"Hollowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... school, you would praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... she had met him—he succeeded, by several easy moves, in isolating her from her aunt, and, notwithstanding her admiration, her desire to tap with her knuckles the metal of her idol and listen for a ring of hollowness, she was alarmed. Yet, perversely, she knew that he would not exhibit his paces before his wife—naturally a disinterested spectator—or before her aunt, who was hardly "intimate" enough. The long-desired hour found her disquieted. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... and their mortification in perceiving a certain course of mal-administration persisted in, in defiance of the known sense of the country. At another time, it has been imputed to their experience of the hollowness of all our public pretenders to patriotism. I am afraid, the cause is to be sought in something, more uniform in it's operation, and less honourable to the lower ranks of society, than either of these. In a ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... overthrew him in three great battles. Niger fled to Antioch, the seat of his late government, and was there decapitated. Meantime Albinus, the British commander-in-chief, had already been won over by the title of Caesar, or adopted heir to the new Augustus. But the hollowness of this bribe soon became apparent, and the two competitors met to decide their pretensions at Lyons. In the great battle which followed, Severus fell from his horse, and was at first supposed to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... old age, shews itself by talkativeness, boasting of the past, hollowness of the eyes and cheeks, dimness of sight, deafness, tremor of voice, the accents, through default of teeth, scarce intelligible; hams weak, knees tottering, head paralytic, hollow coughing, frequent expectoration, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... is being worked out by all these wars and tumults in which we bear our share. It is only as I lie here and think (I have, as thou knowest, been here many times before amongst these books and parchments, able for little but study and thought) that there comes over me a strange sense of the hollowness of these earthly strivings and search after fame and glory, a solemn conviction — I scarce know how to frame it in words — that there must be other work to be done in the world, stronger and more heroic deeds than men will ever do with swords and spears. Methinks the holy ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... after the flight to Palermo, the condition of affairs for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was seemingly critical to the verge of desperation; for neither the preparations of the Coalition, nor the hollowness of the French successes, were understood, and news was slow to reach the remote city where the Court now dwelt. The republican movement extended, though superficially, to the toe of Italy, many of the towns in Calabria planting the tree of liberty, and the new ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... earth, was his conclusion. It was right-named by the ones of old-time as the Star-Born. Only from the stars could it have come, and no thing of chance was it. It was a creation of artifice and mind. Such perfection of form, such hollowness that it certainly possessed, could not be the result of mere fortuitousness. A child of intelligences, remote and unguessable, working corporally in metals, it indubitably was. He stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing wild-fire of hypotheses to account for this far-journeyer who had adventured ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... become very silent; in truth, I found my tongue clinging to the roof of my mouth, and a dry, painful sensation in the throat. I observed a peculiar hollowness in Mudge's voice, too, and I was conscious that my own also sounded unusual. Still it would not do to give in, and we were not so far gone yet as to think of doing that. On, therefore, we went, though not without suffering. My knees felt weak, and I breathed with difficulty; but I would not ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... degradation of the highest and holiest thing on earth. It has come, this ethical Church, to reinforce the wholly forgotten teaching of the Hebrew prophets of the utter emptiness of all religion devoid of moral life, the vanity of sacrifices, oblations and rites, the hollowness of formularies, creeds and confessions, the indispensable necessity of an ethical basis for all religious belief and practice. "What more," asks Micah, "doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... than the Allies. Their losses elude the inquiries of the statistician. They consisted in the utter discredit of the royalist cause throughout France, the resentment that ever follows on clumsy or disloyal co-operation, and the revelation of the hollowness of the imposing fabric of the First Coalition. In the south of France four nations failed to hold a single fortress which her own sons had ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... happy," said the proud mother; "you will now be all I have ever predicted for you;" and, in her joy at the moment, she forgot the hectic of his cheek, and the hollowness of his eye. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... three of them into alliance together. Katharine's tone and glance made Mr. Hilbery once more feel completely at a loss, and in addition, painfully and angrily obsolete; but in spite of an awful inner hollowness ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... likely to combine against one who, in spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia, served only to probe the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons (p. 313) from Charles on behalf of the Spanish Queen. ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous man amasses wealth, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fame (which for profound ends of providence has been endowed with a subtle power of fraud such as no man can thoroughly look through; for those who, like myself, despise it most completely, cannot by any art bring forward a rationale, a theory of its hollowness that will give plenary satisfaction except to those who are already satisfied). Thus Cicero, feeling that if this were nothing, then had all his life been a skirmish, one continued skirmish for shadows and nonentities; a feeling of blank desolation, too startling—too humiliating to be faced. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... worshipped her beauty, she probably experienced the same delirium of joy, the same momentary exultation, that a prima donna feels when called before an excited and enthusiastic audience. But satiety and chagrin surely follow such triumphs, and she lived to feel their hollowness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... will be: You see a tremendous tower-like pine-tree in the forest; it seems as it will stand there forever; but strike it fairly with your axe and it will reveal hollowness and punk will come out. So is it with the strength of the Knights of the Cross. But I commanded you to tell me what you have done and what you have accomplished there. Let me see, you said you fought there with weapons, did ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... have been with you. When two serve together, one must command, and the other must obey. So far from complaining of these Hanoverian Boards, and First Lords, it seems to me that they have always kept in view the hollowness of their claims to the throne, and have felt a desire to purchase honest men ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... prejudice his Majesty against any one, but only that it might be known to what a height the impudence was rising." Certainly the King and the ecclesiastic, like the Roman soothsayers, would have laughed in each other's face, could they have met, over the hollowness of such demonstrations. Granvelle's letters were filled, for the greater part, with pictures of treason, stratagem, and bloody intentions, fabricated mostly out of reports, table-talk, disjointed chat in the careless freedom of domestic intercourse, while at ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the latest Editors is as certainly corrupt. This is a case therefore where the value of Patristic testimony becomes strikingly apparent. It affords also one more crucial proof of the essential hollowness of the theory on which it has been recently proposed by Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles and the rest to reconstruct the text ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... consideration recall this hideous rashness: for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear's youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honour was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already at his service? That should not hinder ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was miserably poor, and had aged parents and brothers and sisters dependent on her exertions; but her Christian employer paid her the lowest possible price, and trampled on her feelings as though she had been a brute. Oh, the hollowness of the religion I saw practiced! I sneered at everything connected with churches, and heard no more sermons, which seemed only to make hypocrites and pharisees of the congregation. I have never known but one exception. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... all, we say, depends on how it was said. If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, 'To take the Mexico fleet would be piracy,' it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an answer. The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact. He is not expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing in that passage of his 'Apology,' about which ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... transformation effected by the composer. Advantage has also been taken of the difference between its high and low tones, and now in some romantic music, as in Raff's "Lenore" symphony, or the prayer of Agathe in "Der Freischuetz," the hollowness of the low tones produces a mysterious effect that is exceedingly striking. Still the fact remains that the native voice of the instrument, though sweet, is expressionless compared with that of the oboe or clarinet. ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Scythrop. There is a girl concealed in this tower, and find her I will. There are such things as sliding panels and secret closets.'—He sounded round the room with his cane, but detected no hollowness.—'I have heard, sir,' he continued, 'that during my absence, two years ago, you had a dumb carpenter closeted with you day after day. I did not dream that you were laying contrivances for carrying on secret intrigues. Young men will have their way: I had my way ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... cutter's cabin, and for many minutes he stared and listened, while Peter seemed to stand without breathing. Then making a wide megaphone of his hands, he shouted. It was an alarming thing to do and Peter started as if struck. For there were only ghosts to answer back and the hollowness of a shriven pit for the cry to travel in. Nothing was there. Even the great sawdust piles had shrunk into black scars under the ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... certainty of holding intercommunion with the spirits. The 'Other worldliness' of the mediaeval monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its passive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came to her aid: her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in which she had achieved a hollowness beyond her years, allowed her fully to understand she had not ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... argument. But he was also a staunch believer in forced labour, which was quite a different thing. Consequently we found ourselves condemned to some of the most filthy tasks conceivable. Incidentally, however, these duties only served to reveal still more convincingly the hollowness of Germany's preachings concerning the principles of health and hygiene to the whole world while herself practising the diametrically opposite. We were commanded to clean ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... of what to smaller people appears entirely and absolutely antagonistic, of utmost scientific scepticism and highest spiritual faith and worth. "He was filled full with the scepticism, bitterness, hollowness, and thousandfold contradictions of his time, till his heart was like to break; yet he subdued all this, rose victorious over this, and manifoldly, by word and act, showed others that came after how to do the like." Carlyle, who is never done recalling his worth, confesses ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... his mere tone and look. This was not the old Darius. Edwin felt intensely the futility and the hollowness of all those reassurances which ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of the beard. The melancholy which marks the face of any sleeper, a foreshadow of the eternal sleep, had become on this sleeper's countenance a profound sadness. From his seat Curran could see the pitiful droop of the mouth, the hollowness of the eyes, the shadows under the cheek-bones; marks of a sadness too deep for tears. Sonia took his face in her soft hands and turned the right profile to the light. She looked at the full face, smoothed his hair as if trying to recall an ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... find encouraging words. I talked with him, holding him by the hand and patting him affectionately on the shoulder; but my voice had in my own ears the empty hollowness of deceit, and Miraz, looking at me, seemed ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... presidential year and the air was thick with politics. Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general. Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in outspoken ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I saw the hollowness of the whole thing, and took Hemangini by the hand and led her to my own room. I gently stroked her face and arms and hair, and found that she was about fifteen years old, ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... kept his favorite corn. I am not sure that it was not the stepping of an awkward visitor upon one of these same glass eyes, while these slippers for the first time covered his feet, that set Mr. Carraway to cogitating upon the hollowness of "Christmas as She is Celebrated." Indeed, it is my impression that at the very moment when that bit of adornment was pressed down upon Mr. Carraway's corn he announced rather forcibly his disbelief in the utility of any such infernal Christmas ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... to Him. You will probably hear much and be told much at this time. I have nothing to say that you have not heard and will not hear said far better by others. Our Church gives the keynote in the collect for Sunday: 'We have no power.' I never realised my weakness, my pride, my hollowness so much as I did at my ordination. God has been teaching me, even in the short time since I was ordained, wonderful lessons—lessons of strength being perfected in weakness. He alone knows the depths of our hypocrisy, our vanity, our atheism, and He alone can help us. To get nearer to ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... for the rest, the London sparrows had it pretty much to themselves. As things were, Mr. Pryme envied the sparrows, who were ready clothed by Providence, and had no rates and taxes to pay, as well as the clerks, who, at all events, had plenty to do and no time to soliloquize upon the hardness and hollowness of life. To have plenty of brains, and an indefinite amount of spare time to use them in; to desire ardently to hasten along the road towards fortune and happiness, and to be forced to sit idly by whilst others, duller-witted, perchance, and with less capacity ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... climb the highest cliff; I hear the sound Of dashing waves; I gaze intent around; I mark the gray cope, and the hollowness Of heaven, and the great sun, that comes to bless The isles again; but my long-straining eye, No speck, no shadow can, far off, descry, That I might weep tears of delight, and say, It is the bark that bore my child away! Sun, that returnest bright, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... these expressions, so natural from the lips of two individuals thus closely allied, who had been long at variance, and had at length met in amity, should have been the mere outpourings of policy; and yet, it is equally impossible not to be struck by their hollowness and falsehood; Louis being, at that very moment, endeavouring to undermine the influence of his mother by estranging from her cause all those who still clung to her waning fortunes; while Marie was labouring with equal zeal to strengthen her position, by attracting to her faction all the discontented ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... night behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and that is Madame's room over the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... that Mr. Westonhaugh cares nothing about it, one way or the other. The little plan for 'amusing brother John' is a hoax. The thing cannot be done. You might as well try to amuse an undertaker as to make a man from Bombay laugh. The hollowness of life is ever upon them. No. It was Kildare; he called and said that Miss Westonhaugh had never seen a tiger, and he seemed anxious to impress upon me his determination that she should. Pshaw! what does Kildare care ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... preponderated over all the animal qualities for strength in character and success in life. The eyes were soft, dark, and brilliant, but dreamlike and vague; the features in youth must have been regular and beautiful, but their contour was now sharpened by the hollowness of the cheeks and temples. The form, in the upper part, was nobly shaped, sufficiently muscular, if not powerful, and with the long throat and falling shoulders which always gives something of grace and dignity ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he drank, drank. He paid strict enough attention to my education. I read with him much; he had stores of books. I read the Bible with him, too; often he spent long evenings expounding it to me. But I saw the hollowness of it all—he hardly believed himself; he doubted—doubted all, while he would fain have made me a believer. I saw it well: I heard him rave of it in a fever into which drink had thrown him. All was dark to him, he said, when he was near dying; but he had taught ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... streams. The country around it is a vast treeless prairie, upon which scarcely a shrub is to be seen; but a thick coat of grass covers it throughout its entire extent, with the exception of a few spots where the hollowness of the ground has collected a little moisture, or the meandering of some small stream or rivulet enriches the soil, and covers its banks with verdant shrubs ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... smaller they are the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in rattle-boxes, they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness. Or does this happen to us ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... start the grey forward to the north. For to the south lay Sally Fortune, and at the thought of her a singular hollowness came about his heart, a loneliness, not for himself, but for her. Yes, in a strange way all self ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... shy, unaccustomed endearment. Gordon was stereotyped, commonplace; he was certain that even she must recognize the hollowness of his protestations. But she never doubted him; she accepted the dull, leaden note of his spurious passion for the clear ring of ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... waters of Shiloah." It may be the death of a mother, whom the bereaved half deemed immortal—some disappointment, like the falsehood of one dearly loved—some rude shock, as the discovery of a day-dream's hollowness; happy, thrice happy! if it be but one of these, and not the descent from ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... corpse. The society might have been waked up if Mr. Lowell, then returning from England, could have been induced to co-operate. He was approached on the subject, but would not respond,—he only said that he desired rest! Alas for the hollowness of American ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... author has disclosed the inward disease, the fearful hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation's philosophical and theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old, they will exclaim, "That man is ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the banks of the river Taf. In the neighbourhood of Newport, which is in the district of Gwentluc, {78} there is a small stream called Nant Pencarn, {79} passable only at certain fords, not so much owing to the depth of its waters, as from the hollowness of its channel and muddy bottom. The public road led formerly to a ford, called Ryd Pencarn, that is, the ford under the head of a rock, from Rhyd, which in the British language signifies a ford, Pen, the head, and Cam, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... of the White Nile by a line of fortified posts, and with the river steamers, which would result in cutting off the slave hunters from their best source of supply. The expression of his plans in his earnest manner showed up by contrast the hollowness of the views and policy of those who had obtained his services. In his own graphic and emphatic way he wrote: "I thought the thing real and found it a sham, and felt like a Gordon who has been humbugged." He found Cairo "a regular hot-bed ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... sometime heard as it were the sound of pipes, trumpets and drummes: which noises may perhaps be caused by the vehement and sundry motions of such firie exhalations in the aire, as we see the like in many experiences wrought by fire, aire and winde. [Sidenote: The middle region of the aire is cold.] The hollowness also, and diuers reflexions and breaking of the cloudes may be great causes hereof, beside the vehement colde of the middle region of the aire, whereby the said fiery exhalations, ascending thither, are suddenly stricken backe with great force: for euen common and dayly experience teacheth vs, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... in Spenser's "Colin Clout's come home again,"[3] on the instability and hollowness of patronage, may occur ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c (luminary) 423 [Lat.]; such stuff as dreams are made of [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c 353; baseless fabric of a vision [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c (absence) 187. inanity, fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c (imaginary) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages"[88] by the present [1889] Roman Cardinal, but then Anglican Doctor, John ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride—the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... arrival at Plasencia, the English general had learned at once the hollowness of the Spanish promises. He had been assured of an ample supply of food, mules, and carts for transport; and had, on the strength of these statements, advanced with but small supplies, for little food and but few animals could be obtained in Portugal. He found, on arriving, that no preparations ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... I tried, and I am weary of the hollowness, weary of life, and the world. So long as I have your face here, I care not to cross my own threshold till friendly hands bear me out to my quiet resting-place under the willows of Greenwood. Electra, ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... demand for repentance was constant. It is a rabbinic commonplace that the delay of the Messiah's coming is due to lack of repentance in Israel. But near as this conception is to John's, we need but to recall his words to the Pharisees (Matt. iii. 7) to realize how clearly he saw through the hollowness of their religious pretence. With the quibbles of the scribes concerning small and great commandments, Sabbaths and hand-washings, John shows no affinity. He may have learned some things from these "sitters in Moses' seat," but he was ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... awful when such is the case, when the promise and interest of youth settles into impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean's spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness. This is melancholy, indeed, and many such wrecks of religious life are around us. But with Enoch, the increase of life's cares brought an access of fresh devotion. New gifts of Providence roused new feelings of gratitude, and he grappled himself the closer in attachment ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... said to be a hard man, and in some respects this was certainly the case; but a faint flush crept into his grim face. Perhaps he had noticed the weariness in Nasmyth's voice or the hollowness of his cheeks. ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... time Robert drew much courage from Charteris, who had been a prisoner a long time in Quebec, and who understood even more thoroughly than young Lennox the hollowness of the ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... after this judgment Galileo remained in Rome, apparently hoping to find some way out of this difficulty; but he soon discovered the hollowness of the protestations made to him by ecclesiastics, and, being recalled to Florence, remained in his hermitage near the city in silence, working steadily, indeed, but not publishing anything save by private letters to friends ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Cocksmoor, and set their affairs in order. All the time Ethel said not a word, except when referred to by her brother; but when Mr. Wilmot took leave, he shook her hand warmly, as if he was much pleased with her. "Ah!" she thought, "if he knew how ill I have behaved! It is all show and hollowness with me." ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... with a disappointed air, whose hollowness was proved by her rising redness and her half-guilty low laugh. "Where is ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... shaded with his wide white hat, his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... entertaining exponent of the facetious side of the stars, that we should ever have gone to the moon to find out such easy inferences, and points the pun with an allusion to Gruyere, but he certainly might have announced his knowledge of the hollowness of the moon before. And if the moon is hollow, then the apparent absence of air and water is, of course, quite easily explained. The sea lies within at the bottom of the caverns, and the air travels through the great sponge of galleries, in accordance ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... through the grayish-violet mist the lights were blooming like flowers, and above them a few stars shone faintly over the obscure frowning outlines of the buildings. Fifth Avenue was thronged, and to her anxious mind there seemed to be hollowness and insincerity in ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... messengers do. The sorrow tells of real desire, and the departure will sooner or later be exchanged for return with a deeper and more thorough purpose, if the earlier wish had any substance in it. If it had not, better that the consciousness of its hollowness should be forced upon the man, than that he should outwardly become what he is not really,—a Christian; for, in the one case, he may be led to reflection which may issue in thorough surrender; and in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... string, that had been stuffed with presents in the dawn. But the morning had now sunk into immeasurable distance and seemed as remote as Job himself. And all through the evening, as we lay abed and listened to the droning piano below, we felt a spiritual hollowness because the great ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... sophisms, it is capable of being so stated as most of all to baffle the subtle dialectician; and Kant himself, though not cheated, was never so much perplexed in his life as in the effort to make its hollowness apparent.] ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... to witness how all kinds of incapacities, stupidities, how meanness, hollowness, heartlessness, all incarnated in politicians, in trimmers, in narrow brained; how all of them ride on the shoulders of the masses, and use them for their sordid, mean, selfish and ambitious ends. And the masses are superior to those riders in everything constituting manhood, honesty ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... recognised freedom was permanently won to all races and creeds by the victory at Jerusalem. The most significant of all the signs was the attitude of Moslems. The Turks had preached the Holy War, but they knew the hollowness of the cry, and the natives, abandoning their natural reserve, joined in loud expression of welcome. From flat-topped roofs, balconies, and streets there were cries of 'Bravo!' and 'Hurrah!' uttered ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies. Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to the absorbing ...
