"Bubble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thousands of feet into the air, and, as suddenly as it rose, fell again, rising again to about half the height, and then disappearing. There was then a great column of steam rising from the crater, and probably, so Debenham asserts, it was not a flame which appeared, but the reflection from a big bubble breaking in the crater. Afterwards the smoke cloud stretched away southwards, and we could not ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... of the material universe. Man was more than a match for nature. It was all for him, and not for itself. His enormous egotism, or hold upon the central thought or instinct of human worth and import, was an anchor that never gave way. Science sees man as the ephemeron of an hour, an iridescent bubble on a seething, whirling torrent, an accident in a world of incalculable and clashing forces. Whitman sees him as inevitable and as immortal as God himself. Indeed, he is quite as egotistical and anthropomorphic, though in an ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... prudence kept the party from committing itself openly to Burr, but its vote was cast for him. Burr carried his old stronghold, New York City, but he was beaten elsewhere in the State. The hopes of the Federalists were shattered; the conspirators were confounded; and the bubble of ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... is all a bubble, a mere court artifice to procure money, is evident (at least to me) in every character in which it can be viewed. It would be impossible, on the rational system of representative government, to make out a bill of expenses to such an enormous ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... the philosopher, "the making of a balloon is almost as easy as making a soap-bubble. Any air-tight bag, filled with heated atmosphere, becomes a balloon. The question is, what weight it can be made to carry—including the materials out of which it ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Steinheil, the celebrated optician of Munich. The principle was discovered by the immortal Newton, and it shows how much can be made of the ordinary phenomena seen in our every-day life when placed in the hands of the investigator. We have all seen the beautiful play of colors on the soap bubble, or when the drop of oil spreads over the surface of the water. Place a lens of long curvature on a piece of plane polished glass, and, looking at it obliquely, a black central spot is seen with rings of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... believed his old-time Grande Pointe schoolmaster would have offered could Bonaventure ever have so shamefully forgotten himself. Yet the chagrin of having at once so violently and so impotently belittled himself added one sting more to his fate. He was in despair. An escaped balloon, a burst bubble, could hardly have seemed more utterly beyond his reach than now did Marguerite. And he could not blame her. She was right, he said sternly to himself—right to treat his portrait as something that reminded her of nothing, whether it did so or not; to play on with undisturbed inspiration; ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... in the water than it began to swim, by expanding, and contracting itself with such facility that, but for the meshes of the net, it would soon have taken its wondrous hanging fringes and delicate soap-bubble ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... gifted illustration of my little Quelle [spring] [Liszt's "Au bord d'une source" (Annees de Pelerinage), for three violins concertante (Schott, Mainz)] delights me anew. The three violins flow, splash, bubble and ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... have been, and again they passed as they now are, with no trace of their ancient greatness, but here and there a ruin, and everywhere the desolation of tombs. With all their splendour, power, and might, they vanished like a bubble, or like the dream of a child, leaving but for a moment a drop of cold sweat upon the sleeper's brow, or a quivering smile upon his lips; then, this wiped away, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... sometimes becomes trivial in his comparison of each English poet to a special flower; but his poetry is usually sincere with an undercurrent of pathos, as in 'The Ruined Chapel,' 'The Winter Pear,' and the 'Song.' For lightness of touch and aerial grace, 'The Bubble' will bear comparison with any verse of its own genre. 'Robin Redbreast' has many delightful lines; and in 'The Fairies' one is taken into the realm of Celtic folklore, which is Allingham's inheritance, where the Brownies, the Pixies, and the Leprechauns trip ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... toward his store, which was a grocery, and next the coffee shop; but before opening it he sat down on one of the low stools, and was at once served by one of the waiters with an "argille," or hubble-bubble, and a cup of coffee. He wore a suit of dark green cloth, a crimson satin vest, silk girdle of many colors, and a red tarboosh. Another gentleman came up, dressed in a similar costume, only of ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever: man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master, out of which grew so many ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... man appeared beside us in a pirogue. So sudden, so silent was his arrival that we were thrilled with surprise. He said if we had a hatchet he could help