But the second scene was as ephemeral as the first.

Ingenuity may devise one clever panacea after another for the salving work and for lifting the working classes from the intolerable conditions that have prevailed for more than a century; they will be ephemeral in their existence and futile in their results unless sense of holiness is restored, and the joy in production and creation given back to those who have been defrauded.

The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to last.

Nothing is more ephemeral than periodical essays, unless marked by extraordinary power both in style and matter, like the essays of Macaulay and Carlyle.

You wander from the ephemeral to the ephemeral.