— English Satires • Various
... deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly, but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls. They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Of the young forester's unbended bow; But, above all, to tenderness at home, And sweet security of kind concern Even from those who seem most truly ours. Who would resign all this, to be approached, Like a sick infant by a canting nurse, To spread his arms in darkness, and to find One universal hollowness around? Forego, a little while, that bane of peace. Love may ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... bliss on their faces that I've nearly cried for pure joy and sympathy. But in my heart all the time I felt that this was weakness and folly; that what was bliss to the mother, stupefying her for a while to the hollowness and emptiness of her existence, was the beginning of a probable life of misery to the child that could end only with death. And I have vowed to myself that never should child of mine have cause to reproach me for selfishness ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... eighteenth century that Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They felt that there is an inexpugnable truth of religion. Still that was merely an ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... that were half smiling and some brave silences that were wholly pathetic, and then the hour for Rupert's departure all too suddenly arrived. They separated with ostentatious whooping, and then Johnny, suddenly overcome with the dreadfulness of all earthly things, and the hollowness of life generally, instantly resolved to ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... been abusing the fair Frances, and ridiculing old Rowley, to gratify their hostess. She knew them by heart—their falsehood and hollowness. She knew that they were ready, every one of them, to steal her royal lover, had they but the chance of such a conquest; yet it solaced her soreness to hear Miss Stewart depreciated even by those false lips—"She was too tall." "Her Britannia profile looked as if it was cut out of wood." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... only left it yesterday. Fordham, having thrown off his wraps, waited on his guests, looking exceedingly happy in his quiet way, but more fragile than ever. He had a good deal of fair beard, but it could not conceal the hollowness of his cheeks, and there were great caves round his eyes, which were very bright and blue. Yet he was called well, waited assiduously on little Lina, and talked ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... see, but he could feel. His fingers quested all over one plate, probing and tapping. The plate was hollow—in reality, two saucer-shaped plates with their concave faces together. They gave off a muffled clink of hollowness when he tapped them. When he shook the armor, there was something extra in the sound, and that impelled him to hold a plate close to his ear. He heard a soft, ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... agitation, I went about overhauling ammunition, and instructing my men on the exact objectives and the work of consolidation. My restlessness brought back vividly that day when I had suffered from nerves before the Bramhall-Erasmus swimming race. The same interior hollowness made me chafe at delay and long to be started—to be busied in the excitement of action—to be looking back on it all as a thing of ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... near to doing so. It is on record that when an unwelcome visitor came to call, the sage sent out to say that he was too ill to receive guests, at the same time seizing his harpsichord and singing to it from an open window, in order to expose the hollowness ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... "one whom I love. There is something frank in your eyes which raises memories of my dead son. In you I see both my offspring's and my own youth recalled to me. You are Canadian—in you I can banish the coldness, hollowness, and degeneracy of Europe. Replace my boy. Let me call you 'Germain' ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... the outside, and white within like Milk, and in the end of Summer becometh hard and woody. Whether this be the very same kind, I cannot affirm, but both the Picture and Description come very neer to that I have, but that he seems not to take notice of the hollowness or Worm, for which 'tis most observable. And therefore 'tis very likely, if men did but take notice, they might find very many differing Species of these Nuts, Ovaries, or Matrixes, and all of them to have much the same ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... independence, and of course its politics were to match. Thackeray and a Beckett joined later in the sport. But Jerrold, while believing in Thackeray's hatred of the snob, more than suspected him of being a snob himself; and Thackeray felt not less convinced of the hollowness of Jerrold's "stalwartness." "Thackeray had neither love nor respect for Jerrold's democracy," Vizetelly tells us. "I remember him mentioning to me his having noticed at the Earl of Carlisle's a presentation copy ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... he told them off, however, the old sense of hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene, let down before an empty stage; a painted sham, with darkness and vacuity behind. At bottom, none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him; not a scrap of mental pabulum could be got from them: ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... this last reason will seem the best of all. However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether with the Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's Debacle, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second Empire, especially ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... reason of the war, then going on between the pope and the king of Sicily, the party at last reached Beneventum. The trial that took place lasted several days; when the result of the pleadings for and against was, that Adrian became convinced of the hollowness of the accusations, laid by the patriarch against the knights of St. John, and, therefore, refused to grant the redress sought for,—namely, to annul the patent of privileges conferred by Anastasius. William of Tyre,—who describes ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... not have been human if incidents like these had not caused him pain. Occasionally he would give vent to his grief, but his manly courage, too, would soon assert itself, and he would expose the hollowness, insincerity, and futility of the lying tales that were spread about him. At a public meeting in Campo Flore he was cursed, sentenced to death, and burned in effigy. (21a, 174.) He has read offensive reports about himself, and puts them down with the calm declaration: There is not a man that ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the express ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... and wholesome as such thoughts are, they are not all the truth. So the prayer changes in tone, even while its substance is the same. He rises from the shows of