Will they fight? They say so. And will the French? I can hardly, Hardly think so; and yet----He is come, they say, to Palo, He is passed from Monterone, at Santa Severa He hath laid up his guns. But the Virgin, the Daughter of Roma, She hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn,--The Daughter of Tiber, She hath shaken her head and built barricades against thee! Will they fight? I believe it. 'tis ephemeral folly, Vain and ephemeral folly, of course, compared with pictures, Statues, and antique gems!--Indeed: and yet indeed too, Yet, methought, in broad day did I dream,--tell it not in St.英文原著 · 《Amours de Voyage》
There are instances squarely in our own time by which their mighty influence may be tested. They are of books of almost ephemeral value save for the student of history. As literature they will be quickly forgotten; but as FORCES they must be reckoned with. There is Uncle Tom's Cabin. It would be absurd to say that it brought the American Civil War, or freed the negroes, or saved the Union. It did none of those great things. Yet it is not at all absurd to name it among the potent powers in all three. It is not to our purpose whether it is true or not as a statement of the whole fact.英文原著 · 《A Study of Bible》
Fight against these illusions of petty and ephemeral minds. It does not matter the millionth of a straw to _mankind_ whether any one woman is called queen, or empress, of India; and it matters greatly to mankind whether the whole race of women are to be allowed to study medicine and practice it, if they can rival the male, or are to be debarred from testing their scientific ability, and so outlawed, _though taxed_ in defiance of British liberty, and all justice, human and divine, by eleven hundred lawgivers--most of 'em fools.英文原著 · 《A Woman-Hater》
All he felt was a terrible estrangement from the things of this world, which grew greater and greater; and the feeling was very defined and exact as he looked upon the seething foam behind, and tried to remember how long had lasted this pace that never slackened night or day. Down on deck, the crowd of men, huddled together in the shadow of the awnings, panted with weariness. The water and the air, even the very light above, had a dull, crushing splendour; and the fadeless glory of those elements were as a very mockery of the human beings whose physical lives are so ephemeral.英文原著 · 《AN ICELAND FISHERMAN》
Now, if that is true, as it is true, even of earthly and ephemeral love, how much more true is it of the love that is in the immortal soul of man for the everlasting God? And what a blessed life that already is when all things that come to us--joy and sorrow, good and evil, nature and grace, all thoughts, all passions, all delights--are all but so many ministers to our soul's desire after God, after the Divine Likeness and for the Beatific Vision.英文原著 · 《Bunyan Characters-3》
The mountains reached up their bulky shoulders to receive the level gallop of Apollo's homing steeds, the day died in the lagoons and in the shadowed banana groves and in the mangrove swamps, where the great blue crabs were beginning to crawl to land for their nightly ramble. And it died, at last, upon the highest peaks. Then the brief twilight, ephemeral as the flight of a moth, came and went; the Southern Cross peeped with its topmost eye above a row of palms, and the fire-flies heralded with their torches and approach of soft-footed night.英文原著 · 《Cabbages and Kings》