graspless

We are held by the spectacle of the failing strength, the graspless memory, the dim discernment, the scanty breath; the brief flickering of the fading light; the expiration; the awful stillness.

Brooks by the Traveller's Way 1864-1923 1902

Though all else fell from him like dry sand from graspless fingers, yet if by

The Scapegoat; a romance and a parable Hall Caine 1892

He took the pen in his graspless hand, and essayed to write.

The Shadow of a Crime A Cumbrian Romance Hall Caine 1892

Roma made a faint cry, and dropped the revolver out of her graspless hand.

The Eternal City Hall Caine 1892

Her face was worn and pale, her bonnet fallen back from her forehead, her head leaning against the trunk of the tree, one hand on her breast, the other straying aside on the drift of yellow leaves, where a little bundle covered by a red handkerchief had fallen from her graspless fingers, and the radiant morning sunlight over all.

A Son of Hagar A Romance of Our Time Hall Caine 1892

A moment later it fell from his graspless fingers to the floor.

The Manxman A Novel - 1895 Hall Caine 1892

The first is the method of the universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former adventures in the body.

The Destiny of the Soul A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life William Rounseville Alger 1863

That 'graspless hand,' from which, as already in one of his early poems (November, 1794) he had complained --

The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2 Thomas De Quincey 1822

'Drop friendship's priceless pearls as hour-glass sands,' was made much _more_ graspless, and in this way the very graces of his moral nature ministered eventually the heaviest of his curses.

The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2 Thomas De Quincey 1822

The layers of these characters are build and revealed and like the fine dust on a butterflys 'which enable flight to happen, it is the almost graspless aspect of this story that intrigues.

California Literary Review 2009