gossamery

Richard Polwhele's "Unsexed Females," where he asks us to picture an "unsex'd" woman's body: "Scarce by a gossamery film carest,/Sport [s], in full view, the meretricious breast;" he then guides us to undress the woman farther, to "Loose the chaste cincture, where the graces shone,/And languish'd all the Loves, the ambrosial zone."

'Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business': Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's _Juvenilia_

They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating.

The Shell Collector : Stories

They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating.

The Shell Collector : Stories

Yes, there it was in the boys, those gossamery boys who thumped the stage.

At Swim, Two Boys

They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating.

The Shell Collector : Stories

Yes, there it was in the boys, those gossamery boys who thumped the stage.

At Swim, Two Boys

And though you could not mark the delicacies of faces, you could have the full effect of costumes, -- rich, majestic, floating, gossamery, impalpable.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 70, August, 1863

But I must not anticipate -- a beautiful veil of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only for penance, but a silken gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's check.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 67, May, 1863

The Sedleys, Rochesters, and their compeers, had too much actual occupation, good and bad, to be fairly ranked among those gossamery ornaments of mankind; they were idle enough in their hearts for the purpose, but their lives were _not_ shadows, their sole object was _not_ self.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844

The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical precision.

My Second Year of the War