us. His fairy bark floated in among the branches like a bubble, and he soon chopped a path for us, and was delighted to get some matches in return. He said the cannon we heard yesterday were in an engagement with the ram Arkansas, which ran out of the Yazoo that morning. We did not stop for dinner to-day, but ate a hasty lunch ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... is that this idea... you understand? was just being hatched in their brains... you understand? That is, no one ventured to say it aloud, because the idea is too absurd and especially since the arrest of that painter, that bubble's burst and gone for ever. But why are they such fools? I gave Zametov a bit of a thrashing at the time—that's between ourselves, brother; please don't let out a hint that you know of it; I've noticed he is a ticklish subject; it was at Luise Ivanovna's. But to-day, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... one old man dressed in white, carrying a scythe, who imagined himself the personification of "Time," though called "Father Lampson." Occasionally he would bubble over with some prophetic vision, and, as he could not be silenced, he was carried out. He usually made himself as limp as possible, which added to the difficulty of his exit and the amusement of the audience. A ripple of ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to space—to Higher Space. A closed box only seems closed. There is a way in and out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin." ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or the too-little. . . . Well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly, she had gone, and still is gone—and he sits marvelling. Three months! Is she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... time, fully saturated a quantity of ether with acid air, I admitted bubbles of common air to it, through the quicksilver, by which it was confined, and observed that white fumes were made in it, at the entrance of every bubble, for a ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... strangely vain and small pursuits and pleasures—thy pipe, thy wine, thy women, thy "busy" city life, thine immense sagacity which once in twenty times outwits a fool or knave—thy vaunted living is a bubble ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... like horses that have run away, to have been blinded by the rapidity of their own motion. It almost amounts to an epidemic, and is infectious—the wise and the foolish being equally liable to the disease. We had ample evidence of this in the bubble manias which took place in England in the years 1825 and 1826. A mania of this kind had infected the people of America for two or three years previous to the crash: it was that of speculating in land; and to show the extent to which it had been carried on, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... seasons; it is somewhat inclined. The earth, once regarded as the fixed and solid centre of creation, is now to be conceived of as a globular sphere of some fire-blown stream, bounded by a film of rock like a soap-bubble, carrying an unresting sea in the hollows of its rind, swathed in a soft gauze of air, going round upon itself every day, running round the sun every year; and all that with so much silence, security, and stillness of speed that nobody ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Koshare over in his hand, I saw that there were many things had come into his head which would never come into mine. Presently I heard him laugh as he did when he had hit upon some new trick for splitting the people's sides, like the bubble of a wicker bottle held under water. He took my chin in his hand. 'Without doubt,' he said, 'this is Kokomo's; he would be very pleased if you returned it to him.' I understood ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... inherits cares; The banks may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn; A heritage it seems to me, One scarce would wish ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... things, Which come and go on Fancy's wings, Now longer, and now shorter: The Fair One well her day-dream nurst, But, when the light-blown bubble burst, She wearied ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... him no longer. They push his boat to the shore, where, alighting, he kisses his hand, then, even as a bubble, he flies back to the mountain top, dons his acorn helmet, his corselet of bee-hide, his shield of lady-bug shell, and grasping his lance, tipped with wasp sting, he bestrides his fire-fly steed and off he goes like a flash. The world spreads out ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... affectation of reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined: "Know each other? Fiddlesticks! Everybody in New York has always known everybody. Let the young man have his way, my dear; don't wait till the bubble's off the wine. Marry them before Lent; I may catch pneumonia any winter now, and I want to give ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... she said, in a voice that seemed to bubble up through an overflow of tears, "may you never hexperience the feelinks of a mother, more especial the mother of a honly son, which 'arrowing is no name for them. As I were saying to Miss Penny ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... and two pipes of molasses. The cane, now in process of manufacture, is very small and unprofitable, all of the larger kind having been already ground. The sugar-house is a wretched building, with a thatched roof, and the sides roughly boarded like a cow-shed. There were four boilers in full bubble, and ten thousand bees in full buzz about the establishment; the insects bidding fair to hoard up more ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... important!" warmly defended Soloviev. "If we had to do with a well-educated girl, or, worse still, with a half-educated one, then only nonsense would result out of all that we're preparing to do, a mere soap-bubble; while here before us is ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... its glory will pass away. That is exactly what I think. I agree with you. Only, you are of a serious disposition and take the matter to heart, while I think it is great fun. What is the use of thinking so much. We are all like bubbles: we float in the air, and then the bubble bursts and this life is over. I am now a poor boy. I fear no change. In a future incarnation I may be born as the son of a king, like you. And think of it, after a few million years, this whole world, this big bulky stupid institution, this home of so many villains, and a couple of good ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... creeping down The bridges, till the houses' walls Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's Loomed like a bubble o'er ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... together, in a most tuneful chorus, as her stern went down with a roll and a bubble ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... but surely, by lawful use of other people's money. Breathed upon by these 'gentle influences,' he was, from his youth, a remarkable man— measured by Trade's standard. At five-and-twenty divine what he did! He saved the bank. You have read of bubbles: the Mississippi Bubble and the South Sea Bubble. Well, in the year 1825, it was not one bubble but a thousand; mines by the score, and in distant lands; companies by the hundred; loans to every nation or tribe; down to Guatemala, Patagonia, and Greece; two hundred new ships ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... period of the wildest speculation; which was followed, as it always is, by reaction and collapse. Then came the threatened renewal of the war with Great Britain, followed by the long imbroglio with France, which put a stop to emigration for years. The Western lands did not sell. The bubble burst. Robert Morris was ruined. He was arrested in 1797 upon the suit of one Blair McClenachan, to whom he owed sixteen thousand dollars, and he was confined in the debtors' prison in Philadelphia, as before mentioned, for four years. Nor would he have ever been ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... for they are patent to the world; but she allows zeal to run away with judgment. The rules for satire are the rules for Irish stew. You mustn't empty the pepper-castor, and the pot should be kept at a gentle bubble only. There is reason in the profitable denunciation of a wicked world, as well as in the ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... whilst you have left your family and have only your individual self to readjust. If you refuse to adjust yourself, for no matter what reason, you will act upon this family you have entered, as a red hot iron would act upon a pan of water—there'll be boil and bubble, toil and trouble and the family will fly to pieces. All because you came in with positive notions of your own which you insist ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... great, is the head of poor old Furry preserved, with the mouth wide open, to display the extraordinary tooth! Fame is a strange thing, after all. I believe that our friend the rat was not the first, nor will be the last, to pay a heavy price for the bubble! ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... meet at Garraway's Coffee House in Exchange alley. This is the Garraway's that became so famous at the time of the South Sea Bubble, and its fame continued down to the end of the wars of Napoleon. Then its glory departed as a centre of speculations, but its renown as an old-fashioned chophouse remained till 1873. Everywhere in contemporary English literature, from ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... on his domain, and frightening his wife and little family, for whom he was ready to lay down his life? There he would sit in spite of me, and make my ears ring with the sound of his woo-whoop, till the spring of life should cease to bubble in his ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... and me, and send a hurricane to drive those caitiffs back to the wretch they have abandoned. Nature alone is mighty. Oh, if I could have her on my side, and only God against me! But she is as deaf to prayer as He is: as mechanical and remorseless. I am a bubble melting into the sea. Soul I have none; my body will soon be nothing, nothing. So ends an honest, loving life. I always tried to love my fellow-creatures. Curse them! curse them! Curse the earth! Curse the sea! Curse all nature: there is no other ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... the bubble of distant musketry, and I hurried out. It came from the north, and it was languidly echoed from Caesar's Camp. Tack-tap, tack-tap—each shot echoed a little muffled from the hills. Tack-tap, tack-tap, tack, tack, tack, tack, tap—as if the devil was hammering nails into the hills. Then ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... his frantic blusterings may bite off his own tongue, may fulminate all kinds of evils, bans, excommunications, wars, desolations, and burnings, as long and as much as he likes. But if we take refuge with the Lord God, what can this inane, worn-out man and water-bubble do to us?" With more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... There is some obscurity respecting his parentage, but there is little doubt he was the natural son of Dr. William Oldys, Chancellor of Lincoln, and Advocate of the Admiralty Court. His father left him some property, which he appears to have lost in the South Sea Bubble. From the year 1724 to 1730 Oldys resided in Yorkshire, but in the latter year he returned to London, and became acquainted with Edward Harley, the second Earl of Oxford, to whom he sold his collection of manuscripts for forty pounds. In 1738 the Earl ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... place to see and hear, sitting in the middle of the main aisle, directly over the dust of John Law, who alighted in Venice when his great Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now sleeps peacefully under a marble tablet in the ugly church of San Moise. The thought of that busy, ambitious life, come to this unscheming repose under our feet,—so far from the scene ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... man-haters, were not so indeed, The Athenian Timon, and beside him more Of which the Latines, as the Greekes haue store; 80 Nor not did they all humane manners hate, Nor yet maligne mans dignity and state. But finding our fraile life how euery day, It like a bubble vanisheth away: For this condition did mankinde detest, Farre more incertaine then that of the beast. Sure heauen doth hate this world and deadly too, Else as it hath done it would neuer doe, For if it did not, it would ne're permit A man of so much vertue, knowledge, wit, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... from the cherub in the perambulator, crowing ecstatically over the red bubble that tugged at her wrist, to the ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... far from quite right—if not further: already the pill Seems, if I may say so, to bubble inside me. A poet's heart, Bill, Is a sort of a thing that is made of the tenderest young bloom on a fruit. You may pass me the mixture at once, if you please—and I'll thank you to boot For that poem—and then for the julep. This really is damnable stuff! (Not the poem, of course.) Do you snivel, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... its larger namesake, and noted for the fact that half a mile away is a small canyon full of mineral springs—sulphur, iron, soda, magnesia, etc. Naturally it is a "deer-lick," which makes it a Mecca during the open season to hunters. The springs bubble up out of the bed of the stream, the water of which is stained with the coloring matter. When the stream runs low so that one can get to the springs he finds some of them as pleasant to the taste as those of Rubicon and ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... craze followed, the like of which has never since been known. Bubble companies sprang into existence with objects almost as absurd as those of the philosophers whom Swift ridiculed in "Gulliver's Travel's," where one man was trying to make gunpowder out of ice, and another to extract ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... palpitating with the shock which had broken the cables by which she had so long, long ago moored herself in the safe and deep waters of the harbor of a literary and intellectual celibacy, still dreamed of the bubble personality which had vanished, although at times waves of anxious ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... foolishness of youth; nor was there that cool, calm poise which comes of the calculation and discretion of age. Man and woman, we were in full tide, strong, simple, and elemental. Life rioted in our veins; we were a-bubble with the ferment; and it is out of such abundance that Mother Nature has always exacted her progeny. From the strictly emotional and naturalistic viewpoint, I must consider it, even now, the perfect love. But it was decreed that I should develop into an intellectual ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... turn to fire, Its coolness change to thirst; And, by its mirth, within the brain A sleepless worm is nursed. There's not a bubble at the brim That does not ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... could hardly check an involuntary 'So did I.' A moment after and her resolve to confess perished like a bubble. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a fold just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its crowd, and I was looking at and admiring the sunset. The golden earth and sky seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe of human futility. . . . Then in the twilight I walked along an unknown, bat-haunted ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Oliver looked at him over his shoulder. "Prick this bubble, by heaven! Make an end of it for them, confound them and cover ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... made! Oh, what if a bound should be laid To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring, — To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string! I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream, — Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night, Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light, Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem But a bubble that broke in a dream, If a bound of degree ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... over it literally by inches, they found nothing unusual—in fact nothing from Sargol except a small twig of the red wood which lay on the steward's worktable where he had been fashioning something to incorporate in one of his miniature fairy landscapes, to be imprisoned for all time in a plasta-bubble. Dane turned this around in his fingers. Because it was the only link with the perfumed planet he couldn't help but feel that ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... myriad of queer greenish lights. These grew and spread over the surface of the water, until as he floated closer they could see that he was melting like a piece of soap and washing away in green bubbles. They watched him, quite fascinated, until the last bubble had floated away ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... so much about it of child-like unreasonableness, and yet withal so much of the beautiful attraction luminous in a child's sweet unreasonableness, would seem fore-fated by its very essence to the transience of the bubble and the rainbow, of all things filmy and fair. Did some shadow of this destiny bear part in his sadness? Certain it is that, by a curious chance, he himself in Julian and Maddalo jestingly foretold the manner of his end. "O ho! You talk as in years past," said Maddalo (Byron) to Julian (Shelley); ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... cave in, end in smoke, miss the mark, fail; lose ground; miss stays. Adj. unreached; deficient; short, short of; minus; out of depth; perfunctory &c. (neglect) 460. Adv. within the mark, within the compass, within the bounds; behindhand; re infecta[Lat]; to no purpose; for from it. Phr. the bubble burst. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... before Antiochus's elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim, —though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the boat's fragmentary .. stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... "it's the aim and object of a good many people's lives. It's the bubble I'm in pursuit of, and if I obtain one half the recognition you have had, I shall be ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... big bubble he had blown up was likely to be blown down. His mother and sisters strongly objected to his purpose, and begged of him not to bury himself out of the world as long as he had an opportunity ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... the bottom of the other tube, and then, while the bulb is held between the fore and middle fingers of the upturned hand, one presses slowly with the thumb upon its bottom so as to expel all the air that it contains. This air enters the lime-water bubble by bubble. After this the tube is removed from the water, and the bulb is allowed to fill with air, and the same maneuver is again gone through with. This is repeated until the figures 1882, looked at from above, cease to be clearly visible, and disappear entirely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract as a demon; and another subtle ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sufficient for someone to recall what had been the opinion of the dead in former times in order to reestablish calm, everyone accepting their opinion. The dead, eternal and immutable, were the only reality! Men of flesh and blood were a mere accident, an insignificant bubble ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... original batch of glass are drawn out into long hair-like tubes during the process of manufacture. When such tubing is worked, the walls of these microscopic tubes collapse in spots, and the air thus enclosed will often collect as a small bubble in the wall, thus weakening it. Irregularities are of various kinds. Some of the larger sizes of thin-walled tubing often have one half of their walls much thicker than the other, and such tubing should ...
— Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing • Francis C. Frary
... 'Tocsin.' Foremost stood an article headed, 'The Bursting of a Soap Bubble.' It was a satirical review of the history of New Wanley, signed by Comrade Roodhouse. He read in one place: 'Undertakings of this kind, even if pursued with genuine enthusiasm, are worse than useless; they are positively pernicious. They are half measures, and can only result ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Pagoda on the Hill of the Imperial Spring (Yue Ch'uean Shan T'a; more commonly Chen-shui T'a, 'Water-repressing Pagoda'). [27] The spring is still there, and day and night, unceasingly, its clear waters bubble up and flow eastward to Peking, which would now be a barren wilderness but for Yen Wang's ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... crops the flow'ry food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood. Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n, 85 That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n: Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, And now a bubble burst, ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... confessed to having misjudged his resources. He had suddenly stopped short in all evil ways, so Aiken confessed to having misjudged his strength of character. He had announced that he was going out West to seek the bubble wealth in the mouth of an Idaho apple valley, so Aiken cheered him on and wished him well. And when Aiken beheld the calmness of his farewells to Miss Tennant, Aiken said: "And he seems to have ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... where he hung. On that end lived the life of the asteroid, and were located all Ku Sui's works. On a space planed flat in the rock, rested the dome, like an inverted quarter-mile-wide bowl of glittering glasslike substance, laced inside with spidery supporting struts—the half bubble from inside which men guided the mass. Therein an artificial atmosphere was maintained, even as on any space-ship, and there lay the group of buildings, chief of which was the precious laboratory in which were the coordinated brains to whom the Hawk ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... got no farther, feeling weak in all his bones. She never reproached him or was angry with him. He was often cruelly ashamed. But still again his anger burst like a bubble surcharged; and still, when he saw her eager, silent, as it were, blind face, he felt he wanted to throw the pencil in it; and still, when he saw her hand trembling and her mouth parted with suffering, his heart was scalded with pain for her. And because of the intensity to which ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... firm. The sail stretches tight like a bubble ready to burst. The raft flies at a rate that I cannot reckon, but not so fast as the foaming clouds of spray which it dashes from side to side in its ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Bunyan's day, in camp and council chamber, in High Courts of Parliament, and among the poor drudges in English villages, they were still radiant with spiritual meaning. The dialect may alter; but if man is more than a brief floating bubble on the eternal river of time; if there be really an immortal part of him which need not perish; and if his business on earth is to save it from perishing, he will still try to pierce the mountain barrier. He will still find the work as hard as Bunyan ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... glassy bubble, Which costs philosophers such trouble; Where, one part crack'd, the whole does fly, And wits are crack'd ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... their ultimate good. Saints, like sinners, can only have two legs apiece, we all know; but the saints of our ancestors, if their relics spoke truly, must have been saintly centipedes: of making new limbs there was no end, and, as their numbers increased, reverence waned, till hey!—the bubble of credulity burst at last, as did ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... deal more meaning than people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the reader he may ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... was not deceived; for a light cutter, that played like a bubble on its element; was soon approaching the shore, where the three expectants were seated. When it was near enough to render sight perfectly distinct, and speech audible without an effort, the crew ceased rowing, and permitted the boat to lie in a state of rest. The mariner of the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... is a tavern-game, the sharpers generally take care to put about the bottle before the game begins, so quick, that a BUBBLE cannot be said to see clearly even when he begins ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the man worked with the great mass on his blow-pipe! Now he blew it far down into the pit beneath, where it hung like a mighty, elongated soap-bubble; now he swung it to and fro; now lifted it above his head. And all the time he was blowing into it blasts of air ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... from the river, while the balloon, half-empty, and borne away by a swift current, sped on, to plunge, like a huge bubble, headlong with the waters of the Senegal, into the ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... not get the gate open, and while he wrenched at the lock, he dreaded that delay might give her time to change her mind. But Evelyn was now quite determined. Her brain seemed to effervesce and her blood to bubble with joy, a triumphant happiness filled her, for no doubt remained that she ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... doubts. Had they gone off in any other way, there would have been a possibility of tracking them. But a conge in a canoe was a very different affair: man's presence leaves no token upon the water: like a bubble or a drop of rain, his traces vanish from the surface, or sink into the depths of the subtle element—an emblem ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... mermaids Pluck and play On their twangling harps In a sea-green day; Down where the mermaids, Finned and fair, Sleek with their combs Their yellow hair.... Bates and Giles- On the shingle sat, Gazing at Turvey's Floating hat. But never a ripple Nor bubble told Where he was supping Off plates of gold. Never an echo Rilled through the sea Of the feasting and dancing And minstrelsy. They called-called-called: Came no reply: Nought but the ripples' Sandy sigh. Then ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... was plain to Palma, Werbrust, and du Tillet that the trick had been played. Nobody else was any the wiser. The three scholars studied the means by which the great bubble had been created, saw that it had been preparing for eleven months, and pronounced Nucingen the ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... from his wife. This time he would have told, but could not. He sat down to tea with a choking breast and a heart so big within him that it left no room for food. He strove to eat, but could get no morsel past his lips. At one moment the news seemed to bubble up within him, and his mouth opened to shout it aloud; the next, his courage failed at his own vaunting thoughts, and he reached a hand down to the table-leg, to 'touch wood,' as humble men do to avert Nemesis if by chance they have let slip a boastful ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... soap bubble in a gale," Mr. Flint declared contemptuously. "Sometimes I think we made a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... d'you call 'em? You can't see my bubble; I can't see yours; all we see of each other is a speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame. The flame goes about with us everywhere; it's not ourselves exactly, but what we feel; the world is short, or people mainly; ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... his acquaintance, and civilly invite him to drink a glass of wine,—wheedle him into play, and win all his money, either by false dice, as high fulhams,(11) low fulhams, or by palming, topping, &c. Note by the way, that when they have you at the tavern and think you a sure "bubble," they will many times purposely lose some small sum to you the first time, to engage you more freely to BLEED (as they call it) at the second meeting, to which they will be sure ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... caught up the mallet. A frantic thought had flashed on him of killing Philip as he sat on the bench which he had disgraced, administering the law which he had outraged. The wild justice of this idea made the blood to bubble in his ears. He saw himself holding the Deemster by the throat, and crying aloud to the people, "You think this man is a just judge—he is a whited sepulchre. You think he is as true as the sun—he is as false as the sea. He has robbed me of wife and child; at the very ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... The latter rose first, but it was a long time before Basil came to the surface—so long that Norman and the others were beginning to feel uneasy, and to regard the water with some anxiety. At length, however, a spot was seen to bubble, several yards from where he had gone down, and the black head of Basil appeared above the surface. It was seen that he held something in his teeth, and was pushing a heavy body before him, which ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... face and throat a beautiful ruddy buff. There were so many glints of color on his steel-blue back and wings, as he spread them in the sun, that it seemed as if in some of his nights he must have collided with a great soap-bubble, which left its shifting hues upon him as ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... It has no more strength and permanency than Jonah's gourd. Nay, it has really never been a living thing! It has been a pathetic delusion, beautiful, but empty as a bubble, ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them madding after shadows. The example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation; bubble rises on bubble; every one helps with his breath to swell the windy superstructure, and admires and wonders at the magnitude of the inflation ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... it matter to me?" he mused. "Why should I hesitate to destroy a dream? Why should I care if another rainbow bubble of life breaks and disappears? I am too old to have ideals—so most people would tell me. And yet—with the grave open and ready to receive me,—I still believe that love and truth and purity surely ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... seemed to think Would light on him who drank with each alway. I looked so hard my eyes were looking double Into them all, but when I came to see That they were filthy, each in his degree, I bent my head, though not without some trouble, To where the little waves did leap and bubble, And so ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... could never manage, to his own satisfaction or interest, an estate worked with Chinese labour, but the European might. The Chinese is essentially of a commercial bent, and, in the Philippines at least, he prefers taking his chance as to the profits, in the bubble and risk of independent speculation, rather than calmly labour at a fixed wage which affords no ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... air-ship ready over there," cried the captain; "that's the only sensible thing to do." He pointed to a spot far off where a large, yellow motor-balloon could be seen hanging in the air like a large bubble. ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... to face the speaker. It was the guard, Antazzo, and he was clothed from neck to ankles in a garment of bright metallic stuff that shimmered with shifting colors like those of a soap bubble. A mask of similar stuff covered his face, and in each hand there was a weapon resembling a ray pistol but of ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... mystery of the Orient was even found in our menus, and it did not take long for the Pandoras of our party to find out that "Bubble and Squeak" was good old ham and eggs and "Angels under Cover" ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... milkpails bubble o'er With the udders' snowy stream, Which in thickening churns we pour Or in wicker baskets store, As the ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... one hasn't a tooth left in one's head. And what is there to say? They were good old times ... but there, enough of them! And as for those folks—you were asking, you troublesome boy, about the lucky ones!—haven't you seen how a bubble comes up on the water? As long as it lasts and is whole, what colours play upon it! Red, and blue, and yellow—a perfect rainbow or diamond you'd say it was! Only it soon bursts, and there's no trace of it left. And so ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... suppose they would be after making me into an Irish stew, or a dish of bubble and squeak!" exclaimed Pat, whose spirits were not to be quelled even with the anticipation of being turned into a feast for cannibals. I had an idea, however, that the people into whose hands we had fallen ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... of light in the Exposition grounds below us burst into radiance. The Horticultural dome turned to a wonderful iridescent bubble and the Tower of Jewels caught and reflected the light that played upon it. Wide bands of color streaked the sombre sky, transforming the clouds to shades of violet, yellow and rose. "The rainbow colors ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... chance is supreme, and bend the knee as one who has entered the very penetralia of his divinity. But the man of science knows that here, as everywhere, perfect order is manifested; that there is not a curve of the waves, not a note in the howling chorus, not a rainbow-glint on a bubble, which is other than a necessary consequence of the ascertained laws of nature; and that with a sufficient knowledge of the conditions, competent physico-mathematical skill could account for, and indeed predict, every one of these ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of Visby. In spite of this disaster, Norby's hopes ran high. He sent letters every day to Christiern, telling him that Denmark as well as Sweden was overrun with rebels, and that he now had a chance of restoration such as he had never had before. But Norby's hopes were at the very highest when the bubble burst. The emperor proved too busy with his own affairs to send his army to the North, and Christiern could not raise the armament requisite for a foreign war. Gustavus, moreover, sent his troops to drive back the invader, and the Danish nobility enlisted in ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... hoards and other mysteries," he said, "have no kind of attraction for me. I feel sort of discouraged when they bubble up round me. You're young, Daisy, and naturally inclined to romantic joys. Just you butt in and worry round according to your own fancy. There's only one thing I'd rather you didn't do. Don't get interfering in any serious way with Smith. Smith's ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... banks there is a break at all times, but in fine weather, at high water, a boat may cross near the east point. There is very little water, and, in places, a nasty race and bubble, so that caution is requisite. The best directions for going in over the regular bar passage, according to my experience, are as follows: Steer down well to the eastward of the bar passage, so as to avoid the outer part of the western shoals, on which there is usually a bad sea. When you get near ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... soft yet full, and not unlike a bursting bubble, made the house appear to leap elastically, like the rebound of ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... regular rhythm. From it there depended two long, drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble, and drifted upon ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gown in the chimney corner, where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the candles burning brightly, and family, guests, and servants were all ranged in eager lines, longing for the signal to start an oldfashioned country dance ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... How thin a bubble blame may be! I sought for doves in Italy; But orient was my main intent, And on an Indian ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... unsatisfactory performances. Diffusing the rich and facile treasures of his genius through a host of lesser men, he had almost ceased to be a personality. Even his own work, as proved by the Transfiguration, was deteriorating. The blossom was overblown, the bubble on the point of bursting; and all those pupils who had gathered round him, drawing like planets from the sun their lustre, sank at his death into frigidity and insignificance. Only Giulio Romano burned with a torrid sensual splendour all his own. Fortunately for ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... keen knife severed the rope which held the boat, and then the cutter glanced ahead, leaving the light bubble of bark, which instantly lost its way, almost stationary. So suddenly and dexterously was this manoeuvre performed, that the canoe was on the lee quarter of the Scud before the Sergeant was aware of ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... of admiration merely, hints More than crammed Pro Con of your favourite's page." At this he shouts a scornful roaring laugh, The table shaking, and the vessels chinked As fell his weighty arm: with massive gaze In hurly-burly sort he bantered me: "Young bubble-dreamer, plotting stanza rhymes, What can you know of laws: what know of plans Which bound these varied interests of ours, Through crossing currents, fixed for certain ends, To frame this state we call society, The full outcome of immemorial time? Know, here on earth ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner |
