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More "Illusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conduct did not apparently occur to the authorities, nor that the true way to repress Popery was by cultivating Puritanism. Believing the true principles of the Church of England to be the golden mean between the two, they acted under the pleasing illusion that when both halves were cut off, the middle would be left intact, and all the better for ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... felt that the charm of the great question and answer had been lost in considering it. Spontaneity—that subtle element of all that is lovely and enchanting—had flown away at the first suspicion of constraint. Some sweet illusion that had always hung like a halo over this grand decision evaded her consciousness; the glorious ideal had become a reality and lost all its enchantments ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... no other hope had got, Than what the chance of traffick might allot; Illusion vain, or doubtful at the best:— Though some grow rich, yet all are not so blessed. 'Twas said our husband never would succeed; And truly, such it seemed to be decreed. His agents (similar to those we see In modern days) were with his treasure free; His ships were wrecked; his commerce came ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... is that what you call 'things', actually something real, something which has existence? Isn't it just a deception of the Maja, just an image and illusion? Your stone, your tree, your river— are they actually ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... of my heart, which made me feel ill, I realised that probably I would have to stay away from school because of the infection. My feet tapped on the floor with joy, though I tried to appear unconcerned. Then, as I nursed my sudden hope of freedom, a little fearfully lest it should prove an illusion, a new and enchanting idea came to me. I slipped from the room, ran upstairs to my bedroom and, standing by the side of my bed, tore open my waistcoat and shirt with clumsy, trembling fingers. One, two, three, four, five! I counted the spots in a triumphant voice, and then ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... needs pry closely into the matter, it may be doubted whether there was any real change, after all, in the sordid, worn-out, worthless and ill-jointed substance of the scarecrow, but merely a spectral illusion and a cunning effect of light and shade, so colored and contrived as to delude the eyes of most men. The miracles of witchcraft seem always to have had a very shallow subtlety and at least, if the above explanations do not hit the truth of ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he was about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness the peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense colour. I cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely caused by memory, and by the twilight of incense, for I would not acknowledge that he could overcome my now mature intellect; and I said: 'Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some form of worship, why should ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... illusion for us; no splendid armies, banner—laden, passing through unbroken triumphs across the sunset's glory; no winged victory, with smooth brow laurelled to teach us to forget the holocaust. Neither ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... practised—were represented as ancient institutions; a whole new way of thinking and acting was set in motion on the assumption that it was old. Yet, so far as is known, no one in or out of Palestine ever saw through the illusion for over two thousand years. It was reserved for nineteenth-century scholars to draw aside the veil hiding the ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... original formulae allow. Matter is described as Maya and is potentially contained in the Lord who manifests it in the creative process which begins each kalpa. The Lord is also said to be one with our souls and yet other. The soul is by nature ignorant, in bondage to the illusion of Maya and of Karma, but by the grace of the Lord it attains to union (not identity) with him, in which it sees that its actions ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... for all the deeper, stronger love of Madam Conway's nature had gone forth to the merry, gleeful girl whose graceful, independent bearing she had so often likened to herself and the haughty race with which she claimed relationship. How was this illusion dispelled! Margaret was not a Conway, nor yet a Davenport. A servant-girl had been her mother, and of her father there was nothing known. Madam Conway was one who seldom wept for grief. She had stood calmly at the bedside of her dying husband, had buried ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... affecting or partly feeling a sudden sickness, he abruptly left the theater. The king being departed, the play was given over. Now Hamlet had seen enough to be satisfied that the words of the ghost were true and no illusion; and in a fit of gaiety, like that which comes over a man who suddenly has some great doubt or scruple resolved, he swore to Horatio that he would take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds. But before he could make up his resolution ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Rowland coveted; not her heart, indeed, but her ample fortune. Wilding had been a stumbling-block to him since he had come to Bridgwater; but for Wilding he might have run a smooth course; he was still fool enough to hug that dear illusion to his soul. Somewhere in England—if not dead already—this Wilding lurked, an outlaw, whom any might shoot down at sight. Sir Rowland swore he would not rest until he knew that Anthony Wilding cumbered the earth no more—leastways, ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... editing for two years a monthly review, The New East (Shin Toyo),[7] with for motto a sentence of my own which expresses what wisdom I have gained about the Orient, The real barrier between East and West is a distrust of each other's morality and the illusion that the distrust is on one ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... yet still it is plebeian. Why should he feel so shocked at mine?" Of course, she knew him only as "Mr. Wheeler." "Perhaps he has imagined that I had some grand name, and, learning my true one, has lost his illusion. He formerly esteemed me. He ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... for adulation. The smoothness of flattery cannot now avail; cannot save us in this rugged and awful crisis. It is now necessary to instruct the throne in the language of truth. We must dispel the illusion and the darkness which envelop it, and display, in its full danger and true colors, the ruin that is brought to ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... conscience and might ruin his, but it existed firmly like a fortress. She could not surrender it. Her love was not great enough for that; or was it, she asked herself, too great? She could not comfort herself with that illusion, and there came creeping the thought that for some one else, some one too strong to need such a capitulation, she would have given it gladly, but against Francis, who was intrinsically weak, she ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... over the city; say, I want to tell you that place was—well, gigantic! It was colossal; at first I thought the size was due to that illusion I spoke of—you know, the nearness of the horizon—but it wasn't that. We sailed right over it, and you've never ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... Cumberland a continual stream of nervous strength—an electric thing. Nonsense, of course. And it was nonsense, also, to think that the huge dog which lay staring up into the face of the master understood all this affair much better than the practiced mind of the physician. Yet the illusion held with Randall Byrne in ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... home in splendour, pretending that he and Duke were a long procession; and he made enough noise to render the auricular part of the illusion perfect. His own family were already at the lunch-table when he arrived, and the parade halted only at ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... of hypocrites, ways and means are never of a very exalted order—roads and stairs and so forth are always to be trodden under our feet. The advantage of utilising men like you in our plans is that we have to make use of no mask or illusion. But if I were to consult my prime minister, it would be absurd for me to call theft by any name less dignified than public benefit. I will go now, and move the princes about like pawns on the chessboard; the ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... repeating the curious experiments of Mr. Dutrochet day after day, and scrupulously following his directions, we have, in the presence of our results, that were exactly identical with his, almost been tempted to believe ourself to be the victim of some occult power, or at least of some optical illusion, the true cause of which remained a mystery to us. Finally, after many fruitless attempts to find a key to the enigma that engaged our attention, the light finally dawned upon us, and then ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... this a gipsy encampment. Miss Hamilton and myself are quite dark enough to favor the illusion, and Ellen and Mr. Carlton would pass as of gipsy descent; but what would they think of Miss Mary? She is ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... figures, each dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel of a coat here and there, a strip of paper announcing the very low price at which you may become the happy possessor. That dissipates the illusion. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... crawling, and a deer for flight, A hawk for rending, and a dog for sight To judge the strength of men that wake or sleep, A snake, when 't is advisable to creep, Illusion's self, to seem a saint or rogue, Goddess of Speech in understanding brogue; A light in blackest night, in holes a lizard I can be, A horse on terra firma, and a ship upon the ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... Cardiff, because you—disapproved. Then why didn't you remonstrate with me? I've often wondered." Elfrida spoke softly, dreamily. Her happiness seemed very near. Her self-surrender was so perfect and his understanding, as it always had been, so sweet, that the illusion of the moment was cruelly perfect She raised her eyes to Kendal's with an abandonment of tenderness in them that quickened his heart-beats, man ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... feeling or thought nothing could have turned me, neither general despair nor personal fear. For I believed that the deep secrets of nature were being revealed to me; I felt that everything was immortal and that death was only a pleasant illusion. But I really did not think very much about it, since I was not particularly in a mood for mental synthesis and analysis. But I gladly lost myself in all those blendings and intertwinings of joy and pain from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... side first. The motion of a top gives it bands of color to our eyes that it does not have at rest. They are temporary and not permanent, a result of motion merely; illusion and ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... again, and snoring as if they thoroughly enjoyed it. There was Lord Nelson on one wall, in flaming watercolors; and there, on the other, was a portrait of Admiral Bartram's last flagship, in full sail on a sea of slate, with a salmon-colored sky to complete the illusion. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... quietly again into the smooth channel of a new routine. Not that the story of the succeeding months was really uneventful. If our readers suppose that from this point onward we led a prosperous untroubled existence, it will be due to the illusion, which, in fiction, makes us cheerful over the woes of the struggling hero, because we have glanced at the end of the book, and view the present trouble in the light of the successful issue: what the end would be we did not know, nor ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... of man. Wild horses, in the proper sense of the term, are in Europe at the present day only met with in Bessarabia; whereas the so-called wild herds in Hungary may rather be compared to the animals ranging in our large parks, which are attended to and watched. The deer are left to the illusion that they enjoy the most unbounded freedom; and the deer-stalker, when in pursuit of his game, readily gives in to the same illusion. Or, to take another simile, the reader has only to picture to himself a well-constituted ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... made up. He was silent; but he laboured: laboured for three long years without intermission at the making of a military machine that should cut out of the world for ever such romantic accident or random adventure; a machine that should cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion that they had wings. That he did so plot and prepare for an attack that should come from him, anticipating and overwhelming any resistance, is now, even in the documents he has himself published, a fact of common sense. Suppose a man sells all his lands except a small yard containing a well; ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... a dream of beauty and peace. There is not much difference between the height of high and low water on this coast, and the lake-like illusion would have been perfect had it not been that the rocks were tinged with gold for a foot or so above the sea by a delicate species of fucus. In the exquisite inlet where I spent the night, trees and trailers drooped into the water and were mirrored in it, their green, heavy shadows lying ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... practice of the one does not at all train a man for practising the other. "Money might be of great service to me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that I do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have my opportunities increased." It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the inner man; but, one could well fancy them bursting off madly into some boyish game, with all the ardour that their previous application may have generated—the shouts of the Westminster scholars in the adjacent yard bearing out the illusion. ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... honeymoons seems born of wisdom as much as of expediency. It may sound brutal, but undisturbed possession soon palls, and man was made {95} for something more virile than perpetual billing and cooing. The long honeymoon makes a very heavy demand upon the emotions. It is fatal to try and keep up a lost illusion. The moment a man or woman sees that the sweetness is beginning to cloy, and the inaction to bore, it is time to return to ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... "because a first, fresh love, like yours, deserves better recompense than it could receive from a bruised and worn-out heart like mine. I can never experience the illusion of love again. I have suffered ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... strange illusion experienced by all who climb isolated mountains. The higher one climbs, the more of the earth's surface becomes visible, and the effect of this is that the horizon seems up-hill from the observer. This illusion is especially notable on Haleakala, for the old ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... stout old quartos you were reading. To tell you the truth, I inferred, from the dimensions of the books and your white cravat, that you were a clergyman." Marcus might have added, that the old gentleman's flowing white locks and benevolent features had contributed to the illusion; but he had already discovered that Mr. Van Quintem, like himself, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... can I, without vocal strain, attain the rumbling bass tones so favoured by many elocutionists. But I have been led to believe that a sonorousness of delivery and a nice use of gesticulation and modulation compensate in me for a lack of bulk, creating as it were an illusion of physical impressiveness, of brawn, of thew and sinew. I bowed to the chairman, and to the assemblage, cleared my throat ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... its pang, for him The torturing ghost of days that are no more, For him no more illusion, but remorse And memory's serpent gnawing ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... peat-moss, upon which the mist was producing a singular mirage. We seemed to be upon a causeway traversing an immense lake whose waves crept up gently, dying in transparent folds along the edge of the embankment. Here and there a group of trees or a cottage, emerging like an island, completed the illusion, for such it was. A sheet of bluish mist, floating a little above the ground and curling up along its upper surface under the rays of the sun, caused this aqueous phantasmagoria, resembling the Fata Morgana of Sicily. In vain did my geographical knowledge protest, disconcerted, against ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... Johnson, the learned world were accustomed to insist upon the observance of the unities, on the ground that they were necessary to uphold the illusion of the theatre. The doctor, in his preface to Shakspeare, demolished this argument, by showing that the illusion they were declared so necessary to support, does not, in fact, exist. No man really believes that the stage before him is Rome, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... literary construction of the plot was of no consequence to the reader who tasted a novel for the first time in his life. The naivete of the plot was in keeping with the naive, artificially reproduced language of the prophet Isaiah and the biblical annals, which intensified the illusion of antiquity. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... is true, and I now feel that it is a sin for Christians to stay here; and it seems to me as if our Lord said to us in that cry of the cocks, 'Come up, ye Christian children, out of those abodes of illusion and magic; come to the light of the stars, and act as children of light.' I now feel that it was a great sin for me to come down here, but I trust I shall be forgiven on account of my youth; for I was a child and knew not what ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was of the same opinion, and the illusion was at ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... remained closed to him, whom I loved and respected, but between whose mind and my own the point of contact was wanting. Of Henry, for many reasons, I had rather not talk to you. You know that I have never hesitated to tell myself the truth, or to destroy an illusion, which in the secrecy of my heart I have felt to be such; but it requires a courage and a strength which, to-day especially, I do not find in myself, to trace the progress of estrangement in an affection ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... really are affected by altitude, but weariness, lack of muscular as well as mental control, often creates altitudinous illusion. Of this condition I had an example while guiding a party of three women and one man to the top of Long's Peak. We climbed above timberline, headed through Storm Pass, and finally reached Keyhole without a single incident to mar the perfect day. The ladies were new, but ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... General and fight like men." Having thus given due warning, he led his "army" forward, marching and counter-marching his meager forces among the trees and hills to give an appearance of great numbers, while he and his captains helped keep up the illusion by galloping wildly here and there on horses they had confiscated, as if ordering a vast array. At nightfall the men advanced upon the stockade and opened fire from ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... is nevertheless too commonly believed that the docks of France are crowded and her navy-list swollen with hulks which are but the mouldering mementos of the vast armaments hastily created during the Consulate and the Empire; an illusion most hazardous to our interests abroad and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... smile. "I admit I do not exactly answer to the average description, and my heart is not broken—there is only a blank in it—something dead that can never live again. Once I loved a man with all my heart"—Jo sighed—"with all the illusion of youth, and he loved me. The difference between his love and mine was, that mine was forever, and ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... fog and rain something which seemed like a great pale shadow loomed before the schooner. For a moment we gazed, uncertain whether it were real, or an illusion ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... hinder. She had forgotten the insistent declaration of Gladys that she had seen a light flicker from these blank windows the preceding night. Indeed, even at the time she had accounted it but the hysteric adjunct of their panic in the illusion of a stealthy step on the veranda of the bungalow. She was animated only by the simplest impulse of idle curiosity when she laid her hand on the bolt. The big door swung open at once on well-oiled hinges, and she found herself in the spacious hotel office, on ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... there. The faintest of winds had blown for a moment or two, and when Dick looked up, he saw that the sky was covered with black clouds. The saddest of woods had moved far away, but by some sort of optical illusion he ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... which awaits you in Langona Church is its chancel, which stands high above the level of the nave, and, rising suddenly beneath a fine Early English arch, carries the eye upward to the altar with a strange illusion of distance. Even in those days the first impression was one of rare, almost singular, beauty—an impression lost in a series of small pangs as your eye rested on the ruinous details one by one. For of the great ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... make a shore-goer feel, not as if he were in a ship under water, but rather in a subway section under construction, or some overdriven corner of some sort of night-working machine-shop, or some other homelike place ashore. The bright electric lights helped out the machine-shop illusion. ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... seen nothing that he had seen. Then it was all an illusion? a fragment of his drunken dreams? But no drunken dream was ever ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... architecture, the outgrowth of the solid rock. They were vast ranges, apparently of enormous height, their color indescribable, deepest and reddest near the pine-draped bases, then gradually softening into wonderful tenderness, till the highest summits rose all flushed, and with an illusion of transparency, so that one might believe that they were taking on the hue of sunset. Below them lay broken ravines of fantastic rocks, cleft and canyoned by the river, with a tender unearthly light over all, the apparent ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Another illusion which had been dispelled was Lesbia's comfortable idea of her own expectations. Her grandmother had told her that she might take rank among heiresses; and she had held herself accordingly, deeming that her place was ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... rained once that spring—the morning after we had gone up Mount Lowe to see the sun rise, to be sure, but it would be a carping creature who would complain when only one expedition had been dampened. For twenty years I cherished the illusion that this was a land of endless sunshine. I don't know where I thought the moisture came from that produces the almost tropical luxuriance of the gardens and the groves. I know better now and, strange to say, I have come to love a rain in its proper time and place, if it isn't too boisterous. We ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties, positively destroys the illusion which ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Point Of Biography Cloud Winds of the World The Honours of Mortality At Monastery Gates Rushes and Reeds Eleonora Duse Donkey Races Grass A Woman in Grey Symmetry and Incident The Illusion ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... of Knowledge Immortality The Hermit The Great Breath The Divine Vision The Burning Glass A Vision of Beauty Rest The Earth Breath Divine Visitation The Master Singer Aphrodite Illusion Babylon Alter Ego Krishna Symbolism Sung on a By-Way The Hunter The Vision of Love A Call of the Sidhe Janus The Grey Eros The Memory of Earth By the Margin of the Great Deep Three Counsellors, Desire The Place of ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... attempt to explain this illusion, or whatever it was. I do not know how long it lasted; but presently, as I may testify, I saw Orme rise and kick at the wetted, bloodstained blanket. He lifted it, heavy with dripping blood. I saw the blood fall from its corners ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... contorted cloud. Far to the right I saw the delicate outlines of the little wood which I had come to think of as the Grove of Ashtaroth. I listened. There was not a sound in the air. The land seemed to sleep peacefully beneath the moon, and yet I had a sense that the peace was an illusion. The place was ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... see if Mr. Jaffrey's illusion would stand the test of daylight. It did. Elkanah Elkins Andrew Jackson Jaffrey was, so to speak, alive and kicking the next morning. On taking his seat at the breakfast-table, Mr. Jaffrey whispered to me that Andy had had a ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern Rome the canonisation of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion which furnishes them with something to adore. By a law of association, from the operation of which even minds the most strictly regulated by reason are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and happiness to love, although there ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to the illusion, as the canoe came to the quay the sun sank, a gun boomed out from the tallest of the four towers, and the flag ran down its staff; all as if by clockwork. As if by clockwork, too, the taller of the two old gentlemen on the quay—the one in a gold-laced ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... world: for Nunnely Wood in June she saw her narrow chamber; for the songs of birds in alleys she heard the rain on her casement; for the sigh of the south wind came the sob of the mournful east; and for Moore's manly companionship she had the thin illusion of her own dim shadow on the wall. Turning from the pale phantom which reflected herself in its outline, and her reverie in the drooped attitude of its dim head and colourless tresses, she sat down—inaction would suit the frame of mind into which she was now declining—she ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... which they supposed entirely incapable of such boldness as isolated action. They never believed for a moment but that the refusal by Italy of a double intervention would have for effect a treble occupation. You know how this illusion of a treble occupation died a wretched death in the ridiculous appearance of Italian and French ships in the neighbourhood of the Canal just at the moment when Wolseley seized it ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... trying to speak with ease, but she did not succeed well. Her "good nights," had in them a tone as if she was annoyed, as in fact she was; though not at all in the way Clara supposed. She did not care for the notice of her tears, but she said to herself, "This is what Edmund calls destroying the illusion. If they would but have let me go to bed with the spell of that ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... by tallness and well-proportioned limbs, by patience, by sincerity, by affluence, by compassion, by excellence of form, and by might. He shines, endued with all celestial weapons of wonderful form and make. He has Yoga for his illusion. He is possessed of a thousand eyes. He is free from every stain or fault. He is high-minded. He is endued with heroism. He is an object of pride with all his friends. He is dear to all his kinsmen and relatives and they are dear to him. He ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name; in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of which she is so justly proud—being scornful of mere Daughters of the Revolution—and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream. And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been listening to the ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... deceive himself when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he holds the larger portion of himself. That power exists; it is society. When the Australian feels within himself the surging of a life whose intensity surprises him, he is the dupe of no illusion; that exaltation is real, and it is really the product of forces that are external and superior to the individual."[10] Yes, but identical in kind and genesis with himself and his own race. To Leuba, in his Psychological Study of Religion, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... caught a glimpse of a figure on the south face of the wall. But it was so fleeting he was not sure. If he had only brought his glasses with him he might have decided, but he was without them, and he concluded finally that it was merely an optical illusion. He and the Indian had the mountain walls to themselves, and the warrior could not have moved around ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... turning flight gives the illusion of great speed. The small, compact flocks commonly fly low over the marshes, and often ...
— Ducks at a Distance - A Waterfowl Identification Guide • Robert W. Hines
... certain one always suffered thus on those feast-days on which he had to receive Communion, his superiors, discovering that there was no fault on his part, ruled that he was not to refrain from communicating on that account, and the demoniacal illusion ceased. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and Blount entered the bar together—the Broadway Room, decorated in gleaming plastics and chromium in enthusiastic if slightly inaccurate imitation of a First Century New York nightclub. There were no native servants to spoil the illusion, such as it was: the service was fully automatic. Going to a bartending machine, von Schlichten dialed the cocktail they had decided upon and inserted his key to charge the drinks to his account, ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... never spoken to Miss Vivian." Gordon Wright stood looking at Bernard and urging his point as he pronounced these words. Bernard felt peculiarly conscious of his gaze. The words represented an illusion, and Longueville asked himself quickly whether it were not his duty to dispel it. The answer came more slowly than the question, but still it came, in the shape of a negative. The illusion was but a trifling one, and it was not for him, after ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... hidden sense, which sees certain immaterial objects, as the external sense sees the physical objects. No one else sees those forms, but they are none the less real, for the whole species of prophetic persons testify to their existence. In ordinary perception we tell a real object from an illusion by appealing to the testimony of others. What appears to a single individual only may be an illusion. If all persons agree that the object is there, we conclude it is real. The same test holds of the prophetic visions. All prophets see them. Then the intellect of the prophet ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... his race, he had found out everything. That he, from this time forth, would share the lot of his adored sahib appeared to him a matter of course. And Heideck had not the heart, in this hour of their meeting again, to destroy his illusion. ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow, the rain-drops, the air they breathed, the sunshine in their eyes and hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their very substance and spirit. Feeling this, death becomes an illusion; and the illusion that the continuous life of the species (its immortality) and the individual life are one and the same is the reality and truth. An illusion, but, as Mill says, deprive us of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... dim inversion, and then totally disappeared; leaving behind it a clear open area of ice of the same dimensions. We now perceived that this bed of ice, which was thinly suffused with water, had produced the illusion, by reflecting and refracting (as persons skilled in optics would no doubt easily explain) a rocky and woody section of the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... voir se renouveler des excutions qui soulvent contre elle l'indignation de toute la Chrtient. C'est dans son propre intrt que nous lui adressons cette demande. La Porte ne doit pas se faire illusion sur les lmens qui fermentent en Turquie. Au lieu de s'aliner les sentimens des populations Chrtiennes, le Gouvernement Ottoman doit travailler plus que jamais, se les concilier. Qu'il comprenne enfin la ncessit de laisser tomber en dsutude des dispositions surannes de la loi Mahomtane, ...
— Correspondence Relating to Executions in Turkey for Apostacy from Islamism • Various
... often taken for a wild bull, and with us a brace of carrion crows, seated upon the crest of a ridge, were actually thought to be buffaloes, until they suddenly took wing and rose into the air, thus dispelling the illusion! ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the maiden occasionally turned a leaf, in order to keep up the illusion that she was reading, she might have been a statue, so motionless was her form, and so pallid her face. But she felt that she was perplexing and troubling those who had wounded her, and the consciousness gave secret satisfaction. Her ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... before me. I recognized it as one of those we saw from the Capitol, but it appeared so much smaller when viewed from a greater distance, that I was quite deceived. On considering we were still three-fourths of a mile from it, and that we could see its minutest parts distinctly, the illusion ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... huts, almost within a stone's throw of Tarbet, many of them oval in shape, are like exhalations of rounded stones and heather. We felt, as we gravely looked at them, that we were back again in the Stone Age. In the island of North Ouist we were visited by the same illusion. The landing stage was, indeed, a scene of crowded life; but the life was the life of sea birds, which were hardly disturbed by our approach. Leaving North Ouist, we passed the mounded shores of Benbecula, the island ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy, prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each other the augur's wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together in that light of young omniscience from which fate ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... machines, lay Venerians. Dead they seemed, the illusion intensified by their strangely blue complexions. The two Terrestrians knew, however, that they could readily be restored to life. The great machines they had been operating were humming softly, almost ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... example, in an appeal to the eye, rectangular shape in proportion of three to five, that is to say, three units of measurement wide by five units of measurement long is more likely to attract favorable attention than a square. Similarly, any object in motion or having the illusion of motion, is more likely to attract favorable attention than an object at rest. Black letters upon a white background attract more favorable attention than white letters upon a black background. Many such psychological problems have been worked out. They ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... a single new melody, but substituted instead, sadly mauled and pinched thematic fragments of Liszt, Berlioz, and Beethoven, combined with exaggerated fairy-tales, clothed in showy tinsel and theatrical gauds, the illusion being aided by panoramic scenery; scenery that acted in company with toads, dragons, horses, snakes, crazy valkyrs, mermaids, half-mad humans, gods, demons, dwarfs, and giants. What else is all this ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... which issued from these thousands of crevasses, opening up in every direction, the melting snow mixed with earth and sand, those little mounds whence numerous streamlets were issuing,—all these combined to make the illusion perfect." ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... at Harlowe House. To Grace it seemed as though she had been wafted back once more to the dear dead days when the Sempers had held forth. The presence of Arline and Elfreda was the last touch needed to complete the illusion, and she went about her work feeling happier than she had for a long time. Even the shadow cast upon her heart by Tom's absence seemed ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... Pericles felt of Athens—unique value in her, nothing else mattering; but his theory of politics was Bismarck's. He had one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least. His principles for the peace can be expressed simply. In the first place, he was a foremost believer in the view of German psychology ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... mind corrupted doth present to you this false illusion; But turn awhile unto the spirit of truth in your distress, And it shall cast out from your eyes all horror and confusion, And of this your affliction it ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... He has seen the rouge on the cheeks that seem to blush with the bloom of youth and beauty and innocence, and has caught the cold glint in the eyes that, from the distance, seem to languish with tenderness and love. Why, he asks, should we create an illusion that must thus be rudely dispelled? Why revamp and refurbish the old platitudes and dole them out each succeeding year? Why not tell these young people the truth and let them be prepared for the fate that must come ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... being unpleasant to his gentle listener, whose inclinations, for a few minutes, blinded her to the resolutions already made on principle. So urgent was her suitor, indeed, that she should solemnly plight her faith to him, ere he sailed, that a soft illusion came over the mind of one as affectionate as Mary, and she was half-inclined to believe her previous determination was unjustifiable and obdurate. But the head of one of her high principles, and clear views of ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Illusion! Nothing is gained without some sacrifice; you cannot hold the past and the present in the same hand, the concealed elevator spoke in all the rooms once its presence was betrayed, the telephone talked—everywhere was evident the use of yesterday ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... larynx, together with difficulty in deglutition and speech. After a fruitless search, with instrumental and laryngoscopic aid, the missing teeth were found—in a chest of drawers; the symptoms immediately subsided when the mental illusion was relieved. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and the presence of a prowler on the premises caused his heart to gallop wildly. He seized the pistol, crept to the window and peered cautiously out. Between the crash of the breakers he listened intently and had decided that the steps had been the illusion of a dream when a sound in the room below renewed his alarm. He gained the door in two jumps. He could hear the opening and closing of drawers and see the flash of an electric lamp as the thief moved swiftly about, apparently taking it for granted that he had the house ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... dignity of the youth, assisted by the illusion that prevailed concerning a revolver in his pocket, had kept his foes at bay, and gained him a hearing. He now attempted to pass on, when the man Gad, stepping behind him, raised the broom-handle, and dealt him a stunning blow on ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... insisted on A natural. They argued together over three Steins of beer; the waiter, referred to, decided for A flat. It was a serious matter to have one's teeth set, as one may say, for a natural and then to be shocked with an unexpected half-tone up or down! It destroyed the illusion; it disappointed; it hurt. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of M. Alexandre Ribot, the veteran minister of finance, who, having Verdun before his eyes, told the Chamber of Deputies: "We have reached the decisive hour. We can say without exaggeration, without illusion, and without vain optimism, that we now see the end of this ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... have been an hallucination. He may have accidentally placed the screen so as to favour such an illusion. But what he saw was a bony hand coming round the corner of the screen, and, with a cry, he fell to the ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... fear that, instead of listening to his sermon, I have been roaming amid that Alpine scenery and basking again in the soft moonlight of Venice. I heard you singing, though," she said, when Anna was presented to her, "and it helped to keep up the illusion—it was so like the music heard from a gondola that night, when Mr. Leighton and myself made a voyage through the streets of Venice. Oh, it was so beautiful," and the blue eyes turned to Mr. Leighton for confirmation of what the lips ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... rose and, approaching his offspring, inspected them with the same interest that he would have bestowed upon a wax-works. A certain stiffness of pose combined with the glassy stare which met his gaze helped to favour the illusion. ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... it had accidentally become unclean, and our father Abraham was accustomed to eat his daily bread only in a clean state.