impalpability

One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

Ulysses 2003

This was taken off, one cup of water poured out, and three cups full of the powder, after she had ascertained its impalpability between her finger and thumb, were stirred in with a stick of cinnamon.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 19, No. 538, March 17, 1832 Various

They represent metaphorically, however, certain important qualities of verse which, with the exception of rime, cannot from their very impalpability be formally explained, but can only be suggested and partially described.

The Principles of English Versification Paull Franklin Baum

I was obliged to make inquiries concerning his whereabouts, and this investigation soon convinced me that there was something wrong in Mayo after all; not the _spectre vert_ exactly, but yet an unpleasant impalpability.

Disturbed Ireland Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. Bernard H. Becker

One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

Ulysses James Joyce 1911

Not often subtle in impulse or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of Debussy, nothing of the impenetrable backgrounds of Brahms.

Edward MacDowell Lawrence Gilman 1908

Not often subtle in impulse or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of Debussy, nothing of the impenetrable backgrounds of Brahms.

Edward MacDowell Gilman, Lawrence, 1878-1939 1908

The spirit finds Dante alive in the flesh and he in turn on account of the impalpability of the shade clasps only empty air.

Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Student Body of the New York State College for Teachers, Albany, 1919, 1920 1902

And, in below the sunshine of the gorse, where rough Mother Earth should have been, there lay instead a soft sunset cloud, the tender cream-yellow and green of myriads of primroses and the just uncurling fronds of the bracken -- primroses in such unbroken sheets and masses as to give a weird effect of remoteness and impalpability to that which was solid and close at hand.

Pearl of Pearl Island John Oxenham 1896

Perhaps one day, between them, they would break down the barrier, the strength of which seemed to lie in its very flimsiness, its impalpability.

All Roads Lead to Calvary 1893