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More "Enigmatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "What are you doing? sit still." On Sundays, after mass, he was allowed to play, that is to say, he was given a thick book, a mysterious book, the work of a certain Maimovitch-Ambodik, entitled "Symbols and Emblems." This book was a medley of about a thousand mostly very enigmatical pictures, and as many enigmatical interpretations of them in five languages. Cupid—naked and very puffy in the body—played a leading part in these illustrations. In one of them, under the heading, "Saffron and the Rainbow," the interpretation ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... agreement for example about a certain impresario, Maxfield Ware, who created a sensation among the company and staff by turning up ostentatiously unaccounted for from New York and looking intensely enigmatical whenever any one asked him any questions. He was a sufficiently well-known figure in that world for surmises to spring up like round-eyed ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the discovery of the philosopher's stone, I now inquired about the sublime alkahest or universal solvent, and whether he had succeeded in deciphering the enigmatical descriptions of the ancient writers on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... to the course of this conversation, which had sufficiently explained to her whatever was enigmatical in the first appearance of the bailiffs. The painful and incredible reality that was thus presented effectually dissipated the illusions of frenzy to which she had just been a prey. "My dear Madam," said she to Mrs. Hammond, "do not harass yourself with useless efforts. I am very sorry ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... are obvious similes to use concerning a powerful and warlike people. These two similes are, therefore, not sufficient by themselves to prove that the tribal standards are being referred to. But the otherwise enigmatical verse— ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... tried that game last week. He's in the horspital now." This was portentous and enigmatical. The guard continued: "If a party gets electrocuted, it's no concern of the employees on the line. It lies between such parties and the Company. I shouldn't myself, if I was you! But it's between you and the Company. I wash ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... answer and under the steadiness of her silent gaze, his momentary reassurance wilted. He had foreseen the possibility of encountering a woman turned Valkyrie, but was unaccoutred to face this enigmatical calm. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... we all were, by reason of the rebellion we had been guilty of against his majesty the king. Whereupon the child did only laugh, and told me, "Here she would abide until the time came." And with this enigmatical expression I was fain to be content; for she would vouchsafe me no other. And, corroborative of all which, she said, she relied on the assurances made unto her to that effect by Sir Walter Ouseley, one of the young gentlemen which ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... then about six miles from the Chimneys, not far from that part of the downs in which the engineer had been found after his enigmatical preservation. They halted at this place and prepared for breakfast, for it was half-past eleven. Herbert went for some fresh water from a stream which ran near, and brought it back in a jug, which ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... is rather enigmatical to the average member, who would, ordinarily, look upon the author as a dolt or pretender. They do not dare to do either in the case of Mr. Knox; therefore, the conclusion that he is indifferent. Never have the men associated ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... sternly assert themselves contemporaneously and in contrast with the careless and free-handed tendencies of the season by the emission of Christmas books—a kind of literary assignats, representing to the emitter expunged debts, to the receiver an investment of enigmatical value. For the most part bearing the stamp of their origin in the vacuity of the writer's exchequer rather than in the fulness of his genius, they suggest by their feeble flavor the rinsings of a void brain after the more ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... see nothing but the line of burnished copper stretching across his path and flashing the light back in his eyes. Behind this, a moment later, he made out the dark and gloomy mass of the black safe. Then he looked deeper, with what was still again a flutter of enigmatical fear about his heart, for that twin and ghostlike glow which had filled ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Mr Brooke, who was puzzled by this last rather enigmatical speech. "Of course we have watchful eyes in our boat, but I don't see anything ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... negro of the purest, blackest type, with the eyes of a white man, of a man from the North, pale, cold, clear, blue eyes, and his surprise increased, when, after a few words of excuse for his untimely visit, he added, with an enigmatical smile: ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... of idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, are all on the woman's side. A man has to stand much. There are times when a woman may be an angel, but others when she behaves as if her ancestry was in a different direction. No wizard works such enigmatical changes as that master of human destinies called Love. Lives are glorified or ruined by it, and no man or woman experiences it who is not more or less, in the process of experiencing, some sort of a fool. ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... remains to some extent enigmatical, appeared about this time and unquestionably had some intercourse with Jesus. About the year 28 of our era there spread through the whole of Palestine the reputation of a certain John, a young ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... sordid tragedy came out in broken snatches, to the last particle. For once in her life Evelyn Desmond spoke the unvarnished truth, adorning nothing, extenuating nothing; and Honour listened in an enigmatical silence—a silence which held even after the last word had been spoken. Evelyn ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... moment Varney laid down the paper, but Varney, staring absently out of the porthole, did not listen. This, then, was the meaning of the pale young editor's enigmatical remark last night. Here was no idle malice. Diabolically resourceful and without shame, young Mr. Smith had circulated this lie to discredit reform and drive off its new champion. And this was the way that he, Varney, had kept the coming of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to the consideration of a far more enigmatical class of agglomerated matter — the smallest of all asteroids, to which we apply the name 'arolites', or 'meteoric stones',* when they reach our atmosphere ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... contained in a little tract which has fallen in our way, containing "extracts from a sermon addressed to the students in the United Presbyterian Theological Seminary of Xenia, Ohio, by Rev. William Davidson." It begins in this somewhat enigmatical way:— ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... situation may be very briefly told; I had inquired into many matters, in order that I might become wise, and I had read and pondered over the words of the wise, so called, till I had made myself master of the sum of human wisdom; namely, that everything is enigmatical and that man is an enigma to himself; thence the cry of 'What is truth?' I had ceased to believe in the truth of that in which I had hitherto trusted, and yet could find nothing in which I could put any fixed or deliberate belief—I was, indeed, in a labyrinth! In what did I not doubt? With ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... period came when he rejoiced in an inveterate enemy's discomfiture. It is fanciful to affirm that he would have been pleased to assist in turning aside the final shock of ruin. His sentiments towards Essex at the end, unhappily, are too certain for the precise meaning of his enigmatical undated letter to Cecil, discovered among the Hatfield papers, to be of much consequence. Of its authenticity there is no real doubt, though Mr. Charles Kingsley, whose enthusiasm for Ralegh is delightful and unmixed, chooses to question it on the slender ground that it is signed by ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... friends, by a few men whose keen natural perception of genius enabled them to discern it in spite of the eccentricity and inequality of his work; but to the general public, on whose recognition depends the reputation of the artist, his verses as well as his drawings were a sealed, or at least an enigmatical, book. His verses have no literary atmosphere about them: they smell neither of the midnight oil nor of that smoke of fame the fumes of which Byron tells us "are frankincense to human thought." They seem to have been written as spontaneously as a bird might warble on a bough, and no bird was ever ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... reflection. "But you must suffer me to say a word upon the other side. We have a natural curiosity to learn the truth of this affair; I have some of it myself; my lord (it is very plain) has but too much. The matter of the Indian's return is enigmatical." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the contrary, my sweet friend: only the poet is talking in riddles after the fashion of his tribe. For all poetry has by nature an enigmatical character, and it is by no means everybody who can interpret it. And if, moreover, the spirit of poetry happen to seize on a man who is of a begrudging temper and does not care to manifest his wisdom but keeps it to himself ...
— Alcibiades II • An Imitator of Plato
... you by force? Yet that is what you ask of God. If you were right in going, let the circumstance prove it; if we were right, let it appear by time. So says God; and his friendship has eternity to work in; so also has every human friendship. Let us wait, but in faith." This ending, somewhat enigmatical to her, had yet recurred to her heart so often that she knew ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... But this passage is enigmatical, as the original type seems to be involved in dense obscurity. Buffon considered the shepherd dog to be the least modified by domestication—very erroneously, according to Dr Prichard; it is still a vexata questio, whether the original progenitor of the dog ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... bother about me. I have relegated my little romance to the garret of no-account things, at least for the present," said Hillard, with an enigmatical smile. He sought his watch. "Make up your mind at once; we have ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... of feeling and expression, and that these were waited upon and worshiped by a set of nobles and litterateurs, who used towards them a peculiar strain of high-flown, pedantic gallantry. These ladies adopted fictitious names for themselves and gave enigmatical ones to the commonest things. They lavished upon each other the most tender appellations, as though in contrast to the frigid tone in which the Platonism of the Hotel required them to address the gentlemen of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... time her too-ready tongue tripped. She looked away and recovered herself to the end of the sentence. She could not resist another look, however, and this time her words came more slowly. She paused—wavered—and then fixed her gaze in silence upon the enigmatical device. There was a unanimous smothered sigh as the bystanders recognized their good fortune. Guido, frightened half to death, slipped unobserved out of a side door, and was never seen at Greenwich again. Nor has that fatal newspaper ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... herself the little innocent figure of her child, which she at once placed between herself and him. Seeing this, I recalled the scraps of cipher left in my room above and wished I had succeeded in determining their meaning, if only to understand the present enigmatical situation. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... day the girl was enigmatical both to Horace and to Ann. Weary hours, crowding one upon another, offered her no relief. The thought of Lon's letter shattered hope and made her desolate. She did not stop to reason that her relations with Horace demanded ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... under the charm of her enigmatical and mocking smile, that smile in which her teeth gleamed cruelly between her red lips, and glistened as if they were ready to bite and to heighten the pleasure of the most delightful, the most ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... parlor we are all tarred with the same brush, all daubed with the same dauber; we have nothing, as the rather enigmatical phrase goes, on one another. Indeed, we hardly look at one another, and are as remote as strangers sitting side by side in a theatre. Individually, in a steady, subconscious way, I think we are all wondering how we are going to get ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... inscrutable, secret, dark, mystic, transcendental, enigmatical, mystical, unfathomable, hidden, obscure, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... seriously, and turn towards heaven, the devotion which he misplaced on earthly beauties. This conversation is the subject of one of Boccaccio's eclogues, entitled, "Philostropos." His eclogues are in the style of Petrarch, obscure and enigmatical, and the subjects are muffled up under emblems ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Now this was enigmatical enough to the king and courtiers. But the reverse of the plate explained it a little. Its writing amounted ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... can revisit old places? If I had the quaint Muse of Sir Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write a Sonnet to the Road between W—m and Shrewsbury, and immortalise every step of it by some fond enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed! I remember but one other topic of discourse in this walk. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... been accepted as archbishop he should resign the see and return to his beloved Bangor. So in 1137 he nominated and consecrated Gelasius as his successor in the primacy, and "returned to his former parish, but not to Connor." Let me explain this enigmatical statement. Malachy had had some years' experience of the people of the diocese of Connor, whom St. Bernard gently describes as "not men but beasts." He had doubtless discovered that the district which it included could not be ruled by a single bishop. In fact it ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... towards the fugue of youth. Older by a quarter of a century than General D'Hubert, he looked upon him in the secret of his heart as a rather troublesome youngster in love. He had heard his enigmatical words very well, but attached no undue importance to what a mere man of forty so hard hit was likely to do or say. The turn of mind of the generation of Frenchmen grown up during the years of his exile was almost unintelligible ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... loser, but which did not occur till seven years afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an income of L1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship the latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a double ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... anything odd about that," she exclaimed impatiently. "Don't be so enigmatical. If you've anything to say, say it! Don't look at me like ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... borders on the grotesque, and holding a hunting-spear. Still more astonishing in its exaggeration of a Venetian mode in portraiture[44] is the great crimson, dragon-crowned helmet which, on the left of the canvas, Cupid himself supports. To the right, a rival even of Love in the affections of our enigmatical personage, a noble hound rubs himself affectionately against the stalwart legs of his master. Far back stretches a prospect singularly unlike those rich-toned studies of sub-Alpine regions in which Titian as ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... laughter! This earthquake which invisible powers heave up out of the knotty entanglement of our dark enigmatical being! which in boisterous senseless noises announces that within, in the unseen world, the soul neither recks of nor knows truth or falsehood, and has just been murdering the innocent herald who was bringing these phantasms before it! These ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... bas-reliefs represents two soldiers of the Swiss guard, the next a Turk and a Slav tilting at each other, and then comes a scroll entwined round a thistle, and inscribed with this enigmatical motto: "Giane le sur ou rien." In the third bas-relief a couple of passionate Italians are winding up a gambling dispute with a hand-to-hand combat, in the course of which table, cards, and dice have got cantered over; the fourth presenting us with two French ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... consequently, that a first beginning, mathematical or dynamical, is by no means required. The possibility of such an infinite derivation, without any initial member from which all the others result, is certainly quite incomprehensible. But, if you are rash enough to deny the enigmatical secrets of nature for this reason, you will find yourselves obliged to deny also the existence of many fundamental properties of natural objects (such as fundamental forces), which you can just as little comprehend; and even the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... newly alight in the hall, burning with that spare, clear brilliancy that the recent removal of ashes imparts to a wood fire. All the world was still beclouded with mists, and the windows and doors looked forth on a blank white nullity—as inexpressive, as enigmatical, as the unwritten page of the unformulated future itself. The present seemed eliminated; he stood as it were in the atmosphere of other days. But whither had blown the incense of that happy time? The lights on the shrine had dwindled to extinction! What had befallen his strong ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... played straight through like a Haydn symphony, as well as the orchestra could manage it, Pohlenz, instead of having to conduct a vocal quartette, a cantata, or an Italian aria, took his place at the desk to undertake this highly complicated instrumental work, with its particularly enigmatical and incoherent opening, one of the most difficult tasks that could possibly be found for a musical conductor. I shall never forget the impression produced upon me at the first rehearsal by the anxiously and carefully played ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... street, in sixes and sevens, like so many reliefs on army duty. A gang would enter the sitting room occupying the chairs and sofa, look on with open mouths for ten or fifteen minutes and listen to what must have been enigmatical to them; then looking one at the other, the entire party would rise together, stalk back to the store, where they would relate their experience to others, who in turn would brace up and make a descent on the lion of ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... scene remained fixed in Irene's memory. She drew from it formerly, extensive conclusions, then she ceased altogether to recall it; now she thought again of it, forgetting her painted chrysanthemums, which, on the blue satin, seemed to gaze at her, having as subtle and enigmatical a look ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... Elhaj Beshir, came face to face with the newly arrived ministers in the ante-chamber where the Mantle of the Prophet was jealously guarded, he rubbed his hands together with an enigmatical smile which ill became his coarse, brutal countenance and cloven lips, and when the Padishah asked him what the rebels wanted, he replied that he ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... science besides that of stellar aggregation, Herschel may justly be styled a pioneer. He was the first to bestow serious study on the enigmatical objects known as "nebulae." The history of the acquaintance of our race with them is comparatively short. The only one recognised before the invention of the telescope was that in the girdle of Andromeda, certainly familiar in the middle of the tenth century to the Persian ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... found a difference in vertical height of 7 feet. In the chalky sand, sometimes occurring in interstices between the separate fragments of flint, constituting the coarse gravel Number 4, entire as well as broken freshwater shells are often met with. To some it may appear enigmatical how such fragile objects could have escaped annihilation in a river-bed, when flint tools and much gravel were shoved along the bottom; but I have seen the dredging instrument employed in the Thames, above and below London Bridge, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... country still largely mysterious to the denizen of Western Europe, and the Russian peasant, the moujik, an impenetrable riddle to him. Of all the great Russian writers not one has contributed more to the interpretation of the enigmatical soul of the moujik than Russia's great poet, Nekrassov, in his life-work the national epic, Who can ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... minds of children. But words, vague as they may be, are still too precise to express those feelings; one would need that uncertain language that comes in dreams, of which upon awakening, one retains merely enigmatical, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... may have gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of lantern show that used to be known in the village as the "Dissolving Views," the scene that is going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident, and the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are to replace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the new England of our children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideas of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity have certainly never really entered ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... The original text says in a more enigmatical fashion, "he nourishes the religion of Mazda as a hundred feet of men and a thousand breasts of women ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... was a tedious journey: in the whole Banat the harvest was over; only the maize was still standing, otherwise they saw nothing but monotonous fields of stubble. None of them spoke; all three found it hard to keep awake. In the afternoon Timar could no longer endure the silent looks, the enigmatical expression of his wife; under pretense of wanting to smoke he took a seat by the driver in the open coupe, and remained there. When they got out at a post-house, Athalie grumbled at the bad roads, the dreadful heat, the annoying flies, the stifling dust, and all the rest of ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... not quite sure of that," replied Mustapha, with a stern look, in hopes of frightening the man into a compliance with his wishes—"there was something very enigmatical in those words. Your 'hard crust' may mean his sublime highness the pacha; 'wearing away your teeth' may imply exactions from the government and as you affirmed that he was happy who could command the hard crust—why it ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... pipe—Poetry and Music had been dedicated to the worship of the gods of Greece. At the appointed season of festival to each several deity, his praises were sung, his traditionary achievements were recited. One of the divinities last introduced into Greece—the mystic and enigmatical Dionysos, or Bacchus, received the popular and enthusiastic adoration naturally due to the God of the Vineyard, and the "Unbinder of galling cares." His festival, celebrated at the most joyous of agricultural seasons [7], was associated ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instant, then with an enigmatical smile extended her hand, but there was nothing enigmatical in the sidelong look which Van Lennop gave Dr. Harpe, a look that, had she seen it, would for once have made her grateful for her sex. Subconsciously he had seen the slight ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... blotted by the rain and by the kindness of nature, was fortunately illegible, for it is possible that its philosophy concerning the inhalation of gold, at the same time both enigmatical and lucid, might not have been to the taste of the sheriffs, the provost-marshals, and other big-wigs of the law. English legislation did not trifle in those days. It did not take much to make a man ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... vein of feeling, a patriot passion so vehement and dangerous, that, like that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is compelled to veil itself from power, or from sympathy, in utterance made purposely enigmatical. The passage which begins "Last came and last did go", raises in us a thrill of awe-struck expectation which. I can only compare with that excited by the Cassandra of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. For the reader to feel this, he must have present in memory the circumstances of England in 1637. He ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... think so—by my old Annamite friend of the Penguin experience, who stood by his flag nodding his head at me. He said, "Beaucoup bon," showing his polished black teeth in an approving grin. I forgot for the moment that "beaucoup bon" was his enigmatical comment upon all occasions, and that he would have grinned just as broadly had he been dragging me out from ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... Cambridge, I may say, and subsequently brought out a respectable edition of Polyaenus—contained among other things the notes which the old Vicar had made upon the occasion of Sir Matthew Fell's death. And for the first time Sir Richard was confronted with the enigmatical Sortes Biblicae which you have heard. They amused ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... understand," said Jimbo coolly, with no sign of being offended. "How could you?" He glanced at his sisters, gaining so much support from their enigmatical faces that he added, for their especial ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... task—which is no light one; for in our survey of this book we have to keep in view both hero and hero-worshipper, Cromwell and Carlyle, both somewhat slippery personages, abnormal, enigmatical. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... was quite the caballero. The brig herself was then all black and enigmatical, and very dirty; a tarnished gem of the sea, or, rather, a neglected work of art. For he must have been an artist, the obscure builder who had put her body together on lovely lines out of the hardest tropical timber fastened with the purest copper. Goodness only ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... anxious to know how they bored these long barrels, which seemed perfectly true and are said to shoot admirably; and, on asking the Gusti, received the enigmatical answer: "We use a basket full of stones." Being utterly unable to imagine what he could mean, I asked if I could see how they did it, and one of the dozen little boys around us was sent to fetch the basket. He soon returned with this most extraordinary boring-machine, the mode of using which the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... an enigmatical reply, and Dick saw that it was useless to ask them questions. Robertson mounted, and Dick, without another word, sprang up behind him. Two of the privates rode up close, one on either side, and the other kept ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... nothing. They did not seem to exist, he points out, even in politics until prohibitionist fury threatened their beer. Then, indeed, the American German emerged from silence and obscurity, but only to rescue his mug and retire again with it into enigmatical silence. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... With this enigmatical peroration the major made Hester a low bow, and handed her a sheet of foolscap, twice folded, and tied with a bit of white ribbon. She took it with a sweetly radiant curiosity. It was the title-deed of the house in Addison square. She gave a cry of joy, got up, threw her arms round majie's ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... predecessors in the novelty of the combinations of his opening, in the complications of the windings through which he led the expectant cortege; and this course, even when restricted to a single saloon, might be made remarkable by the designing of graceful arabesques, or the involved tracing of enigmatical ciphers. He made good his claim to the place he had solicited, and displayed his skill, by inventing close, complicated and inextricable figures; by describing them with so much certainty and accuracy, that the living ribbon, turned and twisted as it might be, was never broken in the loosing ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... uneasily. "You can think as you please, Jack," said he: "but we'll see—we'll see." The coroner, like many other men of greater claims to wisdom, used this enigmatical expression when he could ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... esse" (Vol. vii., pp. 235. 342.).—In one of Dr. Byrom's Common-place Books now in the possession of his respected descendant, Miss Atherton, of Kersal Cell, is the following arrangement and translation of this enigmatical inscription, probably made ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... and that exclamation, "It was this very place!" Whew! Jonah had tied a bit of his bootlace on the hedge just under the spot, and could find it again within a foot. Then the rencontre with the two boys and the strange, enigmatical talk in the shed, pointing to the plot of a new crime of which he—Trimble—was to be the victim. Ha, ha!—and the business over that tricycle too, in the candle-light. Jonah could see through that. He could put a spoke in a wheel as ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... restaurant, unless the Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them. But that last hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them anywhere outside those special establishments. One never met these enigmatical persons elsewhere. It was impossible to form a precise idea what occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night. And he himself had become unplaced. It would have been impossible ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... peers voted for repeal, 61 against it. Thirty-three peers thereupon signed and recorded their protest. At the third reading no division was had, but a second protest, bearing 28 signatures, was entered. On March 18 the king, whose position had been a little enigmatical, but who at last had become settled in opposition to the bill, unwillingly placed his signature to it, and ever ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... very quiet. It was the first sensation of its kind he had ever experienced; it was disquieting, and yet soothing; it filled him with an indefinable uneasiness, and yet with a strange yearning. He stood, in these moments, at the inscrutable threshold of the great North; he felt the enigmatical, voiceless spirit of it; it passed into his blood; it made his heart beat a little faster; it made him afraid, and yet daring. In his breast the spirit of adventure was waking—had awakened; he felt the call of the Northland, and it alarmed even as it thrilled him. He knew, now, that this was ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... was enigmatical to Rainey, but there was no mistaking Lund's tremendous seriousness and, duly impressed, Rainey promised to carry ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... and mortar. I liked the situation; it was just far enough away from a town to enable me to escape all the smoke and traffic, and near enough to make shopping easy. The only obstacles were the shadows—the strange, enigmatical shadows I had seen in the hall and passages, and the figure of the walker. Dare I take a house that knew such visitors? At first I said no, and then yes. Something, I could not tell what, urged me to say yes. I felt ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... supernatural. He therefore prepares his roots and herbs with the most singular ceremonies, and, in mixing them up, invokes the aid of the Great Spirit. He also accompanies his directions with various gesticulations and enigmatical expressions. The ceremonies he uses are various. Sometimes he creeps into the oven where he sweats, howls, and roars, and now and then grins horribly at his patient. Altogether I cannot conceive of a more irrational manner of performing ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... with enigmatical eyes while, in his thought, wrath was beginning to bubble. He almost hated her on recalling the arrogance with which she had treated him, fleeing from that room. "Hypocrite!..." She was just amusing ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... eternity smiled benignly and touched with his delicate, almost transparent, hand the curly head of the sprightly little boy. Then the child became a prince really, though the smile of his holiness was ever enigmatical. But whoso had been touched by the divine hand was not to know misfortune in life and had to ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... entered the Mosque, and presently returned with the Fakir's answer, in these enigmatical words:—"He who would see the sun rise must watch till ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... of the Roman occupation. The second class, of greater antiquity than the first, at least on the ground of subject, is also distinguished by a much more mythological character, a bolder use of the miraculous, an enigmatical form, a style full of alliteration and plays upon words. Of this number are the tales of Pwyll, of Bramwen, of Manawyddan, of Math the son of Mathonwy, the Dream of the Emperor Maximus, the story ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... feverishly finished his julep, and as the other stopped, he placed his glass beside him on the board-pile and swung a long leg across, so that he sat directly facing his enigmatical guest. The latter, in the enthusiasm of his argument, swung into a similar position, and so they sat, both hammering on the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... it were tentacles on all sides in quest of chance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagination by the electric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol of the thinking it had led to. And so he puts down word or phrase, so enigmatical to us who see it by itself, which to him would wake up a whole train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it—how at a certain time and place this word set the whole moving, seemed to breathe new life and shed new light, and has remained the token, meaningless in itself, which reminds ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... of her wonderful eyes, widely opened and turned upon me with such an enigmatical expression as set my heart leaping wildly—then, stepping back, Karamaneh placed the lamp upon the boards of the passage and ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... window now and then it dropped, with a vague presage, upon the sleek head of the daring and enigmatical captain, reading the Litany, from 'battle, murder, and sudden death, good Lord deliver us,' and he almost fancied he saw a yellow skull over his shoulder glowering cynically on the Prayer-book. So the good attorney prayed on, to the edification of all who saw, and ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... my chops, turn round, lie down, and go to sleep again." It was bad policy in me to let the words "go to sleep" sound upon the reader's ear, for I have not yet quite done; I have one more class, and though last not least; were I to adopt that enigmatical style which made the fortune of the oracle of Apollo, I might add—and though least, greatest. But this, the oracular sublime, has now gone to the gipsies and the conjurors, and I must write ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the enigmatical response. And Mr. Starr muttered something about women and geometry and went away, shaking his head. And Aunt Grace ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... to find it hard reading the character of John Charles Fremont, calling it enigmatical and baffling. Not so with those who knew him best. "His unwritten history," writes one of these, "gives the clew to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... its kind: a tragedy of thought inspired by continual and never-satisfied meditation on human destiny and the dark perplexity of the events of this world, and calculated to call forth the very same meditation in the minds of the spectators. This enigmatical work resembles those irrational equations in which a fraction of unknown magnitude always remains, that will in no way admit of solution. Much has been said, much written, on this piece, and yet no thinking head who anew expresses himself on it, will (in ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the verses of Orpheus and the sacred books of the Egyptians and Phrygians, that the ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but of all nations, was nothing more than a system of physics, a picture of the operations of nature, wrapped up in mysterious allegories and enigmatical symbols, in a manner that the ignorant multitude attended rather to their apparent than to their hidden meaning, and even in what they understood of the latter, supposed there to be something more deep than what they perceived. Fragment ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... over, as unfit for dainty ears and dulcet tones, facts, and rumours of facts, which none the less often determined events by stirring the strong feelings of your ancestors, whose conduct, unless explained by this light, must remain enigmatical. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... St. Petersburg that Russia would acquiesce in any measures proposed by France and Great Britain to maintain peace. Minister Klobukowski reported from Brussels that the Belgian Government regarded Germany's attitude as enigmatical, and justifying every apprehension. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... Without a word the Texan complied, and as he held a match to the cigarette he stared straight into the man's eyes: "You've started out good," he remarked gravely. "I'm just wonderin' if you can play your string out." With which enigmatical remark he turned to the cowboys: "The drinks are on me, boys. Jerk off that rope, an' go back to town! An' remember, this lynchin' come off as ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... had read my thoughts, his eyes caught mine and held them. To all appearances he was listening to the banter of Dicky and his wife, but there was an inscrutable look in his eyes, an enigmatical smile upon his lips, as he looked at me that vaguely troubled me. His glance, his smile, seemed significant somehow, as if we were old friends who held some humorous experience in common remembrance. And I had never seen him but ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... extravagant outlay for expedition, replied that he would lay this proposition with the despatch, before the San Francisco office. He then took it and read it—and re-read it. He preserved the usual professional apathy,—had doubtless sent many more enigmatical and mysterious messages,—but nevertheless, when he finished, he raised his eyes inquiringly to his customer. That gentleman, who enjoyed a reputation for equal spontaneity of temper and revolver, met his gaze a little impatiently. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with its one Creator; Pantheism with its "one Spirit's plastic stress"; and Science with its one Energy. He is hard upon Christianity and its "trinal God": I have not softened his expression ({Arabic} a riddle), although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other objections they can get over, not this. Nor is he any lover of Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and its Hellenic hedonism; with the world of thought moving between these two extremes. The former, defined as predominant ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... But his depositions had been taken at his bedside, were sworn to by him, and were now placed before the magistrate by the prosecuting counsel, and the facts they revealed were certainly as remarkable as they were brief and enigmatical. ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... of this view. It is this generic quality and compositeness of the purpose of the individual and of the spirit of society that obscures the meaning of history and often makes individual lives so enigmatical, and which also makes these purposes of individuals and nations so persistent, sometimes ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... interest. It was strange how the enigmatical personality of the owner of Far End kept cropping ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... glanced towards Avery, but she did not raise her eyes. She worked on, still with that faint, enigmatical smile about her lips. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... yourself, my excellent friend! Just as in the case of the relationship between collective ownership and human degeneration, which seemed so "enigmatical" to this same Baron Garofalo—and although he has not offered his gratitude for the solution of this enigma to the socialist Oedipus who explained it to him—here also, in the case of this other enigma, the explanation ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Mariam had spoken of her power, and gave him to understand that she did not require money; the squalor of her room made this seem rather enigmatical to the sick man, but he knew such people were sometimes eccentric in their mode of living, and this might possibly account for his surroundings. However, it was no affair of his, she had been an angel of goodness to him, and he had no right to pry ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... many days of dallying, great Philip decided to sacrifice himself for Spain and marry his enigmatical sister-in-law. She must, of course, renounce Protestantism and all the laws that made her legally a queen; which was absurd, as Feria soon saw, and frankly told his master. So then Philip half-heartedly patronised the suit of his Austrian ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... only true of advice direct. You never, I grieve to say, get from the great men a plain answer to a plain question; still less can you entangle them in any agreeable gossip, out of which something might unawares be picked up. But of enigmatical teaching, broken signs and sullen mutterings, of which you can understand nothing, and may make anything;—of confused discourse in the work itself, about the work, as in Duerer's Melancolia;—and of discourse not merely confused, but apparently unreasonable ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was going to lower the glass when from behind the massive angle of the stockade there stepped out into the brilliant immobility of the landscape a man in a long white gown and with an enormous black turban surmounting a dark face. Slow and grave he paced the beach ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in an Oriental tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergence and ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... shall see," was the queen's enigmatical rejoinder. She swept to her chariot, and with her brilliant train, soon left Stafford ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally descended from the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... keep my word!" was the enigmatical remark the smiling Quimby made as he entered. Then, catching sight of the festive board, he stopped short and stared, with an utterly confounded face, at that, at the embarrassed Nattie, at Cyn, behind the door, and at the saucepan ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... sooner be built without any ground to fix it on, than a commonweal be constituted altogether void of any religion and opinion of the gods,—or being constituted, be preserved. But this, which is the foundation and ground of all laws, do these men, not going circularly about, nor secretly and by enigmatical speeches, but attacking it with the first of their most principal opinions directly subvert and overthrow; and then afterwards, as if they were haunted by the Furies, they come and confess that they have grievously offended in ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... in misadventure. Sybil had often described to her little son the concealed valuables, which, if the exiled Royalists were ever able to re-visit England, she hoped to recover for herself and for him; and, in later years, Sir Ralph could still recall the enigmatical words in which his mother had (possibly with the idea that the rhyme might, as it did, cling to his childish memory) spoken to him of ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... princess is said to have visited Solomon, "to prove him with hard questions," by which have generally been understood enigmatical puzzles. Some of these are to be found in sacred writ, of which the riddle which Samson proposed to the young men of Timnath, is a very ancient and curious specimen. It appears from the writings of the ancients, that the Greeks and all the Eastern nations, were singularly attached ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... voices. Another time he came upon a working-gang busy at hoeing weeds. They scarcely noticed him when he came up, though they knew thoroughly well what was going on. It was no affair of theirs that the enigmatical white men should be out trying to kill each other, and whatever interest in the proceedings might be theirs they were careful to conceal it from Sheldon. He ordered them to continue hoeing weeds in ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... times over with those enigmatical proverbs of yours," said the Parson testily, "you would not make it ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... uncertain as to the result. He was determined to secure Antwerp, but he yet thought it possible to secure it by negotiation. The enigmatical policy maintained by France perplexed him; for it did not seem possible that so much apparent solemnity and earnestness were destined to lead to an impotent and infamous conclusion. He was left, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "Meine Reisen" and the puerile abbreviation as well as the reasons assigned for it, were intended to be a Sterne-like jest, apitiful one. Why Goedeke should suggest "Meine Randglossen" is quite inexplicable, since Gchhausen himself in the very first chapter indicates the real title. Beneath the enigmatical title stands an alleged quotation from Shandy: "Ein Autor borgt, bettelt und stiehlt so stark von dem andern, dass bey meiner Seele! die Originalitt fast so rar geworden ist als die Ehrlichkeit."[65] The book itself, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... desisted, and, with all her faculties abnormally on the alert, she lay awake and listened. A deathlike hush hung over the house, interrupted at intervals by the surreptitious noises peculiar to the night—enigmatical creaks and footsteps, rustlings as of drapery, sighs and whisperings—all very faint, all very subtle, and all possibly, just possibly, attributable to natural causes. Mrs. Murphy caught herself—why, she could not say—waiting for some definite ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... atoning power. There is no sense of wrongdoing or unworthiness on the part of the performers, or of any relation to a deity. The theology of Central Australia is still obscure—the general religious situation in that region has much that is enigmatical. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... that this man, with his mournful face, his huge, brushlike eyebrows, and his small, yellow eyes, startling by their incessant activity, had for the observer something enigmatical about him, and therefore did not ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... quite manifest that Saturn did not exhibit a simple circular disc like Jupiter, or like Mars. It seemed to Galileo as if the planet consisted of three bodies, a large globe in the centre, and a smaller one on each side. The enigmatical nature of the discovery led Galileo to announce it in an enigmatical manner. He published a string of letters which, when duly transposed, made up a sentence which affirmed that the planet Saturn was threefold. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... satisfactory, explanation. The question: 'How does Anthroposophy explain this or that?' is quite wrongly put. We ought rather to ask: 'How does Anthroposophy help us to read more clearly this or that otherwise enigmatical chapter ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... to enigmatical utterances of this kind has long ago passed away; and, if any meaning ever attaches to them, it is apt to be sadly commonplace. Nevertheless, when Balder was born, and the hereditary blue eyes were found wanting, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... himself; and went away with a lighter heart. The trick of reading truly the enigmatical forces at work in women at given times, which with some men is an unerring instinct, is peculiar to minds less ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... untroubled as to the origin of dreams, the popular view holds firmly to the belief that dreams really have got a meaning, in some way they do foretell the future, whilst the meaning can be unravelled in some way or other from its oft bizarre and enigmatical content. The reading of dreams consists in replacing the events of the dream, so far as remembered, by other events. This is done either scene by scene, according to some rigid key, or the dream as a whole is replaced by something else of which it was ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Payne and I have long puzzled over these enigmatical and possibly corrupt lines: he wrote to me in 1884, "This is the first piece that has beaten me." In the couplet above (vol. xii. 230) "Rayhani" may mean "my basil-plant" or "my food" (the latter Koranic), "my compassion," etc.; and Susani is equally ancipitous ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... or three revolutions of my brain to perceive how this answer bore upon the question, and when I repeated it to Alister, his comment was almost as enigmatical. ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... now; but I shan't be long," answered the young hostess, with a confident wink in Alfaretta's direction. To which that matter-of-fact maid replied by a contemptuous toss of her head and the enigmatical words: ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... youth whom in her innocence she called her lover was almost enigmatical to Pierrette, she believed in it with all her virgin faith. Her heart was filled with that sensation which travellers in the desert feel when they see from afar the palm-trees round a well. In a few days her ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... of this strikingly original theory the present writer should not be understood as assenting to it. That it appears bizarre is not, in itself, a reason for rejecting it, when we are dealing with so problematical and enigmatical a subject as the Milky Way; but the serious objection is that the theory does not sufficiently accord with the observed phenomena. There is too much evidence that the Milky Way is an organic system, however fantastic its ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... standing. She had resumed her composure, and her face had taken on the enigmatical expression so difficult to fathom, especially as she had assumed a deliberate air of dejection, which Perenna guessed was intended to hide her excitement and alertness, together with the tumultuous feelings which even she had great ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed at times that I must be the first discoverer ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... its name. Few were aware that it was merely a band of "Sontag-Reiters." Our hon. sec., being at the time prominent in politics, received congratulations from those who imagined the T.P.C. was a political association, and much wonderment was excited by the decidedly enigmatical appellation of the small and select society. Sir Edward Lawson showed marked ingenuity in retaining the mystery by his paragraphs in his paper. The first meet of our second season was the only one I missed during the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... whose original genius qualified him for sympathizing even to excess with any real merits in that work. This novel is in its own nature and purpose sufficiently obscure; and the commentaries which have been written upon it by the Hurnboldts, Schlegels, &c., make the enigma still more enigmatical. We shall not venture abroad upon an ocean of discussion so truly dark, and at the same time so illimitable. Whether it be qualified to excite any deep and sincere feeling of one kind or another in the German mind,—in a mind trained under German discipline,—this we will consent to waive ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... time when you'll yield, just because you are blue and discouraged—or something; whatever mood it is that makes the temptation hardest to resist. I know myself that things are harder to endure some days than they are others." She stopped and looked at him in that enigmatical way she had. "You may not know it—but I've been staying here just to see whether you fail or succeed. I thought I understood a little of why you came, and I—I stayed." She leaned and twisted a wisp of Hooligan's mane nervously, and ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... with disdain for his fellow-guests, Monsieur le Marquis talked little, but with a very lofty manner, as if he were obliged to stoop to those persons whom he honored with his conversation. From time to time he tossed at the Nabob, across the table, sentences that were enigmatical to everybody. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... thought I, "she has been invited to spend at Stedman's country-house on Schuylkill. She consented to go, and I was to accompany her. I am fit only for solitude. My behaviour, in her presence, will be enigmatical, capricious, and morose. I must not go: yet what will she think of my failure? Not to go will be ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... weapon of office, which in the place of a gun was an immense carved wooden mace, not unlike a leg of the old-time wooden bedstead of antiquity. His ugliness was embittered somewhat by sunken, toothless jaws and an enigmatical stare from a cross-eye; he was also knock-kneed, and as an erstwhile gunpowder worker, had lost two fingers and a large part of one ear. But he had learnt the secret of simple duty: he had no dreams, no ambition embracing vast limits, did not appear to wish to achieve ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... will now be seen that, if the proposition were reversed, it would be nearer the reality. On the other hand, considered historically, the primitive association of Conveyances and Contracts explains something which often strikes the scholar and jurist as singularly enigmatical, I mean the extraordinary and uniform severity of very ancient systems of law to debtors, and the extravagant powers which they lodge with creditors. When once we understand that the nexum was artificially prolonged to give time to the debtor, we can better comprehend his position ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... not sure that I gave you my name, Miss Killigrew." He was secretly confused over this enigmatical reception. ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... flights of thought so common in dreams I heard the hoarse falsetto of the bric-a-brac dealer, repeating like a monotonous refrain the phrase he had uttered in his shop with so enigmatical an intonation: ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... the columns of the Giant's Causeway is rather enigmatical. The Causeway cannot be a dyke, as has often been supposed, otherwise the columns would have been horizontal, i.e., at right angles to the sides of the dyke. Mr. R. G. Symes, of the Geological Survey, has suggested that the ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester, with the following painted upon it: "Robert, E. of Leicester, Stadtholder of Holland, A.D. 1585." After this comes the ragged staff, but without its usual accompaniment, the bear. Under the staff follow these enigmatical lines, which I request any of your correspondents to translate and explain. I send you a translation in rhyme; I should thank them the more if they would do the same: as to explanation, the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... the girl was enigmatical both to Horace and to Ann. Weary hours, crowding one upon another, offered her no relief. The thought of Lon's letter shattered hope and made her desolate. She did not stop to reason that her relations with Horace demanded that she tell him of Everett's perfidy. Had not her ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... was not at all gracefully acknowledged. The unfortunate brickfields were pelted again; it was enigmatical; that Mr. Rhodes should be reckoned "a brick," by Boers, was improbable; rumour had it that his blood was hungered for. Some shells were hurled also at the grand stand of the race-course. Finally, the enemy appeared to ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... occasions she made no attempt to rouse him. But when he again awoke to the world, to the coach passing in its cloud of dust, or the gaping urchin, or the clang of the distant dinner-bell, he would find her considering him with an enigmatical smile, that lay in the region between amusement and pity; her shapely chin resting on her hand, and the lace falling from the whitest wrist in the world. One day the smile lasted so long, was so strange and dubious, and so full of a weird intelligence, ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of her beauty had at last unfolded: her vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman whose hand is on the ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... him here," was the enigmatical reply, "but I am almost certain that he is here. I might have expected it, and I blame myself for not ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... With an enigmatical smile, the detective replied, "The game has doubled back on the trail pretty adroitly, but I have made one or two little discoveries that may be of value later. What ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... in S. Catherine's life were founded on a too literal acceptation of biblical metaphors. The Canticles, perhaps, inspired her with the belief in a mystical marriage. An enigmatical sentence of S. Paul's suggested the stigmata. When the saint bestowed her garment upon Christ in the form of a beggar and gave Him the silver cross of her rosary, she was but realising His own words: 'Inasmuch ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... said the major with an enigmatical smile, "what you need to see you through life is a wife. When a man mounts a high-horse aeroplane and goes sailing off, dimity is the best possible ballast. Consider the matter I beg of ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Ursins, accompanied by a smile, escaped from the King, generally so complete a master of himself, and appeared enigmatical to such an extent, although striking, that Torcy, to wham it was addressed, understood nothing. In his surprise, he related to Castries what the King had said; Castries told it to Madame la Duchesse d'Orleans, who reported it to M. d'Orleans and to me. We racked our brains ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... while. The new order may have gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of lantern show that used to be known in the village as the "Dissolving Views," the scene that is going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident, and the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are to replace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the new England of our children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideas of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity have certainly never ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... go to the Riviera with Sir Isaac and when she came back Mary Trunk and Lucy Baxandall had vanished from both the International Hostel and the International Stores. She tried to find out why, and she was confronted by inadequate replies and enigmatical silences. "They decided to go," said Mrs. Pembrose, and dropped "fortunately" after that statement. She disavowed any exact knowledge of their motives. But she feared the worst. Susan Burnet was uninforming. Whatever had happened had failed to reach Alice Burnet's ears. Lady Harman could ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Nestling in the dense foliage stood a temple. The doors and courts were in ruins. The walls, inner and outer, in disrepair. An inscription on a tablet testified that this was the temple of Spiritual Perception. On the sides of the door was also a pair of old and dilapidated scrolls with the following enigmatical verses. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... orchestra could manage it, Pohlenz, instead of having to conduct a vocal quartette, a cantata, or an Italian aria, took his place at the desk to undertake this highly complicated instrumental work, with its particularly enigmatical and incoherent opening, one of the most difficult tasks that could possibly be found for a musical conductor. I shall never forget the impression produced upon me at the first rehearsal by the anxiously and carefully played 3/4 time, and the way in ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... they are, seem to me to be very profound and significant; and I wish, on this Easter Sunday, to look at them as throwing a light upon the gladness of this day. They suggest to me three things: I find in them, first, an enigmatical forecast of our Lord's own history; second, a prophetic warning of Israel's; and last, a symbolical foreshadowing of His world-wide work as the Restorer of man's destructions. 'Destroy this Temple, and in three days ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... am not quite sure of that," replied Mustapha, with a stern look, in hopes of frightening the man into a compliance with his wishes—"there was something very enigmatical in those words. Your 'hard crust' may mean his sublime highness the pacha; 'wearing away your teeth' may imply exactions from the government and as you affirmed that he was happy who could command the hard crust—why it is as ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... odd, enigmatical ways, had refrained from questioning her—waiting to ask for explanations until the poor girl should have become more quiet, and able to give them. She could see that some terrible catastrophe must have occurred, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... forgot," said the editor. "Look here, then, just do me an enigmatical and oracular article that can be read ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... really tasted like they could never decide. It reminded them of many things and of nothing. It was sweet yet bitter; it repelled but at the same time pleased them; it was as perplexing as the voice—as enigmatical. When they had eaten it they resumed their former positions on the ground, and the voice ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... looked enigmatical, as indeed she always did when she was ignorant. She had not the smallest idea what an idle corner might be, nor how it could be broken up. She therefore peered through her eyeglasses and said nothing. Mr. Amarinth was ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... The enigmatical conduct of Sir Barnard was no less perplexing. His sudden desertion of Hector, and of the cause which he had so loudly defended, were alarming. For what other interpretation could be put upon the voters in the Baronet's interest, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Browning's liberal sentiment in politics. One, the stately Artemis Prologuizes, is the sole remaining fragment of a classical drama, "Hippolytus and Aricia," composed in 1840, "much against my endeavour," wrote the poet,—a somewhat enigmatical phrase—"while in bed with a fever." A considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as expressions or demonstrations of various passions, central among which is the passion of love. A few, and these conspicuous for their masterly handling of ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Liz gave another enigmatical nod, and a faint, slow, melancholy smile gathered about the lips of Teen as she sat down to her work again, after having stirred the fire and pushed the dirty brown teapot on to the coals. In this teapot a black decoction brewed ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... the imposing portrait of Mr. Upjohn which she had been gravely contemplating, and met the troubled eye of her young host with an enigmatical flash of her own. But she made no answer in words. Instead, she lifted her right hand and ran one slender finger thoughtfully up the casing of the door near which they stood till it struck a nick in the old mahogany almost on ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... depreciated by Pett's accusers, he declared that "the cross-grain was in the men, not in the timber." The king, on historical evidence, and by what he said in his own works, claims the honour of discovering the gunpowder plot, by the sagacity and reflection with which he solved the enigmatical and ungrammatical letter sent on that occasion. The train of his thoughts has even been preserved to us; and, although a loose passage, in a private letter of the Earl of Salisbury, contradicted by another passage in the same letter, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... middle till the end of February. This was no doubt a sad disappointment to the Countess Anna, who thereby missed much enjoyment, and the delay must have caused intense irritation to the impatient Balzac, but Madame Hanska's feelings on the subject remain, as usual, enigmatical. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... humanity." Before my eyes that "nourisher" lay outspread, a nourisher overlaid with dry and fragrant herbage. And as I gazed, in the haze of a vision, upon that nourisher's dark and enigmatical face, I saw also the thousands of men who have seamed this earth with furrows, to the end that dead things should become things of life. And in particular, there uprose before me a picture strange indeed. In that picture I saw marching over the steppe, where the expanse lay bare and void—yes, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the famous cheese-cakes of that place. All the travellers got out. Puzzled by the apparent truth mingled with Georges' inventions, the count returned to the coucou when the others had entered the house, and looked beneath the cushion for the portfolio which Pierrotin told him that enigmatical youth had placed there. On it he read the words in gilt letters: "Maitre Crottat, notary." The count at once opened it, and fearing, with some reason, that Pere Leger might be seized with the same curiosity, he took ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... reputation, which was simply execrable. Short and sturdy, as far as I could judge, clad in an old brown morning-suit, he sat leaning on his elbow, his hand shading his eyes, and half averted from the chair I was to occupy on the other side of the table. He was motionless, mysterious, remote, enigmatical, with something mournful, too, in the pose, like that statue of Giugliano (I think) de Medici shading his face on the tomb by Michael Angelo, though, of course, he was far, far from being beautiful. He began ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... and steadily, at the woman. Her expression struck him as oddly enigmatical; meeting his glance, Plimmer reddened, her eyes dropped. "I expect any simple key would open it," he ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of it? It has less the appearance of notes or fragments prepared by Rabelais than of a first attempt at revision. It is not an author's rough draft; still less is it his manuscript. If I had not printed this enigmatical text with scrupulous and painful fidelity, I would do it now. It was necessary to do it so as to clear the way. But as the thing is done, and accessible to those who may be interested, and who wish to critically examine it, there is no further need of reprinting it. All the editions of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... through the world. Under the veil of mysterious allusion, all wisdom was then concealed. From the sensible world images were everywhere borrowed to describe things unseen. More was understood to be meant than was openly exprest. By enigmatical rites the priests communicated his doctrines; by parables and allegories the philosopher instructed his disciples; even the legislator, by figurative sayings, commanded the reverence of the people. ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... word "Virgin Soil" was a favorite phrase with Tourgueneff when speaking of his country, and he used it as the title of his last novel. It seemed to him to explain everything in Russian conditions that to the rest of the world appeared enigmatical. The whole of Dr. Brandes's book is interpenetrated with this consciousness of the vast possibilities hidden in the virgin bosom of the new earth, even though they may be too deeply hidden to sprout up into the daylight for centuries to come. The Russian literature, which is at present enchaining ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... lie down, and go to sleep again." It was bad policy in me to let the words "go to sleep" sound upon the reader's ear, for I have not yet quite done; I have one more class, and though last not least; were I to adopt that enigmatical style which made the fortune of the oracle of Apollo, I might add—and though least, greatest. But this, the oracular sublime, has now gone to the gipsies and the conjurors, and I must write plain ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... not wholly lacking. In Marcionite congregations repetition of baptism is said to have taken place (on the Elkesaites see Vol. I. p. 308). One can only wonder that there is not more frequent mention of such attempts. The assertion of Hippolytus (Philos. IX. 12 fin.) is enigmatical: [Greek: Epi Kallistou ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... in vertical height of 7 feet. In the chalky sand, sometimes occurring in interstices between the separate fragments of flint, constituting the coarse gravel Number 4, entire as well as broken freshwater shells are often met with. To some it may appear enigmatical how such fragile objects could have escaped annihilation in a river-bed, when flint tools and much gravel were shoved along the bottom; but I have seen the dredging instrument employed in the Thames, above and below London Bridge, to deepen the river, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... are all tarred with the same brush, all daubed with the same dauber; we have nothing, as the rather enigmatical phrase goes, on one another. Indeed, we hardly look at one another, and are as remote as strangers sitting side by side in a theatre. Individually, in a steady, subconscious way, I think we are all wondering ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... was disquieting, and yet soothing; it filled him with an indefinable uneasiness, and yet with a strange yearning. He stood, in these moments, at the inscrutable threshold of the great North; he felt the enigmatical, voiceless spirit of it; it passed into his blood; it made his heart beat a little faster; it made him afraid, and yet daring. In his breast the spirit of adventure was waking—had awakened; he ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... them, that in this case the Messiah announced by the Jewish prophets was destined for the Jews, and that he ought to have been their liberator, instead of destroying their worship and their religion. If