Word: vainly
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Once readers were ignorant, and naively vain of their erudition Later readers were honest, and openly proud of their vices. Later still readers were gentle, and sentimentally enamored of their poses. Now readers are literate, and remarkably fond of their opinions. Elizabethan, Restoration, Victorian, Modern literature ? where is it going...
...have said that so long as a man lives he has not failed unless he believes that he has failed, and sometimes not even then. Among the great prophets, reformers, and leaders of mankind some have died thinking that their labors had been in vain, their mission a failure or their cause lost, when in fact after their death their work has borne abundant fruit from generation to generation. If this is true of them it is no less true of countless others unknown to fame but by the good they have done shining in God's firmament...
...another before he lit upon the method of treating rubber that has made it one of the essential substances in the civilization of the present day. Captain Mahan applied to one publisher after another to print his book on the "Influence of Sea Power on History", but all in vain, so that he was on the point of giving up the attempt, when Parkman, it is said, persuaded Little, Brown and Company to take it. Even then it had a scant sale, until its merit was recognized in England, and in a few years he became the American best known...
...republic can no longer be sustained successfully by your arms. Further sacrifices on your part would now be in vain. The continuance of the struggle in arms is unwise in the national interest...
...object of this flattery, to misquote one of his speeches, was born with a funnel in his mouth. A deplorable circumstance which his father had in vain tried to remedy. And then came the storm which blew Henry out to the Pacific coast, drinking as he went. Of course he fell in love with the "whitest girl in the world", and, taking her heart in his hand, he dragged her after him to the dregs of a Chinese city--6, 560 miles! There "midst horrid shapes, and shrieks and sights unholy" the battle for purity took place a veritable wrestling...