"Ephemeral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... draped with snowy lace, lightly embroidered at the edges, and looped with cords of blue and silver—tables with marble tops, supporting porcelain vases filled with flowers, were placed between the windows, for these ephemeral children of sunshine were dear to the heart of the dying one. Beside one of these stood a large cushioned chair, in which reclined a young man of delicate features and wasted form. He appeared in the last stages of his fell disease, and the friends who had received ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... difficulty is, however, that the results are not permanent; the facts learned do not have time to seek out and link themselves to well-established associates; learned in an hour, their retention is as ephemeral as the application which ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... seek so much to cover up as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and when he gravely refused to license a work by the author of Our Village. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... will come to question, as never before, both its direction and its results. He is bound to perceive, if he does not perceive already, that the war's arrestment of architecture (in all but its most utilitarian and ephemeral phases) is no great loss to the world for the reason that our architecture was uninspired, unoriginal, done without joy, without reverence, without conviction: a thing which any wind of a new spirit ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... at Abbotsford has felt of the white beaver hat of Sir Walter Scott knows that he has touched part—and a very considerable part—of Sir Walter. The hat, the boots, the waistcoat are far less ephemeral than the body they protect, and indicate almost as much of the wearer's character as his hands and face. So I am not ashamed of my silk pajamas or of the geranium powder I throw in my bath. They are ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... I'm confident, to write plays—strong plays. Does he ever write except ephemeral space stuff for ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... heart bleed,—we may well understand how all these causes may have given rise to some moments of misanthropy, such as are betrayed by a few expressions in his journal; but it was a misanthropy that existed only in words, a plant without roots, of ephemeral growth, and most natural to a fine nature. We feel, notwithstanding all these real palpable causes of ennui, that his principal sufferings ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... wiser than we are; they were certainly less informed, and probably were, on that account, in the general case, less judicious. But time has swept away their follies, which were doubtless great enough, as it has done the worthless ephemeral literature with which they, as we, were overwhelmed; and nothing has stood the test of ages, and come down to us through a series of generations, of their ideas or institutions, but what had some utility in human feelings and necessities, and was on the whole expedient at the time when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a means?" asked he; "the holiest tie on earth only as a means, and for what? For a pitiable and ephemeral chase after happiness, which you call honour and freedom. Poor, deceived Sara! Are you so misled, so turned aside from the right? Is it possible that the miserable book of a writer, as full of pretension ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... times of deep reflection, of slowly maturing thought, are past; and now that erudition is a jest, ancient learning an exploded chimera, and elaborated eloquence known chiefly by recollection, the ample gazette runs its daily career, and heralds, in ephemeral language, the deeds of the passing hours. The age of accumulated learning is past, and every thing is carried along the rushing current of public economy, or of private business.—Life is divided between excited passions ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... that bundles of pale strawlike beams radiated around them in the shape of a fan. Some were large and near, glowing scarlet-red from the shade, like wounds in a black hide. Some were Maenades, with winy faces and blown hair. These tinctured the silent bosom of the clouds above them and lit up their ephemeral caves, which seemed thenceforth to become scalding caldrons. Perhaps as many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds of the district; and as the hour may be told on a clock-face when the figures themselves are invisible, so did the men recognize the locality of each fire ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... adjuncts of modern tuition;" but if we are to consider that the condition of the human intellect at any particular juncture is worth studying, it is certainly of importance to know on what food its infancy is fed. And so of children's play-books as well as their work-books; these are as ephemeral as their other toys. Retaining dear recollections of some that were the favourites, and desiring to awaken from them old recollections of careless boyhood, or perhaps to try whether your own children inherit the paternal susceptibility to their beauties, you make application to the bookseller—but, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... by poem, has passed under | | the educated criticism and scholarly eye of WILLIAM CULLEN | | BRYANT, a man reverenced among men, a poet great among | | poets. | | | | This is a Library of over 500 Volumes in one book, whose | | contents, of no ephemeral nature or interest, will never | | grow old or stale. It can be, and will be, read and re-read | | with pleasure as long as its leaves hold together. Over 800 | | pages beautifully printed, choicely illustrated, handsomely | | bound. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... literary coquetry may be permissible to retailers of the marvelous, the sober chronicler is bound to forego such advantage as he may reap from an odd-sounding name, on which many ephemeral successes are founded in these days. Wherefore the present writer gives the following succinct statement of the reasons which induced him to adopt the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... applauded by those they entertain or amuse. The chess master receives no applause; over the board, however, he enters into conversation with amateurs, and is rewarded by friendships that far outweigh the wildest ephemeral outbursts of approval. The friendships so formed by Zukertort have now been snapped, and his removal has caused, in the words of the old player Bird, "a severe blank." Bird himself is an interesting character. He is by far the oldest chess master, does the chess ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... long scan of waves, myself call'd back, resumed upon myself, In every crest some undulating light or shade—some retrospect, Joys, travels, studies, silent panoramas—scenes ephemeral, The long past war, the battles, hospital sights, the wounded and the dead, Myself through every by-gone phase—my idle youth—old age at hand, My three-score years of life summ'd up, and more, and past, By any grand ideal tried, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... advancement. In his profession, however, he did not succeed; and meeting with no encouragement in any other quarter, he devoted himself henceforward to the service of the booksellers. More novels, translation, historical compilation, ephemeral criticism, were the multifarious employments which they laid on him. Nothing that he afterwards produced quite came up to the raciness of his first performances. In 1753, he published the Adventures of Ferdinand ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... of an author whose characters speak in the argot proper to their surroundings, the necessity for revision is even more imperative; the change in the cultured speech of a language is a process that requires years to become pronounced, the evolution of slang is rapid and its usage ephemeral. For example Stephen Gaselee, in his bibliography of Petronius, calls attention to Harry Thurston Peck's rendering of "bell um pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... their coming and going more trace than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... resume in this our exile, and with more prospect of continuity, the emotions which were so agreeable in our former state? So agreeable—although, as you justly say, too ephemeral [coming a little closer]. Can you not teach us to moderate ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... immediate pleasures of sense, as well as such positive gains, however ill-gotten, as could be made the means of procuring them, and throwing aside all thought both of honor and of long-sighted advantage. Life and property being alike ephemeral, there was no hope left but to snatch a moment of enjoyment, before the outstretched hand of destiny should fall ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... Tartars, they never would have had much to do with the history of the world. In that case, they would have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis; they might have swept over the face of the earth, and scourged the human race, powerful to destroy, helpless to construct, and in consequence ephemeral; but this would have been all. But this has not been all, as regards the Turks; for, in spite of their intimate resemblance or relationship to the Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential barbarism to ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Constitution in other schools, and under other teachers. She looks upon it with other regards, and deems more highly and reverently both of its just authority and its utility and excellence. The history of her legislative proceedings may be traced. The ephemeral effusions of temporary bodies, called together by the excitement of the occasion, may be hunted up; they have been hunted up. The opinions and votes of her public men, in and out of Congress, may be explored. It will all be in vain. The Carolina doctrine can derive ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... recollected the best things. Now, it is not everybody can remember a thousand disconnected facts and recall them apropos. He was various, fluent, and, above all, superficial; and such are your best conversers. They have something good and strictly ephemeral to say on everything, and don't know enough of anything to impale their hearers. In my youth there talked in Pall Mall a gentleman known as "Conversation Sharpe." He eclipsed everybody. Even Macaulay ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... spiritual power resulting in crimes, which were "a sin unto death." Another abuse of secrecy has been manifested in means heretofore employed in the constant effort to obtain and maintain worldly power. This was by affecting the imagination and blinding the reason of the masses. Some time ago, an ephemeral work was published, even the name of which is not recollected by this writer, wherein was a picture showing the section of a handsome tent with curtains closely drawn. Within, is a man eating and feasting like other mortals. Without, is a stand on which ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... as much contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular, sprang from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth." ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... a consistent and simultaneous view of the general field of British politics in an hour of fateful decision. I have exercised full freedom in compression and in verbal correction necessary to make them easier to read. Facts and figures have been, where necessary, revised, ephemeral matter eliminated, and epithets here and there reconsidered. But opinions and arguments are unaltered; they are hereby confirmed, and I press them earnestly ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... lost their influence. The traditions of European mythology, the revelations of Asia, the time-consecrated dogmas of Egypt, all had passed or were fast passing away. And the Ptolemies recognized how ephemeral are forms ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... still forego Thy heritage and high ambition, To lie full lowly and full low, Adjusted to thy new condition? Not hidden in the drifted snows, But under ink-drops idly spattered, And leaves ephemeral as those That on ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... enfold a legion of children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. He ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... theatricals at Bridgewater House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor Hugo's play of "Hernani," ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... called in America travelling side- shows'; and the inexperienced foreigner could never imagine the possibilities of a Japanese side-show. On certain great holidays the showmen make their appearance, put up their ephemeral theatres of rush- matting and bamboos in some temple court, surfeit expectation by the most incredible surprises, and then vanish as suddenly as they came. The Skeleton of a Devil, the Claws of a Goblin, and 'a Rat as large as a sheep,' were some of the least extraordinary displays which I saw. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... invisibility. A gentle breeze was astir in the woods, and it set the leaves to whispering. The treetoads and the locusts were trolling a chorus. So loudly vibrant, it was! So clamorously gay! Some subtle intimation they surely had that summer was ephemeral and the season waning, for the burden of their song was, Let us now be merry. The scarlet head of a woodpecker showed brilliantly from the bare dead boughs of a chestnut-oak, which, with its clinging lichens of green and gray, was boldly projected against the azure sky. ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... returned to Valparaiso on the 3rd of June, 1822, having been absent more than twenty months. An enthusiastic welcome awaited him. Medals were struck in his honour, and in various ephemeral ways the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... cannot be disobeyed: we have order in the seasons, in the tides, in the movement of the heavenly bodies, in the instinct of animals, in the duration of life assigned to each; from the elephant who lives more than a century, to the ephemeral fly, whose whole existence is ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and the notion of being obliged to forego this advantage and triumph, and the perplexity into which he was thrown between doubt whether it really was worth while, and fear of sacrificing a great and permanent, to an accidental and ephemeral interest, threw him into an uncertainty and embarrassment which disturbed his equanimity. It is at all events fortunate that I did not go to him myself, for I should have been met with a cold austerity of manner which would have disconcerted me, and I should have most certainly quitted ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... after our unsuccessful attempt to see the tombs of these ephemeral rulers we received another message, naming an hour for our visit; and this time the Pasha's representative was waiting in the archway. We followed his lead, under the openly mistrustful glances of the Arabs who hung about the square, and after picking our ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... was before this question was mooted, and without which there can be no happiness or security to the community. A thousand mushroom orators and politicians have sprung up all over the country, each big with his own ephemeral importance, and every one of whom fancies himself fit to govern the nation. Amongst them are some men of active and powerful minds, and nothing is less probable than that these spirits of mischief and misrule ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... pen had superseded the sword, for Victor and Eugene were scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to founding ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... prevail at last! Surely ye shall prevail! Your silence and austerity shall win at last: Desire and mirth, the world's ephemeral lights shall fail, The sweet star of your queen ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... less judgment than if Mr. Dutton had been at hand. Being without natural taste for intellectual pursuits, unless drawn into them by his surroundings, he had dropped them entirely, and read nothing but the ephemeral controversial literature of his party, and not much of that, for he was teaching, preaching, exhorting, throughout his spare time; while the vicar was in too great need of help to insist on deepening the source from which his zealous assistant ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from time to time with passionate adoration; for, thanks to the singular conformity of character, mind, and taste between him and the Bacchanal Queen, their attachment had deeper and stronger roots than generally belong to ephemeral connections founded upon pleasure. Cephyse and Jacques were themselves not aware of all the power of a passion which till now had been surrounded only by joys and festivities, and not yet been ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... their very long course, perish as though from weariness in the unfeeling ocean."[80] Elsewhere, the great folio begets the octavo, "which becomes the parent of the small volume, of booklets, of ephemeral pamphlets, invisible spirits flying in the night, creating under the very eyes of tyrants the circulation of liberty." The descending process materializes abstractions, gives them body, makes them ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the spot that the successor of "Tosca" had been found. Signori Illica and Giacosa, librettists in ordinary to Ricordi & Co., took the work of making the opera book in hand. Signor Illica's fancy had roamed in the Land of Flowers before; he had written the libretto for Mascagni's "Iris." The ephemeral life of Cho-Cho-San was over in a few months, but by that time "Madama Butterfly," glorified by music, had lifted her wings for ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... James Frederick Dillingham was one and the same person who sailed the Charlotte to India, China, South America, or some other ephemeral port. How paradoxical was this dual role, ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... devoted to their culture. For our own part, we scarcely consider the tulip as in any way justifying the praise which is lavished upon it even in the present day, because its beauty is, to say the least, ephemeral, whilst its showiness is far from being either chaste or delicate. It will be, however desirable to have six or even a dozen bulbs, which only cost about a penny apiece. They can be planted any time during the present month, from two to three inches below ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... trees and fields are beautiful. The flashing aurora, the golden clouds, the sapphire sky, are beautiful. The circling planets, the blazing sun, the starry canopy, are beautiful. But what are they compared to a human soul? What is an ephemeral flower or an age-lasting star compared with glorious reason, with eternal love, with deathless benevolence, and conscience? What were the material universe with all its sublime grandeur and awe-inspiring ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... ephemeral in any event, was about to be rudely removed, permitting to flourish in unrestrained vigor the natural tendency to compel admiration and secure advantage by the spell of physical beauty, and by the exertion of natural aptitudes for pleasing in the only path ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic literature—that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of inherited ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... tarpaulin—that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown—and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house read the certificates, and seized my luggage as contraband. I was too old a traveler ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... of ephemeral essays to you in recognition of your worth as a man and a scientist, and as ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd of followers and admirers of the ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... of Nature as she appears in all times and places, but of particular and eccentric manners and characters, the excressences of overloaded society, they have made a short cut to the favour of the public, and inundated the stage with a torrent of ephemeral productions, to the depravation of public taste, and in defiance of classical criticism: their highest praise that they do no moral mischief, and that if they possess not the bold outline and faithful colouring of nature which distinguished ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... and Mademoiselle de Puymandour was entirely deficient in that brief, ephemeral light that shines over the honeymoon. The icy wall that stood between them became each day stronger and taller. There was no one to smooth away inequalities, no one to exercise a kindly influence over two characters, both haughty and determined. After his father's death, when Norbert ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He only seems to have made them in order that they may reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and then die like ephemeral insects. I said, reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and I adhere to that expression. What is there, as a matter of fact, more ignoble and more repugnant than that filthy and ridiculous act of the reproduction of living ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... published in England at the same moment that a good novel appeared, the American publishers would have given us immediately a horrid reprint of the novel; but we should have heard nothing of Abbott's book, till its success had been abundantly tried abroad; nor even then, if some ephemeral novel had started up which promised ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the dream that the stone which was despised by the architect has become the corner-stone. The acorn of the dream, of the ephemeral and inconsiderable product of our soul, dates from the earliest times. Before that, men saw in the dream a prophecy for the future, a warning spirit, a comforter, a messenger of the gods. Now we ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... friend. Hampton did not contain him,—of this she was sure; and in her efforts to visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so indifferently across the ephemeral ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fellowship, more excellent than the aristocratic idea, that of born master and of born serf! And both that welcome of the accomplishment of a signal act of justice, and that desire to participate in the eternal strength of the children of labour as against the ephemeral and fictitious strength of the children of idleness and wealth, found strange confirmation in ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... wide of the truth than certain theories now almost unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. That such may be the case with literature, particularly the more ephemeral kinds thereof, is very likely, since literature, save in the great complex structures of epos, tragedy, choral lyric, is but the development of daily speech, and possibly as upstart, as purely passing, as ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... zeal, and almost as much ability. But I predict that the popularity of their doctrines will not last; and if ever you visit the moon again, you will find that their glory, now at its height, like the ephemeral fashions of the earth, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... may be permissible. It is a mistake