African employer would take an early opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" in that way before, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Blamite troops offered such a determined resistance to all attack, that he was finally left in undisturbed possession of his kingdom (692 B.C.): the actual result to Assyria, therefore, of the ephemeral victory gained by the fleet had been the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... as if its natty laws were a library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without mischief—they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning sand, and leave depression growing from ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... protraction of the fulfilment of the most yearning expectation and fulfilled desire will seem but as the winking of an eyelid when we get to estimate duration by the same scale by which He estimates it, the scale of Eternity. The ephemeral insect, born in the morning and dead when the day fades, has a still minuter scale than ours, but we should not think of regulating our estimate of long and short by it. Do not let us commit the equal absurdity of regulating the march of His providence ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... had Thomas, dazzled by the reception of "Le Caid," remained for a long time a wanderer from the path which lay open to his great talents. The composer's ambition, however, proved to be too high to content itself with ephemeral success, or cultivating the more frivolous forms of his art, however profitable aid ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Mr. Lowe's reputation as a prophet that, after more than one hundred and thirty years, this ephemeral firework, as he deemed it, should still be sparkling with undiminished brilliancy, and to judge by recent editions, is selling as vigorously as ever. From the days when Lady Mary wrote "Ne plus ultra" in her own copy, and La Harpe called it le premier roman du monde, (a phrase ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Bethlehem, money-vine,—all have seen better days, but now are flower-tramps. Even the larkspur, beloved of children, the moss-pink, and the grape-hyacinth may sometimes be seen growing in country fields and byways. The homely and cheerful blossoms of the orange-tawny ephemeral lily, and the spotted tiger-lily, whose gaudy colors glow with the warmth of far Cathay—their early home—now make gay many of our roadsides and crowd upon the sweet cinnamon roses of our grandmothers, which also ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... buds; the passion-flowers, asclepiads, bignonias, convolvuluses, and climbing leguminous plants escape both floods and cattle by climbing the highest trees and towering overhead in a flood of bloom. The ground plants are the portulacas, turneras, and cenotheras, bitter and ephemeral, on the bare rock, and almost independent of any other moisture than the heavy dews. The pontederias, alismas, and plantago, with grasses and sedges, derive protection from the deep and brilliant pools; and though ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... schooled men in trickery and peculation. It was a corrupting influence in the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have profited ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... he passed through Preston, Jenny Cameron is said to have administered cordials. By the same writer the Jacobite army are described as looking like "hunted hares." Such is a specimen of one of the ephemeral slanders of the day; and the circumstance of the coach and six tends to disprove the whole letter. The Prince, it is evident from every isolated account, marched on foot until he entered Derby.[110] It was, however, perfectly true that Mrs. Murray of Broughton and Lady Ogilvie, whose husbands ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... Burden Onerous Beginning Initial Boundary Conterminous Brother Fraternal Bowels Visceral Body Corporeal Birth Natal, native Calf Vituline Carcass Cadaverous Cat Feline Cow Vaccine Country Rural, rustic Church Ecclesiastical Death Mortal Dog Canine Day Diurnal, meridian, ephemeral Disease Morbid East Oriental Egg Oval Ear Auricular Eye Ocular Flesh Carnal, carnivorous Father Paternal Field Agrarian Flock Gregarious Foe Hostile Fear Timorous, timid Finger Digital Flattery Adulatory ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... subsequent references to this proposed collection or miscellany of composures, and I know of no book that was published at that time which could answer the description, so I suspect the well-laid plan came to naught. The specimens of local and ephemeral poetry that were printed in the colonial press in succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... a strong vein of intense feeling upon certain subjects, restrained as a rule by his dislike to unveiling his heart too freely and yet making itself perceptible in some forcible phrase and in the general temper of mind implied. The great mass of such work is necessarily of ephemeral interest; and it is painful to turn over the old pages and observe what a mould of antiquity seems to have spread over controversies so exciting only thirty years ago. We have gone far in the interval; though it is well to remember that ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... His first act is to transmit to all the (Buchanan) subordinates abroad copies of the President's Message, accompanying it with a score of terse and sparkling paragraphs regarding the rebellion; yet, in those few paragraphs, demonstrating the illusory and ephemeral advantages which foreign nations would derive from any connection they might form with any 'dissatisfied or discontented portion, State, or section of the Union.' In this connection, he refers to the 'governments' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... little volume of ephemeral essays to you in recognition of your worth as a man and a scientist, and as ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... lately dead, men have a right to say, as Saul said to the Witch of Endor, "Call up Samuel!" In your study of a life so recent as Kinglake's, give us, if you choose, some critical synopsis of his monumental writings, some salvage from his ephemeral and scattered papers; trace so much of his youthful training as shaped the development of his character; depict, with wise restraint, his political and public life: but also, and above all, re-clothe him "in his habit as he lived," ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... stiffish climb up out of the valley of the Jonte. By the time he had managed it, the sun had already robbed all vegetation of its ephemeral jewellery, the Causse itself showed few signs of a downpour which had drenched it for seventy-two hours on end. To that porous limestone formation water in whatever quantity is as beer to a boche. Only, if one paused to listen on the brink of an aven, there were odd ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... answered Aylmer,—"pluck it, and inhale its brief perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed-vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over and over again expressed in addresses to the Governor up to 1834. Such being the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... enterprise, contented with what they have, nor ambitious for more—which, to an American, with whom, if the earth is obtained, the moon must be striven for, is stranger than all else—living indolently at their ease, regardless of ephemeral worldly distinctions, but happy in the comforts of home, and striving only to make this a place for the enjoyment of themselves and those ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... necessity for revision is even more imperative; the change in the cultured speech of a language is a process that requires years to become pronounced, the evolution of slang is rapid and its usage ephemeral. For example Stephen Gaselee, in his bibliography of Petronius, calls attention to Harry Thurston Peck's rendering of "bell um pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this was well ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... been divided into a succession of private rooms, comfortably furnished, where, screened behind thick curtains, dined somewhat "irregular" patrons: lovers who were in either the dawn, the zenith, or the decline of their often ephemeral fancies. On the top floor, spacious salons, richly decorated, were used for large and ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... The clarion sweetness of the dance-music, now pealing loudly on the air, irritated his nerves,—the lights, the flowers, the brilliancy of the whole scene jarred upon his soul,—what was it all but sham, he thought!—a show in the mere name of friendship!—an ephemeral rose of pleasure with a worm at its core! Impatiently he shook himself free of those who sought to detain him and went at once to his library,—a sombre, darkly-furnished apartment, large enough to seem gloomy by contrast with the gaiety ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... it must be confessed he began to wonder whether his services to the nation were worth so much hardship, such complete isolation. The stream sang of the eternities, and his own short span of life (half gone already without any permanent accomplishment) seemed pitifully ephemeral. The guardians of these high places must forever be solitary. No ranger could rightfully be husband and father, for to bring women and children into these ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... panting, staring at the distant haze of a peak. Trackless and tortuous, the way underfoot was incredibly difficult. Yet the distances melted in ephemeral slopes as lovely in their tints as they were accursed in their reality of cruelty. Rhoda, unaccustomed to day travel, panted and gasped as they walked. But she held her own fairly well, while DeWitt, sick and overstrained at the start, ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... travel often over the various creeks in order to decide which claims should lapse and which should be retained. A quartz miner himself in his early youth, before coming to Alaska, he dreamed of finding the mother-lode. A placer camp he knew was ephemeral, while a quartz camp abided, and he kept a score of men in the quest for months. The mother-lode was never found, and, years afterward, he estimated that the search for it had cost ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... physiological reasons for this. We learn names only after many other parts of speech—which means that the brain-cells corresponding thereto are laid down or brought into conscious activity last; they are therefore more ephemeral and less fundamental than others—hence the first to "go." This accounts for the increasing difficulty in the aged for remembering names—theirs is a physiological rather than a psychological defect. By analogy, therefore, there is every reason to believe that proper names are ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... talent and learned professional pride have been overbalanced by a democratic press. The whole nation writes, and the individual writer is either swallowed up in the mass or gains but ephemeral fame. Every writer, almost without exception, affects a