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More "Hollowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it gayly, And guessed at its hollowness, Still shone, with each bursting bubble, One star ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... to the poor." In vain he sought for inspired words that would reestablish the happy land beyond the grave that his teachers had ever pictured in set phrase. Yet every word of the Master pointed the other way. "Here"; "now"; and "first within" was the kingdom. And the hollowness of all the rich man's preachment—that the poor must suffer patiently in hope of a reward beyond the grave—was more and more a hideous stratagem as in his mind arose together two portrait types: the pinched, ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the human family the hairs are tubular, the tubes being intersected by partitions, resembling in some degree the cellular tissue of plants. Their hollowness prevents incumbrance from weight, while their power of resistance is increased by having their traverse ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends. Therefore, what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... and mutual revilings. The listener by the rock learnt definitely what he had previously suspected—that there was bitter blood and bad feeling between the two men, buried for a time, but now revived with a savageness which revealed the hollowness of their supposed reconciliation. It was about a girl, some girl in England with whom they had both been in love. Thalassa gathered that Remington had left England as the favoured suitor. He had (in ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... tried, and I am weary of the hollowness, weary of life, and the world. So long as I have your face here, I care not to cross my own threshold till friendly hands bear me out to my quiet resting-place under the willows of Greenwood. Electra, my darling, think me weak if you ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the banks of these two streams. The country around it is a vast treeless prairie, upon which scarcely a shrub is to be seen; but a thick coat of grass covers it throughout its entire extent, with the exception of a few spots where the hollowness of the ground has collected a little moisture, or the meandering of some small stream or rivulet enriches the soil, and covers its banks ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... is so saddening to witness how all kinds of incapacities, stupidities, how meanness, hollowness, heartlessness, all incarnated in politicians, in trimmers, in narrow brained; how all of them ride on the shoulders of the masses, and use them for their sordid, mean, selfish and ambitious ends. And the masses are ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... age, shews itself by talkativeness, boasting of the past, hollowness of the eyes and cheeks, dimness of sight, deafness, tremor of voice, the accents, through default of teeth, scarce intelligible; hams weak, knees tottering, head paralytic, hollow coughing, frequent expectoration, breathless wheezing, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... show these men of birth The hollowness of rank on earth." The agent answered, "Very true - But I should not, if ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... true, but clearly defined—a line that did not dent the cheeks of early maidenhood, a line that had found no place near her own lips ten years ago; and above her eyes—she had not discerned that, at first—there was a lack of fullness, you could not name it hollowness; that was new, at least new to her, others with keener eyes may have noticed it months ago, and there was a yellowness—she might as well give it boldly its right name—at the temple, decrease of fairness, ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... by local color, in all these beautiful traditions of whatever nation or clime; at the zenith of success, in the spring-time of youth and hope, on the very eve of joy unutterable, there often seizes on the soul of man an overwhelming sense of the hollowness and fleetingness of life. It is this touch of the spiritual which raises these old heroic poems to such sublime beauty and power. Poetry of this kind implies a nation, one which is still, or has been, great; one which has a past, a legendary history, vivid recollections, and an original and poetical ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... and white within like Milk, and in the end of Summer becometh hard and woody. Whether this be the very same kind, I cannot affirm, but both the Picture and Description come very neer to that I have, but that he seems not to take notice of the hollowness or Worm, for which 'tis most observable. And therefore 'tis very likely, if men did but take notice, they might find very many differing Species of these Nuts, Ovaries, or Matrixes, and all of them to have much the same designation and office. And I have very ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... little hollowed; to make this hollowness, a Square must be made, whose Side must be equal to the Pan, in which the Channelling is to be made, and having put one foot of the Compass in the middle of the Square, make a crooked Line from one Angle of the Channelling to the other, both ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... vigour on its chosen labour. Moreover, to write a good novel one should have passed through the spring-time and enthusiasm of youth—one should be able to survey life with some degree of tranquillity; neither wrapped in its illusions, nor full of indignation at its discovered hollowness. At two-and-twenty, even if the heart is not burning with fever heat of some kind—some enthusiastic passion or misanthropical disgust—the head at least is preoccupied with some engrossing idea, which so besets the man, that he can see nothing clearly in the world around him. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... was his wont. In spite—or perhaps in consequence—of his abasement, forlornness, and unworthiness, he showed a dignity and impressiveness which were novel in him. The boyishness, vivacity, and motion, had quite vanished. There were a depth and hollowness in his eyes which gave a singular power to his face. There must have been a vein of genuine strength and nobleness in the man, or he would have been too much crushed to show any thing but weak despair or brutal sullenness. Had Professor Valeyon's attention been directed ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Gresley, "it has always been our aim to be independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to them ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... Chesterfield's strictures discouraged the practice of the Violin in the higher circles of society is very probable, appearing as they do in a work which was held in the light of a textbook upon the conduct of a gentleman for some considerable time. Happily, the hollowness of much of his advice came to be recognised, and he who deemed cards and dice a necessary step towards fashionable perfection, and ordained that Fiddlers were to be paid to play for you as substitutes for your own personal degradation, came to be remembered, possibly, more on account of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... assurances that everything would come right. They had taken "a leap in the dark," they had staked the fortunes of the party on the dice-box, and events were to decide the issue. When the blow came Mr. Disraeli's reputation for sagacity fell to zero. At last the hollowness of his pretensions was detected, and there was no mincing of epithets for the man who had befooled and destroyed a great party. The Dukes left him to himself, and, according to our present informant, their flight was the harbinger of reviving fortunes. The heart of provincial conservatism ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... will be: You see a tremendous tower-like pine-tree in the forest; it seems as it will stand there forever; but strike it fairly with your axe and it will reveal hollowness and punk will come out. So is it with the strength of the Knights of the Cross. But I commanded you to tell me what you have done and what you have accomplished there. Let me see, you said you fought there with ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... than the table, admiring the courage that had snubbed Tozer with a word. But his musing remark rang a bell in young Gourlay. By Jove, he had thought that himself, so he had! He was a hollow thing, he knew, but a buckram pretence prevented the world from piercing to his hollowness. The son of his courageous sire (whom he equally admired and feared) had learned to play the game of bluff. A bold front was half the battle. He had worked out his little theory, and it was with a shock of pleasure the timid youngster heard great Allan give it forth. He burned to let him know that ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... it dulled her perceptions in one respect, had deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly, but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls. They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... It is not necessary that the present generation, how quietly reaping the fruit of your heroic endurance, should see eye to eye with you in respect to all your testimonies and beliefs, in order to recognize your claim to gratitude and admiration. For, in an age of hypocritical hollowness and mean self-seeking, when, with noble exceptions, the very Puritans of Cromwell's Reign of the Saints were taking profane lessons from their old enemies, and putting on an outside show of conformity, for the sake of place or pardon, ye maintained the austere dignity of virtue, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... felt it lonely in the old place before, for there was companionship even in the memory of her dead, but this evening as she sat on the porch, the familiar objects in the yard growing dim through the oncoming night, the hollowness of desolation was there. Joe was in prison. The neighbors had refused to believe the word of her boy. There was nobody to help him but her. The hand of everybody else was against him. She had delivered him into bondage and brought this trouble to him, ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Tickell, and Swift. Pope's face, as given in Kneller's portrait, (which recalls the poet's stolen complimentary verse to the painter,) has a sad and weary look, and is marked by that pallor, and that peculiar hollowness of eye and cheek, which often accompany bodily deformity. Swift's face betrays but little of the bitterness of his soul; but it was painted in his best days, before the cloud of darkness had begun to settle down upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Beethoven's overture "Leonore No. 3," we marvel at the transformation effected by the composer. Advantage has also been taken of the difference between its high and low tones, and now in some romantic music, as in Raff's "Lenore" symphony, or the prayer of Agathe in "Der Freischuetz," the hollowness of the low tones produces a mysterious effect that is exceedingly striking. Still the fact remains that the native voice of the instrument, though sweet, is expressionless compared with that of ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... should be than they. A weak-minded, shallow girl would have succumbed to their ridicule, and soon have become like them, but high-spirited Rose only despised them, and gradually sought out and found some companionship with those of the better sort in the large store. But there seemed so much hollowness and falsehood on every side that she hardly ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... of the commonwealth, and their mortification in perceiving a certain course of mal-administration persisted in, in defiance of the known sense of the country. At another time, it has been imputed to their experience of the hollowness of all our public pretenders to patriotism. I am afraid, the cause is to be sought in something, more uniform in it's operation, and less honourable to the lower ranks of society, than either of these. In a word, luxury and dissipation have every where ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... stared up; without a stir in the great, gaunt body, he was dead. Pierre reverently drew the eyes shut. There were no tears in his eyes, but a feeling of hollowness about his heart. He straightened and looked about him and found that the room was ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and that is Madame's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... you yourself have heard, is very contracted and poor, without inflection or expression, being nothing but the repetition of the same sounds, by which means—that is simply by the number and the depth of hollowness of the same monosyllables—they convey their wishes to each other. It is, indeed, wonderful how they can do so, and our learned men, from this circumstance, have held that the language of the wood-pigeon is the most difficult to acquire, so much so that it is scarce ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... approve of the Peace of Utrecht, or to abandon his desire for the Hanoverian succession. Distrusting the sincerity of Harley's pretended exertions, he resolutely refused to hold intercourse with a Minister of whose hollowness he had already received many proofs. Nor was the Duchess less determined never to pardon the injuries which she conceived herself and her husband to have sustained from Harley. All offers of his aid, all attempts to lend to ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... upon hands and knees also began to inspect the cracks and crannies between the various stones. In the right-hand corner furthest from the entrance, their quest was rewarded. A stone some three feet square moved slightly when pressure was applied to it, and gave up a sound of hollowness beneath the tread. Dust and litter covered the entire floor, but having cleared the top of this particular stone, a ring was discovered, lying flat in a circular groove cut to receive it. The blade of a penknife served to raise it from its resting place, and Dr. Cairn, standing astride ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... of rest, clothing herself in the majesty of beauty, Hellas yet seemed ready to burst forth out of this rest into an effort more gigantic, to be followed by a more memorable rest as the reflex