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More "Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corner, in a most unimportant manner, it was related that Austria had sent an ultimatum to Serbia. West had read part way through this stupid little piece of news, when suddenly the Thunderer and all its works became an uninteresting blur. ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... specks silhouetted against the sky—not three or four, but five—no! six—no! seven! Seven black specks which detach themselves one by one, one from another and from the vagueness beyond—experienced eyes scan the horizon with enthusiasm and excitement which threaten to blur the clearness of their vision. Anyone with an eye for sea-going craft can distinguish that topsail-schooner there, well ahead of the rest of the tiny fleet, skimming the water with swift grace, and immediately behind her the three-masted ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... tread I stole to the parlor door. At my old seat by the window was Emily Warren, writing on a portfolio in her lap. For a second a blur came over my vision, and then I devoured her with my eyes as the famishing would ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... it was just a blur of blues and greens, with irregular patches of white, and gay tiny dashes of strong colour, pinks and purples and yellows. But when, as Anne had bidden him, he held it at arm's length he saw it all—the garden with its box-bordered beds full of tall yellow tulips and pink and ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... which was a queer thing; for ordinarily the swamp boy seemed to be as cool and self-possessed as an Indian brave, who thought it a blur on his manhood to display emotion in the ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... yet that, for the sake of its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... country was exactly as he remembered it; indeed he recalled it far more vividly in his dream than he had done in memory. The little town stood on a level flat as bare as the hand, not even a willow near it; only in the far distance, a copse lay, a dark blur on the very edge of the horizon. A few paces beyond the last market garden stood a tavern, a big tavern, which had always aroused in him a feeling of aversion, even of fear, when he walked by it with his father. There was always a crowd there, always shouting, laughter and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... are gone! A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls Eery, distorted, as it long had shone On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone. The whir of motors, stricken through with calls Of playing boys, floats up at intervals; But all these noises blur to one long moan. What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange That other men still go accustomed ways! I hate their interest in the things they do. A spectre-horde repeating without change ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... he saw her depart, for the entire room was merely an indistinct blur. He was too desperately angry even to swear. In this emergency, Mr. Wynkoop, dimly realizing that something unpleasant had occurred, sought to attract the attention of his new ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... most hideous clamour arose beneath the carriage. The horses, which had been flying before, excited by the noise, put down their heads and tore blindly forward. The vehicle rocked and swayed, and the avenue and its occupants swept by in an indistinguishable blur. ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... sat moodily staring at the carpet its silly intricacies melted into a blur from which the eyes of Mrs. Leath again looked out at him. He saw the fine sweep of her brows, and the deep look beneath them as she had turned from him on their last evening in London. "This will be good-bye, then," she had said; and it occurred ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... of the town were a mere blur beneath them, Tinker switched on the electric lamps, and the millionaire saw him sitting on a wicker seat in the stern of the boat-shaped car, surrounded by levers, instruments, and dials. Tinker bade him grip the steel rails on either side of ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... indifference and blankness came upon him, and he could only move feebly on, seeing everything in a blur and mist. After these long days and nights of sleeplessness, semi-starvation, and terrible excitement, every nerve was sick, every organ out of gear. The lights of the Tuileries, the stately pile of the Louvre, under a gray driving ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stubbornly dark, and by the time Sally gave up trying to determine precisely which window it had been, and turned her gaze seaward again, the boat had vanished. Its lights, at least, were no longer visible, and it was many minutes before the girl succeeded in locating the blur it made on the face of the waters. It seemed to be moving, but the distance was so great that she could ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... lookouts framed blue emptiness. Below, on direct sight, was but the vaguest blur that meant earth and clouds far beneath. Only the magnification of the microscope brought out the details, and on its screen the unrolling picture showed those three lines broadening and merging to widespread desolation; then the smoke clouds came between to shut off ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... her down the street until her blue dress, with its white trimming became a blur in the shadows. Then he struck out once ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... shape, a prominent angle being directed towards the adjacent star. Finally, an exposure of ten hours made by Barnard with the Willard lens indicated the singular fact that the entire group is embedded in a nebulous matrix, streaky outliers of which blur a wide surface of the celestial vault.[1569] The artist's conviction of the reality of what his picture showed was confirmed by negatives obtained by Bailey at Arequipa in 1897, and by H. C. Wilson at ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... upon a dreary white plain, alternating with green belts of woodland, while occasionally the train plunges into dense dark pine forest only to emerge again upon the same eternal "plateau" of silence and snow. Now and again we pass a village, a brown blur on the limitless white, rarely a town, a few wooden houses clustering around a green dome and gilt crosses, but it is all very mournful and depressing, especially to one fresh from Europe. This train has one advantage, there is no rattle or roar about it, as it steals like a silent ghost across ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... defined the outlines; I have suffused them with a haze of half-tints warm or golden, in such a sort that you can not lay your finger on the exact spot where background and contours meet. Seen from near, the picture looks a blur; it seems to lack definition; but step back two paces, and the whole thing becomes clear, distinct, and solid; the body stands out; the rounded form comes into relief; you feel that the air plays round it. And yet—I am not satisfied; I have misgivings. Perhaps one ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... blur moral distinctions, and to obliterate plain duties, as the free indulgence of speculative habits. We must all know many a sorry scrub who has fairly talked himself into the belief that nothing but his intellectual difficulties prevents him from being another St. Francis. We think we ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... seems to lie in the temperament and in the transmuting and modifying medium. More or less of filtration does it all. Nature makes the poet, not by adding to, but by taking from; she takes all blur and opacity out of him; condenses, intensifies; lifts his nerves nearer the surface, sharpens his senses, and brings his whole organization to an edge. Sufficient filtration would convert charcoal into diamonds; and we shall everywhere ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... became conscious that there was a moving blur before him, as if some portion of the general darkness, by some trick of vision, had been rendered more compact and animate. Then he saw that it was a cow, and immediately in the animal's wake appeared another blur. This ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... still Loyal Subjects to King James, while they are only forc'd Bonds-Men to the Act of Settlement, for the sake of that comfortable Importance, call'd Food and Rainment; and thus their Reputation might have been sav'd, which is most unhappily tarnish'd and blur'd, with the malicious Attacks of the Whigs on one Hand, and ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... Under the forts are seventeen galleys; the channel is 'scoured' with cannon: but on holds Raleigh's 'Warspite,' far ahead of the rest, through the thickest of the fire, answering forts and galleys 'with a blur of the trumpet to each piece, disdaining to shoot at those esteemed dreadful monsters.' For there is a nobler enemy ahead. Right in front lie the galleons; and among them the 'Philip' and the 'Andrew,' two of those who boarded the 'Revenge.' This day there shall be a reckoning for the blood of ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... wears my legs out before I have climbed half a dozen steps. It has had its character spoiled. Then there are those journals and books I used once to devour without difficulty by moonlight: to-day, even in the brightest sunlight, they mock my curiosity, and exhibit nothing but a blur of white and black when I have not got my spectacles on. Then the gout has got into my limbs. That is another malicious trick ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Henry Overton, U. S. A.,'" replied Hal, turning the envelope so that his mother might read. But a sudden rush of mist to her eyes made the letters blur. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... modern nations in respect of science and scholarship, as also in the aesthetic or the industrial arts. Local color and local pride, with one thing and another in the way of special incitement or inhibition, may come in to vary the run of things, or to blur or hinder a common understanding and mutual furtherance and copartnery in these matters of taste and intellect. Yet it is scarcely misleading to speak of the peoples of Christendom as one community in these respects. The sciences and the arts are held as a joint ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... a few minutes. No one knew what to say to comfort Betty, although they were genuinely sorry, and glanced from time to time at the brown head turned away from them toward the window. She was looking at the flying landscape through a blur of tears, recalling the way little Davy's dimpled fingers had clung to hers, his chubby feet followed her. Of course he was much larger and older, she told herself, not at all like the little fellow she had left so long ago. He was big enough to stand pain now, and ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... just as long as she possibly could. He was on the platform by Ruthy now, and he waved his handkerchief as the train started, and threw kisses to his little girl. Ruby pressed her face closer and closer against the glass, but at last it was of no use. There was only an indistinct blur where papa and Ruthy had been standing, for Ruby's eyes were so full of tears that she could not see them, and by the time she had taken out her new handkerchief and wiped them away, the train had begun to go so fast that ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... did not look around as he thrust his last cartridge into the rifle. He let it lie beside him for half a minute while he opened and shut his right hand, and then, taking it up quickly, fired. Still there was no blur on the white surface of the card and Gladwyne sharply shut his glasses, while two of the onlookers ran toward the target. They came back in silence and one significantly held up the ace. There were three small ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... a firm grip on the lapel of his coat Dink suddenly found himself, with the departure of the other guests, a helpless captive. The first painful scraps of conversation passed in a blur. Before he knew it he was crossing the campus, actually walking, in full view of the school, at ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... peril of apostasy, to entreat him to return. It all sounded vague and futile. They spoke as if he had betrayed or offended some one; but when they came to name the object of his fear—the one whom he had displeased, and to whom he should return—he heard nothing; there was a blur of silence in their speech. The clock pointed to the hour, but the bell did not strike. At last Hermas refused to see ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... been. They lived in a house which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the Saunders mansion. At the time of Maria's first visit to Amity it had been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with its roof and walls of rain and sun stained shingles and clapboards, its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda. When Maria went to Amity to begin teaching, the old house had undergone ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... money at the rate of $500 or $1,000 every month, until they were perfectly sickened. One by one they shut up shop. One went to his farm, another to his merchandise, another to emigrant running, another (known by the elegant surname of Blur-eye Thompson) to raising recruits, several ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... house, walking with bowed head out of Sequoia, up the abandoned and decaying skid-road through the second-growth redwoods to the dark green blur that marked the old timber. It was May, and Nature was renewing herself, for spring comes late in Humboldt County. From an alder thicket a pompous cock grouse boomed intermittently; the valley quail, in pairs, were busy about their household affairs; from ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... him down the hall. Plainly she was bitterly afraid when she came beside him, under the dim hall light. She wore that same black hat, turned back from her white face, and the red flower beside it was a dull, uncertain blur. Decidedly she was pretty enough to explain ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... not even the crystal summit ridges delighted us as did the changing waters in the path of the steamer. Following immediately upon the transparency preserved to a depth of some eighty feet, a blur passed over the surface. This changed by imperceptible degrees to a light green. The green, again, speedily deepened, shading into a light blue; and finally, in deepest water (where the Lake is all but fathomless), ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... meeting with Maurice, she ate her lunch with a glance every few minutes at her great-uncle Allan on the opposite wall. A very black portrait, it seemed only a meaningless blur till in a certain light the strong face and stern eyes shone out of the surrounding gloom with startling effect. She sometimes wondered rather anxiously if the uncle to whose home-coming she looked forward, could ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... camera there is a flattened glass ball called the lens. If you were to remove it, the camera would not take any pictures; it would take a blur of light and shade and ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... lunged forward again, swinging the now deadened right arm at the blur Corrigan made in front of him. Something collided with him—a human form—and thinking it was Corrigan, clinching with him, he grasped it. The momentum of the object, and his own weakness, carried him back and down, and with the ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... survey from his bank steps at three o'clock, some one yelled, "Hello, Amzi!" A piece of brick flung with an aim worthy of a nobler cause whizzed past his head and struck the door-frame with a sharp thwack and blur of dust. Amzi looked down at the missile with pained surprise and kicked it aside. His clerks besought him to come in out of harm's way; and yet no man in Montgomery had established a better right than he to stand exactly where he stood and view contemporaneous ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... without break or blur, continue my description; and to say truth, at this distance of time, I have some difficulty—so well acquainted was I with the actors and the scenery—in determining, without consulting my diary, what portions of the narrative I relate from hearsay, and what as a spectator. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... one of those endless Italian corridors, painted, picture after picture, by a master hand; and man is the traveler through it, taking his eyes from one scene but to rest them upon another. Some remain a blur in his mind; some he remembers not; for some he has but to close his eyes and he sees them again, line for line, tint for tint, the whole spirit of the piece. I close my eyes, and I see the sunshine hot ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... Bar looks, with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... Prue, and Jessie began to display her purchases before eyes that only saw a blur of shapes and colors, and expatiate upon their beauties to ears that only heard the words—"The splendid cousin is ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... Goat-foot piping low: . . . But these are things I do not know. I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . . Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx. Dan Chaucer hears his river ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... him, all painted with eyes. All the real, as he rode, was the horse at his thighs, And the thought "They'll come back, if I've luck, if I'm wise." Some banners uncrumpled on the blue of the skies, The cheers became frantic, the blur of men shook, As Thankful and Kubbadar went at ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a most outrageous picture which adorned a song-book used in Sunday School, portraying the Lord upon his throne, surrounded by tiers and tiers of saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am ashamed to tell how old I was when that picture ceased to appear before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to ask protection ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... weather. The moon, I think, must by this time have been near its sinking, for the mist grew full of darkness round about us, and at last it was altogether deep night. I could see my companion only as a blur of difference in the darkness, but even as this change came I felt the steepness relax beneath my climbing feet, the round level of the ridge was come, and soon again we were hurrying across it until there came, in a hundred yards or so, a moment in which my companion halted, as ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... close together the marks are! Unfortunately, that's about all we're likely to deduce from them, and I doubt if a finger-print expert will be able to help us. Observe, there are no finger-prints—merely faint marks of the middle of the fingers, and a kind of blur for the thumb. But the thing is ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... work going through the drifts and keeping the right way over a plain that had the similarity of the sea, but the men did not falter. Jimmy Grayson was always looking into the darkness, striving to see the darker line or blur that would mark the hills, but he asked no questions. The snow ceased, and after a while low, black slopes appeared against ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... silvery filament over the black barrier of the Mazatzal in a sky cloudless and glinting with myriad points of fire. The nights were cold and still, the days soft yet brilliant in the blaze of an unshrouded sun. An almost Sabbath-like calm hovered over the valley, for even signal smokes had ceased to blur the horizon. Not a hostile Indian had been heard of since the coming of Freeman's couriers. The brawling gang of "greaser" gamblers had stolen away from the "ghost ranch." Even the ghost himself seemed to walk no more. Something had happened to call the firm of Munoz y Sanchez ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... quite careful to distinguish satire from epic poetry, the total effect of his Essay is to blur this distinction and to raise The Dunciad very nearly to the level of genuine epic. The term "Epic Satire" (p. 6) certainly seems to refer to the wedding of two disparate genres in The Dunciad, lifting it above satire that is merely "rugged" or "mischievously ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... there. He wished more than ever that he was back with Shining Fish. Then he remembered that in another week he would be on board the "Sea Gull." He watched Captain Stoddard's sloop until it was only a white blur against the distant shore, and then went ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark—against a sky