popular style. But, in this rich literary field, all springs up freely without connection or guidance. No party is concentrated or represented by any reigning journal, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... accidentally crossing his path. She considered sacred a sash which she wore when dancing with him, and she remembered him specially in her prayers. Henceforward, one devouring desire occupied her mind. She wished—and praiseworthily—to be Burton's wife. To him, on the other hand, she was but an ephemeral fancy—one of the hundred and fifty women—his fair cousins in England and the softer and darker beauties of France and Italy—to whom he had said tender nothings. Later, when Miss Arundell saw him flirting with another girl, a certain "Louise" [100] ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... tea-masters substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tea-room, and the term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical. It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... his own son and at others as Caesar's. Giovanni had already been invested with the title of Nepi, and Francesco Borgia, Cardinal of Cosenza, as the child's guardian, administered these estates. There are coins of this ephemeral Duke ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... history of trelliage and an appreciation of its practical application to modern needs is a conjurer's wand—you can wave it and create all sorts of ephemeral constructions that will last your time and pleasure. You may give your trellis any poetic shape your vision may take. You may dream and realize enchanting gardens, with clipped hedges and trellis walls. You may transform a commonplace ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... question beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a life eternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to produce a merely ephemeral result. But since then another argument has occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race was beginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality were coming in with the family, when society was ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... opposition. It is usually with purpose to excite the envy of contemporary enemies that poets call attention to their graces, the student may discover. Frequently the quarrels leading them to flaunt their personalities in their verses have arisen over the most personal and ephemeral of issues. Indeed, we may have appeared to falsify in classifying their enemies under general heads, when for Christopher North, Judson, Belfair, Friend Naddo, Richard Bame, we substituted faces ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Rivers became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Section of this treatise. Venus and Helen, Liber and Lyaeus, are but the current coin of poetic diction common to the whole student class. These Olympian deities merge without a note of discord into the dim background of a medieval pothouse or the sylvan shades of some ephemeral amour, leaving the realism of natural appetite ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... to all who had poured their ephemeral and seldom varying homage in her ear—no woman's heart ever beat with more kind—more generous—more devoted sentiments, than her own. Possessed of a vivid imagination, which the general quietude of her demeanor in a great degree disowned, she had already sketched ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... an opportunity to see the Fair and remained to earn his living as best he could by contributing cartoons to the newspapers, writing paragraphs in a funny column, and occasional verse of the humorous order. And he designed covers for ephemeral magazines,—in a word, nimbly snatched the scanty dollars ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... changeless. All must vary, must progress or retrograde; the very rocks in the bowels of the earth undergo organic alterations, while the eternal hills that cover them increase or are worn away. Much more is this obvious in the case of ephemeral man, of his thoughts, his works, and everything wherewith he has to do, he who within the period of a few short years is doomed to appear, wax, wane, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... to do so, and at even increasing their apparent egotism by my style, instead of sheltering myself under cover of the third person; but I will not yield a half compliance to the request of that tender friendship which is far more valuable to me than the ephemeral success which a journal might obtain. It is sufficient for me to know that this relation, intended for a few friends only, will never extend beyond their circle: it even possesses two very great advantages over many celebrated books: ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... heard her give a sudden sharp sigh as she read the "Morning Post,"—she had turned to the middle of the newspaper where the events of the day were chronicled, and where a column of fashionable intelligence announced the ephemeral doings of the so-called "great" of the world. Here one paragraph had caught and riveted her attention—it ran thus—"Lord and Lady Blythe have left town for Glen-Alpin, Inverness-shire, where they will entertain a large house-party to meet the ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... departure on the day but one after the final meeting.—I may just remark, that before this time one or two families had returned to Purleybridge, and others were free from their Christmas engagements, who would have been much pleased to join our club; but, considering its ephemeral nature, and seeing it had been formed only for what we hoped was a passing necessity, we felt that the introduction of new blood, although essential for the long life of anything constituted for long life, ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... the pumping of the ether or rhigolene ceases, the tissue operated on ceases to be frozen, so ephemeral is the degree of the cold obtained by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... prison again. Marfa Petrovna had not the slightest intention of settling anything substantial on him, having regard for his children's interests, and, if she left him anything, it would only be the merest sufficiency, something insignificant and ephemeral, which would not last a year for ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in my sea life when I served ship-owners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the well-known firm of London ship-brokers which had chartered the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian Transport Company. A death leaves something behind, but there was never anything tangible left from the F. C. T. C. It flourished no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses it blossomed in the dead of winter, emitted ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... from the original "by Homer," no more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen. But scarcely is the ink dry on the page of his last known political pamphlet, when Fielding reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral politician, but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for English literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the broils, and warfares of two centuries. For, to-day, the fierce ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... wanders at its ease. Wild wasp and tutored bee sing sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; with broad coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts alee. Beside a brown coated stone in the shadowed stream a brown trout watches for the puffs that slay the May-flies. Their ephemeral wings were made for a more exquisite life; they endure but one sun; they bear not the touch of the water; they die like a dream dropping into the river. To the amethyst in the deep ditch the wind comes; no petal ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... are not retentive of knowledge, but volatile, are not said to have such and such a 'habit' as regards knowledge, yet they are disposed, we may say, either better or worse, towards knowledge. Thus habit differs from disposition in this, that while the latter in ephemeral, the former is permanent and difficult ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... addition to soaps, including yeast, tar from peat (sphagnol), Swedish wood tar, permanganate of potash, perborates and percarbonates of soda and ammonia, chlorine compounds, but none of these has at present come much into favour, and some had only ephemeral existence. Of the many drugs that it has been suggested to admix in soap for use in allaying an irritable condition of the skin, the majority are obviously better applied in the form of ointments, and we need not consider ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... his guns. But the Virgin, the Daughter of Roma, She hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn,—The Daughter of Tiber, She hath shaken her head and built barricades against thee! Will they fight? I believe it. Alas! 'tis ephemeral folly, Vain and ephemeral folly, of course, compared with pictures, Statues, and antique gems!—Indeed: and yet indeed too, Yet, methought, in broad day did I dream,—tell it not in St. James's, Whisper it not in thy courts, O Christ Church!—yet did I, waking, Dream of a cadence that sings, Si ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... periodical a theatre of special activity, a way to the entertainment and instruction of the many; and though much of what is thus produced may bear, as we have hinted, a character more or less ephemeral, we are sometimes presented also with the earlier blossoms and the fresher odors of a rich and perennial growth of genius, everywhere known and acknowledged in the realms of belles-lettres, philosophy, and science, crowded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... that is set over us is an ignorant, indolent, incompetent, self-deceived ministry; if our own chosen, set-up, and maintained minister is himself an uninstructed, unspiritual, unsanctified man; and if the books we buy and borrow and read are all secular, unspiritual, superficial, ephemeral, silly, stupid, impertinent books, then the impossibility of our salvation is absolute, and we are as good as in hell already with all our guilt and all our corruption for ever on our heads. Now, that was the exact case of Mansoul in the allegory ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... moments which turn mice into lions and make heroes of the craven. Unfortunately they are apt to be ephemeral. Paul Burton shook his head as he looked into her eyes, and answered ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... at the Cauldon Bar Ironworks. The two rivers hung slowly dying in the mists of smoke. They reddened and faded, and you thought they had vanished, and you could see them yet, and then they escaped the baffled eye, unless a cloud aided them for a moment against the sun; and their ephemeral but enchanting ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... smiling radiance, Through orifice, through rift and aperture, Invades the storm, and dissipates the clouds, Which scatter, cowering and ephemeral, Hugging the cliffs, and o'er the dire abyss Hover, in fleecy, ever changing form, And in a transient season disappear; Vanish, as man must ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... the Ministry here, three groups are represented: one declines to take Lenin seriously, regarding him as an ephemeral personage, the second does not take this view at all, but is nevertheless unwilling to treat with a revolutionary of this sort, and the third consists, as far as I am aware, of myself alone, and I will treat with him, despite the possibly ephemeral character of his ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... things ephemeral and the strange changes going on in the city, wherein were very few old men, but only the young and strong of many nations, were the stabilities of life. Carleton found time to examine and write about education, the libraries, churches, asylums, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... they concealed themselves on deck under a black tarpaulin—that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown—and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house read ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... party was able to occupy its true and final position, or to rally to its standard all who were in fact its friends. Old parties encumbered the ground. Men were slow to give up old associations and leave the discussion of obsolete, immaterial, or ephemeral issues. ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... of fighting Godfrey of Bouillon, ephemeral king of Jerusalem, took his homeward road back to France, accompanied by three cavaliers, in all, 'then, four horses, one more than Rashi had predicted. Godfrey remembered the rabbi's prophecy, and determined to carry out his ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... eaten hot once a week, and the remaining six days he subsisted on the cold remains. It seemed impossible to raise money for his present pressing necessities. He managed to sell "L'Initie,"[*] at a ridiculously small price, to an ephemeral journal called Le Spectateur Republicain, but only received in return bills at a long date, and it was doubtful whether he was ever paid the money due ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... actor's art that its excellence is never absolute. An audience is entitled to say, "What care I how good he be if he seem not good to me?" A performance that does not move the spectators is not only a failure but to some extent a culpable failure, since the actor's art is more utterly ephemeral than any other—possibly by aid of gramophone, biograph, and the like some fairly effective records will be made in the future—but, this consideration apart, he may not even take heed for the morrow. At the moment his mission is to move the particular collection of people before him, and ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... shoppers. She lingered long at her table to get to the full the worth of her three-and-sixpence; to watch the suave, gay women pass in and out, be fed and flattered and entertained. The great furs laid across their slender shoulders, the ephemeral corsages beneath, the hint of pearls on well-massaged necks, the luring cock of a hat, the waft of a perfume that was yet hardly so crude as definite perfume, all roused her hostility, her fighting sense. Not a woman there knew what passed behind ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... though Nash died of a disease attributed to coarse and unwholesome cheap food. His fame proved to be singularly ephemeral. So far as I am aware, no book of his was reprinted after his death, with the single exception of "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," which was issued again in 1613. His name was mentioned and some interest in his writings was awakened at the close of the next century by ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... having allowed the substantial forms of the creatures themselves to disappear, while it has carefully preserved the more shadowy and incidental memorials of their life. The naturalist can tell us from the ephemeral impressions on the soft primeval mud, not only what was the true nature of the obscure creatures that produced them untold ages ago, but also the direction in which they were moving along the shore, and ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... theories now almost unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. That such may be the case with literature, particularly the more ephemeral kinds thereof, is very likely, since literature, save in the great complex structures of epos, tragedy, choral lyric, is but the development of daily speech, and possibly as upstart, as purely passing, as daily speech itself; ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... bring that knowledge to the service of honour and virtue. The author is already known to the public by the two novels announced in her title-page, and both, the last especially, attracted, with justice, an attention from the public far superior to what is granted to the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering-places and circulating libraries. They belong to a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more immediately from the current of ordinary life than ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... it. Circumstances have made him coarse and brutal, but below all this surface beats a heart full of true instincts and honest impulses. I am certain the recording angel will blot out many of his sins, as he did those of Uncle Toby. His means exhausted, he abdicates his ephemeral kingdom, and, uncomplaining, takes his pick and shovel, his frying-pan, bacon, and flour, and starts over the mountains for new diggings. Yet he gains no wisdom by experience. The same bacchanalian orgies follow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... number of Punch was varied in character. Mr. Watts, R.A., once told me that the paper was regarded with but little encouragement by the occupants of an omnibus in which he was riding, one gentleman, after looking gravely through its pages, tossing it aside with the remark, "One of those ephemeral things they bring out; won't last a fortnight!" Dr. Thompson, Master of Trinity, informed Professor Herkomer that he, too, was riding in an omnibus on the famous 17th of July, when he bought a copy from a paper-boy, and began to look at it with curiosity. When he chuckled at the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the case with Roman type, or white-letter. What I suspect, however, is that this ballad is considerably older, and that my copy is only a comparatively modern reprint with some alterations; it requires no proof, at this time of day, to show that it was the constant habit of our old publishers of ephemeral literature to reprint ballads without the slightest notice that they had ever appeared before. This, in fact, is the point on which I want information, as to The Royal Courtly Garland, or Joy after Sorrow. Can any of your ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... RUSSELL, authoress, born at Alresford, Hants, lived with her father, an extravagant physician, at Lyme Regis and London; she published poems in 1810-11-12, but, forced to earn a living, took to dramatic work; "Julian," "The Foscari," and "Rienzi" were successful if ephemeral tragedies; her best work was "Our Village," sketches of homely English life written with much care, and after appearing in the London Magazine, published ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... discussion between human voices. Burke answered Dr. Price, and to Burke in turn replied Tom Paine with the brilliant, confident, hard-hitting logic of a pamphlet (The Rights of Man) which for all the efforts of Pitt to suppress it, is still read and circulated to-day. Two notable answers were ephemeral, one from Mary Wollstonecraft, and another (Vindiciae Gallicae) from Mackintosh, who afterwards recanted his own opinions and lived to be ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... fortune to be born into the language while it was yet "a well of English undefiled." In that well he became saturated with a pure, direct, simple diction which later contact with the tendencies of his era and the ephemeral production of the daily press was not able ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... of ancient or of modern battles; and may have pursued the line of march of triumphant conquerors, whose armies trampled down the most mighty kingdoms of the world. The winds and storms have utterly obliterated the ephemeral impressions of their course. Not a track remains of a single foot, or a single hoof, of the countless millions of men and beasts whose progress spread desolation over the earth. But the reptiles that crawled upon the half-finished ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... Ever mindful of his own destitute condition while an orphan deprived of both parents, all the orphans of the thickly-inhabited district that constituted his mission became objects of his special care. And at a time when such an institution as a Catholic orphanage was regarded as visionary, or the ephemeral creation of a too ardent zeal, this good pastor succeeded in founding and supporting an asylum which has since become of incalculable value, not only to the Catholics as a body, but to the inhabitants of the whole city ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... boldness to a pitch of madness, who were surprised by no novelty and arrested by no scruple, and who never hesitated to put any design whatever into execution. Nor must it be supposed that these new beings have been the isolated and ephemeral creation of a moment, and destined to pass away as that moment passed. They have since formed a race of beings which has perpetuated itself, and spread into all the civilised parts of the world, everywhere preserving the same physiognomy, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... agree with him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded down his ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... historians, and notably the French historian Taine, have played it boldly enough, and have stated dogmatically, as historical happenings, things that never happened and that they knew never happened. But the plain or brute historical lie is more commonly found in the pages of ephemeral journalism. Thus the other day, with regard to the Budget, I saw some financial operation alluded to as comparable with "the pulling out of Jews' teeth for money in the Middle Ages." When did anyone in the Middle Ages pull out a Jew's teeth for money? ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Nor was this an ephemeral ardor, like a fire of stubble or straw, flashing into a momentary blaze, to relapse into deeper gloom. It lasted for several centuries; it was still in full flame at the time of Columba, more than two hundred years after Patrick; it grew into a vast conflagration in the seventh and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... taken and subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de Medici, then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under Spanish rule, municipal independence, private feuds, the great exploits of political adventures and successful usurpations, the system of ephemeral principalities, based on force and fraud, all give way to permanent repression, monarchical discipline, external order, and a certain species of public tranquility. Thus, just at the time when the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Ephemeral as the sunset glow Is human grandeur. Mortal life Was given that souls might seek and know Immortal truths; and through the strife That shakes the earth from land to land The wise shall ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... was at this season filled with what is called the Green Bay fly, a species of dragon-fly, with which the outer walls of the houses are at times so covered that their color is hardly distinguishable. Their existence is very ephemeral, scarcely lasting more than a day. Their dead bodies are seen adhering to the walls and windows within, and they fall without in such numbers that after a high wind has gathered them into rows along the sides of the quarters, one may ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... fatal brilliancy which had been the lot of her mother,—her simple peasant garb with those remembered visions of jewelry and silk and embroideries with which the partial patronage of the Duchess or the ephemeral passion of her son had decked out the poor Isella; and then came swelling at her heart a tumultuous thought, one which she had repressed and kept down for years with all the force of pride and hatred. Agnes, peasant-girl ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... and tint of the frail little vase he has wished to fix for all time the ephemeral forms and colors of ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... a complete shelter and make an atmosphere of their own. The old Curwin Mansion, or "Witch House," to be sure, with its jutting upper story, and its dark and grimy room where witch-trials are rumored to have been held, is a solid scrap of antique gloom; but an ephemeral druggist's shop has been fastened on to a corner of the old building, and clings there like a wasp's nest,—as subversive, too, of quiet contemplation. The descendants of the first settlers have with pious care preserved the remains ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... hospitals and other philanthropic establishments.[2258]—The abstract principle, proclaimed by the Constituent Assembly, reveals, by degrees, its exterminating virtues. France now, owing to it, contains nothing but dispersed, powerless, ephemeral individuals, and confronting them, the State, the sole, the only permanent body that has devoured all the others, a veritable Colossus, alone erect in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... are ephemeral. They will roll away, and we shall once more gladly recognise the lineaments of an essentially lofty character, of one who, though a man of genius and of letters, neither outraged society nor stooped to it; was neither a rebel ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... judges. It did not deceive Lady Mary, who had seen the men and manners of very many climes; it did not deceive Gibbon, who was not especially prone to overvalue things English, and who could look down from twenty centuries on things ephemeral. It deceives, indeed, I am told, some excellent persons at the present day, who think Fielding's microcosm a "toylike world," and imagine that Russian Nihilists and French Naturalists have gone beyond it. It will deceive ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... is arranged in accordance with a most purposeful plan and is most strictly subjected to laws and rules. And the very strict order, on account of which the existence of your creations is so short lived, and, I may say, ephemeral, is full of the profoundest wisdom. Allowing you to perfect yourself in your art, it wisely guards other people against the perhaps injurious influence of your productions, and in any case it completes logically, finishes, enforces, and makes clear the meaning of your solitary ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... GREATEST EMPIRE OF THE WORLD, not only at the present time, but since the beginning of human history. Neither the artificial combination of Alexander of Macedonia nor the ancient Roman Empire, neither Spain of Charles V. nor Napoleon's ephemeral dominion were nearly so great as the British Empire of to-day. Never has a nation possessed so much sea and so much land as the British. This wonderful Empire includes people of every race, countries of every climate, human societies of every degree of civilisation, ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... in between two posts of a gateway toward a huge house of rough granite. And Hodder wondered whether, in the swift onward roll of things, the time would come when this, too, would have been deemed ephemeral. With its massive walls and heavy, red-tiled roof that sloped steeply to many points, it seemed firmly planted for ages to come. It was surrounded, yet not hemmed in, by trees of a considerable age. His host explained that these had belonged to the original farm of which all this Park ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... urged him not to say anything further, but Marston, whose eyes were now lightened by that ephemeral light so often seen in the eyes of the ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... inviting, became strong and impressive, yet still holding all his former qualities. The first year of his new residence in Boston saw the production of The Dandelion Girl, a light-hearted, careless creature, full of a life that had no touch of responsibility, and descriptive of a joyous and ephemeral mood. A long step forward was taken in The Romany Girl, which immediately followed,—a work full of fire and freedom, strongly personal in suggestion, and marked by a wild and impatient individuality which revealed in the girl the impression of a lawless ancestry, that somehow and somewhere ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... lesson of the dead: Sudden the rich bells chorussed overhead: "O be not of the throng ephemeral To whom to-day is fame, to-morrow fate, Proud of some robe no statelier than a pall, Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral— A phantom generation fatuate. Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save, Virtue alone revives ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... that long scan of waves, myself call'd back, resumed upon myself, In every crest some undulating light or shade—some retrospect, Joys, travels, studies, silent panoramas—scenes ephemeral, The long past war, the battles, hospital sights, the wounded and the dead, Myself through every by-gone phase—my idle youth—old age at hand, My three-score years of life summ'd up, and more, and past, By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a nothing, And haply yet some ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... certain symbols which at first probably appeared only incidentally to signify some idea content, wish content, etc., return and become a persistent or typical form. And the more such a typical form is established and is impressed, the farther it is removed from its first ephemeral meaning, and the more it becomes a symbolic representative of a whole group of similar experiences, a spiritual capital, so to speak, till finally we can regard it simply as the representative of a spiritual current (love, hate, tendency to frivolity, to cruelty, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... and nothing so peculiarly marks a great man as the continuance of influence with the absence of power; for influence and power are distinct. Influence, in fact, never passes away, but power is ephemeral. Theologians, poets, philosophers, great writers, have influence and no power; railroad kings and bank presidents have power but not necessarily influence. Saint Augustine, in a little African town, had more ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... this surface beats a heart full of true instincts and honest impulses. I am certain the recording angel will blot out many of his sins, as he did those of Uncle Toby. His means exhausted, he abdicates his ephemeral kingdom, and, uncomplaining, takes his pick and shovel, his frying-pan, bacon, and flour, and starts over the mountains for new diggings. Yet he gains no wisdom by experience. The same bacchanalian orgies follow the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... they had made, whether by argument or not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they fell. Then Jacob was left there, in the shallow ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... has been acquired by the species we happen to be considering, there would remain a great deal that could not be referred to selection; but we are postulating an evolution which has stretched back through aeons, and in the course of which innumerable adaptations took place, which had not merely ephemeral persistence in a genus, a family or a class, but which was continued into whole Phyla of animals, with continual fresh adaptations to the special conditions of each species, family, or class, yet with persistence of the fundamental elements. Thus the feather, once acquired, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... gentle breeze was astir in the woods, and it set the leaves to whispering. The treetoads and the locusts were trolling a chorus. So loudly vibrant, it was! So clamorously gay! Some subtle intimation they surely had that summer was ephemeral and the season waning, for the burden of their song was, Let us now be merry. The scarlet head of a woodpecker showed brilliantly from the bare dead boughs of a chestnut-oak, which, with its clinging lichens of green ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... lifetime. Being made of stucco, woodwork, plaster, and such perishable materials, it was unfortunately destined to decay. But Florence had always been liberal, nay, lavish, of her genius in triumphs, masques, magnificent street architecture, evoked to celebrate some ephemeral event. A worthier occasion would not occur again; and we have every reason to believe that the superb structure, which was finally exposed to view upon the 14th of July, displayed all that was left at Florence of the grand style in the arts of modelling and painting. They were ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... was publishing his journal at Lausanne in 1845, and in 1848 he was named representative of the people, by a considerable majority, in one of the largest cities of Germany. And this was by no means an isolated fact. Atheism showed itself in the ephemeral parliament of Frankfort as a sort of party, of which M. Vogt, says the Revue des Deux Mondes, was ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... fulfilment of the most yearning expectation and fulfilled desire will seem but as the winking of an eyelid when we get to estimate duration by the same scale by which He estimates it, the scale of Eternity. The ephemeral insect, born in the morning and dead when the day fades, has a still minuter scale than ours, but we should not think of regulating our estimate of long and short by it. Do not let us commit the equal absurdity of regulating the march of His providence by the swift beating ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... sudden unreasoning enthusiasms. After the ephemeral flame of their first ardor has burned itself