earth to his true home, driven thither by their hollowness. "My hope is in Thee." The conviction of earth's vanity is all different when it has "tossed him to Thy breast." The pardoned sinner, who never thereafter forgot his grievous fall, asks for deliverance "from all his transgressions." The sullen silence has changed into full acquiescence: "I ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you, would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend, if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers sometimes seems poured out in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... stared up; without a stir in the great, gaunt body, he was dead. Pierre reverently drew the eyes shut. There were no tears in his eyes, but a feeling of hollowness about his heart. He straightened and looked about him and found that the room was ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... the cause, and I answered that his observation reminded me of the story of a lady offering her condolence to a poor Irishwoman on the death of her child, who stated that she had never been more affected than on the event; the poor woman, knowing the hollowness of the compliment, answered with all the quickness of her country, "Sure, then, Ma'am, that is saying a great deal, for you were always affected." Lord Byron laughed, and said my apropos was very wicked—but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... that if the increasing and unblushing materialism of our times shall at last call for such scathing rebukes as the Jewish prophets launched against the sin of idolatry, or such as Christ himself employed when he exposed the hollowness of the piety of the men who took the lead in religious instruction in his day, then the loftiest characters—those whose example is most revered—will again disdain and shun a style of life which seriously conflicts with the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... of a beast to the image of God. Vanity is a mighty power and incentive, as great as hunger and thirst, and much more generally active in the affairs of civilized humanity. And yet its very name means hollowness. "The hollowness of hollowness, all things are hollowness," said the preacher, and his translators have put the word vanity in his mouth, because it means the same thing. But in itself, being hollow, it is neither bad nor good; its badness or goodness lies in those things whereof ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves and grass to make a "smudge." His suspicions regarding the hollowness of the tree proved true, for the draft through the hollow hole acted like a chimney and sucked the smoke upward. It began to wreathe out between the first limbs, some thirty feet or more ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance—shocks far deeper feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over the orthodox Church-of-Englandism—for ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Catherine's case (a case, how common!), the truth come too late—if the tomb is closed—if the heart you have wrung can be wrung no more—why the truth is as valueless as the epitaph on a forgotten Name! Some such conviction of the hollowness of his own words, when he spoke of service to the dead, smote upon Philip's heart, and stopped ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... without the slightest scruple, and in this lack of an artistic conscience its whole glory perished. It is true in this passion for excited compositions an excess of splendid works were produced; it is true immense resources were expended, and able artists were employed; but such inner hollowness stares at us with inanimate eye from the greater number of these works that we turn from them with repugnance, and even ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... nothing to be put but their leader's assurances that everything would come right. They had taken "a leap in the dark," they had staked the fortunes of the party on the dice-box, and events were to decide the issue. When the blow came Mr. Disraeli's reputation for sagacity fell to zero. At last the hollowness of his pretensions was detected, and there was no mincing of epithets for the man who had befooled and destroyed a great party. The Dukes left him to himself, and, according to our present informant, their flight was the harbinger ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... is Italy, fully more than the poet, that may be regarded as speaking in the following lines, which furnish evidence that, along with Dante, and all the great minds of the period, Torquato Tasso had seen the hollowness of the Papal Church, and felt the galling bondage which that Church inflicts on both the intellect ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... become me on this occasion to make some reflections on the hollowness of court life, which has seldom been better exemplified than in the scene before me. The sun was low, but its warm beams, falling aslant on the gaily dressed group at the gates and on the flowered terraces and gray walls behind them, seemed to present a picture at ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... and misunderstandings, and to persons of no inconsiderable influence gave juster notions of the true importance of the island to Great Britain. He displayed the magnitude of the trade of the Mediterranean in its existing state; showed the immense extent to which it might be carried, and the hollowness of the opinion that this trade was attached to the south of France by any natural or indissoluble bond of connection. I have some reason for likewise believing that his wise and patriotic representations prevented Malta from being made the seat of and ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... also displayed the hollowness of the proceedings by making "de Archangelis" the very opposite of his saturnine and blood-thirsty client: the last person we could think of as in sympathy with him. He is a coarse good-natured paterfamilias, whose ambitions are all centred on an eight-year-old son, whose birthday ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... it, where he came off second best. His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it. Three empty bottles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... there is a vibrant patriotism far more poignant than we can discover in any of the playful apologues published before the war. He had had an inside view of the Second Empire, he could not help seeing its hollowness, and he revolted against the selfishness of its servants; no single chapter of M. Zola's splendid and terrible "Downfall" contains a more damning indictment of the leaders of the imperial army than is to be read in Daudet's ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... will show the depth of the whole and of the parts, and their position. The third figure will be a demonstration of the bones of the backparts. Then I will make three other figures from the same point of view, with the bones sawn across, in which will be shown their thickness and hollowness. Three other figures of the bones complete, and of the nerves which rise from the nape of the neck, and in what limbs they ramify. And three others of the bones and veins, and where they ramify. Then three figures with the muscles and three with the skin, and their proper proportions; and three ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... men