to take the extremer forms of this reaction too seriously, although at the present time this is very frequently done. One must remember that such a spirit as this is to be found in every age, and that it always creates an ephemeral literature which imagines itself to be a lasting one. It is nothing new. It is as old and as perennial as the complex play of the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... these, filled full of days, divine and dead, Sages and singers fiery from the god, And such as loved their land and all things good And, best beloved of best men, liberty, Free lives and lips, free hands of men free-born, And whatsoever on earth was honourable And whosoever of all the ephemeral seed, Live there a life no liker to the gods But nearer than their life of terrene days. Love thou such life and look for such a death. But from the light and fiery dreams of love Spring heavy sorrows ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... an endless number of works poured from Sacher-Masoch's pen. Many of these were works of ephemeral journalism, and some of them unfortunately pure sensationalism, for economic necessity forced him to turn his pen ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... became strong and impressive, yet still holding all his former qualities. The first year of his new residence in Boston saw the production of The Dandelion Girl, a light-hearted, careless creature, full of a life that had no touch of responsibility, and descriptive of a joyous and ephemeral mood. A long step forward was taken in The Romany Girl, which immediately followed,—a work full of fire and freedom, strongly personal in suggestion, and marked by a wild and impatient individuality which revealed in the girl the impression of a lawless ancestry, that somehow ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... his hand, and urged him not to say anything further, but Marston, whose eyes were now lightened by that ephemeral light so often seen in the eyes of the ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... in a mirror will be still more ephemeral than fame in a dream. That fine splendour will fleet how soon! Make no further allusion to embroidered curtain, to bridal coverlet; for though you may come to wear on your head a pearl-laden coronet, and, on your person, a jacket ornamented with phoenixes, yours will not ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... set down as an axiomatic statement that no large publishing house in this country could possibly live exclusively from what are known as miscellaneous books, by which is meant current fiction and other ephemeral publications. The worst thing about such books is that they create no assets; their life is short, and once it is ended, the plates have value only as old metal. A house, therefore, in publishing this class of books ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but among ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... oligarchic polity, the very silence of the English has arrested the eyes of France. By a law which is universal where bodies are bound in one system, an extreme of separation has wrought its own remedy and the return towards a closer union is begun. I do not refer to such ephemeral and artificial manifestations as a special and somewhat humiliating need may demand; I consider rather that large sweep of tendency which was already apparent fifteen years after the Franco-Prussian War. An approach ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... lips were red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too ephemeral-looking to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... like." Dr. Newman therefore learned that musically he was only an ordinary folk, and he would have been the first to laugh down the notion that he was anything else; for a modest estimate of himself in many things was a very marked characteristic with him, and made him call his beautiful verse "ephemeral effusions" to Badeley, and write in May, 1835, apropos of a suggested uniform edition of his revised Latin plays, "I have not that confidence in my own performance to think I can compete with a classical Jesuit" (i.e. Father Jouvency). In 1828 he had contemplated ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... these essays, at the time, as purely ephemeral. The success of the 'Review' suggested republication long afterwards. The first collection of articles was, I presume, Sydney Smith's in 1839; Jeffrey's and Macaulay's followed in 1843; and at that time even Macaulay thought it necessary to explain that the republication ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... to do; he had to establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now, more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... flit, pass away, fly, gallop, vanish, fade, evaporate; pass away like a cloud, pass away like a summer cloud, pass away like a shadow, pass away like a dream. Adj. transient, transitory, transitive; passing, evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous^. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... triumphant entry of Nero, is vigorous and animated. Nero's boasting is pitched in just the right key; bombast and eloquence are equally mixt. If he had been living in our own day Nero might possibly have made an ephemeral name for himself among the writers of the Sub-Swinburnian School. His longer poems were, no doubt, nerveless and insipid, deserving the scornful criticism of Tacitus and Persius; but the fragments preserved by Seneca shew that he had ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... granite, a third marble, most of us wood or clay. Our task is to fashion these substances. Everyone knows that the most precious material may be spoiled, and he knows, too, that out of the least costly an immortal work may be shaped. Art is the realization of a permanent idea in an ephemeral form. True life is the realization of the higher virtues,—justice, love, truth, liberty, moral power,—in our daily activities, whatever