[142] Abraham himself served his guests, and it appeared to him that the three men ate. But this was an illusion. In reality the angels did not eat,[143] only Abraham, his three friends, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre, and his son Ishmael partook of the banquet, and the portions set before the angels were devoured ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... drop, or ligament, is entirely an illusion, and, broadly speaking, of an optical origin. Something very similar will be noticed if one brings one's thumb and forefinger slowly together against a very ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... horror, began to see that this must be the very hallucination of which he had read, a sweet illusion of green fields and crystal water, which often precedes actual death by thirst and starvation. He trembled, he prayed secretly to God to spare her, and not to kill his new-found child, his darling, in ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... betraying his surprise; but as he cherished a belief that the souls of all pretty women went to school to the devil before entering upon earthly enterprise, he wondered that he had been open to the illusion of complete ingenuousness in a descendant of one of the oldest and subtlest civilizations of earth. Within that luminous shell of youth there were, no doubt, whispering memories of men and women steeped in court intrigue from birth, of triumphant beauties that ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... prejudice, the result of education and of habit? It has little power, it seems, for it is braved with impunity. Many say that it is a factitious power from which one comes at last to deliver one's self by resisting it. Am I not the dupe of an illusion? I am losing joys which others allow themselves. Barriers encompass me on every hand, for there are for me prohibited actions, unwholesome beauties, culpable feelings. Others are free, and make a larger use of life in all directions. What if I too ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... assured me he had observed five Arab horsemen within a mile of our column: we rode forward, and soon the five shadowy horsemen gave place to five black crows hopping about by the edge of the Suwaicha marsh. But the most curious illusion I have seen in this way was looking towards the Pusht-i-Kuh hills across the marsh from San-i-yat. The foothills, some thirty miles distant, had sometimes the appearance of ending in abrupt white cliffs such as one sees at Dover. The cause of ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... mortgage. The two men came to Paris with the peace. Louvier determined both to seize the Breton lands and to complete the ruin of Duplessis, when he learned from De Mauleon that he had spent half his life in a baseless illusion; that Alain's father was innocent of the crime for which his son was to suffer;—and Victor, with that strange power over men's minds which was so peculiar to him, talked Louvier into mercy if not into repentance. In short, the mortgage is to be paid off by ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the monstrous thought came to her in bed: Supposing I published those poems—I always meant to do it some day. Why haven't I? Because I don't care? Or because I care too much? Because I'm afraid? Afraid that if somebody reads them the illusion they've created ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... Can the illusion be due to the colouring, which is light in the cork and not unlike the tint of the silk globe when soiled with a little earth, while it is white in the paper and the cotton, when it is identical with that of the original pill? I give the Lycosa, in exchange for her work, a ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... layer of the new line—little mounds of earth, stringy with grass. The ease and speed with which the work begins—like all entrenching work in free soil—foster the illusion that it will soon be finished, that we shall be able to sleep in the cavities we have scooped: and ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... mist lifted, and everybody's gaze was directed on Talana Hill, where numbers of men in black mackintoshes could be seen. The general impression was that they were members of the town guard, but the arrival of the first shell soon dispelled this illusion. ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... arrival. I divined that the kind-hearted composer had a motive in this invitation. He thought that in witnessing the applauses bestowed on actors, and sharing in the fascination in which theatrical illusion holds an audience, my old passion for the stage, and with it the longing for an artiste's ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shores was a solid mountain of green on each side, the trees growing down to the water. Here the reflections were so brilliant that the dividing line between shore and water was difficult for the untrained eye to make out. The boys seemed to be gazing upon an optical illusion. From the water's edge the mountains rose sheer to a great height, their distant peaks capped with snow glistening in the morning sunlight, while glacial streams flashed over the open spaces ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... to some temporary defect in Peter's vision, or to some illusion attendant upon mist and moonlight, or perhaps to some other cause, that the whole procession had a certain waving and vapoury character which perplexed and tasked his eyes not a little. It was like the pictured pageant ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... from other edifices. Theological though the subject is, the oratorio is as much a hymn to joy as the Ninth symphony; and there is in it far more of genuine joy, of sheer delight in living. Of the sense of sin—the most cowardly illusion ever invented by a degenerate people—there is no sign; where Bach would have been abased in the dust, Handel is bright, shining, confident, cocksure that all is right with the world. Mingled with the marvellous tenderness of "Comfort ye" there is an odd air of authority, a conviction that ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... herself of his reality. Urged by an uncontrollable impulse, a man thrust his hand through the ground glass of an office door. The glass shivered, and crashed to the tile floor. The pieces broke—silently. It was as though the man had been the figure in a cinematograph illusion. He stared at his cut and bleeding hand. The woman who had touched the man suddenly threw back her head and screamed. They could see her eyes roll back, her face change color, could discern the straining of her throat. No ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... said Vance, "if he were robbed of the Colby illusion and had Black Jack put in its place as a cold fact? But of course we'll never ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Here's another dear illusion Reft away and wholly gone: O the spiritual confusion Of the pained progressive Don! If the facts are quite correct As regards the Architect, Comes the question, plain and clear, ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... that had once been hers. If he had been bewildered before, he was now almost terrified; for there was a light in the room; the window was an orange oblong as of yore; and the corner of the blind was lifted and let fall as on the night when he stood and shouted to the stars in his perplexity. The illusion only endured an instant; but it left him somewhat unmanned, rubbing his eyes and staring at the outline of the house and the black night behind it. While he thus stood, and it seemed as if he must have ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... watched a wonderful golden mist to the southward, where the rays of the declining sun shone through vapour rising from the ice. All normal standards of perspective vanish under such conditions, and the low ridges of the pack, with mist lying between them, gave the illusion of a wilderness of mountain-peaks like the Bernese Oberland. I could not doubt now that the 'Endurance' was confined for the winter. Gentle breezes from the east, south, and south-west did not disturb the hardening floes. The seals ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... new guarantees to rest on. There is something very remarkable in the prominence given to hope in the New Testament, and in the power ascribed to it to order a noble life. Paul goes so far as to say that we are saved by it. To a Christian it is no longer a pleasant dream, which may be all an illusion, indulgence in which is pretty sure to sap a man's force, but it is a certain anticipation of certainties, the effect of which will be increased energy and purity. So our Apostle, having in the preceding context in effect summed up the whole Gospel, bases upon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... When one dropped one's eyes form these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemed to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy distances and its little islands of illusion. All that a great cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the tranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty, the cathedral of Chartres gave ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... English Priesthood risen like a sun, over the waste ruins and extinct volcanoes of his dead Radical world, with promise of new blessedness and healing under its Wings; and this too has soon found itself an illusion: "Not by Priesthood either lies the way, then. Once more, where does the way lie!"—To follow illusions till they burst and vanish is the lot of all new souls who, luckily or lucklessly, are left to their own choice in starting on this Earth. The roads are many; the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... that the thing she had wanted,—a picturesque, cleverly executed restaurant where people could be fed according to the academic ideals of an untried young woman like herself was an unthinkable thing. The power of illusion failed for the moment. Just what was it that she had hoped to accomplish with this fling at executive altruism? What was she doing with a French cook in white uniform, a competent staff of professional dishwashers ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... moved over the table-cloth. The waiters placed before them a chicken with its four limbs stretched out, a stew of eels in a dish of pipe-clay, wine that had got spoiled, bread that was too hard, and knives with notches in them. All these things made the repast more enjoyable and strengthened the illusion. They fancied that they were in the middle of a journey in Italy on their honeymoon. Before starting again they went for a walk along ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Kaner smiled. "But that's part of illusion—the spiel and the misdirection. I'm going to try this cold first, so I can get it moving up and down smoothly, then go through it with the ...
— Toy Shop • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... deny as mere nightmare the Thing which had visited me. Better confront that fact! It was real. Only, real in what sense? What human agency could produce an effect so frightful, an illusion so hideous that I could scarcely bear to recall it here in full daylight, without the use of a sight or sound to ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... in the name of musical comedy; while lovers and sound judges of music are quite as often woefully remiss in their knowledge of stagecraft, accepting scenery and stage management in their opera which would put men less skilled in the creation of theatric illusion than David ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... double, the mythical beings who inhabited the early world being regarded as able to change from animal to human shape, by merely pushing up or pulling down the upper part of the face as a mask. Such masks are often hinged to complete the illusion, the actor ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... might be an illusion; but as I did not think so, I knew not what to do, because I was very much ashamed to go to my confessor about it. It was not, as it seemed to me, because I was humble, but because I thought he would laugh at me, and ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... wheel around it with antic gestures. Max at first bethought him of calling up his brothers; but recollecting the daring character of the youngest, and finding it impossible to wake the elder without also disturbing Martinconceiving also what he saw to be an illusion of the demon, sent perhaps in consequence of the venturous expressions used by Martin on the preceding evening, he thought it best to betake himself to the safeguard of such prayers as he could murmur over, and to watch in great terror and annoyance this ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... laugh as I write this. For she would have it that I was only one more of her infatuated lovers, and that her clouds of glory were purely stage illusion. She knew exactly what she was doing with those wide-open, innocent eyes! Had not old Lady Dee, most cynical of worldlings, taught her how to use them when she was a child in pig-tails? To be sure she had been scared when she stepped off the train, and strange men had shoved cameras under her ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the life of a young Cambridge man who is devoted to Gypsies. The "Athenaeum" reviewer {221b} begs the question by calling the Gypsy dialogues of Hindes Groome, photographic; and is plainly inaccurate in saying that if they are compared with those in "Lavengro" "the illusion in Borrow's narrative is disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers." For Borrow's dialogues do produce an effect of some kind of life; those of Hindes Groome instruct us or pique our curiosity, but unless we know Gypsies, they produce ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... this epistle as a mere illusion of the brain, and a continuation of the reverie in which he had been engaged. He read it ten times over, without being persuaded that he was actually awake. He rubbed his eyes, and shook his head, in order ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... are here treating only of France. But, in order to dispel an illusion of the French public, we may remark that historical pedagogy is still less advanced in English-speaking countries, where the methods used are still mechanical, and even in German-speaking countries, where it is hampered by the conception ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... breathing fanning my cheek, I felt my senses gradually becoming wrapt with a sweet dream, and so quickly did it steal upon me, that in a few moments all the peril of our position was veiled from my mind, and I was reveling in a delightful illusion. I was floating upon an undulating field of ice, in a triumphal car, drawn by snow-white steeds, and in my path glittered a myriad gems of the icy north. My progress seemed to be as quiet as the falling of the snow-flake, and swift as the wind, which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... he could at that moment be brought closely to reconsider this opinion, which, at other moments, when facts are forgotten, raise delightful feelings in his mind, could not but have his eyes open to the fallacy:—the illusion would vanish at once. If baptism were a divinely appointed medium of spiritual good to the minds of infants, then its beneficial tendency must appear in the development of children in Christian countries. If this ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... of the visionary. We are bound to appeal to Paul, and Loyola, and Fox, and Wesley to know what their feelings were, because here they are the supreme authorities. But we must consult others to discover why they experienced these feelings. An illusion is no more than a false interpretation of a real subjective experience; although many are inclined to treat the rejection of the interpretation as equivalent to a charge ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... Their illusion was of short duration. Ayrton's and Gideon Spilett's rifles then spoke, and no doubt imparted some very disagreeable intelligence to two of the ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... mere coincidence that Myra's blindness and the General's strange illusion occurred about this time? Why should this green ray only be ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... rose in the distance with heliotrope-and-purple bounds to stand across the vision and dispel the illusion of the night that the sky came down to the earth all around like a close-fitting dome. There were mountains on all sides, and a slender, dark line of mesquite set off the more delicate ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... poor old gentleman," returned Mrs. Ochiltree, with a simper of senile vanity, though her back was weakening under the strain of the effort to sit erect that she might maintain this illusion of comparative youthfulness. "Bring him to see me some day when he is ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... under the illusion that I was Valmai that I had no occasion to tell a lie, and I only spoke the truth when I told him that I hated him, and that my greatest desire was never to see his face again. He was wounded to the quick. I saw it, I realised it all, and, oh, I felt for him, for there was something open ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... Borrow’s dramatic pictures of gipsy life, wheresoever the scene may be laid. Take his pictures of English gipsies. The reader has only to compare the dialogue between gipsies given in that photographic study of Romany life ‘In Gipsy Tents’ with the dialogues in ‘Lavengro’ to see how the illusion in Borrow’s narrative is disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers. After all allowance is made for the Romany’s love of high-sounding words, it considerably weakens our belief in Mr. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... supernatural. When the indications of the marvellous are addressed to us through the ear, the mind may be startled without being deceived, and reason may succeed in suggesting some probable source of the illusion by which we have been alarmed. But when the eye in solitude sees before it the forms of life, fresh in their colours and vivid in their outline; when distant or departed friends are suddenly presented to its view; when visible bodies disappear and reappear without any intelligible cause; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... out—a short sharp laugh—at the mention of the Salvation Army. But he listened patiently, and at the end even professed to think there might be something in it. As to his own scheme, he dropped all mention of it. Yet Anderson was under no illusion; there it lay sparkling, as it were, at the back ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... &c. Ib p. 1215. Johnson reports the Chancellor as saying:—'It has not been yet pretended that he assumes the title of prime minister, or, indeed, that it is applied to him by any but his enemies ... The first minister can, in my opinion, be nothing more than a formidable illusion, which, when one man thinks he has seen it, he shows to another, as easily frighted as himself,' &c. Johnson's Works, x. 214-15. In his Dictionary, premier is only given as an adjective, and prime minister is not given at all. When ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... brings us back once more to "Values"; and whether our "Values" are values of taste or values of devotion what matter? Life becomes once more arresting. The everlasting Drama recovers its "Tone"; and the high Liturgy of the last Illusion rolls forward to its ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... and windows on the opposite side to the fireplace, reminding one of the port-holes of a ship's cabin, while the chief window looks out on to the old-fashioned garden, giving the beholder altogether a pleasing illusion, carrying him back to the days ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... hospital in my wanderings, I started as some faint resemblance,-the shade of a young man's hair, the outline of his half-turned face,—recalled the presence I was in search of. The face would turn towards me, and the momentary illusion would pass away, but still the fancy clung to me. There was no figure huddled up on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, none toiling languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance, that I did ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lords, which has been the parent of so many terrours, consultations, embassies, and alliances is, I find, not yet to be acknowledged, what it certainly was, a mere phantom, an empty illusion, sent by the arts of the French to terrify our ministry. His late majesty's testimony is cited to prove that stipulations were really entered into by the two powers allied by that treaty, to destroy our trade, subvert our constitution, and set a new king upon ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... town-wall, an expanse of creviced brownness, and pass under a gateway sur- mounted by the arms of a mediaeval despot. Why I should find it a pleasure, in France, to imagine my- self in Italy, is more than I can say; the illusion has never lasted long enough to be analyzed. From the bottom of its perch Poitiers looks large and high; and indeed, the evening I reached it, the interminiable climb of the omnibus of the hotel I ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... think I ever loved you; I was loving a man who didn't exist, an illusion I imagined to be Ed Sorenson, not your real self. If I loved at all, which I now doubt! And you never loved me, though you may think you did and still do. But it's not so; for no man who really loved ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... surroundings was less easy for Selma. Benham, in its rapid growth, had got beyond the level simplicity of Westfield and Wilton, and was already confronted by the stern realities which baffle the original ideal in every American city. We like as a nation to cherish the illusion that extremes of social condition do not exist even in our large communities, and that the plutocrat and the saleslady, the learned professions and the proletariat associate on a common basis of equal virtue, intelligence, and culture. And yet, although Benham was a comparatively young ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... you have never spoken to Miss Vivian." Gordon Wright stood looking at Bernard and urging his point as he pronounced these words. Bernard felt peculiarly conscious of his gaze. The words represented an illusion, and Longueville asked himself quickly whether it were not his duty to dispel it. The answer came more slowly than the question, but still it came, in the shape of a negative. The illusion was but a trifling one, and ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... who should not be worshipped thus—a god who was not the object of adoration—would not be worthy of the name, and would hardly be called a god. So strongly is this felt that even writers who incline to regard religion as an illusion, define gods as beings conceived to be superior to man. The degree of respect, rising to adoration, will vary directly with the degree of superiority attributed to them; but not even in the case of a fetish, so long as it is worshipped, is the respect, which is the ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... sure (For so I can distinguish by mine Art) Benighted in these Woods. Now to my charms, 150 And to my wily trains, I shall e're long Be well stock't with as fair a herd as graz'd About my Mother Circe. Thus I hurl My dazling Spells into the spungy ayr, Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion, And give it false presentments, lest the place And my quaint habits breed astonishment, And put the Damsel to suspicious flight, Which must not be, for that's against my course; I under fair pretence of friendly ends, 160 And ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... successful, happy; I'm absolutely perfect; no one else In all the world can be compared to me. Now will I offer up a sacrifice, Give gifts with lavish hand, and be triumphant." Such men, befooled by endless vain conceits, Caught in the meshes of the world's illusion, Immersed in sensuality, descend Down to the ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... however, the theological and metaphysical conceptions, in their application to sociology, had reference not to the production of phaenomena, but to the rule of duty, and conduct in life. It is this which was based, either on a divine will, or on abstract mental conceptions, which, by an illusion of the rational faculty, were invested with objective validity. On the one hand, the established rules of morality were everywhere referred to a divine origin. In the majority of countries the entire civil and criminal law was looked upon as revealed from above; and it is to the ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... States. It strikes a deadly blow at the vital principle of the whole Union. To allow State resistance to the laws of Congress to be rightful and proper, to admit nullification in some States, and yet not expect to see a dismemberment of the entire government, appears to me the wildest illusion, and the most extravagant folly. The gentleman seems not conscious of the direction or the rapidity of his own course. The current of his opinions sweeps him along, he knows not whither. To begin with nullification, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... another variety of effrontery that is comparable to the form of courage exhibited by the timorous who sing in a loud voice in order to lessen their terror and imagine that by so doing they give the illusion of bravery. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... impression grew on me—now came, at last, horror—horror to a degree that no words can convey. Still I retained pride, if not courage; and in my own mind I said: "This is horror, but it is not fear; unless I fear I can not be harmed; my reason rejects this thing; it is an illusion—I do not fear." With a violent effort I succeeded at last in stretching out my hand toward the weapon on the table: as I did so, on the arm and shoulder I received a strange shock, and my arm fell to my side powerless. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... multitude the glorious soprano voice of Mrs. Jones. So far above, yet so thrillingly sweet and distinct, one could scarcely refrain from imagining that the Pearly Gates had opened, and we were listening to the voice of one of the Redeemed. But that illusion was soon dispelled, and we recognized the familiar strains of "Star Spangled Banner." And when the whole hundred voices swelled the splendid chorus, a great shout arose from the multitude like the sound of many waters, beginning directly beneath the globe, and spreading ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... setting the criterion of efficiency. He spoke of the cause for which he was fighting as if this were the great thing of all to him and to every man under him, but without allowing his feelings to interfere with his judgment of the enemy. His opponent was seen without illusion, as soldier sees soldier. To him his problem was not one of sentiment, but of military power. He dealt in blows; and blows alone could win ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand as before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon close approach one saw that each ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... primitive Church, whether Nazarene or Pauline; which Jesus is made to prophesy, over and over again, in the Synoptic gospels; and which dominated the life of Christians during the first century after the crucifixion;—if he believed and taught that, then assuredly he was under an illusion, and he is responsible for that which the mere effluxion of time has demonstrated to ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... interest in the study of physiology, and during my college course conducted a series of experiments in hypnotism, and made some interesting discoveries regarding the exaltation of the senses, and especially in relation to illusion and hallucination by the aid ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... among Christians; he would dissemble among Jews, aping the ancient apes. He foresaw no difficulty in the recantation. And—famous idea!—his brother Joseph, poor, dear fool, should bring it about under the illusion that he was the instrument of Providence: for to employ Dom Diego as go-between were to risk the scenting of his real motive. Then, when the Synagogue had taken him to its sanctimonious arms, Ianthe—overwhelming ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... eyes; he reflected what a nice house, what a bonny wife and rosy children he had, and how warm the cloak which he had thrown over him was, and how well off were both man and beast; and through the still night he drove along, and beside him sat a spirit; but not an illusion of the brain, such as in olden time men conjured up to their terror, a good spirit sat beside him—beside the woodman who his whole life long had never believed that anything could have power over him but ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... glens—cabarfeidh stags, hinds, and prancing roes. At night we could hear them bellowing and snorting as they went up and down the street in herds from Ben Bhrec or the barren sides of the Black Mount and Dalness in the land of Bredalbane, seeking the shore and the travellers' illusion—the content that's always to come. In those hours, too, the owls seemed to surrender the fir-woods and come to the junipers about the back-doors, for they keened in the darkness, even on, woeful warders of the night, telling the ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... heart sink within her; but she forced herself to smile. All that Varhely had said to her returned to her mind. Yes, Zilah had staked his very existence upon her love. To drag aside the veil from his illusion would be like tearing away the bandages from a wound. Decidedly, the resolution she had taken was the best one—to say nothing, but, in the black silence of suicide, which would be at once a deliverance and a punishment, to disappear, leaving to ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... is an ordinary two-storey frame house. After it was built, the criminal that constructed it nailed on, at the corners perpendicularly, some two-inch fluted planks. These planks rise the height of the house, and to a drunken man have the appearance of fluted columns. To complete the illusion in the eyes of the drunken man, the planks are topped with wooden Ionic capitals, nailed on, and in, I ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... and grim in its disorder and dirt. My thought centered on that picture of Judge Henley hanging against the further wall. Perhaps it had not moved; the supposition that it did might have been an illusion, produced by some flaw in the mirror opposite, or by a freak of imagination. Yet I could never be satisfied until I learned absolutely what was concealed behind that heavy gilded frame. There was mystery to this house, and perhaps here ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... Church exalted herself over all other religions "as high as the heaven is exalted over the earth." The other races and religions thought that behind this proud criticism of Christian Europe there must be at least a well-possessed security for the world-peace. Of course it was an illusion. On no continent was the peace of mankind more endangered than in Europe, the very metropolis of Christianity and Christian civilisation. And it has been so not only during the last few years, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... head with love's purest halo. The command, "Preserve yourself for others besides your dying friend," yet throbbed at his heart; and with ten thousand rapturous visions flitting before his sight, he trod in air, until the humble door of his melancholy home presenting itself, at once wrecked the illusion, and offered sad reality in the person of ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... plays, watching with hateful, sardonic amusement the light and shadow of emotion upon her dirty face. Oh, he was a magician, no doubt at all of that! Past master in the rare art of a true genius, that of producing illusion. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... of such a view might of course have an identity with one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated there, already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence, for Milly's beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with. There were things she would never recognise, never feel, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... met by me at their residences in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe or at the receptions of the United States minister. These fair attractions, although occupying, in practice, a preponderating share of my time, are as nothing to me, however, in comparison with that enticing illusion, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... tell you the truth, I inferred, from the dimensions of the books and your white cravat, that you were a clergyman." Marcus might have added, that the old gentleman's flowing white locks and benevolent features had contributed to the illusion; but he had already discovered that Mr. Van Quintem, like himself, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the fin de siecle scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation, erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in part also from ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... horror of that pale tobacco which gives a barber of the Rue de la Michodiere the illusion of oriental voluptuousness. But, in their way, these musk-scented cigarettes were not bad, and it was a long time since I had used ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... you didn't come to Thirion's to see me? How one may deceive oneself! The highest hopes we cherish here! Another beautiful illusion gone!" ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... him if he had hidden his shame in the country that had witnessed it. Probably his sense of pride and respectability is offended more than his love of virtue, though he characteristically gives his jealous anger the illusion of morality. This, I say, is the average social view. There are few things more cruel than affronted respectability. The elder brother is an eminently respectable person, totally unacquainted with wayward passions, and his only feeling for his ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... curious phenomenon presented by men in evident possession of their faculties who relied for the dispersion of human care on means invisible and mystic. The fact that in this case he himself had appealed to the illusion rendered the working of it none the less astonishing. His own method for the dispersion of human care—and the project was dear to him—was by dollars and cents. It was, moreover, a method as to which there was no trouble ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... resided in the simple plea that the book was exquisite. I had said: "Come, my dear friend, be original; just risk it for that!" My dear friend seemed to rise to the chance, and I followed up my advantage, permitting him honestly no illusion as to the quality of the work. He clutched interrogatively at two or three attenuations, but I dashed them aside, leaving him face to face with the formidable truth. It was just a pure gem: was he the man not to flinch? His danger appeared to have acted ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... gentle listener, whose inclinations, for a few minutes, blinded her to the resolutions already made on principle. So urgent was her suitor, indeed, that she should solemnly plight her faith to him, ere he sailed, that a soft illusion came over the mind of one as affectionate as Mary, and she was half-inclined to believe her previous determination was unjustifiable and obdurate. But the head of one of her high principles, and clear views of duty, could not long be deceived by her heart, ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... forenoon, and stopped on his way home, at the corner of Princes Street, in one of our seasonable east winds, to talk with an old friend. The same evening acute bronchitis declared itself; from the first, Dr. M'Combie anticipated a fatal result, and the old gentleman appeared to have no illusion as to his own state. He repeatedly assured me it was 'by' with him now; 'and high time too,' he once added with characteristic asperity. He was not in the least changed on the approach of death: only (what I am sure must be very grateful to your feelings) he seemed to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... To keep up the illusion that Aix-les-Bains is a part of the Riviera, there is a Rumpelmayer cake-shop within two minutes' walk of ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... the very first that the dramatic poet should assume to render the spectators unconscious of theatrical artifice, and make them take part with the actors; and he banished from the scene everything that could diminish their illusion; he would not mar the intensity of the effect by changing the action from place to place, or by compressing within the brief time of the representation the events of months and years. To achieve the unity of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the common stories of phantoms by attributing them to ocular illusion, aided or not aided by the imagination or by particular conditions of the bodily or mental health. The eye, of course, is never quite proof against deception, but there needs some little material for it; and in my case there was absolutely none—no waving sheet or trees or clouds, nothing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... too wonderful to be believed—too much like a happy dream to have the stable feeling of reality—She extricated herself from his close and affectionate embrace, and held him at arm's length, to satisfy her mind that it was no illusion. But the form was indisputable—Douce David Deans himself, in his best light-blue Sunday's coat, with broad metal buttons, and waistcoat and breeches of the same, his strong gramashes or leggins of thick ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... walk, seeking to see, hear, feel, everything newly, I devise secret words for the things I see: words that convey to me alone the thought, or impression, or emotion of a peculiar spot. All this, I know, to some will seem the acme of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... outrageous piece of petty finance on high models, and it euchred Eddie out of everything he had in the world except his illusion that Jabez was working for the good ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... said, "let me say parenthetically that I think our foreign trips will have a far greater vraisemblance if we heighten the illusion with a few photographs, don't you? They cost about a quarter apiece ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... them to a venerable creature of sixteen, who delivered them to me with such paternal directions, that it only needed a pat on the head and an encouraging—"Now run home to your Ma, little girl, and mind the crossings, my dear," to make the illusion quite perfect. ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... valleys lost to the vision which leapt only from summit to summit. In the clear air the peaks themselves seemed not a dozen miles away, but Y.D. had not ridden cactus, sagebrush and prairie from the Rio Grande to the St. Mary's for twenty years to be deceived by a so transparent illusion. Far over the plains his eye could trace the dark outline of ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... and about France and circling round Paris I found myself wondering sometimes whether all this war had not been a dreadful illusion without reality, and a transformation had taken place, startling in its change, from military ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... which can only be stupid, sterile and false, for the very reason that they are principles, that is to say, ideas which are considered as certain and unchangeable, in this world where one is certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... wood, goe swifter then the winde, And Helena of Athens looke thou finde. All fancy sicke she is, and pale of cheere, With sighes of loue, that costs the fresh bloud deare. By some illusion see thou bring her heere, Ile charme his eyes against ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... everyone flocked into a queer kind of semi-underground hall whose walls were painted to represent a cave, dingy cork festoons and "rocks" adding to the illusion. Here, at long tables, everyone drank innocuous French beer, that was really quite cool and good. It was rather like part of an English bank holiday. Everybody spoke to everybody else, and there were no classes and distinctions. ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... such an application of the laws of suggestion to religious experience, we shall reduce religion itself to a mere favourable subjectivism, and identify faith with suggestibility. But here the bearing of this series of facts on bodily health provides us with a useful analogy. Bodily health is no illusion. It does not consist in merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condition of well-being and of power; depending on the state of our tissues and correct balance and working of our physical and psychical life. And this correct and wholesome ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... bunch of nuts. Don't you know they are so damn conceited that if you were to tell them that every time you look at a German you see two men, they would believe you; and then as if they hated to lie to themselves, they would say perhaps it was an optical illusion. Tell them that God did not create anyone but the Germans and that he left the rest of the world to the students in his office, and they will give you a smile of assent." Edestone smiled indulgently. "Tell them that when ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... spread her toys on it. She wore her hair cut in the Dutch fashion, and sometimes at the end of the day, as I sat by the waning embers and watched her moving to and fro between me and the fading autumn fields, I had the most precious twilight illusion of having stepped backward ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... had searched the secret crevices of the mind, and had aided the iridescent foam seen from the harbour, looked tawdry and vulgar, like a circus on a rainy morning. Even the theatres, with their sign-borne superlatives, were garish and illusion-shattering. There was almost an apologetic air about the bill-boards proclaiming their nightly offering to be ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... From the beginning of his misfortunes until he is again sailing for England, after nearly thirty years of captivity, he holds us spellbound by the reality, the simplicity, and the pathos of his narrative; but, far beyond the temporary illusion of the modern novel, everything remains real: the shipwrecked mariner spins his yarns in sailor fashion, and we believe and feel every word he says. The book, although wonderfully good throughout, is unequal: the prime interest only lasts until he is rescued, and ends with his embarkation ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... shattered my last illusion. I looked back upon the time I had spent there, upon the despair that had beset me when the music ceased, upon the joy that had been mine when again I heard it, accepting it always as a sign of grace. And it was as he said. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Toryism, might fill himself with the fond belief that this increase in the Conservative vote foretold a gradual return to the good old days. But Peel was too practical a statesman to be touched for a moment by any such illusion. He had fully expected some increase in the Tory vote. He knew, as well as anybody could know, that there had been some disappointment among the more advanced and impatient reformers all over the country with the achievements of the first reformed ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... streets, and one who walks there in the still mid-day feels that all this completion of architecture, these walls, perfect in every stone, may be an enchanted vision, a mirage; he more than half believes that the cool of the sunset will dispel the illusion, and he will find himself on a pleasant little hill of Languedoc, looking down upon the commonplace "Lower ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... ruins of Hadrian's Villa, I tried to picture the villa as it was when its first owner walked among the buildings which his whim had created. The moment Hadrian himself appeared upon the scene, antiquity seemed an illusion. How ultra-modern he was, this man whom his contemporaries called "a searcher out of strange things"! These ruins could not by the mere process of time become venerable, for they were in their very ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... we visited the cathedral to hear the celebrated organ. The organist performed a piece descriptive of a storm. We resigned ourselves to the illusion. Low, mysterious wailings, swelling, dying away in the distance, seeming at first exceedingly remote, drew gradually near. Fitful sighings and sobbings rose, as of gusts of wind; then low, smothered roarings. Anon came flashes of lightning, rattling hail, and driving rain, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... justifications of trade unionism. To secure for the workers advances of wages, which economic conditions justify, sooner than would otherwise have been obtained, is certainly no trivial or contemptible function. But it is none the less an illusion to suppose that the general wage-level can be appreciably and permanently raised by trade union action, except in so far as it increases the efficiency of the workers or incidentally stimulates ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... indicated some new eruption of the great volcano of Lancerota; for we recollected that Bouguer and La Condamine, in scaling the volcano of Pichincha, were witnesses of the eruption of Cotopaxi. But the illusion soon ceased, and we found that the luminous points were the images of several stars magnified by the vapours. These images remained motionless at intervals, they then seemed to rise perpendicularly, descended sideways, and ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... catch! Passe, how? Well, maybe so; not as much as he makes himself out, though." "Passe, yes," said a merciless belle to a blade of her own years; "a man of strong sense is passe at any age." Sister Jane's name was mentioned in the same connection, but that illusion quickly passed. The cousins denied indignantly that he had any matrimonial intention. Somebody dissipated the rumor by a syllogism: "A man hunting a second wife always looks like a fool; the Doctor doesn't look a bit like ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... other mythical heroes was a large alcove, or tokonoma, decorated with peacock, stork, and crane panels. Carvings and lacquer added to the beauty of it. A miniature chrysanthemum garden heightened the illusion. Carved hinoki wood framed the panels, and the roof was supported by columns in the old Japanese style, the whole being a compromise between the very simple and quiet and the polychromatic. The dark woods, the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... down, Calliope, from above: Breathe on the pipe a strain of fire; Or if a graver note thou love, With Phoebus' cittern and his lyre. You hear her? or is this the play Of fond illusion? Hark! meseems Through gardens of the good I stray, 'Mid murmuring gales and purling streams. Me, as I lay on Vultur's steep, A truant past Apulia's bound, O'ertired, poor child, with play and sleep, With living green the stock-doves crown'd— A legend, nay, a miracle, By Acherontia's ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... explained the Shaggy Man, "is what is called an optical illusion. It is quite real while you have your eyes open, but if you are not looking at it the barrier doesn't exist at all. It's the same way with many other evils in life; they seem to exist, and yet it's all seeming and not true. You will notice that the wall—or what we thought was a wall—separates ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... could have filled his place as agent of the colonies: no other had his sagacity, his experience, his wisdom, his address. He was not of that class of diplomatists who surround every subject they handle with a tissue of illusion or falsehood; Franklin was always honest and undisguised in his transactions; so that what was long afterward said of a lesser man was true of him: "Whatever record spring to light, he never will be shamed." No service rendered by him to his country was more ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... steps. The way thither from the little city of Capri leads through narrow lanes along a stony but populous hill-side, to which the flat-roofed dazzling white houses with their small iron-barred windows lend an oriental aspect; an illusion that is aided by the appearance of an occasional date-palm over-topping some low wall, and by clumps or hedges of the prickly pear. This latter plant, of Indian extraction as its name of Ficus Indica ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... conviction. If you will turn to page 209 of this book you will see it said of the denial of the Sacrament by the Reformers and of Ridley's dogma that it was bread only "the commonsense of the country was of the same opinion, and illusion was at an end." Froude knew that the illusion was not at an end. He probably knew (for we must continue to repeat that he was a most excellent historian) that the "commonsense of the country" was, by the time Ridley ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... of a later age,—and Beattie, and Campbell, and the British poets, and dramatic writers, were always at hand, when he had nothing better to do, with no seals to cut, no ciphers, no razor-strops, no stoves, and no clients. Over that field of enchantment and illusion he wandered with lifted wings, month after month, and year ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... not above making use of any aids to create that illusion. Well, as I was saying, what guide-book ever really helped anyone to see?—that's what one travels for, I take it. Here, for instance, Murray or Baedeker would give you this sort of thing: 'Honfleur, an ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... as he thought of this marvellous system, it presented itself to him in such an aspect of almost comical absurdity that he was forced to laugh and to wonder whether it really existed at all, or if it were only an illusion of his own ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... more interesting every day, as experience and science drive us more and more to consider them favorably. In considering them, we shall waste our time unless we give them a reasonable construction. We must assume that the man who saw his way through such a mass of popular passion and illusion as stands between us and a sense of the value of such teaching was quite aware of all the objections that occur to an average stockbroker in the first five minutes. It is true that the world is governed to a considerable extent by the considerations that occur to stockbrokers ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... struck me as from a field of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking corridor. As I turned into the common passage, a white figure, holding a lamp, stood full before me. I thought at first it was one of those images made to stand in niches and hold a light in their hands. But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes speedily recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to see that the figure was a breathing one. It was Iris, in one of her statue-trances. She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I knew ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... moment it seemed to Lorand as if both were laughing—the face of the dead and the face of Death, but it was only for a moment; and perhaps, too, that was merely an illusion. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... and he raged within himself. How could he have been so gauche, so clumsy and unlike himself. He had punished them both, and destroyed an illusion. He meant that she should picture herself and him as married lovers, and she had only seen—Josiah Brown. They both fell into silence and ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... was here, and the world's confusion, And the dust of the wheels of revolving life, Pain, labour, change, and the fierce illusion Of strife more vain than the sea's old strife. And her heart within her was vexed, and dizzy The sense of her soul as a wheel that whirled: She might not endure for a space that busy Loud coil ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... exactly what he wanted. Lifting the dish, he drained it at a gasp, though the milk almost choked him, and, to the apprehension of his hostess, set the bowl spinning on the table like a top. Another illusion of the disease was his: that he succeeded perfectly in deceiving everybody round him with his pathetic make-believe; and, unlike most deceivers, he deceived himself as well. The two actions, inconsistent as they were, were reconciled in him, as in all the race ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... exegesis of the biblical texts. Fausto Sozini thought Christ was "a subaltern God to whom at a certain time the Supreme God gave over the government of the world." Servetus defined the Trinity to be "not an illusion of three invisible things, but the manifestation of God {627} in the Word and a communication of the substance of God in the Spirit." This is no new rationalism coming in but a reversion to an obsolete heresy, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... last and up to the present the least imitated of Bely's novels, is the story of a child in his very first years. In it the "poetical" methods of the author reach their full development; but at the same time he achieves miracles of vividness and illusion in the realism of his dialogue and the minute, but by no means dry, analysis of the movements of his hero's subconscious Ego. In spite of the enormous difference of style, methods, and aims Bely approaches in many ways ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... quite another matter. Democracy, even Social-Democracy, though as hostile to British Junkers as to German ones, and under no illusion as to the obsolescence and colossal stupidity of modern war, need not lack enthusiasm for the combat, which may serve their own ends better than those of their political opponents. For Bernhardi the Brilliant and our own very dull Militarists are alike mad: the war will not do any ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... been found excellent, when the state was small and poor, did not answer now that it had become great and splendid. The freedom of the city, and the title and privileges of a Roman citizen had been very widely extended; they were therefore become an illusion, and a very dangerous one for the public weal; they served as a foundation for cabal and intrigue ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... harmless fancy, and was not, I think, altogether rejected by the old people. A certain large, patriarchal, bountiful manner, of late visible in Daddy, and the increase of much white hair and beard, kept up the poetic illusion, while Mammy, day by day, grew more and more like somebody's fairy godmother. An attempt was made by a rival camp to emulate these paying virtues of reverence, and an aged mariner was procured from the Sailor's ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Correspondence with George Sand. It extols the "objective" as against the psychological method of novel-writing, but directs itself most strongly against the older romance of plot, and places the excellence of the novelist in the complete and vivid projection of that novelist's own particular "illusion" of the world, yet so as to present events and characters in the most actual manner. But, as promised, we shall ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... a cry of joy, and hastened his steps, as though he had, in that moment, regained all his lost vigor. But it was a brief illusion. His forces suddenly abandoned him, and he fell upon the brink of a ditch, exhausted. But his heart was beating with content. The heaven, thickly sown with the most brilliant stars, had never seemed so beautiful ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... natural science. The facts of natural science itself indeed cannot be comprehended by means of those methods of knowledge which so many people would like to employ to the exclusion of others, under the illusion that they stand on the firm ground of natural science. It is only when we are prepared to admit that a full appreciation of our present admirable knowledge of nature is compatible with genuine mysticism, that we can take the contents of this book ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... blessings! With you happiness entered into my destiny. You were the dawn announcing a glorious sunrise, the prelude to the melodies which, since yesterday, swell in my bosom. If I take pleasure in recognising your gentle influence in the secret delight that pervades my being, do not deprive me of the illusion. I believe, with my mother, in mysterious influences. I believe that, as there are miserable beings who, unwittingly, drag misfortune after them and sow it over their pathway, there are others, on the other hand, ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... spluttered, flinging it in the other's face. And instantly he turned round towards the girl. She stood just behind him, perfectly still and silent. Her set, white face gave an illusion of placidity. Only her staring eyes ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... me,—now came, at last, horror, horror to a degree that no words can convey. Still I retained pride, if not courage; and in my own mind I said, "This is horror; but it is not fear; unless I fear I cannot be harmed; my reason rejects this thing; it is an illusion,—I do not fear." With a violent effort I succeeded at last in stretching out my hand toward the weapon on the table; as I did so, on the arm and shoulder I received a strange shock, and my arm fell to my side powerless. And now, to add to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Despairless! like that Indian wise Free of desire, save no desire to know. To gain that sweet Nirvana each one tries, Thinks to assuage soul-wearing passion so. From the white rest, the ante-natal bliss, Not loth, the wondrous wondering soul awakes; Now drawn to that illusion, now to this, With gathering strength each devious pathway takes; Till at the noon of life his aims decline; Evermore earthward bend the tiring eyes, Evermore earthward, till with no surprise They see Nirvana from Earth's bosom shine. The still kind mother holds ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... the "Gold-bug," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget," the latter, a recital of fact, demonstrating the author's wonderful capability of correctly analyzing the mysteries of the human mind; such tales of illusion and banter as "The Premature Burial" and "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether"; such bits of extravaganza as "The Devil in the Belfry" and "The Angel of the Odd"; such tales of adventure as "The Narrative ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... perusal of the writings of the schools of thought in question will show that this is not the case. The foundation of the whole system is that all desire must be obliterated, the desire for the good just as much as the desire for the evil. The good is as much "illusion" as the evil, and until we have reached absolute indifference to both we have not attained freedom. When we have utterly crushed out all desire we are free. And the practical results of such a philosophy are shown in the case of Indian devotees, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... by degrees, stared in stupefaction at the scene, as if he thought it an illusion raised by some fiendish incantation. Bathsheba, pallid as a corpse on end, gazed back at him ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... brilliant white. I cannot express their vague, yet vast and intense splendor, by any other word than incandescence. It was as if the sky had suddenly grown white-hot in patches. When we first looked, we thought St. Helen's an illusion,—an aurora, or a purer kind of cloud. Presently we detected the luminous chromatic border,—a band of refracted light with a predominant orange-tint, which outlines the higher snow-peaks seen at long range,—traced it down, and grasped the entire conception of the mighty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... 1798-'99. If, however, any such hope may have been entertained, but few moons had filled and waned before the defiant occupation of her territory and the enrollment of her citizens as soldiers in the army of invasion must have dispelled the illusion. ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... being. Though greatly shocked, my first act was to look in every direction for a possible reflection—but in vain. There was no light either without or within, other than that from the setting sun—nothing that could in any way have produced an illusion. I looked at the face and marked each feature intently. It was unmistakably a wolf's face, the jaws slightly distended; the lips wreathed in a savage snarl; the teeth sharp and white; the eyes light green; the ears pointed. The expression ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... by one at least, and praised in terms that thrilled through and through the mother's heart in their truth and simplicity, for that sincerity, generosity, and unselfishness. It was her own daughter, her real Rachel, no illusion, that she heard described in those grave earnest words, only while the whole world saw the errors and exaggerated them, here was one who sank them all in the sterling worth that so few would recognise. The dear ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which was uncommonly bright now colored them all with silver, and Dick, with his imaginative mind, easily turned them into a train of the knights of old, clad in glittering mail. They created such a sense of illusion and distance, time as well as space, that the peace of the moment was not disturbed. It was a spectacle out of the ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... having loosened the chains, so as to let their bights fall into the sea, the ship slowly drifted astern, and rode by her cables. When this was done, the two young men stood together in silence on the forecastle, as if each felt that all which had just occurred was some illusion. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... that he could establish was a Canterbury gallop with the hind legs, in which those more forward assisted for doubtful moments, though generally content to maintain a loping trot. Perhaps the rapidity of the changes from one of these paces to the other created an optical illusion, which might thus magnify the powers of the beast; for it is certain that Heyward, who possessed a true eye for the merits of a horse, was unable, with his utmost ingenuity, to decide by what sort of movement his pursuer worked his sinuous way on his footsteps ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the lady in white, with cherry-velvet bands, and a white tunic looped with crimson, and headdress of white illusion, a la vierge, I think they ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... a speaking-tube. Whenever the speaking-tube was used from another part of the building, the summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that—for deliverance from one impending disaster simply ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... but he could not leave. He stood and looked around him in this old workroom, filled with shade and with peace, and it seemed to him as if he were being driven from Paradise. He had spent so many sweet hours there in the illusion of his brightest fancies, that it was like tearing his very heart-strings to think all this was at an end. What troubled him the worst was his inability to explain matters, and that he could only take with him such a fearful uncertainty. At last he said ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... be an immense stretch of credulity. The chances would be millions to one against two persons, neither of whom, before or after, experienced sensorial illusions, becoming the subject of one, and seemingly the same illusion at the same moment—the two hallucinations coinciding in point of time with an event which they served, in the mind of one of the parties at least, to foreshadow. I prefer supposing that the event so communicated really had to do with, and was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... no account before the car stops. Nothing is left to chance or muddle in Berlin, and unless you are a born fool you cannot go astray. If you are a born fool you ask a policeman, as you would at home, and find another dear illusion shattered. He does not draw his sword, he is neither gruff nor disobliging. He greets you with the military salute, and calls you gracious lady. Then he answers your question if he can. If not he gets out ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... which were mingled wild grasses, plantain, pimpernel, groundsel, and myriads of tiny stems and heads. In the middle, fenced off with boards, was a bed of artichokes, strawberries, and pumpkins, looking like the garden of some squatter at the edge of a virgin forest; and, to complete the illusion, beside it was ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... appearance when I went. My husband was to come later. I found Emelie already there; she was beautiful, and looked most elegant. They placed me beside her; a looking-glass was before us, on which I threw stolen glances, and saw opposite to me—a shadow! I thought at first it was some illusion, and looked again: but again it revealed unmercifully to me a pale ghost beside the beautiful and dazzling Emelie. 'It is all over, irremediably over,' thought I, 'with my youth and my bloom! But if my husband and children only ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... who shall satisfy us with his love, and defend us with his power, and be our all-sufficient satisfaction and our rest in weariness, then much of man's noblest nature is a mistake, and many of his purest and profoundest hopes are an illusion, a mockery, and a snare. The obstinate hope that, within the limits of humanity, we shall find what we need is a mystery, except on one hypothesis, that it, too, belongs to 'the unconscious prophecies' that God has lodged in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... astonishment that I had to set my teeth so as not to laugh outright. His cautious advance to investigate the phenomenon was still more ludicrous, and I was quite relieved when our cousin straightened his back and dissipated an illusion monstrously worthy of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... down to supper that night, Raven was reading his paper by the fire. He glanced up as if she came in so every night, Nan thought. She liked that. But she was a little awkward, conscious of her masquerade and so really adding to the illusion of girlhood, ill used to its own charm. Raven threw down ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... costliness of his furniture, he observes, "they encompass me with an air of respectability, and they give me the illusion of not having fallen into the lowest circumstances. I must also declare that I will die like a gentleman, on a clean bed, surrounded by the Venus's, Apollo's, and the Graces, and the busts of great men; nay, even among flowers, and, if possible, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... of self-appointed apostles who are eager to answer his question in many strange and inconsistent ways, calculated to increase rather than resolve the obscurity of his mind. He will learn that mysticism is a philosophy, an illusion, a kind of religion, a disease; that it means having visions, performing conjuring tricks, leading an idle, dreamy, and selfish life, neglecting one's business, wallowing in vague spiritual emotions, and being "in tune with the infinite." He will discover that it emancipates ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... next landing he looked closer. It was not unlike a monster bowl of bubbles; the same illusion of movement, the same delicacy and witchery of colour, only here the sensation was not that of decomposition but of life; of flowers, delicate as the rainbow, tenuous, sinuous, breathing—weaving in a serpentine maze of daedalian hues; long tendrils of ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... surprise. He had always known her to be kind and gentle, and what the old people called "mannersome," to every living body that came near her. But to hear her put, better than he could put them, his own budding sentiments (which he thought to be new, with the timeworn illusion of young Liberals), and to know from her bright cheeks, and brighter eyes, that her heart was in every word of it, and to feel himself rebuked for the evil he had thought, and the mischief he had given ear to—all this was enough to make him angry with himself, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Nativity theme in the Towneley manuscript) is one of the most notable plays, but is very coarse. Subjects for discussion: 1. Narrative structure and qualities. 2. Characterization and motivation. 3. How much illusion of reality? 4. Quality of the religious and human feeling? 5. The humor and its relation to religious feeling. 6. Literary excellence of both substance and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... heeded the wounded soldier, the stretcher-bearers would go on open ground. This he frequently does, if he is at all able to get on without aid; once hit he thinks himself invulnerable—a singular illusion which has brought about many catastrophes. At the first dressing-station and at the front hospital, relief begins. In ordinary times, this will be quite complete, and the wounded will not be carried to the rear until ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... manner. Upon others she continually frowns. All their efforts uniformly bring back a plentiful harvest of disappointment. Their labour is ever in vain, they are left to languish in misery and to repine over the illusion which tempted them with a feigned promise of success ever nearer and ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... of Gotama Buddha, was simply matter, or illusion, from which its higher manifestation, mind or spirit, was emerging. She was also the mother of Mercury. A clearer knowledge of the philosophical doctrines which were elaborated at a time when Nature-worship ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... one else, on your fair head. Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... peril. These men might have, seen others fall by the hundreds, but their faith was in the command, their law its law. Peter saw that they were in a sense like men parading through city streets, who endure the eyes of the crowds because they are part of a line. It was the eternal illusion of numbers again—the elbow brush, the heat, the breath, the muttering of men—this atmosphere that the military machine breathed. Standing alone, most of them would have fallen ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
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