so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of something in soft, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... cooerdination and singleness of purpose necessary for one. And so many unseen influences are at work. There is no agreement among the people as to what they want. Each faction is secretly encouraged to war against the other in order to weaken each other and blur the reason and end in the people's minds. Besides, of course, nothing can be done as long as the army can be used to crush any demonstration against the Government. But if I were a Russian, all my hate would be directed against the ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... boughs, and shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them veer and shift Around his blustering path. In clouds blindly whirling, In rings madly swirling, Full of crazy wrath, So furious and fast they fly They blur the earth and blot the sky In wild, white mirk. They fill the air with frozen wings And tiny, angry, icy stings; They blind the eyes, and choke the breath, They dance a maddening dance of death Around their work, Sweeping the cover from ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... thought I was done for, and that they had been hiding in the car when I was put there. I asked them to try to call the train men for me, but they wouldn't listen, or else I couldn't make myself understood. That's all. The rest is a blur. I haven't known anything more until those surgeons were here. Please tell me how long ago it happened. I shall not die, I think; there are a good many things I want to know about." He moved restlessly and the nurse ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... purest opposites, yet mutual, reciprocal, necessary to each other; and he is a narrow man who cannot stand in open relations with both terms, reconciling in the depths of his life, though he can never explain, the mystery of their friendship. He who will adhere only to the universal, and makes a blur of the special, is a rhapsodist; he who can apprehend only the special, being blind and callous to the universal, is a chatterer and magpie. From these opposites we never escape; Destiny and Freedom, Rest and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her," thought Everychild. He could just see her now: a mere blur in the shadows far ahead of him. He could no longer hear the sound of her feet. Then ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... issues, then, before us, and I dare not blur the clear distinction which Jesus Christ draws. I listen to Him, and accept His word, and I press upon you, dear brethren, that the main thing about a road is, after all, where it leads us; and I ask you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... explained Ja, "for the Mezops of Luana are always at war with us and would steal them if they found them," he nodded toward an island farther out at sea, and at so great a distance that it seemed but a blur hanging in the distant sky. The upward curve of the surface of Pellucidar was constantly revealing the impossible to the surprised eyes of the outer-earthly. To see land and water curving upward in the distance until it seemed to stand on edge ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... up his tools resolutely, but he could not work. He fell back on his rough sketch for a lucid Algebra, but his lucid formulae were a blur. He went downstairs and played with the delighted children and listened to the landlady's gossip, throwing her a word or two of shrewd counsel on the everyday matters that came up. Presently he asked her if the van den Endes had told her ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... it were mechanically, for his mind was too busy to feel in its full keenness the sting of the frost, and while his eyes were fixed on the blur of the trail his thoughts were far away, and it was by an almost unconscious effort he restrained the impatient horse. Because speed was essential, he dare risk no undue haste. He was not the only rider out on the waste that night, and the shiver that went through ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... how they meet it, how they fly from it: the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting and your character—all that is done for you: you have just got to select the characteristic things, and not to blur the things that you would have wished otherwise. For God's sake, let us get at the truth in books, and not use them as screens to keep the fire off, or as things to distract one from the depressing facts in one's bank-book. I welcome all this output ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... long after Hugh went to sleep, with the willingness of his sixteen years, I sat listening to the crickets and watching the quiet fields and sky, which were lit up every few seconds by the lightning flash of an approaching storm—still too far away, however, to blur even with a cloudy line the tranquil brilliancy ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... followed by frightened despair. The wilderness, in its evening hush, menaced her with huge emptinesses, utter loneliness. She worked her way to the edge of the wooded plateau. There was a lingering gleam of yellow and rose pink on the distant mountains, but the valley itself lay in a blur of shade, out of which rose the faint murmur of running water, a monotone in the silence. She sat down on a dead tree, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of dark they softly stir, Till arrowy dawn the shadow-blur Dispels—God's tingling kiss of morning On oak and maple ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... a blood-red, wrathful streak Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur His cruel vigilance and her Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak A hopeless hate that cannot stir, A ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... a golden blur, And the small stars followed after her, But when the fireflies cleft the air I saw those three forms standing there, Until the night cooled, and the trees Shook in the strong hands of the breeze, And then I heard their footsteps press The muffled ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... I said at last, abandoning the attempt in despair, and handing the telescope over to him. "I am almost certain that for a single instant I caught a faint blur of light away out there; but I cannot find it now. Take the glass, and see if you can meet with any better success. But verify your bearing before ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... antagonisms of tint side by side, yet without jarring the eye. Green all round, the trees and hedges; blue overhead, the sky; purple and gold westward, where the sun sinks. No part of this grass can be represented by a blur or broad streak of colour, for it is not made up of broad streaks. It is composed of innumerable items of grass blade and flower, each in itself coloured and different from its neighbour. Not one of these must be slurred over if you wish to ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... to aim at him with the rifle I found that I could see only a blur of sights. Other branches and the tip of a very high pine adjoining made a dark background. I changed my position, working around to where the background was all open sky. It proved to be better. By putting the sights against this open sky I could faintly ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... left out of my character. Children as children are dirty, spitty little things, and their noses all need wiping. Here and there I pick out a naughty, mischievous little one that awakens a flicker of interest; but for the most part they are just a composite blur of white face ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... bumps, one of these automobeels went past. It was the first Tusky and me had seen in them parts, so we run out to view her. Owin' to the high spots on the road, she looked like one of these movin' picters, as to blur and wobble; sounded like a cyclone mingled with cuss-words, and smelt like hell on ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... unicorn's throat, swerving its charge, and the unicorn plunged past him. The unicorn swung back, all the triumph gone from its squeal, and the prowler struck again. They became a swirling blur, the horn of the unicorn swinging and stabbing and the attacks of the prowler like the swift, relentless thrusting ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... The story in the newspaper returned to my vision. Oh, this was too much, altogether too much! He took me to be the fashionable thief for whom half the New York police force were hunting. My sight swam for a moment in a blur. ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... found herself Queen by coronation and inheritance, consecrated in her right by the awful seal of the great High-Priest Death—before whose inviolable silence questions cease, and the scroll of the closed life is no longer searched, save with eyes that blur the lines through ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... more complicated things were moving rapidly inside her head than ever before—as though she had tried to keep track of the revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright his eyes were when he looked at you—as though he were, somehow, seeing you more than most people did. What ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... same fraction of a second a furry catapult launched itself across the wide road at a speed that made it look like tawny blur. ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... light the bottom was flecked with shadows of many patterns,—circular, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, netted, and barred. There were other shadows that were no more than ghosts of shadows, cast by faint, diaphanous films of scum which scarcely achieved to blur the clear downpour of radiance, but were nevertheless perceived and appreciated by many of the delicate larval creatures which made a large part of the life of ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the depth of the sea. While it was slightly disturbed on the surface by the passage of the Euphrosyne, beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this way ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... In the right picture two women are chatting, with arms akimbo, over its basin; before the plate for the left picture is got ready, "one shall be taken and the other left"; look! on the left side there is but one woman, and you may see the blur where the other is melting into thin air as she fades forever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... way, upon the rail, turning on maudlin grins and waving your cap at no one in particular, until the crowd becomes a moving blur upon the dock-end. The liner's nose points down the river; gentle vibrations tell you she is under way; small craft dip flags and toot as they go by; the man-made mountain of Manhattan's office buildings drops astern; the statue of Liberty, the shores of Staten Island, the flat back ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... wreck. I'm sure my hair is frightful," she thought, but forgot it as she looked at him. His face was unusually pale. In the tumult of activity he had been betrayed into letting the old despondent look blur his eyes and sag his mouth. "Must get on," ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... be any end. Life would stretch out narrow, interminable, and dark, like the passage with the windows at each end, which were only a kind of blur ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... to drive them out. The motive, too, was plain enough in the light of the overheard conversation at the National Hotel. The men who wanted Mr. Bell's mine had waited till he had located it before striking their first blow. What would their next be? Peggy's pulses throbbed and the grove seemed to blur for an instant. But the next moment she was mistress of herself again. Clearly there was only one thing to do. Lay the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... not exceed for egotism the temper of a new man in the cab of a train like this one. This valkyric journey on the back of the vermilion engine, with the shouting of the wind, the deep, mighty panting of the steed, the gray blur at the track-side, the flowing quicksilver ribbon of the other rails, the sudden clash as a switch intersects, all the din and fury of this ride, was of a splendor that caused one to look abroad at the ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... twisting detached from the pony's back. Everyone witnessed a blur upon the air and knew it was the man. He was flung with catapultic force against a frightened cow. He struck with arms and legs extended. He clung like a bur to the bovine's side, for a moment before he dropped—and everyone roared unfeelingly, ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... windy: presently it blew so strong, that he could hardly keep his legs. But, he got to an arched window in the tower, breast high, and holding tight, looked down upon the house-tops, on the smoking chimneys, on the blur and blotch of lights (towards the place where Meg was wondering where he was and calling to him perhaps), all kneaded up together in a ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... moment, the people of Bonham stared at the thing, not believing their eves. The only flying device then known was the drifting balloon. But this thing was tremendous, and speeding so fast its outlines were almost a blur. ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... well-being. Her body had her in its grip, and her spirit sunk softly into the warm and satisfied flesh. She bade Sarah bring her dinner into the parlor; after she had eaten it she slept. When she awoke in the late afternoon, she wished she could sleep again. All her thoughts ran together in a lazy blur. Somewhere, back of the blur, she knew there was unhappiness, so this was best—to lie warm and quiet by the fire, eating candy and yawning over ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... of bigotry to sully his soul, blur his vision, or cramp his sphere of action, the broad stream of Christian charity flowed from his noble, generous heart, sweeping away obstacles that would have impeded the usefulness of a minister less catholic in sympathy, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the church, through blasts of rain and buffets of wind, which threatened to overturn the cab, and the seaward window was white, as in a snowstorm, with pellets of froth, and the drift of sea-scud. I tried to look out, but the blur and the dash obscured the sight of every thing. And though in this lower road we were partly sheltered by the pebble ridge, the driver was several times obliged to pull his poor horse up and face the wind, for fear of our being ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... power to state a fact, in its whole volume and outline, because, first, they could not comprehend it perfectly, and, second, because their power of expression was limited. The lenses by which they apprehended their facts were not adjusted properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines, cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice measurement of relations, were matters outside of their observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling; and their language was no better than their apprehensions—usually ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... sleeper and making his red face seem purplish and suffused like the face of one I had once seen dead of strangulation; howbeit, he slept well enough, judging from his lusty snoring. Now presently in the surrounding dark beyond the smouldering fire was a glimmer, a vague blur of sloping, trampled bank backed by misty trees; so came the dawn, very chill and full of eddying mists that crawled phantom-like, filling the little dingle brimful and blotting out the surrounding trees. In a little I arose and, coming without the cave, shivered in the colder air, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... continued, "that I shall ever see you again on earth, as you proceed with your journey to-morrow; and indeed I think it will perhaps be as well that this should be our last conversation, so that nothing else should interfere to blur the impression. ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said Maud. She was sitting on the stone seat where Reggie Byng had sat and meditated on his love for Alice Faraday and his unfortunate habit of slicing his approach-shots. To George, as he stood beside her, she was a white blur in the darkness. He could not ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the election, women paraded the streets, singing and cheering, mad with joy, it made my eyes blur to see them. I am sorry it had to come to a show-down, for it seems to set men and women against each other—at least, I know some men feel that way. Of course we had lots of men helping us—we could not have got far without them. Peter Neelands has been one of the best. He was ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... A luminous blur became visible in the nearer sky—moving blobs of silver luminosity in the mud-brown light of the Zed-ray. A hundred or more moving silver blobs. They were taking form. The silvery phosphorescent look faded, became grey-white. Took definite ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... that she would come. Yet when he saw the white blur of her gown against the blackness of the bushes, his heart leaped. All through the ages men have waited for women in gardens—"She is coming, my own, my sweet——" and farther back, "Make haste, my beloved," and in the beginning, as Mandy could ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... shadow, as swift, Attusah is on his feet. At the back of the great niche, so high that none could conceive that it might afford an exit, a fissure lets in a vague dreary blur of light from spaces beyond. Leaping high into the air, the lithe young warrior fixes his fingers on the ledge, crumbling at first, but holding firm under a closer grasp. The elder man, understanding the ruse as if by instinct, lays hold of the knees ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... wonder that bubbles into my soul, I would be a good fountain, a good well-head, Would blur no whisper, spoil ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... be repeated, perhaps, more than once before or after. She will want a boy like you, and you will have a girl like her. That you may easily accomplish before thirty. Afterwards, however, if you go on repeating each other, what do you do but blur the individuality of the original masterpieces—though," pursued Gerard, laughing, always ready to forget his original argument in the seductiveness of an unexpected development of it, "though, after all, I admit, there might be a temptation sometimes ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... the morning, who could be there, and except one, who would know its working? With a bound he was by the aerophone and had given the answering signal. Then instantly, as though she were standing at his side in the room, for this machine does not blur the voice or heighten its ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... six-and-thirty years afterward that I found that out, and then—oh, then I only cried when that picture of young care-free mirth rose before me out of the blur and mists of that long-vanished time; for there had come a day between, when God's good gift of laughter had gone out from me to come again no more in ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... the North, Wind of the Norland snows, Wind of the winnowed skies and sharp, clear stars— Blow cold and keen across the naked hills, And crisp the lowland pools with crystal films, And blur the casement-squares with glittering ice, But go not ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... would have been hard put to it to say whither she was going. But that moral and intellectual landscape which had lain so clear before her when she left Green Cottage was certainly beginning to blur; the mists ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I heard the brute whinny. He was uneasy; he was trying to shy; he was twisting away, trying to avoid the strange thing which lay there. I hid my head no longer. I saw the horse above me. I saw the rider glaring down. He was going to ride over me. I saw his face, a grey blur under his hat. The horse seemed to be right on top of me. I started up to my feet with a cry. The horse shied into the road, with a violence which made the rider rock. Then, throwing up his head, he bolted towards the town, half mad with the scare. Fifty yards down ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... kiss you good-bye. Your feet are cold, and the hands are cold, and the lips are cold, and they take a small mirror and they put it over your mouth to see if there is any breathing, and that mirror is taken away without a single blur upon it; and they whisper through the room: "She is gone." And then the door of the body opens and the soul flashes out. Make ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... bank, he noticed a thin stream of smoke trembling above Bongao. He paused and trained his eye on the blur. Suddenly he dug his ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... or speak. Something seemed to have gone wrong for a moment in his head. He could not hear distinctly the excitement behind him, and before him things were a blur. The sensation came and passed swiftly, with no sign of it in the immobility of his ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... conductor standing in the rear car of the Great Northern train. He speaks as though the snow had hidden something priceless. Here is the view: One railway track and a line of staggering telegraph poles ending in a dot and a blur on the horizon. To the left and right, a sweep as it were of the sea, one huge plain of corn land waiting for the spring, dotted at rare intervals with wooden farmhouses, patent self-reapers and binders almost as big as the houses, ricks left over from last ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... was playing the accompaniment, Nan's own eyes would fill unexpectedly with tears and the black and white notes of the piano run together into an oblong blur of grey. ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... with Mathilde Wesendonck in his arms was Tristan in the arms of Isolde, he did not find a melody instead of a kiss on his lips; he did not find a progression of harmonies melting through the contours of a warm beauty with a blur of desperate ecstasies, semitones of desire, he found only the anxious happiness of any other lover. Nevertheless, he was gathering the substance of the second act of Tristan und Isolde. And it is this that Plato means when he says that fornication is something immortal ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... finer, and better perceived than they would have been had it passed in ordinary course through the post-office. Letters in the post-office are hurried quickly through the operation of stamping, so that one passing over the other while the stamping ink is still moist, will to some extent blot and blur that with which it has come in contact. He will produce some dozens taken at random, and will show that with them all such has been the case. This blotting, this smudging, is very slight, but it exists; it is always there. He will tell you that this envelope ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... and she insensibly receded from her first hasty generalisation of him, and paused to reapproach him on another level. The little girl began to play with her glasses, and accidentally knocked them from her nose. The minister's face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she was tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a Social Union, in spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Jack has promised to bring me this way once again before we go back home. Then, if I've mixed one village with another in a kind of mental earthquake, I can rearrange my tout ensemble. Impressions of the country, however, I shall never lose or blur disastrously with those of any other part: it is too individual, and makes ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... delight of laugh and jest, They plied their subtle alchemy with zest— Till, sudden, high above their tumult, welled Out of the sitting-room a song which held Them stilled in some strange rapture, listening To the sweet blur of voices chorusing:— ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... all his tribe, and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was not openly insulting, but rather that of banter, misplaced perhaps, and in poor taste at such a time, yet ostensibly ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... and over the field went the 65th in a wild charge. The noise of a thousand seas was in the air, and the smoke of the bottomless pit. The yellow flashes of the guns came through it, and a blur of colour—the flag on the bank. On went their own great battle-flag, slanting forward as Billy Maydew ran. The bank flamed and roared. A bullet passed through the fleshy part of the boy's arm. He looked sideways at the blood. "Those ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... hope and the entrance into despair. It is children's awe and fools' amazement, a worm in conscience and a curse to wickedness. In brief, it makes the coward stagger, the liar stammer, the thief stumble, and the traitor start. It is a blot in arms, a blur in honour, the shame of a soldier, and the defeat of ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... consider or interpret anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes at ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... All was blur, hurry, confusion, tumult. Yet I remember, as we pressed onwards with the stream and part of it, certain sharp outlines. I caught here and there a glimpse of a pale scared face at a window, a half-clad form at a door, of the big, wondering eyes of a child held ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Through it all, however, he smiled. "What my ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... in the most powerful telescope. But when the Ring Nebula is photographed—and this is seen beautifully in the photographs made with the Crossley reflector on Mount Hamilton by the late Prof. J. E. Keeler—this excessively faint star imprints its image boldly as a large bright blur, encircled by the nebulous ring, which itself appears to consist of ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... such a crowd can yell. Then clear water showed between the shells and the four-mile flag fluttered like a blur as the Yale crew rushed by it. Slower plied the blades, shoulders which had swayed backward and forward in such perfect rhythm drooped, and one or two faces, gray from exhaustion, fell forward upon heaving chests. Then the rowing ceased, the long oars trailed over the water, ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the fog steals in (more surely fleet Than the smacks that run from her white-shod feet) And clamours of startled calls arise From bewildered ships that have lost their eyes; The fog horn bellows its deep-mouthed shout, The little lights on the shore blur out And strange, dim shapes pass wistfully With a secret tide to ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... intice any man to enter into it. Nay, he dooth, as if your journey should be through a faire vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of grapes, that, full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse; but hee cometh to you with words set in delightfull proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well enchaunting skill of musicke; and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; the conspectus is always good, and the blur that remains on the mind is probably just enough. I have been enchanted with the unveiling of Revelations. And how picturesque that return of the false Nero! The Apostle John is rather discredited. And to think how one had read the thing ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disillusion him. Standish tried to bolster him up with undergraduate slang, and to convey to Henry the fact that all the hill-folk were solidly behind him, but he knew better than to come out flat with commiseration. Then, too, Standish was conscious of a vague cloud which had come up to blur their relationship. He didn't suspect for an instant the true cause of it, which was his remark, some months ago, that he wouldn't employ in his office a friend such as Henry; but he felt it, and was ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... with a speed which made the flying rocks and foliage along the shore a blur—racing toward a white stretch of churning spray and foam that reached as far down the river as it was possible to see. From the water which dashed itself to whiteness against the rocks there still came the mighty boom! boom! which had put ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... be so crazy with delight at getting home she will see everything through a blur at first. But when we have all gone away and left them here, then Charlotte will see. And she'll be glad to find traces of her devoted family wherever ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the cool evening air ripple against our faces. The Neosho Valley was black now. Only here and there did we catch the glitter of the river. The twilight afterglow was still pink, but the sweep of the prairie was only a purple blur swathed in gray mist. Out of this purple softness, as we parted the bushes, we saw Marjie ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... how they fly from it: the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting and your character—all that is done for you: you have just got to select the characteristic things, and not to blur the things that you would have wished otherwise. For God's sake, let us get at the truth in books, and not use them as screens to keep the fire off, or as things to distract one from the depressing facts in one's ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he had an eye for all things, from the baskets of fruit and flowers, messengers with late orders from the stores, repeated farewells, to the squalling babies in the steerage. Even in the impudent shrieking tugboats he found a measure of delight; and the blur on the water ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... turned as by one impulse and looked back. Life is like one of those endless Italian corridors, painted, picture after picture, by a master hand; and man is the traveler through it, taking his eyes from one scene but to rest them upon another. Some remain a blur in his mind; some he remembers not; for some he has but to close his eyes and he sees them again, line for line, tint for tint, the whole spirit of the piece. I close my eyes, and I see the sunshine hot and bright, the blue of the skies, the ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... front and a little to the left, used the same long, sweeping strokes as with Agatha. At each of them a warm current of air seemed to strike me, and to suffuse a thrill and glow all through me from head to foot. My eyes were fixed upon Miss Penclosa's face, but as I gazed the features seemed to blur and to fade away. I was conscious only of her own eyes looking down at me, gray, deep, inscrutable. Larger they grew and larger, until they changed suddenly into two mountain lakes toward which I seemed to be falling with horrible rapidity. I shuddered, and as I did so some deeper stratum ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the big Turkey cock. When he reached the end of the log he suddenly dropped his tail, stretched himself to his full height and his wings began to beat, first slowly then faster and faster, until they were just a blur. They seemed to touch above his back but when they came down they didn't quite strike his sides. It was those fast moving wings that made the thunder. It was so loud that Peter almost wanted to stop his ears. When it ended Strutter settled down to rest and once more appeared like a ball of fluffy ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... chance to get him, after all," she thought eagerly. "It won't be much of a picture perhaps . . . just a white blur against a white ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... during his life. Nor, I think, since that, have many men fared worse, by the Limner or Biographic class, the favorable to him and the unfavorable; or been so smeared of and blotched of, and reduced to a mere blur and dazzlement of cross-lights, incoherences, incredibilities, in which nothing, not so much as a human nose, is clearly discernible by way of feature!"—Courage, reader, nevertheless; on the above terms let us march according ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... he continued, "that I shall ever see you again on earth, as you proceed with your journey to-morrow; and indeed I think it will perhaps be as well that this should be our last conversation, so that nothing else should interfere to blur the impression. ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Bar broke hold after hold; he was like lightning, panther-like, subtle, vicious. Time after time he spun Chick out of his defense and bore him down into a hold of death. And each time Chick somehow wriggled out, and saved himself by a new hold. The struggle became a blur—muscle, legs, the lust for killing—and hatred. Twice Watson essayed the offensive; first he got a hammer lock, and then a half-Nelson. The ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... stood with the paper in his hand, the type a blur before his eyes. He could almost see Isobel's old home in Montreal. It was on the steep, shaded road leading up to Mount Royal, where he had once watched a string of horses "tacking" with their two-wheeled carts of coal ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... later the faith of the pack in their leader was justified. Not far away a gray blur drifted across their path and vanished, hidden by the curtain of snow which had begun to fall. It was a caribou herd, that drifting band which in midwinter is at once the hope and the despair of the larger flesh-eating ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... in great trouble because he had not been allowed to accompany his master to his hiding-place, but he retained his self-respect and kept himself so fine that his black court-dress and immaculate white cravat made a blur before Stair's eyes in the upward ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... her through a blur of tears. It had been nearly seven years since she had last stood at that old gate. Such a crowd of memories came ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the Saunders mansion. At the time of Maria's first visit to Amity it had been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with its roof and walls of rain and sun stained shingles and clapboards, its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda. When Maria went to Amity to begin teaching, the ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of signs showing where the cattle had been driven off. A large herd was missing, and it must have taken a number of rustlers to have rounded them up and started them toward Double Z, or whatever place was to be used to change, or blur the brands, so the cattle could be sold to some innocent purchaser, perhaps. Though there were not wanting, in that ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... the officers, she started up, and stood erect, face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace and joy and light and life"—for he was standing against the window a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame from hell, since he was in it—and she cried to him to stand away, she chose hell ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 'supernatural' occurrence was caused by a careless boy's love affairs, by a gust of southwest wind, by a sudden heavy rain, and by the chance that I had used English ink, the kind that water cannot blur. All these simple natural things made me act so foolishly toward a good friend, the sort of friend I have always known you to be. Let me hear from you, and tell me what you people up North think of my book. I give you my word that the 'Unknown Powers' shall ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded lamp-light it became once more a dim Rembrandtish blur. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... and bright greens, yellows and pinks, positive discords and absolute antagonisms of tint side by side, yet without jarring the eye. Green all round, the trees and hedges; blue overhead, the sky; purple and gold westward, where the sun sinks. No part of this grass can be represented by a blur or broad streak of colour, for it is not made up of broad streaks. It is composed of innumerable items of grass blade and flower, each in itself coloured and different from its neighbour. Not one of these must be slurred over if you wish to get the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... was a queer thing; for ordinarily the swamp boy seemed to be as cool and self-possessed as an Indian brave, who thought it a blur on his manhood to display emotion in the face of ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... filled my heart. Now all is silent. O silence, thou art terrible! terrible as that calm of the ocean which lets the eye penetrate the fathomless abysses below. Thou showest us in ourselves depths which make us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of suffering. Welcome tempests! at least they blur and trouble the surface of these waters with their terrible secrets. Welcome the passion blasts which stir the wares of the soul, and so veil from us its bottomless gulfs! In all of us, children of dust, sons of time, eternity inspires an involuntary anguish, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... after Miss Goodward left him Peter remained walking up and down, thinking of many things and unable to think of them clearly because of a pleasant blur of excitement in his brain. As he came finally back to the house he heard the Lessings talking from behind one of the ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... dark they softly stir, Till arrowy dawn the shadow-blur Dispels—God's tingling kiss of morning On oak and ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... Barnabas saw a mark upon the panelling—a blur like the shadow of a hand; but even as he stared at it, Billy Button, shuddering, passed his sleeve across it and lo! it ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... between Miss Cash and the immensely interested Cousin Gussie, gazed dully about the circle. He saw little except a blur of faces; his thoughts were elsewhere, busy in dreadful anticipation of the scene he knew he must endure when he and his cousin and Miss Phipps returned to the house of the latter. He did not dare ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Gilkan was in the greater part understood, measured; there was a certain amount of inchoate, youthful response to her sheer physical well being, a vague blur of pleasant sensation at her proximity; but beyond that he felt no attraction except a careless admiration for her endurance and dexterity in the woods, a certain relief in the freedom of her companionship. He had never considered ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest impression was the sweet sense ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... squared elbows, swinging hips, and heads on high, as suits women who carry heavy weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a hundred sons and no daughters, as the saying is. ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... sake of its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... against the fence door, and it gave with a crash. Pandemonium reigned behind him. In a blur he saw the courtyard, that was dimly lighted now by the open doors and open windows of the dance hall, swaying with shapes, and, like ghostly figures, a mob tearing toward ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together. He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun. The first Terry knew of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... had no wish to meet him again. Without telling herself why, she would have shunned the meeting. Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in sublime scenery were best avoided. She thought so the more for a fitful blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of a little train that puffed out of the Finland station—a primitive, miniature train, white with frost and powdered with the ashes of its wood fuel. The vision came and passed a sketch, not a picture—a suggestion of straight tracks, wide snow plains, and the blue, misty blur of fir woods. Then a shifting, a juggling of effects! Abo, the Finnish port, painted itself upon his imagination, and he was embarked upon the lonely sledge-drive, to the harbor. He started in his sleep, shivered and sighed at that remembered drive. The train passed over new points, the hoods ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... endeavor; it sanctifies defeat and denial; it polishes manners; it gives to morals a tincture of devotion; and, as with the spell of magic, such as Milton describes in "Comus," it dissipates with a glance the wild rout of low desires and insane follies which so much blur and blot up the otherwise fair face of human society. It permits of no meanness in its train; it expels vulgarity, and, with a high stretch toward perfected humanity, it unearths the grovelling nature, and gives it aspirations of sand ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... to listen; he looked long and steadily into the darkness around him. Suddenly he saw her—a pale blur ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... driven rapidly, on a sharp trot as they turned, and then, a hundred feet further, at a slashing gallop. Just outside their trail appeared the marks of a galloping horse. A few rods farther along Keith came to a confused blur of pony tracks sweeping in from the east, and the whole story of the chase was revealed as though he had witnessed it with his own eyes. They must have been crazy, or else impelled by some grave necessity, to venture along this trail in so small a party. And they were travelling west—west! Keith ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... o'clock in the morning, who could be there, and except one, who would know its working? With a bound he was by the aerophone and had given the answering signal. Then instantly, as though she were standing at his side in the room, for this machine does not blur the voice or heighten its tone, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... advantage all over the house, but Mrs Verloc's mother was confined to two back rooms on the first floor. The luckless Stevie slept in one of them. By this time a growth of thin fluffy hair had come to blur, like a golden mist, the sharp line of his small lower jaw. He helped his sister with blind love and docility in her household duties. Mr Verloc thought that some occupation would be good for him. His spare time he occupied by drawing circles with ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... pointed majestically to the pictorial blur in the paper. "Perhaps you don't recognize ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... congregation and be able to estimate the causes and effects of his discourse. I have sometimes suspected, indeed, that better saints occupy this Amen Corner for a less excusable curiosity about the doings in the congregation. William closed the hymn-book, looked out over the blur of faces before ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... beginnings of Christianity in me. All my history, Bible and English, came to me through picture-books. I wept tenderly over the endangered eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many kings, princes, and governors who incurred my displeasure, scratching them with pins till only a white blur ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... after I left her house I never gave her a thought, but on the third her shy side-glances suddenly loomed up in my mind and would not leave it. Just her black, serious eyes and those shy looks of theirs gleaming out of a white, strikingly interesting complexion. Her face in general was a mere blur in ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... content to remain where we were. The night had fallen; the streets, as they lost themselves in dim turnings, in mysterious alleyways, and arches that seemed grotesquely high in the vague blur of things, were filled for us with the charm of a new and lovely beauty. At one end the street ended in a towering mass of stone; that doubtless was the cathedral. At the right, the narrow houses dipped suddenly; their roof-lines were lost in vagueness. Between the slit made by the street a deep, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... her side as though he had been turned to stone, rigidly upright, his hand hanging lifeless at his side, his face expressionless. She felt that she had struck right at his life's vitality—that she had killed him. Yet it was not remorse that blinded her till the white road became a shimmering blur—it was a frightful personal pain which was hers and hers alone. Neither spoke. They passed a crowd of natives returning to the Bazaar. They salaamed, but Nehal Singh made no response, as was his wont. He did not seem to see them. Mechanically he guided ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... the living, the shrieks of the dying deafened him. Renewed shots from the rifles in the tree, made the Serpent lash about in a dazzling white blur, smashing trees, apes, everything in its path. But Kirby, finding himself still safe, scarcely heard or saw. His eyes, turned ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... was hobbled in the mesquite. Swiftly he saddled. Leading the animal very carefully so as to avoid rustling the brush, he zigzagged from the camp until he had reached a safe distance. Here he swung himself on and rode into the blur of night, at first cautiously, but later with swift-pounding hoofs. He went toward the northwest in a bee line without hesitation or doubt. Only when the lie of the ground forced a detour did he vary ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... the man on the couch, and she raised her head. In the half darkness he could not have seen how she was suffering. Her face was only a warm blur to him, vague and sweet and beautiful, with tender eyes. He said: "I think—I'm falling asleep. My head is so very, very queer! What is the matter with my head? Coira, do you think I might be kissed before I go ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... massive crossbeams, its leaning gables, its rows of gleaming lattices, and so up to the great sign swinging above the door—an ancient sign whereon a weather-beaten hound, dim-legged and faded of tail, pursued a misty blur that, by common report, was held to be a hare. But it was to a certain casement that his gaze oftenest reverted, behind whose open lattice he knew his father lay asleep, and his eyes, all at once, grew suffused with a glittering brightness that was not of the morning, and he took a step forward, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... unbelievers, the Herd of the Lost, pleading and threatening in the forest round his place of refuge. His followers were trying to bring him food and raiment, and his enemies were preventing them and boasting that they would keep guard over his refuge till they starved him out. Then all again was a blur, a texture of conscious and unconscious misery till a night came when the woof broke and trailed away from him, and he lifted himself on his elbow and after he had drunk a long draft from the spring, found tremulous strength to get to his feet. He tried some steps in the open space, where the ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... shoulder. Only a flare here and there as a rifle spat its red threat, that and a blur of running figures. As yet no horseman following them. That would take another minute or two. He looked at Betty. She rode astride and well; no need to bid her make haste. She leaned forward in the saddle, the loose ends of her reins ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... highly magnified. You may have noticed a sort of blur extending all across the picture. I will not describe to you the special apparatus, dusting powder, etc., which I used. It is a well-known process to the police, and by means of it you can obtain a photograph ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... became more frequent than the idealistic. Gradually, coarse and uninteresting erotic dreams of women began to haunt his mind in sleep. A curious particular regarding the new type of vision was that he never dreamed of whole females, only of their sexual parts, seen in a blur; and the seminal emissions which attended the mental pictures left a feeling of fatigue and disgust. In course of time, his wife and he agreed to live separately so far as sexual relations are concerned. He then indulged his passion for males, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... will come soon.' Now what could I say? I felt such a lump in my throat, that if Solomon had whispered to me some kind speech, I could not have uttered it, so I got out of the room just as fast as possible, to dry the tears that somehow would blur my eyes. When they are surly, or snappish, or violent, or insolent, I know exactly what to do, and have no trouble; but hang me, if I can cope with this lady—there it is out! She is a lady every inch, and as much ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of bringing out the phenomenon of alternation in a still more striking manner is to look at two different sets of writing, with the two eyes. The resultant effect is a blur, due to superposition, and the inscription cannot be read with the eyes open. But on closing them, the composite image is analysed alternately into its component parts, and thus we are enabled to read better with ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... the wind's passage but more silent. Through the visacrys windows a blur of blue-green. Speed ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault
... by, as I came back, covered with green branches and flowers. They went by with a cheer—that cheer which sounds like a cheer sometimes, and sometimes, when two trains pass on adjoining tracks so fast that you only catch a blur of faces, like the windy shriek ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... thirty or forty feet when Patches reached the scene. The girl saw the blur he made as he flashed past her—he had cut between her and the steer—so close to her that the thunder of his hoofs roared deafening in her ears, and the wind from his passing almost drew her off her balance as amazed, stunned, nerveless, ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... attempt to consider or interpret anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes at the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in Mifflin and he was real pleasant. When Gladys and I only had a nickel he'd let us have a glass of ice cream soda with two spoons. He was such a pleasant man. But what did Mr. Jerry mean," she returned to her mutton with a suddenness that made Miss Thorley blur a line, "when he said you were under the spell of ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... life, and so dear a respite, be it ever so short a one, that when that murderous hand was taken from my chin I heard a sudden chiming of little bells, and the lamp blazed up into a strange fantastic blur. It was but for a moment, and then my mind was clear again, and I was looking up at the strange gaunt face ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Then, turning to a box at the foot of the bed—that historic four-poster whereon the twin messengers of birth and death had so often waited—she knelt and raised the lid, looking into its secrets by the feeble ray emitted from the lamp. What she saw therein we care not to tell. Our pen shall not blur the bloom of that romance and association which for her the years could not destroy. Enough that this was her ark, within which were relics as precious as the budding rod and pot of manna. She was low before her holy of holies—face to face with a light which falls from the inalienable ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... top of her hat first—a blur of gray, then the red of the rose that he had sent her, a wave of her gray muff as she saw him. He went down to meet her, and stood with her on the landing. Beneath the painting, on one side, ran the inscription, ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... leisure at the rails. He stuck his hands into his pockets and his head out at the very small train. His bleached blue eyes shut to slits as he watched the rear car in its smoke-blur ooze away westward among the mounded bluffs. "Lucky it's out of range," I thought. But now Scipio ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... looked back on the next few years of her life, she could remember nothing of them except the tremendous difference that the children had made. All the rest was blotted out, a drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity as "social duties," moving always against the variable atmosphere of the house, which was gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according to the fluctuating financial conditions in Wall Street. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... evenings the curtains were Drawn and the candles lighted, for Caroline said she could not Dine comfortably in daylight. The pale flames were repeated in The mahogany of the table; the tall candlesticks, the silver appointments, were reflected also in a blur, like a grey mist; the furniture against the walls became merged into the shadows and Susan, hovering there, was no more than an ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... like a dark cliff was a red church; he could picture it all down to the smallest detail, even the plaster on the gate and the calves that were always grazing in the church enclosure. Three-quarters of a mile to the right of the church there was a copse like a dark blur—it was Count Koltonovitch's. And beyond the church ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Eery, distorted, as it long had shone On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone. The whir of motors, stricken through with calls Of playing boys, floats up at intervals; But all these noises blur to one long moan. What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange That other men still go accustomed ways! I hate their interest in the things they do. A spectre-horde repeating without change An old routine. Alone I ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... fiftieth day from that on which Dick and Phil were rescued from the sinking boat, to be precise—with the rising of the sun a faint blue blur, wedge-shaped, with the sharp edge pointing toward the south, appeared upon the horizon, straight ahead, and the joyous shout of "Land ho!" burst from the lips of the man stationed as lookout upon the lofty forecastle. Yes; there it was; land, unmistakably, sharp ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... over the hills and the morning star commenced to fade. As the light strengthened, the wide panorama of the plains and the far off mountains unfolded and the individual patches of scrub and single trees began to stand out distinctly from the general blur of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... many a blood-red, wrathful streak Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur His cruel vigilance and her Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak A hopeless hate that cannot stir, A ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... coiled, turned colorless worms of light, went into a single vast blur. Dimly Bart saw old Rugel slump forward, moaning softly; saw the old Lhari pillow his bald head on his veined arms. Then darkness took him; and thinking it was death, Bart felt only numb, regretful failure. I've failed, we'll always fail. The Lhari ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... four the hairpin mountain turns. Now I am perfectly willing to travel as fast as any one, if necessity demands it, but to tear through a region as beautiful as Venetia at sixty miles an hour, with the incomparable landscape whirling past in a confused blur, like a motion-picture film which is being run too fast because the operator is in a hurry to get home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is unnecessary. Like all Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted on keeping his cut-out wide open, thereby ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... the wooden building, and his niece standing a moment on the veranda watched the long train roll away down the faint blur of track that ran west to the farthest verge of the great white wilderness. Then with a little impatient gesture she went ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... "Why blur and agers," rejoined the upholder of science, "sure he met the Scotch steward that the lord beyant has, one day, that I hear is a wondherful edicated man, and was brought over here to show us all a patthern,—well, Pether Kelly ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... Diana saw nothing but a blur, but she managed to say, "You must be glad! Come and see my little girl, she is ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... Ram Lal's easy task to purvey luxuries to the imperious Briton, to hold the extravagant underlings in his usurious clutches, to be at peace with Hindu, Moslem, Sikh, Pathan, Ghoorka, Persian, and Armenian, and to blur his easy-going Mohammedanism in a generous participation in all sins of omission and ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... confused blur of color, a face sprang suddenly into focus, swam away again, and came back. The lips of the ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... he had loved about this world was its leisure. What he had hated about his own world above was its constantly increasing speed. Like a squirrel caught in a cage, his world had gone faster and faster until reality had vanished into a mad blur of turning wheels and running feet. Oh, well, he thought, a man is like a pup. Contented enough until life takes him by the scruff of the neck and shakes him up and proves to him that things change and a pup's world changes and he had better accustom himself to new ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... That doth not quiver in me. The old flame Throws out clear tokens of reviving fire:" But Virgil had bereav'd us of himself, Virgil, my best-lov'd father; Virgil, he To whom I gave me up for safety: nor, All, our prime mother lost, avail'd to save My undew'd cheeks from blur ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... biting cold till dawn. Douglas was too weary, too much menaced by the cold, to think coherently; for now, conscious of the depletion of his strength, even his new-found happiness could not blur the fact that he and Judith were playing with death on Black Devil Peak. He kept the fire going and fought the desire to sleep until, far below and to the east, the Indian Range turned black against a crimson sky. Then he awakened Judith. They made a hasty breakfast, then started the ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... this he dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... There was a blur before the lady's eyes—a buzzing in her ears—and the footfall she had listened for so long was now unheard as it came slowly to her side. But the light touch upon her arm—the well-remembered voice within her ear, calling her "Madam Conway," ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... Marguerite Blakeney had managed to read on the half-scorched piece of paper, seemed literally to be the words of Fate. "Start myself tomorrow. . . ." This she had read quite distinctly; then came a blur caused by the smoke of the candle, which obliterated the next few words; but, right at the bottom, there was another sentence, like letters of fire, before her mental vision, "If you wish to speak to me again I shall be in the supper-room at ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... kiddy!" Elise exclaimed, "Oh, Patty, what a daffodil head! Just a blur of yellow fuzz! And such blue eyes! She looks exactly like you! And exactly like Bill, too. Oh, I never saw such a darling baby. Let ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... principles of land-surveying at the agricultural college, and this had made his studies easier. When he came back the moon was getting bright, but the haze had thickened on the low ground and the heights behind had faded to a vague, formless blur. The trail of smoke had vanished, there was no wind, and the smooth swell broke against the bows with a monotonous dull roar as the Rio Negro went on. She was alone on the heaving water and steaming ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... that in both these places I used to muddle and blur the effect by doing the business and speaking at the same time. By acting on Reade's suggestion I gained confidence ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... water, on your left, with a sail here and there and a lunatic asylum on shore; over beyond the water, on a distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which made it blest and beautiful. Still in the distance, but on this side of the water and close to its edge, the Monument to the Father of his Country towers out of the mud—sacred ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... since, on that chill November evening, the news of Lord Ingleby's death had reached Shenstone. The happenings of the weeks which followed, now seemed vague and dreamlike to Myra, just a few events standing out clearly from the dim blur of misery. She remembered the reliable strength of the doctor; the unselfish devotion of Margaret O'Mara; the unspeakable comfort of Jane's wholesome understanding tenderness. Then the dreaded arrival of her mother; ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... well out to sea now. The shore line was sinking gradually into the sea. The land had become a faint, purplish blur in the distance, a strong, salty breeze was blowing across the sloop and the Atlantic rollers were becoming longer. The "Sue" was beginning to roll heavily, rising and falling to the accompaniment of creaking boom, rattling mast rings and flapping jibs. Keeping on ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... of the track the operator moves the front rudder, and the machine lifts from the rail like a kite supported by the pressure of the air underneath it. The ground under you is at first a perfect blur, but as you rise the objects become clearer. At a height of 100 feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably lost it by this time. The ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... Miss Quincey's MS. had become a sightless blur. But she had managed to jot down in her neat arithmetical way: "Poets healers ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... speake a me de feast? me spurne a, me kick a de feast; be garr, me tell a me do de grand grace, de favor for suppa, for dina, for eata with dee; be garrs blur, we have at home de restorative, de quintessence, de pure destill goulde, de Nector, de Ambrosia. Zacharee, make ready de fine partricke, depaste ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... accordingly, the coilings of the wandering forms began to slide into strait layers, and soft settlement of vapor. Loops of hanging moisture marked the hollows of the land-front, or the alleys of the waning light; and then the mass abandoned outline, fused its shades to pulp, and melted into one great blur of rain. Janetta thought of her Sunday frock, forgot the boat, and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... form of the sleeper and making his red face seem purplish and suffused like the face of one I had once seen dead of strangulation; howbeit, he slept well enough, judging from his lusty snoring. Now presently in the surrounding dark beyond the smouldering fire was a glimmer, a vague blur of sloping, trampled bank backed by misty trees; so came the dawn, very chill and full of eddying mists that crawled phantom-like, filling the little dingle brimful and blotting out the surrounding trees. In a little I arose and, coming without the cave, shivered in the colder air, shaken with ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... Jane's gaze riveted upon the rider that made Bishop Dyer turn. Then clear sight failed her. Dizzily, in a blur, she saw the Bishop's hand jerk to his hip. She saw gleam of blue and spout of red. In her ears burst a thundering report. The court floated in darkening circles around her, and ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... Sorely sighing in bitterness of soul, I say, when shall my name be the quotation of the wise, and my countenance be the delight of the godly, like the illustrious lord of Laggan's many hills? As for him, his works are perfect: never did the pen of calumny blur the fair page of his reputation, nor the bolt of hatred fly at ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of him. He heard, too, a high-pitched cry, half of warning, half of fright; the next instant there was a mighty upheaval of snow, an explosion of feathery white, as the human projectile landed, then a blur of blue-and-white stripes as it went rolling down ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... turned away From the vast aweful silences of Heaven (Which answer but with silence when we pray) And sought for something to assuage its grief. Some surcease and relief From sorrow, in pursuit of mortal joys. It drowned God's stillness in a sea of noise; It lost God's presence in a blur of forms; Till, bruised and bleeding with life's brutal storms, Unto immutable and speechless space The World lifts up its face, Its haggard, tear-drenched face, And cries aloud for faith's supreme reward, The promised Second Coming ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... said. For I'd caught sight of the Diana in passing, against the bluish blur of an old verdure—just the background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she wasn't in the ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... quarrel with the wind, whose angry gust Plucks off the summer hat, and flaps the fold Of many a crimson cloak, and twirls the dust In spiral shapes grotesque, and dims the gold Of gleaming tresses with the blur of rust. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... a red blur before the eyes of the Belgian. No! The man should not have her. She was for him and him alone. He would not be ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was not even looking at her now. His eyes were turned to the sea, to hide the blur that crept into them in spite of ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them veer and shift Around his blustering path. In clouds blindly whirling, In rings madly swirling, Full of crazy wrath, So furious and fast they fly They blur the earth and blot the sky In wild, white mirk. They fill the air with frozen wings And tiny, angry, icy stings; They blind the eyes, and choke the breath, They dance a maddening dance of death Around their work, Sweeping the ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... had. She threw her whole life into her work, became a part of the scenes she was depicting; her life was absorbed until the work of writing became a painful process both to body and mind. "Her beautifully written manuscript," says her publisher, "free from blur or erasure, and with every letter delicately and distinctly finished, was only the outward and visible sign of the inward labor which she had taken to work out her ideas. She never drew any of her facts or impressions from second hand; and thus, in spite of the number and variety ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... advice that sour'd a milky queen— (For "bloody" all enlighten'd men confess An antiquated error of the press:) Who, rapt by zeal beyond her sex's bounds, With actual cautery staunch'd the Church's wounds! And tho' he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre, Yet blames them both—and thinks the Pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield Against such gentle foes to take the field Whose beckoning ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... was obscure and damp, its only light filtering through the moving curtain of green water. Black and crawling things squirmed at our feet, and darkness filled the recesses of the cavern. Malicious Gossip's body was a blur in the dimness, and her low soft voice was like an overtone of the deep ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... acquaintances and even by persons hardly known to me by sight, who congratulated me on the Emperor's public championing of me against my powerful Sabine neighbors, I felt my strength ebbing and sometimes saw a gray blur between my eyes and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... impartiality, both in seeing and stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or political prescience, that no man of experience ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Seas. On an eminence above the town, solitary and aloof like a monastery, and deep in its garden of lemon-trees, it commands a wide prospect of sea and sky. By day, the Pacific is a vast stretch of blue, flat like a floor, with a blur of distant islands on the horizon—chief among them Muloa, with its single volcanic cone tapering off into the sky. At night, this smithy of Vulcan becomes a glow of red, throbbing faintly against the darkness, a capricious and sullen beacon immeasurably removed from the path of men. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... was tired beyond words, for long enough sleep would not visit me. Wearily I stared out over the oily sunlit waters. No blur of land met the eye. The ring of ocean was unbroken on every side, and overhead the vault of heaven remained unchanged. The bosom of the deep was littered with the poor wreckage of Atlantis, to remind one, if there had been a need, that what had come about was fact, and not some horrid ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... week because my book lay for sale on a forward table. And now when my friend appeared, a sudden panic seized me and I plunged into the first doorway to escape. I found myself facing a soda fountain. For a moment, in my blur, I could not account for the soda fountain, or know quite how it had come into my life. Presently an interne—for he was jacketted as if he walked a ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... fell silent again. Old Glory: the story we're wanting to hear Is what the plain facts of your christening were,— For your name—just to hear it, Repeat it, and cheer it, 's a tang to the spirit As salt as a tear;— And seeing you fly, and the boys marching by, There's a shout in the throat and a blur in the eye, And an aching to live for you always—or die, If, dying, we still keep you waving on high And so, by our love For you, floating above, And the scars of all wars and the sorrows thereof, Who gave you the name of Old Glory, ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... his lip began to quiver pitifully; his voice shrilled out and his words came tumbling forth like lava; striving to make up by passion and reiteration what they lacked in logic and coherency. "I'm not a thief. I'm not. I'm honest. I don't know how it happened. Everything became a blur in the stretch. You—you've called me a liar, Mr. Waterbury. You've called me a thief. You struck me. I know you can lick me," he shrilled. "I'm dishonored—down and out. I know you can lick me, ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... their blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and intellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence, give forth a hollow sound at the savage touch of war. They become pacifists. They can see neither good nor evil: all is a vague blur ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... and another man in the front seat, both shadows against the moving blur of street lamps and night. Berg and Lancaster sat in the rear, and the secret agent chatted all the way. But he said nothing ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... discovered this at a time most unfortunate for poor Dennis. While polishing away one morning, he suddenly became conscious that she was approaching. It seemed that she was looking directly at him, and was about to speak. His heart thumped like a trip-hammer, his cheeks burned, and a blur came over his eyes, for he was diffident in ladies' presence. Therefore he stood before her the picture of confusion, with a big boot poised in one hand, and the polishing-brush in the other. With ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the sea. As Ross headed toward the wave-washed coast he began to hear shouting and other sounds which made him believe that the besiegers were in the midst of an all-out assault. Yet those distant fires and rocketlike blasts into the sky had a wavery blur. And Ross, making his way with the effortless water cleaving of the diver, surfaced now and then to spot film curling up from the surface of the sea between the two standing rock pillars which ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... finish it out, as if in Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not really or exactly to be described at all, (for on the many hundreds who were there it seems to this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a blotch)—and yet partially to be described as I now proceed to give it. There is a scene in the play representing a modern parlor in which two unprecedented English ladies are inform'd by the impossible Yankee that he ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... stream away from the stern. The houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. The water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. Nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had been ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... and waited. The singing voices came nearer and nearer—I saw the priests, the acolytes, the swinging gold censers heavy with fragrance, the flaring candles, the snowy veils of children and girls—and then all suddenly the picturesque beauty of the scene danced before my eyes in a whirling blur of brilliancy and color from which looked forth—one face! One face beaming out like a star from a cloud of amber tresses—one face of rose-tinted, childlike loveliness—a loveliness absolutely perfect, lighted up by two luminous eyes, large ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... shady spot just off the road two sidewinders were coiled on a rock, beady eyes watching the jeep's passage. The snakes were the color of mottled sand, the "horns" on their diamond-shaped heads clearly identifiable. Their tails were a blur, and he knew they were rattling a warning, but the distinctive buzz couldn't be heard ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... and looked back. The little brown horse and the little brown girl were one with the little brown station so far away, and presently the saloon and men were blotted out in one blur of ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... know what was happening to the crippled liner, but no message came back. The last word from the Titanic was that she was sinking. Then the sparking became fainter. The call was dying to nothing. The Virginian's operator labored over a blur of signals. It was hopeless. So the Allan ship strove on, fearing that the ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... noiselessly traversed the wonderful hall with its canopies of light, its airy arches, massive groinings and bewildering blur of color and fragrance; the air was thick and grateful with incense. Exactly in the middle of the hall there rested on the floor a black shadow, a curiously shaped shadow. It was a life-sized crucifix which Baruch had ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... intent, Will he not wake, and in a desperate rage Post hither, this vile purpose to prevent? This siege that hath engirt his marriage, This blur to youth, this sorrow to the sage, This dying virtue, this surviving shame, Whose crime ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... plain, alternating with green belts of woodland, while occasionally the train plunges into dense dark pine forest only to emerge again upon the same eternal "plateau" of silence and snow. Now and again we pass a village, a brown blur on the limitless white, rarely a town, a few wooden houses clustering around a green dome and gilt crosses, but it is all very mournful and depressing, especially to one fresh from Europe. This train has one advantage, there is no rattle or roar about it, as it steals like ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... to mean—" Sylvia halted, not able to remember in her bewilderment what it had been that Father had said. In a blur of doubt and clouded perceptions she lost all definite impression of what she had heard. Evidently, as so often happened, she had grown-ups' affairs all twisted up in her mind. Aunt Victoria was touched with kindly amusement at the little girl's face of perplexity, and told her, dismissing ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... to see a great yellow garden-spider hanging head downward in the centre of his web, when we approach too closely, instead of deserting his snare, set it vibrating back and forth so rapidly that he becomes a mere blur; a more certain method of escaping the onslaught of a bird than if he ran to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... did arrive at his desired haven, late in the afternoon, when dusk was beginning to fall and blur with her gentle hand the sharp lines of hill and tree, we acknowledged his wisdom, for in the window beside the door, where we creakingly but joyfully alighted, were visible, although no longer distinctly, a vast ham as yet uncut and two richly-browned cold fowls. "There," said he, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... saw the stone terrace dimly lit by the stars far below him. The gardens were a blur of darkness out of which he vaguely discerned the glimmer of ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... By now the white jacket was no more than a blur moving in that deep gloom. He cried again, ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... off to consult Prue, and Jessie began to display her purchases before eyes that only saw a blur of shapes and colors, and expatiate upon their beauties to ears that only heard the words—"The splendid cousin is ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... through the gate when a voice speaking suddenly at his side caused him to start and stop short in his walk. A moment before he had fancied himself alone; he had heard no footsteps; and the place from where the words came was a mere vague blur in the shadows. There was something uncanny in the muffled approach, and the sensation it produced on his nerves was like the shock he used to feel as a child when his hand was ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... not quite dark when he returned to his window, but the far shore was only an indistinct blur of gloom. The fires were brighter. One of them, built solely because of the rivermen's inherent love of light and cheer, threw the blaze of its flaming logs twenty feet into ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... down. He had a dim impression that he could talk better if he took her hand, but he did not venture to ask for it. He contented himself with fixing his eyes upon as much of her face as he could make out in the dusk, a pale blur in ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... gate the spirea had ventured into showering sprays exhaling a shy and fugitive fragrance, and what had been a blur of gray cables strung upon the oaks had begun to bud with emerald and blossom with amethyst—the wisteria was a-borning. And one knew there was Cherokee rose to follow, that the dogwood was in white, and the year's new mintage ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... much tends to blur moral distinctions, and to obliterate plain duties, as the free indulgence of speculative habits. We must all know many a sorry scrub who has fairly talked himself into the belief that nothing but his intellectual difficulties prevents him from being another St. Francis. We think we could suggest ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... father glanced at her curiously. "I must be a wreck. I'm sure my hair is frightful," she thought, but forgot it as she looked at him. His face was unusually pale. In the tumult of activity he had been betrayed into letting the old despondent look blur his eyes and sag his mouth. "Must get on," ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the shadows deepened in the great trees outside. The Downs faded into a misty blur, and at length she turned from the window. In the flickering light of the fire she threw herself face downwards on her bed. For an hour she lay there motionless, while the shadows danced merrily around her, and darkness came down outside. Just every now and then a little pitiful moan ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... sentence Miss Quincey's MS. had become a sightless blur. But she had managed to jot down in her neat arithmetical way: ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... quaver of earnestness in it that needed no daylight to enforce. The pitchy night made a bobbing blur of him as he rode his quick-stepping little ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... the distant island lay, they could manage to locate it by the inky blur that seemed to settle upon the water at this one particular spot. But if any one expected to see lanterns moving to and fro like animated fireflies, they made a sad mistake. It remained as dark as the inside of a pocket ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... in my time, so many little nothings. It is hard to remember them all. They have become confused now, and blended into an interesting background, whose elements I can no longer separate. Your pardon, my lady, but I have forgotten, forgotten so completely that even the stairs seem merely a gentle blur." ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... been as small as a rat, or it might have been a part of something as large as a man. At any rate, it proclaimed that something in that spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly and at other times it vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last, however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously dishevelled and wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the prisoner and then upon the sentry. The wandering ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... banisters, a handrail: all indistinguishable. One step farther down or up, and why? But up is harder. Down! Down to this white blur; it gives before me. ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... have been acquired only by uninterrupted application; she spoke French, German, and Italian with unusual purity. That intellect, as strong and clear as crystal, could never have suffered even a temporary blur. He was beginning to be amazed at the blunder he had committed, when suddenly, one evening, a peculiar note in her voice, accompanied by a certain lifting of the eyelashes—a movement he had noticed for the first time, but which was familiar to him—threw Lynde into great perplexity. It ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... U. S. A.,'" replied Hal, turning the envelope so that his mother might read. But a sudden rush of mist to her eyes made the letters blur. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... glimpse a Naiad's reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low ... But these are things I do not know. I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester ... Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx; Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill; Tennyson notes, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... Thorstan expected the snow. Instead of that, after a few days of sunny weather, the wind dropped in a clear sky; it began to freeze, and then came the white blanket to cling about sheets and spars, and hold them close, a blur drifting upon a sea like oil. Gudrid sat like a ghost in the after deckhouse, nursing her baby and trying to keep it warm. It did not thrive and could not be expected to thrive. She was sure it would die. And so it did—died in its sleep while she was suckling it. She felt the ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... the guise Of a purpose pure and wise, As the love of them is lifted to a something in the skies That is bright Red and white, With a blur of starry light, As it laughs in silken ripples to ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of history, and explode many bubble-reputations that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... staggered into the Preparation room and sat at his desk with his brows on his hand and his eyes on his book. The print danced before his gaze: letter rushed into letter, word merged mistily into word, line into line, till all was a grey blur. A blink of the eyes—an effort of the will—a sort of "squad, shun!" to the type before him—and the words jumped back into their places, letters separated from their entanglement and stood like soldiers at ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... the great fire on shore, by which the defeated pirates lay carousing in the swamp. The other, a mere blur of light upon the darkness, indicated the position of the anchored ship. She had swung round to the ebb—her bow was now toward me—the only lights on board were in the cabin; and what I saw was merely a reflection on the fog of the strong rays ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... done," he said. He picked the second headband from the desk and put it on. Abruptly, both he and his wife were aware of a fuzziness in their thoughts and senses. The walls, the floor, and the furniture seemed to blur and waver, like the fantasy world of delirium. He put his hand up and adjusted the controls. The room returned to normal, and their senses were abruptly sharp and clear again. He dropped ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... account for, except by pleading the general issue of custom. Why should foot and boot be sounded differently? Why food and good? Why should the Yankee mark the distinction between the two former words, and blur it in the case of the latter, thereby incurring the awful displeasure of the "Autocrat," who trusses him, falcon-like, before his million readers and adorers? Why should the Frenchman call his wooden shoe a sabot ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... foulest pen, Or fairest handled by the sons of men. 'Twill also show what is upon it writ, Be it wisely, or nonsense for want of wit, Each blot and blur it also will expose To thy next readers, be they friends ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... uneventfully, where she learned that men from the Embassy had followed on bicycles as a matter of precaution, and the travelers found their compartment and were safely installed. She sank into her place silently and looked out of the window into the blur of moving lights as Vienna was left behind them. Upon the seat opposite her sat the newly created officer of the Fifteenth Army Corps, Ober Lieutenant Carl von Arnstorf, looking rather smart in his borrowed plumage. The intimacy of their new situation did not frighten her, for she thought ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... crowd was still wondering why the man didn't swing his rope, there was a blur of white dust, a brown streak as the cow-horse shot across the forefront of the big steer, the thud of a heavy body on the ground, the glimpse of a man-among the thrashing hoofs, and then a mighty heaving as the huge steer strained against the rope that bound ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... have no mo Admirals that ware gentlemen (for Obdam was so) because they never fought fortunatly with their ennemies when they had such. But certainly this is nought but a fiction made by a commonwealth to cast a blur upon nobility, seing thir same very states have fought most couragiously and advantagiously under the conduct ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... reply; and it was given with such calm dignity that colour, the half-nude figure, and the blur of slavery were forgotten by the lookers-on, and the feeling of wonder at the lieutenant's treatment ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... grossness must be transposed, as it were, to a fictive scale, a scale of fainter tints and generalized signs. A filthy, eruptive, realistic Bardolph and Pistol overlay the romantic with the literal. Relegate them and blur them, to the eye; let their blotches be constructive ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... cupboards gone years ago, questing and nosing no end, and quite methodically too, until he reaches the window. Then he stops, looks back, narrows his foxy lids, listens—quite perceptibly, you know, a kind of gingerish blur; then he seems to open this corner bookcase here, as if it were a door and goes out along what I suppose might at some time have been an outside gallery or balcony, unless, as I rather fancy, the house extended once beyond these ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... to distinguish satire from epic poetry, the total effect of his Essay is to blur this distinction and to raise The Dunciad very nearly to the level of genuine epic. The term "Epic Satire" (p. 6) certainly seems to refer to the wedding of two disparate genres in The Dunciad, lifting it above satire that is merely "rugged" or "mischievously ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... failed. Whatever it was, it had come to nothing. Down in the purple forest, disconnected now from the ship, the last of our friends stood marooned. I could distinguish them through the blur of the closed dome—only a swaying, huddled group was visible. But my fancy pictured this last sight of them, Dr. Frank, Venza, Shac ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... needs no art, With faint, averted feet And many a tear, In our opposed paths to persevere. Go thou to East, I West. We will not say There's any hope, it is so far away. But, O, my Best, When the one darling of our widowhead, The nursling Grief, Is dead, And no dews blur our eyes To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies, Perchance we may, Where now this night is day, And even through faith of still averted feet, Making full circle of our banishment, Amazed meet; The bitter journey to the ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... then, soon, Plutina was again hurrying over the trail, which the bordering wild flowers made dainty as a garden walk. Once, her eyes turned southward, to the gloomy grandeur of Stone Mountain, looming vast and portentous. The blur of shadow that marked the Devil's Cauldron touched her to an instant of foreboding, but the elation of mood persisted. She raised her hand, and the fingers caressed the bag in which was the fairy crystal, and she went ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... words; her voice was in my ears, fresh and musical. The new grace of her shining head and wondrous, swaying figure, the beauty and spirit of her carriage, filled my consciousness. A schooner with a deck load of wood drifted with the tide, her sails flapping; I saw her in a blur. When I turned from the sheen of the river, the bicyclists whizzing past left streaks of light. A man cutting brush in a vacant lot leaned on his axe to look after us. The sudden stopping of his "chop, chop"—he too was staring at the vision of beauty before his eyes—brought me ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... Sir, why I were obliged to lock him in," cried the "good woman," following to the door, to clear every blur from her virtues; "for his own sake I done it, for I felt my cry a-coming, and to see me cry—Lord bless you, the effect upon him is to call out for a walking-stick and ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Charley's face and seemed to blur his sight. His monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and slowly adjusted it again as he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a confused combat, a wild and terrible struggle, the climax of the night-battle. White and red faces mingled before him in a blur, the water seemed to flow in narrow, black streams between the boats and the pall of smoke was ever growing thicker. It hung over them, black and charged now with gases. Paul coughed violently, but he was not conscious of it. He fired ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct instant he cut his drive and released his largest bomb. Then, so rapidly that it was one blur of speed, he again kicked on his eight G's of drive and started to whirl around as only a speedster or a flitter can whirl. Practically unconscious from the terrific resultant of the linear and angular accelerations, he ejected the two smaller bombs. He did not care particularly where ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... So full of love and tenderness and pity, so full of ambition and high resolves and noble impulses, he is dead—dead already—and in his place there stands "private 355" a man of hate, a man of blood! Many a time the knitting has to be laid aside, for the bitter tears blur the stitches. ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... station did we lose the clamour. No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror. But has any one who saw it forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil. And at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my hotel there was a roofless ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... of her meeting with Maurice, she ate her lunch with a glance every few minutes at her great-uncle Allan on the opposite wall. A very black portrait, it seemed only a meaningless blur till in a certain light the strong face and stern eyes shone out of the surrounding gloom with startling effect. She sometimes wondered rather anxiously if the uncle to whose home-coming she looked forward, could by any possibility ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations. Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish blur of habitation, ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... roar the engine awoke to life and the propeller spun around, a blur of indistinctness. The motor was working sweetly. Toni throttled down, assured himself that everything was working well, and then, with a wave of his hand toward Jack, began to taxi across the field, to head up into the wind. All aeroplanes are started ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... the small ones, like the sharp-shinned, but also the larger, wilder species come, and winding up close to the clouds, circle and circle there, trying apparently to see some meaning in the maze of moving, intersecting lines of dots below yonder in the cracks of that smoking, rumbling blur. ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... and the pen, looked a while helplessly at the paper, then at Huish. The swing had gone the other way; there was a blur upon his eyes. "It's a dreadful business," he said, with a strong ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of his habits of thought varies with the degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness with which the individual habitually applies the animistic or anthropomorphic formula in dealing with the facts of his environment. The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms of anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... multitudes of small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of brownish gold. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... had been driven off. A large herd was missing, and it must have taken a number of rustlers to have rounded them up and started them toward Double Z, or whatever place was to be used to change, or blur the brands, so the cattle could be sold to some innocent purchaser, perhaps. Though there were not wanting, in that country, not-so-innocent-purchasers of ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... Breathing. If you wanted to find out whether a little black bunch up in the branches of a tree were a bird or a cluster of leaves, or a brown blur in the stubble were a rabbit or a clod, the first thing you would probably look for would be to see whether it moved, and secondly, if you could get close enough without its moving away, whether it were breathing. You would know perfectly well if you saw it breathing ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... slowly the ponderous top began to revolve upon its axis. Faster, faster, till it was nothing but a blur. Faster yet, until only its outlines were visible. Cliff pressed a lever on the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... nearing exhaustion, and she knew it. Her brain had begun to swim. She saw him in a blur before her quivering vision. The hand that grasped the rapier was too numbed to obey her behests. Suddenly there came a tumult in the corridor without—a hoarse yelling and the rush of many feet. It was the sound she had been listening for, but ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... real pleasant. When Gladys and I only had a nickel he'd let us have a glass of ice cream soda with two spoons. He was such a pleasant man. But what did Mr. Jerry mean," she returned to her mutton with a suddenness that made Miss Thorley blur a line, "when he said you were under the spell of ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... red blur before the eyes of the Belgian. No! The man should not have her. She was for him and him alone. He would not be robbed ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... man, of methodical habits, ever have told how long their voyage lasted. It passed, unreal and timeless, in a glorious mist, a delighted fever: the background a blur of glossy white bulkheads and iron rails, awnings that fluttered in the warm, languorous winds, an infinite tropic ocean poignantly blue; the foreground, Miss Forrester. Her white figure, trim and dashing; her round blue eyes, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... broad torrent of froth, foaming like a furious, rapid stream away from the stern. The houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. The water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. Nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... moving very slowly toward him down the hall. Plainly she was bitterly afraid when she came beside him, under the dim hall light. She wore that same black hat, turned back from her white face, and the red flower beside it was a dull, uncertain blur. Decidedly she was pretty enough to explain ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... muttered Foulet and his tone was tinged with disappointment. But hardly had he spoken when, from one of the myriad roof-tops below us, rose a swift streak of shadow. So fast it flew, with such unbelievable speed, that to our eyes it was little more than a blur; but— ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... by her side as though he had been turned to stone, rigidly upright, his hand hanging lifeless at his side, his face expressionless. She felt that she had struck right at his life's vitality—that she had killed him. Yet it was not remorse that blinded her till the white road became a shimmering blur—it was a frightful personal pain which was hers and hers alone. Neither spoke. They passed a crowd of natives returning to the Bazaar. They salaamed, but Nehal Singh made no response, as was his wont. He did not seem to see them. Mechanically he guided ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... upon the ball, and a louder roaring answered from the stern. A needle quivered and swung over on a dial as their speed increased. Beneath them was a blur of whirling white; ahead was an upthrust mountain range upon which they were driving. And Harkness thrilled with the sense of power that his fingers held as he gently raised the ball and nosed ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... was hardly lighted before they were startled by a confused sound of shouting from the compound;—a blur of shrill and deep voices, punctuated by the strained discordant bark of a dog;—a bark unmistakable to ears that have heard it once. Desmond ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... back ever again?" The meadows swam in a blur before her eyes, and she thought of the purple velvet slippers which would ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was not openly insulting, but rather that of banter, misplaced perhaps, and in poor taste ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... drive them out. The motive, too, was plain enough in the light of the overheard conversation at the National Hotel. The men who wanted Mr. Bell's mine had waited till he had located it before striking their first blow. What would their next be? Peggy's pulses throbbed and the grove seemed to blur for an instant. But the next moment she was mistress of herself again. Clearly there was only one thing to do. Lay the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... stand in open relations with both terms, reconciling in the depths of his life, though he can never explain, the mystery of their friendship. He who will adhere only to the universal, and makes a blur of the special, is a rhapsodist; he who can apprehend only the special, being blind and callous to the universal, is a chatterer and magpie. From these opposites we never escape; Destiny and Freedom, Rest and Motion, Individual and Society, Origination and Memory, Intuition and Observation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... into it. Nay he doth, as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes: that full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well inchanting skill of Musicke: and with a tale forsooth ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... his wife ! He turned back to the fire, and he saw again the red bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a magnificent fight. And she had won. And it suddenly occurred to him that what she had said in the note was true, and that Scottie Deane could easily have killed him. The next moment he wondered ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... a sea voyage so tempestuous as ours had been. For the first few moments I was inclined to agree with her, and said so; but very shortly my opinion was altered by the fact that what I saw first as an indistinct blur gradually assumed a definite shape, and I then found there were six little swallows in front of me, apparently connected with each other by a waving ribbon, or so it ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... even the crystal summit ridges delighted us as did the changing waters in the path of the steamer. Following immediately upon the transparency preserved to a depth of some eighty feet, a blur passed over the surface. This changed by imperceptible degrees to a light green. The green, again, speedily deepened, shading into a light blue; and finally, in deepest water (where the Lake is all but fathomless), the color becomes so ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... her face was gravely thoughtful as she looked across the shining water towards the faint blur of a pine forest on a distant point, and Thirlwell felt as if they had been suddenly united ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... mist had aided him to lose those pursuing vultures. The last of them fell off, baffled,—or afraid to go deeper into France. Now he emerged again into the clear air and the starlight. The land beneath him was a scudding blur, with a dark-green mass in its center, the forest of ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... order to the officers, she started up, and stood erect, face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace and joy and light and life"—for he was standing against the window a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame from hell, since he was in it—and she ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... torch to these truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria's face was the somewhat smoky light of the scene between them. If the light however wasn't, as we have hinted, the glow of joy, the reasons for this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even through the blur cast over them by his natural modesty. She had held herself for months with a firm hand; she hadn't interfered on any chance—and chances were specious enough—that she might interfere to her profit. ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... in response to an exceptionally strident outburst of sound, they beheld the line of lights suddenly incline from the horizontal, saw the slope grow steadily steeper, and then, as the great mass of the vessel's stern hove up, an indistinct blur of deeper blackness on the darkness of the night, the line of lights slid forward and vanished one after another until all had disappeared, while at the same moment a heartrending wail from hundreds of throats pealed ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... Library, reading over St. Louis newspapers of last week's vintage, and never failing to glance at the death notices. For one week an advertisement under PERSONAL appeared, which every time she encountered it was sure to blur over her vision with ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... was all very interesting to him. And he had an eye for all things, from the baskets of fruit and flowers, messengers with late orders from the stores, repeated farewells, to the squalling babies in the steerage. Even in the impudent shrieking tugboats he found a measure of delight; and the blur on the water ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... move Gubin that he rose and transferred his position to the door of the hut, where, a dark blur against the square of blue, he lit a gurgling pipe, and puffed thereat until his long, conical nose glowed. Presently the surging stream of words ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... conscripti, putare] Here the relation of BF to {Pi} seems particularly close. {Pi}, like MVDoxa, has the abbreviation P.C. On a clearly written page, the error of reputare (BF) for P.C. PUTARE is not a specially likely one to make. But in the blur at the bottom of fol. 52v, a page on the flesh side of the parchment, the combination might readily ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... our village streets could not exceed for egotism the temper of a new man in the cab of a train like this one. This valkyric journey on the back of the vermilion engine, with the shouting of the wind, the deep, mighty panting of the steed, the gray blur at the track-side, the flowing quicksilver ribbon of the other rails, the sudden clash as a switch intersects, all the din and fury of this ride, was of a splendor that caused one to look abroad at the quiet, green ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... hear," said Leighton, dully. Then he tossed back his head. He would not blur Lew's happy hour. He held out his hand. "I hear," he repeated, "and I'll—I'll ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... him and all about him a blur of men's faces and figures risen to their feet, he heard a hundred voices say breathlessly: "What!" and one that said: "My ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... corruption; slum, rookery. V. be unclean, become unclean &c adj.; rot, putrefy, ferment, fester, rankle, reek; stink &c 401; mold, molder; go bad &c adj.. render unclean &c adj.; dirt, dirty; daub, blot, blur, smudge, smutch^, soil, smoke, tarnish, slaver, spot, smear; smirch; begrease^; dabble, drabble^, draggle, daggle^; spatter, slubber; besmear &c, bemire, beslime^, begrime, befoul; splash, stain, distain^, maculate, sully, pollute, defile, debase, contaminate, taint, leaven; corrupt ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... day's thine own: Thou and thy Stars have cast me down: 870 My laurels are transplanted now, And flourish on thy conqu'ring brow: My loss of honour's great enough, Thou need'st not brand it with a scoff: Sarcasms may eclipse thine own, 875 But cannot blur my lost renown. I am not now in Fortune's power; He that is down can fall no lower. The ancient heroes were illustrious For being benign, and not blustrous, 880 Against a vanquish'd foe: their swords Were sharp and trenchant, not their words; And did in fight but cut work ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... fishing-net, in the meshes of which two crawfish and a roach with glistening scales were entangled. The women appeared to have cause of dispute between themselves—to be rating one another about something. In the background, and to one side of the house, showed a faint, dusky blur of pinewood, and even the weather was in keeping with the surroundings, since the day was neither clear nor dull, but of the grey tint which may be noted in uniforms of garrison soldiers which have seen long service. To complete the picture, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... to stop at Simsbury for a young man who was presently commanding a meal in the palatial diner, and who had, before this meal was eaten, looked out with compassion upon two Simsbury-like hamlets that the train rushed by, a blur of small-towners standing on their depot platforms to envy the inmates ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... advice that soured a milky queen— (For 'bloody' all enlightened men confess An antiquated error of the press:) Who rapt by zeal beyond her sex's bounds, 25 With actual cautery staunched the Church's wounds! And tho' he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre, Yet blames them both—and thinks the Pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield 30 Against such gentle foes to take the field Whose beckoning hands the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Zeus, 'tis just the same; The thing evades, we hug a name; 110 Nay, scarcely that,—perhaps a vapor Born of some atmospheric caper. All Lempriere's fables blur together In cloudy symbols of the weather, And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas But to illustrate such hypotheses. With years enough behind his back, Lincoln will take the selfsame track, And prove, hulled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Paul, and the boy, too, then opened his eyes. The rest of it, the mad whirlings and jumpings of the warriors, was becoming a blur before him, ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... How much to thy Ingenious Pen they owe, Should my presumptuous Muse attempt to raise Trophies to thee, she might as well go blaze Bright Planets with base Colours, or display The Worlds Creation in a Puppet-Play. Let this suffice, what Calumnies may chance, To blur thy ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... greater violence is done by successive interpreters to sacred writings than to any other relics of ancient literature. Ideas grow and change, yet each generation tries to find its own ideas reflected in the sacred pages of their early prophets, and, in addition to the ordinary influences which blur and obscure the sharp features of old words, artificial influences are here at work distorting the natural expression of words which have been invested with a sacred authority. Passages in the Veda or Zend-Avesta ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... awkward and constrained attitudes, of course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and there an elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of the younger children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... her through the blur of pain. "I wish you'd stay with me, Athalia, I've got a—a sort of—headache. Never mind about being a Shakeress just for to-night. It would be such a comfort to ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... when Wade tried to recall that mad ride, he found it only a vague blur upon his memory. He was conscious only of the fact that he had traveled at a speed which, in saner moments, he would have considered suicidal. Urging the big black over the rougher ground of the higher levels, he rode like a maniac, without regard for his own life and without mercy for the magnificent ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... front; of a pain at the base of her brain. Her father glanced at her curiously. "I must be a wreck. I'm sure my hair is frightful," she thought, but forgot it as she looked at him. His face was unusually pale. In the tumult of activity he had been betrayed into letting the old despondent look blur his eyes and sag his mouth. "Must get on," ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... she visited the Public Library, reading over St. Louis newspapers of last week's vintage, and never failing to glance at the death notices. For one week an advertisement under PERSONAL appeared, which every time she encountered it was sure to blur over her ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... his wise grey eyes into the handsome face and felt a thrill, an awakening, the terrible sincerity of the speaker. At times the ferocity in the eyes when he had spoken of sacrifice caused the free-lance soldier to shiver. A blur of red floated before his eyes—something of a fateful forecasting that some day the awful storm that was brewing would break, and the fanatical Brahmin in front of him would call for English blood to glut ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... She felt inclined for a snooze, but was afraid it would not look well. While hesitating she ceased speaking, and both women fell asleep under the shade of their parasols. It was the shallow, glassy sleep of the open air, through which they divined easily the great blur ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... line in front of our own line here, one sees little but a gentle crest, protected by wire, in front of another gentle crest, also wired, with other gentle crests beyond and to the left. To the right there is a blur of gentle crests behind tree-tops. It is plain from a glance that gullies run irregularly into the spurs here, and make the defence easy. All through the fighting here, it happened too often that the taking of one crest only meant that ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... caught, as at Brightling, in 1659. Mr. Joseph Bennet, a minister in that town, wrote an account of the affair, published in Increase Mather's Remarkable Providences. 'Several things were thrown by an invisible hand,' including crabs! 'Yet there was a seeming blur cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant girl was at last found throwing some things.' She averred that an old woman had bidden her do so, saying that 'her master and dame were bewitched, and that they should hear ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... shame my virtues blur, Till such an ending seem not loss, but gain! Yet o'er my heart there creeps a saddening pain, To hear them cry abroad "You murdered ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... this: leave ill alone! Who tries to mend his wife succeeds As he who knows not what he needs. He much affronts a worth as high As his, and that equality Of spirits in which abide the grace And joy of her subjected place; And does the still growth check and blur Of contraries, confusing her Who better knows what he desires Than he, and to that mark aspires With perfect zeal, and a deep wit Which nothing helps but trusting it. So, loyally o'erlooking all In which love's promise short may fall Of full performance, honour that As won, which aye love ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... vision, and there was a fleeting glimpse of sun-lit spires of mountains, shadowed valleys, and mysterious crevasses from which clouds of steam and yellow vapor curled. Still it seemed they must crash against one of those slender pinnacles. Nearer it came like a flash; a dizzying blur, now, that drove ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... the journey through the traffic-laden streets to the hotel was so vivid a panorama of shifting scenes that, to the unaccustomed eyes of the girls, it seemed like one confused blur. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... of laugh and jest, They plied their subtle alchemy with zest— Till, sudden, high above their tumult, welled Out of the sitting-room a song which held Them stilled in some strange rapture, listening To the sweet blur of voices chorusing:— ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... were being driven rapidly, on a sharp trot as they turned, and then, a hundred feet further, at a slashing gallop. Just outside their trail appeared the marks of a galloping horse. A few rods farther along Keith came to a confused blur of pony tracks sweeping in from the east, and the whole story of the chase was revealed as though he had witnessed it with his own eyes. They must have been crazy, or else impelled by some grave necessity, to venture along this trail in so small a party. And they were travelling ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... of the dark blur behind his candle Alice perceived that he was no ordinary hunter. He was young, alert, and very good-looking, although his face was stern and his mouth bitter. He laid aside his hat as he approached the bunk in which the two women were cowering as mice tremble before a cat. For a full ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... immediately above the bench he had just quitted when he saw a blur of white—an indistinct patch in the half-light. He reached forward, and his trembling fingers closed upon a lady's handkerchief. And then—he caught the faintest breath of a perfume, strange yet hauntingly familiar, ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... of fire, or whatever it was, grew larger and larger. Col. Zane thought it might be a light carried by a man on horseback. But if this were true where was the clatter of the horse's hoofs? On that rocky blur no horse could run noiselessly. It could not be a horse. Fascinated and troubled by this new mystery which seemed to presage evil to them the watchers waited with that patience known only to those ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... good, Henderson," I said at last, abandoning the attempt in despair, and handing the telescope over to him. "I am almost certain that for a single instant I caught a faint blur of light away out there; but I cannot find it now. Take the glass, and see if you can meet with any better success. But verify your bearing before you ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... always, therefore, without Maggie, where, in fine, would he be? She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Through it all, however, he smiled. "What my child does ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of very definite limitations, and yet also of possibilities which the future ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... between his knees. It seemed to him that his thoughts were like a wheel, half-submerged in running water. The wheel went round rapidly, plunging in and out of his consciousness. Hardly had he grasped the meaning of one half when it went under and another blur of moving spokes emerged. Something his father had said, for instance, now began to pass through his mind.... "I've got my plans for her".... Dickie tried to stop the turning wheel because this speech ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... back, paddles athwart. Going with the stream, the voyageurs would "run"—"sauter les rapides"—the safest of the cataracts. Bowman, not steersman, was the pilot of such "runs." A faint, far swish as of night wind, little forward leaps and swirls of the current, the blur of trees on either bank, were signs to the bowman. He rose in his place. A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream—the rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below—the bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his horse ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... certain tongue of shingle thrust out from the further bank. For days and weeks these river marks had warned the anxious inquirers that they might not expect sport. The diminution of the tongue of land on the one side, and a blur in the pure white of the foam on the other, told the one-word ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... as blind. "I can see the people near me," he said, "but I can't make out their faces. I can just make out the pavement and the houses close at hand, and all the rest is a sort of white blur." He looked up: "That ceiling is a kind of white, ain't it? And this," tapping the wall and putting his nose close to it, "is a sort of green, ain't it?" The ceiling might have been whiter. The prevalent tints of the wall-paper had ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Mathilde Wesendonck in his arms was Tristan in the arms of Isolde, he did not find a melody instead of a kiss on his lips; he did not find a progression of harmonies melting through the contours of a warm beauty with a blur of desperate ecstasies, semitones of desire, he found only the anxious happiness of any other lover. Nevertheless, he was gathering the substance of the second act of Tristan und Isolde. And it is ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... silent, or made little signs to one another as they watched the fire. Meanwhile the mother considered the papers, now with a gleam of anger in her eyes, as she read, and now with a momentary blur of tear-dimmed vision. Most of the letters she threw at once on the fire. They writhed a moment like living creatures, and of a sudden blazed out as if tormented into sudden confession of the passions of years gone by; then they ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... spared from the post, he ventured forth alone. When not more than ten miles from the post, he turned his head, as he topped a rock-ribbed ridge for a casual survey of the broad brule he had just crossed. The next instant he brought up rigidly erect as his eye caught a swift blur of motion far back on his trail at the opposite edge of the brule. He looked again but could make out only an army of blackened stumps. Entering the scrub with a vague sense of uneasiness, he circled among the stunted trees and took ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... first proofs, and, with them, some degree of disappointment. Those covering the first outward and return journey between Pozieres and Le Sars were good, as were the next three, at the beginning of the second journey. Then came a confused blur of superimposed ground-patterns, and at the last five results blank as the brain of a flapper. A jamb in the upper changing-box had led to five ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... the paternal standing, from the velvet coat of the mayor's son to the floury roundabout of the baker's offspring; I still heard all their different voices; I saw where each one sat in school; I recalled their words, their attitudes, their gestures. Gradually all the faces melted into a rosy blur, the jackets into a uniform neutral tint; the gestures were blent in a vague ripple of movement, and at last a thick mist enveloped ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... the table support my head. Mr. Rogers could see only the back and top of my head, no part of my face. At the first glance I caught the balance—it was a little less than two millions and a half. At once the other lines upon the sheet became a crimson blur. Into my mind rushed an avalanche of figures and facts which seemed to prove irresistibly that I should have read nine millions in place of the numbers that were burning themselves into my brain. But what if it were rightly but two and a half millions, and the ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... digest it. When, at the end of his life, social entertainments tried his nerves, he gave them up. When people came to see him, and he found himself getting tired or excited by conversation, if it was not convenient to him to leave the room, he put stoppers in his ears to blur the sense of the talk. What better parable of the elaborate framework of egotism on which his life was constructed could there be than the following legend, not derived from the book? One evening, the story goes, the philosopher had invited, at his club, a youthful stranger to join him in a game ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one were to wrest a living from the stones and sand of the hillside farm, one must be up and at work betimes. Then Harry, Tom, and Nellie must be roused, dressed, fed, and made ready for the half-mile walk to the red schoolhouse at the cross-roads. After that the day was one blur of steam, dust, heat, and stifling fumes from the oven and the fat-kettle, broken always at regular ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... only an indifferent glance, but, as he walked on, he was conscious that out of the blur of impressions the memory of ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... a faint blur on the surface of the mirror in Mr Carker's chamber, and its reflection was, perhaps, a false one. But it showed, that night, the image of a man, who saw, in his fancy, a crowd of people slumbering on the ground at his feet, like the poor Native at his master's door: who picked his way ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... into vogue. An artist undertook to take a view of the chateau with a group of guests on the balcony. His Lordship was, asked to keep perfectly still for five seconds, and he promised that he would not stir, but alas,—he moved. The consequence was that there was a blur where ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the only friend I have to close my eyes is the man I plotted against and nearly despoiled of his lady-love," mutters Hollins. Either he is wandering a little bit or the brandy is potent enough to blur his sense of the nearness of death. "I wanted to tell you the truth—not that I look for forgiveness. I know your race well enough. You'll see fair play, but love and hate are things you don't change in ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... companion, during four dark days in December. It was a rude introduction. The wind blew in my face, with scuds of cold rain; a leaden mist hung low on the left, and rolled slowly up Channel. Now and then it thinned enough to reveal a white zigzag of breakers in front, and a blur of land; or, far below, a cluster of dripping rocks, with the sea crawling between and lifting their weed. But for the most part I saw only the furze-bushes beside the path, each powdered with fine raindrops, that in the aggregate resembled a coat of grey frieze, and the puffs of spray ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... scream man ever heard—it was a scream that got to a man. It sent cold shivers up an' down my back. The Red King had come into his own again—he was defyin' his master. He turned, then, an' the last I saw of him was a red blur in the distance. ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... over and saw the stone terrace dimly lit by the stars far below him. The gardens were a blur of darkness out of which he vaguely discerned the glimmer of ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... was open. The thick, wet fog came pouring in like smoke. I moved up boldly through the heavy smother and looked down into the field. There was the blur of the small coop, but ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... that lurks in the corners of her mouth. Emma never tired of studying them—these girls with their firm, slim throats, their lovely faces, their Oriental eyes, and their conscious grace. Often, as she looked, an unaccountable mist of tears would blur her vision. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... got some clothes on him, and took him ashore at Bourke to the new hospital. The doctors did all they knew, but Bogan was blind for life. He never saw anything again—except 'a sort of dull white blur,' as he called it—or his past life sometimes, I suppose. Perhaps he saw that for ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... all those years of loving thrift, Nor blame nor discord marred their lot; Each to the lover-life was gift; And each was free from blur or blot That called for silence ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... Joe suddenly, when the Major was a blur in a cloud of dust and the horsemen were specks in the distance, "this looks like home to me somehow. There ought to be great sheep feed over there in the foothills and summer range in the mountains. What do ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... melts away into everything else; there are no hard edges; it is only from a little distance that we see the effect as of individual features and existences. When we go close up, there is nothing but a blur and confused mass of apparently meaningless touches, as ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... possible? Why, Preston, why, Preston, my boy," said Mr. Garland, taking the young face gently between his hands, "when did things begin to blur so and look dim ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them veer and shift Around his blustering path. In clouds blindly whirling, In rings madly swirling, Full of crazy wrath, So furious and fast they fly They blur the earth and blot the sky In wild, white mirk. They fill the air with frozen wings And tiny, angry, icy stings; They blind the eyes, and choke the breath, They dance a maddening dance of death Around their work, Sweeping the cover ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... glider," muttered Foulet and his tone was tinged with disappointment. But hardly had he spoken when, from one of the myriad roof-tops below us, rose a swift streak of shadow. So fast it flew, with such unbelievable speed, that to our eyes it was little more than a blur; but— ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into the present century. But where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... self-revelation, to be gleaned from familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his time. Yet, after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to many observers a mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an enigma—a blur, bright or black, upon the ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... he dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... desperate effort to know what was happening to the crippled liner, but no message came back. The last word from the Titanic was that she was sinking. Then the sparking became fainter. The call was dying to nothing. The Virginian's operator labored over a blur of signals. It was hopeless. So the Allan ship strove on, fearing that the worst ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... is unto the foulest pen, Or fairest handled by the sons of men. 'Twill also show what is upon it writ, Be it wisely, or nonsense for want of wit, Each blot and blur it also will expose To thy next readers, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... round, packed closely, a glittering mass of shining horses and bright colours. One dropped at the jump near the judge's box, and as the other horses raced away round the turn the riderless horse followed, while his jockey lay still for a moment, a little scarlet blur upon the turf. Eager helpers ran forward to pick him up, but he was on his feet before they could reach him, and came limping up the hill, a little bruised ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Dolph and Brittler were coming with a lantern; a blur of light brightened through ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... sour'd a milky queen— (For "bloody" all enlighten'd men confess An antiquated error of the press:) Who, rapt by zeal beyond her sex's bounds, With actual cautery staunch'd the Church's wounds! And tho' he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre, Yet blames them both—and thinks the Pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield Against such gentle foes to take the field Whose beckoning hands the mild ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... and strained my eyes to see. All I could make out was a dim greyish mist, with something like a little spot or blur on it, at the place which the maid's finger indicated as the position occupied ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... was no longer there. He wished more than ever that he was back with Shining Fish. Then he remembered that in another week he would be on board the "Sea Gull." He watched Captain Stoddard's sloop until it was only a white blur against the distant shore, and then went ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... hardly lighted before they were startled by a confused sound of shouting from the compound;—a blur of shrill and deep voices, punctuated by the strained discordant bark of a dog;—a bark unmistakable to ears that have heard it once. Desmond sprang out of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not really or exactly to be described at all, (for on the many hundreds who were there it seems to this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a blotch)—and yet partially to be described as I now proceed to give it. There is a scene in the play representing a modern parlor in which two unprecedented English ladies are inform'd by the impossible ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the couch, and she raised her head. In the half darkness he could not have seen how she was suffering. Her face was only a warm blur to him, vague and sweet and beautiful, with tender eyes. He said: "I think—I'm falling asleep. My head is so very, very queer! What is the matter with my head? Coira, do you think I might be kissed before I go ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... there was a long pause—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... out at sea in the Channel, with fifty-four ships, when he sighted a dim blur toward the west. This was the Great Invincible Armada. Rain killed the wind, and the English lay under bare poles, unseen by the Spaniards, who still left some of their idle sails swinging to and fro. The great day had come at last. Philip's Armada had drunk to Der Tag (the day) of England's ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... block on 'em!" cried Bill with enthusiasm. Jim could just make out a dark blur in the fog ahead where the pursued hack was galloping to some unknown destination. At the sight all the fierce excitement of the chase came over Jim. He must not let that Mexican escape this time. It meant everything to get a hold of him. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... they were to start with. Even the simplest stimuli of taste and of sound are different to the adult from what they are to the child. What for the adult is a printed page full of significance is for the baby a blur, or at most chaotic ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Kentucky were spinning outside of the window in a vast green whirlpool. The distant trees and houses moved forward with the train, while the foreground, with its telegraph poles, its culverts, section-houses, and shrubbery, rushed backward in a blur. Now and then into the Jim Crow window whipped a blast of coal smoke and hot cinders, for the engine was ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... handsome young cub many things for which he should have been undyingly thankful. But when they reached the park—the cool, dim, moon-silvered park, its benches dotted with glimpses of white showing close beside a blur of black, Emma McChesney stopped talking. Not only did she stop talking, but she ceased to think of the boy seated beside her on ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... trust himself to speak again. The old sensation of choking had come back to him. The room was a blur. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... and a little to the left, used the same long, sweeping strokes as with Agatha. At each of them a warm current of air seemed to strike me, and to suffuse a thrill and glow all through me from head to foot. My eyes were fixed upon Miss Penclosa's face, but as I gazed the features seemed to blur and to fade away. I was conscious only of her own eyes looking down at me, gray, deep, inscrutable. Larger they grew and larger, until they changed suddenly into two mountain lakes toward which I seemed to be falling ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dawn, the two boys were called and came sleepily on deck. The day had broken cold and gray, while the wind had attained half a gale. Joe noted with astonishment the white tents of the quarantine station on Angel Island. San Francisco lay a smoky blur on the southern horizon, while the night, still lingering on the western edge of the world, slowly withdrew before their eyes. French Pete was just finishing a long reach into the Raccoon Straits, and at the same time studiously regarding a plunging sloop-yacht ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... made by Wilson in an extraordinary joint session of Congress, held on the 2d of April. In this, possibly his greatest speech, he was careful not to blur the idealistic principles which, since the spring of 1916, he had been formulating. War existed because Germany by its actions had thrust upon the United States the status of belligerent. But the American people must meet the challenge with their purpose clearly ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of the pace at which she was going. We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. Voices hailed us out of the darkness, but still the Aurora ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seated between Miss Cash and the immensely interested Cousin Gussie, gazed dully about the circle. He saw little except a blur of faces; his thoughts were elsewhere, busy in dreadful anticipation of the scene he knew he must endure when he and his cousin and Miss Phipps returned to the house of the latter. He did not dare look in her direction, fearing to see once ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and while he could conform to the conventionalities of society, he was never more pleased than when mixing with the variegated mass of mankind, where vice and virtue predominated without the guilt of hypocrisy to blur and blast ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... doubt that he lived through in silence, with the strain of it showing in his pale face, and Charlie's voice echoing half heard in his ears. He drew back from Judith slightly as they stood. He was trembling. Judith's face was a blur of white before his eyes, then he could not see it—and then, as suddenly as it had come, ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... his eyes with a dazed expression, at first a blur of consciousness. Then gradually the recognition of himself, of his surroundings, of his life, came into them, and that self-knowledge was unmistakable. There was no doubt about the man with his twisted limbs and his twisted soul. He lay quite ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Fandor had a view that was fairy-like. Spread out in the distance were the sparkling lights of Paris. He was divided from them by the vast mass of roofs about him, by a gulf of empty space, and beyond, by a dark blur—the two arms of the Seine flowing on either side of the Palais de Justice.... The mysterious darkness! The fascination of the sparkling points of light!... Fandor gave himself a mental shake.... This was no moment for dreaming under ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Ellen's mind became an incoherent blur. A stately limousine glided up; Mary Ellen was handed in by a footman and Excalibur was stuffed in after her in installments. The grand gentleman entered by the opposite door and sat down beside her; but Mary Ellen was much too dazed to ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... the calendar with which they did not charge me. Butter money was not accounted for, pickles and preserves missing, things about the house were going to destruction, the country was full of falsehoods and I had told them all. It was all a blur of sound and fury, but in ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... there was another blow on the window, and something pounded and scratched against the glass. Both of them were looking this time, and again my father saw the hand without the little finger—but my mother could see only a blur and a movement. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... "Blur a' nouns, zur!" bawled the Irish hostler, as he came trotting up to the front veranda, where Triangle and Jingo were discussing the transportation ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... then at Thompson, and his face fell. Thompson, watching him as a man watches his antagonist, saw Tommy's lips tremble, a suspicious blur creep into his eyes. Even in his anger ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... him and through the blur of her tears she saw him smiling down at her, calmly, benignantly and with that little touch of whimsicality that was always in evidence and which even his heavy ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... now going to treat you with still greater frankness. I do not approve of your preface, and I will tell you why: if your work should deserve attention, it is a blur on the very face of it. Disadvantages of education, etc., ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded with the public in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties that ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... to its freshness, familiar and friendly as the voice of one's kin, and pushed the horses to a trot, while behind them the blur of light that was the city paled and died down as the miles multiplied under their hoofs. Peter had the leading rein of the middle horse while Barend steadied its burden, and thus they traveled towards the ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... before us, we can make some headway. I believe the V-shape is the lower end of the mountain, probably a headland, and the arrow points to a place 30 leagues to the,—see here, in the last line is a W. and there is a blur before it and after it. That may be SWE, EWS, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; the conspectus is always good, and the blur that remains on the mind is probably just enough. I have been enchanted with the unveiling of Revelations. And how picturesque that return of the false Nero! The Apostle John is rather discredited. And to think how one had read the thing so often, and never understood the attacks ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of something as large as a man. At any rate, it proclaimed that something in that spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly and at other times it vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last, however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously dishevelled and wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the prisoner and then upon the sentry. The wandering rays caused the eyes to glitter ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... surprisingly, the light wavered out, leaving the schooner in stony blackness. A vague blur of complementary color swam in Madden's eyes. A gasp went up ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... towers of a city given over to the devourer. She had no wish to meet him again. Without telling herself why, she would have shunned the meeting. Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in sublime scenery were best avoided. She thought so the more for a fitful blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning time ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dark when he returned to his window, but the far shore was only an indistinct blur of gloom. The fires were brighter. One of them, built solely because of the rivermen's inherent love of light and cheer, threw the blaze of its flaming logs twenty feet ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... giving one last violent wave to his handkerchief. And then he put it back in his pocket, because the crowd upon the deck of the departing Liner had now become a mere blur in the distance, and distant blurs seemed to his practical nature unworthy any further outlay of personal energy. "But oh!" he added, as he and Carter turned to quit the dock, "how the family are just ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... and rejecting, one after another, the desperate expedients that suggested themselves. Suddenly looking up he perceived among the trees, at the distance of a few paces, Rina standing. Hot anger instantly welled up in his breast, and made a red blur before his eyes. Rina's sex was no protection to her then. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... you to come down to his place in a hurry.'—'An' who the devil is your masther?' says I; 'an' didn't think ye had one, only yourself, an' you so fine.'—'Oh,' says he, 'my masther is the Prence Ragin.'—'Blur an' ouns,' says I; 'tell his honour I'll be wid him in the twinklin' ov a bedpost, the minit I take my face from behind my beard, an' get on my clane flax; but stop a bit,' says I; 'where does the masther live?'—'Down at Carltown Palace,' says he; 'so make ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... ascent, dragging himself up by the tops of the slender saplings, stopping every few yards to half- stretch himself out in the soft mass through which he was struggling, panting with exhaustion. He shouted when he gained the top of the ridge. Up through the white blur of snow on the other side there came to him faintly a shout; yet, in spite of its faintness, Jan knew that it was ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... am, my dear kind friend," the girl answered with emotion; "and I can see! see to read fine print that is all a blur to me without these glasses; and all the pain is gone, the fear, the distress of body and mind. Oh, the Lord has been good, good to me! and the doctor so kind and interested! I shall be grateful to him and to you as ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... this distance of time, could not fail to excite an interest in visitors. The few lines of writing, commencing with the stirring words: 'Courage, mes compatriotes!' ended with only a part of the subscription. The letters, Robes, were all that were appended, and were followed by a blur of the pen; while the lower part of the paper shewed certain discolorations, as if made by drops of blood. And so this was the last surviving token of the notorious Robespierre! It is somewhat curious, that no historian seems to be aware ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... Lou, standing at the bar. In that second, she seemed to realize for the first time that something was wrong. She pushed herself violently away from the bar, and looked frantically around, her mouth opening to call. Petkoff was a blur next to her; Malone didn't look at him clearly. Lou took ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... tears of human passion, Blur not the image true; This was not folly's fashion, This was ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... my staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... de feast? me spurne a, me kick a de feast; be garr, me tell a me do de grand grace, de favor for suppa, for dina, for eata with dee; be garrs blur, we have at home de restorative, de quintessence, de pure destill goulde, de Nector, de Ambrosia. Zacharee, make ready de fine ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... and obeying some strange impulse, the girlish figure turned and made straight for the wildly yelling men, who stood in the form of a great circle in the center of which two men weaved and milled about each other in a blur of motion. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
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