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More "Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... savoured of alchemy; it postulated an undefined, undefinable, intangible Principle; it said that all combustible substances are formed by the union of this Principle with another, which is sometimes of an earthy character, sometimes of a fatty nature, sometimes highly volatile in habit. Nevertheless, the theory of Stahl was a step away from purely ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... realizing that, in all her reading there was nothing that could help, since there was no strong helper in the world save that Strong Man God who had gripped her father's imagination and could never grip Louis's, a whole pageant of dreams passed before her; dreams, intangible ideas which she grasped eagerly—visions—she saw herself John the Baptist, "making straight the way of the Lord"—she saw Siegfried, King Arthur—and, with a heart-leaping gasp she asked herself, "Why should not I be Louis's Deliverer? Why should not I be God's pathway ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... man, more and more pleased, regarding and analysing. The man's hickory shirt, his warped boots, his blue jean trousers, his heavy buskins were mean and earth-stained, but inherent in the quality of his low, musical voice and courteous manner was an intangible suggestion of something different, some bigger and happier past, to which, go where he would and clothe himself as he might, voice and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... this too, and something more. It was eight years since he had stood before an English lady, and he surmised that there could not be many to compare with this one, while after his grim lonely life an intangible something that seemed to emanate from her gracious serenity compelled his homage. Then as she smiled at him and held out her hand, he was for a moment sensible of an almost overwhelming confusion. It passed as suddenly, for this was a man of quick perceptions, and ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... men, sturdy and dark-browed, steps forward, clears his throat, and with a half-surly inclination of the head begins, "Mr. Grandon," and then something intangible awes him a trifle. They may grumble among themselves, and lately they have found it easy to complain to Mr. Wilmarth, but the unconscious air of authority, the superior breeding, and fine, questioning ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... broken in upon so frequently by his attempts to write poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth, but they were never completed. Not in a day could he learn to chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure were serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them, an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture. It seemed a glow to him, a warm and trailing vapor, ever ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... social intercourse, the minister finds it necessary to talk more than most men. He must also theorize extensively because of the very nature of theological discipline. Moreover, he is occupied particularly with those affairs of the inner life which are as intangible as they are important. His relation with people is largely a Sunday relation, or at any rate a religious one, and he meets them on the pacific side. Very naturally they reveal to him their best selves, and, true to Christian charity and training, he sees the best in everyone. If the women ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... being afar off, inaccessible, almost intangible,—like the millionaire employer to his humble workman, covered with sweat and grime, at the bottom ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... regard to worth becomes aware of any marked superiority in a fellow creature,—an experience which in unhappy lives very seldom occurs,—a feeling of certainty usually accompanies it, which is as mysterious as the evidence upon which it is based is intangible and elusive. A man knows that he has met his superior, he knows too how far the superiority he recognises extends, and he is conscious of experiencing something ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this manifestation of the disease is observed, the observer will usually connect it with a vague impression once formed or received, that the patient was living a little too hard. He will scarcely have had leisure to turn it over in his mind and form ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... places where they have experienced emotion? If so, churches ought to be very full of ghosts. I dare say that they are, only then no one could know it except those who had shared the emotion, and therefore they remain intangible. Still, I could have sworn that Isobel was here. Indeed, I seem to feel her now, and I hope that the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... obstructions. It seems the very play of man and destiny, and as Otto pored on these recurrent changes, he grew, by equal steps, the sleepier and the more profound. Eddy and Prince were alike jostled in their purpose, alike anchored by intangible influences in one corner of the world. Eddy and Prince were alike useless, starkly useless, in the cosmology of men. Eddy and Prince ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have not proceeded so far without starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is alleged that there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... intangible force being exerted, may seem reasonless. Yet, my instinct warns me, that it is not so. In these things, reason seems to me less to be trusted ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... pride of your caste and of your party, and how much you despise the partisan of the squalid mob of France. Have I said that I aspired to gain your love? I wonder if I have ever dreamed it? I only know, Juliette, that you are to me something akin to the angels, something white and ethereal, intangible, and perhaps ununderstandable. Yet, knowing my folly, I glory in it, my dear, and I would not let you go out of my life without telling you of that, which has made every hour of the past few weeks a paradise for me—my love for ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ghost-like form would flit across the chamber, coming to rest, gnome-like, on larva or ant. Again and again I saw these little springtails skip through the very scimitar mandibles of a soldier, while the workers paid no attention to them. I wondered if they were not quite odorless, intangible to the ants, invisible guests which lived close to them, going where, doing what they willed, yet never perceived by the thousands of inhabitants. They seemed to live in a kind of fourth dimensional ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... with me by a look, a gesture, an inflection of his voice. My perception of any defect in myself was instantaneous with his discovery of it. I fell into the habit of guessing each day whether I was to offend or please him, and then into that of intending to please. An intangible, silent, magnetic feeling existed between us, changing and developing according to its own mysterious law, remaining intact in spite of the contests between us of resistance and defiance. But my feeling died or slumbered when I was beyond the limits of his personal ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... modern romantic school, and gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real quality of all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a purely artistic effect, cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism; it is too intangible for that. One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... would rather be unhappy in the memory of what she actually was, than be happy in the realisation of her transformed, changed, made celestial. I am only human. Her soul! That was beautiful, no doubt. But, again, it was something very vague, intangible, hardly more than a phrase. But the touch of her hand was real, the sound of her voice was real, the clasp of her arms about my neck was real. Oh," he cried, shaken with a sudden wrench of passion, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... recalling the sprig of the same flower which Reine was twisting round her fingers at their last interview. This sweet breath of flowers in the night seemed like an emanation from the young girl herself, and was as fleeting and intangible as the remembrance of vanished happiness. Again and again did his morbid nature return to past events, and make ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... From dramatic events and intangible qualities of the spirit, his consciousness shifted to material things—his immediate surroundings. Not till this blessed moment of relaxation did he become aware of the discomforts of this suite—nor did Genevieve fully appreciate the flamboyantly flowered maroon wall-paper ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... decide whether objects themselves are intended, or the forms, positions, qualities, and motions of other objects which are suggested, and signs for moral and intellectual ideas, founded on analogies, are common all over the world as well as among deaf-mutes. Concepts of the intangible and invisible are only learned through percepts of tangible and visible objects, whether finally expressed to the eye or to the ear, in terms of ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... and wonder of what she could be thinking. For certainly her spirit seemed to be far away wandering in a world of dreams and of strange inexpressible emotions. For Tom the music stirred delicate thoughts bright dreams of beauty and of love; the vivid intangible dreams of awakening youth. He had not had much experience with emotion; the story of his love affairs contained no more dramatic moments than the stealing of occasional kisses from the glowing cheeks of Maria Stonywell, the beauty of the Tinterton road, as ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... class of things on which the best civilisation does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible—caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not be asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does not know. A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks slow or quick, ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... he may be dependent on others; what he is, rests with him alone. What he obtains in life is but acquisition; what he attains, is growth. Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life, is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fulfilled destiny. Happiness is paradoxic because it may coexist with trial, sorrow and poverty. ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... overlooking the party, with his back to the fire, appeared displeased at their levity—shook his head, and was on the point of speaking one of those polite but cynical reproofs, whose irony, cold and intangible, intimidated the less potent spirits of the club-room. But he dismissed it with a little shrug. And a minute after, Major O'Neill and Arthur Slowe became aware that Dangerfield had glided behind them, and was looking serenely, like themselves, at the Dublin ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... It was the sort of revenge one reserved for a foe capable of appreciating its humor and malignity. The answer of laughter was one to which he was unused, and he was amazed to find that it had effected an understanding of some vague and intangible kind between him and Sylvia Garrison. She might not approve of him, he had no idea that she did; but she had struck a chord whose vibrations pleased and tantalized. She was provocative and, to a degree, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the ascertainment of truth alone, in intangible regions of inquiry. The further hypothesis that such truth when found will be most satisfactory, or in other words higher and better than any alternative plan,—the conviction that faith in the exceeding grandeur of reality shall not be confounded,—requires ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... fresh air, looking at our fellow-tourists and listening to their talk, with the agreeable consciousness that, solid and substantial as we were to each other, we were quite inaudible, invisible, and intangible to them. Often we would dispense with the tourists, and have the Yosemite Valley all to ourselves. (Always there, and in whatever place she had visited with her husband, we would dispense with the figure of her former self ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of another example of such rapid success," continued Finot, looking from des Lupeaulx to Lucien. "There are two sorts of success in Paris: there is a fortune in solid cash, which any one can amass, and there is the intangible fortune of connections, position, or a footing in certain circles inaccessible for certain persons, however rich they may be. Now ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... would be useless to try to head off the detective now, and I wisely kept silent. My mind was by no means at rest however; for an unknown reason I did not want a detective any more than Radnor. I had the intangible feeling that there was something in the air which might better ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of something that had a reality compared with which the nervous explanation would have been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained a muffled and intangible form, but that, assuredly, should it take on sharpness, would explain everything and more than everything, would become instantly the light in which Milly ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... which directs men and nations has always been and is the unseen, intangible, underlying force, the resultant of all the spiritual forces of a certain people, or of all humanity, which finds its outward expression ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... spiritual power, reveals to all men, believers or unbelievers, that the pontificate, whose seat is locally in the city, has a life not derived from the city. Rome's temporal fall exhibits in full the intangible spiritual character of the pontificate. If St. Peter had to any seemed to rule because he was seated on the pedestal of the Caesarean empire, when that empire fell the Apostle alone remained to whom Christ gave the charge, whom He invested ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... demoralization. The death of Werner, the fact that he had been stricken down during the taking of a scene and on the very stage, had served to bring the tragedy home to the people. More, it was a second murder in four days, apparently by the same hand as the first. A sense of dread, a nameless, intangible fear, had taken form and found its way under the big blackened glass roofs and around and through the corridors, into the dressing rooms, and back even to the manufacturing and purely technical departments. The gateman eyed us with undisguised uneasiness as ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... not as pure, as all things else; and now — father and friend were away from her, and she was alone. Yet still the sun shone — might it not again some time for her? Poor child, as she stood there the tears dropped fast, at that meeting of hope and sorrow; hope as intangible as the light, sorrow a thicker mantle than that of the cedar trees. And now the sunlight seemed to say 'Ask' — and the green glittering earth responded — "and ye shall receive." Elizabeth looked; — she heard them say it constantly. She did not question the ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... anxiety and discomfort to be those of guilt in a girl too young to be happy in criminal deceit. With his experience of life, and with his usually just perceptions, he ought to have known better; but there is some quality in a few men or women, intangible and yet unmistakable, which makes us instinctively suspect present, or foretell future, moral evil; and poor Molly was one of these. What it was, on the other hand, which made her trust Sir Edmund and drew her to him, it would need a subtle analysis of natural affinities ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... her relationship to this man of whom she saw so little, and yet with whom she felt on close, intangible terms of intimacy! His work tied him to London, and of late years she had not been much in London. He knew very little of her movements. Why, this very letter had been sent to her, care of her London club, the club which had its uses—principally—when she wanted to entertain Mark ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... if Nissr were the center of a vast sphere that moved with her—a sphere through which no enemy could pass—a sphere against the intangible surface of which even the most powerful engines of the air dashed ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... hospitality is something very intangible, and yet nothing is more actually felt—or missed. There are certain houses that seem to radiate warmth like an open wood fire, there are others that suggest an arrival by wireless at the North Pole, even though a much brighter actual fire may be ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... suggestion of such a suspicion, was so absurd that I laughed at myself for my folly in allowing it to obtrude itself, even in the most intangible form, for a single moment on my mind. And yet, such is the perversity of the human intellect, I could not, in spite of myself, quite get rid of the extravagant idea that Monsieur Le Breton was in some inexplicable way cognisant of the outrage; nor could ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... to perceive the intangible price that is attached to the things of the spirit as well as to the material necessities of daily life. She was forced to surrender his love for her as the compensation for his sight, yet she was firmly resolved to keep, for him, ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... is that these creatures (and certain queer skeletons have been found in the "Asiatic Bowl") with a mental superdevelopment, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul, mated forcibly with the Tibetans, thereby strengthening their physical structure to almost the human normal, adapting themselves to earthly speech and habits, and in some strange manner intensifying even further ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... with a strike," said the Philadelphia North American, "not merely against the control of an industry or a group of allied industries, but a strike of class against class, with the lines sharply drawn.... And it is this antagonism, this class war, intangible and immeasurable, that constitutes the largest and most lamentable hurt to the city. It is, moreover, felt beyond the city and throughout the entire nation." (My italics). It goes without saying that all organs of non-Socialist opinion feel that such threatening disturbances ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... was troubled, also, without knowing just why, and she watched his departure with an unhappy feeling that somehow the changes which the year had made in both their lives had raised a misty barrier between them—intangible, but not easily to be swept away. Furthermore, young as she was, she intuitively sensed that hers was the necessity of reconstructing their friendship on a new foundation, because she was a woman. The man ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... production will go on