they may be. And this life is possible in social conditions the most diverse, and with ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... buried in the files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... clung to this as a sacred dogma for over a hundred years, because it did not affect unfavorably any interest. It is untrue. Governments get their powers from the historical fact of their existence. They are all ephemeral, subject to change. When a change takes place it is controlled by the ideas and interests of the time of change, when the popular element in self-government may be much greater than when the constitution was last previously established. In 1898 the popular will, in the United States, was to take ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... true and final position, or to rally to its standard all who were in fact its friends. Old parties encumbered the ground. Men were slow to give up old associations and leave the discussion of obsolete, immaterial, or ephemeral issues. ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... ephemeral, were once replaced in the toilets of ladies by artificial ones. The artificial flower industry originated in China, and from thence passed into Italy and afterward into France. In course of time people got tired of artificial ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... one shadow of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning's sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... supper, whereupon she stole out of the house as quietly as a kitten, and was out of sight of it as quickly. Not a creature was to be seen. The gutters were all choked and the streets had become river-beds, already torn with the rush of the ephemeral torrents. But through it all she dashed fearlessly, bounding on to ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... tears He writes upon his parents' tomb, And thus ancestral dust reveres. Oh! on the fields of life how bloom Harvests of souls unceasingly By Providence's dark decree! They blossom, ripen and they fall And others rise ephemeral! Thus our light race grows up and lives, A moment effervescing stirs, Then seeks ancestral sepulchres, The appointed hour arrives, arrives! And our successors soon shall drive Us from ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... that curious and certainly ephemeral vagary of the human mind which has appeared before now in human history, which is called "Sophistry," and which consists in making up "systems" to explain the world; in contrast with Philosophy which aims at the answering of questions, ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts;—faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions;—faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour of goodwill ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... close mathematical study of analogy—of probability—that we exclude error little by little from our observations—we improve more and more our instruments of precision—we count out the errors of our observation; and we are constantly seeking those laws which are not transient and ephemeral only, but which are eternal and immortal. Upon those laws, finally, must rest all our real, certain knowledge; and it is the endeavor of the anthropologist to apply those laws to man and his development; and such, indeed, is the recognized and highest mission of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... years ago, there have been manifestations of personal animosity, indications of an eagerness to seize the opportunity of venting long secreted venom. This has appeared as well in books as in more ephemeral publications, and upon both sides, and even between writers on the same side. On every hand there has been a most deplorable impeachment of motive, accompanied by a detraction of character by imputation which is quite shocking. Petty personal slights have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... one; and besides this, however the power of the performer, once attained, may be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to popular passion or childishness, and spend itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral (like Michael Angelo's snow statue in the other art), or else in vicious difficulty and miserable noise—crackling of thorns under the pot of public sensuality—still, the attainment of this power, and the maintenance of it, involve always in the executant some virtue or courage of high kind; ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... date at which the Englishman's historical education has commonly come to an end; and if by chance it has gone any further, it has probably been confined to purely domestic events or to foreign episodes of such ephemeral interest as the Crimean War. It may be well, therefore, to pass lightly over these matters in order to sketch in brief outline the development of the empire and the problems which it involves. European affairs, in fact, played a very subordinate part in English ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... our excuse or pretext of to-day is fraught with the more peril to our morality inasmuch as it reposes on a law, or at least a habit, of Nature, that is far more real, more incontestable and universal than the will of an ephemeral and local god. ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... side of many. It was the all-absorbing interest; it embraced not only worship and prayer, but what we call philosophy, morality, law, and government—all was pervaded by religion. Their whole life was to them a religion—everything else was, as it were, a mere concession made to the ephemeral requirements ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... our friend the Pope, and they will say of us, Prostant venales apud Lambeth et Whitehall. God forbid it should ever be said of us with justice. It is pleasant to loll and roll and to accumulate—to be a purple-and-fine-linen man, and to be called by some of those nicknames which frail and ephemeral beings are so fond of accumulating upon each other;—-but the best thing of all is to live like honest men, and to add something to the cause of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... religion of this ancient town. He used the church as a necessary foundation, or stay, for the raising of the rampart; and he preserved it by covering it with feudal fortifications as with a mantle. Issoudun was at that time the seat of the ephemeral power of the Routiers and the Cottereaux, adventurers and free-lancers, whom Henry II. sent against his son Richard, at the time of his rebellion as Comte ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... familiar as it already was to Carroll, struck him that afternoon as looking more than usually unreal, ephemeral, and unsubstantial. The Moorish arches, of the thinnest white pine; the arabesque screens and lattices that looked as if made of pierced cardboard; the golden minarets that seemed to be glued to the shell-like towers, and the hollow battlements that ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... him to leave that evening free. And, Mr. Steele, if you will be so good, give me the names of some of those halfhearted ones—critical people who have to see in order to believe. I shall have them at my table—I shall let them see that the shadow which enveloped me was ephemeral; that a woman can rise above all weakness in the support of a husband she loves and honors as I do ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue. It was in the company of Mr. Edward ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... from peat (sphagnol), Swedish wood tar, permanganate of potash, perborates and percarbonates of soda and ammonia, chlorine compounds, but none of these has at present come much into favour, and some had only ephemeral existence. Of the many drugs that it has been suggested to admix in soap for use in allaying an irritable condition of the skin, the majority are obviously better applied in the form of ointments, and we ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... of science. This "holy" being, our relation to which is to take the place of our relation to an Eternal Father, by the adoration of which we are to be sustained and controlled, if it exist at all, is as ephemeral compared with eternity as a fly. We shall be told that we ought to be content with an immortality extending through tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years. To the argumentum ad verecundiam there is no reply. But will this banish the thought ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... care of man on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the accumulations ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... save the shock Of young years widow'd, and the pain When single state comes back again To the lone man who, reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark, And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, Why human buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral That has his day; while shrivell'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss: Rites, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... When all the brood have disappeared, the aperture of the nest is thus hung with a branch of fine, short threads, twisted and knotted together, like dried white of egg. Each thread is expanded into a tiny cup at its free end. These are very delicate and ephemeral relics, which perish at a touch. The least wind ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... which he would not long submit without, it might be, losing his reason and taking his life. Strong, black and fragrant, he would die without that beverage for which—and for Racine, by the way—Madame de Sevigne prophesied an ephemeral popularity. Taken immediately after meals, it removes the fumes of the claret and champagne he has drunk, and leaves him feeling as clear-headed as Plato and grateful as a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... reservation. Doctor Holland regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... shifts and expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way. How should she have distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... and our public men bewildered, by a similar dogma. The merest fabric of human contrivance, a particular form of political society, is impiously clothed with an essential attribute of God alone; and ephemeral politicians are announcing, as an eternal law of Providence, that "a State cannot die." The mischiefs that result, in the management of human affairs, from enthroning dogmas over reason, truth, and fact, are, as they ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of Babylonia and Assyria. Each exercised an influence on the Israelites and their neighbours, though in a different way and with different results. The influence of Assyria was ephemeral. It represented the meteor-like rise of a great military power, which crushed all opposition, and introduced among mankind the new idea of a centralised world-empire. It destroyed the northern kingdom of Samaria, and made Palestine once more what it had been in pre-Mosaic ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... nothing of him but amusement, promptly forgetting him; and asking divine great deeds of those before whom she bends the knee. Everything is judged by laws of its being; the diamond must be flawless; the ephemeral creation of fashion may be flimsy, bizarre, inconsequent. So Lucien may perhaps succeed to admiration in spite of his mistakes; he has only to profit by some happy vein or to be among good companions; but if an evil angel crosses his path, he will go to the very depths ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... not a mere ephemeral strife of partizanship; it is a deliberate and bold attempt to change the leading features of the Constitution—a Constitution to which allegiance has been sworn, and to which firm attachment has been over and over again expressed in addresses to the Governor ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... to the celebrated Council of Five Hundred. During their ephemeral reign, these very rooms were designed for their halls of audience, and levees, the rich mouldings, and cornices of which were half gilt, and covered with silver paper to preserve them: the poor council were never ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... contrasted in subject matter, reveal the same profound understanding of American life which makes Mr. Cobb almost our best interpreter in fiction to readers in other countries. Like Mark Twain, Mr. Cobb is quite uncritical of his own work, and two of these stories are of merely ephemeral value. I should like no better task than to edite a selection of Mr. Cobb's stories in one volume for introduction to the English public, and I think that such a volume would be the best service American letters could render to English letters at ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... realize the bitter and venomous hatred with which I am regarded by the very politicians who at Utica supported me, under dictation from masters who were influenced by political considerations that were national and not local in their scope. I realize very thoroughly the absolutely ephemeral nature of the hold I have upon the people, and the very real and positive hostility I have excited among the politicians. I will not stay in public life unless I can do so on my own terms; and my ideal, whether lived up to or not, is rather a high one. For very ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... "Too ephemeral," says Caligula. "I'd want ham and eggs, or rabbit stew, anyhow, for a chaser. What do you consider the most edifying and casual in the way ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... Nash died of a disease attributed to coarse and unwholesome cheap food. His fame proved to be singularly ephemeral. So far as I am aware, no book of his was reprinted after his death, with the single exception of "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," which was issued again in 1613. His name was mentioned and some interest in his writings was awakened ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... decidedly Egyptian, solid and expressive, but dreadfully compact. No arabesques, those offshoots of lazy, dreamy hours and pleasantly disconnected thoughts, disgrace the solemnly even tenor of these fathers of 'Ephemeral Literature,' as some 'rude Iconoclast' has irreverently styled the butterfly journeyings of our magazine age. But we, O merry souls and brave, are still young and frivolous: we still look at pictures with as much zest as before our dimly remembered teens; and we belong to that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... disregard to chronology, in not precisely stating the year, or rather the months, during which flourished one of a race, who, like the flowers of the Cistus, one morning in all their splendour, on the next, are strewed lifeless on the ground to make room for their successors. Speaking of such ephemeral creations, it will be quite sufficient to ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... all, which of those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to the Hebrides" ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Perez Codex and Stela P at Copan, the merits of their execution alone, weighed simply in comparison with observed history elsewhere, would prove that we have to do not with the traces of an ephemeral, but with the remains of a wide-spread, settled race and civilization, worthy to be ranked with or beyond even such as the Roman, in its endurance, development and influence in the world, and the beginnings of whose culture are still totally unknown. As to ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... source of reading for the majority. Practically all the papers are published in the cities of Santo Domingo, Santiago and Puerto Plata, and all are of modest dimensions. Many newspapers have been founded in the Republic and after leading an ephemeral existence have succumbed, some because their editors were persuaded by threats or rewards on the part of the government to cease publication, and the greater portion because of financial embarrassment. Notwithstanding the constitutional precept guaranteeing ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... that the living standard is going down all the time, isn't it?" asked Mr. Tanter, keeping his ephemeral smile. "What about those three thousand ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... of the metropolis, much less take notice of our dependencies:—the existence of places without the London radius is seldom brought home to the readers of our daily metropolitan papers, except some "Frightful Murder," or "Painful Accident," or "Dreadful Calamity" occurs, to fasten ephemeral attention on ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the Great Salt Lake, where, as he told his followers, he was instructed by divine revelation to plant the City of the Saints. It proved more permanent than might have been expected, as zion—cities usually are quite ephemeral affairs. ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... and the dash of waters make a deep undertone, and one comes away with the feeling—not exactly that the scene is too good to last, but—of regret that the result of such lavish care should be ephemeral. In a few months all on the left side of the river may again be parade-ground, and the thirty thousand troops which can be readily man[oe]uvred upon it be getting ready for another conflict, while the palace which the Genius ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... intending to go to America were now gathered in one vessel. Whatever previous disposition of them had been made, or whatever relations they might have had in the disjointed record of the exodus, were ephemeral, and are now lost sight of in the enduring interest which attaches to their final and successful ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames |
