What showed as land was of too unsubstantial a quality, too thin and broken a rind on that vast area of water to be of any use as a foothold.
It had to go on, he believed, until the spreading certitudes of the scientific method pierced its unsubstantial thickets, burst its delusive films, drained away its folly.
Things crept out of darkness, awoke as it were out of mysteries and reclothed themselves in unsubstantial shadows and faint-hued forms.
The reasoning of the zealous Father deduces a great deal from very little, it will be observed, and in this elastic way tradition "enlarged its borders" and assumed unsubstantial dimensions.
She tried to think of Arthur, but her mental image of him had become as thin and unsubstantial as a shadow.
Neither possession impressed her at the moment as marketable, except in the vivid imagination of Madame, and her social position, at least, was constructed of a very thin and unsubstantial fabric.
Dreams, and hopes, and peradventures are toounsubstantial stuff to be a bulwark against the very real, undeniable present.
The traditions of their ancient autonomy have become as unsubstantial and obsolete as those which record the vanished fame of their poets and historians, and the exploits of their mariners.
But when the Hungarian nobleman came not, all these dreams began to vanish into thin air, and, like the unsubstantial fabric of a vision, to leave no trace behind them.
Charles--Charles, is that indeed you, or some unsubstantial form in your likeness?
The aunt is going to call on yourunsubstantial father.
Lottie, she looks more shadowy and unsubstantial than ever!
Its quality was one with the shadows, unsubstantial and shapeless.
In retrospect it was again as unsubstantial as a phantom.
It was asunsubstantial as an evening's performance, in temporary finery, of a high comedy of manners.
It was the street of a delirium, running, perhaps, for half a mile; an irregular deeply rutted way formed by its double row of small unsubstantial buildings of raw or gaudily painted boards and galvanized sheet iron.
She was unusually seductive in appearance, with, over the sheer embroidered beauty of her underclothes, her graceful silken knees, a floating unsubstantial wrap like crushed handfuls of lilacs.
But beyond this crowd of unaspiring humanity, passionate of gain rather than of any unsubstantial thing, rises the splendid front of the cathedral, set upon a height, as the temple of the Lord should be.
No string of substitute heirs of entail, as empty and unsubstantial as the morsels of paper strung to the train of a boy's kite, to cumber my flights of inclination, and my humours of predilection.
The young man was not of course truly famous; but some sort of unsubstantial fame he hoped to attain one day.
So rigorous was the economy in this decayed but honorable house that the wax candles burned to-day in the oratory had scrimped their dinner, unsubstantial as it was wont to be.
What stranger could possibly be persuaded that this, which we know to be an unsubstantial mockery, is really so; and that there exists only a single Island on this beautiful Lake?
Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk stockings and put them on the figure's legs, where they showed as unsubstantial as a dream, with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself miserably apparent through the holes.
Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantialbeauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light.