exactly as one would wish; he does not conceive it possible that any one can raise even a single difficulty in the way of what he calls his SYSTEM. And, in fact, what objection can be offered to a conception so radically null, so intangible as that of M. Blanc? The most curious part of his book is in the select collection which he has made of objections proposed by certain incredulous persons, which he answers, as may be imagined, triumphantly. These ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... tell you, young man, the corporations in this country are eating the life out of it. This power of three men to get together, steal the privilege from the people, and by their joint action to produce a fourth body (corpus), behind which they hide and push their schemes—an intangible something which outlives them all—that is the power that is undermining this government. It's against the Constitution. Old Chief Justice Marshall in his verdict (which ushered in the reign of corporations, in this country) distinctly said that it was based on ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... suspended around the haunches by a string; she had a rag tied about her head and jaws to keep her from mewing; as she slowly descended she curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung downward and clawed at the intangible air. The tittering rose higher and higher—the cat was within six inches of the absorbed teacher's head—down, down, a little lower, and she grabbed his wig with her desperate claws, clung to it, and was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... most human and lovable of the Church's feasts. Easter and Ascensiontide speak of the rising and exaltation of a glorious being, clothed in a spiritual body refined beyond all comparison with our natural flesh; Whitsuntide tells of the coming of a mysterious, intangible Power—like the wind, we cannot tell whence It cometh and whither It goeth; Trinity offers for contemplation an ineffable paradox of Pure Being. But the God of Christmas is no ethereal form, no mere spiritual essence, but a very ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... then they tower serenely into the blue heavens, steeped in ethereal splendor. Once more it struck him that in their latter aspect his companion resembled them. Made finely, of warm flesh and blood, she was yet ethereal too. There was something aloof and intangible about her that seemed in harmony with the hills among ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... flanged with rocky buttresses, dark amid the long sweeps of radiant snow, their shattered peaks reared high into the very heavens. A great silence reigned. There was no wind with us, and yet, even as we watched, a white cloud flitted past the virgin peak of Kolahoi—ghostly, intangible; and immediately, even as vultures assemble suddenly, no one knows whence, so did the clouds appear, surging over the gleaming shoulders of the mountain ridges, and up and round the grim precipices. We turned and hurried down the face of the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... special effort to get him through on time; the team needed him, the squad needed him, L. A. needed him. It was more like a college than a High School in those days, with its numbers and its spirit, that strong, intangible evidence of things not seen. There was something about it, a concentrated essence of Jimsy King and hundreds of lesser Jimsy Kings, which made it practically unconquerable. In the year before his final one the team reached its shining perfection and held it to the end. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... said on the subject, and as they rode along in silence, each was thinking of the curious web of emotions that was moulding their lives and making definite objects grow from intangible impulses. He was hardly conscious yet what a motive force in his plans Liddy was destined to be; and she was filled with a new and sweet consciousness of a woman's power to shape a man's plans in life. When her home was reached, and after he had assisted ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... was because of some wordless, intangible reason, that only lovers know, which made Diana seem more beautiful, more pure, her touch more sacred, and Enoch stronger, finer, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... falling off from Probation, which in its turn was a distinct falling-off from Miss Fothergill's initial story, The First Violin. The characters are dim, intangible, remote, possessing no reality even at the outset, and as they progress becoming even more estranged from our belief and sympathy. Jerome is too feeble to arouse even our resentment, which we mildly expend on Sara instead for displaying grief for so poor a creature. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... his mighty sinews against the force he could not understand. Here was an intangible thing, yet it was a power that challenged his own brute strength, and he exerted himself to the limit in accepting the challenge. With legs spread wide and with sweat oozing from every pore, he heaved himself erect, straightening knees and spine and ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... that the arrest had seemed but a secondary matter in accord with the insanity of zu Pfeiffer's statement that he was engaged to Lucille. The affair had been so sudden that for some time he could progress no farther in an attempt to think than a gasp, pawing mentally at an intangible substance which eluded him like a child's small hand trying to grasp a toy balloon. Sense of reality appeared to have been dissolved. He had followed the sergeant across the square meekly without realising what was happening, and ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... he makes concerning the situation of objects are confined to those only that are perceivable by touch. All those things that are intangible and of a spiritual nature, his thoughts and desires, his passions, and in general all the modifications of the soul, to these he would never apply the terms UPPER and LOWER, except only in a metaphorical ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... mountain-passes and lashing the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of snow-helmed ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of all things, manifests himself to men, in lesser forms, according to this mythology, more and more human and less and less intangible. These forms are generally triads, and resolve themselves into a male deity, a female deity, and their child. Triad after triad brings the original Divinity into forms more and more earthly, till at last we find "that ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... great serpent would make as it drew its glistening coils through leaves or grass. But it was impossible for him to tell how near it was to him or from what point it came, and his blood became chill in his veins. He was not afraid of a danger seen, but when it came intangible and ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... Eileen Meredith, daughter of the Duke of Burghley. Like others, he had fallen a victim to her grey eyes. The piquant beauty, the supple grace, the intangible charm of the girl had aroused his desire. A man who always achieved his ends, he set himself to woo and win her with fierce impetuosity. He had won. Now he was spending his last night of bachelordom at ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... here day after to-morrow?" How eagerly he spoke, on impulse, without a consideration of the intangible ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... It was something that pervaded the room, not a pulsing but a presence, a sort of snapping intangible intelligence that reached beyond the audible ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... in a dream, sometimes imagining the meeting of husband and wife, sometimes trying to fancy Isabelle with her lover. As was inevitable, the older woman seemed to lose something charming and intangible in this confession of definite weakness. To be adored by any man merely adds to her glory, but the instant she concedes him an inch, the Beauty throws down her halo, the whole affair becomes mundane and vulnerable. Harriet might have envied ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... nation—is in last analysis an aggregate of human units and nothing besides. Its life consists of the combined activities of such components—and nothing else. Could we subtract the members one by one, there would be no intangible residuum after all the people and their lives had been taken away. When these simple facts are recognized, it is clear at once that the concerted activities performed by biological units cannot be anything but organic in their ultimate basis ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... behind the pines. She had heard the autumn raindrops beating against it and had welcomed the spring robins at its sill. She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms—if, when one left forever the room where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... statue to Pygmalion: I have grovelled down in adoration at its feet, and have found it the same immobile, relentless, unresponsive image. Youth is yet mine, but it is a youth hoary in desolation. Centuries of anguish have flooded through my bosom, even in the heyday of existence. The tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, have been at deadly strife in my conjectures. The present has been to me an evasion, the future an enigma; the earth a delusion, the heavens a doubt. Even the pomp of those inexplicable stars is a new ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... moccasins. The thicket grew more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through its density and darkness—an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange resemblance to human figures! Pressing a few yards further, he himself presently became a part of this shadowy procession, which on closer scrutiny revealed itself as a single file of Indians, following each other ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... he looked forward daily, hourly, to the anguish of her departure. She would vanish out of his life, intangible as a melted snow-flake, and only memory would stay behind to tell him he had known and loved her. Why should this be so hard to bear? If she stayed, he dared not tell her she was dear to him; he dared not stretch forth his hand to help her. In all the world there was ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... father." Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a tone of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taught to like—yet the picture did possess an intangible something that provoked doubt as to its quality. "You sure do ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... weight of the past rain, and a plaintive dripping from the trees can be heard,—a refreshing sound that lessens the sense of heat. The small birds stir cosily in their nests, and now and then a drowsy note breaks from one or another; a faint mist, white and intangible, rises from the hills, spreading ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... practicable means for diminishing the force of a custom which is the disgrace of civilization, seems to be the establishment of a court of honour, which should take cognizance of all those delicate and almost intangible offences which yet wound so deeply. The court established by Louis XIV might be taken as a model. No man now fights a duel when a fit apology has been offered, and it should be the duty of this court to weigh dispassionately the complaint of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... measured and felt and handled are the worst trials to which flesh is heir. But they are mistaken. Hearts are elastic, and real sorrows seldom crush them. Souls have in them a wonderful capacity for recovering after knockdown blows. It is the intangible, the thing that one dreads vaguely, that catches one in the dark, that suggests and intimates a peril that is spiritual rather than mortal; it is the burden that carries dismay and terror ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... up and down the window dropped on the sill, then began to buzz again. Through the Venetian blinds the sunshine fell in bars across the carpet; she opened her eyes and watched its silent movement,—so intangible, so irresistible; the nearest line touched her foot; her skirt; climbed to her listless hands; out in the hall the clock slowly struck three; her thoughts blurred and ran together; her very fears seemed to sink into space and time and silence. The sunshine passed over ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... of all studies, child-psychology. It is an impossible subject. The victim—the child—cannot be interrogated till it is too late. The influences that work on the child's senses and mind cannot be determined; they are too many, and too intangible. The observers of babies, mostly young fathers proud of their first offspring, remind me always of a very learned friend of mine, who presented to the Royal Society most laborious pages containing his lifelong observations on certain deviations of the magnetic needle, and who had forgotten ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... great principles of nature are a vacuum, and a plenum. The plenum is body, or tangible nature; the vacuum is space, or intangible nature. "We know by the evidences of the senses (which are our only rule of reasoning) that bodies have a real existence, and we infer from the evidence of the senses that the vacuum has a real ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... rather than ideal. Does not an ideal mean something beautiful—something beyond—something we'd give our all for? Not our working hours alone, but our hours of pleasure and our times of thought. An ideal is an intangible thing—having much of the supernatural in its make-up; 'tis a fetish for which we'd sacrifice life—or the strongest ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... remember, the corner stone of our political liberty. The Constitution is a piece of parchment—sacred and to be revered—but it is, in its outward presentment, material and inactive. The spirit of the Constitution is intangible and ideal, its interpretation alone is its vitality. We the people—through equally material morsels of paper entitled votes—raise the spirit of the Constitution by placing in the halls of Congress the interpreters of that Constitution, over whom and above ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... distant region only dimly, and it has no more substance than a pale gray vision; my words, however intangible and elusive, give too definite a form to my dreamy conceptions. But still (I speak as a little child, with the child's faith), but still I always think of my mother as having, in that far off place, preserved her earthly aspect. I think of her ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... and yet in its radical sense it was thoroughly so. He delighted in it because of the benefit it brought himself. He had long felt a void within his heart, a want or craving for something, something indefinite, intangible certainly—something that no sensual indulgence could appease, that no light pleasure could distract, and now all at once it seemed to him that long-felt vacuum was filling up. A something, just as ethereal ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... science would not have been able to arise. It is only by recognizing the effects that we can go back to the unhealthy causes, and save humanity from danger. The causes of death are as invisible and intangible as microbes; man may drink poison when he thinks he is drinking nectar. Woe to us if the diseased and degenerate did not exhibit themselves to us as an advance guard, to testify to the unconscious errors which threaten ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... these words, the vision began to disappear. AEneas endeavored to clasp the beloved image in his arms to retain it, but it was intangible and evanescent, and, before he could speak to it, it was gone, and he was left standing in the desolate and gloomy street alone. He turned at length slowly away; and solitary, thoughtful and sad, he went back to the gate of the city, and thence out to the valley where he had concealed ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... cloud gas attack was upon the German Army, we will quote from the Special Correspondent of the Vossiches Zeitung. He said: "I devote a special chapter to this plague of our Somme warriors. It is not only when systematic gas attacks are made that they have to struggle with this devilish and intangible foe." He refers to the use of gas shell, and says: "This invisible and perilous spectre of the air threatens and lies in wait on all roads leading to ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... this sort of correspondence the communication is written like any ordinary letter designed for transmission, but instead of stamping and posting it, a lighted match is applied to the finished work. The material part is destroyed, but the intangible and only real and lasting part remains behind. This is attached, by the direction of the will, to a particular person and set in a certain direction. If all the conditions have been properly observed it will not ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... cried. "But it's such a joke! Can't you see that it's nothing in the world except a perfectly delicious, perfectly intangible joke?" ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it is that even the still more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that baffles and eludes you. Beauty is a thing severe and unapproachable, never to be won by a languid lover. You must lie in wait for her coming and take her unawares, press her hard and clasp her in a tight embrace, and force her to yield. Form is a Proteus more intangible and more manifold than the Proteus of the legend; compelled, only after long wrestling, to stand forth manifest in his true aspect. Some of you are satisfied with the first shape, or at most by the second or the third that appears. Not thus wrestle the victors, ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... one vast cafe. Conversation in France was at its zenith. There were less eloquence and rhetoric than in '89. With the exception of Rousseau, there was no orator to cite. The intangible flow of wit was as spontaneous as possible. For this sparkling outburst there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part to the auspicious revolution of the times, to the great event which created new customs, and even modified human temperament—the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... The Rev. S.R. Riggs, who for forty years has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions, etc., says, Tahkoo Wahkan, p. 55, et seq.: "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshiper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect or despise others, but the great object of all their ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... with the Sassafras, he went home discomforted and even flustered. That hand was too much like the hand of possession. The girl was stealing over him like a light, intangible vapor. He struck ahead with a quicker gait, as if trying to outwalk a creeping fog. One consolation, however: Hortense had come like a puff of wind. Even a second squall from the same quarter would ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... a scornful smile flickered for a moment in the royal eyes. It was surely news enough for any man that she was a woman—beautiful still—possessing still that intangible and fatal gift of pleasing. The woman slowly faded from her eyes as they rested on the great soldier's face, and the Queen it was who, with a gracious gesture, bade him be seated. But the General remained standing. He alone perhaps of all the men who ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... riotous impulses. It was one thing to ride out to meet the foe, it was another matter when the foe was known to be near. A half mile nearer and the acrid taste in the air turned to a defined veil of smoke, intangible and unreal, at first, which merely seemed to hang about the trunks of the mighty trees and make them seem dim and far away. Nearer yet, and the air grew hard to breathe, the smoke was billowing through the foliage of the pines, which sighed wearily and moaned in a vague fear of the enemy ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... great good humour, too, although Eli gave it small encouragement. The shadow of leaving Saaron had hung over Eli's mind for more than two months; heavy, oppressive, but until this morning intangible as a cloud. Vashti had remarked that the days deadened him while they should have been nerving him to action; and Vashti, this very morning, had forced his eyes open by asking, in a business-like way, if he had ever thought ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... raise its cover. The man almost shuddered as he bent over and looked in, curious as though these things had never before met his gaze. There was a dull odor of dead flowers long boxed up. A faint rustling as of intangible things became half audible, as though spirits passed out at this contact with the ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... oneself behind an opaque glass through which one can see only the reflection of one's own nose. To see as far as possible the good, the bad, about, around, yonder, everywhere; to perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible things towards the necessity of the decent, the good, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Gatherings of this sort are finished. We meet, one or two of us, perhaps, by accident, in the clubs and in the streets, in our houses and perhaps in the restaurants, but the bond which unites us, and which no human power could ever sever because it is of the spirit, that bond from to-night is intangible. Wait, all of you, for a message. The task given to each shall not ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... law-abiding communities as well as amongst miners and backwoodsmen. If inoffensive people were ever to cast it aside, then wicked men would have everything their own way and make life intolerable. Fortunately the evil-doers always have the fear of this intangible six-shooter before them; a wholesome feeling, which restrains them more than reasonableness or the law courts, and to which we owe it that the meek are permitted to inherit the earth. But now this quarrel was with a whole nation, though certainly not with a very great ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... that unfortunate Dorothy for her feeble participation? Nothing of a healthy, wholesome, vigorous, vital, individual, personal kind; but some pitiful pretence of wit or humor, having for its vague or indefinite object ideal or general, abstract, impersonal, or, so to speak, invisible intangible subjects, wanting all the vivacious pungent stimulus that belongs to real individual absurdity, and the direct ridicule of it, judiciously and dexterously applied; the only efficient—I had almost said legitimate—object of a rational creature's amusement. If Dorothy depends upon you for her entertainment ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in imaginative ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... In this effort she had totally failed. Dion had never left her since he had killed Robin. In the flesh he had pursued her in the walled garden at Welsley on that dark night of November when for her the whole world had changed. In another intangible, mysterious guise he had attended her ever since. He had been about her path and about her bed. Even when she knelt at the altar in the Supreme Service he had been there. She had felt his presence as she touched the water, as she lifted the cup. Through all these months she had learnt to know ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... spectacular ways, the amount of alumni gifts is the most available standard by which the effectiveness of this support can be shown. Judged by this rough and ready approximation for a force which is in reality intangible and based on something finer and more spiritual than material gifts, particularly since it represents obviously only the sentiment of the few rather than that of the thousands who would do likewise if they were able, it shows nevertheless ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... pages of Mrs. Toynbee's volumes. Enthusiasm alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself—the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities: it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in black-and-white and a finished painting in oils. Probably Miss Berry's edition will still be preferred by the ordinary reader who wishes to become acquainted with a celebrated figure in French literature; but Mrs. ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... like the footsteps of ghosts, so intangible were they—were now so near that to Klara's supersensitive mind they appeared to be less than ten paces ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue that brightens ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... says, if you is on a quest fur a father or a mother, only you have got to be worthy of that there quest, she says. The first time you meet the right one you are drawed jest like the witch hazel. That is the Intangible Something working on you, she says. Martha had learnt a lot about that. The book that had fell in the crick was like that. She lent it ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... is correlated with longer life. The lessons of experience come to it over and over again, and it can and must learn them. It is the intelligent, remembering, thinking type. The insect had begun to peer into the world of invisible and intangible relations, the vertebrate will some day see them. This much is prophecied in his very structure. He must be heir ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... interpreting the looks of faces and the meanings of actions around her by what she had heard, she could not doubt she had received but a too true sample of experiences innumerable. One result was, that, young as was Hester, she no longer shrank from the thought of that invisible, intangible solvent in which the generations of man vanish from the eyes of their fellows. She said to herself what a blessed thing was death for countless human myriads—yea doubtless for the whole race! It looked sad enough for an end; but then it was not the end; while but for the thought ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... exquisite ferns and mosses. Overhanging it are weeping palms with long straight leaves. Trees, with erect stems as tall as Nelson's Column, strain upward to the light. Butterflies in numbers flutter noiselessly about. The air is absolutely still and of a feel like satin. Clouds of intangible softness and clean and white as snow float around, appear, dissolve, and reappear. Through the parting in the overhanging trees the intense blue sky is seen in glimpses. The sun here and there pierces through the arching foliage, and the greens of the foliage glisten brighter ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... and I should not account myself that were I capable of anything but deference to those whom nature or fortune may have placed above me, or to those who being placed beneath me in rank may labour under a disability to resent my lack of it." It was a neatly intangible rebuke. M. de Rivarol bit his lip. Captain Blood swept on without giving him time to reply: "Thus much being clear, shall we ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... love-sick girl. They told him that because a thing is a mystery it is not necessarily a folly, though mysteries are for the most part dealt in by fools. They suggested that there may be many things and forces above us and around us, invisible as an electric current, intangible as light, yet existent and capable of manifestation under certain rare and ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... no engagement, only a something altogether intangible and vague, understood to be an understanding. And Lucia adored him. If she had not adored him he might have been urged to something irretrievable and definite. As it was, there was no need, and ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... thought of failure oppressed him. Even that slight slackening of his rigid concentration brought relief to the Professor. Without any knowledge as to the source of their conviction, the two girls who watched felt that the Professor was becoming dominant. And then there came a sudden queer change. The intangible triumph of the Professor's stony poise seemed to fade away. His eyes had sought the corner of the room, his lips quivered. The horror was there again, the horror they had seen before. He crouched a little back. His hands were uplifted as though ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had not changed in the slightest detail. The crystal sphere still softly glowed, with intangible shadows flitting across its surface; the adept still sat cross-legged staring into its depths; opposite him, the cobra, its hood distended, swayed slowly ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty. No change has taken place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in the boy. Such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for all that. It is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the accepted definition of education. Though it defies analysis ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... own it appears to me to be a little incongruous—or, at least, a little defective in that pure classical taste which the sculptor unquestionably possesses,—to put, what may be considered visible and invisible—or tangible and intangible—representations of the same person before you at the same time. If a representation of the figure of the duchess be necessary, it should not be in the form of a medallion. The pyramidal back-ground would doubtless have had ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... across the chamber, coming to rest, gnome-like, on larva or ant. Again and again I saw these little springtails skip through the very scimitar mandibles of a soldier, while the workers paid no attention to them. I wondered if they were not quite odorless, intangible to the ants, invisible guests which lived close to them, going where, doing what they willed, yet never perceived by the thousands of inhabitants. They seemed to live in a kind of fourth dimensional state, a realm comparable to that which we people with ghosts and spirits. It was a most ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute human personality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, the Divine Personality is a contradiction ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... was to take the packet in our hands and examine it, in order to discover the hiding-place. No matter! The packet itself, the plug of Maryland made up and passed by the State and by the Inland Revenue Office, was a sacred, intangible thing, a thing above suspicion! And nobody opened it. That was how that demon of a Daubrecq allowed that untouched packet of tobacco to lie about for months on his table, among his pipes and among other unopened packets of tobacco. And no ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... undoubtedly invigorating. The spirituous scent of melaleuca-trees burdens the air, not as an exhalation but as an arrogant physical part of the Isle, while a wattle (ACACIA CUNNINGHAMI) shyly proclaims its flowering by a scent as intangible and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... largest specimen of the 'Sweetheart' that homes with us would measure three and one half inches if it would spread its wings full width as do the moths of other species. No moth is more difficult to describe, because of the delicate blending of so many intangible shades. The front wings are a pale, brownish grey, with irregular markings of tan, and dark splotches outlined with fine deep brown lines. The edges are fluted and escalloped, each raised place being touched with a small spot of tan, and above ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... maintain that there is no such thing as matter—that all is mind. They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality. ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with moisture. Old Daniel wiped his forehead. He was heated, but so happy that he was not aware of it. He saw wonderful new lights over everything. He had wielded love, the one invincible weapon of the whole earth, and had conquered his intangible and dreadful enemy. When, for the sake of that little beloved life, his own life had become as nothing, old Daniel found himself superior to it. He sat there in the tumultuous heat of the May day, watching the child picking violets and gathering strength with ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... idioms and errors were dropping away; they had not utterly departed, however, but came crowding back in moments of excitement. At other times she clothed Miss Smith's clear-cut, correct speech in softer Southern accents. She was drifting away from him in some intangible way to an upper world of dress and language and deportment, and the new thought ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... human life, whether tangible or intangible, have this same method. For example, there has not been an invention known to mankind that has not come on in the manner of growth. The antecedents of it work on and on in a tentative way, producing first this trial result and then that, always ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... family of "select" American girls. It might seem that the tradition of the Villa Ponitowski (as the place continued to be called) was hardly suitable for her purposes, but the robust common sense of our age rarely hesitates over such intangible considerations, and least of all the sophisticated Miss Comstock. At the Villa Ponitowski the young women enjoyed the healthful freedom of a suburb with the open fields of the Bois directly at their door, and yet were within easy reach of Paris, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... not raise a little finger for her. Dear old Emily, she wasn't a bit cross the other night when I wouldn't go home with her. I must go and see her. She says she loved me—really loved me! ... She used to lie and dream of pulling me out of burning houses. I wonder why I am liked! How intangible, and yet how real! What a wonderful character I would make ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... sect was a clever woman. Well aware of the power and fascination of the mysterious, she exploited it with a profound understanding of the human heart. She mingled the realities of life with the mysteries of thought, and the sun of her revelations is always veiled by intangible clouds. From her gospel one might cull at random scores of phrases that defy human understanding. "Evil is nothing, no thing, mind or power," she says in Science and Health. "As manifested by mankind, it stands for a lie, nothing claiming to ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... stage in the journey Tom could not have accounted for himself in the ethical field. Something, a thing intangible, had gone out of him. He could not tell what it was; but he missed it. The kindly Gordon nature was intact, or he hoped it was, but the neighbor-love, which was his father's rule of life, seemed not to have come down to him in its largeness. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... potentially divine for him, and all received worship, but none entered so intimately into his life as animals. He was doubtless struck, perhaps awed, by the brightness of the heavenly bodies, but they were far off, intangible; mountains were grand and mighty, but motionless; stones lay in his path, but did not approach him; rivers ran, but in an unchanging way, rarely displaying emotion; plants grew, and furnished food, but showed little sign of intelligence. Animals, on the other ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... hid thy gracious head? Veiled with what visions while the grey world grieves, Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves, What warm intangible green shadows spread To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed? What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives? Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet Its silver web unweave, Thy footless ghost on some unfooted ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... stimulated, and inspired to a keener, clearer vision on a wider outlook. The most significant, vital, and inspiring phases of these conferences, those which really count for most, and are the strongest guaranties of the permanence and power of this movement, must, however, remain intangible. This fact was manifest in every moment of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... whirlygig compasses is drawed to the north. It is the same, Martha says, if you is on a quest fur a father or a mother, only you have got to be worthy of that there quest, she says. The first time you meet the right one you are drawed jest like the witch hazel. That is the Intangible Something working on you, she says. Martha had learnt a lot about that. The book that had fell in the crick was like that. She lent it ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... the Father (Saint Joseph), and the Child—with Saint Anne looming in the background (the grandmother is an important personage in the patriarchal family). The Creator of all things and the Holy Ghost have evaporated; they are too intangible and non-human. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... in fact a great strategic change in the world during the past year. That precious intangible, the initiative, is becoming ours. Our policy, not limited to mere reaction against crises provoked by others, is free to develop along lines of our choice not only abroad, but also at home. As a major theme for American policy during the coming ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to several other hypnotists without success, and I have had some of my unsuccessful subjects hypnotized by other hypnotists. How and why does it happen? I believe that some of the reasons are so intangible that it would be impossible to explain all of them with ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... partisan of the squalid mob of France. Have I said that I aspired to gain your love? I wonder if I have ever dreamed it? I only know, Juliette, that you are to me something akin to the angels, something white and ethereal, intangible, and perhaps ununderstandable. Yet, knowing my folly, I glory in it, my dear, and I would not let you go out of my life without telling you of that, which has made every hour of the past few weeks a paradise for ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... complete than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... than his name to offer her. It relieved somewhat the present situation. Yet her avoidance of him he could construe only as contempt for a man who had played with her while bound by other ties. Sometimes he felt that he must explain to her how intangible were those bonds. Yet he was sufficiently conscious of their actual existence to feel that the difficulties of explanation were almost insurmountable. And Hilda, poor child, took his devotion ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... sensations, evoked by this same motion. The mare swerved violently and stopped. There, passing within three yards, from the same direction as before, the soundless shapes of the pony and her foal flew by again, more intangible, less dusky now against the darker screen. Were we, then, to be haunted by those bewildering uncanny ones, flitting past ever from the same direction? This time the mare did not follow, but stood still; knowing as well as I that direction was quite ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it was true, if the whole miserable story was true, then he knew that something had been taken from him. Something he had cherished in that dim, secret corner of his heart. Its truth or untruth did not affect his feeling for Meg. But if it were true, then he had irretrievably lost something intangible, yet precious. Young men like Miles never mention ideals, but that's not to say that in some very hidden place they don't exist, like ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... without hope still, but it was not such as could be allowed to control his action. He could not say now why it was; he could not tell what was lacking, but somehow there seemed to have been a change. She was so far away—so intangible. It was the same lithe form, the same bright face, the same pleasant voice; but the life, the soul, seemed to have gone out of the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... nor even Paula, imagine that Dick—the keen one, the deep one, who could see and sense things yet to occur and out of intangible nuances and glimmerings build shrewd speculations and hypotheses that subsequent events often proved correct—was already sensing what had not happened but what might happen. He had not heard Paula's brief significant words at the hitching post; nor had he seen Graham ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... joy in the open; and Dade, his cigarette sending up a tiny ribbon of aromatic smoke as if he were burning incense before the altar of the soul of him that looked steadfastly out of his eyes, walked among them with that intangible air of good-fellowship which is so hard to describe, but which carries more weight among men than any degree of imperious superiority. Valencia looked up and flashed him a smile as he came near; and Pancho, the lean vaquero with the ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within himself and ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... the Continental Congress on the second day of July, 1776, when the people of the rebelling British colonies in America, by action of their representatives, assumed a free and independent position. But a motion is intangible. It is an act, of which the announcement is the visible result. "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind" prompted the Congress on July 4, 1776, to "declare the causes" which impelled it to separation. This date is accepted in the popular mind, as well as ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... in a deep peace, not to be rapt from it by any fantasy, nor beguiled by any dream, they paid only in a high morality their debt to the intangible. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... strangely aloof acknowledgment of Crossman's possible relation to this woman, his woman, who yet was not his or any man's, somehow shocked Crossman. His blood flamed at the thought, and yet he felt her intangible, unreal. He had but to look into her shifting, glittering eyes, and there were silence and playing lights. Suddenly his vision of her changed, became human and vital. He saw before him the sinuous movement of her strong young body. He realized the living perfume of her, clean and fresh, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... passengers, leaving largesses behind her, and always followed by thanks and blessings when she came away. Not pride, surely—the great dark fathomless eyes were wondrously sweet and soft; the lips, that might once have been haughty and hard, tender and gentle now, and yet there was a vague, intangible something about her, that held all at arm's length, that let no one come one inch nearer than it was her will they should come. Lady Catheron had been their interest from the first—she was their mystery ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... domain as a national asset. With all his realism, Douglas was gifted with a certain sort of imagination in things political. He not only saw what was obvious to the dullest clerk,—the revenue derived from land sales,—but also those intangible and prospective gains which would accrue to State and nation from the occupation and cultivation of the national domain. He came to believe that, even if not a penny came into the treasury, the government would still be richer from having parcelled out the great uninhabited ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... her, keep her for himself, became a daily inquisition. Nothing had happened to lead him to think that his possession was endangered, his fear proceeded from an instinct, which he could not subdue, that she was gliding from him; he wrestled with the intangible, and, striving to subordinate instinct to reason, he often refrained from kissing her; he imitated the indifference which in other times he could not dissimulate when the women who had really loved him besought him with tears. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... instinct to share his fear. He poured himself a drink. Evelyn watched him with compressed lips as he drained the glass. He drew himself up out of the depths of his chair and began to tramp the floor; words leaped to his lips but he pressed them back; he was aware that only the most intangible barriers held between them; an impulse that grew in his throbbing brain seemed driving him forward to destroy these barriers; to stand before her as he was; to emerge from his mental solitude and claim her companionship. What was marriage made ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... the penalty of greatness and bear on their young shoulders the burdens of the world. Evidence is hard to collect, for the witnesses disagree among themselves. Then there are other complications. Abundance stole things which you can see and touch, while Lotus's theft was only one of intangible thoughts. Furthermore, Abundance comes from a no-account family, quite "down and out," while Lotus is a pastor's daughter and as such entitled to due respect and deference. And still further, nobody ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... God of simple people, such as her mother and Philip Benoix and Brother Bates, the God upon whom she herself called at times because of the force of early habit—perhaps He was only life-principle—the warmth of the sun, for instance—an impersonal, intangible something which started the universe as one winds a clock, and left it to go on ticking till the mechanism runs down.... Good or bad, wise or foolish—what difference? Spin our webs no matter how carefully, they are only gossamer, visible for a moment with the dew or the ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... they tower serenely into the blue heavens, steeped in ethereal splendor. Once more it struck him that in their latter aspect his companion resembled them. Made finely, of warm flesh and blood, she was yet ethereal too. There was something aloof and intangible about her that seemed in harmony with the hills among which ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... All were arrested by some intangible suggestion of a deeper mystery than they had yet touched. One by one they began to cross the hall with the conscious air of men who were not curious but thought that they might as ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... on all the relations and conditions of life. The connexion between religious faith and political practice is, in truth, far closer than is generally thought. Public opinion has not yet ripened into a knowledge that religious error is the intangible but real substratum of all political injustice. Though the 'Schoolmaster' has done much, there still remain among us, many honest and energetic assertors of 'the rights of man,' who have to learn that ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... and substantial, and yet so intangible! Her defensive armor is perfect, and I cannot get near or touch her unless she permits it. The sincerest compliment glances off. Out of her kindness she helps me and does me good. She bewitches and sways me by her spells, but I might as well seek to imprison ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... the thought, almost, of death! We do not guess that this humble desire for a likeness is one of our most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcome space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most fleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... future, that terra incognita which Mr. Lindsay's vague words—"There are trials ahead of you"—had peopled with dread yet intangible phantoms, whose spectral shadows solemnly presageful, hovered over even the present. Why was her own history a sealed volume—her father a mystery—her mother a wanderer ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Circumstance he had met and thought to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end Custom was laughing in his face. Beside those intangible antagonists which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and swaggering and cheap. But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was an entity—a thing upon which one might hurl oneself and spend one's ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... handed the young lady in; but Constance declared that though he sat beside her and took care of her at breakfast he had on one of his intangible fits which drove her to the last extreme of ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... of glittering coins to his fawning beggars. From somewhere in the structure above, the crackling, hissing wireless mechanism was thrusting its invisible hands out into the night and catching the fleeting messages that were borne on the intangible pulsations of the mysterious ether. From time to time these messages were given form and body, and despatched to the luxurious suite below, where, in the dazzling sheen of silver and cut glass, spread out over richest napery, and glowing beneath a torrent of white ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... thrust out with foolish hands and feet, Murmuring; but those grey women with bound hair Who fright the gods frighted not him; he laughed Seeing them, and pushed out hands to feel and haul Distaff and thread, intangible; but they Passed, and I hid the brand, and in my heart Laughed likewise, having all my will of heaven. But now I know not if to left or right The gods have drawn us hither; for again I dreamt, and saw the black brand burst on fire As ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... admiration, and she was too unsophisticated to conceal her delight. He smiled to himself at her evident pleasure in his words, and, with much the same feeling with which he might have cuddled a purring, affectionate kitten, he went a step farther and made love—a very shadowy, intangible sort of love, in a very indefinite ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... complete seclusion. Little wonder then that a hush fell on Dominic crossing the threshold, since so doing he passed from the world of healthy action to that of acquiescent sickness, from vigorous hoarse-voiced realities to the intangible sadness of unrelated dreams! The effect was one of rather haunting melancholy; and it was characteristic of the lad that he did not resent it, though rejoicing in the reputation at school of being high-spirited enough, impatient of restraint or of any frustration of purpose. His mother ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... and behind her stretched the rows of serried trunks which had grown to vastness of girth and stateliness with the centuries, and the girl, who was of quick perceptions, felt instinctively the influence of their age and silence. There was, it seemed, something intangible but existent in this still land of shadow which reacted upon her pleasantly after the artificial gaieties and glitter of surface civilization. Her impatience and irritation seemed to melt, and the time slipped by, ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... if I were about to receive an electrical shock. The effect was more startling than electricity would have produced. His hand had neither weight nor substance; my fingers, when they would have closed upon it, found nothing that they could grasp: it was intangible, though it had ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... it by no material elements, but by the principle of life in which its individuality consists, which is to make it a new being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this manifestation of the disease is observed, the observer will usually connect it with a vague impression once formed or received, that the patient was living a little too hard. He will scarcely have had leisure to turn it over in his ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... spiritual being, who can not draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and of putting anything in motion? Nothing is plainer than that they would have us believe that an intangible ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... facts on which the scientists based their conclusions were collected by the War Department itself. This indifference is the more curious because the Army had always been aware of what the War Department Policies and Programs Review Board called in 1947 "that intangible aspect of military life called ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as tone ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... through the narrow, vaulted passageway, the veiled women, the hawk-featured, turbaned men, the Jews, the Chaldeans, the Arabs, the Armenians, the stalwart Kurds, and through it all a leaven of khaki-clad Indians, purchasing for the regimental mess. All these and an ever-present exotic, intangible something are what the bazaar means. Close by the entrance stood a booth festooned with lamps and lanterns of every sort, with above it scrawled "Aladdin-Ibn-Said." My Arabic was not at that time sufficient to enable me to discover from the owner whether he claimed illustrious ancestry ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... like them. They were large and soft and velvety, like—like black pansies! That was precisely what they were, saucy, wide-awake black pansies, the most beautiful flower in all creation; and, while they were shadowed by the intangible melancholy of the tropics, they were also capable of twinkling in the most roguish manner imaginable, as at the present moment. Her hair was soft and fine, entirely free from the harsh lustre so common ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... mockery of the form of free government without its powers or attributes. An individual despot may be reached, terrified, or persuaded, but a despotic oligarchy has no restraint of individual responsibility, and is as intangible in its individuality as it is grasping and heartless in its acts and policy. For governors, all executive officers, judges, and legislative councillors appointed from England, together with military officers, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... the absorption of this strength, when, in magnetic disturbances, there is an unusual amount of immortal food. Should we try to resist it, there would eventually be a greater pressure without than within, and we should assimilate involuntarily. We are part of the intangible universe, and can feel no hunger that is not instantly appeased, neither can ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... qui dors dans Vombre, O sacre Souvenir." If we could have remembrance now And see, as in the days to come We shall, what's venturous in these hours: The swift, intangible romance of fields at home, The gleams of sun, the showers, Our workaday contentments, or our powers To fare still forward through the uncharted haze Of present days. . . . For, looking back when years shall flow Upon ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... sweetness of her kiss. How had he kept himself from catching her to his heart in that moment, and holding her there while he drank his fill of the cup she had so shyly proffered? How had he ever suffered her to flit from him down the rough kopje and turn at the bottom with the old intangible ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... ineffable undercurrent of meaning in his words—an intangible suggestion that he might be bribed to do all this to which he ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... will of the adversary, Rapid Dominance will apply a variety of approaches and techniques to achieve the necessary level of Shock and Awe at the appropriate strategic and military leverage points. This means that psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure, will have to be achieved. It is in this broader and deeper strategic application that Rapid Dominance perhaps most fundamentally differentiates ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... The intangible something that places the stamp of popular approval on one musical enterprise, while another equally artistic and as cleverly managed languishes in a condition of unendorsed greatness, remains ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... his own happiness; it is the aroma of a life lived in harmony with high ideals. For what a man has, he may be dependent on others; what he is, rests with him alone. What he obtains in life is but acquisition; what he attains, is growth. Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life, is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fulfilled destiny. Happiness is paradoxic because ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... politic man as he was, and versed in state secrets, he never succeeded in fitting M. Colbert. This is beyond explanation; it is a matter for guessing or for intuition. Great geniuses of every kind live on unseen, intangible ideas; they act without themselves knowing why. The great Percerin (for, contrary to the rule of dynasties, it was, above all, the last of the Percerins who deserved the name of Great), the great Percerin was inspired when he cut ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone can lead to the ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... evening he looked forward daily, hourly, to the anguish of her departure. She would vanish out of his life, intangible as a melted snow-flake, and only memory would stay behind to tell him he had known and loved her. Why should this be so hard to bear? If she stayed, he dared not tell her she was dear to him; he dared not stretch forth his hand to help her. In all the world there ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... son of Madri, about what thou hast asked me. I am excited by this question of thine, like a hill of red-chalk.