Word: vainly
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...prize poem is something which is struggled for, and the successful man is justly admired. That such a prize has been awarded yearly, for many generations, accounts, in some degree certainly, for the rank which the poets of England have taken in the world. Here we look in vain now for those who are to succeed to the places which are occupied by Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, and Holmes. America either has no young poets coming forward at the present time, or else they are keeping themselves in the dark, to burst upon us like the harlequin in the play...
...vain do we search in our relentless critic's article for hearty, unbegrudged praise. Of some of the finest essays not a word. Were he disposed to be fair even, he could hardly fail to acknowledge the merits of "Quotation and Originality," of the "Progress of Culture." His complaint that he finds nothing practical in such a particularly unpractical, un-bread-and-butter subject as "Poetry and Imagination," and his surprise at hearing nothing new or startling on "Immortality," are fair specimens of his captious criticism...
...About half of everything here is hypocritical to a more or less extent," is the "awful statement," to make which the Lampoon abandons its levity. If this statement be true, the Lampoon will not have lived in vain. If by these words we are brought to a realizing sense of our condition, our "comic college journal" will deserve all the good things that have been said of it, and may rest its reputation on this one point...
...carried on board a number of cattle, to be killed on the passage, and for this purpose we also carried a man who called himself a butcher, on the lucus a non lucendo principle. This butcher, having made several vain attempts with a knife on a bullock (which we shipped at Rio), and next danced around him for several minutes with an axe, - the animal looking up at him from time to time more in pity at his inefficiency than in anger, - came aft and announced his trouble to the captain, who, with the three sporting gentlemen from New York...
...Bursar if the post facto nature of the act were removed. To advertise one price, and, when the rooms are taken, to raise that price, is manifestly unjust. Two hundred and fifty dollars is not too much to be asked for Holworthy rooms, but I have looked in vain for a notice that the rent of other and very undesirable rooms - such as those in the upper stories of Thayer - is to be reduced in proportion to the advance of price in Holworthy. The Bursar, by this move, has added to the annual income of the College the neat...