of a destiny more nearly consummated. But in this promise there was the very hollowness of deception. Just because the intense strain against external barbarism had relaxed, those elements which common necessity had made tributary to success and triumph began to suffer dissolution; each separate interest became a prominent centre of a distinct political crystallization; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... sermons; the emptiness of the prayers, written in advance and spoken with conventional unctuous voice, and gestures to suit; and the apathy of the people who, dressed out in their best, came to listen,—how early I divined its hollowness,—and how deep was my disappointment, and how cruel the disillusionment—oh! the disheartening formalism of it all! The very appearance of the church disconcerted me: it was a new cityfied one, ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... drumming on the pane, turned his back to the bleak perspective and, seizing his hat, departed in search of Catie. He found Catie mending a tear in the new frock she had worn, the night before, and unsympathetic in proportion to her discontent. The hollowness of the world was all about him, when he went back to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... vision. I saw a door—shut, ominous. Before that door stood a woman, tall, pale, beautiful. She was there to enter, but to what no mortal living could say. She saw nothing but loss and the hollowness of a living death behind that ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... of the incline. Yellow dust like the gloom of the cave, but not so changeless, drifted away on the wind; the roar clapped in echo from the cliff, returned, went back, and came again to die in the hollowness. Down on the sunny terrace there was a different atmosphere. Ring and Whitie leaped around Bess. Once more she was smiling, gay, and thoughtless, with the dream-mood in the shadow of ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... will produced a certain incapacity of believing that she had been absolutely deceived. Her whole fabric was so compact, and had been so much solidified by her own intensity of purpose, that any hollowness of foundation was utterly beyond present credence. She was ready to be affronted with Mauleverer for perilling all for a bad joke, but wildly impossible as this explanation would have seemed to others, she preferred taking refuge in it to accepting the full brunt of the blow ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enough when he has business on his hands and all his engines at work, he is still worse when he has nothing to do, and we only see into the hollowness of his heart. His indifference when Othello falls into a swoon, is ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... profession, the real character of a man or woman, than those extreme trials and difficulties of earth, when no friends are near to help and where no way of escape seems possible. In trials, such as those related above, the noblest traits of character or the hollowness and rottenness of a profession are often plainly seen. Five cold winter days and nights came and passed, yet no relief came to the imprisoned family. They dare not move out, fearing the Indians would see them and come at night and murder them. The sixth day Crabtree, ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness: for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear's youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honour was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already at his service? That should not hinder duty ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... providence has been endowed with a subtle power of fraud such as no man can thoroughly look through; for those who, like myself, despise it most completely, cannot by any art bring forward a rationale, a theory of its hollowness that will give plenary satisfaction except to those who are already satisfied). Thus Cicero, feeling that if this were nothing, then had all his life been a skirmish, one continued skirmish for shadows ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... public, I have often accused that body of having no sense of humour. Conscience pricks me to atonement. Let me withdraw my oft-made imputation, and show its hollowness by examining with you, reader (who are, of course, no more a member of the public than I am), what are the main features of that sense of humour which the public ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... any more to do the things that offered. Something dead within him just refused to respond to any suggestion. He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no-one for the moment to drink with. Nor was there a woman. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... away from him. He spoke about something that evidently was vitally important in his eyes. He addressed himself to nobody in particular, and yet his words were meant for some one. It was hardly correct to say that men and women were corrupt; they had simply reached a certain degree of hollowness; they had degenerated and grown small. Shallow soil, anaemic soil, without growth, without fertility! The women carried on their surface existence. They were not tired of life, but they did not venture ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... century that Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They felt that there is an inexpugnable truth of religion. Still ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... society might have been waked up if Mr. Lowell, then returning from England, could have been induced to co-operate. He was approached on the subject, but would not respond,—he only said that he desired rest! Alas for the hollowness of American religion ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... saddle blanket, his eyes bright as though with fever or fear. The skin of his face where it was seen through the black stubble of beard looked yellow with sickness. The cheek bones stood out sharply, little pools of shadow emphasizing the hollowness of his sunken cheeks. Above the waist he was stripped to his undershirt; a rude bandage under the shirt was stained the reddish brown of dried blood. A quick pity drove the distrust out of the eyes of the man ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... prejudice his Majesty against any one, but only that it might be known to what a height the impudence was rising." Certainly the King and the ecclesiastic, like the Roman soothsayers, would have laughed in each other's face, could they have met, over the hollowness of such demonstrations. Granvelle's letters were filled, for the greater part, with pictures of treason, stratagem, and bloody intentions, fabricated mostly out of reports, table-talk, disjointed chat in the careless ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... affairs in order. All the time Ethel said not a word, except when referred to by her brother; but when Mr. Wilmot took leave, he shook her hand warmly, as if he was much pleased with her. "Ah!" she thought, "if he knew how ill I have behaved! It is all show and hollowness with me." ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... full of indifferent gossip about society, it contained a few sarcastic remarks about his own approaching failure, with some rather youthfully cynical observations on the instability of things in general and the hollowness of all ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... evinced great caution, trying with their poles before venturing their weight; the heat was intense, and made us glad to find ourselves again on terra firma, if that expression may be allowed where the walking was exceedingly disagreeable, owing to the hollowness of the lava, formed in great bubbles, that continually broke and let us in up to our knees. This dike has probably been formed by the drainage of the volcano by a lateral vent, as the part of the crater which it confines has sunk lower than that outside it, and the contraction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... advanced with the old wilful shake of his curly head. "I also would rather walk, if you please." As he looked at him, compassion came into the Etheling's face. The hollowness of their sockets made the boy's large eyes look larger, and his fever-flush trebled their brightness. Sebert said, with a poor attempt at a smile, "Little did I think that my hospitality would ever produce such a guest. Poor ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... unaccustomed endearment. Gordon was stereotyped, commonplace; he was certain that even she must recognize the hollowness of his protestations. But she never doubted him; she accepted the dull, leaden note of his spurious passion for the clear ring ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and the altar after the Spanish fashion is sumptuous with gilt and florid carving. He wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of exquisite lace, but he wears them as though their weight were more than he could bear; and in the meagre, trembling hands, and in the white, ashen face, in the dark hollowness of the eyes and in the sunken cheeks, there is a bodily corruption that is terrifying. The priest seems to hold together with difficulty the bonds of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the soul to burst its prison, only with despair; it is as if the Lord ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... in exile from his kind, being driven off as a punishment for his heterodoxy on matrimonial subjects. This is one explanation of the fact that Leprechawns are always seen alone, though other authorities make the Leprechawn solitary by preference, he having learned the hollowness of fairy friendship and the deceitfulness of fairy femininity, and left the society of his kind in disgust at its ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... the course of contemplation thus traced in the psalm, we have these three points brought before us—first, the thought of life common to both clauses; second, the gloomy, aimless hollowness which that thought breathes into life apart from God; third, the blessedness which springs from the same thought when we look at it in connection with our Father ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fear any one without might see it, and set it down beside the flagstone. All over this stone I groped without finding any trace of a rift or any hint of how to lift so formidable a weight. It seemed fast set in the boards, and gave no sound of hollowness or symptom of ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... clear it away, if we had no positive truth to offer in its room. But the thousands of good men whom it has beguiled, because it professed to meet the earnest craving of their minds for a restoration of Christ's church with power, need not fear to open their eyes to its hollowness; like the false miracles of fraud or sorcery, it is but the counterfeit of a real truth. The restoration of the church, is, indeed, the best consummation of all our prayers, and all our labours; it ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... carefully prepared himself in guilty secrecy, and appeared unusually well, but he was the only one who sighed deeply after the good man's departure. Rising from the depths of his soul through his false exhilaration was a low, threatening voice, saying, "That man is true; you are a sham, and your hollowness will ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... arm-chair, whence she rose with slow dignity to respond to the bow of each person that entered. She listened to the condolences but answered never a word, overcoming her physical pain by rigidity of bearing. Pierre, who had learnt to know her, could divine, however, by the hollowness of her cheeks, the emptiness of her eyes, and the bitter twinge of her mouth, how frightful was the collapse within her. Not only was her race ended, but her brother would never be pope, never secure the elevation which she had so long fancied she was winning for him by dint of devotion, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... pondered—the bright, intermittent color, the emaciation, the hollowness of the eyes. The effect, so far, was to add to Kitty's natural distinction, to give, rather, a touch of pathos to a face which even in its wildest mirth had in it something alien and remote. But she, too, reflected that a little ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... temporary is done, we suppose, with a pad. But the Bosom was at the Banquet, and the proprietor was there to thump it, until it must have sounded and reverberated; and if Mr. DOUGHERTY had also thumped his head, there would have been equal evidence of hollowness within. "May my tongue never prove a traitor!" cried the orator. Mr. PUNCHINELLO hastens to reassure him. The tongue is well enough, and is likely to be. It's something a little higher up that ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... thou hast forced thy bark Up this strong stream, whose broken waters here Send pleasant murmurs to the listening sense: Rest thee beneath this hazel; its green boughs Afford a grateful shade, and to the eye Fair is its fruit: Stranger! the seemly fruit Is worthless, all[1] is hollowness within, For on the grave of ROSAMUND it grows! Young lovely and beloved she fell seduced, And here retir'd to wear her wretched age In earnest prayer and bitter penitence, Despis'd and self-despising: think of her Young Man! and learn to ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... position, was his argument. But he was also a staunch believer in forced labour, which was quite a different thing. Consequently we found ourselves condemned to some of the most filthy tasks conceivable. Incidentally, however, these duties only served to reveal still more convincingly the hollowness of Germany's preachings concerning the principles of health and hygiene to the whole world while herself practising the diametrically opposite. We were commanded to ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... on through the leafy woods, trundling the basket behind him. Nothing had gone wrong; indeed, everything had been much easier than he could have hoped. Perhaps it was the weariness that had crept into his legs, and the hollowness that began to appear in his stomach; but, somehow, although in the morning he had expected to find Gay's new mothers beckoning from every window, so that he could scarcely choose between them, he now felt as if the whole race of mothers had ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... angry with himself that he felt galled. But in his wounded pride there was no mercenary regret,—only that sort of sickness which comes to youth when the hollowness of worldly life is first made clear to it. From the faces round him there fell that glamour by which the amour propre is held captive in large assemblies, where the amour propre is flattered. "Magnificent, intelligent audience," thinks the applauded ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... human if incidents like these had not caused him pain. Occasionally he would give vent to his grief, but his manly courage, too, would soon assert itself, and he would expose the hollowness, insincerity, and futility of the lying tales that were spread about him. At a public meeting in Campo Flore he was cursed, sentenced to death, and burned in effigy. (21a, 174.) He has read offensive reports ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... thus brought to see the hollowness of the contention that 'Pure Reason' can ignore its psychological context and dehumanize itself. A thought, to be thought at all, must seem worth thinking to someone, it must convey the meaning he intends, it must be true in his eyes and relevant to his purposes in the situation ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... trades unions, and refused to grant reforms or concessions. Consequently a strike was declared in 1900 by which the mine workers obtained a ten per cent increase in wages and the promise of semi-monthly wages in cash. But they had not resumed work before they discovered the hollowness of these concessions. Two years of futile application for better conditions passed, and then, in 1902, 150,000 men and boys went on strike. This strike lasted one hundred and sixty-three days. The magnates were generally regarded as arrogant and defiant; they ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... fled to Antioch, the seat of his late government, and was there decapitated. Meantime Albinus, the British commander-in-chief, had already been won over by the title of Csar, or adopted heir to the new Augustus. But the hollowness of this bribe soon became apparent, and the two competitors met to decide their pretensions at Lyons. In the great battle which followed, Severus fell from his horse, and was at first supposed to be dead. But recovering, he defeated his rival, who immediately committed suicide. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... coincidence alone (for otherwise it could not possess it) a power to affect us. I confess, with me the conviction is absolute, that, if the impression and sense of death were not thus counterbalanced, such a hollowness would pervade the whole system of things, such a want of correspondence and consistency, a disproportion so astounding betwixt means and ends, that there could be no repose, no joy. Were we to grow up unfostered by this genial warmth, a frost would chill ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c (luminary) 423 [Lat.]; such stuff as dreams are made of [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c 353; baseless fabric of a vision [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c (absence) 187. inanity, fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the mould. But the mould is broken, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... remedy for the fierce, shallow war of society, or its faded and jaded hollowness, is to be found in generous friendships, begotten by a common pursuit of the holiest ends of existence. In the nurture of these relations, by every law of fitness and want, it belongs to women to take the lead. The realm of the affections, with its imperious exactions ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... will well consider it, idle speaking is precisely the beginning of all Hollowness, Halfness, Infidelity (want of Faithfulness); it is the genial atmosphere in which rank weeds of every kind attain the mastery over noble fruits in man's life, and utterly choke them out: one of the most crying maladies of these days, and to be testified against, and in all ways ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... his breath, and leaned on his cane for support. He realised now the hollowness of his previous anger. He had never for a moment believed the boy was going to the bad. Down underneath his crustiness was a deep love for his son and a strong faith in him. He had allowed his old habit of domineering to get the better ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... another's opinions when you do not; to deceive by a glance of the eye, a nod of the head, a smile, a gesture; to lack sincerity; to assume to know or think or feel what you do not—all these are but various manifestations of hollowness and falsehood resulting from want ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... formative essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies of religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency between the conduct and the professions of such persons. Though utterly indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark upon the hollowness of a Christianity which was horror-stricken at a dance or a Sunday drive, while it was blandly silent about the separation of families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors of a system which can lessen ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... spelling, the terse thought, and the concise form, are all characteristic of Napoleon. The right of petition, the recital of unjust acts, the illegal action of the council, the use of force, the hollowness of the pretexts under which their request had been refused, the demand that the troops be withdrawn and redress granted—all these are crudely but forcibly presented. The document presages revolution. Under a well-constituted and regular authority, its writer and signatories would of course ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... mighty historical episode touched on in the last chapter, is this: Was the fact that these despised men were so entirely right and their triumphant adversaries so entirely wrong a mere fluke, or was it due to the soundness of one set of principles and the hollowness of the other; and were the principles special to that case, or general to ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... form of a beast to the image of God. Vanity is a mighty power and incentive, as great as hunger and thirst, and much more generally active in the affairs of civilized humanity. And yet its very name means hollowness. "The hollowness of hollowness, all things are hollowness," said the preacher, and his translators have put the word vanity in his mouth, because it means the same thing. But in itself, being hollow, it is neither bad nor good; its badness or goodness lies in those things whereof a man ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... left us, however, soon after that "little mill," as the young fellow John called it, where he came off second best. His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it. Three empty bottles of Mrs. ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... exhausted, she found herself entirely at the end of her resources. How thoroughly did the banished woman then realise the woes of exile—how hard it is to climb and descend the stranger's stair, experience the hollowness of his promise, and the arrogance of his commiseration. And, finally, as though fated to drain her cup of bitterness to the last drop, to learn that she, her long-loved bosom friend and royal mistress, who owed her, at the very least, a silent fidelity, had openly ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... very silent; in truth, I found my tongue clinging to the roof of my mouth, and a dry, painful sensation in the throat. I observed a peculiar hollowness in Mudge's voice, too, and I was conscious that my own also sounded unusual. Still it would not do to give in, and we were not so far gone yet as to think of doing that. On, therefore, we went, though not without suffering. ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... truthful is Helmer, that inexpugnable prig, with his shallow selfishness, his complacent conceit, and his morality for external use only. Ibsen is never happier, and never is his scalpel more skilful, than when he is laying bare the hollowness of shams like these. Never is his touch more delicate or more caressing than when he is delineating a character like Bernick's sister Martha, with her tender devotion and her self-effacing simplicity. Not even Helmer's ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... at the back, they fancied that they detected a suggestion of hollowness, still not enough to make Roy determine to have ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... not see, but he could feel. His fingers quested all over one plate, probing and tapping. The plate was hollow—in reality, two saucer-shaped plates with their concave faces together. They gave off a muffled clink of hollowness when he tapped them. When he shook the armor, there was something extra in the sound, and that impelled him to hold a plate close to his ear. He heard a soft, ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... deputation. But when the officials warned them against wasting their money on a deputation and told them in the next breath that it was a breach of the law to find an abode for the evicted wanderers, these Natives, perceiving the hollowness of the Government's advice, determined that as a last resort a deputation should be sent ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... and intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions—and left him. She came and left him as that dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing him one jot or one tittle of the hollowness of her ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... for fraud, falsehood, and selfish simulation, moved Warwick's admiration as well as pity. Whatever contrasted Edward IV. had a charm for him. He schooled his hot temper, and softened his deep voice, in that holy presence; and the intimate persuasion of the hollowness of all worldly greatness, which worldly greatness itself had forced upon the earl's mind, made something congenial between the meek saint and the fiery warrior. For the hundredth time groaned Warwick, as he quitted ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 'ropes of pearls,' in priceless diamonds, gorgeous clothing, and magnificent furniture. The phenomenon is curious, but not uncommon. One may sometimes find an epicure who stills retains an infantile taste for sweetmeats, and is not afraid to avow it. Experience of the world taught Disraeli the hollowness of some objects of his early admiration, but it never so dulled his palate as to make pure splendour insipid to his taste. It is as easy to call this love of glitter vulgar, as to call his admiration for dukes snobbish; but the passion ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the sparrows, who were ready clothed by Providence, and had no rates and taxes to pay, as well as the clerks, who, at all events, had plenty to do and no time to soliloquize upon the hardness and hollowness of life. To have plenty of brains, and an indefinite amount of spare time to use them in; to desire ardently to hasten along the road towards fortune and happiness, and to be forced to sit idly by whilst others, duller-witted, perchance, and with less capacity for work, ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... side heaves up with a groan at its own weight. Beneath lies a hollow, seven feet square, where a priest might lie concealed with the gratifying knowledge that, however the ponderous trap-door be hammered from above, there would be no tell-tale hollowness as a response. Having bolted himself in, he might to all intents and purposes be imbedded in a rock (though truly a toad so situated is not always safe from intrusion). Three centuries have rolled away and thirteen sovereigns ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... was vain to attempt it, I could not pray; I questioned the justice of God; I cursed mankind, and all the world, revolving in my mind all the possible sophisms and satires I could think of, respecting the hollowness and vanity of virtue. The disappointed and the exasperated are always ingenious in finding accusations against their fellow-creatures, and even the Creator himself. Anger is of a more universal and injurious tendency than is generally supposed. As we cannot rage and storm from morning till ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... mention Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, Catherine, and all the famous Empresses and Queens, not to prove the capacity of women for the most arduous and responsible office, for that is undeniable, but to show the hollowness of the assertion that there is an instinctive objection to the fulfillment of such offices by women. Men who say so do not really think so. The whole history of the voting and office-holding of women shows that whenever men's theories of the relation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... husband believes that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the express desire of ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... imperial dignity to Henry VIII. for a good round sum; but the King of England's envoy, Dr. Cuthbert Tunstall, a stanch and clearsighted servant, who had been sent to Germany to deal with this singular proposal, opened his master's eyes to its hollowness and falsehood, and Henry VIII. held himself aloof. Francis I. remained the only rival of Charles of Austria; Maximilian labored eagerly to pave the way for his grandson's success; and at his death the struggle ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... warm-hearted old Chevalier, "one whom I love. There is something frank in your eyes which raises memories of my dead son. In you I see both my offspring's and my own youth recalled to me. You are Canadian—in you I can banish the coldness, hollowness, and degeneracy of Europe. Replace my boy. Let me call you 'Germain' ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... all-in-all—for in such trials in real life it is all-in-all, or we regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance—shocks far deeper feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over the orthodox Church-of-Englandism—for ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... hollowness of their days with an extraordinary amount of running about. There was incessant shifting of interest from one focal point to another of the colony, a perpetually restless swarming hither and yon to some new centre of distraction, a continual kaleidoscopic parade of the ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... and easy matter for the letter of the Constitution to have expressed this spirit, or indeed to have done away altogether with this machinery of a sham election. The Jackson men had only to state their argument in order to expose its hollowness; for they said substantially that the Constitution established an election without an option; that the electors were to vote for a person predestined by an earlier occurrence to receive their ballots. But besides their unsoundness in argument, their statistical position was far from being ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... pierced down into the state of society that obtained and was praised so highly, and with ever less surprise and ever greater disquiet, found hollowness everywhere. And this called my will to battle, armed it ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies. Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to the ...
— English Satires • Various
... boy's whereabouts, when, by the same mail, I am advised by him that he is on board the very boat of which you claim to be Captain and owner. I of course take my boy's word in preference to that of any stranger. Having thus detected the hollowness of your sympathy, and the falseness of your pretended friendship for my husband, I must request you to refrain from further meddling in this matter. ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... is strange, like some other audacious sophisms, it is capable of being so stated as most of all to baffle the subtle dialectician; and Kant himself, though not cheated, was never so much perplexed in his life as in the effort to make its hollowness apparent.] ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... the taking of this wall by setting fire to it; so he gave order that the soldiers should throw a great number of burning torches upon it: accordingly, as it was chiefly made of wood, it soon took fire; and when it was once set on fire, its hollowness made that fire spread to a mighty flame. Now, at the very beginning of this fire, a north wind that then blew proved terrible to the Romans; for by bringing the flame downward, it drove it upon them, and they were almost in despair of success, as fearing their machines would be burnt: but after ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... little with tweezers. Compress the wings loosely to the sides. If there is an unnatural hollowness between the shoulders, lift the mane and at one side of it where the skin is bare, make a short longitudinal incision. Through this place a little soft filling over and between the shoulders to fill out hollowness. It is not necessary to sew up ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... their kind wings. So that we have not to banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness of any good emotion. And hence in that contest before noted, between the body and the soul, we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered and outworn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitter pain upon it, and yet without ever diminishing ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... tastes are so far affected by circumstances, that it is possible that Helvetius's exclusive association with the selfish circles of the French society, which never lived for the good of others, together with the perception of the hollowness of the respect which persons paid him for his wealth and influence, led him to regard self-love as the sole motive of conduct. His philosophy is expressed in two works;(553) the one on the spirit, the other on man: the former a theoretical view of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Their losses elude the inquiries of the statistician. They consisted in the utter discredit of the royalist cause throughout France, the resentment that ever follows on clumsy or disloyal co-operation, and the revelation of the hollowness of the imposing fabric of the First Coalition. In the south of France four nations failed to hold a single fortress which her own sons ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears of that generation,—partially opened, for the general aesthetic ear is not fully opened yet,—to a hollowness which was musical to the many: "Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... creation of which was the worst day's work he ever accomplished. It is only a big word, printed with a capital letter, to express the objective side of the relativity of human, knowledge. It connotes all that we do not know. It is a mere confession of ignorance; it is hollowness, emptiness, a vacuum, a nothing. And this nothing, which Mr. Spencer adorns with endless quasi-scientific rhetoric, is used as a buttress to prop up ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... knowing that nature is sufficient to excite it. From the palaces of kings—from the tents of warriors, he comes—equally at home with man in all aspects—to the cotter's hearth:—he bids us turn from the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's daughter—he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there one—not even Burns himself—who forced us more intimately to acknowledge, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... make the pilgrim a participator in that which is Divine. A struggle has to take place, because so much that belongs to the life, on the level where it now stands, belongs to a world below it. Impulses and passions, the narrow outlook, the timidity and hollowness of the "small self"—all these, which have previously remained at the centre of life, have to be thrust to the periphery of existence. So that an entrance into the highest spiritual world is not merely something to know, but far rather something to do and to be. ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam slips in detached snow-flakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the water circles slowly like black oil; a little butterfly lies on its back, the wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... the tie cutter's cabin, and for many minutes he stared and listened, while Peter seemed to stand without breathing. Then making a wide megaphone of his hands, he shouted. It was an alarming thing to do and Peter started as if struck. For there were only ghosts to answer back and the hollowness of a shriven pit for the cry to travel in. Nothing was there. Even the great sawdust piles had shrunk into black scars under the scourge ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... the intemperate sunlight and the great hill. The hollowness of life as they lived it came home to them with an aching force. Yet she lifted her fan from the table and fanned herself gently with it, and he mechanically lit a cigar. Servants passed in and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' is well enough as a proverb applicable to cases of friendship, though absence is not always necessary to hollowness of heart, even between friends, and truth and honesty, like precious stones, are perhaps most easily imitated at a distance, when the counterfeits often pass for real. Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... attempt to liberate the Fenian prisoners confined in it. On the 20th of December Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother, "We are in a strange uneasy state in London, and the profound sense I have long had of the hollowness and insufficiency of our whole system of administration does not inspire me with much confidence." The "strange uneasy state" was not confined to London, but prevailed everywhere. Obviously England was threatened by a mysterious and desperate enemy, and no one seemed to know that enemy's ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... irresolutely from one foot to the other. A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed wits. Now and then ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... economical, and brilliantly effective," H.L. Mencken admits.[6] "Yet the same hollowness that marks the American novel," he continues, "also marks the short story." And of "many current makers of magazine short stories," he asseverates, "such stuff has no imaginable relation to life as men live it in the world." He further comments, "the native author ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Babylonian empire was of short duration. Its vaulting ambition appears to have overleaped itself. Realizing for a time the Assyrian ideal of a world monarchy, the fall was as sudden as its rise was unexpected. Internal dissensions gave the first indication of the hollowness of the state. Nebuchadnezzar's son was murdered in 560 B.C., within two years after reaching the throne, by his own brother-in-law, Neriglissar; and the latter dying after a reign of only four years, his infant child was put out of the way and Nabonnedos, a high officer of the state, but ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... physiological character; they are not to be used for retailing moral platitudes. To make them that would be a fatal mistake. The young are often very hostile to merely conventional moral maxims, and suspect their hollowness, not always without reason. The end to be aimed at here is enlightenment. Certainly knowledge can never be immoral, but nothing is gained by jumbling up knowledge ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ruler's going away sorrowful, and so should His messengers do. The sorrow tells of real desire, and the departure will sooner or later be exchanged for return with a deeper and more thorough purpose, if the earlier wish had any substance in it. If it had not, better that the consciousness of its hollowness should be forced upon the man, than that he should outwardly become what he is not really,—a Christian; for, in the one case, he may be led to reflection which may issue in thorough surrender; and in the other he will be a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... train panted in, pulled up, whistled, and puffed out again, leaving three people behind it. One of these was a woman of sixty (approximately), the second a small girl of ten, the third a young gentleman in a top hat and Etons, who carried a bag, and looked as if he had seen the hollowness of things, for his face wore a bored, supercilious look. His uncle had evidently not arrived, unless he had come disguised as an old woman, an act of which Gethryn refused to ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... homelike and natural, that the newcomers felt as if they had only left it yesterday. Fordham, having thrown off his wraps, waited on his guests, looking exceedingly happy in his quiet way, but more fragile than ever. He had a good deal of fair beard, but it could not conceal the hollowness of his cheeks, and there were great caves round his eyes, which were very bright and blue. Yet he was called well, waited assiduously on little Lina, and ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... your pupils to walk in the paths which you tread. But no clearness and faithfulness in religious teaching will atone for the injury which a bad example will effect. Conduct speaks louder than words, and no persons are more shrewd than the young to discover the hollowness of empty professions, and the heartlessness of mere pretended interest ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... wholly pathetic, and then the hour for Rupert's departure all too suddenly arrived. They separated with ostentatious whooping, and then Johnny, suddenly overcome with the dreadfulness of all earthly things, and the hollowness of life generally, instantly ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... men; and my mother urged Miss Wesley, as one whom Mrs. Lee admitted to her confidence, above all things to act upon her pride by forewarning her that such men, in the midst of lip homage to her charms, would be sure to betray its hollowness by declining to let their wives and daughters visit her. Plead what excuses they would, Mrs. Lee might rely upon it, that the true ground for this insulting absence of female visitors would be found to lie in her profession of infidelity. This alienation of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... time to time she had a fancy that she might accomplish something by ingenious concessions to form, though she should persist in caring for Morris. Catherine's ingenuities were indefinite, and we are not called upon to expose their hollowness. The best of them perhaps showed itself in that freshness of aspect which was so discouraging to Mrs. Penniman, who was amazed at the absence of haggardness in a young woman who for a whole night had lain quivering beneath a father's curse. Poor ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... hips elevated; her abdomen large and her thighs voluminous. Hence, she should taper from the center, up and down. Whereas, in a well-formed man the shoulders are more prominent than the hips. Great hollowness of the back, the pressing of the thigh against each other in walking, and the elevation of one hip above the other, are indications of ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... it likely to combine against one who, in spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia, served only to probe the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons (p. 313) from Charles on behalf of the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... with the recess, it has a decoration peculiar to itself. We have often, in the preceding chapters, noted the fondness of the Northern builders for deep shade and hollowness in their mouldings; and in the second chapter of the "Seven Lamps," the changes are described which reduced the massive roll mouldings of the early Gothic to a series of recesses, separated by bars of light. The shape of these recesses is at present a matter of no importance to us: ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... a flush upon her broad face and following his every movement with adoring eyes. To all but Dr. Harpe he looked the fortunate and beaming bridegroom and only she saw the tiny lines which sleeplessness had left about his eyes or detected the hollowness of ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... drum warned him; the singing had ceased. And this bitter idealist, this preacher of the hollowness of the real, wondered where were the sable trappings of woe, the hideous envisagement of them that are condemned with mortuary symbols in garbs of painted flame to the stake, faggot, axe, and headsman. None of these were visible, and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... school, you would praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... she had met him—he succeeded, by several easy moves, in isolating her from her aunt, and, notwithstanding her admiration, her desire to tap with her knuckles the metal of her idol and listen for a ring of hollowness, she was alarmed. Yet, perversely, she knew that he would not exhibit his paces before his wife—naturally a disinterested spectator—or before her aunt, who was hardly "intimate" enough. The long-desired hour found her disquieted. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... and their mortification in perceiving a certain course of mal-administration persisted in, in defiance of the known sense of the country. At another time, it has been imputed to their experience of the hollowness of all our public pretenders to patriotism. I am afraid, the cause is to be sought in something, more uniform in it's operation, and less honourable to the lower ranks of society, than either of these. In a ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... overthrew him in three great battles. Niger fled to Antioch, the seat of his late government, and was there decapitated. Meantime Albinus, the British commander-in-chief, had already been won over by the title of Caesar, or adopted heir to the new Augustus. But the hollowness of this bribe soon became apparent, and the two competitors met to decide their pretensions at Lyons. In the great battle which followed, Severus fell from his horse, and was at first supposed to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... old age, shews itself by talkativeness, boasting of the past, hollowness of the eyes and cheeks, dimness of sight, deafness, tremor of voice, the accents, through default of teeth, scarce intelligible; hams weak, knees tottering, head paralytic, hollow coughing, frequent expectoration, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... is being worked out by all these wars and tumults in which we bear our share. It is only as I lie here and think (I have, as thou knowest, been here many times before amongst these books and parchments, able for little but study and thought) that there comes over me a strange sense of the hollowness of these earthly strivings and search after fame and glory, a solemn conviction — I scarce know how to frame it in words — that there must be other work to be done in the world, stronger and more heroic deeds than men will ever do with swords and spears. Methinks the holy ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... after the flight to Palermo, the condition of affairs for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was seemingly critical to the verge of desperation; for neither the preparations of the Coalition, nor the hollowness of the French successes, were understood, and news was slow to reach the remote city where the Court now dwelt. The republican movement extended, though superficially, to the toe of Italy, many of the towns in Calabria planting the tree of liberty, and the new ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... earth, was his conclusion. It was right-named by the ones of old-time as the Star-Born. Only from the stars could it have come, and no thing of chance was it. It was a creation of artifice and mind. Such perfection of form, such hollowness that it certainly possessed, could not be the result of mere fortuitousness. A child of intelligences, remote and unguessable, working corporally in metals, it indubitably was. He stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing wild-fire of hypotheses to account for this far-journeyer who had adventured ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... become very silent; in truth, I found my tongue clinging to the roof of my mouth, and a dry, painful sensation in the throat. I observed a peculiar hollowness in Mudge's voice, too, and I was conscious that my own also sounded unusual. Still it would not do to give in, and we were not so far gone yet as to think of doing that. On, therefore, we went, though not without suffering. My knees felt weak, and I breathed with difficulty; but I would not ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... degradation of the highest and holiest thing on earth. It has come, this ethical Church, to reinforce the wholly forgotten teaching of the Hebrew prophets of the utter emptiness of all religion devoid of moral life, the vanity of sacrifices, oblations and rites, the hollowness of formularies, creeds and confessions, the indispensable necessity of an ethical basis for all religious belief and practice. "What more," asks Micah, "doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... than the Allies. Their losses elude the inquiries of the statistician. They consisted in the utter discredit of the royalist cause throughout France, the resentment that ever follows on clumsy or disloyal co-operation, and the revelation of the hollowness of the imposing fabric of the First Coalition. In the south of France four nations failed to hold a single fortress which her own sons had ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... happy," said the proud mother; "you will now be all I have ever predicted for you;" and, in her joy at the moment, she forgot the hectic of his cheek, and the hollowness of his eye. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... three of them into alliance together. Katharine's tone and glance made Mr. Hilbery once more feel completely at a loss, and in addition, painfully and angrily obsolete; but in spite of an awful inner hollowness ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... likely to combine against one who, in spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia, served only to probe the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons (p. 313) from Charles on behalf of the Spanish Queen. ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous man amasses wealth, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fame (which for profound ends of providence has been endowed with a subtle power of fraud such as no man can thoroughly look through; for those who, like myself, despise it most completely, cannot by any art bring forward a rationale, a theory of its hollowness that will give plenary satisfaction except to those who are already satisfied). Thus Cicero, feeling that if this were nothing, then had all his life been a skirmish, one continued skirmish for shadows and nonentities; a feeling of blank desolation, too startling—too humiliating to be faced. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... worshipped her beauty, she probably experienced the same delirium of joy, the same momentary exultation, that a prima donna feels when called before an excited and enthusiastic audience. But satiety and chagrin surely follow such triumphs, and she lived to feel their hollowness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have been with you. When two serve together, one must command, and the other must obey. So far from complaining of these Hanoverian Boards, and First Lords, it seems to me that they have always kept in view the hollowness of their claims to the throne, and have felt a desire to purchase honest men ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of the latest Editors is as certainly corrupt. This is a case therefore where the value of Patristic testimony becomes strikingly apparent. It affords also one more crucial proof of the essential hollowness of the theory on which it has been recently proposed by Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles and the rest to reconstruct the text ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... consideration recall this hideous rashness: for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear's youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honour was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already at his service? That should not hinder ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was miserably poor, and had aged parents and brothers and sisters dependent on her exertions; but her Christian employer paid her the lowest possible price, and trampled on her feelings as though she had been a brute. Oh, the hollowness of the religion I saw practiced! I sneered at everything connected with churches, and heard no more sermons, which seemed only to make hypocrites and pharisees of the congregation. I have never known but one exception. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... all, we say, depends on how it was said. If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, 'To take the Mexico fleet would be piracy,' it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an answer. The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact. He is not expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing in that passage of his 'Apology,' about which ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... transformation effected by the composer. Advantage has also been taken of the difference between its high and low tones, and now in some romantic music, as in Raff's "Lenore" symphony, or the prayer of Agathe in "Der Freischuetz," the hollowness of the low tones produces a mysterious effect that is exceedingly striking. Still the fact remains that the native voice of the instrument, though sweet, is expressionless compared with that of the oboe or clarinet. ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Scythrop. There is a girl concealed in this tower, and find her I will. There are such things as sliding panels and secret closets.'—He sounded round the room with his cane, but detected no hollowness.—'I have heard, sir,' he continued, 'that during my absence, two years ago, you had a dumb carpenter closeted with you day after day. I did not dream that you were laying contrivances for carrying on secret intrigues. Young men will have their way: I had my way ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... cutter's cabin, and for many minutes he stared and listened, while Peter seemed to stand without breathing. Then making a wide megaphone of his hands, he shouted. It was an alarming thing to do and Peter started as if struck. For there were only ghosts to answer back and the hollowness of a shriven pit for the cry to travel in. Nothing was there. Even the great sawdust piles had shrunk into black scars under the ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... certainty of holding intercommunion with the spirits. The 'Other worldliness' of the mediaeval monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its passive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came to her aid: her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in which she had achieved a hollowness beyond her years, allowed her fully to understand she had not ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... argument. But he was also a staunch believer in forced labour, which was quite a different thing. Consequently we found ourselves condemned to some of the most filthy tasks conceivable. Incidentally, however, these duties only served to reveal still more convincingly the hollowness of Germany's preachings concerning the principles of health and hygiene to the whole world while herself practising the diametrically opposite. We were commanded to clean ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... of what to smaller people appears entirely and absolutely antagonistic, of utmost scientific scepticism and highest spiritual faith and worth. "He was filled full with the scepticism, bitterness, hollowness, and thousandfold contradictions of his time, till his heart was like to break; yet he subdued all this, rose victorious over this, and manifoldly, by word and act, showed others that came after how to do the like." Carlyle, who is never done recalling his worth, confesses ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... his mere tone and look. This was not the old Darius. Edwin felt intensely the futility and the hollowness of all those reassurances which ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of the beard. The melancholy which marks the face of any sleeper, a foreshadow of the eternal sleep, had become on this sleeper's countenance a profound sadness. From his seat Curran could see the pitiful droop of the mouth, the hollowness of the eyes, the shadows under the cheek-bones; marks of a sadness too deep for tears. Sonia took his face in her soft hands and turned the right profile to the light. She looked at the full face, smoothed his hair as if trying to recall an ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... find encouraging words. I talked with him, holding him by the hand and patting him affectionately on the shoulder; but my voice had in my own ears the empty hollowness of deceit, and Miraz, looking at me, seemed ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... presidential year and the air was thick with politics. Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general. Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in outspoken ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I saw the hollowness of the whole thing, and took Hemangini by the hand and led her to my own room. I gently stroked her face and arms and hair, and found that she was about fifteen years old, ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... kept his favorite corn. I am not sure that it was not the stepping of an awkward visitor upon one of these same glass eyes, while these slippers for the first time covered his feet, that set Mr. Carraway to cogitating upon the hollowness of "Christmas as She is Celebrated." Indeed, it is my impression that at the very moment when that bit of adornment was pressed down upon Mr. Carraway's corn he announced rather forcibly his disbelief in the utility of any such infernal Christmas ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... to Him. You will probably hear much and be told much at this time. I have nothing to say that you have not heard and will not hear said far better by others. Our Church gives the keynote in the collect for Sunday: 'We have no power.' I never realised my weakness, my pride, my hollowness so much as I did at my ordination. God has been teaching me, even in the short time since I was ordained, wonderful lessons—lessons of strength being perfected in weakness. He alone knows the depths of our hypocrisy, our vanity, our atheism, and He alone can help us. To get nearer to ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... for the rest, the London sparrows had it pretty much to themselves. As things were, Mr. Pryme envied the sparrows, who were ready clothed by Providence, and had no rates and taxes to pay, as well as the clerks, who, at all events, had plenty to do and no time to soliloquize upon the hardness and hollowness of life. To have plenty of brains, and an indefinite amount of spare time to use them in; to desire ardently to hasten along the road towards fortune and happiness, and to be forced to sit idly by whilst others, duller-witted, perchance, and with less capacity ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... climb the highest cliff; I hear the sound Of dashing waves; I gaze intent around; I mark the gray cope, and the hollowness Of heaven, and the great sun, that comes to bless The isles again; but my long-straining eye, No speck, no shadow can, far off, descry, That I might weep tears of delight, and say, It is the bark that bore my child away! Sun, that returnest bright, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... these expressions, so natural from the lips of two individuals thus closely allied, who had been long at variance, and had at length met in amity, should have been the mere outpourings of policy; and yet, it is equally impossible not to be struck by their hollowness and falsehood; Louis being, at that very moment, endeavouring to undermine the influence of his mother by estranging from her cause all those who still clung to her waning fortunes; while Marie was labouring with equal zeal to strengthen her position, by attracting to her faction all the discontented ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... night behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and that is Madame's room over the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... that Mr. Westonhaugh cares nothing about it, one way or the other. The little plan for 'amusing brother John' is a hoax. The thing cannot be done. You might as well try to amuse an undertaker as to make a man from Bombay laugh. The hollowness of life is ever upon them. No. It was Kildare; he called and said that Miss Westonhaugh had never seen a tiger, and he seemed anxious to impress upon me his determination that she should. Pshaw! what does Kildare care ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... preponderated over all the animal qualities for strength in character and success in life. The eyes were soft, dark, and brilliant, but dreamlike and vague; the features in youth must have been regular and beautiful, but their contour was now sharpened by the hollowness of the cheeks and temples. The form, in the upper part, was nobly shaped, sufficiently muscular, if not powerful, and with the long throat and falling shoulders which always gives something of grace and dignity ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he drank, drank. He paid strict enough attention to my education. I read with him much; he had stores of books. I read the Bible with him, too; often he spent long evenings expounding it to me. But I saw the hollowness of it all—he hardly believed himself; he doubted—doubted all, while he would fain have made me a believer. I saw it well: I heard him rave of it in a fever into which drink had thrown him. All was dark to him, he said, when he was near dying; but he had taught ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... streams. The country around it is a vast treeless prairie, upon which scarcely a shrub is to be seen; but a thick coat of grass covers it throughout its entire extent, with the exception of a few spots where the hollowness of the ground has collected a little moisture, or the meandering of some small stream or rivulet enriches the soil, and covers its banks with verdant shrubs ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... smaller they are the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in rattle-boxes, they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness. Or does this happen to us ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... start the grey forward to the north. For to the south lay Sally Fortune, and at the thought of her a singular hollowness came about his heart, a loneliness, not for himself, but for her. Yes, in a strange way all self ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... shy, unaccustomed endearment. Gordon was stereotyped, commonplace; he was certain that even she must recognize the hollowness of his protestations. But she never doubted him; she accepted the dull, leaden note of his spurious passion for the clear ring of ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... waters of Shiloah." It may be the death of a mother, whom the bereaved half deemed immortal—some disappointment, like the falsehood of one dearly loved—some rude shock, as the discovery of a day-dream's hollowness; happy, thrice happy! if it be but one of these, and not the descent from ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... corpse. The society might have been waked up if Mr. Lowell, then returning from England, could have been induced to co-operate. He was approached on the subject, but would not respond,—he only said that he desired rest! Alas for the hollowness of American ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... author has disclosed the inward disease, the fearful hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation's philosophical and theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old, they will exclaim, "That man is ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the banks of the river Taf. In the neighbourhood of Newport, which is in the district of Gwentluc, {78} there is a small stream called Nant Pencarn, {79} passable only at certain fords, not so much owing to the depth of its waters, as from the hollowness of its channel and muddy bottom. The public road led formerly to a ford, called Ryd Pencarn, that is, the ford under the head of a rock, from Rhyd, which in the British language signifies a ford, Pen, the head, and Cam, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... of the White Nile by a line of fortified posts, and with the river steamers, which would result in cutting off the slave hunters from their best source of supply. The expression of his plans in his earnest manner showed up by contrast the hollowness of the views and policy of those who had obtained his services. In his own graphic and emphatic way he wrote: "I thought the thing real and found it a sham, and felt like a Gordon who has been humbugged." He found Cairo "a regular hot-bed ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... sometime heard as it were the sound of pipes, trumpets and drummes: which noises may perhaps be caused by the vehement and sundry motions of such firie exhalations in the aire, as we see the like in many experiences wrought by fire, aire and winde. [Sidenote: The middle region of the aire is cold.] The hollowness also, and diuers reflexions and breaking of the cloudes may be great causes hereof, beside the vehement colde of the middle region of the aire, whereby the said fiery exhalations, ascending thither, are suddenly stricken backe with great force: for euen common and dayly experience teacheth vs, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... in Spenser's "Colin Clout's come home again,"[3] on the instability and hollowness of patronage, may occur ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c (luminary) 423 [Lat.]; such stuff as dreams are made of [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c 353; baseless fabric of a vision [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c (absence) 187. inanity, fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c (imaginary) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages"[88] by the present [1889] Roman Cardinal, but then Anglican Doctor, John ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride—the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... arrival at Plasencia, the English general had learned at once the hollowness of the Spanish promises. He had been assured of an ample supply of food, mules, and carts for transport; and had, on the strength of these statements, advanced with but small supplies, for little food and but few animals could be obtained in Portugal. He found, on arriving, that no preparations ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... I tried, and I am weary of the hollowness, weary of life, and the world. So long as I have your face here, I care not to cross my own threshold till friendly hands bear me out to my quiet resting-place under the willows of Greenwood. Electra, ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... demand for repentance was constant. It is a rabbinic commonplace that the delay of the Messiah's coming is due to lack of repentance in Israel. But near as this conception is to John's, we need but to recall his words to the Pharisees (Matt. iii. 7) to realize how clearly he saw through the hollowness of their religious pretence. With the quibbles of the scribes concerning small and great commandments, Sabbaths and hand-washings, John shows no affinity. He may have learned some things from these "sitters in Moses' seat," but he was ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... awful when such is the case, when the promise and interest of youth settles into impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean's spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness. This is melancholy, indeed, and many such wrecks of religious life are around us. But with Enoch, the increase of life's cares brought an access of fresh devotion. New gifts of Providence roused new feelings of gratitude, and he grappled himself the closer in attachment ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... said to be a hard man, and in some respects this was certainly the case; but a faint flush crept into his grim face. Perhaps he had noticed the weariness in Nasmyth's voice or the hollowness of his cheeks. ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... time Robert drew much courage from Charteris, who had been a prisoner a long time in Quebec, and who understood even more thoroughly than young Lennox the hollowness of the ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... after this judgment Galileo remained in Rome, apparently hoping to find some way out of this difficulty; but he soon discovered the hollowness of the protestations made to him by ecclesiastics, and, being recalled to Florence, remained in his hermitage near the city in silence, working steadily, indeed, but not publishing anything save by private letters to friends ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Cocksmoor, and set their affairs in order. All the time Ethel said not a word, except when referred to by her brother; but when Mr. Wilmot took leave, he shook her hand warmly, as if he was much pleased with her. "Ah!" she thought, "if he knew how ill I have behaved! It is all show and hollowness with me." ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... with a disappointed air, whose hollowness was proved by her rising redness and her half-guilty low laugh. "Where is ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... shaded with his wide white hat, his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... entertaining exponent of the facetious side of the stars, that we should ever have gone to the moon to find out such easy inferences, and points the pun with an allusion to Gruyere, but he certainly might have announced his knowledge of the hollowness of the moon before. And if the moon is hollow, then the apparent absence of air and water is, of course, quite easily explained. The sea lies within at the bottom of the caverns, and the air travels through the great sponge of galleries, in accordance ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... through the grayish-violet mist the lights were blooming like flowers, and above them a few stars shone faintly over the obscure frowning outlines of the buildings. Fifth Avenue was thronged, and to her anxious mind there seemed to be hollowness and insincerity in ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... messengers do. The sorrow tells of real desire, and the departure will sooner or later be exchanged for return with a deeper and more thorough purpose, if the earlier wish had any substance in it. If it had not, better that the consciousness of its hollowness should be forced upon the man, than that he should outwardly become what he is not really,—a Christian; for, in the one case, he may be led to reflection which may issue in thorough surrender; and in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... string, that had been stuffed with presents in the dawn. But the morning had now sunk into immeasurable distance and seemed as remote as Job himself. And all through the evening, as we lay abed and listened to the droning piano below, we felt a spiritual hollowness because the great ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... sophisms, it is capable of being so stated as most of all to baffle the subtle dialectician; and Kant himself, though not cheated, was never so much perplexed in his life as in the effort to make its hollowness apparent.] ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... to witness how all kinds of incapacities, stupidities, how meanness, hollowness, heartlessness, all incarnated in politicians, in trimmers, in narrow brained; how all of them ride on the shoulders of the masses, and use them for their sordid, mean, selfish and ambitious ends. And the masses are superior to those riders in everything constituting manhood, honesty ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... recognised freedom was permanently won to all races and creeds by the victory at Jerusalem. The most significant of all the signs was the attitude of Moslems. The Turks had preached the Holy War, but they knew the hollowness of the cry, and the natives, abandoning their natural reserve, joined in loud expression of welcome. From flat-topped roofs, balconies, and streets there were cries of 'Bravo!' and 'Hurrah!' uttered ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies. Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to the absorbing ...
— English Satires • Various
... deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly, but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls. They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Of the young forester's unbended bow; But, above all, to tenderness at home, And sweet security of kind concern Even from those who seem most truly ours. Who would resign all this, to be approached, Like a sick infant by a canting nurse, To spread his arms in darkness, and to find One universal hollowness around? Forego, a little while, that bane of peace. Love may ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... bliss on their faces that I've nearly cried for pure joy and sympathy. But in my heart all the time I felt that this was weakness and folly; that what was bliss to the mother, stupefying her for a while to the hollowness and emptiness of her existence, was the beginning of a probable life of misery to the child that could end only with death. And I have vowed to myself that never should child of mine have cause to reproach me for selfishness ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... eighteenth century that Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They felt that there is an inexpugnable truth of religion. Still that was merely an ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... that were half smiling and some brave silences that were wholly pathetic, and then the hour for Rupert's departure all too suddenly arrived. They separated with ostentatious whooping, and then Johnny, suddenly overcome with the dreadfulness of all earthly things, and the hollowness of life generally, instantly resolved to ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... been abusing the fair Frances, and ridiculing old Rowley, to gratify their hostess. She knew them by heart—their falsehood and hollowness. She knew that they were ready, every one of them, to steal her royal lover, had they but the chance of such a conquest; yet it solaced her soreness to hear Miss Stewart depreciated even by those false lips—"She was too tall." "Her Britannia profile looked as if it was cut out of wood." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... only left it yesterday. Fordham, having thrown off his wraps, waited on his guests, looking exceedingly happy in his quiet way, but more fragile than ever. He had a good deal of fair beard, but it could not conceal the hollowness of his cheeks, and there were great caves round his eyes, which were very bright and blue. Yet he was called well, waited assiduously on little Lina, and talked ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... see, but he could feel. His fingers quested all over one plate, probing and tapping. The plate was hollow—in reality, two saucer-shaped plates with their concave faces together. They gave off a muffled clink of hollowness when he tapped them. When he shook the armor, there was something extra in the sound, and that impelled him to hold a plate close to his ear. He heard a soft, ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... agitation, I went about overhauling ammunition, and instructing my men on the exact objectives and the work of consolidation. My restlessness brought back vividly that day when I had suffered from nerves before the Bramhall-Erasmus swimming race. The same interior hollowness made me chafe at delay and long to be started—to be busied in the excitement of action—to be looking back on it all as a thing of ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... near to doing so. It is on record that when an unwelcome visitor came to call, the sage sent out to say that he was too ill to receive guests, at the same time seizing his harpsichord and singing to it from an open window, in order to expose the hollowness ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... "one whom I love. There is something frank in your eyes which raises memories of my dead son. In you I see both my offspring's and my own youth recalled to me. You are Canadian—in you I can banish the coldness, hollowness, and degeneracy of Europe. Replace my boy. Let me call you 'Germain' ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... the outside, and white within like Milk, and in the end of Summer becometh hard and woody. Whether this be the very same kind, I cannot affirm, but both the Picture and Description come very neer to that I have, but that he seems not to take notice of the hollowness or Worm, for which 'tis most observable. And therefore 'tis very likely, if men did but take notice, they might find very many differing Species of these Nuts, Ovaries, or Matrixes, and all of them to have much the same ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... independence, and of course its politics were to match. Thackeray and a Beckett joined later in the sport. But Jerrold, while believing in Thackeray's hatred of the snob, more than suspected him of being a snob himself; and Thackeray felt not less convinced of the hollowness of Jerrold's "stalwartness." "Thackeray had neither love nor respect for Jerrold's democracy," Vizetelly tells us. "I remember him mentioning to me his having noticed at the Earl of Carlisle's a presentation copy ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... he told them off, however, the old sense of hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene, let down before an empty stage; a painted sham, with darkness and vacuity behind. At bottom, none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him; not a scrap of mental pabulum could be got from them: ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... this last reason will seem the best of all. However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether with the Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's Debacle, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second Empire, especially ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... reason of the war, then going on between the pope and the king of Sicily, the party at last reached Beneventum. The trial that took place lasted several days; when the result of the pleadings for and against was, that Adrian became convinced of the hollowness of the accusations, laid by the patriarch against the knights of St. John, and, therefore, refused to grant the redress sought for,—namely, to annul the patent of privileges conferred by Anastasius. William of Tyre,—who describes ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... not have been human if incidents like these had not caused him pain. Occasionally he would give vent to his grief, but his manly courage, too, would soon assert itself, and he would expose the hollowness, insincerity, and futility of the lying tales that were spread about him. At a public meeting in Campo Flore he was cursed, sentenced to death, and burned in effigy. (21a, 174.) He has read offensive reports about himself, and puts them down with the calm declaration: There is not a man that ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the express ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... and wholesome as such thoughts are, they are not all the truth. So the prayer changes in tone, even while its substance is the same. He rises from the shows of earth to his true home, driven thither by their hollowness. "My hope is in Thee." The conviction of earth's vanity is all different when it has "tossed him to Thy breast." The pardoned sinner, who never thereafter forgot his grievous fall, asks for deliverance "from all his transgressions." The sullen silence has changed into full acquiescence: "I ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you, would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend, if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers sometimes seems poured out in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the cause, and I answered that his observation reminded me of the story of a lady offering her condolence to a poor Irishwoman on the death of her child, who stated that she had never been more affected than on the event; the poor woman, knowing the hollowness of the compliment, answered with all the quickness of her country, "Sure, then, Ma'am, that is saying a great deal, for you were always affected." Lord Byron laughed, and said my apropos was very wicked—but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... that if the increasing and unblushing materialism of our times shall at last call for such scathing rebukes as the Jewish prophets launched against the sin of idolatry, or such as Christ himself employed when he exposed the hollowness of the piety of the men who took the lead in religious instruction in his day, then the loftiest characters—those whose example is most revered—will again disdain and shun a style of life which seriously conflicts with the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... of a beast to the image of God. Vanity is a mighty power and incentive, as great as hunger and thirst, and much more generally active in the affairs of civilized humanity. And yet its very name means hollowness. "The hollowness of hollowness, all things are hollowness," said the preacher, and his translators have put the word vanity in his mouth, because it means the same thing. But in itself, being hollow, it is neither bad nor good; its badness or goodness lies in those things whereof ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves and grass to make a "smudge." His suspicions regarding the hollowness of the tree proved true, for the draft through the hollow hole acted like a chimney and sucked the smoke upward. It began to wreathe out between the first limbs, some thirty feet or more ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance—shocks far deeper feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over the orthodox Church-of-Englandism—for ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Catherine's case (a case, how common!), the truth come too late—if the tomb is closed—if the heart you have wrung can be wrung no more—why the truth is as valueless as the epitaph on a forgotten Name! Some such conviction of the hollowness of his own words, when he spoke of service to the dead, smote upon Philip's heart, and stopped ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... without the slightest scruple, and in this lack of an artistic conscience its whole glory perished. It is true in this passion for excited compositions an excess of splendid works were produced; it is true immense resources were expended, and able artists were employed; but such inner hollowness stares at us with inanimate eye from the greater number of these works that we turn from them with repugnance, and even ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... nothing to be put but their leader's assurances that everything would come right. They had taken "a leap in the dark," they had staked the fortunes of the party on the dice-box, and events were to decide the issue. When the blow came Mr. Disraeli's reputation for sagacity fell to zero. At last the hollowness of his pretensions was detected, and there was no mincing of epithets for the man who had befooled and destroyed a great party. The Dukes left him to himself, and, according to our present informant, their flight was the harbinger ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... is Italy, fully more than the poet, that may be regarded as speaking in the following lines, which furnish evidence that, along with Dante, and all the great minds of the period, Torquato Tasso had seen the hollowness of the Papal Church, and felt the galling bondage which that Church inflicts on both the intellect ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... become me on this occasion to make some reflections on the hollowness of court life, which has seldom been better exemplified than in the scene before me. The sun was low, but its warm beams, falling aslant on the gaily dressed group at the gates and on the flowered terraces and gray walls behind them, seemed to present a picture at ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... and misunderstandings, and to persons of no inconsiderable influence gave juster notions of the true importance of the island to Great Britain. He displayed the magnitude of the trade of the Mediterranean in its existing state; showed the immense extent to which it might be carried, and the hollowness of the opinion that this trade was attached to the south of France by any natural or indissoluble bond of connection. I have some reason for likewise believing that his wise and patriotic representations prevented Malta from being made the seat of and ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... also displayed the hollowness of the proceedings by making "de Archangelis" the very opposite of his saturnine and blood-thirsty client: the last person we could think of as in sympathy with him. He is a coarse good-natured paterfamilias, whose ambitions are all centred on an eight-year-old son, whose birthday ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... it, where he came off second best. His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it. Three empty bottles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... there is a vibrant patriotism far more poignant than we can discover in any of the playful apologues published before the war. He had had an inside view of the Second Empire, he could not help seeing its hollowness, and he revolted against the selfishness of its servants; no single chapter of M. Zola's splendid and terrible "Downfall" contains a more damning indictment of the leaders of the imperial army than is to be read in Daudet's ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... will show the depth of the whole and of the parts, and their position. The third figure will be a demonstration of the bones of the backparts. Then I will make three other figures from the same point of view, with the bones sawn across, in which will be shown their thickness and hollowness. Three other figures of the bones complete, and of the nerves which rise from the nape of the neck, and in what limbs they ramify. And three others of the bones and veins, and where they ramify. Then three figures with the muscles and three with the skin, and their proper proportions; and three ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... men of birth The hollowness of rank on earth." The agent answered, "Very true— But I should not, if ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... blessedness even in exile from his kind, being driven off as a punishment for his heterodoxy on matrimonial subjects. This is one explanation of the fact that Leprechawns are always seen alone, though other authorities make the Leprechawn solitary by preference, he having learned the hollowness of fairy friendship and the deceitfulness of fairy femininity, and left the society of his kind in disgust at its ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... consolation" to enable them to ride out the storm; who, when sorrow and bereavement overtake them—the lowering shadows of the dark and cloudy day—have still to grope after an unknown Christ; and, amid the hollowness of earthly and counterfeit comforts, have to seek, for the first time, the only ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... votes, it would have been a plain and easy matter for the letter of the Constitution to have expressed this spirit, or indeed to have done away altogether with this machinery of a sham election. The Jackson men had only to state their argument in order to expose its hollowness; for they said substantially that the Constitution established an election without an option; that the electors were to vote for a person predestined by an earlier occurrence to receive their ballots. But besides their unsoundness in argument, their statistical position was far from being what they ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... concessions. Consequently a strike was declared in 1900 by which the mine workers obtained a ten per cent increase in wages and the promise of semi-monthly wages in cash. But they had not resumed work before they discovered the hollowness of these concessions. Two years of futile application for better conditions passed, and then, in 1902, 150,000 men and boys went on strike. This strike lasted one hundred and sixty-three days. The magnates were generally regarded as arrogant and defiant; they contended that they had nothing ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... floor and walls looked singularly dry. To find out if this were the case, she ran her fingers over the walls, and, on removing them, found they showed no signs of moisture. Then she rapped the floor and walls, and could discover no indications of hollowness. She sniffed the air, and a great wave of something sweet and sickly half choked her. She drew out her handkerchief and beat the air vigorously with it; but the smell remained, and she could not in any way account for it. She turned to leave the cellar, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... to think I show a want of generous confidence, if I sometimes try the ground on which I tread, to see if perchance it may return the echoes of hollowness.' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... The Pillars of Society was the hollowness and rottenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prose which Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He was accused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to have fallen out of touch with real Norwegian ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... into life, and intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions—and left him. She came and left him as that dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing him one jot or one tittle of the hollowness of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... intelligent English woman deliberate in Parliament, or any such American woman in Congress? I mention Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, Catherine, and all the famous Empresses and Queens, not to prove the capacity of women for the most arduous and responsible office, for that is undeniable, but to show the hollowness of the assertion that there is an instinctive objection to the fulfillment of such offices by women. Men who say so do not really think so. The whole history of the voting and office-holding of women shows that whenever men's theories ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... mail, I am advised by him that he is on board the very boat of which you claim to be Captain and owner. I of course take my boy's word in preference to that of any stranger. Having thus detected the hollowness of your sympathy, and the falseness of your pretended friendship for my husband, I must request you to refrain from further meddling in this matter. Yours ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... grammar and spelling, the terse thought, and the concise form, are all characteristic of Napoleon. The right of petition, the recital of unjust acts, the illegal action of the council, the use of force, the hollowness of the pretexts under which their request had been refused, the demand that the troops be withdrawn and redress granted—all these are crudely but forcibly presented. The document presages revolution. Under ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and yet it revealed in a moment the hollowness of the apparent reconciliation between them. What chance of mutual confidence could there be between these two? He asked Wenna if she had been busy in his absence; and the thought immediately occurred to him that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... evident that Michael was in earnest. He spoke warmly, but with a natural vehemence that by no means disfigured his good-looking visage, now illuminated with unusual fire. In these days of hollowness and hypocrisy, an ingenuous straightforward character is a refreshing spectacle, and commands our admiration, be the principles it represents just what they may. Hence, possibly, the unaffected pleasure with which Margaret listened to her visitor whilst he declaimed against men and things ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... most of the scenes seem to demand dramatic accessories to give them their full effect. But I think one cannot with justice bestow higher praise than this. To speak candidly, I felt, in reading the tale, a wondrous hollowness in the moral and sentiment; a strange dilettante shallowness in the purpose and feeling. After all, 'Jack' is not much better than a 'Tony Lumpkin,' and there is no very great breadth of choice between the clown he IS and the fop his father would ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... felt by the average hearer. Alma had an emotional nature, but her emotions responded to almost any kind of excitement sooner than to the musical. So much had she pretended and posed, so much had she struggled with mere manual difficulties, so much lofty cant and sounding hollowness had she talked, that the name of her art was grown a weariness, a disgust. Conscious of this, she was irritated whenever Harvey begged her to play simple things; for indeed, if she must hear music at all, it was just those ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... own comfort and strength. We need it to deliver us from the vanity and hollowness, the fever and hysteria of the present age. We need it to make us better soldiers and workers for every good cause. Peace is coming to all the earth some day through Christ. And those who shall do most to help Him bring it are the men and women to whom ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... poor child!" said the mother, in a tone of distress, "what is to be the end of your inordinate ambition for the things of the world? You have got to discover the vanity and hollowness of them some time, but what must you suffer on your way to this experience! Money and position cannot bring happiness in marriage. Nothing can ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... difference between the two writers, was open and clear to any unprejudiced mind prepared for such investigations, and we should at any rate have pointed it out at one time or other for the sake of exposing the hollowness of those impostures which offer themselves in our ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... see, I had given her up. And when one love is lost, there sink such awful chasms into the soul, that, though they cannot be filled, we must at least bridge them over with a new affection. The number of marriages built in this way, upon false foundations of hollowness and despair, is incomputable. We talk of jilted lovers and disappointed girls marrying 'out of spite.' No doubt, such petty feeling hurries forward many premature matches. But it is the heart, left shaken, unsupported, wretchedly sinking, which reaches out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... from one foot to the other. A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... is true she had created her own troubles, but in spite of that he could be sorry for her. Like a foolish woman she had built her life's hopes upon a shifting, sandy foundation; she had looked on the outward appearance, and a fair exterior had blinded her to the hollowness beneath. The result was ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... how the ideas of Christian learning came into direct competition with the arrogant self-assumption and the hollowness of the selfish teachings of the old Graeco-Roman schools. The Christian doctrine, advocating the development of the individual life, intimate relations with God, the widening of social functions, with its teachings of humility, and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Bouillon soon learned the hollowness of the promises of his allies. The Spaniards sent neither money nor men, while the Austrians received orders to march away from Sedan and to join the Spaniards, who were marching ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... cracks and crannies between the various stones. In the right-hand corner furthest from the entrance, their quest was rewarded. A stone some three feet square moved slightly when pressure was applied to it, and gave up a sound of hollowness beneath the tread. Dust and litter covered the entire floor, but having cleared the top of this particular stone, a ring was discovered, lying flat in a circular groove cut to receive it. The blade of a penknife served to raise it from its resting place, and Dr. Cairn, standing astride across ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... description of Roman habits and customs. Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities should be consulted, as it is a great thesaurus of important facts. Lucian does not describe Roman manners, but he aims his sarcasms on the hollowness of Roman life, as do the great satirists generally. Tillemont is the basis of Gibbon's history, so far as pertains to ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth, so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... around ag'in," she added, in the customary mockery of an attempt at cheer. The other woman started slightly, turned her head, and gazed on her old friend long and intently. The hollowness of ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... despair to the summit of happiness, and back again. But if you have seen or experienced that morbid condition, you would know that there is more reason to mourn over it than to laugh at it. There is acute misery felt now and then; and there is a pervading, never-departing sense of the hollowness of the morbid mirth. It is but a very few degrees better than "moody madness, laughing wild, amid severest woe." By depression of spirits I understand a dejection without any cause that could be stated, or from causes which in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... beyond himself. He had no great Father, as we have. A strange, unhappy life he lived upon the world, uncomforted, unfriended. He looked at the stars and comprehended them not; and at the graves, and they said nought. He walked alone under heaven's wide hollowness. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... for baser men; and my mother urged Miss Wesley, as one whom Mrs. Lee admitted to her confidence, above all things to act upon her pride by forewarning her that such men, in the midst of lip homage to her charms, would be sure to betray its hollowness by declining to let their wives and daughters visit her. Plead what excuses they would, Mrs. Lee might rely upon it, that the true ground for this insulting absence of female visitors would be found to lie in her profession of infidelity. This alienation of female ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the legs, arms, and head of a human body, being solid parts, are specifically somewhat heavier than fresh water, as the trunk, particularly the upper part, from its hollowness, is so much lighter than water, so the whole of the body, taken altogether, is too light to sink wholly under water, but some part will remain above until the lungs become filled with water, which happens when a person, in the fright, attempts breathing while the mouth ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... that unless her own piety were of the merely formal kind, she would be sure to make the discovery. The congregation in the old story were untouched by the disguised devil's eloquence on behalf of religion: it lacked unction. The verbal conformity of the unbeliever lacks unction, and its hollowness is speedily revealed to the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the blind accuracy of the engine, and the bright, strange play of the living stroke—a difference as great as between the form of a stone pillar and a springing fountain. And on this blindness follow all errors and abuses—hollowness and slightness of framework, speciousness of surface ornament, concealed structure, imitated materials, and types of form borrowed from things noble for things base; and all these abuses must be resisted with the more caution, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... have all felt the brazenness of words without emotion, the hollowness, the unaccountable unpersuasiveness of eloquence behind which lies no love. The Greatest Thing ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... robes and coronet—the beadle in his gaudy livery of scarlet, and purple, and gold—the dignitary in the fulness of his pomp—the demagogue in the triumph of his hollowness—these and other visual and oral cheats by which mankind are cajoled, have passed in review before us, conjured up by the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
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