[480] In ancient times the universe was one vast expanse of water, motionless and skyless, and without this earth occupying any space in it. Enveloped in darkness, and intangible, its aspect was exceedingly awful. Utter silence reigning all over, it was immeasurable in extent. In his own proper time the Grandsire (of the universe) took his birth. He then created the wind and fire, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... short while, Lambert and Madge fought them off, thrusting at them, seeming to push them backward down the intangible slope; the cries which the dematerialized humans uttered also helped to hold the leaders of the attacking army partially in check, but the vast number ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... There are voices which so move and stir the hearer that they arouse an emotion which for the moment may override reason; voices which appeal to the senses like beguiling music, and which conquer by a persuasive sweetness as irresistible as it is intangible. The tones of the Persian swayed Ashe so deeply that the young man felt as if swimming on a billow of melody. Philip regarded as if fascinated the slender, dusky fingers of the reader as they handled the splendidly illuminated parchment on which glowed strange characters of gold, marvelously ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... of humanity, regenerative science would not have been able to arise. It is only by recognizing the effects that we can go back to the unhealthy causes, and save humanity from danger. The causes of death are as invisible and intangible as microbes; man may drink poison when he thinks he is drinking nectar. Woe to us if the diseased and degenerate did not exhibit themselves to us as an advance guard, to testify to the unconscious errors which threaten us with perdition. Science does not exactly limit itself to tending ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... sun-steeped ways of the wonderful Japanese city. Still, even could I revive all the lost sensations of those first experiences, I doubt if I could express and fix them in words. The first charm of Japan is intangible and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... and inanimate. The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Tahkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshipper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect or despise others, but the great ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... though, who suggested that arms, ammunition, supplies and comforts be left behind in the cabin, ostensibly for that intangible personality who had signed himself Tarzan of the Apes, and for D'Arnot should he still be living, but really, she hoped, for her forest god—even though his feet ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... their bidding, because of their having the brains, it might be understood. Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the City's contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase. She remembered her satisfaction at the allotment; the golden castle ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... (pleaded the pipe) in the charter of that kingdom—in the sunshiny Sermon on the Mount. It is no fanciful conception of an intangible order of things, but a practical, workable code of daily life, adapted to any stage of civilisation, and delivered to men and women who, even according to the showing of hopeless pessimists, or strenuous advocates for Individualistic force and cunning, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... ascertainment of truth alone, in intangible regions of inquiry. The further hypothesis that such truth when found will be most satisfactory, or in other words higher and better than any alternative plan,—the conviction that faith in the exceeding grandeur of reality shall not be confounded,—requires ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... nights passed quietly; and then, on the fourth, all those curious signs and hints culminated suddenly in something extraordinarily grim. Yet, everything had been so subtle and intangible, and, indeed, so was the affair itself, that only those who had actually come in touch with the invading fear, seemed really capable of comprehending the terror of the thing. The men, for the most part, began to say the ship was unlucky, and, ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... right!" He pressed her hand, he smiled, he reassured her by all the subtle, intangible ways known to lovers, and it was borne in upon her that he had altered, had grown mentally in his months of exile—that he was steadier, more certain of life or of himself, than when he had rushed tempestuously out of Max's studio. She pondered ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... which gleamed bare white shoulders, hair studded with diamonds, drops of water on the brunettes, glistening reflections on the blondes, and the same intoxicating perfume, the same confused, pleasant buzzing, made by waves of heat and intangible wings, that caresses all the flowers in the garden in summer. At times a little laugh, ascending in that luminous atmosphere, a quicker breath, made plumes and curls tremble, and attracted attention to a lovely profile. Such was the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... desires his thoughts to be transmitted to any given point, he leans toward the stem leading to that point. This silken web which you have admired, is a sensitive electric telegraph. It is composed of the elements of mind; in the world you have lately inhabited it would be intangible, but it has a subtle connection with the human brain, and spirit thoughts directed through it go with the promptness of electricity to their destination. Thought is electric, but its power of transmitting itself ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... boiled in a pot and then allowed to cool in the same vessel or poured out to cool in a large earthen or wooden bowl. Then Mr. Tao together with Mrs. Tao and all the young Taos squat on their heels around the mixture and satisfy that intangible thing called the appetite. They do not use chop sticks as the Chinese do, but the rice and fish are caught in a hollow formed by the first three fingers of the right hand. The thumb is then placed behind the mass. It is raised up and poised before the mouth, with a skill coming ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... palms, like rigid and glittering sword-blades, were clear-cut against the stars. The boulevard in which he sat stretched its great length, empty and silent. And Miramar seemed a dream palace set in a dream world, a world filled with strange, intangible people, intent on strange, fantastic plots. To Roddy the father, who the day before had cast him off, seemed unreal; the old man buried in a living sepulchre, and for whom in a few hours he might lose his life, was unreal; as ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... the official, with a little gesture of despair, "Scotland Yard has its limitations. We cannot investigate the cause of intangible fears. If you are threatened we can help you, but the mere fact that you fancy there is come sort of vague danger would not justify our taking ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... workshop in which he carried on his affairs and the affairs of the concern which had its foundation in unshaken ideals and high honor. In an intangible fashion its inanimate accessories reflected something of himself. On one wall, from a generous spread of moose antlers, hung a rifle and a pair of restrung snowshoes: reminders of the open woods he loved. There were autographed ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... that Audrey could not see. In that world she was a pilgrim and a stranger; it was peopled with shadowy fantastic rivals, who left her with no field and no favour; flesh and blood were powerless to contend against them. They excited no jealousy—they were too intangible for that; but in their half-seen presence she had a sense of helpless irritation and bewilderment—it baffled, overpowered, and humiliated her. To a woman thirsting for a great experience, it was hard to find that the best things lay always just beyond her reach; ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... fastened on almost solemnly. The detectives, in spite of their usual roughness and the bitterness of their resentment against Lupin, acted with reserve and discretion, astounded as they were at being allowed to touch that intangible being. ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... a piece with the rest of him. It was not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience—an intangible, dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring's, a diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington himself would have been disgusted by any mention of it. If he had been obliged, he would have ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... be taken in the euphemistic sense which the term has under the code duello governing "affairs of honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity, liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a casus belli than the material assets of the community. ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... just proportion; red tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood a while unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ridgar, drawn by that intangible sense of eyes upon him, raised his head; and, as their glances met, that great void flashed suddenly into full panoply of life peopled with a ring of painted faces against the background of a night forest, a leaping fire, and the heroic figure of a tall ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... him in a likely place, and the rapt patience of the born angler had folded him close, she disposed herself comfortably in the thick grass, her back against a tree, and took up the shuttle of fancy to weave a wonderful daydream, as beautiful, intangible as the lacy, summer ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... They had tea to the accompaniment of much light-hearted chatter on the parts of Violet and Max Wyndham. Colonel Campion sat in heavy silence, and Olga instinctively held aloof. There was something in Max's attitude that puzzled her, but it was something so intangible that she could not even vaguely define it to herself. All his careless banter notwithstanding, she was fully convinced in her own mind that he was not in the smallest degree dazzled or so much as ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... not one word of what Bone Stillman said, it is possible that the outcast's treatment of him as a grown-up friend was one of the most powerful of the intangible influences which were to push him toward the great world outside of Joralemon. The school-bound child—taught by young ladies that the worst immorality was whispering in school; the chief virtue, a dull quietude—was here first given a reasonable basis for supposing ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul. It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. The God that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our needs—let the ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... in him than Jean were grateful to Geoffrey Stonor when he smiled. They felt relieved from some intangible responsibility for ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of the sea were of far more vital interest to her than men, and the next ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... of thousands of women. The world's standard of success may appear to give the prize to those who collect things, but in reality the crown of victory, the laurel wreath, the tribute beyond all material value, is always reserved for those invisible, intangible qualities which are evinced ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... which, with the intensity of observation rendered necessary and inevitable by its narrow field, had noted, as he stepped out in the street, the intangible shifting of relations in his surroundings incident to the mere passage of time in the few days of his obliteration, now felt, as a blind man feels the mountain in his approach, or as the steersman in a Newfoundland fog apprehends ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... altered to a steady-eyed seriousness in which, too, she recognized the intangible quality that made him seem to her different from all the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... ready ever to absorb the fresh advance of waves. It is indeed striking to observe how authors and men of talent have increased, so vastly out of all proportion with other classes of men. Observing it, the political economist may well shout 'Io triumphe!' for that even in so delicate and intangible a matter as intellectual gifts, the famous doctrine of supply and demand is so thoroughly carried out. We raise, however, no hue and cry after 'poor trash.' Neither have we the blood-thirsty wish to run to ground the panting scribbler, or to adorn ourselves with the glories ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a subtle, intangible, but very real spirit influence breathing out of every man's presence. It is proportioned entirely to the strength of the man living within. With some it is very attractive. Sometimes it is positively ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... pocket—seemed to affect Zack far more than that other blow at the intangible essence, his family honour. He could see his son Nim set off for the back settlements of Iowa without a pang; for it is in vulgar Yankee nature to fling abroad the sons and daughters of a house far and wide into the waters of the world, to ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... sat on her bed, and later on in the train, striving to break the mental thongs which bound her to some intangible stake, Jan Cuxson was sitting in the secret places of the jungle temple, striving to break the bonds of raw hide by which he had found himself fastened to a ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... marvellous thing is family likeness! In height, in complexion, and feature alike this man appeared diametrically the opposite of the stout little person encountered outside the inn; yet in his thin, cadaverous face there was an intangible something which marked him out as a child of the same parents. The brother on whom Margot was now gazing was considerably the younger of the two, and might have been handsome, given a trifle more flesh and animation. As it ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the subject, and as they rode along in silence, each was thinking of the curious web of emotions that was moulding their lives and making definite objects grow from intangible impulses. He was hardly conscious yet what a motive force in his plans Liddy was destined to be; and she was filled with a new and sweet consciousness of a woman's power to shape a man's plans in life. When her home was reached, and after he had ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... so subtle as almost to escape measurement—he had glided back to the forbidden and dangerous ground of the war. At first it was an intangible reference to something that occurred on such and such a date, the date in question being that of some sanguinary battle; then a swift sarcasm, veiled and softly shod; then a sarcasm that dropped its veil for an instant, ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of which and by means of which we are carrying on our business and our daily avocations. The wonder of the carpet that would carry the person through the air who sat upon it and wished is nothing compared with the power of electricity, steam, any one of these invisible, intangible powers that are thrilling through the world to-day. There never was so much room for mystery, for awe, for poetry, for romance, as there is in the midst of our commercial ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... shoulders and faintly-rosy hands, from her light and, at the same time, rather languid gait, from the very sound of her voice, which was low and sweet,—there breathed forth an insinuating charm, as intangible as a delicate perfume, a soft and as yet modest intoxication, something which it is difficult to express in words, but which touched and excited,—and, of course, excited something which was not timidity. Lavretzky turned the conversation on the theatre, on the performance ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... heat of the day you hear the rustling of summer showers and the whispering of summer winds. Everything is lifted up from the plane of labor to the plane of love, and a glory spans your life. With your friend, speech and silence are one; for a communion mysterious and intangible reaches across from heart to heart. The many dig and delve in your nature with fruitless toil to find the spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... conquests hereafter William II may achieve, even should we be defeated again, we shall be able to stand up before him and to his face to say, "You will never achieve greatness!" Material greatness turns again to dust, like all matter, but moral greatness is eternal, an intangible thing, which surrounds men, invisible, and which emanates ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... felt this too, and something more. It was eight years since he had stood before an English lady, and he surmised that there could not be many to compare with this one, while after his grim lonely life an intangible something that seemed to emanate from her gracious serenity compelled his homage. Then as she smiled at him and held out her hand, he was for a moment sensible of an almost overwhelming confusion. It passed as suddenly, for this was a man of quick perceptions, and remembering ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... Lucky the man who shall next find it, but unlucky the world when he does; for then the day of the general conflagration will be at hand. In the mean time, it remains, like the top of Mount Meru, covered with clouds, or, like the inside of a Chinese puzzle, a work of unrivaled art, conceivable but intangible by man. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... to that horrible cousin of her father's. She seemed so intangible, remote and virginal, that her cousin and Miss Pinnegar both failed to make anything of her. She answered their questions simply, but did not talk. They talked to each other. And at last the cousin went away, with a profound dislike ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... capillary system, either absorbent or diffusive, and wholly electrical? Whether the fluid phenomena of the Will, a matter generated within us, and spontaneously reacting under the impress of conditions as yet unobserved, were at all more extraordinary than those of the invisible and intangible fluid produced by a voltaic pile, and applied to the nervous system of a dead man? Whether the formation of Ideas and their constant diffusion was less incomprehensible than evaporation of the atoms, imperceptible indeed, but so violent in their effects, that are given off from a grain ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... his seat Tom laughed heartily as he told of the traveling man who had visited Joe Wainsworth's shop and the placing of the order for the factory-made harness. In some intangible way he felt that when Jim Gibson laid the order for the harness on the bench in the shop and by the force of his personality compelled Joe Wainsworth to sign, he justified all such men as himself. In imagination he lived in that ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body, as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... as white as snow just fallen, and must have required most faithful and religious care to keep it so. As for the volumes of the library, they are wired within the cases and turn their gilded backs upon the visitor, keeping their treasures of wit and wisdom just as intangible as if still in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... took hold of me. They commenced with a thrill which passed all up my body, and next all feeling save the consciousness of the loud beating of my heart ceased. Then it seemed that boy's eyes were inside my head and not outside, while along with them an intangible something pervaded my brain. The sensation at first was like the application of ether to the skin—a cool, numbing emotion. It was followed by a curious tingling feeling, as some dormant cells in my mind answered to the thought-transfer, and were filled and fertilised! ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... rather Le ffacase himself—still possessed that intangible thing called prestige and I was satisfied with my bargain. Le ffacase showed no reluctance—as why indeed should he?—to continue as managingeditor and acted toward me as though there had never been any previous association, but I ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... she came home expecting him to dance attendance upon her as before. She treated him coldly and he ceased calling, his volatile and sensitive nature resenting such treatment. It is curious what little things influence the trend of human lives. Many estrangements are caused by trifles so intangible that we can scarcely ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... about him. History, churches, factories on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last—its little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air—sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible—out ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... most intangible of assets and the most unescapable of liabilities. On Saturday, Mr. Mix had arrived too late because he had overslept because his alarm-clock had been tinkered by a watchmaker who had inherited a taste for alcohol from a parent who had been ruined by the Chicago ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... regarded as authoritative by all. People never disregard them. Brahma is of two kinds, viz., Brahma as represented by sound, and Brahma as Supreme (and intangible).[1256] One conversant with Brahma represented by sound succeeds in attaining to Supreme Brahma. Commencing with the rites of Garbhadhana, that body which the sire creates with the aid of Vedic mantras is cleansed (after birth) by Vedic mantras.[1257] When the body has been cleansed with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... objects appear in many respects as in a painting. Thus you see, in a painting done on a flat surface, objects which appear in relief, and in the mirror—also a flat surface—they look the same. The picture has one plane surface and the same with the mirror. The picture is intangible, in so far as that which appears round and prominent cannot be grasped in the hands; and it is the same with the mirror. And since you can see that the mirror, by means of outlines, shadows and lights, makes objects appear in relief, you, who have in your ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... woman has this element of mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone can lead to the discovery of ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... heart and will, he was silently assuring himself that all would go well—must go well. He must not even fear failure, think failure, imagine failure. Strong confidence on his own part, he fully believed, would be definite, if intangible, ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... of human life, whether tangible or intangible, have this same method. For example, there has not been an invention known to mankind that has not come on in the manner of growth. The antecedents of it work on and on in a tentative way, producing first this ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... talking about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to Cytherea—if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what she mutely expressed was what, beneath his comprehension, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was a cosmopolitan tinge to this region, and the boinas of Basques mingled with the cast-iron faces of Americans and sturdy self-possessed Negroes under broad "Texas" hats. An hour beyond the hills, in a thick-wooded land, I dropped off at the town of Tehuantepec, an intangible place that I had some difficulty in definitely locating ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... he wrote. "His hand is over all, and yet he is more intangible than mist. I am hedged about with difficulties and dangers which multiply as the days pass. I can do no more, hence the task devolves upon you. Be careful, for he is more desperate than ever. It is your ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... for years been left unopened. It was like opening a grave now to raise its cover. The man almost shuddered as he bent over and looked in, curious as though these things had never before met his gaze. There was a dull odor of dead flowers long boxed up. A faint rustling as of intangible things became half audible, as though spirits passed out at this contact ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... honeysuckle arising from the garden assisted the reality of the vision, by recalling the sprig of the same flower which Reine was twisting round her fingers at their last interview. This sweet breath of flowers in the night seemed like an emanation from the young girl herself, and was as fleeting and intangible as the remembrance of vanished happiness. Again and again did his morbid nature return to past events, and make his present position ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... space of time. In the sixteenth, these holocausts were appealed to as conclusive evidence of the reality of the crime, terror was again aroused, the more vindictive that its sources were so vague and intangible, and cruelty was the natural consequence. Nothing but an abject panic, in which the whole use of reason, except as a mill to grind out syllogisms, was altogether lost, will account for some chapters in ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... then her two sons, likely enough boys, and then Anne Wellington with Prince Koltsoff. She almost touched Armitage as she passed; the skirt of her lingerie frock swished against his ankles and behind she left, not perfume, but an intangible essence suggestive, somehow, of the very personality of the cool, beautiful, lithe young woman. As Armitage turned in response to Thornton's prod in the ribs, he met her eyes in full. But she gave no sign of recognition, and ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... flexibility. His every word was like a caress. There are voices which so move and stir the hearer that they arouse an emotion which for the moment may override reason; voices which appeal to the senses like beguiling music, and which conquer by a persuasive sweetness as irresistible as it is intangible. The tones of the Persian swayed Ashe so deeply that the young man felt as if swimming on a billow of melody. Philip regarded as if fascinated the slender, dusky fingers of the reader as they handled the splendidly illuminated ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... pioneer scout of the Wolf Patrol, having attained the age of maturity and realizing that my Boy Scout days are numbered, do hereby give, devise and bequeath my scout assets, tangible and intangible, ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... from Buluwayo and was going on to a place called Selukine for a week or two. It was not necessary for her to tell him that she was recently from home, for he knew it by her air, her voice, her accent, her rustly garments, the soft perfume of fur and violets, and a dozen little intangible signs and symbols that all had an appeal for him. For Druro was one of those Englishmen who love England from afar a great deal better than they do when at home. He had lived in Rhodesia, off and on, for ten years, and the ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Gaunt felt the intangible calm that hung about this man: this woman saw beneath it flashes of some depth of passion, shown reluctant even to her, the slow heat of the gloomy soul below. It frightened her, but she yielded: her will, her purpose slept, died into its languor. She loved, and she was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... enough after the form that baffles and eludes you. Beauty is a thing severe and unapproachable, never to be won by a languid lover. You must lie in wait for her coming and take her unawares, press her hard and clasp her in a tight embrace, and force her to yield. Form is a Proteus more intangible and more manifold than the Proteus of the legend; compelled, only after long wrestling, to stand forth manifest in his true aspect. Some of you are satisfied with the first shape, or at most by the second or the third that appears. Not thus wrestle the victors, the unvanquished ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... uncalled for; mingled with other thoughts and disturbed them all. Whether at my desk, or in the courts; among men in the crowded mart, or in places simply where the idle and the thoughtless congregate, it was still my companion. It was, however, still a shadow only; a dull, intangible, half-formed image of the mind; the crude creature of a fear rather than a desire; for, of a truth, nothing could be more really terrible to me than the apparent necessity of taking the life of one so dear to me once, and still so ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... the tangible definite today, calls it nothing, and accepts the intangible unknown eternity ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... thing is family likeness! In height, in complexion, and feature alike this man appeared diametrically the opposite of the stout little person encountered outside the inn; yet in his thin, cadaverous face there was an intangible something which marked him out as a child of the same parents. The brother on whom Margot was now gazing was considerably the younger of the two, and might have been handsome, given a trifle more flesh ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... communion with it, "united" with its reality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant does and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities, which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things and forces which feed and support it; of the whole universe that touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants— though this were far better than your old game of indexing your own poor photographs of them—will never give you access to the Unity, the Fact, whatever ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... centre, differing from the cells that surround it by no material elements, but by the principle of life in which its individuality consists, which is to make it a new being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though we may trace its action on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... repellent, and yet who rises to full accomplishment by reason of pure intellectual force or strength of character; but nine times out of ten the man who gets ahead, be he merchant, banker, promoter, or crook, does so by reason of this abstract asset, this intangible birthright. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... that it was the last review that many of the men were ever destined to see and it seemed to be peculiarly fitting that before they left for the field of battle they should see that figure,—the head of the Empire—that stood for freedom and that intangible something that had made them come thousands of miles to fight and, ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... politics, honours, Spain, and society in Paris, and to rise to the height of this lofty climax. And what in truth could be more tragic? How much must pass in the souls of these two lovers, brought together in a place of strangers, on a ledge of granite in the sea; yet held apart by an intangible, unsurmountable barrier! Try to imagine the man saying within himself, "Shall I triumph over God in her heart?" when a faint rustling sound made him quiver, and the curtain was ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... in struggles with storms. After the hurricane, the shoal; after the wind, the rock. First the intangible, then the immovable, to ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of something that had a reality compared with which the nervous explanation would have been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained a muffled and intangible form, but that, assuredly, should it take on sharpness, would explain everything and more than everything, would become instantly the light in which Milly ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... Some intangible feeling of uneasiness made me leave my tent about 11 p.m. that night and glance around the quiet camp. The stars between the snow-flurries showed that the floe had swung round and was end on to the swell, a position exposing it to sudden strains. I started to ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... hidden waters and of an unseen multitude was strange and terrifying in the extreme. It was as though, without perceiving them, their human faculties suddenly became aware of the spirits of the unnumbered dead, thronging, watching, following—there, but intangible; speaking without words, ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... left the room, something intangible went with him. Will felt his moral stamina crumbling. He waited until he heard his brother leave the hotel. Then he went downstairs and returned with a bottle of whiskey. He drank, hid the bottle, and went to bed. He knew that without ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the adoration of this woman, yes, he was happy, very happy: to bless life, to excite envy, to arouse jealousy, to appear simply ridiculous if he complained of destiny; and nevertheless, at the bottom of his soul, discontented without knowing why, consumed by intangible, feverish instincts, ill-defined desires for Parisian curiosities, having dreamed in his youth of results very inferior to those he had realized, yet finding when he analyzed the realities that he enjoyed, that the promises ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... physiological memory. It is there that the traces of ancestral experience are stored so that almost nothing that was ever essential in the development of the phylum is ever entirely lost. Hence suggestive as are many physical traits of our racial history, the intangible psychophysic traits must be assumed to be both far ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the rear. It was unhinged and half open as it had been when he had awakened to his painful and inexplicable predicament. He went through, fumbling in his pocket for matches. The damp chill of the hall nauseated him as it had done before, seemed to place about his throat an intangible band that made breathing difficult. Before he could get his match safe out the doctor had struck a wax vesta. Its strong flame played across the ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... who had talked to him politely and courteously enough, the change was no less apparent. It was in the air, a certain vague shrinking and turning of the shoulder, a general atmosphere of aversion and repulsion, an unseen frown, an unexpressed rebuff, intangible, illusive, but as unmistakable as his own existence. The world he had known knew him now no longer. It was ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." The higher class Egyptians, however, fearing that their existence would continue to be of the same shadowy and intangible character after the second judgment, as they believed it would be in the Amenti, if worms were allowed to destroy their bodies, hoped to preserve them until that time by ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... himself, became a daily inquisition. Nothing had happened to lead him to think that his possession was endangered, his fear proceeded from an instinct, which he could not subdue, that she was gliding from him; he wrestled with the intangible, and, striving to subordinate instinct to reason, he often refrained from kissing her; he imitated the indifference which in other times he could not dissimulate when the women who had really loved him besought him with tears. But there was ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... government, the wise and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island and its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by which all these great material and still greater intangible possessions had been first won, and then kept, against every hostile comer whether domestic or foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, like that which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves in the great ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... noticed that Emmanuel was hunchbacked. Emmanuel, who was afraid and mortified in the presence of girls, made an exception in favor of Rainette. The little invalid, who was half petrified, was to him something intangible and far removed, something almost outside existence. Only on the evening when the fair Berthe kissed him on the lips, and the next day too, he avoided Rainette with an instinctive feeling of repulsion: he passed the house without stopping and hung his head: and he prowled about ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... All through the day, during the luncheon in an unpretentious little inn, and the leisurely homeward drive, she had been once more entirely herself, pleasant and sympathetic, ignoring absolutely the intangible barrier which had grown up between them, soon to be thrown down for ever or to ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... smooth, refined, proud, and reserved. They loved each other to the point of idolatry; and yet they parted ten days after marriage with these words of wroth and madness. Something had come between them. What was it? Another man? No. Another woman? Still no. What then? A ghost, an intangible, almost an invisible but very real and divorce-making ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... than I was last night! He came at eight punctually. I trembled all over when I shook hands with him: I think he must have seen it, but he said nothing. What a wonderful thing this thing they call high breeding is! One feels it in a moment, and yet it seems intangible, indescribable. He has it, I should think, in perfection, and he is the only person I have ever known who possessed it, except, perhaps that young girl, his cousin, whom he presented to me at the party. For a while we talked—at least he did—easily and pleasantly, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile. Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation—with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that she loved him," said Henry, "I should have hesitated a long time before seeking to fasten the murder on him. I may have only a vague regard for justice, for abstract right is so intangible; but I have a ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... smartest of the new apartment houses that were beginning to be built in San Francisco. Susan called, with Emily, upon Mrs. Baxter, and somehow found the old lady's personality as curiously shrunk, in some intangible way, as was her domestic domain in actuality. Mrs. Baxter, cackling emphatically and disapprovingly of the world in general, fussily accompanying them to the elevator, was merely a rather tiresome and pitiful old woman, very different from ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute human personality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, the Divine Personality is a contradiction in terms? If we can validly affirm in the Deity qualities corresponding ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... danger that seemed to be forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps, and steal forth under the midnight stars to murder, rapine, and pillage—a danger always threatening, and yet never assuming shape; intangible, and yet real; impossible, and yet not improbable. Across the serene and smiling front of safety, the pale outlines of the awful shadow of insurrection sometimes fell. With this invisible panorama as a background, ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... of the heaven which is above the heavens, no earthly poet has sung or ever will sing in a worthy manner. But I must tell, for I am bound to speak truly when speaking of the truth. The colourless and formless and intangible essence is visible to the mind, which is the only lord of the soul. Circling around this in the region above the heavens is the place of ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... on almost solemnly. The detectives, in spite of their usual roughness and the bitterness of their resentment against Lupin, acted with reserve and discretion, astounded as they were at being allowed to touch that intangible being. ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... out. Here, in the gray station, in this damp hour of dawn, he had touched something magnetic—some force that drew and held him. A quality intangible and indescribable seemed to emanate from this unknown boy, some strange radiance of vitality that flooded his ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... asceticism is brought forth from one of its strong citadels, Mt. Athos, the holy mountain of Greece, and a contrast is made between the "gleaming beauties of the world" and the utter absorption of the ascetic by the intangible world beyond. The vision of "Queen Hellas," the classic age of Greece, is followed by the conquering spirit of Hellenism spreading triumphantly from the democracies of Athens and Sparta to the Golden Gate of ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... operate all Minerals. This is done incomprehensibly and spiritually, and therefore it is to be accounted supernatural, even as two Lovers, their persons are visible, but their Love one to the other is invisible: Humane Bodies are tangible and natural, but Love is invisible, spiritual, intangible and supernatural, comparable to a Magnetick Attraction only; for the invisible Love which is attracted unto it spiritually by the Imagination is, accomplish'd by the desires and fruition. In like manner when the Heaven hath a love to the Earth, and the Earth hath a Love, Inclination, ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... full of you!—As I came in And closed the door behind me, all at once A something in the air, intangible, Yet stiff with meaning, ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... and analysing. The man's hickory shirt, his warped boots, his blue jean trousers, his heavy buskins were mean and earth-stained, but inherent in the quality of his low, musical voice and courteous manner was an intangible suggestion of something different, some bigger and happier past, to which, go where he would and clothe himself as he might, voice and manner ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... of meaning in his words—an intangible suggestion that he might be bribed to do all this to ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... daily their bounteous, beauteous yield of daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... relieved somewhat the present situation. Yet her avoidance of him he could construe only as contempt for a man who had played with her while bound by other ties. Sometimes he felt that he must explain to her how intangible were those bonds. Yet he was sufficiently conscious of their actual existence to feel that the difficulties of explanation were almost insurmountable. And Hilda, poor child, took his devotion entirely ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... or so, or flitted from side to side of the stage, she clearly knew just why she did it, why she went up-stage instead of down. But she had more than mere technical perfection: she had personality, that strange, intangible something so rare in the danseuse, that wanders over the footlights. The turn of a foot, the swift side look, the awakening smile, the nice lifting of an eyebrow—these things were spontaneous. No amount of rehearsal or managerial thought could have produced effects so brilliantly ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this manifestation of the disease is observed, the observer will usually connect it with a vague impression once formed or received, that the patient was living a little too ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... INTABGIBLE PROPERTY.—Where taxation is on the basis of assessment, it often happens that the tax burden rests unequally upon different forms of property. Property in tangible form, such as land, cattle, and houses, is easily discoverable, and hence cannot easily evade the payment of taxes. But intangible property, such as bonds, stocks, or mortgage, can easily be hidden, so that owners of this type of property often evade their ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... here "lonely," is a very expressive word to a Cherokee and is of constant recurrence in the love formulas. It refers to that intangible something characteristic of certain persons which inevitably chills and depresses the spirits of all who may be so unfortunate as to come within its influence. Agisa[']'t[)i] nige[']s[^u][n]na, ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... preservation? For if it be said that the former creations are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... a broad ghostly band of silver white that was the road, all flecked and mottled with leaf shadows that moved slowly to and fro. He paused a moment. He scarcely dared breathe lest the whole thing vanish. A fairy touch on his arm, light as thistle-down, a subtle sense of warmth and a dim, intangible fragrance, and he started, blinking, and then walked on. Something was dry and dusty in his throat. "Golly, the old place sorta gets next to you on a night like this," he thought. "Guess I'd better get in. They'll think I'm nuts, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... that the infinite bigness of this uninhabited wild, the sense of its infinite loneliness, pressed her close. Despite herself, against all reason, as a child is afraid of the dark there grew upon her a terror of this intangible thing called solitude that stretched out into the future endlessly. Smiling as it was this day, unchangeably smiling, she fancied a time when it would not smile, when its passive eventless monotony would be maddening. ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... wizard's curse had blighted life and growth amid the rank vegetation rising from this dismal Slough of Despond. The brooding melancholy of atmosphere and scenery penetrates mind and soul, oppressed by an intangible weight, and escape from the Dantesque horrors of this selva oscura is accompanied by a sudden relief and buoyancy of spirit which perceptibly heightens the interest of the old-world city, once isolated by the woodland fastness of Nature, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... emotions are not safe guides to worldly distinction. It is not the artist who feels the most keenly, who sways men the most powerfully; it is the one who has most perfectly mastered the art of swaying men. Self-sacrifice and a lofty sense of duty find their rewards in the intangible realm of the spirit, but they do not find them in a brilliant society whose foundations are laid in vanity and sensualism. "The virtues, though superior to the sentiments, are not so agreeable," said Mme. du Deffand; and she echoed the spirit of an age of which she was one of the most striking ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... authors and men of talent have increased, so vastly out of all proportion with other classes of men. Observing it, the political economist may well shout 'Io triumphe!' for that even in so delicate and intangible a matter as intellectual gifts, the famous doctrine of supply and demand is so thoroughly carried out. We raise, however, no hue and cry after 'poor trash.' Neither have we the blood-thirsty wish to run to ground the panting scribbler, or to adorn ourselves with the glories ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... considerable amount of good fact left over, for unless you know a good deal of the region on the outskirts of your argument you will feel cramped and uncertain within it. The effect of having something in reserve is a powerful, though an intangible, asset in an argument; and, on the other hand, the man who has emptied his magazine ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... finds provided for her as companions the five maidens, Meditation, Contrition, Compassion, Cleanness and Fruition, while near by await her seven teachers, Discretion, Devotion, Dilection, Deliberation, Declaration, Determination and Divination, a goodly company of Doctors indeed. Of all these intangible figures one only, Milton's 'cherub Contemplation', speaks, but the rest are quite obviously represented on the stage, though whether all in flesh and blood may be matter for uncertainty. Much more talkative, on the other hand, are ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the vulgar ghost be really a shadow, there must be some substance of which it is the shadow. These visible and intangible shadows, without substances ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... between these two, the frankly voluptuous woman and the calculating full-blooded man. Whitney, for his part, seemed almost fascinated by her gaze. He rose as she bowed, and, for a moment, I thought that he was going over to speak to her, as if drawn by that intangible attraction which Poe has so cleverly expressed in his "Imp of the Perverse." For, clearly, one who talked as Whitney had just been talking would have to be on his guard with that woman. Instead, however, he returned her nod and stood still, ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... that night, instead of preparing for sleep, she sat down in the window, and tried to analyze the charm which drew her towards this stranger, without any volition of her own. She could not do it—it was intangible, evasive and subtle. The effect of his presence was like the sun-burst on the landscape, the moment of his arrival. The dark places of her soul seemed suddenly illumined; the massy columns of her intellect turned like the tree trunks, into pillars of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... essays—those rapt and secret confessions of his own heart—were a delight to him. He began to taste the transport, the intoxication of an author. And, oh, what a luxury is there in that first love of the Muse! that process by which we give palpable form to the long-intangible visions which have flitted across us;—the beautiful ghost of the Ideal within us, which we invoke in the Gadara of our still closets, with the wand of the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young companion's agitation, which became greater every instant, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... see that education must enable the individual to meet the real problems of actual experience as they are confronted in the day's life. Nor can the help rendered be indefinite, intangible, or in any degree uncertain. It must definitely adjust one to his place, and cause him to grow in it, accomplishing the most for himself and for society; it must add to the largeness of his personal life, and at the same time increase his ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... so that no one ever shall. Since then mortals have been more or less demented, particularly those who are held to be wise, but madmen are in reality the only wise men; for they can see, hear and feel the invisible, the inaudible and the intangible, though they cannot relate their experiences to others.' Thus Zohar, the wisest of all the books of wisdom, and therefore one that no one believes. I shall build no tower of Babel, but I shall tempt the Powers ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... blessing of Allah for having so successfully executed the heavenly command. Gabriel was a very valuable ambassador, for through the to-and-fro journeying of this indefatigable messenger Allah was able to remain at ease in heaven, thus keeping up the appearance of intangible, majestic remoteness so necessary for dignified gods. And thus Mohammed came into his own. From that moment Mohammed looked upon himself as Allah's vice regent, through whom Allah's incontestable decrees were ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... corn-shops, where the lawless agreements for delivery of unsown harvests changed hands ten times in the hour, and bills on Rome, scrawled over with endorsements, outsped currency as well as outwitted the revenue men. No tax-farmer's slave could keep track of the flow of intangible wealth when the bills for a million sesterces passed to and fro like cards in an Egyptian game. Men richer than the fabled Croesus carried all their wealth in leather wallets in the form of mortgages on gangs of slaves, certificates of ownership of cargoes, promises ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... every company has to do, in one form or another, on this side or anywhere in the world. Wherever an existing business is bought out something has to be given over and above the old iron value of the concern for the value of the connection and other intangible assets. Wherever an entirely new industry is started it has to meet certain initial expenses. It has to placate, to use the unpleasant American word, various interests in order to get to work, or it has to lay out money, in building up a concern by advertising ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... who had only been cruelly wronged. At length they began speaking. They had lost everything, absolutely everything, they said, what with the Boxers and the sack, all this long, unending Reign of Terror. But that they did not mind. They were bitter and beyond consolation because they had lost the intangible—their honour. Each one had had women of their households violated. One, with many hideous details, told me how ... soldiers came in and violated all his womankind, young and old. That account, muttered to me with trembling ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... sings to him of Mount Abora and of the old heroes of the elder days. If the Egyptologist or the archaeologist could revive within him one-hundredth part of the elusive romance, the delicate gaiety, the subtle humour, the intangible tenderness, the unspeakable goodness, of much that is to be found in his province, one would have to cry, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... washed-out cretonne, its faded carpet and vulgar little gimcrack ornaments on the mantelpiece. And this friend gave one the idea that her husband had fallen from a somewhat better position in life than he was now in. There was an intangible something about him which showed him to be one of those favoured children of destiny who are placed above the need of a "career," who dress well and live delicately, and have nothing to do in life but to extract all the sweetness there is in it. Very good- looking was this Mr. Eden, with an almost ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... darling, you tantalise me, and I begin to think you are after all a fairy or a wood nymph, or something intangible ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... a stepping-stone merely to the study of the law. The old merchant eyed him askance, but made no response. Occasionally the veteran of the market evinced a glimmer of enthusiasm over a prime article of butter, but anything so intangible as a young man's ambitious dreams was looked upon with a very cynical eye. Still he could not be a part of New York life and remain wholly sceptical in regard to the possibilities it offered to a young fellow of talent and large ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... reserve force, whose power of endurance she could not estimate; because her dealings with Michael's shallower nature had afforded her no experience of a moral stability free from the warp of the personal equation. It was as if some intangible part of him, over which she could establish no hold, stood persistently afar off,—tormented, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... beings were the first gods, and that the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards as an extension of the same principle. Mr. Max Mueller seems to share this view when he says that man was led from the worship of semi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to that of intangible objects, which gave him deities proper. The Germans, as a rule, hold the view that the great nature-worship came first, and that the sanctity of the tree and the river came to them from above, these objects being regarded as lesser ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... how much you despise the partisan of the squalid mob of France. Have I said that I aspired to gain your love? I wonder if I have ever dreamed it? I only know, Juliette, that you are to me something akin to the angels, something white and ethereal, intangible, and perhaps ununderstandable. Yet, knowing my folly, I glory in it, my dear, and I would not let you go out of my life without telling you of that, which has made every hour of the past few weeks a paradise for me—my love ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... What's wrong with it?" Dicky asked belligerently. "Oh, you mean figure posing! She wouldn't have to do that at all if she didn't want to. Plenty of good nudes. It's the intangible, high-bred look and ability to wear clothes well that's hard ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... bases flanged with rocky buttresses, dark amid the long sweeps of radiant snow, their shattered peaks reared high into the very heavens. A great silence reigned. There was no wind with us, and yet, even as we watched, a white cloud flitted past the virgin peak of Kolahoi—ghostly, intangible; and immediately, even as vultures assemble suddenly, no one knows whence, so did the clouds appear, surging over the gleaming shoulders of the mountain ridges, and up and round the grim precipices. We turned and hurried down the face of the glacier, and made for camp, as we knew from much experience ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Many obvious answers occur. Mr. Muller says, speaking of the Indians (p. 205): 'The concept of gods was no doubt growing up while men were assuming a more and more definite attitude towards these semi-tangible and intangible objects'—trees, rivers, hills, the sky, the sun, and so on, which he thinks suggested and developed, by aid of a kind of awe, the religious feeling of the infinite. We too would say that, among people who adore fetiches and ghosts, the concept of gods no doubt silently grew ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... the first two parts of the Divina Commedia, but are things of the spirit, viz., knowledge, beauty, faith, love, joy; and he is aided in making visible those invisible entities of the spiritual life by such intangible things as sound, motion ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... of his power. Drifting would not matter for a while; he could afford to drift. His genius would ripen, he told himself, and time was on his side. So he drifted, very happy and content, ripening; but being overlaid all the time, deeper and thicker, with this intangible, transparent, strong wall, hemming him in, shutting in the gold, just like that little joss there under ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... retreating rapidly; she gave him a smile over her shoulder, however, that was at once full of mirth and something more—something that he could not explain or grasp any more than he could the soft, silvery light of the moon that filled the sky, and was as real as it was intangible. He walked away as if in a dream; he continued his aimless wanderings for hours, but swift as were his strides a swifter current of passion, deep and strong, was sweeping him away from Jennie Burton and the power to make good his open pledge ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... all life,—pervading all nature, animate and inanimate. The Rev. S.R. Riggs, who for forty years has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions, etc., says, Tahkoo Wahkan, p. 55, et seq.: "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshiper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect or despise others, but the great ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... ground for tracks and pitfalls and sticks, that might crackle. Louis, with his whole face pricked forward, trusted more to his eyes and ears and that sense of "feel," which is—contradictory as it may seem—utterly intangible. Once the Indian picked up a stick freshly broken. This was examined by both, and the Indian smelt it and tried his tongue on the broken edge. Then both fell on all fours, creeping under the branches of the thicket and ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... there is a gulf of vibrations that has not yet been bridged. For that reason science divides matter into two "planes," or octaves, of vibration—the matter of this visible and tangible plane being called prakriti and that of the invisible and intangible plane being called etheric. Across this gulf the two planes respond to each other, note for note, the note in trillions chording when the note in thousands is struck. Note for note, chord for chord, they answer one another, and the minutest and the most complex phenomena are ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... sturdy and dark-browed, steps forward, clears his throat, and with a half-surly inclination of the head begins, "Mr. Grandon," and then something intangible awes him a trifle. They may grumble among themselves, and lately they have found it easy to complain to Mr. Wilmarth, but the unconscious air of authority, the superior breeding, and fine, questioning ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... war, where he had met him and learned to respect him whole-heartedly. From occasional remarks he had learned that McKay had been in all sorts of places between Buenos Aires and Nome; and from a few intangible hints he suspected that his "position in life" had once been much higher socially than at present. But he asked ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... of the crystalline March morning, the memory of the Winter sorrow still lay. The bare, brown earth was not wholly hidden by the mantle of sleet and snow, yet there was some intangible Easter close at hand. Miss Evelina felt it, stricken ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... system, either absorbent or diffusive, and wholly electrical? Whether the fluid phenomena of the Will, a matter generated within us, and spontaneously reacting under the impress of conditions as yet unobserved, were at all more extraordinary than those of the invisible and intangible fluid produced by a voltaic pile, and applied to the nervous system of a dead man? Whether the formation of Ideas and their constant diffusion was less incomprehensible than evaporation of the atoms, imperceptible indeed, but so violent ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... awful smear, father." Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a tone of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taught to like—yet the picture did possess an intangible something that provoked doubt as to its quality. "You sure ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... though with a desire to tear through the shield which the written words had formed about a mysterious past and disclose that which was so effectively hidden. So much had the letter told—and yet so little! Dark had been the hints of some mysterious, intangible thing, great enough in its horror and its far-reaching consequences to cause death for one who had known of it and a living panic for him who had perpetrated it. As for the man who stood now with the letter clenched before him, there was promise ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... "by affinity. The power of vision which makes the poet, the power of deduction which makes the man of science, are based on invisible affinities, intangible, imponderable, which vulgar minds class as moral phenomena, whereas they are physical effects. The prophet sees and deduces. Unfortunately, such affinities are too rare and too obscure to be subjected to ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... is a third class of things on which the best civilisation does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible—caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not be asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does not know. A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the will of the adversary, Rapid Dominance will apply a variety of approaches and techniques to achieve the necessary level of Shock and Awe at the appropriate strategic and military leverage points. This means that psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure, will have to be achieved. It is in this broader and deeper strategic application that Rapid Dominance perhaps most fundamentally differentiates ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had been originally designed for such high dames as the one now looking on me from the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... animal that most deeply impressed early man.[439] All objects were potentially divine for him, and all received worship, but none entered so intimately into his life as animals. He was doubtless struck, perhaps awed, by the brightness of the heavenly bodies, but they were far off, intangible; mountains were grand and mighty, but motionless; stones lay in his path, but did not approach him; rivers ran, but in an unchanging way, rarely displaying emotion; plants grew, and furnished food, but showed little sign of intelligence. Animals, on the other hand, dwelt with him in his ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... who suggested that arms, ammunition, supplies and comforts be left behind in the cabin, ostensibly for that intangible personality who had signed himself Tarzan of the Apes, and for D'Arnot should he still be living, but really, she hoped, for her forest god—even though his feet ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... anxious grief, the same fears, the same longing pressing hourly round her like phantoms in the mist—no, not like phantoms, like real living things peeping at her from the dark. Sometimes, indeed, the presentiments and intangible terrors that were gradually strengthening their hold upon her would get beyond her control, and arouse in her a restless desire for action—any action, it did not matter what—that would take her away out of these dull hours ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth—often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... nature are a vacuum, and a plenum. The plenum is body, or tangible nature; the vacuum is space, or intangible nature. "We know by the evidences of the senses (which are our only rule of reasoning) that bodies have a real existence, and we infer from the evidence of the senses that the vacuum has a real existence; for if space have no real existence, there would be nothing in which bodies ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... that I have not proceeded so far without starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is alleged that there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. The mind ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... years the world has been studying the latter, and is not yet sure that it understands him; yet Shakespeare is to Carlyle what a graded turnpike is to a tortuous mountain path. The former deals chiefly with the visible; the latter with the intangible. The first tells us what men did; the last seeks to learn why they did it. Carlyle is the prince of critics. He is often lenient to a fault, but seldom deceived—"looks quite through the shows of things into the things themselves." Uriel, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... Single Tax a candidate whose private character was generally respected, even by those who most hated his economic teachings. The mere thought that such a Radical should be proposed for Mayor scared, not merely the Big Interests, but the owners of real estate and intangible property. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... seemed like the footsteps of ghosts, so intangible were they—were now so near that to Klara's supersensitive mind they appeared to be less than ten paces from ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the HELOISE for DILETTANTE ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities. It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain- work. To find the right word is so doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost equally certain he has found a right tone or ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at least of all that vast assemblage had not given up victory for Philadelphia. I had not dared to look at Old Well-Well for a long, while. I dreaded the nest portentious moment. I felt deep within me something like clairvoyant force, an intangible ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... and it kept knocking them into my head, and it wouldn't leave off. Fancies, or memories—which?—and my mind reverted with a flash to the fearful thoughts which had haunted it the day before in Dame Alice's tower. It was dark now. Those ghastly intangible shapes must have taken full form and color, peopling the old ruin with their ageless hideousness. And the storm had found them there and borne them along with it as it blew through the creviced walls. That was why the wind's sound struck ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... for your botching getting the beast out again, as that is in the nature of things a difficult job. The mischief was done when the Revolution was allowed to occur. After that it became a case of groping with a bewildering, kaleidoscopic, intangible state of affairs. Mr. Henderson's performances have excited much ridicule, but against his absurd belief in M. Kerensky must be set his prompt recognition of his own unfitness for the position of representative of the British Government on the banks of the Neva. M. Kerensky, no doubt, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... all things. There is a connecting link between earth, air and sea, between flowers, beasts and birds, between mankind and all animals, and inanimate things, a mysterious joining of mind to matter. It is an intangible something, perhaps an electrical current, but certain it is that the line is there and unbroken, and between every human creature whom God has made, there is the same unbroken chain, which can be followed up link by link, step by step, ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... action, if I was to save his life, came to me with an intense relief. No matter what animated him for the moment, Shorthouse was only a man; it was flesh and blood I had to contend with and not the intangible powers. Only a few hours before I had seen him cleaning his gun, smoking his pipe, knocking the billiard balls about with very human clumsiness, and the picture flashed across my mind with the most ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... almost to a whisper, but the outward, upward glance of the inspired eyes completely disconcerted the aggressive old chieftain. His supposed enemy, in some intangible way, had escaped him, and he felt keenly his own mistake. He was glad to see Colin coming; it gave him an opportunity of escaping honorably from a conversation which had been very humiliating to him. He had a habit when annoyed of seeking the ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as heartily as the vulgarest of our gobblegobbets hate it, metaphor only can describe; and for the reason, that he had in him just something more than is within the compass of the language of the meat-markets. He had—and had it not the less because he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... deliciously think if he could but grasp it. Without quite visualizing either wall or sea, he was yet recalling old dreams of a moonlit wall by a warm stirring southern sea. If there was a girl in the dream she was intangible as the scent of the night. Presently he was asleep, a not at all romantic figure, rather ludicrously tipped to one side in his office chair, his large solid shoes ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... seem oddly unreal and intangible, when she had looked at them in the light of Mistress Margaret's clear old eyes and candid face. It was a real event in her inner life when she first began to understand what the rosary meant to Catholics. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... her handiwork became what would now be termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... frost-fall was occurring, in which, whatever moisture may exist in the air, somehow aggregates into feathers and fern leaves, the loveliest of creations, only seen in rarefied air and intense cold. One breath and they vanish. The air was filled with diamond sparks quite intangible. They seemed just glitter and no more. It was still and cloudless, and the shapes of violet mountains were softened by a veil of the tenderest blue. When the Greeley stage wagon came up, Mr. Fodder, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... thought is it for me now to essay to draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis—the appallingly beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy, and its ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... presence at her mother's was not the real reason that impelled Ruth to continue in the home Bonbright had made for her. It was something more intangible. She found the thought of leaving that spot unendurable, but she did not, dared not, seek in her heart ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Artegall, who not only slays both the giant and his daughter, but razes their castle to the ground. Shortly after, on approaching the sea-shore, Sir Artegall perceives a charlatan provided with scales in which he pretends to weigh all things anew. Thereupon Sir Artegall, by weighing such intangible things as truth and falsehood, right and wrong, demonstrates that the charlatan's scales are false, and, after convicting him of trickery, drowns him ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... of the marvelous adaptations of nature. From being a mere ear of corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty. No change has taken place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in the boy. Such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for all that. It is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the accepted definition of education. Though it defies analysis and the rule of thumb, the boy is conscious of it and can say with the man who ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... are words he has known applied to things perceivable by touch, but to things perfectly intangible he never knew them applied. Those words in their wonted application always marked out to his mind bodies or solid things which were perceived by the resistance they gave. But there is no solidity, no resistance or protrusion ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... he found an enthusiasm for some intangible purpose, objection to his own plans and a certain hauteur that he ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... the explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'—[Clemens had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. "I first met him when he reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation where the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... element was not wanting in the expression of her face or in the dignity of her carriage. Her deep, suppressed feeling, which bordered on despair; her womanly pride, which would disguise all suffering at every cost, gave to her presence a subtle power, felt none the less because intangible. It was evident that she neither saw nor cared for the strangers who were looking their curiosity and admiration; and Graydon understood her barely well enough to think, "Something, whatever it may be, makes her unlike other girls. She ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina. Every touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy. Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to be a ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as this otherwise prosaic republic can show. There under the vivid summer sun, beside the glittering sea, men and women met to commune on the incommunicable, to question the voiceless, and to embrace the intangible. It was, indeed, such a revelation of human credulity as might well have overpowered a young novelist. From the warm, pine-scented afternoon air I crept into one of these tiny cabins, and sat with my hands upon a closed slate in order to receive ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... very simple case for the doctor to deal with; but it costs the patient just everything short of life, when you have to dig right down and cut out by the roots an evil of a whole life standing. I assure you that it is hard work, because these feelings of ours are such intangible, untractable things! It is hard to lay hold of, and mould and ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... prospect. Nehal Singh descended the winding stair that led to the first terrace. Thence three paths stretched themselves before him. He chose the central one, and with bowed head passed between the high, half-wild, half-cultivated borders of plants and shrubs. A faint evening breeze breathed its intangible perfume against his cheek, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
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