of birth The hollowness of rank on earth." The agent answered, "Very true— But I should not, if ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... blessedness even in exile from his kind, being driven off as a punishment for his heterodoxy on matrimonial subjects. This is one explanation of the fact that Leprechawns are always seen alone, though other authorities make the Leprechawn solitary by preference, he having learned the hollowness of fairy friendship and the deceitfulness of fairy femininity, and left the society of his kind in disgust at its ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... consolation" to enable them to ride out the storm; who, when sorrow and bereavement overtake them—the lowering shadows of the dark and cloudy day—have still to grope after an unknown Christ; and, amid the hollowness of earthly and counterfeit comforts, have to seek, for the first time, the only ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... votes, it would have been a plain and easy matter for the letter of the Constitution to have expressed this spirit, or indeed to have done away altogether with this machinery of a sham election. The Jackson men had only to state their argument in order to expose its hollowness; for they said substantially that the Constitution established an election without an option; that the electors were to vote for a person predestined by an earlier occurrence to receive their ballots. But besides their unsoundness in argument, their statistical position was far from being what they ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... concessions. Consequently a strike was declared in 1900 by which the mine workers obtained a ten per cent increase in wages and the promise of semi-monthly wages in cash. But they had not resumed work before they discovered the hollowness of these concessions. Two years of futile application for better conditions passed, and then, in 1902, 150,000 men and boys went on strike. This strike lasted one hundred and sixty-three days. The magnates were generally regarded as arrogant and defiant; they contended that they had nothing ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... floor and walls looked singularly dry. To find out if this were the case, she ran her fingers over the walls, and, on removing them, found they showed no signs of moisture. Then she rapped the floor and walls, and could discover no indications of hollowness. She sniffed the air, and a great wave of something sweet and sickly half choked her. She drew out her handkerchief and beat the air vigorously with it; but the smell remained, and she could not in any way account for it. She turned to leave the cellar, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... deputation. But when the officials warned them against wasting their money on a deputation and told them in the next breath that it was a breach of the law to find an abode for the evicted wanderers, these Natives, perceiving the hollowness of the Government's advice, determined that as a last resort a deputation should be ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... to think I show a want of generous confidence, if I sometimes try the ground on which I tread, to see if perchance it may return the echoes of hollowness.' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... The Pillars of Society was the hollowness and rottenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prose which Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He was accused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to have fallen out of touch with real Norwegian ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... into life, and intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions—and left him. She came and left him as that dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing him one jot or one tittle of the hollowness of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... intelligent English woman deliberate in Parliament, or any such American woman in Congress? I mention Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, Catherine, and all the famous Empresses and Queens, not to prove the capacity of women for the most arduous and responsible office, for that is undeniable, but to show the hollowness of the assertion that there is an instinctive objection to the fulfillment of such offices by women. Men who say so do not really think so. The whole history of the voting and office-holding of women shows that whenever men's theories ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... mail, I am advised by him that he is on board the very boat of which you claim to be Captain and owner. I of course take my boy's word in preference to that of any stranger. Having thus detected the hollowness of your sympathy, and the falseness of your pretended friendship for my husband, I must request you to refrain from further meddling in this matter. Yours ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... grammar and spelling, the terse thought, and the concise form, are all characteristic of Napoleon. The right of petition, the recital of unjust acts, the illegal action of the council, the use of force, the hollowness of the pretexts under which their request had been refused, the demand that the troops be withdrawn and redress granted—all these are crudely but forcibly presented. The document presages revolution. Under ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and yet it revealed in a moment the hollowness of the apparent reconciliation between them. What chance of mutual confidence could there be between these two? He asked Wenna if she had been busy in his absence; and the thought immediately occurred to him that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... evident that Michael was in earnest. He spoke warmly, but with a natural vehemence that by no means disfigured his good-looking visage, now illuminated with unusual fire. In these days of hollowness and hypocrisy, an ingenuous straightforward character is a refreshing spectacle, and commands our admiration, be the principles it represents just what they may. Hence, possibly, the unaffected pleasure with which Margaret listened to her visitor whilst he declaimed against men and things ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... most of the scenes seem to demand dramatic accessories to give them their full effect. But I think one cannot with justice bestow higher praise than this. To speak candidly, I felt, in reading the tale, a wondrous hollowness in the moral and sentiment; a strange dilettante shallowness in the purpose and feeling. After all, 'Jack' is not much better than a 'Tony Lumpkin,' and there is no very great breadth of choice between the clown he IS and the fop his father would ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... felt by the average hearer. Alma had an emotional nature, but her emotions responded to almost any kind of excitement sooner than to the musical. So much had she pretended and posed, so much had she struggled with mere manual difficulties, so much lofty cant and sounding hollowness had she talked, that the name of her art was grown a weariness, a disgust. Conscious of this, she was irritated whenever Harvey begged her to play simple things; for indeed, if she must hear music at all, it was just those ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... own comfort and strength. We need it to deliver us from the vanity and hollowness, the fever and hysteria of the present age. We need it to make us better soldiers and workers for every good cause. Peace is coming to all the earth some day through Christ. And those who shall do most to help Him bring it are the men and women to whom ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... poor child!" said the mother, in a tone of distress, "what is to be the end of your inordinate ambition for the things of the world? You have got to discover the vanity and hollowness of them some time, but what must you suffer on your way to this experience! Money and position cannot bring happiness in marriage. Nothing can ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... difference between the two writers, was open and clear to any unprejudiced mind prepared for such investigations, and we should at any rate have pointed it out at one time or other for the sake of exposing the hollowness of those impostures which offer themselves in our ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... see, I had given her up. And when one love is lost, there sink such awful chasms into the soul, that, though they cannot be filled, we must at least bridge them over with a new affection. The number of marriages built in this way, upon false foundations of hollowness and despair, is incomputable. We talk of jilted lovers and disappointed girls marrying 'out of spite.' No doubt, such petty feeling hurries forward many premature matches. But it is the heart, left shaken, unsupported, wretchedly sinking, which reaches out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... from one foot to the other. A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... is true she had created her own troubles, but in spite of that he could be sorry for her. Like a foolish woman she had built her life's hopes upon a shifting, sandy foundation; she had looked on the outward appearance, and a fair exterior had blinded her to the hollowness beneath. The result was ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... how the ideas of Christian learning came into direct competition with the arrogant self-assumption and the hollowness of the selfish teachings of the old Graeco-Roman schools. The Christian doctrine, advocating the development of the individual life, intimate relations with God, the widening of social functions, with its teachings of humility, and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Bouillon soon learned the hollowness of the promises of his allies. The Spaniards sent neither money nor men, while the Austrians received orders to march away from Sedan and to join the Spaniards, who were marching ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... cracks and crannies between the various stones. In the right-hand corner furthest from the entrance, their quest was rewarded. A stone some three feet square moved slightly when pressure was applied to it, and gave up a sound of hollowness beneath the tread. Dust and litter covered the entire floor, but having cleared the top of this particular stone, a ring was discovered, lying flat in a circular groove cut to receive it. The blade of a penknife served to raise it from its resting place, and Dr. Cairn, standing astride across ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... description of Roman habits and customs. Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities should be consulted, as it is a great thesaurus of important facts. Lucian does not describe Roman manners, but he aims his sarcasms on the hollowness of Roman life, as do the great satirists generally. Tillemont is the basis of Gibbon's history, so far as pertains to ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth, so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... around ag'in," she added, in the customary mockery of an attempt at cheer. The other woman started slightly, turned her head, and gazed on her old friend long and intently. The hollowness of ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... despair to the summit of happiness, and back again. But if you have seen or experienced that morbid condition, you would know that there is more reason to mourn over it than to laugh at it. There is acute misery felt now and then; and there is a pervading, never-departing sense of the hollowness of the morbid mirth. It is but a very few degrees better than "moody madness, laughing wild, amid severest woe." By depression of spirits I understand a dejection without any cause that could be stated, or from causes which in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... beyond himself. He had no great Father, as we have. A strange, unhappy life he lived upon the world, uncomforted, unfriended. He looked at the stars and comprehended them not; and at the graves, and they said nought. He walked alone under heaven's wide hollowness. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... for baser men; and my mother urged Miss Wesley, as one whom Mrs. Lee admitted to her confidence, above all things to act upon her pride by forewarning her that such men, in the midst of lip homage to her charms, would be sure to betray its hollowness by declining to let their wives and daughters visit her. Plead what excuses they would, Mrs. Lee might rely upon it, that the true ground for this insulting absence of female visitors would be found to lie in her profession of infidelity. This alienation of female ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the legs, arms, and head of a human body, being solid parts, are specifically somewhat heavier than fresh water, as the trunk, particularly the upper part, from its hollowness, is so much lighter than water, so the whole of the body, taken altogether, is too light to sink wholly under water, but some part will remain above until the lungs become filled with water, which happens when a person, in the fright, attempts breathing while the mouth ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... that unless her own piety were of the merely formal kind, she would be sure to make the discovery. The congregation in the old story were untouched by the disguised devil's eloquence on behalf of religion: it lacked unction. The verbal conformity of the unbeliever lacks unction, and its hollowness is speedily revealed to the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the blind accuracy of the engine, and the bright, strange play of the living stroke—a difference as great as between the form of a stone pillar and a springing fountain. And on this blindness follow all errors and abuses—hollowness and slightness of framework, speciousness of surface ornament, concealed structure, imitated materials, and types of form borrowed from things noble for things base; and all these abuses must be resisted with the more caution, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... have all felt the brazenness of words without emotion, the hollowness, the unaccountable unpersuasiveness of eloquence behind which lies no love. The Greatest Thing ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... robes and coronet—the beadle in his gaudy livery of scarlet, and purple, and gold—the dignitary in the fulness of his pomp—the demagogue in the triumph of his hollowness—these and other visual and oral cheats by which mankind are cajoled, have passed in review before us, conjured up by the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various |