out we shall but find ourselves seated by the mass of ashes formed of our ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... the distant haze of a peak. Trackless and tortuous, the way underfoot was incredibly difficult. Yet the distances melted in ephemeral slopes as lovely in their tints as they were accursed in their reality of cruelty. Rhoda, unaccustomed to day travel, panted and gasped as they walked. But she held her own fairly well, while DeWitt, sick and overstrained at ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... after the expiration of a few months, the chest will become diminished in size. This will be effected without any suffering of a marked character; but the general health and strength will be impaired. It is not the violent and ephemeral pressure, but the moderate and protracted, that produces the miscalled, "genteel," ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... The explanation brought Lionel relief. But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. In his eyes it ceased ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... for the Working Classes,' 'The Modern Exodus;'—these were not themes to be dealt with by the facile journalist, standing on one foot. Mr. Greg always showed the highest conception of the functions and the obligations of the writer who addresses the public, in however ephemeral a form, on topics of social importance. No article of his ever showed a trace either of slipshod writing or of make-believe and perfunctory thinking. To compose between four and five hundred pages like these, on a variety of grave subjects, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... not to augur, quick-eared Shade. Ephemeral at the best all honours be, These even more ephemeral than their kind, So ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... in the salle-a-manger that we saw the other occupants of the hotel; and when we learned that several of them had lived en pension under the roof of the assiduous proprietor for periods varying from five to seven years, we felt ephemeral, mere creatures of a moment, and wholly unworthy ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... affection in it, as the first one to fail in "value received" so clearly understands. The unwholesome absorption of one woman with another, so that no minute apart can be endured, may be long-lived or an ephemeral expression of a weakness on one or the other side, but it is not the best type of friendship. Among men the submergence of one personality in another, so that although there are two people there is but one mind and one purpose, may be friendship, but it is ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... indispensable; but none the less is it true that whenever official business was not too heavy, he invariably read for a minimum of four hours a day. This did not include the time that he gave to ephemeral literature; it was the time that he spent in the serious reading of books, generally old books. How many of us, not professed students, can show a record as good, or half as good? He read quickly, too, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... the purpose of literature, if only for a season, by affording pleasure to readers. No sooner were they written than Time began to winnow them over and over, giving them to all the winds of opinion, one generation after another, till the hosts of ephemeral works were swept aside, and only a remnant was left in the hands of the winnower. To this remnant, books of abiding interest, on which the years have no effect save to mellow or flavor them, we give the name of great or enduring literature; ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... time enters widely into our opinions. To one person an institution which has existed for the whole of his conscious life is part of the permanent furniture of the universe: to another it is ephemeral. Geological time is very different from biological time. Social time is most complex. The statesman has to decide whether to calculate for the emergency or for the long run. Some decisions have to be made on the basis of what will happen in the next two hours; others ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... more nor less than Atheism. On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than the mere ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... talking between them, and that kept by him studiously on subjects of purely ephemeral, childish interest. Her mind, by the happy dispensation of nature which facilitates healing by all means when once healing has begun, was blank to any impressions save the luxury of rest, of passive enjoyment, indifferent to ought but the passing present. She took pleasure in flowers, in the gambols ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... inexorable expansion of the universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear—there is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life. Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it suggested—absurdly and abominably—a certain cheap drink of sudden and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined, extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably wandering about in a world too ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... around; and yet it seemed as if it were a fine summer's day, mild and warm. Fresh and green he spread out his mighty crown; the sunbeams played among the twigs and the leaves; the air was full of the fragrance of herbs and blossoms; gay butterflies chased each other to and fro. The ephemeral insects danced as if all the world were created merely for them to dance and be merry in. All that the tree had experienced for years and years, and that had happened around him, seemed to pass by him again, as in a festive pageant. He saw the knights ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... carried their boldness to a pitch of madness, who were surprised by no novelty and arrested by no scruple, and who never hesitated to put any design whatever into execution. Nor must it be supposed that these new beings have been the isolated and ephemeral creation of a moment, and destined to pass away as that moment passed. They have since formed a race of beings which has perpetuated itself, and spread into all the civilised parts of the world, everywhere preserving the same physiognomy, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... bignonias, convolvuluses, and climbing leguminous plants escape both floods and cattle by climbing the highest trees and towering overhead in a flood of bloom. The ground plants are the portulacas, turneras, and cenotheras, bitter and ephemeral, on the bare rock, and almost independent of any other moisture than the heavy dews. The pontederias, alismas, and plantago, with grasses and sedges, derive protection from the deep and brilliant pools; and though at first sight ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to Theodora. She was subject to attacks of the most furious passion, especially when any thing occurred to thwart the indulgence of the ephemeral partiality I have just described. Then, wherever she was, she would throw herself down at once,—on the floor, on the walk or lawn, or, as happened on one occasion, in the water,—and kick and scream. ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... wonderful than the things ephemeral and the strange changes going on in the city, wherein were very few old men, but only the young and strong of many nations, were the stabilities of life. Carleton found time to examine and write about education, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... human soul is most perfect and beautiful. The flower and trees and fields are beautiful. The flashing aurora, the golden clouds, the sapphire sky, are beautiful. The circling planets, the blazing sun, the starry canopy, are beautiful. But what are they compared to a human soul? What is an ephemeral flower or an age-lasting star compared with glorious reason, with eternal love, with deathless benevolence, and conscience? What were the material universe with all its sublime grandeur and awe-inspiring magnificence ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... as such positive gains, however ill-gotten, as could be made the means of procuring them, and throwing aside all thought both of honor and of long-sighted advantage. Life and property being alike ephemeral, there was no hope left but to snatch a moment of enjoyment, before the outstretched hand of destiny should fall upon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the crowd of men, huddled together in the shadow of the awnings, panted with weariness. The water and the air, even the very light above, had a dull, crushing splendour; and the fadeless glory of those elements were as a very mockery of the human beings whose physical lives are so ephemeral. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... families in consonance with the laws of nature, and save to health the time spent in poorly-ventilated rooms, where, under the pressure of the modern school system, everything valuable and practical seems sacrificed to the ephemeral and non-essential. We do not underrate the good our schools accomplish, not at all; on the other hand, we feel a just pride in the liberality of the country, and realize that in them lies the only security for a Republican form of government, and, indeed, our opinions go further in this direction ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... the sky, it gathers, mutters and disperses, leaving the sky bluer, the atmosphere purer, and Nature more smiling than before. What use is there in reflecting on this storm that passes swift as a caprice, ephemeral as a fancy? Before we have discovered the secret of the meteorological enigma, the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... newspaper any subsequent references to this proposed collection or miscellany of composures, and I know of no book that was published at that time which could answer the description, so I suspect the well-laid plan came to naught. The specimens of local and ephemeral poetry that were printed in the colonial press in succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... straits.") This summit is nearly 500 metres above the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of the little chapel or the walls of the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... fossil ichthyology. I hope, if I can command another hundred louis, to complete everything of which I have spoken before the end of the summer, that is to say, in July. I shall then have on hand two works which should surely be worth a thousand louis to me. This is a low estimate, for even ephemeral pieces and literary ventures are paid at this price. You can easily make the calculation. They allow three louis for each plate with the accompanying text; my fossils will have about two hundred plates, and my fresh-water fishes ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... Fashion is ephemeral. Taste and public opinion having no corporal identity, are nothing but the passing fancy of ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... supported, as a body, my opponent. They took compassion upon 'a monument of injured innocence,' and they sustained the monument for a while, upon the pedestal their influence