it be possible to unravel any thing in these obscure, enigmatical, and symbolical oracles of the prophets of Judea, as we find them in the Bible,—if there be any means of guessing the meaning of the obscure riddles, which have been decorated with the pompous name of prophecies, we shall perceive that the inspired writers, when ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... of Alencon had by no means decided to descend into the plain. In presence of the Constable, my Lord the Bastard and the captains, he consulted the holy Maid, who gave him an enigmatical answer: "See to it that you ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... this quality in his Autobiography is not wholly due to Hazlitt—there is some chance that it is) possessed a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could never attain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many-sided spunger, philanderer, and corruptor of youth had a much higher general qualification for novel-writing than any one mentioned hitherto in this chapter, or perhaps than any to be mentioned, except the curiously contrasted pair, of Irish ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... so enigmatical, that I am forced to conclude you resort to this method of defence. The exigencies of professional duty compel me to assume toward you an attitude, as painfully embarrassing to me as it is threatening to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... misadventure. Sybil had often described to her little son the concealed valuables, which, if the exiled Royalists were ever able to re-visit England, she hoped to recover for herself and for him; and, in later years, Sir Ralph could still recall the enigmatical words in which his mother had (possibly with the idea that the rhyme might, as it did, cling to his childish memory) spoken to him ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... rather enigmatical to the average member, who would, ordinarily, look upon the author as a dolt or pretender. They do not dare to do either in the case of Mr. Knox; therefore, the conclusion that he is indifferent. Never have the men associated with ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... was sitting in the drawing-room, listening to the insinuating tones of Gedeonovsky's wearisome verbiage, he suddenly turned round, he knew not why, and caught the deep, attentive, inquiring look of Liza's eyes. That enigmatical look was directed towards him. The whole night long Lavretsky thought of it. His love was not like that of a boy, nor was it consistent with his age to sigh and to torment himself; and indeed it was not with a feeling ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... Frona replied. "His tongue is a sluggard. He leaves one at the most interesting point with an enigmatical reference to a man of a bygone age. You take an unfair advantage of us, Mr. St. Vincent, and we shall be unhappy until you show how Tamerlane brought your journey ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... of sidereal science besides that of stellar aggregation, Herschel may justly be styled a pioneer. He was the first to bestow serious study on the enigmatical objects known as "nebulae." The history of the acquaintance of our race with them is comparatively short. The only one recognised before the invention of the telescope was that in the girdle of Andromeda, certainly familiar in the middle of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... where, for three days and three nights he had been under the enigmatical sway of death, and returned alive to his dwelling, for a long time no one noticed in him those sinister oddities, which, as time went on, made his very name a terror. Gladdened unspeakably by the sight of him who had been returned to life, those near to him ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... my word!" was the enigmatical remark the smiling Quimby made as he entered. Then, catching sight of the festive board, he stopped short and stared, with an utterly confounded face, at that, at the embarrassed Nattie, at Cyn, behind the door, and at the saucepan cover, which, ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... expression and how inadequately it explains my meaning. But perhaps it will become more intelligible in the course of my story. But, indeed, in the expression of her golden eyes, that seemed at times to throw out sparks of light, in the curve of her enigmatical mouth, in the substance of her skin, at once brown and yet luminous, in the play of the angular and yet harmonious lines of her body, in the ethereal lightness of her footsteps, even in her bare arms, to which invisible wings ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... Taillebourg, when committing all sorts of excesses against the Protestants of Saintes, was: "Agimus a gagne Pere Eternel!" As Agimus was the first word of the customary grace said at meals by devout Roman Catholics—"Agimus tibi gratias, omnipotens Deus," etc.—this apparently enigmatical expression was only a profane formula to celebrate the triumph of the Roman over the reformed church. See Bulletin, xii. 247 ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... amused myself with the variegated colors of a tent hung with panther skins. Distant people to rule over, I have taken Chulan to be my wife: the Khan has sent me to tell you this.'" His wife seems to have understood the enigmatical phrases, for Setzen says: "The sensible (!) Burte Judjin thus replied: 'The wish of Burte Judjin and of the whole people is that the might of our sovereign may be increased. It rests with him whom he shall befriend or bind himself ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... was still in Limerick, Strongbow died in Dublin. As it was of the highest political importance that his death should be concealed until some one was present to hold the reigns of government, his sister, Basilia, sent an enigmatical letter[301] to her husband, which certainly does no small credit to her diplomatic skill. The messengers were not acquainted with the Earl's death; and such of the Anglo-Normans in Dublin as were aware of it, had too much prudence to betray the secret. Raymond at once set out on his journey. Immediately ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... man, whose position remains to some extent enigmatical, appeared about this time and unquestionably had some intercourse with Jesus. About the year 28 of our era there spread through the whole of Palestine the reputation of a certain John, a young ascetic, full of fervour and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... would be too rash to assign to the eastern chain of Bolivia and Central Chile, a later origin than the western chain (the nearest the Pacific), but that the circumstance of the rivers of a lower mountain chain having forced their way through a higher chain seems, without this supposition, to be enigmatical. Mr. Darwin is of opinion that the phenomenon is assignable to a periodical and gradual elevation of the second mountain line (the Andes); for a chain of islets would at first appear, and as these were lifted up, the tides would be always wearing ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... doubt, been damned for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem chanted by the rest of the edifice. Archdeacon Claude had the credit also of having fathomed the mystery of the colossus of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty, enigmatical statue which then stood at the entrance of the vestibule, and which the people, in derision, called "Monsieur Legris." But, what every one might have noticed was the interminable hours which he often employed, seated upon the parapet of the area ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... caressing cadences in the voice of Lance Lorrigan, any provocative tilt to his eyebrows, any tenderness in his smile, anything enigmatical in his personality, none of these things were apparent when he set the first bucket of water on the stove to heat. He had added to his charms a broad streak of soot across his forehead and a scratch ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... when once he asked Beethoven to tell him what the F minor and D minor (op. 31, No. 2) meant, he received for an answer only the enigmatical remark: 'Read Shakespeare's "Tempest."' Many a student and commentator has since read the 'Tempest' in the hope of finding a clew to the emotional contents which Beethoven believed to be in the ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... a seductive frankness, a sort of exquisite virility. I do not know why she should have felt so friendly to me. It may be that she thought I understood her much better than I was able to do. The most precise of her sayings seemed always to me to have enigmatical prolongations vanishing somewhere beyond my reach. I am reduced to suppose that she appreciated my attention and my silence. The attention she could see was quite sincere, so that the silence could not be suspected ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the necessity and wisdom of Birth Control, this philosophy in its turn opens to science in its various fields a suggestive avenue of approach to many of those problems of humanity and society which at present seem to enigmatical and insoluble. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Lola was in a state of great depression; "What is the matter?" I asked. "er in or ist aus!" I questioned her more closely, so as to get at the meaning of this enigmatical remark: "What 'in ear'?" (or being meant for Ohr ear). She replied: "eid zu sagen" ( oath to tell—or to say) adding "ich auch aus" ... ( I also done for). She looked absolutely miserable, ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... This earthquake which invisible powers heave up out of the knotty entanglement of our dark enigmatical being! which in boisterous senseless noises announces that within, in the unseen world, the soul neither recks of nor knows truth or falsehood, and has just been murdering the innocent herald who was bringing these phantasms before it! These rude unmeaning sounds which ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... should be mentioned with reverence as beginning to develop again that current of Greek thought which the system drawn from our sacred books by the fathers and doctors of the Church had interrupted for more than a thousand years, was Giordano Bruno. His utterances were indeed vague and enigmatical, but this fault may well be forgiven him, for he saw but too clearly what must be his reward for any more open statements. His reward indeed came—even for his faulty utterances—when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, thoughtful men from all parts of the world united in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... us back by the persons and traditions mentioned in them to the later years of the Roman occupation. The second class, of greater antiquity than the first, at least on the ground of subject, is also distinguished by a much more mythological character, a bolder use of the miraculous, an enigmatical form, a style full of alliteration and plays upon words. Of this number are the tales of Pwyll, of Bramwen, of Manawyddan, of Math the son of Mathonwy, the Dream of the Emperor Maximus, the story of ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the word, you go into the parlor, take part in a discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They have selected a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical replies. Everybody knows that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads, the best way is to choose a very ordinary word, and to invent phrases that will send the parlor Oedipus a thousand leagues from each of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... it—Luke, so different from the majority of the croppers—Luke, who had steadily refused to have anything to say to General Lud and his schemes against the masters. Mary's last words gave him a clue to the mystery—"Your dear feyther gave his life for little Jenny." He coupled it with Luke's enigmatical words, "A loife for ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... the manager crossed the floor and paused for an instant beside the nearest worker, a brawny, coal-black negro, with a red shirt open at his throat, on which I saw a strange, jagged scar, running from ear to chest, like the enigmatical symbol of some savage rite I could not understand. Without turning his head at the manager's approach, he picked up a great leaf and stripped it from the stem at a single stroke, while his tremendous bass voice rolled like the music of an organ over the deep piles of tobacco before which ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... the astronomer is able by his calculations to tell the existence of a planet, which observation proves to be strictly true. But wonderful as is all this, we are not reduced to any such necessity with regard to the future of the gospel. We have not to take a few dark sayings, or enigmatical expressions, or hieroglyphic inscriptions, and as we best may spell out the universal spread of truth. As with the light of a sunbeam, or with "the point of a diamond," is it revealed. He that runs may read. Abraham saw it: "And in thy seed shall all the families of the ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... than, he had hitherto exhibited, to drive home the charge which Trumbull had made earlier in the campaign. Prompted by Trumbull, probably, Lincoln reviewed the shadowy history of the Toombs bill and Douglas's still more enigmatical connection with it. The substance of the indictment was, that Douglas had suppressed that part of the original bill which provided for a popular vote on the constitution to be drafted by the Kansas convention. ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... was saying that she had been "listed" with Komoru for some great journey. What did it mean? What could she do? Again she looked up at the secretary; but far from seeing any trace of scheme or plot in his enigmatical countenance, she found him to be considering the situation with the same equanimity with which he would have recorded the calcium content ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... hopeless feeling were these enigmatical words charged that the boy could do nothing but heave a ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... to the house of David. Further,—If the passage under review be understood of the Messiah, we have an excellent fountainhead for all the prophecies of a personal Messiah; in its significant, enigmatical, and expressive brevity, it is most suitable for such a purpose. But if its reference to the Messiah be explained away, we are deprived altogether of a suitable starting-point. In the Davidic psalms, the Messianic prophecy already more ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... proved suggestive, as his whimsical notions often do. It always pleases me to take some hint from anything he says when I can, and carry it out in a direction not unlike that of his own remark. I reminded the company of his enigmatical symbol. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the course of this conversation, which had sufficiently explained to her whatever was enigmatical in the first appearance of the bailiffs. The painful and incredible reality that was thus presented effectually dissipated the illusions of frenzy to which she had just been a prey. "My dear Madam," said she to Mrs. Hammond, "do not harass yourself with useless efforts. ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... there's my money, I'm glad I've got it to give to papa. Dear papa, I don't believe he or mama cares because I'm so ugly; I'll give it to him to-night, and then while I'm waiting, I'll work and earn some more, so as to have enough;" and, after ending this slightly enigmatical speech with an abrupt nod, Olive looked a little brighter and fell to work so rapidly, that she shaded a dimple until it looked like a bullet-hole in the ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... manner and enigmatical in allusion; felt it particularly hard thus to be placed in the dock, as if he were an Irish County Councillor under Prince ARTHUR's new Bill. Only last Friday, in debate preceding the very Division now under discussion, he had delivered an Address which disclosed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... time, to us, enigmatical phenomenon, was kept in mind until we had an opportunity of instituting comparisons between the climate of Japan and China and our own, and we then concluded that in the case of a plant imported from thence, and exposed to such different climatical influences, the origin ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... which it reflected upon himself. Full of disdain for the people around him, M. le Marquis spoke little, in a very high voice, and as though he were stooping towards those whom he was honouring with his conversation. From time to time he would throw to the Nabob across the table a few words enigmatical ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... to read the riddle of the sphinx, and your words are as enigmatical. I have not begun to find their clew," replied Madeleine, pausing in the garland she was forming, and letting the ivy ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... face, her clear forehead, her gentle eyes had become less conspicuous; and now the lower part stood out, with its somewhat sensual jaw, ruddy mouth, and superb teeth. And still she smiled with that enigmatical, girlish smile, which was, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... shouted hoarsely was not true, of course. He did not believe,—and yet, there was Shorty's enigmatical answer to a simple question; there was Sam Pretty Cow, implying much while he actually said very little; there was this unheralded departure of all the Devil's Tooth riders in the night, in the season between round-ups. There was Coaley feeling fit for anything, shut up in the box stall while ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... Filled with disdain for his fellow-guests, Monsieur le Marquis talked little, but with a very lofty manner, as if he were obliged to stoop to those persons whom he honored with his conversation. From time to time he tossed at the Nabob, across the table, sentences that were enigmatical to everybody. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the staff on which he leans. Within the cavern a white lady appears, who invites him to accept as much of her wealth as he choses. Thereupon he fills his pockets, and hastening to quit her mysterious domains, he heeds not her enigmatical warning, "Forget not the best," the result being that as he passes through the door he is severed in twain amidst the crashing of thunder. Stories of this kind, however, are the exception, legendary lore generally regarding the lightning ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... this sudden change, and catching, with all the mysterious rapidity of instinct peculiar to the lower animals, at the enigmatical character of the situation, turned his pleading, melancholy eyes from one to another of the motionless three, as if begging that his humble intellect (pardon me, naturalists, for the use of this word "intellect" in the matter of a monkey!) should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... curious, enigmatical Pile de Cinq Mars, we suddenly realized that we were quite near Luynes, and Walter told Francois to stop there as he knew that Archie would be charmed with the beauty of the situation of this chateau which ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... speculation. The veil of the unknown is set with the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal. The Veiled Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the mirror upon which the busy shapes of life are moving. It is as if it waited in a great stillness. Our lives do not deal with it, and cannot deal with it. It may be that they may never be able ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... her aloud, and saw nothing in it but a proof of mental aberration; she lighted the paper at a wax taper standing near her, as she had some letters to seal, saying, "It is not worth keeping." She afterwards much regretted the loss of this enigmatical memorial. After having burnt the paper, her Majesty said to me, "That man is born to be my torment; he has always some mad scheme in his head; remember, the first time you see him, to tell him that I do not like diamonds now, and that I will buy no more so long as I live; that if I had ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... disappointment and anger were great, and he could not be persuaded that all was not the fault of Mr. Dutton's suspicion and precaution in holding back the money, nor could any one persuade him that it was mere imposture. When another ill-written enigmatical letter arrived, he insisted that it was from the same quarter, and made Broadbent conduct the negotiations, with the result that after considerable sums had been paid in circuitous fashions, the butler was directed ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... crowd of people struggling toward the hostess across Mrs. Denton Frostwinch's handsome drawing-room. Mrs. Frostwinch belonged, beyond the possibility of any cavilling doubt, to the most exclusive circle of fashionable Boston society. Boston society is a complex and enigmatical thing, full of anomalies, bounded by wavering and uncertain lines, governed by no fixed standards, whether of wealth, birth, or culture, but at times apparently leaning a little toward each of these three great factors of ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... me two or three revolutions of my brain to perceive how this answer bore upon the question, and when I repeated it to Alister, his comment was almost as enigmatical. ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... centre to create an era of peace and development within, whereby Russia may rise free and rejoicing to face her great destinies? Hard and bitter is the shaping of nations. Uvar Ivanovitch still fixes his enigmatical stare into ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... next forty-eight hours Walker hung about the hotel like a culprit. He would have sacrificed even a glimpse of Edith to feel free to go away. He couldn't go away while the other man's plans remained enigmatical; but he wished he hadn't come. He felt his position undignified, grotesque, like that of a boy detected in some bit ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... the ordinary circumstances of life. The pleasure of Miss Haviland was equalled only by her surprise, when, on entering the house, she found her former fellow-prisoner, the sprightly and fearless Vine Howard, a transient but favored inmate, whose presence here now fully explained the enigmatical language of Bart, on the way, while it soon raised a shrewd suspicion of the cause of the awkward shyness he had exhibited in making his partial and roundabout revelations. Their mutual salutations, inquiries, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... relations, who have been most shamefully libelled by this female 'Tisiphom', a name which your 'Ladyship' will recollect to have belonged to one of the Furies. You need not take the precaution of writing in so enigmatical a style in your next, as, bad as the woman is, she would not dare to open any letter addressed to me from you. Whenever you can find time to write, believe me, your epistles will be productive of the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... whole-hearted agreement for example about a certain impresario, Maxfield Ware, who created a sensation among the company and staff by turning up ostentatiously unaccounted for from New York and looking intensely enigmatical whenever any one asked him any questions. He was a sufficiently well-known figure in that world for surmises to spring up like round-eyed ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... xxxvii. Fifty-five[DT] Enigmatical Characters, all very exactly drawn to the Life, from several Persons, Humours, Dispositions. Pleasant and full of Delight. By R. F. Esq.; London: Printed for William Crook, at the sign of the Three Bibles on ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... are a handsome overmantel in one of the private rooms of the firm, and a curious ceiling. The former is of wood, and is varnished and painted in various tones of bronze and gold. The carving upon it is very elaborate and enigmatical. The panelled ceiling has some affinity with it, but has been modernized, and is not so interesting. The front of the house remains as it was, and claims to be the only ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... tone was enigmatical. She gave an inward gulp of envy, however, excited by the cut of the French girl's black and white cotton. Then she dropped Elise's ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... very—sweet," was the enigmatical response. And Mr. Starr muttered something about women and geometry and went away, shaking his head. ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... sudden flights of thought so common in dreams I heard the hoarse falsetto of the bric-a-brac dealer, repeating like a monotonous refrain the phrase he had uttered in his shop with so enigmatical an intonation: ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed at times that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... pleasant to think so—by my old Annamite friend of the Penguin experience, who stood by his flag nodding his head at me. He said, "Beaucoup bon," showing his polished black teeth in an approving grin. I forgot for the moment that "beaucoup bon" was his enigmatical comment upon all occasions, and that he would have grinned just as broadly had he been dragging me out from a mass ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... encounters almost solely in the music of the third period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally descended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... must be accountable for an enigmatical inscription at St. Andrew's, Worcester, on the tomb of a man who died in ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... because they felt that he was too great and strong for them, and it is to the honor of Sophia Peabody that she was not only attracted by the magnetism of Hawthorne, but finally had the courage to unite herself to such an enigmatical person. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... in an invulnerable garment. After this action, more blood being shed than usual in an Icelandic engagement, Thorarin returned to Mahfahlida, and, being questioned by his mother concerning the events of the skirmish, he answered in the improvisatory and enigmatical poetry of ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... lady was first to undergo tortures in some remote locality, nursed devotedly—poor thing—by Aunt Aggie. The result of her ministrations was never in doubt from the first. The Archdeacon's wife was, of course, to succumb, calling down blessings on the devoted stranger at her bedside, with the enigmatical smile which spoke of some ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... send an explicit verbal message, since there was no time to write. But the chance of the boy being stopped, or becoming confused with feeling himself the messenger of a hurried and important communication, made him, on the whole, glad that he had preferred a more enigmatical way of conveying the intelligence. He had, therefore, the advantage of his patron, for he was conscious still of ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... what we shall see," was the queen's enigmatical rejoinder. She swept to her chariot, and with her brilliant train, ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... it against the rules to smoke?" Without a word the Texan complied, and as he held a match to the cigarette he stared straight into the man's eyes: "You've started out good," he remarked gravely. "I'm just wonderin' if you can play your string out." With which enigmatical remark he turned to the cowboys: "The drinks are on me, boys. Jerk off that rope, an' go back to town! An' remember, this lynchin' come off ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... declares here, in the second part, the future events before they spring forth, before the facts begin to sprout forth from the soil of the Present, and hence could have been known and predicted by human combination. The words, "before they spring forth," become completely enigmatical, if it be denied that Isaiah [Pg 185] wrote the second part; inasmuch as, in that case, it would have in a great part, to do with things which did not belong to the territory of prophetic foresight, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... "What does the man mean? He must be insane!" She quietly lighted the note at a wax taper which was standing near her, and burned it, remarking that it was not worth keeping. Afterward, as she reflected more upon the enigmatical nature of the communication, she deeply regretted that she had not preserved the note. She pondered the matter deeply and anxiously, and at last said to ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... diameter and surrounded by a saw-edged rampart, some of whose pinnacles are 6,000 or 7,000 feet high. Plato is a favorite subject for study by selenographers because of the changes of color which its broad, flat floor undergoes as the sun rises upon it, and also because of the existence of enigmatical spots and streaks whose visibility changes. South of Plato, in the Mare Imbrium, rises a precipitous, isolated peak called Pico, 8,000 feet in height. Its resemblance in situation to the conical mountain Pico in ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... up many gaps in my own limited experiences of that enigmatical being who was half divine (though, I think, rather wicked or at any rate unmoral in her way) and yet all woman. It is true that it showed her in lights very different from and higher than those in ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... this work, in the Introduction, as a romance and not a romance, as a truth for those who can comprehend it, and an extravagance for those who cannot. The most careless or matter-of-fact reader must see that the work, like the enigmatical "Faust," deals in types and symbols; that the writer intends to suggest to the mind something more subtle and impalpable than that which is embodied to the senses. What that something is, hardly two persons will agree. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... unhappy,—in a mood that savoured of misanthropy; my fate was growing cross-grained, enigmatical. Mr. Hamilton's frown had struck cold to my heart; I was beginning to lose patience (to lose hope was impossible),—to ask myself why ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a good lesson at Paris in 1839, when I heard the orchestra of the Conservatoire rehearse the enigmatical Ninth Symphony. The scales fell from my eyes; I came to understand the value of CORRECT execution, and the secret of a good performance. The orchestra had learnt to look for Beethoven's MELODY in every bar—that melody which the ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... ma vie there is an enigmatical page in which George Sand has intentionally measured and veiled every expression. She speaks of her moral solitude, which, at that time, was profound and absolute, and she adds: "It would have been mortal to a tender mind and to a girl in the flower ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... These words do not prove that enigmatical knowledge, viz. by dream and vision, belongs to the nature of prophecy; but the comparison is drawn between other prophets, who saw Divine things in dreams and visions, and Moses, who saw God plainly and not by riddles, and who ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... else to do at present.' He gave me an enigmatical glance. 'I must leave you behind. You can join me in my house, where Bhagabati's son and I ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... second, he gives us no hints of any mystery at all; but when he here comes to ver. 4, etc., he says that Moses, after the seventh day was over, began to talk philosophically; it is not very improbable that he understood the rest of the second and the third chapters in some enigmatical, or allegorical, or philosophical sense. The change of the name of God just at this place, from Elohim to Jehovah Elohim, from God to Lord God, in the Hebrew, Samaritan, and Septuagint, does also not a little favor some such change in the narration ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... again, come back twa!" was the enigmatical sentence with which the landlady made her adieu, and a faint colour flickered in Margot's cheek as she pondered over ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... meaning. We shall, perhaps, best grasp the whole depth of that meaning according to the Messianic reference which we give to the text, if we consider the sad and solemn conception of man's life that underlies it; the enigmatical and obstinate hope which it holds out in the teeth of all experience—'A man shall be a refuge'; and the solution of the riddle ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... of the eccentricity and inequality of his work; but to the general public, on whose recognition depends the reputation of the artist, his verses as well as his drawings were a sealed, or at least an enigmatical, book. His verses have no literary atmosphere about them: they smell neither of the midnight oil nor of that smoke of fame the fumes of which Byron tells us "are frankincense to human thought." They seem to have been written as spontaneously ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... step-mother. "June ain't goin' to be with us long, I'm afeerd:" and, without looking up, June knew the wireless significance of the speech was going around from eye to eye, but calmly she pulled her thread through a green pod and said calmly, with a little enigmatical shake of her head: ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... Captain struck his riding boot a resounding blow with his whip, and whistled; while the Marquis dangled his eyeglass by its riband, viewing it with eyes of mild surprise, and the Viscount glanced from one to the other with an enigmatical smile upon his lips. ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we have been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the preparations; for charades were to be enacted, and he was reported skilful in the arrangement of these saturnalia of civilised society, or, as he himself expressed it, he was "up to all the dodges connected with the minor domestic enigmatical melodrama". By Harry's recommendation I despatched a letter to Mr. Frampton, claiming his promise of visiting me at Heathfield Cottage, urging as a reason for his doing so immediately, that he would meet four of his old Helmstone acquaintance, viz., Oak-lands, Lawless, Coleman, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... back to him now. Briefly he told Francis of his absence from the Mill House in response to the summons from Nur-el-Din, of his interview with the dancer and her story of the Star of Poland, of his hurried return just in time to meet Mortimer, and of Mortimer's enigmatical reference to the dancer ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... promises of support, vague warnings of trouble to come. "Fear not, for God will stand by you." She thought they meant that she would be delivered in safety as she had been hitherto, her wounds healing, her sacred person preserved from any profane touch. But yet such promises have always something enigmatical in them, and it might be, as proved to be the case, that they meant rather consolation and strength to endure than deliverance. For the first time the Maid was often sad; she feared nothing, but the shadow was heavy on her heart. Orleans and Rheims had been clear as daylight, her "voices" ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Calmly surveying the bustle, and somewhat quizzically scanning Shirley's enigmatical-looking countenance, he remarked that in truth this was the hottest end of the room, that he found a climate there calculated to agree with none but cool temperaments like his own; and putting the waiters, the napkins, the satin robe—the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... idealised rural life. But Lycidas opens up a deeper vein of feeling, a patriot passion so vehement and dangerous, that, like that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is compelled to veil itself from power, or from sympathy, in utterance made purposely enigmatical. The passage which begins "Last came and last did go", raises in us a thrill of awe-struck expectation which. I can only compare with that excited by the Cassandra of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. For the reader to feel this, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... width— intrusive dikes of trap— organic bodies of diversified shapes, and other causes of unevenness in the planes of deposition, both on the small and on the large scale, will interfere with parallelism. If complex and enigmatical appearances did not present themselves, it would be a serious objection to the metamorphic theory. Mr. Sorby has shown that the peculiar structure belonging to ripple-marked sands, or that which is generated ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Petersburg that Russia would acquiesce in any measures proposed by France and Great Britain to maintain peace. Minister Klobukowski reported from Brussels that the Belgian Government regarded Germany's attitude as enigmatical, and justifying every apprehension. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... from the verses of Orpheus and the sacred books of the Egyptians and Phrygians, that the ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but of all nations, was nothing more than a system of physics, a picture of the operations of nature, wrapped up in mysterious allegories and enigmatical symbols, in a manner that the ignorant multitude attended rather to their apparent than to their hidden meaning, and even in what they understood of the latter, supposed there to be something more deep than what they perceived. Fragment of a work of Plutarch now lost, quoted by Eusebius, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... imagine a loathsome insect in love? And his loathsomeness, too, was abject, so that a simply disgusting person would have appeared noble by his side. He has his place neither in the background nor in the foreground of the story; he is simply seen skulking on its outskirts, enigmatical and unclean, tainting the fragrance of its youth and ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... bigger and more violent as the latter grew frailer and frailer. He could not realise his aspirations, could not compass his desires, in short, could not fully assert himself. Here, indeed, we have lit upon the tragic motive of Chopin's life-drama, and the key to much that otherwise would be enigmatical, certainly not explicable by delicacy and disease alone. His salon acquaintances, who saw only the polished outside of the man, knew nothing of this disparity and discrepancy; and even the select few of his most intimate friends, from whom he was not always able to conceal ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... many chances in their favor. Even if this family were of gypsy extraction, it was so wealthy, so attractive, that fashionable society could well afford to overlook its little mysteries. But, unfortunately, the enigmatical history of the Lanty family offered a perpetual subject of curiosity, not unlike that aroused by the novels of ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... Banat the harvest was over; only the maize was still standing, otherwise they saw nothing but monotonous fields of stubble. None of them spoke; all three found it hard to keep awake. In the afternoon Timar could no longer endure the silent looks, the enigmatical expression of his wife; under pretense of wanting to smoke he took a seat by the driver in the open coupe, and remained there. When they got out at a post-house, Athalie grumbled at the bad roads, the dreadful heat, ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... proposition were reversed, it would be nearer the reality. On the other hand, considered historically, the primitive association of Conveyances and Contracts explains something which often strikes the scholar and jurist as singularly enigmatical, I mean the extraordinary and uniform severity of very ancient systems of law to debtors, and the extravagant powers which they lodge with creditors. When once we understand that the nexum was artificially prolonged to give time to the debtor, we can better comprehend his position ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... what it is, and do not think to know with the first or second reading of poems, that are on the surface of them scholastic, academic, mystical, obtrusively enigmatical. Perhaps, after all, it is that Eros who ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... next important topic of conversation, and Mrs. Brewster listened to the news with an enigmatical expression on her face. When Anne finished telling about it, the elder ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the fire newly alight in the hall, burning with that spare, clear brilliancy that the recent removal of ashes imparts to a wood fire. All the world was still beclouded with mists, and the windows and doors looked forth on a blank white nullity—as inexpressive, as enigmatical, as the unwritten page of the unformulated future itself. The present seemed eliminated; he stood as it were in the atmosphere of other days. But whither had blown the incense of that happy time? The lights on the shrine had dwindled to extinction! What had ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... uncle was quite so easily satisfied!" the Prefect said, and his look, as he turned to Monsieur Joseph, was a little enigmatical. ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... and Gruget call this preparation poudre de Dun, as enigmatical an appellation as poudre de Duc. As for the specific supplied by the apothecary, the context shows that this was the same aphrodisiac as the Marquis de Sades put to such a detestable use at Marseilles ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... a great deal of time merely to perceive where the enigmatical in many things is actually located. Many simply introduce logic into their poetry and believe this is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... shadows of night and fear enough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit us rarely, in the illimitable visions that emancipate us often, in the unearthly thoughts and dreams that ravish our minds, enigmatical intimations of our kinship with God, prophecies of a super earthly destiny whose splendors already break through the clouds of ignorance, the folds of flesh, and the curtains of time in which our spirits ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... hand and drew toward herself the little innocent figure of her child, which she at once placed between herself and him. Seeing this, I recalled the scraps of cipher left in my room above and wished I had succeeded in determining their meaning, if only to understand the present enigmatical situation. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... and under the steadiness of her silent gaze, his momentary reassurance wilted. He had foreseen the possibility of encountering a woman turned Valkyrie, but was unaccoutred to face this enigmatical calm. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
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