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More "Indescribable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boars lose their heads; there was a sudden clatter of tusks, a muffled, indescribable sound, half squeal, half roar; a fountain of feathery snow, and two shots close together. Then ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... also be regretfully abandoned; and with it the two other possible excuses as well. This secrecy is one which cannot be justified as a sensational joke nor as a common human freemasonry, nor as an indescribable personal whim. Strangely enough, indeed, it violates all three conditions and classes at once. It is not hidden in order to be revealed: it is hidden in order to be hidden. It is not kept secret because it is a common secret of mankind, but because mankind must not get hold of ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... shed tears with him—tears of pity and of rage at all this spectacle implied. On a day of indescribable glory, when earth and heaven shed benedictions upon the soul of man, a child, whose nature would have bidden him rejoice as only childhood may, wept his heart out because his hand had dropped a sixpenny piece! The loss was a very serious one, and he ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... unvarnished tale, these legends may appear childish or absurd, but they have a depth of meaning to those who strive to read between the lines of such rude and inarticulate attempts to describe the indescribable. That which (the previous and subsequent career of the teacher being borne in mind) seems to be possible and even probable, appears to be somewhat ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... time she had read the secret in his eyes, but his lips had remained mute. She understood this tact, this diplomacy which, though it chafed her, she could not rebuke. Thus, he was more or less a fragment of her thoughts, day after day. Ah, that mad folly, that indescribable impulse, which had brought her to New France instead of Spain! Eh well, the blood of the De Rohans and De Montbazons was in her veins, and the cool of philosophy was never plentiful in that blood. She was to learn ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... them. On landing at the other side, we had to ascend a ladder about 200 feet high. We ordered a carriage at the Cataract Hotel, and drove to the whirlpool, four miles down the Rapids. This is an awful place, and indescribable. We then walked over Bath Island and Iris (or Goat) Island: here again is a splendid view. We saw Gull Island, where man has never been; and in the Rapids we saw the hull of the ship Detroit, fitted up in ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... his portentous introduction, fills the rest of his sixteen loosely printed double-columned octavo pages with a farrago of the most indescribable character, made up of brags, lies, promises, forged recommendations and letters, boasts of systematic charity, funny scraps of stuff in the form of little disquisitions, advertisements of remedies, hair-oils, cosmetics, liquors, groceries, thistle-killers, anti-bug ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... one, attempted to show others the right road. And in this way I have gone on for thirteen years, preaching and teaching, visiting the sick, and ministering to them, with Winifred by my side heartening me on. Occasionally I am visited with fits of indescribable agony, generally on the night before the Sabbath; for I then ask myself, how dare I, the outcast, attempt to preach the word of God? Young man, my tale is told; ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... not find Greenton, or Bayley's Four-Corners, as it is more usually designated, on any map of New England that I know of. It is not a town; it is not even a village; it is merely an absurd hotel. The almost indescribable place called Greenton is at the intersection of four roads, in the heart of New Hampshire, twenty miles from the nearest settlement of note, and ten miles from any railway station. A good location for a hotel, you will say. Precisely; ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a cratered, jagged globe of desolation indescribable; of sheer, bitter cold incarnate and palpable; of stark, sharp contrasts. Gigantic craters, in whose yawning depths no spark of warmth had been generated for countless cycles of time, were surrounded by vast ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... was deposited; and there she fainted away, holding her hand still clenched, wounded, bleeding, with the nails deep bedded in the flesh. Brigaut, Frappier, his wife, and the old woman stood looking at Pierrette in silence, all four of them in a state of indescribable amazement. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... arms with a gesture indescribable, elate, nervous with his passion. "Auntie, think of it: you mind her eyes and her hair, yon turn of the neck, and her song? ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... endeavouring to aim, but think of the hare's ears—say a couple of feet in front of his tail—and the moment the gun feels steady pull the trigger. The flash and report come together; there is a dull indescribable sound ahead, as some of the shot strikes home in fur and some drills into the turf, and then a rustling in the grass. The moorhens dive, and the coots scuttle down the brook towards the mere at the flash. While yet the sulphurous smoke lingers, ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... convictions and intellectual opinions gathered from that contact a supreme degree of that character by which men knew him; that character which is the most distinctive possession of the best American nature; that almost indescribable quality which we call, in general, clearness or truth, and which appears in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of active life as practicalness. This one character, with ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... annoyances and indignities and so far they were good, but they also helped towards a more general indifference. She might have told these last experiences to Mr. Brumley if she had not felt them to be indescribable. They could not be half told. They had to be told completely or they were altogether untellable. So she had them hid, and at once accepted and distrusted the consolation they brought her, and went on with the duties and philanthropies that she ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... in indescribable terror. "Geronimo, your intimate friend? That noble and generous cavalier who loves you as a brother? He is as gentle ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... proximity. Those who were at Edenburn at the time state that between four and half-past four a low rumbling noise, followed by a sharp report, was heard. The house trembled and shook to its foundations. The inmates, some of whom were only awakened by the shock, were seized with an indescribable terror. All the windows were smashed to atoms, the furniture and fixtures in the interior were rattled, and some lighter articles disturbed from their position. The suddenness of the alarm, and the darkness of the night, coupled with an indefinite idea as to the nature and extent of the explosion, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... to him. These sounds—he realized now how he loved them. Verily they were a part of his life. Mid them he had been bred; of them as of food he had grown. That whistle, thin and unmusical; that elusive, indescribable call of prairie male; all these homely sounds that meant so much to him—could he ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... was lighted by a broad arched window crowded full of diamond-shaped glass, tinted through and through by the bloom and glow of a conservatory within. In short the mansion was a picturesque incongruity utterly indescribable, and yet one of the most interesting old ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... urging her pony to a gait which set him reaching at his bit. She sat her saddle in a fashion which belonged solely to the prairie. The long stirrups and straight limb. The lightness, and that indescribable something which suggests the single personality of ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... of artillery, the crashing of falling buildings, the wails, shrieks, and shouts of the terrified inhabitants. The field-pieces rattled past, regiments trotted along, and disappeared around the corners, constituting a scene of indescribable terror and destruction; but here, in the emperor's room, every thing presented a spectacle of peace and repose. Caulaincourt and Berthier sat at their desks, writing. The emperor was slowly walking up and down. He did not even listen to the noise outside; he dictated his ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... when they found that the parson and his wife had been invited to dinner and they themselves left out was indescribable. Never had such an insult been offered them. They had always been the first people of their class in the place, always held their heads up and condescended to the clergy, always been helped first at table, gone first through doors, sat in the right-hand ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... this substance, as is apparent from his own words: "Oh, indescribable mixture, incomparable elixir, antidote beyond all praise! Celestial purgative (if I may be permitted to use the expression), which throws into the shade every medical prescription; which surpasses in fragrance every ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... everlasting day, shining on wanderers in "the valley of the shadow of death;" they are droppings from the overflowing and ineffable cup of mercy; they are presciences of eternity, inestimable, unutterable! and the pen that would describe indescribable perceptions, droops in shame and sorrow at its own imbecility. Such perceptions have visited, do visit us, on this most rapturous of Christmas Days? Is it not a golden day? does it not remove us for a little space from earth, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... courtiers seemed to sink into the carpets and divans and silken and down coverlets; when the sweet-smelling incense rose from the golden censers and intoxicated the brain; when a hundred servants made ready the banquet of indescribable luxury, and carried it in silver dishes, alabaster bowls, and crystal goblets; when youths and maidens, with arms entwined, crowned each other with wreaths of roses; when the fanfares sounded, and ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... dome-shaped huts which constituted the store of Last Notch came into view against a sky of dull velvet as they breasted the last rise. The indescribable homely smell of a wood-fire greeted the nostrils with the force of a spoken welcome. They could hear the gabble of the Kafirs at their supper and the noise ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... spoke his eyes were fixed with cold intensity upon a fringe of gray across the coulee below the little pasture. To the nostrils of the outraged Happy Family was borne that indescribable aroma which betrays the presence of sheep; that aroma which sheepmen love and which cattlemen hate, and which a favorable wind will ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... and argumentative as Hindu thought is, it is less prone than European theology to the vice of distorting transcendental ideas by too stringent definition. It adumbrates the indescribable by metaphors and figures. It is not afraid of inconsistencies which may illustrate different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the divine within the limits of a logical phrase. Attempts to explain how the divine and human nature were combined ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... failed, by a few inches, in the legs, yet made up for it by fitting a little better than the skin everywhere else. His head stood upon a shirt collar that held it up by the ears, and a cravat, something smaller than a table-cloth, bandaged his throat; his face was narrow, long, and grave, with an indescribable air of ponderous wisdom, which, as Fox said of Thurlow, "proved him necessarily a hypocrite; as it was impossible for any man to be as wise as he looked." Gravity and decorum marked every lineament of his countenance and every line of his body. All the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... But, alas! when my companions at length departed, they left me in no condition to complete a sermon. I fell fast asleep, and was wakened in the morning by the bishop's servant. The dismay I felt is indescribable; I started up—it was nine o'clock: I began to write; but my hand and my mind trembled, and my ideas were in such confusion, that I could not, great genius as I was, produce a beginning sentence in ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... a total stranger. He had no acquaintance to greet him with a friendly welcome; and the next day, as he was jostled by the crowd, and pushed aside by the hurried pedestrian, he realized what it was to be a stranger in a strange land, and an