erected. But the monument fell, and the fall proved that such influence was merely ephemeral, and it sank into insignificant nothingness, as it should, and I hope ever will do; or God help this noble land. Poor Blackies! Be not so bold or so conceited, or so insolent ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... It offers the highest—not to create life is the only good; the creation of life is the only evil; all else which man in his bestial stupidity calls good and evil is ephemeral ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... but rewarding him as he ascends with oblivion of the discords and irregularities of the world. Nietzsche's wisdom becomes pregnant upon lonely mountains; he claims that whosoever seeks to enter into this wisdom "must be accustomed to live on mountain-tops and see beneath him the wretched ephemeral gossip ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... elected to do; he had to establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now, more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy to rank as ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... is why well-educated people are so afraid of it. From the custom of saying everything in the same tone has arisen that of poking fun at people without their knowing it. When emphasis is proscribed, its place is taken by all sorts of ridiculous, affected, and ephemeral pronunciations, such as one observes especially among the young people about court. It is this affectation of speech and manner which makes Frenchmen disagreeable and repulsive to other nations on first acquaintance. Emphasis is found, not in their speech, but ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... was Roland Marleigh's," Crispin muttered. "Heigho! Life is precarious as the fall of a die at best an ephemeral business. To-night you say the house that was Roland Marleigh's; presently men will be saying the house that the Ashburns lived—aye, and died—in. Give ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... such a fact what suits our purpose, and leave a fatal weakness in our argument. The butterfly does, indeed, emerge from the coffin of the cocoon and the seemingly dead pupa. But it is only for a brief day of life. Then it lays its eggs and dies forever. It is born to no immortality, but to the most ephemeral life. The early Church; yea, the Jewish Church, found rational warrant for belief in immortality and the resurrection of the body, first in the thought that it was unjust for those who fought for and brought in the kingdom of God, to enjoy nothing of what ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... favour and the power derived from favour. The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling their actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a state of perpetual fluctuation. The bishops locally situated in these changing districts would have been themselves divided. In fact, the Arian bishops had no common centre. They were the nominees and ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... adventurer who embarks in the speculation of paying by publication the expenses of his travels. We have no individuals in view in these remarks; we speak of things in general, as they are, or rather have been; for we believe these ephemeral travels, like other ephemerals, have had their day, and are fast dying out. The market has become so glutted with them that they are, in a great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... not matter if the use of the poor papers were restricted to newspapers and other ephemeral literature, but when, as is often the case, paper of very poor quality is used for books of permanent literary interest, the matter is ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... stationer, and his shop was at the sign of the Rose Garland in Fleet Street. Although he carried on business from 1515 to about 1548, only a few of his books are now known, none of which appear to be in the British Museum. The majority were purely ephemeral. The most interesting phase of this printer's career occurs in connection with one or two books printed by Wynkyn de Worde, notably "The Assembly of Foules," 1530, at the end of which is "Lenvoy of Robert Copland boke prynter," one of the ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... mystery—expanses of shattered, white granite, as it were, fretted and scrawled with blackness—reaches of loneliness older than time. So well is the mask of eternity assumed by the mutable moonlight and the ephemeral ice. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... characteristic annual celebration of the lower classes, anticipated with eagerness, and achieved with difficulty, indeed, often only through the alternative of pawning clothing and furniture to provide the means for this ephemeral transformation. I remember being warned, also, that the buffoonery was coarse, and some of the slang hardly fit for "ears polite." But I am afraid that I was not shocked at the prodigality of these poor people, who purchased a holiday on such hard conditions; and, as to the coarseness of ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thence a class of deformed disciples, who succeed in entangling their false pretensions with the claims of true merit. So much dust is puffed into the eyes of the public, that it can hardly distinguish between works of durable importance and the ephemeral productions of empirics; and those who would otherwise disdain the notoriety acquired by advertisement, end in adopting the system as the only means to avoid the mortification of seeing their own ideas appropriated and uttered in another form ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... subdivided into ephemeral fevers, which last but a short time and terminate by critical phenomena; intermittent fevers, in which there are alterations of exacerbations of the febrile symptoms and remissions, in which the body returns to its normal ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... the fourth round. Of course there was no question in the minds of the majority of the spectators as to who would win the fight. The stranger had merely shown one of those sudden and ephemeral bursts of form that occasionally are witnessed in every branch of sport; but he couldn't last against such a man as the "white hope"!—they looked for a knock-out any minute now. Nor ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... brilliant eye, a figure as graceful and elastic as that of a fairy, and with words of wonderful wisdom flowing, as it were, instinctively from her lips, she seemed effectually and almost unconsciously to have enthralled the king. All his previous passions were boyish and ephemeral. But Mary was very different from any other lady of the court. Her depth of feeling, her pensive yet cheerful temperament, and her full-souled sympathy in all that was truly noble in conduct and character, astonished ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... even a little excess of laudation may not be out of place. But these are the exceptions, in a mass of standardised poetry made to pattern, loosely versified, respectable in sentiment, uniformly meditative, and entirely without individual character. The reviewers who applaud all these ephemeral efforts with a like acclaim, and who say that there are hundreds of poets now writing who equal if they do not excel the great masters of the past, talk nonsense; they talk nonsense, and they know it. They lavish their flatteries ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... these propositions may at first seem strange, but they are founded. The quantity of trash I have received as books is incalculable, and neither amused nor instructed. Reviews and magazines are at the best but ephemeral and superficial reading: who thinks of the grand article of last year in any given Review? In the next place, if they regard myself, they tend to increase egotism. If favourable, I do not deny that the praise elates, and if unfavourable, that the abuse irritates. The latter may ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... chose to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being princes and chancellors. Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom and, even under the ephemeral governments which followed his death, no foreign state ventured to treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came back not as a mediator between his people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator between internal factions. He found the Scotch Covenanters and the Irish ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... lost their influence. The traditions of European mythology, the revelations of Asia, the time-consecrated dogmas of Egypt, all had passed or were fast passing away. And the Ptolemies recognized how ephemeral ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... and tutored bee sing sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; with broad coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts alee. Beside a brown coated stone in the shadowed stream a brown trout watches for the puffs that slay the May-flies. Their ephemeral wings were made for a more exquisite life; they endure but one sun; they bear not the touch of the water; they die like a dream dropping into the river. To the amethyst in the deep ditch the wind comes; no ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... publication: but I was rather curtly answered with a "Did I suppose these gnats were intended to be shrined in amber? these mere minnows to be treated with the high consideration due only to potted char and white bait? these fleeting thoughts fixed in stone before that Gorgon-head, the public? these ephemeral fancies dropped into the true elixir of immortality, printer's-ink? these——" I stopped him, for this other mighty mouthful of images betrayed the hypocrite—"Yes, I did." An involuntary smile assured me he did too, and the cause proceeded thus: first, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... shadow of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the trail of ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... splendid robes appear the wings Of the ephemeral fly; And such the pomp of those great men, Which soon in death shall lie! I grieve! Would they but come to me! To teach ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way. How should she have distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... it will unfailingly relapse into the obscurity and sluggishness of its former parochialism. This great world crisis will be either the making or the unmaking of American Jewry, and no Jew whose mind is unclouded by the ephemeral passions of party strife can do aught except ardently pray that the Jews of America may emerge in triumph ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... and Mademoiselle de Puymandour was entirely deficient in that brief, ephemeral light that shines over the honeymoon. The icy wall that stood between them became each day stronger and taller. There was no one to smooth away inequalities, no one to exercise a kindly influence over two characters, ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... trustworthy; a ready-money man, just and ungenerous. To every one's surprise, the capital he had accumulated in the stone trade was of large amount for a business so unostentatiously carried on—much larger than Jocelyn had ever regarded as possible. While the son had been modelling and chipping his ephemeral fancies into perennial shapes, the father had been persistently chiselling for half a century at the crude original matter of those shapes, the stern, isolated rock in the Channel; and by the aid ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... would-be singer, a song written by a would-be poet, and set by a would-be musician. Verve was there none in the whole ephemeral embodiment. When it died a natural death, if that be possible where never had been any life, Vavasor said, "Thank you, Raymount." But Hester, who had been standing with her teeth clenched under the fiery rain of discords, wrong notes, and dislocated rhythm, rushed to the piano with glowing cheeks ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... two of preliminary warning may be permissible. It is a mistake to take the extremer forms of this reaction too seriously, although at the present time this is very frequently done. One must remember that such a spirit as this is to be found in every age, and that it always creates an ephemeral literature which imagines itself to be a lasting one. It is nothing new. It is as old and as perennial as the complex play of the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... civilization of a people to reach the very best elements of their being, and then, having reached them, there to abide as an indigenous principle, you must imbue the womanhood of that people with all its elements and qualities. Any movement which passes by the female sex is an ephemeral thing. Without them, no true nationality, patriotism, religion, cultivation, family life, or true social status, is a possibility. In this matter it takes two to make one—mankind is a duality. The male may bring, as an exotic, a foreign graft, say, of civilization, to a new people. ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... and scornful words, in the language of sadness and despair, developed the need and the misfortune of the land. The king gave the chief minister of police strict injunctions to send him all these ephemeral publications. He wanted to read them all, wanted to find the kernel of wheat which each contained, and, from his enemies, who assuredly would not flatter, he wanted to learn how to be a good king. And the first of his cares he saw to be a frugal ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... answer magnificently that he was a poet. So Follete lives in a golden zone of a certain sort—a golden, or rather torrid zone, whence he issues twice daily purple as to his face—and all these clouds and vapours and ephemeral winds pass far below ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dissolution. The Archduke, proclaimed King of Spain by the Emperor under the name of Charles III. and recognised in that quality by England and Holland, had just landed at Lisbon; the campaign opened against the Portuguese had ended, after some ephemeral successes, by a sort of disbanding of the Spanish army, through want of clothing, pay, and provisions, in the supply of which nothing was done after Orry's departure, recalled to France from the same motives as the Princess. ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth." ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... how often have I cautioned you against this trait of your character. Because your workling does not deserve to be mentioned in the same category with works of solid and acknowledged merit, like, for instance, Rollin's Ancient History or Prideaux' Connexion, and can, at best, enjoy but an ephemeral existence, does it deserve to have no existence at all? On your principle, we should have no butterflies, because their careless lives ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Messrs. Lecky and Mark, and in 1817 he appeared as an exhibitor in the second exhibition of the Cork Society, for he had already displayed considerable talent as an artist. In 1818 he contributed to an ephemeral production called 'The Literary and Political Examiner:' on the 22nd March of that year his father died, and he left Ireland, not to revisit it until he made a short excursion there in 1821 with Alfred ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... after he had escaped the guillotine of Robespierre; and in resentment, because, after he had participated in the French Revolution, President Washington seemed not to have thought him so very important a character in the world, as officially to interpose for his relief from the fangs of the French ephemeral Rulers. In a word, no man, however well informed, was willing to hazard his own popularity by exhibiting the real intellectual character of ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... stand completely still and changeless. All must vary, must progress or retrograde; the very rocks in the bowels of the earth undergo organic alterations, while the eternal hills that cover them increase or are worn away. Much more is this obvious in the case of ephemeral man, of his thoughts, his works, and everything wherewith he has to do, he who within the period of a few short years is doomed to appear, wax, wane, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... other, the compositions and "arrangements" of the editors. Here and there a modern tune strikes the public taste or sinks deeper to the heart, and it takes its place thenceforward with the "Old Hundredth," with "Martyrs," and "Mear"; but the greater number of these compositions are as ephemeral as newspaper stories. Every conductor of a choir knows, however, that, to maintain an interest among singers, it is necessary to give them new music for practice, especially new pieces for the opening of public worship,—that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Mademoiselle de G——, for a mistress, I think, by choice, I should have liked her, better as a confidante; be that as it may, I felt on leaving them as though I could not live without either. Who would have thought that I should never see them more; and that here our ephemeral amours must end? ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... debate would afford him the opportunity of a signal triumph; and the notion of being obliged to forego this advantage and triumph, and the perplexity into which he was thrown between doubt whether it really was worth while, and fear of sacrificing a great and permanent, to an accidental and ephemeral interest, threw him into an uncertainty and embarrassment which disturbed his equanimity. It is at all events fortunate that I did not go to him myself, for I should have been met with a cold austerity of manner which would have disconcerted me, and I should have most ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... that had come upon her like a strong man armed, not as he had shown himself to her before—laughing and merry, playful and sweet.... This was no ephemeral, girlish passion, evoked by the beauty of gay, wanton, grey-green jewel-eyes and a bold, smiling mouth. This was a love that drew you with irresistible strength, and knitted you to the soul, and the heart, and the flesh of another, until his ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over and over again expressed in addresses to the Governor up to 1834. Such ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... in his words and actions, or when his environment is still very ignorant and superstitious, the crowd of believers increases still more rapidly, and thus one sees even at the present day in less-civilized countries new sects or religious guilds, more or less ephemeral, in which the spirit of the prophet sometimes ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... however, is that this ballad is considerably older, and that my copy is only a comparatively modern reprint with some alterations; it requires no proof, at this time of day, to show that it was the constant habit of our old publishers of ephemeral literature to reprint ballads without the slightest notice that they had ever appeared before. This, in fact, is the point on which I want information, as to The Royal Courtly Garland, or Joy after ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... schools of thought relating to amendment of the Constitution. One need not be committed to the belief that amendment is weakening the fundamental law, or that excessive amendment is essential to meet every ephemeral whim. We ought to amend to meet the demands of the people when ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... for; never failing to distinguish that which is produced by intellect, from that which is not, though it may be intellect degraded by ministering to its misguided will. Public taste may thus degrade a race of men capable of the highest efforts in art into the portrait painters of ephemeral fashions, but it will yet not fail of discovering who, among these portrait painters, is the man of most mind. It will separate the man who would have become Buonaroti from the man who would have become Bandinelli, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... envy, but is a generous ambition. If Columbus had found rivals and enemies resembling Amerigo, I should not see, as now, the magnificent scene of his triumph so suddenly changed into mourning and horror, the gloomy night of ignominy and mockery succeed the brief light of ephemeral happiness, and that invincible leader, who redoubled the power and dominions of ungrateful Castile, groaning under the weight of infamous chains, while he asks for nothing but liberty to carry her arms to the most distant shores of ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... the acquaintance if he got the chance. He heard her give a sudden sharp sigh as she read the "Morning Post,"—she had turned to the middle of the newspaper where the events of the day were chronicled, and where a column of fashionable intelligence announced the ephemeral doings of the so-called "great" of the world. Here one paragraph had caught and riveted her attention—it ran thus—"Lord and Lady Blythe have left town for Glen-Alpin, Inverness-shire, where they will entertain a large house-party ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... "This ephemeral character of my work does not displease me. We are men of the day, people in love with the passing moment, with all that is fugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of our work preoccupies us little, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... world has passed. Men have set their mark on mankind forever, as they thought; but time has washed it out as it has washed out mountains and continents." She raised herself on her elbow. "And what if we could help mankind, and leave the traces of our work upon it to the end? Mankind is only an ephemeral blossom on the tree of time; there were others before it opened; there will be others after it has fallen. Where was man in the time of the dicynodont, and when hoary monsters wallowed in the mud? Will he be found in the aeons that are to come? We are sparks, we are shadows, ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of keeping ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... as "An Irish Folk Song." Like "O Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was a corrupting influence in the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled to put its economic energies into what was at best an ephemeral and transitory source of national wealth and to neglect the solid foundations of agriculture and industry which in the long run would have ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... that our great dramatist never once makes even the slightest allusion to smoking? Who can suggest a reason? Our great poet knew the human heart too well, and kept too steadily in view, the universal nature of man to be afraid of painting the external trapping and ephemeral customs of his own time. Does he not delight to moralize on false hair, masks, rapiers, pomandens, perfumes, dice, bowls, fardingales, etc? Did he not sketch for us, with enjoyment and with satire, too, the fantastic fops, the pompous stewards, the mischievous ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... toward All Mankind, which this Mecca of Peace, Enlightenment, Beauty, and Inspiration for a better and greater future gives forth. Its purposeful influence is destined to serve perpetually beneficent cause in the furtherance of unified international humanitarianism after the ephemeral vision of this Phantom ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... specimen of the true mob-literature! ... written to-day, forgotten to-morrow! 'Tis a droll thing to meditate upon, the ephemeral nature of all this pouring-out of unnecessary words and stale stock-phrases!—and, wouldst thou believe it, Theos! each little paid scribe that adds his poor quota to this ill-assorted trash deems himself wiser and greater far than any poet or philosopher ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... least, by their utility. It is not that our ancestors were wiser than we are; they were certainly less informed, and probably were, on that account, in the general case, less judicious. But time has swept away their follies, which were doubtless great enough, as it has done the worthless ephemeral literature with which they, as we, were overwhelmed; and nothing has stood the test of ages, and come down to us through a series of generations, of their ideas or institutions, but what had some utility ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Once born, there is naught but sorrow; for who is there can escape death? From the first moment of life, the result of passionate love and desire, there is nought but the bodily form transitional as the lightning flash." Yet apart from all transitory passions and the ephemeral results of mortal love, the song of the Taoist lover soars unstained, untrammelled. Man attains not by himself, nor woman by herself, but, like the one-winged birds of the Chinese legend, they must rise together. To be a great lover is to be a great ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow, frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... India when the Company began to take part in the disputes of its ephemeral sovereigns. About eighty years have elapsed since we appeared as auxiliaries in a contest between two rival families for the sovereignty of a small corner of the Peninsula. From that moment commenced a great, a stupendous process, the reconstruction ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... alas, his name has now almost passed from the memories of men; the veil of time has settled over him; no distinct image is recalled by the mention of his name. How suggestive this, of the ephemeral fame of even a ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... boy should go on to the hard and unlighted life that inevitably awaited them, if neither had the opportunity of development. She would be at forty a later edition of the Widow Miller. He had seen the widow. Sally's charm must be as ephemeral under the life of illiterate drudgery and perennial child-bearing as her mother's had been. Her shoulders, now so gloriously straight and strong, would sag, and her bosom shrink, and her face harden and take on that drawn misery of constant anxiety. But, if ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... the Venerable Beadle sometimes—it being, I grieve to say, his way to deride grave subjects. You wouldn't suppose now, my young Clive, that the same hand which pens the Art criticisms, occasionally, when His Highness Pendennis is lazy, takes a minor theatre, or turns the sportive epigram, or the ephemeral paragraph, should adopt a grave theme on a Sunday, and chronicle the sermons of British divines? For eighteen consecutive Sunday evenings, Clive, in Mrs. Ridley's front parlour, which I now occupy, vice Miss Cann promoted, I have written the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a certain literary coquetry may be permissible to retailers of the marvelous, the sober chronicler is bound to forego such advantage as he may reap from an odd-sounding name, on which many ephemeral successes are founded in these days. Wherefore the present writer gives the following succinct statement of the reasons which induced him to adopt the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... been a station where the Nhambiquaras at intervals built their ephemeral villages and tilled the soil with the rude and destructive cultivation of savages. There were several abandoned old fields, where the dense growth of rank fern hid the tangle of burnt and fallen logs. Nor had the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... days[FN488] were past; when I called together the merchants and nobles of the folk and made them a sumptuous entertainment. As soon as they had eaten, I said to them, 'O merchants, verily this world is ephemeral, but the next world is eternal, and extolled be the perfection of Him who endureth always after His creatures have passed away! Know ye why I have called you together this blessed day?' And they answered, 'Extolled be Allah sole Scient of the hidden ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... certain sudden and bold strokes, a la Buccanier, upon the rich Spanish towns and richer churches; and as "their sound went out into all lands," others flocked to the Pacific for the same purpose. But by this time the first agony was over: the new government, short-lived and ephemeral as it was, enacted certain wholesome laws, which, as they did not materially interfere with the political views of the parties that successively kicked each other down stairs, were generally permitted to stand. A navy was organised and plunder ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... time. It is natural for one generation to hate more than anything else in the world the fashions immediately preceding the one affected. Pointed contemporary satire has, from the very shape it must assume, an ephemeral success. It is only when something more than the mere object of the satire is involved by some grace of the satirist's genius—some response on his part to charm in the thing assailed, that the work of satire comes down from its own time with ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... evaporate; pass away like a cloud, pass away like a summer cloud, pass away like a shadow, pass away like a dream. Adj. transient, transitory, transitive; passing, evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c. v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous[obs3]. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, insecure; impermanent. brief, quick, brisk, extemporaneous, summary; pressed for time &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... an absent gloomy figure in the midst of these lively folk, always musing over his own fate, always absorbed by his own sufferings, seemingly impatient of the most harmless chat. He saw how he had shunned the ephemeral intimacies that travelers are so ready to establish—no doubt because they feel sure of never meeting each other again—and how he had taken little heed of those about him. He saw himself like the rocks without, unmoved by the caresses or the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... exhibition occupies a bare, disconsolate, shabby suite of rooms. They resemble much the editorial offices of those ephemeral daily papers which, commencing with very small capital, after a spasmodic career of a few months fall despairingly into the arms of the sheriff. I had once occasion to visit the commission on a little matter of business. What that was I have forgotten: I recollect ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... blood dance a mad waltz in your veins, and fair women's faces shall seem fairer to you than ever, their embraces more tender, their kisses more tempting! Spin the ball of Society like a toy in the palm of your hand! I see your life stretching before me like a brilliant, thread-like ephemeral ray of light! But in the far distance across it looms a shadow—a shadow that your power alone can never lift. Mark me, Ivan! When the first dread chill of that shadow makes itself felt, come to me—I shall yet be living. Come; for then no wealth can aid you—at that dark hour ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... resumed the examination of her ancient certitudes, and has proved their fragility. To-day she sees her ancient principles vanishing one by one. Mechanics is losing its axioms, and matter, formerly the eternal substratum of the worlds, becomes a simple aggregate of ephemeral forces in transitory condensation. ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... and thus was Caron ushered into the humble dwelling of the humble and ineffective-looking individual whose power already transcended that of any other man in France, and who was destined to become still more before his ephemeral star went out. ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... preceding his mission to Spain, Irving kept fagging away at the pen, doing a good deal of miscellaneous and ephemeral work. Among his other engagements was that of regular contributor to the "Knickerbocker Magazine," for a salary of two thousand dollars. He wrote the editor that he had observed that man, as he advances in life, is subject to a plethora of the mind, occasioned ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... were clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it sees the light, that it is destined ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... high ruffles of the neck to the buckles of the red-heeled shoes. Powder sparkles on the head coverings of these new gallants of France. They step daintily, yet not ungracefully, into this brilliantly-lighted room, these creatures, gracious and resplendent, sparkling, painted, ephemeral, not unsuited to the place ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... to be stuck up as a ninepin only to be knocked down! There are politicians for whom such occupation seems to be proper;—and who like it too. A little office, a little power, a little rank, a little pay, a little niche in the ephemeral history of the year will reward many men adequately ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... relations upon which rests human nature. They are the living, free expression of man's place in creation. The most elaborate schemes and powerful organizations are soulless without these basic principles of morality and have but an ephemeral existence. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
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