indescribable sensation came upon him, known only to those who have been ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the routine of life at Mentone); I told him that where one found a kitchen so exquisite, one astonished oneself that the wine was not up to the same form. "Et voila precisement mon cote faible, monsieur," he replied, with an indescribable amplitude of gesture. "Que voulez-vous? Moi, je suis cuisinier!" It was as though Shakespeare, called to account for some such peccadillo as the Bohemian seaport, should answer magnificently that he was a poet. So Follete lives in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the single soldiers where they stood, overthrow them by the sheer weight of horse and car, and crush them and their arms beneath the hoofs and wheels. And where the scythes caught them, men and weapons were cut to shreds. [32] In the midst of indescribable confusion, the chariots rocking among the weltering mounds, Abradatas was thrown out and some of his comrades with him. There they stood, and fought like men, and there they were cut down and died. The Persians, pouring in after them, dealt ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... was in the latest mode of Paris, her gown showed unmistakably the hand of the French dressmaker, while her elegance was essentially that of the Parisienne. There is always a something—something indescribable—about the Frenchwoman which is marked and distinctive, and which the English-bred ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... proudly termed the Switzerland of Canada. Its majestic hills—so grandly rugged—its placid lakes, and its dense and undulating forests lend an indescribable enchantment to the companion and lover of nature, who for the first time beholds their supreme beauty. The tree-topped hills in their altitude are at times lost in the clouds. The lumberman has not yet ventured to ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... and smooth as ever; then higher and higher, sending its rays across the vast level, and turning all to gold. It was between us and the sun now one broad patch of light, but not quite all golden glory, for as I looked right away from the poop-deck, with that indescribable feeling of joy in my breast which comes when the darkness of night and its horrors give place to the life and light of day, I felt a strange contraction about my heart—a ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... She sat in the sunlight with the music in her ears, listening to his abrupt, vivid speech, and a fear came to her which blanched her cheeks and caught at her throat. The hand which held her dainty parasol of lace shook, and an indescribable thrill ran through her veins. She could no more think of this man as a clodhopper, a coarse upstart without manners or imagination. In many ways he fell short of all the usual standards by which the men of her class were judged, yet she suddenly ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but He garlanded it with blossoms, or a sky but He studded it with stars, or allowed even the smoke of a furnace to ascend but He columned, and turreted, and doled, and scrolled it into outlines of indescribable gracefulness. When I see the apple orchards of the spring and the pageantry of the autumnal forests, I come to the conclusion that if nature ever does join the Church, while she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship, she never ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the hotel, drinking, smoking, talking, bargaining, or walked about among the cattle-pens, looking with knowing eyes at the horned people. The owners of the cattle stood near at hand, waiting for offers. There was something indescribable in their aspect, that showed them to be the owners, though they mixed among the crowd. The cattle, brought from a hundred separate farms, or rather from a thousand, seemed to agree very well together, not quarrelling in the least. They almost all had a history, no doubt, if they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness of age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach was lumbering along,—these things, together with an indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very nature transient, and makes no implicit demands ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... stream, their attention being attracted by a gunshot in that direction, which they knew could be only from our own men. In camp during the day I again experimented in the culinary department, and produced two dried-apple pies, one of which Clem and I ate with an indescribable zest, and the other we kept to astonish the absentees with when they should reach camp. I have since learned that my method of pie-making was original I soaked the dried apples till they were soft then made a crust which had plenty of bacon ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... spirit of gifted writers is something too intangible to be firmly grasped, yet its presence is felt as a pervasive and delightful atmosphere. A work is sometimes suffused with the divine touch of genius, as the delicate and indescribable hues of autumn glorify the valleys and mountains. While hovering near the earth for a time, the spirit of genius, as in Shakespeare and Ruskin, sometimes suddenly and spontaneously soars to regions of supernal splendor,—altitudes ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Van Tassel's mansion. Not those of the bevy of buxom lasses, with their luxurious display of red and white; but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table, in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped-up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tender olykoek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... fresh oscillations by the shock of the fall, making it utter those thirteen words, and stop. I was sufficiently indignant at the moment, but have since been glad, for I was thereby put upon the notion of collecting a number of cylinders with records, and have been touched with indescribable sensations, sometimes thrilled, at hearing the silence of this Eternity broken by those singing and speaking voices, so life-like, yet most ghostly, of ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... sun; the whole house in a tumult, drivers in a worry, and the sleepy animals now and then joining in the clatter with a vocal performance that is neither a trumpet-call nor a steam-whistle, but an indescribable noise, that begins in agony and abruptly breaks down in despair. It is difficult to get the train in motion. The lady who ordered Succarina has got a strange donkey, and Macaroni has on the wrong saddle. Succarina is a favorite, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... indescribable confusion followed, some crying that the king was dead, while others called for a doctor, and some by name for Dortoman. I expected to see the doors closed and all within secured, that if the man had confederates they ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... poor dear Charles, I sympathize with you keenly all that long night, and in that indescribable waking in the morning, and that dreary day of travel which followed it! By the afternoon you were at home. O piercing change! it was but six or seven weeks before that you had passed the same objects the reverse way, with what different feelings, and ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... Wych Hazel remembered this clasp of her hand, and felt it as often as she remembered it. There was nothing sentimental; it was only a frank clasp, in which her hand for a moment was not her own; and though the clasp did not linger, for that second's continuance it gave her an indescribable impression, she could hardly have told of what. It was not merely the gentleness; she could not separate from that the notion of possession, and of both as being in the mind, to which the hand was an index. But such a thought passes as it comes. Something else in ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... old Crowfoot with two strides stood before the constable, and waving him aside with a gesture of indescribable dignity, took his son in his arms and kissed him on either cheek. Then, stepping back, he addressed him in a voice grave, solemn, and vibrant with emotion. Jerry interpreted ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... united, tumultuous became the joy of the high-souled gods. Then all the gods, the Siddhas, and the great Rishis, uttered the word Jaya, adoring Maheshwara. The triple city then appeared immediately before that god of unbearable energy, that Deity of fierce and indescribable form, that warrior who was desirous of slaying the Asuras. The illustrious deity, that Lord of the universe, then drawing that celestial bow, sped that shaft which represented the might of the whole universe, at the triple city. Upon that foremost of shafts, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... acclimatised, but the fact remains that a very large proportion of us were down with a kind of dysentery, attended by vomiting and violent pains in the stomach. Then there are days when the winds blow from the desert—an indescribable experience. They bring moths and flies with them, and great clouds of sand; it is a genuine labour to breathe, and at noon and for two hours after the temperature in the sun runs up into the "hundred-and-sixties." ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... an indescribable tenderness of tone, "sympathy. I have explained to you how and why I sought you; you, however, have yet to tell me, Madame, why you ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... floe in sight being much to the eastward of our course. This we reached after considerable labour, in the hope of its leading to the northward, which it did for about one mile, and we then came to the same kind of loose ice as before. On the morning of the 9th July, we enjoyed the indescribable comfort of two or three hours' clear, dry weather, but had scarcely hung up our wet clothes, after halting at five A.M., when it again came on to rain; but, as everything was as wet as it could be, we left them ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All strive, some planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate ease with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... came to me she was a sweet, fragile girl of about twenty. There was a look of indescribable tenderness about her, and a faraway look in her eyes. She might have been a sentimentalist, but there was no room for dreaming in that fight. From the first Kate showed an appreciation of her calling and a spirit that was determined to go through to the end. I have ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... was to run to the belfries in order to sound the tocsin, but they found that the royalists had removed the clappers of the bells. Nothing daunted, they beat the bells all day with hammers and other implements, and so produced an indescribable noise which had a material influence on the nerves of the terrified Neapolitan troops. Being disarmed, the only other help which the inhabitants could render to their deliverers was the erection ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... rioters were able to give full vent to their beastly instincts. Demiovka, a suburb of Kiev, was invaded by a horde of rioters during the night. They first destroyed the saloons, filling themselves with alcohol, and then proceeded to lay fire to the Jewish houses. Under the cover of night indescribable horrors were perpetrated, numerous Jews were beaten to death or thrown into the flames, and many women were violated. A private investigation carried on subsequently brought out more than twenty cases of rape committed on Jewish girls and married women. Only two of the sufferers ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... scourge as tuberculosis. The editorial writer might equally well have used the heading 'Typhoid a National Reproach,' or perhaps even 'Typhoid a National Crime,' since it is an absolutely preventable disease. And as for the typhoid fly, that a creature born in indescribable filth and absolutely swarming with disease germs should practically be invited to multiply unchecked, even in great centers of population, is surely nothing ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... every moment, while the lake for long remained "one burnished sheet of living gold," and Truckee lay utterly out of sight in a hollow filled with lake and cobalt. Before long a carnival of color began which I can only describe as delirious, intoxicating, a hardly bearable joy, a tender anguish, an indescribable yearning, an unearthly music, rich in love and worship. It lasted considerably more than an hour, and though the road was growing very dark, and the train which was to take me thence was fast climbing the Sierras, I could not ride faster ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... have a free passage home in the five caravels which are now waiting to return to Spain. To such a pass have things come in the paradise of Espanola! But the rabble finds life pleasant enough in Xaragua, where they are busy with indescribable pleasures; and for the moment there is no great response to this invitation to be gone. Columbus therefore despatches his ships, with such rabble of colonists, gaol-birds, and mariners as have already had their fill both of ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... with the old woman—to see the apple-tree, and the window-plants, and be still. The shudder of the screw, the blasts of hot air from the engine and cook's galley, the ceaseless jangling, clanging, pumping noises, and all the indescribable smells which haunt a steam-ship, became more wearisome day by day. Even when the cage was hung outside, the, sea breeze seemed to mock him with its freshness. The rich blue of the waters gave him no pleasure, ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... spoke, he looked at her with burning eyes. He was astonished, almost terrified by his hardiness; and what he detected of its effect on her threw him into an indescribable ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... a sound, save the indescribable night voices of the jungle and the rippling of the black waters; yet the big Hollander's ears had heard something different, and as he spoke he swung his huge bulk out of the boat and up the bank by the vines that had served him in coming, disappearing from ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... with an indescribable sound, rather like the snarl of an infuriated beast than an expression of a reasoning creature. Dashing down the sand, he plunged into the Nile and swam with superhuman speed for the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... down here the day before Lady Nottingham and the rest of the party were to arrive, and they found plenty to occupy them. The house had not been used since Easter, and wore that indescribable look of uninhabitableness which results from a thorough house-cleaning. Everything, even in the irregular hall, looked angular and uncomfortable; chairs were set square to tables; tables were set at mathematically precise angles; blinds were ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Ibarra to obey. He exchanged the small silver trowel for a larger iron one, which made some of the people smile. He advanced quietly and descended the stairs. Elias looked at him with an indescribable expression. If you had seen him, you would have thought that all his life was concentrated in his eyes. The yellow man looked down into the abyss opening ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... accustomed to regard you from a distance, that I wonder at my own presumption when I touch, however lightly, on that theme. But to one who—I may say, who felt no common interest in my mother once—it may be something to hear, now that all is past, with what indescribable feelings of affection I have, in my obscurity, regarded him; with what pain and reluctance I have kept aloof from his encouragement, when a word of it would have made me rich; yet how I have felt it fit that I should hold my course, content to know him, and to be unknown. ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... the question, there was an indescribable look of painful emotion on her brow. It did not escape Gertrude's eye, and was not to her perfectly unintelligible. She had conceived an idea—why, she did not know—that these recent tidings of hers would not be altogether agreeable to ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... fire, and it gave her back a picture of the young man dressed in the hideous prison garb, with the wavy hair cut close; with the prison look, that indescribable look of degradation and despair, stamped on his ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... affected, to a little lady seated, or rather reclining on a low ottoman close by, something that caused her to start as if the gallant officer was not altogether unknown to her, but her memory would not at the moment serve her, yet a feeling of mistrust, a sort of almost indescribable sensation of disquietude came over her as she listened to the polite nothings that issued from his lips; but fearing to attract observation she quietly withdrew, and entering the upper end of the ball room summoned her chobdah and ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... minutes of inky blackness, of indescribable terror, of flying missiles armed with death, Cyclona lay unconscious. When she opened her eyes a calm light of the evenness of twilight had spread over the track of the cyclone, and her head lay pillowed on Hugh Walsingham's shoulder. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... mountains, ooooooo-ow-wow-wow! a long wailing crescendo beginning softly, like a sound in a dream, and swelling into a roar that waked the sleeping echoes and set them jumping like startled goats from crag to crag. Instantly the huskies answered, every clog breaking out into indescribable frenzied wailings, as a collie responds in agony to certain chords of music that stir all the old wolf nature sleeping within him. For five minutes the uproar was appalling; then it ceased abruptly and the huskies ran wildly here and there among the rocks. From ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... years ago. The soldiers of Hannibal doing massacre, the perishing mercenaries, supported my closest gaze, and left no curiosity unsatisfied. (Alas! could I but see it again, or remember clearly what was shown tome!) And over all lay a glory of sunshine, an indescribable brilliancy which puts light and warmth into my mind whenever I try to recall it. The delight of these phantasms was well worth the ten days' illness which paid for them. After this night they never returned; I hoped for their renewal, but in vain. When I spoke of the experience ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... that met us on going into the so-called hospital grounds was something indescribable. The land was perfectly level; no drainage whatever; covered with long, tangled grass; skirted by trees, brush, and shrubbery; a few little dog-tents not much larger than could have been made of an ordinary table-cloth thrown over a short rail, and under these lay huddled ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... death, or the preparation for death—every road and footpath crammed with it, every field trampled by it, every woodland shattered by it, every stream running thick with its pollution. The sour smell of marching men, the stale taint of unclean fires, the stench of beasts—the acrid, indescribable odor that hangs on the sweating flanks of armies seemed ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... question: How, in the name of all that is rational, can Illiterates control and operate a system of socialized Literacy? Who but Literates can keep such a program from disintegrating into complete and indescribable confusion? ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... was indescribable. This old tree plaza, about which the early city was built, is now in the centre of Chinatown, of the Italian district and of the "Barbary Coast," the "Tenderloin" of the Western metropolis. It is the chief slum district of the city. The tremor here ran up the Chinatown hill and shook ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the road and springing over the puddles, I thought to myself that it was small wonder such a wench was pestered in a common soldier's camp. For she had about her everything to allure the grosser class—a something—indescribable perhaps—but which even such a man as I had become unwillingly aware of. And I must have been very conscious of it, for it made me restless and vaguely ashamed that I should condescend so far as even to notice it. More than that, it annoyed me not a little that I should bestow any thought ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... ludicrousness of his predicament had the effect of turning the whole adventure into merriment among those who remained in the establishment; and availing ourselves of the clamorous mirth of the parties, we made our escape from the place with a feeling, on my part, of indescribable relief. ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... have her own way, would permit. Though the man was old, you could not call him aged. One-eyed and crippled, still, marking the muscular arm, the expansive chest, you would have scarcely called him broken or infirm. And hence there was a certain indescribable pathos in his whole appearance, as if Fate had branded, on face and form, characters in which might be read her agencies on career and mind,—plucked an eye from intelligence, shortened one limb for life's progress, yet left whim sparkling out ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... elasticity of youth had banished all depression from mind and body, and she sprang eagerly to the window that she might see the effects of the storm, expecting to witness its ravages on every side. Imagine her wonder and delight when, instead of widespread wreck and ruin, a scene of indescribable beauty met her eyes! The snow had draped all things in white. The trees that had seemed so gaunt and skeleton-like as they writhed and moaned in the gale were now clothed with a beauty surpassing that of their summer foliage, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the almost unbroken surges of music that come from the field outside, from the multitude beneath the almond blossom laden trees. Movement is without volition in the spirit stage; attraction that follows a hidden impulse, that seems indescribable at first, directs them. It is only as the process of consolidation in the City of Light individualizes, that the spirits become, as you would say, human. But it is a humanity of great beauty. Material particles invade or transfuse them, replacing the diaphanous phosphorescent spirit ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... them as then entered the house of God, looking for the last one to darken the door. The impatience and anxiety with which they waited, and the bliss they anticipated on the eventful day, is altogether indescribable. Those that have been so fortunate as to embark in such a noble enterprise know all its realities; and those who have not had this inestimable privilege will have to taste its sweets before they can tell to others its joys, its comforts, and its Heaven-born ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... after the first attack. The Rector through that dark time was untouched by the contagious dread which overpowered his parishioners, and his presence carried confidence and health. On the worst day, sultry, stifling, with no sun, an indescribable terror crept abroad, and Mr. Cobb, standing at his gate, was overcome by it. In five minutes he had heard of two deaths, and he began to feel what were called "premonitory symptoms." He carried a brandy flask in his pocket, brandy being then considered a remedy, and ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... was no artist. The sense had not been cultivated, but the feeling was born in her. So the British Museum was to her something quite beyond fairyland; a region of wonders, where past ages went by in procession; or better, stood still for her eyes to gaze upon them. The Tower was another place of indescribable fascination. How many visits they made to it I dare not say; Dolly never had enough; and her delight was so much of a feast to her father that he did not grudge the time nor mind what he would have called the dawdling. Indeed it was a sort of refuge to Mr. Copley, when business ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... different parts of the brain may have something to do with the character of the function, but this is a contested point. Education increases the mental efficiency, no doubt, but it is too late in the day to attribute everything to that. So that we are obliged to resort to that indescribable condition called quality, as the chief source and origin of the differences of mental ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the "Doric." It is now, like everything else, in a state of lamentable decay. The honeycombed eighteen pounder, which was the signal gun of former years, is choked with drifting sand, and the air of misery about the place is indescribable. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... his head like the quills of the porcupine; his forehead was somewhat narrow, but his features were neither plain nor coarse; there was, however, a startled, frightened look about them, and an otherwise painful and indescribable expression, which told too plainly that the ruling power of the intellect had been overthrown, and that the living machine could no longer be altogether held responsible for its acts. Such, in appearance, was Lawrence ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... theology of his priests, throws himself into the embrace of Mephistopheles. That is human nature. Exactly the same thing was done in the days of Paul, and exactly the same thing he himself did. There was the indescribable misery of the age, and there were the knowledge and theories of that overburdened century, and no answer, no reply to the questions addressed to heaven and eternity; and they went to the fountains of mysticism and secret ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... There is an indescribable feeling of solitude in all houses in the environs of Mexico, a vastness, a desolation, such as I never before experienced in the most lonely dwellings in other countries. It is not sad—the sky is too bright, and nature too smiling, and the air we inhale too pure for that. It is a sensation ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... wounded men, sometimes over a wounded arm or leg or head, sometimes over a whole man, sometimes stretched as netting in the windows. And no ten thousand dollars was ever better spent, for the flies occasioned indescribable suffering as well ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... the ideal picturesque accessories. It stands at the corner of two meeting roadways. It is set in an ideal pastoral frame—a frame of sleeping fields, of waving tree-tops, of an enchanting, indescribable snarl of bushes, vines, and wild flowers. In the adjoining fields, beneath the tree-boughs, ran the long, low line of the ancient manoir—now turned ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... The indescribable yet almost overwhelming pathos of the tones affected Dr. Grey much as the tremolo-stop in some organ-overture in a dimly-lighted cathedral; and, as the singer seemed to pour her whole aching heart and wearied soul into the concluding "Ah! ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... spoken when a light so vivid and dazzling that it seemed the whole lustre of the fiery element was concentrated therein broke around us, filling the whole atmosphere, and covering rock, tree and mountain with a glare indescribable. The mule of the peasant tumbled prostrate, while the horse I rode reared himself perpendicularly, and turning round dashed down the hill at headlong speed which for some time it was impossible to check. The lightning was followed ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... What he said, wild and wanton though it was, was beginning to fill me with a sense of the most extreme discomfort. His sentences, in some strange, indescribable way, seemed, as they came from his lips, to warp my limbs; to enwrap themselves about me; to confine me, tighter and tighter, within, as it were, swaddling clothes; to make me more and more helpless. I was already conscious that whatever mad freak he chose to set me on, I should have no option ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... up from his seat and came round to her side of the table. He had a vague intention of imprisoning her hand, and perhaps her waist, but some indescribable quality held him off. It was difficult to suppose she did not half guess what was in his mind, and yet, without showing the smallest consciousness or shyness, she faced him with a look so boyishly frank and open it utterly ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not. She was indescribable. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the girl in the photograph, older, more beautiful—the same soft, sweet contour of face, the same dark eyes that had looked at him in MacGregor's office, filled with an indescribable sadness now, instead of the laughing joy of girlhood. In another moment he would have responded to her hesitation, to the pathetic tremble of her lips, but before words could form themselves she had turned and was gone. And yet at the ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... the following confession of faith, as the present belief of the philosophical Hindoos, concerning the nature of God, viz.:—"God is invisible, independent, ever-living, glorious, uncorrupt, all-wise, the ever-blessed, the almighty; his perfections are indescribable and past finding out; he rules over all, supports all, destroys all, and remains after the destruction of all; there is none like him; he is silence; he is free from passion, from birth, &c., and from increase and decrease, from fatigue, the need of refreshment, &c. He possesses the ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... half-past six before Trix, alone, walked up the drive. Newhaven, a solitary figure, paced up and down the terrace fronting the drive. Trix came on, her head thrown back and a steady smile on her lips. She saw Newhaven; he stood looking at her for a moment with what she afterward described as an indescribable smile on his face, but not, as Dora understood from her, by any means a pleasant one. Yet, if not pleasant, there is not the least doubt in the world that it was highly significant, for she cried out nervously: "Why are you looking at me like that? ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... suffuse her whole face with waves of exquisite color. Her delicate head bore a weight, almost too great, of fine, blue-black hair, just now hanging in a heavy plait to her knees. Her eyes, large and velvety as Ivan's own, were, however, of a shade indescribable, chameleon-like: one day varying between beryl and aqua-marine, anon of a light hazel, and finally, in moments of excitement, grief, or joy, of a deep, baffling black. Hitherto, Ivan had been undecided about their color; but to-night, as he saw them run ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... into a trot. It pecked badly, and he shot over its bowed head and landed in a mud-hole. Scrambling to his feet he noticed for the first time the gaunt ribs, heaving flanks and swollen legs of his steed. He swore heartily, seized the bridle and dragged the horse forward. The road was indescribable. Mud, slush and icy water took him to the knee at every step; but he plugged manfully forward, dragging the protesting horse after him. So for an hour, across the barren rise of land to the southward, after which he remounted ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... should have written The Ancient Mariner with Coleridge—"and perhaps the most beautiful passage in the poem," adds one critic after another. It is no more than a good likeness, and has nothing whatever of the indescribable Coleridge quality. ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... height and solidly built, but he was not tall. His face had often been described as a "perfect blank." No one saw anything of what lay within by merely looking into his eyes, and yet there was a certain indescribable something that appealed to one from those eyes. An elderly German lady once remarked to his mother: "Ihr Sohn hat so etwas gutes ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... a match and glanced at their companion. For some indescribable reason he shared Brett's views concerning this gentleman, and immediately started a conversation of general significance. They soon discovered that they had several mutual acquaintances, and in this way they passed the dreary journey to Paris ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... kissed his cheek. Thus a champion of liberty from the Old World and one from the New were linked in this little act of helpfulness. When he was an old man, Whitman still treasured the reminiscence as one of indescribable preciousness. ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... notes, the second a fifth higher than the first, with a "grace-note," very low indeed, before each one. The other beginning was also two notes, the second at least a fifth lower than the first, with an indescribable jerk between, and uttered so softly that if I had been a little further away I could not have heard it. ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... might never behold him more. I then cast my eyes towards the hulk, as the horizontal rays of the sunset glanced on her polluted sides, where, from the bend upwards, filth of every description had been permitted to accumulate for years; and the feeling of disgust which the sight occasioned was indescribable. The multitude on her Spar-deck and Fore-castle were in motion, and in the act of descending for the night; presenting the same appearance that met my sight when, nearly five months before, I had, at the same hour, approached her as ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... for studying pigs were good. As the smallest and swiftest of the flock, his tail tightly curled, and indescribable jauntiness in his whole demeanor, came bounding to the river's brink, followed by his fellows, driving, pushing, snuffing, winking, and gobbling, and lastly by a small boy in a large coat, with a long switch, Jan was witness ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wild cherry, stood upon the brink of the bald summit of a high mountain. Gray, timeworn rocks lay piled loosely about, or overtoppled the just visible byways of the red fox. The trees had a half-scared look, and that indescribable wildness which lurks about the tops of all remote mountains possessed the place. Standing there, I looked down upon the back of the red-tailed hawk as he flew out over the earth beneath me. Following him, my eye also took in farms ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... at Tuskegee before an indescribable force began to have its influence upon me. Whatever this power may be called, it was both refining and energizing. People who know the school and have been there and know of its influence, call this force "the Tuskegee spirit." This spirit, ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... problem of the morning came to him. These sounds—he realized now how he loved them. Verily they were a part of his life. Mid them he had been bred; of them as of food he had grown. That whistle, thin and unmusical; that elusive, indescribable call of prairie male; all these homely sounds that meant so much to ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Abraham; He submitted His claims to the ecclesiastical authorities of the nation, and, when they rejected them, He directed against the religious parties the thunderbolts of His invective. The tears and words of indescribable tenderness which He poured out upon the city where He was about to be martyred proved that the patriotism of Isaiah and Jeremiah still burned in His heart; and He charged His apostles, when sending them forth to evangelize the world, ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none the less—-and with the flexible personality of houses—taking on the print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... particularly handsome, since, their fineness notwithstanding, his features lacked regularity; the cheekbones were too high and the chin was too small, small faults redeemed to some extent by the steady and cheerful grey eyes. For the rest, he was broad-shouldered and well-set-up, sealed with the indescribable stamp of the English gentleman. Such was the appearance of ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... this speech was indescribable. The applause with which he was frequently interrupted, and which greeted him as he took his seat, was such as I have never heard in a deliberative assembly. And not the least striking feature of this display of enthusiasm was that it mainly proceeded from the extreme Liberal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... us, Li Ho?" The inscrutable, oriental eyes looked for a moment into the frank eyes of the white man and then passed by them to the open door—to the dawn just turning gold above the sea. The uninjured hand rose and fell in an indescribable gesture. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... finish the victory. The heads of columns again advanced, and the firing became tremendous on both sides. The French batteries poured an absolute shower of balls upon us, and we were beginning to lose men, when a strange and indescribable sound suddenly caught every ear. Such was the universal sense of something more singular, and even more formidable, than the work of war, that the fire on our side rapidly subsided, and every eye was turned to look for the cause. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... redoubt ('redoubt of Scheidingen') on Ferdinand's right wing, did nothing, or next to nothing, for behoof of his Broglio. Who, hour after hour, finds himself ever worse bested;—those Granby people proving 'indescribable' once more [their Wutgenau also with his Hanoverians NOT being absent, as they rather were last night];—and about 10 in the morning gives up the bad job; and sets about retiring. If retiring be now permissible; which it is not altogether. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Not a flower, no gilding, but in a frame of black was contained a portrait of a man, before which the lady now knelt down, with dry eyes, but a sad heart. She fixed on this picture a long look of indescribable love. It represented a young man about twenty-eight, lying half naked on a bed; from his wounded breast the blood still flowed, his right hand hung mutilated, and yet it still held a broken sword. His eyes were closed as though he were about to die, paleness and suffering gave to his face ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... implies a rooted ethical defect in her nature. In the romance of Sir T. Mallory the preference she gives to Lancelot would have been signally just, had she been free to choose. For Lancelot is of an indescribable grandeur; but the limit of Arthur's character is thus shown in certain words that he uses, and that Lancelot never could have spoken. "Much more I am sorrier for my good knight's loss than for the loss of my queen; for queens might I have enough, but, such a fellowship ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... small, was neatly made; that his hands were very different in texture and colour from those of common seamen; that his features in general, although sharp, were regular; and that there was an air of superiority even in the obsequious manner of the little personage, and an indescribable something about his whole appearance which almost impressed you with awe. Amine's dark eyes were for a moment fixed upon the visitor, and she felt a chill at her heart for which she could not account, as she requested that ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... light, a visionary enchantment, fell over this one spot of ground, and divided it by some magic circle from every other place in the world. The crude iron railing, the bare gravel, the ugly spouting fountain which was stripped of every leaf or blade of grass—these things appeared to her through an indescribable glamour, as if they stood there as the visible gateway to some invisible garden of dreams. Whenever she looked at this ordinary spot of earth a breathless realization of the wonder and delight of life rushed over her. She knew nothing of the mental processes by which these external objects were ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure, indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here and there over all these,—remnants broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... dread, the hatred, the childish antipathy, real or affected, but always ridiculous, which is felt in England, not only among gypsies, but even by many gentlemen scholars, to having the Romany language published is indescribable. Vambery was not more averse to show a lead pencil among Tartars than I am to take notes of words among strange English gypsies. I might have spared myself any annoyance from such a source among the Russian ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... by, and Siegfried longed to see the place of his childhood again. So he turned homewards and reached Xanten after many adventures. The joy of his noble parents at seeing their valiant son again was indescribable. ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... terrible awaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read to her this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of the book, that all the things which make it just what it is to me—the indescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism—are utterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid and Psyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by the unnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... then looking at her with the same softened and eloquent expression, which had given her so much anxiety on a former occasion. The impression produced upon her was exactly what it had been then—indescribable—inexplicable to herself. ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... another word, but with an air of indescribable dignity adjusted the retort, took out a cork—and—but words fail me to describe the catastrophe! Before Dr. Mumbudget could rush forward to prevent it, the gas had come in contact with the air, become inflamed instantly, and sent Dr. Skihi whirling above ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... elegantly; and last, but not least, you have an assured position. The trouble is so apt to be, that those who attempt anything of the sort are not known. All the talent in the world will not be able to constitute a salon unless one possesses, and is intimate with others who possess, that indescribable something which every one understands, but which it is difficult to put into words. Yes, Virginia, you have a great opportunity before you, if only you choose to take ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... whom Sandy insisted had come to Edinburgh to marry me, was an intentional female, with much hair, much rouge, and a pallor heightened by rice-powder, which gave her a very floury and unclean appearance. Her eyes were an indescribable color, resembling the pulp of a grape, and near-set, a thing which I have never been able to abide in man, woman, or child. Her nose was long and peaked, and her mouth dropped at the corners. But it was the strange set of her whole figure ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... as any two mammals of the same species are like each other. Each audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture always. I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture in the convent,—that he sometimes thought the living tenants were ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... beholders with her indescribable grace, to which there was added something of mystery, and not by any classic beauty or dignity. Vivacity, gentleness, and amiability are the qualities which all Lucretia's contemporaries discovered in her.[166] This animated and delicate face, with large blue eyes, and surrounded ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... spur, Quelling uprisings promptly. Some small stir In Parthia next engaged him, until maimed, As I have said; and cynic Time proclaimed His noble spirit broken. What a waste Of such a Roman!—one in youth-time graced With indescribable charm, so I have heard, Yea, magnetism impossible to word When faltering as I saw him. What a fame, O Son of Saturn, had adorned his name, Might the Three so have urged Thee!—Hour by hour His own disorders hampered Panthera's power To brood upon the fate of those ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... was very pale, and had exquisitely chiselled features, and the ones I now looked upon were of the same cast. The height was also similar, and an indescribable atmosphere of refinement, purity, and quiet dignity, for which she had been remarkable; all this was present with this materialisation. More than this I cannot say, for no materialisation I have ever seen could be truthfully considered identical ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... produced an infant. She says it's like Roger, but Roger hopes not. He says it's like nothing on earth. He came to see me off from Euston yesterday and when I asked him to describe it to me, he said he couldn't ... it was indescribable. It looks raw, he says. It must be frightfully comic ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... general sort, the character of those primitive sprouts and upshoots of the Gothic Drama in England. Their rudeness of construction, their ingrained coarseness of style, their puerility, their obscenity, and indecency, according to our standard, are indescribable. Their quality in these respects could only be shown by specimens, and these I have not room to produce, nor would it be right or decent to ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... distinguishable, or are distinguished only by peculiarities of the most glaring kind. But the dialogue is resplendent with wit and eloquence, which indeed are so abundant that the fool comes in for an ample share, and yet preserves a certain colloquial air, a certain indescribable ease of which Wycherley had given no example, and which Sheridan in vain attempted to imitate. The author, divided between pride and shame, pride at having written a good play, and shame at having done an ungentlemanlike ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... any adequate conception. Often he caught the glint of great, rare butterflies hovering in the early sunlight which filtered through the interlaced fronds and branches. Often when the boat hugged the bank he saw indescribable buds and blossoms, and multicolored orchids clinging to the drooping bejucos which festooned the enormous trees. As the afternoon waned and the sun hung low, the magic stillness of the solitude began to cast its spell about him, and he could imagine ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... bituminous reek that outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and left, "huge blackened grain- elevators, flame-crowned furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots, littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses." [Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 59.] Nothing but these in a place whose very smoke was a sign of what had made it possible ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... on. It was not more than a hundred yards to where the grass grew on firm ground. Racey and his horse reached solid earth without incident. Then—a scramble, a scraping, and a clattering followed in a breath by the indescribable sound of a ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... wasn't a gentleman at all; he was one of those mean whites down South.' As she said this, the scornful emphasis on mean whites was something quite indescribable. Truly, the condition of poor whites at the South must be pitiable indeed, to be regarded with such utter contempt ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fell within him. The mad joy that took hold of him is indescribable. It was undefiled human joy that filled him to the brim, when from the place whence he expected only death and hatred there came familiar human words. Forgetting the deathly peril, he sprang to his knees, threw ...
— The Shield • Various
... from Paestum, there came a storm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted—such masses of ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a commingling of all these—a revelation of the wrath of colour! The waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came thundering on ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... church presents the ideal picturesque accessories. It stands at the corner of two meeting roadways. It is set in an ideal pastoral frame—a frame of sleeping fields, of waving tree-tops, of an enchanting, indescribable snarl of bushes, vines, and wild flowers. In the adjoining fields, beneath the tree-boughs, ran the long, low line of the ancient manoir—now turned into ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... An indescribable loathing entered into the imagination of the Bacchante even as she lay upon the grass; yet she rose with precipitation and filled a chalice to the brim with Falernian. Tiberius grasped it with an eager hand, and his mouth pressed the lip of the cup as if to drain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... spirits' need, and he insisted that this, and this alone, was his actual mission. From the first the popular enthusiasm had had to ignore many contradictions of its cherished notions. But his power and the indescribable force of his personality had served hitherto to hold them to a hope that he would soon discard the perplexing role which he had chosen for the time to assume, and take up avowedly the proper work of the Messiah. This last refusal to accept what seemed to them to be his evident duty caused a ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... to the Banks was made in response to the same kind of impulse as that which drives the nomad out of his winter quarters in the springtime or brings the wild geese back to their summer feeding grounds. To one who really loves the ocean, the return to it after a period of exile on the land, is an indescribable satisfaction. There was at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the shore into the practically limitless ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... him, and stood in the middle of the room with a look of expectation. His face, which was rugged, with a glow of weather-beaten health upon it, had a brightness, a strength, an eagerness, a sensibility, which were indescribable. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... succession of fantastic-looking dishes of food, and the revellers, with their flushed faces and feverish eyes and loud laughter. Above all the tumult was the voice of the orchestra, calling, calling, like the storm wind upon the mountains; the music was wild and chaotic, and produced an indescribable sense of pain and confusion. When one realized that this same thing was going on in thousands of places in this district it seemed that here was a flood of dissipation that out-rivalled even that ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... "I've been in a dream, and this is the only evening we'll ever have together." The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain ached with indescribable weariness, and he could think of nothing to say or to do that should arrest the mad flight ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... a small lake —with native companions (ARDEAANTIGONE) strutting round, and swarms of ducks playing on its still water, backed by an open forest, in which the noble palm tree was conspicuous—suddenly burst upon our view, were so great as to be quite indescribable. I joyfully returned to the camp, to bring forward my party; which was not, however, performed without considerable trouble. We had to follow the Dawson down to where the creek joined it; for the scrub was impassable ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... Bedford Square—each insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the indescribable ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... redeeming feature. Every morning it is crowded and presents a brilliant and lively spectacle. All the trade is in the hands of women, and the Tehuantepec women have the reputation of being the handsomest in the world. They are large, finely-built, and in their movements exhibit an indescribable freedom and grace. Their natural attractions are set off by a characteristic and becoming costume. The huipilili is a little sleeveless waist, loose at the neck and arms, and so short that it rarely reaches to ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... always beautiful. But there is something in it now that we have never before observed. The long dark lashes half hide and half reveal a tenderer light than has hitherto stolen into those deep brown eyes. The general expression of the girl's face is not of laughter nor yet of tears, but of that indescribable something that lies between these two, when, after a world of sadness, the heart is glad—the sunshine of ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... the fore-hold, where a quantity of coal was stored, and blew into the air thousands of fragments of wood. Immediately afterwards people came shrieking up the companion ways, many, of them cut, bruised, and blackened. The scene was indescribable. A great deal of confusion was caused by the separation of children from parents and husbands from wives. One poor woman begged me to go and find her baby, which was torn from her arms. The Captain, on hearing the explosion ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... of an unknown continent. The great subject in his mind at the moment was starch. Somebody—Father Dan regretted that he was not able to name him—had discovered the means of manufacturing a precious liquid, which would impart various colours, and indescribable powers of standing alone, to any texture of linen, ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... Fanny were returning, there were civilities, and the young men were receding. By a great effort she controlled herself to face the enquiring eyes of her friends. All that afternoon she lived the life of a heroine under the indescribable outrage of that name, chatting, observing, with "Snooks" gnawing at her heart. From the moment that it first rang upon her ears, the dream of her happiness was prostrate in the dust. All the refinement she had figured was ruined and defaced ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... content. Your Worship can give out that the divining spirit has declared: 'that the deceased, Feng Yan, and Hseh P'an had been enemies in a former life, that having now met in the narrow road, their destinies were consummated; that Hseh P'an has, by this time, contracted some indescribable disease and perished from the effects of the persecution of the spirit of Feng.' That as the calamity had originated entirely from the action of the kidnapper, exclusive of dealing with the kidnapper according ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... with the rain pouring in torrents. I had tried to buy a pair of shoes before going to sleep, but they brought me a pair for a boy of twelve and assured me that there were no others in the town, and those I had come with were in tatters which were hardly to be kept on my feet. The mud was indescribable,—the entire country flooded, and all the bridges across a river we must pass carried away, except one over a narrow gorge where the rocks approached so closely that a couple of logs reached from side to side, and over these the horses must be led. To say that I was at ease on this trip ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... in the inner doorway. It was dark here, to—and yet, how bizarre, a star seemed to twinkle through the very roof of the room itself! The odour was pungent now. There was a long-drawn sigh—then a low, indescribable sound of movement. SOMEBODY, APART FROM OLD LUDDY, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... "Sucuruju." Few people can comprehend the feeling that creeps into one's heart when this word is pronounced, under such circumstances, in the far-off forest, in the middle of the night. The word means boa-constrictor, but it meant a lot more at this moment. An indescribable feeling of awe seized me. I knew now that I was to face the awful master of the swamps, the great silent monster of the river, of which so much had been said, and which so few ever ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... that. She might sweep all that overboard, see it go by whole pieces (the best pieces) at a time, and still be in love with the dear, incomprehensible, indescribable you. That," said Edie, triumphant in her wisdom, "is ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... stare, which must always repel a man of refined or proper feeling. The handsomer of the two was Nancy; and Roland imagined that he perceived behind the forwardness of her manner a kind of reckless despair; that indescribable sort of vivacity which arises when hope, and honour, and everything that is dear are dead, and only what is worse remains to live for. This girl had evidently at some time moved in a society different far from this; for her speech was somewhat refined, and her bearing that ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... regards in his mind two as brought together to each other without commingling, making the theory of them as a matter of fact, but not by a lying imagination and vain combinations of the mind; but in nowise separating them, since now the division into two has been destroyed on account of the indescribable and incomprehensible union; saying with the holy Athanasius, for there is now flesh and again the flesh of God the Word, now flesh animated and intelligent, and again the flesh of the animated and intelligent God the Word; but should under ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... spite of her apprehension lest her Bostonian mother might not strictly appreciate this Wyoming barn-warming and the cosmopolitan society attendant thereupon. She wanted them all to feel as six weeks ago she had felt that indescribable first thrill at the sight of chaps and lariats and fully-equipped cowboys. She wanted them all to realize that here in Mr. Benjamin Jarvis' new barn was a true democracy of comradeship—a comradeship freed from the ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... made no answer, and his look reminded Donal of that he wore when he came to his chamber. A moment, and he rose and began to pace the room. An indescribable suggestion of an invisible yet luminous cloud hovered about his forehead and eyes—which latter, if not fixed on very vacancy, seemed to have got somewhere near it. At the fourth or fifth turn he opened the door by which ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... thorough Eskimo in dress and in cast of feature, there was a refinement, a gravity, a kindliness, and a something quite indescribable about this man, which marked him out as an exceptional character among his fellows. As we have said elsewhere, he was not unusually large, though he was unusually strong, for his power lay rather in a well-knit and splendidly proportioned than a bulky frame. Ujarak was taller and broader, yet did ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the females, as the Indian runner glided by her, unexpectedly, and led the way along the military road in her front. Though this sudden and startling movement of the Indian produced no sound from the other, in the surprise her veil also was allowed to open its folds, and betrayed an indescribable look of pity, admiration, and horror, as her dark eye followed the easy motions of the savage. The tresses of this lady were shining and black, like the plumage of the raven. Her complexion was not ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his withdrawal from the platform. The Authors' Readings when they had won their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... culinary utensils. In such multitudes do they come that the streets and squares of the city are encumbered with their swarms, and incarnadined with their red cloaks. The disorder and confusion are indescribable. Bands of the holy men traverse the streets chanting prayers, or uttering wild cries. They meet, they jostle, they quarrel, they fight; bloody noses, black eyes, and broken heads are freely given and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... hands together and exclaimed, "'Where is she? Where is she?' was what he said. Again and again he repeated these words in a tone of indescribable anguish, and I was almost thankful when his mind wandered again, and I could leave his dreadful question unanswered. Alice, my child, I am so weak, and you are so strong in your faith, in your hope, in your boundless charity, that I must give way before you, and for once ask you ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... times disappeared under the swirling surface. I had no choice. I slipped from the saddle and, holding this by my left hand, swam with my right beside my mount, encouraging him with my shouts. For a time he floated with lips apart and his teeth set firm. In his widely opened eyes was indescribable fear. As soon as I was out of the saddle, he had at once risen in the water and swam more calmly and rapidly. At last under the hoofs of my exhausted animal I heard the stones. One after another my companions came up on the shore. The well-trained horses had brought all their burdens ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... with equal severity." He gives a sad account of the terrible condition of the negro soldiers and their officers who were captured at Fort Wagner, and says the hospital at this place was "a lazar-house of indescribable misery." ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... his life was apart from the lives of other men, he did not therefore live alone. Was he not still of more value than many sparrows? And Kirsty's love for him had in it no shadow of despair. Her pain at such times was but the indescribable love-lack of mothers when their sons are far away, and they do not know what they are doing, what they are thinking; or when their daughters seem to have departed from them or ever the silver cord be ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... child—the music of my heart is silenced! Yet there is nothing I would not do to regain the ravishment of the past—when the sight of the sunset across the hills, or the moon's silver transfiguration of the sea filled me with deep and indescribable ecstasy—when the thought of Love, like a full chord struck from a magic harp, set my pulses throbbing with delirious delight—fancies thick as leaves in summer crowded my brain—Earth was a round charm hung on the breast of a smiling Divinity—men ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... eyes leaped indescribable terror as Kathleen's hand closed over hers. For an instant she stared wildly at the newspaper girl, then the stony reserve, with which she had bolstered herself, gave away, and tearing her hands free she covered ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent and the transient. Behind the uncharted riot there hides a power whose invisible energy is the real master of the field. The ocean can be lashed by the winds into indescribable fury, and the breakers may rise and fall in crushing weight and disaster; and yet behind and beneath all the wild phenomena there is a subtle, mystical force which is exerting its silent mastery even at the very height of the storm. We must discriminate ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... ennui, never attains complete satisfaction. The pleasure which it pursues is nothing but the removal of a dissatisfaction, and vanishes at once when the longing is stilled, to be replaced by fresh wants, that is, by new pains. In view of the indescribable misery in the world, to favor optimism is evidence not so much of folly and blindness as of a wanton disposition. The old saying is true: Non-existence is better than existence. The misery, however, is the just punishment for the original sin of the individual, which gave itself ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the supernal conjugal—who has written 'epics' and 'lyrics,' of which I must honestly say, as Emerson, I believe, once honestly said of some of the writings of Swedenborg: 'I read them with an unction and an afflatus quite indescribable.' They lift one to the empyrean like nothing else I know of outside the Bible. There is such a saintly purity; such a wondrous, rich, mellow joyousness; such bounding elasticity of spirit; such an evidently irresistible gush of song ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... or dagger!" echoed the excited voice of the morio, whose appearance had undergone a transformation. The indescribable vacancy with which he had listened to the minstrel was replaced by an ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... on cleanliness are in the highest degree superficial. We make a great fuss over a flea; hardly mention it in polite company; but we tolerate the dirty housefly on all our food. We eat high game which our cook's more natural taste calls muck. We are only just beginning to realise the indescribable filthiness of carious teeth, than which anything more unclean, a few diseases excepted, can scarcely be found in slums. Even in this great age of pseudo-scientific enlightenment, we do not have a carious tooth extracted ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Chicago for any response he made; though Armorer shouted with Shuey; and at every pause the whir of the machinery mocked the shouters. Indescribable moans and gurgles, with a continuous malignant hiss, floated up to them from the rebel steam below, as from a volcano considering eruption. "They'll be bound to need the elevator some time, if they don't need US, and that's one comfort!" ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... relieved to see the two aviators walking off unhurt. Meanwhile, I notice a regular game of football going on at a distance, and some carefully written names of bypaths—"Hyde Park Corner," "Piccadilly," "Queen Mary's Road," and the like. The animation, the life of the scene are indescribable. ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lead me away. Amroth, who was himself, I perceived, deeply moved, and stood with lips compressed, nodded in token of assent. We went quickly down the stairway, and took our way up the hill among the stones, in silence. The shapes of similar enclosures were to be seen everywhere, and the indescribable blankness and grimness of the scene struck a chill to ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... braced their feet and gave their entire attention to keeping from being flung bodily from the car. Forewarned for miles, no living creature crossed their path. The din and the dust, the hairbreadth escapes made the discomfort of the ride for the two women indescribable. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... diagrams, grotesque drawings, lettered inscriptions. Some were sketched rudely upon the plastering with colored chalk; others were designed upon paper, and pasted on the wall. In the centre of the room sat an indescribable human figure, with its face buried in its hands. It wore an anomalous garment, slashed with various colors, like a harlequin's coat. Upon one shoulder was sewed the semblance of a door cut out of blue cloth; on the other, a crescent cut out of green. Upon the head was set a tinsel crown, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... perceiving an object to be good, did not at once and actively pursue it; and with all this energy he joined a corresponding warmth and, so to speak, eagerness of affection, a keen appreciation of humour, in which he found a rest, and an indescribable frankness and simplicity of character, which, crowning his other qualities, made him, I think (and I strive to think impartially), the most interesting old ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... decorations that six strong men labored to support it; and those from Paris, Bordeaux, Rheims, Lille, etc. were not greatly inferior to it in elegance. The sun shone brightly, and with the grandeur of the banners and the pomp of the prelates in their rich sacerdotal robes formed a scene of indescribable splendor. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... relative, little paintings of the boy Browning, all attracted the eye in turn, and gave rise to a thousand musings. A quaint mirror, easy-chairs and sofas, and a hundred nothings that always add an indescribable charm, were all massed in this room. But the glory of all, and that which sanctified all, was seated in a low arm-chair near the door. A small table, strewn with writing-materials, books, and newspapers, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... been duly seconded, one Rogers, a publican, got up and said he had something to say. There was indescribable confusion, some crying, "Turn him out;" others "Pitch into 'em, Bill." Bill Rogers was well known as the funny man in Cowfold, a half-drunken buffoon, whose wit, such as it was, was retailed all over the place; a man who was ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... his right; while his left, closed in by the mountains, was at once supported, and rendered, for any movement in retreat, completely useless. The Allies came on with great courage, somewhere about eighty thousand men being in their line; and till two o'clock the battle raged with indescribable fury. But the odds were irresistable. Vandamme began, in the presence of the victor, a retrogressive movement, which ought to have been accomplished under shadow of the darkness. It was made to no purpose. To the horror and amazement of the French, to the surprise and ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... Obedianus punished the heathen that had done it, and I supported her as she fell dying and took her curly head on my knees and spoke her name; she opened her eyes once more, and spoke mine softly and with indescribable tenderness. I had never thought that wild Miriam could speak so sweetly, I was overcome with terrible grief, and kissed her eyes and her lips. She looked at me once more with a long, wide-open, blissful gaze, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... then it seemed as though all hell had broken loose upon the world. The wall of blackness became a wall of flame, in which strange and ardent shapes appeared ascending and descending; the thunder bellowed till the mountains rocked, and in one last blaze, awful and indescribable, the skies melted into a deluge of fire. In the flare of it Owen thought that he saw the figures of men falling this way and that, then he staggered against the cross for support ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... Hable Creme Chantilly sounds French, but the cheese is Swedish and actually lives up to the blurb in the imported package: "The overall characteristic is indescribable and delightful freshness." ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... the scenery allowed the pious Philippe to discern his father's body dimly, as something white in the midst of the darkness. The young man moistened a cloth in the liquid and then, deep in prayer, he faithfully anointed the revered head. The silence was intense. Then he heard indescribable rustlings, but he attributed them to the wind among the tree-tops. When he had bathed the right arm he felt himself rudely seized at the back of the neck by an arm, young and vigorous—the arm of his father! He gave a piercing cry, and dropped the phial, which fell on the floor ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... sort of thing was very sweet to him, and the girl's dull personality had bloomed like some pale, delicate flower. He saw unfathomed depths in her grey eyes, shining now, with the indescribable light that comes from within. She had been negative and colourless, but now she was a lovely mystery—a half-blown windflower on some brown, bare hillside, where Life, in all its fulness, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... in very shyly, kept my eyes sternly from Nicolete's white bed, though, as I couldn't shut my ears, the sound of her breathing came to me with indescribable sweetness. After I had lain among the sheets some five or ten minutes, I was suddenly startled by a little ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable blending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's "blackguards," achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritual achievement—at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph—that makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... listened. All around was the tender, indescribable Devonshire night; it hung about him with warm scented breath; he felt its heart beat in the innumerable pulses of the stars. Behind the blue transparent darkness the music throbbed like a dawn; it swayed and sank, piano, pianissimo, and ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... rather go with the beautiful stranger, into the wild forest itself, than return to the cottage, where no one did as she wished, and from which the beautiful knight would himself depart sooner or later. Then, throwing her arms round Huldbrand, she sang with indescribable grace:— ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... still, save for those indescribable sounds which ever accompany the close of a summer's evening, those sounds which reveal to us that the great pulse of life is still strong,—strong even at that hour of repose,—the sleepy half-notes of the woodland bird, the "droning flight" of the ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker
... a strange sight,—the picturesque group, and the contrast between the quiet manners of the true Malay and the grotesque fun of the half-negro. The latter made his tambourine do duty as a drum, rattled the bits of brass so as to produce an indescribable effect, nodded and grinned in wild excitement, and drank beer while his comrade took water. The dancing was uninteresting enough. The Dutchmen danced badly, and said not a word, but plodded on so as to get all the dancing they could for their money. I ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... management of this inner lock as of the outer; but at length it did open; and not vain, as hitherto, was her search; her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable. Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript, for half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters; and while she acknowledged with awful sensations this ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... thank you," she said, looking up at me frankly and affectionately. "I wish I could tell you how much I appreciate your goodness to me, and all your disinterestedness. I wish I deserved it!" She clasped my hands warmly as she spoke, then dropped them; and instantly I became conscious of an indescribable sense of relief; and prepared to depart at once; but she stopped me again with a word as ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Italy, where colour is so important, could there be a yellow like the yellow paint on the ancient shingled house-front at Kidd's Pines. I suppose the white window-facings and doorway and pillars, and the green blinds, and the frame of cathedral elms, partly account for the indescribable sweetness of that yellow. I can't liken it to anything but primroses in a forest, seen in the level, secret ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... him, which Albert took for plans of nativity; and various models of machinery, in which Dr. Rochecliffe was an adept. There were also tools of various kinds, masks, cloaks, and a dark lantern, and a number of other indescribable trinkets belonging to the trade of a daring plotter in dangerous times. Last, there was a casket with gold and silver coin of different countries, which was left carelessly open, as if it were the least of Dr. Rochecliffe's concern, although his habits in ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... trees there had grown upon our ears a distant sound. Tonnison bent forward, listening. I could hear it more plainly now; it was continuous and harsh—a sort of droning roar, seeming to come from far away. I experienced a queer, indescribable, little feeling of nervousness. What sort of place was it into which we had got? I looked at my companion, to see what he thought of the matter; and noted that there was only puzzlement in his face; and then, as I watched his features, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... Italian poets; musings in a golden granary full to the brim with good things.... We venture to say that no acute and penetrating critic surpasses Mr. Howells in true insight, in polished irony, in effective and yet graceful treatment of his theme, in that light and indescribable touch that lifts you over a whole sea of froth and foam, and fixes your eye, not on the froth and foam, but on the solid objects, the true heart and soul of ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... occupied by a coke brazier, emitting large quantities of carbon monoxide, and an untidy gentleman in khaki, with a blue-and-white device upon his shoulder-straps, who is humped over a small black instrument, luxuriating in a "frowst" most indescribable. He is reading a back number of a rural Scottish newspaper which you never heard of. Occasionally, in response to a faint buzz, he takes up his transmitter and indulges in an unintelligible altercation with a person unseen. You need feel no surprise ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... black, curly hair. The face was of a beautiful, clear oval, with that warm brunette tint in which the Italian painters delight. The black eyebrows were strongly and clearly defined, and there was in the face an indescribable expression of childish innocence and shyness, mingled with a kind of confiding frankness, that gave the picture the charm which sometimes fixes itself in faces for which we involuntarily make a history. She was represented as simply ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... soon up again, walking, walking, looking at her watch. At last she left the shade, crossed the lawn, ascended the terraces, between orange and lemon-trees with their undergrowth of jessamine, and entered the belvedere, having by this progress created a panic indescribable in ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... say?" he retorted. "Had he been left alone, he would perhaps have lingered in indescribable agony until sunset, when the poison in his system would have done its work, and he would have died. On the other hand, had I employed my utmost skill, and been free to give my undivided attention to him for, say, a month, I might, perhaps, have been so far successful as to have prolonged ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... other hours like that one, indescribable hours, so sweet they stung, and in which, keeping pace with his love, was the nobler stride of a spirit that more every day lightened ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... in uniform and unmistakable detectives stood about the various entries, and little knots of people, evil-looking and unclean for the most part, lurked in the background or sat on benches and diffused through the stale, musty air that distinctive but indescribable odour that clings to police vans and prison reception rooms; an odour that, in the present case, was pleasantly mingled with the suggestive aroma of disinfectants. Through the unsavoury throng we hurried, and up a staircase to a landing ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... said the fool. "Harry of Shirley! Harry of Shirley! Methinks I could help you to the man, if so be as you will deem him worth the finding," he added, suddenly turning upside down, and looking at them standing on the palms of his hands, with an indescribable leer of drollery, which in a moment dashed all the hopes with which they had turned to him. "Should you know this nunks of yours?" ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looks very old,—so old, indeed, that the front bulges forth, as if the timber framework were a little weary, at last, of standing erect so long; but the state of repair is so perfect, and there is such an indescribable aspect of continuous vitality within the system of this aged house, that you feel confident that there may be safe shelter yet, and perhaps for centuries to come, under its time-honored roof. And on a bench, sluggishly enjoying the sunshine, and looking into the street of Warwick as from a life ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... deputies, had almost all the first men in the Assembly in their favour? I entreated them therefore to wait patiently; as well as upon another consideration, which was, that by an imprudent conduct they might not only ruin their own cause in France, but bring indescribable misery upon their ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... before, it was nearly a minute before he made answer, or took any notice of my suggestion. "By-and-by," said he at length—"time enough—home by-and-by." I had expected a similar reply, but there was something in the tone of these words which filled me with an indescribable feeling of dread. I again looked at the speaker attentively. His lips were perfectly livid, and his knees shook so violently together that he seemed scarcely able to stand. "For God's sake, Augustus," I screamed, now heartily ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dead by the servant who came to bring a lamp to the study, towards evening, when it grew dark. As soon as the alarm was given a scene of indescribable confusion followed, which lasted until the prefect of police arrived, accompanied by a party of police officials. The handkerchief was examined and identified. Thereupon, in accordance with the Roman practice of that day, the prefect had announced his determination of taking ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... that exquisite order which is only to be observed in spots devoted to similar purposes, here and at Oxford. The effect of an unbroken plot of turf of this kind and quality, and in a situation like this, is perfectly unique, and perhaps indescribable. It is supposed to be, and in fact is, for all purposes of preservation and beauty, sacred from the foot of man or beast; and the feeling arising from this circumstance, added to the exquisite natural adaptation of the object itself to the purposes of rest and relief ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... tried to think himself explaining his scheme to the Archdeacon. 'The place is in frightful disorder, filled with indescribable vice and misery, but there is a shadow of hope that a few may be worked on if something like a mission can be organized. Circumstances seemed to mark me out as the person to be at the cost of setting it on foot, my father's connection with the parish ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... madly for the storm to keep off, and now as her fleet steps brought her nearer the rendezvous at the end of the avenue, her heart misgave her, and an indescribable feeling of awe, that had something of a dread presentiment in it, filled her very soul. She pressed the cherished gift for her lover close against her heaving breast, and when she reached the shady nook where they were accustomed to meet, her breath was coming in wild gasps, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... happened for a little bit. Love scenes, if genuine, are indescribable; for to those who have enacted them, the most elaborate description seems tame, and to those who have not, the simplest picture seems overdone. So romancers had better let imagination paint for them that which is above all art, and leave their lovers to themselves during the ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... passed on his way southwards. On his right hand a broad, lightly diversified expanse of vineyard, of towns and towers innumerable, rolled its burden of fat things down the slope of the Gironde towards the more perfect level beyond. In the heady afternoon an indescribable softness laid hold on him, from the objects, the atmosphere, the lazy business, of the scene around. And was that the quarter whence the dry daylight, the intellectual iron, the chalybeate influence, was to come?—those coquettish, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... unfrequent among courtiers to this day. But this showy tradition goes further still. The Bostan al Irem (Garden of Paradise) is believed still to exist in the deserts of Aden; though geographers differ on its position. It still retains its domes and bowers—both of indescribable beauty; its crystal fountains, and its walks strewed with pearls for sand. It is true, that no living man can absolutely aver that he has seen this place of wonders; but that is a mere result of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... embroidered nightshirt, and his bare feet projected from his trousers. His head was horribly injured, and the whole room bore witness to the savage ferocity of the blow which had struck him down. Beside him lay the heavy poker, bent into a curve by the concussion. Holmes examined both it and the indescribable ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... Sojourner, carried away with her own feeling, sang it from beginning to end with a triumphant energy that held the whole circle around her intently listening. She sang with the strong barbaric accent of the native African, and with those indescribable upward turns and those deep gutturals which give such a wild, peculiar power to the negro singing,—but above all, with such an overwhelming energy of personal appropriation that the hymn seemed to be fused in the furnace of ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... unfortunate pigeons destined to be stewed therein. "Then," said the matter-of-fact little Winny, "we must put all our feet together, and stick them up in the middle." One day, when we happened to be in that indescribable state—a sort of half consciousness of what was passing around—scarcely knowing whether we were dreaming or waking, we heard a knock at the door, and the hot but smiling face of our captain shewed itself. He was immediately ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... venture to say there is not a sound in the whole compass of nature which I cannot imitate, and even improve upon;—nay, what I consider the perfection of my art, I have discovered a method of expressing, in the most striking manner, that indefinable, indescribable silence which accompanies the falling ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... announced by the beautiful and solemn notes of umbajas, but when he appeared there resounded the shrill notes of fifes, the beating of drums, the rattle of stones shaken in empty gourds, and whistling on elephants' teeth, all of which combined created an infernal din. The swarm was swept by an indescribable fervor. Some threw themselves on their knees; others shouted ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... headstrong and self-confident, it was in part due to a faith in my inheritance. The delicate and refined lips of my mother, upon which prayers were followed by lies and lies by prayers, taught me an almost indescribable belief in my own strength. The fruit forbidden by moral law to the ordinary man seemed to belong of right to me. No sensation, no indulgence, no excess seemed to threaten me. I knew my mother's philosophy of pleasure ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... direction of the sun. I encountered a strong current of wind; mist was about me; it lay like dew upon my coat. At last, a thick bar of vapor being past, what a scene was disclosed! A storm was sweeping through the sky, nearly a mile beneath; and I looked down upon an ocean of rainbows, rolling in indescribable grandeur, to the music of the thunder-peal, as it moaned afar and near, on the coming ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not given to making much of anything that was due to himself—partly through carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to-night, troubled him, surprised ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... said, "Christ precious?" Summoning all her energies, she raised both hands, clasped them, and said, "Yes." "Have you trusted Christ too much?" he asked. Seeing that she made an effort to speak, he said, "God can be glorified by silence." An indescribable smile lit up her ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... a master of his weapon, which, neither quite so long as you describe your husband's nor nearly so thick at the point, is very much so at the root, and as stiff and hard as iron. I assure you, the wild excess of passion he drives me into is indescribable. You shall experience the delight of his fucking, for, with you and me, there must be no difficulty, diversion, nor jealousy. Nay, I shall try to seduce your husband, with a view to cover our delinquencies. I would offer you mine, but, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... the thought of danger arises. He sat perfectly still with his back to the tutor, while his face expressed rapid inward transition. The deep blush, which had come when he first started up, gradually subsided; but his features kept that indescribable look of subdued activity which often accompanies a new mental survey of familiar facts. He had not lived with other boys, and his mind showed the same blending of child's ignorance with surprising ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... which he presided was in a state of indescribable chaos. It could not be arranged as he had seen stores all his life, so he did nothing ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and the usual serenity of his aerial blue is enriched into the softness and depth of the sapphire, when it ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the bare "bones" of the Acropolis; but now under the dazzling sunshine how it glitters with indescribable splendor! Before us as we ascend a whole succession of buildings seem lifting themselves, not singly, not in hopeless confusion, but grouped admirably together by a kind of wizardry, so that the harmony is perfect,—each visible, brilliant column and pinnacle, ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... of applause, enthusiasm, and wonder afterwards was indescribable. The gentlemen crowded round the singers—even the parliamentary gentlemen had lost their self-control, while the young lady who had wept forgot her timidity to make an eager approach ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... everywhere, say the natives, undermined by water; its open sea-view to the west; its mound of clean yellow sand behind, extending to the rocky horizon; and its pure fresh breezes blowing from the Nejd with an indescribable sense of lightness and health and enjoyment. In fact, it has all the accessories of an "eligible position." At the third or southern palm patch, we found the only public work which remains visible in the great Nabathaean port. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
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