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More "Inexplicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... presented themselves, armed with invitations, singly and in small parties, whilst dancing was in progress, and in a house open to such mixed society had been admitted without arousing suspicion. There was little that was obscure or inexplicable in the coup; it was an amazing display of force majeure, an act of stark audacity. It pointed to the existence in London of a hitherto unsuspected genius. Such ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... "An inexplicable impulse, foolish and unreasonable in its nature, may ephemerally appear to offer a sufficient excuse for your conduct; but there are duties imposed upon you which are incompatible with your regard for a poor girl such as I ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Quibble, was, to be sure, poor enough. The salary that he received as pastor of his church was meagre to the degree of necessitating my wearing his over-worn and discarded clerical vestments, which to some extent may account for my otherwise inexplicable distaste for things ecclesiastical. My mother was poor, after wedlock, owing to the eccentricity of a parent who was so inexorably opposed to religion that he cut her off with a shilling upon her marriage to my father. Before ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... awake. The repetition of the process had made the whole matter a singular one. Early as it was the first sounds might have been those of the housemaid descending, though why she should have come down so stealthily and in the dark did not make itself clear. But the second performance was inexplicable. Ruth got out of bed and lifted her blind. The dawn was hardly yet pink, and the light from the sandbank was not yet extinguished. But the bushes of euonymus against the white palings of the front garden could be seen, also ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... fashion of a lover, he soon forgot that it was he who was too soon, and he chafed and chafed as the minutes passed, until at about quarter to one he was striding gloomily about with despondent features and melancholy forebodings, imagining a thousand miserable reasons for her inexplicable delay. A good many people stared at him as they passed, and we may do so among ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... suspiciously fewer and fewer. Once, an eclipse of the sun was enough to throw men on their knees because they thought it supernatural. If they were logical they'd kneel today because it has been found natural. Only the inexplicable phenomena are miracles; and after a while—if the theologians will only permit us to finish the job —there won't be any inexplicable phenomena. Mystery, as I believe William James puts it may be called ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fall the precious relic with gestures of horror. To these ingenuous souls the mystery that wrapped their unknown visitor became inexplicable, and the priest from that day forth forbade himself to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the man repelled me while I was with him, and though I was cordial and liberal he seemed to feel that I abhorred him. We arranged to meet again in the evening, but when I dragged myself with an inexplicable loathing to the place of meeting, there was no ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... also (1Samuel x. 3), which seem originally by no means to have been considered unfit to be offered as in Leviticus ii. 11. For under this law of Leviticus ii. even the presentation of the shewbread would be inexplicable, and moreover it is certain that at first the loaves of the feast of weeks were offerings, properly so called, and not merely dues to the priests. According, to Amos iv. 5, leavened bread was made use of precisely at a particularly solemn sacrifice, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money, had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... of her youth the study of her husband's strange littleness had grown to be a second nature from the habit of her devotion to him. But she could not understand him; she could not explain to herself the sudden confession of old age, the quiet anticipation of death, the inexplicable generosity towards herself. She only knew that he must be at heart a man more kindly and of better impulse than he had generally been considered, and she resolved to do her utmost to repay him, and to soothe the ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Crown jewels of Persia mentioned in these changes of royal rule have, by inexplicable good fortune, been preserved from plunder while in the hands of rebels. The Crown jewels are in great part a portion of the splendid spoil which Nadir Shah obtained in the sack of Delhi, when it was the capital of the ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... century, he has never broken 90 on a first-class course. From my superior position (I have on three never-to-be-forgotten occasions broken 80, one of them at Manchester!), I sometimes wonder what keeps him at the game. Then I play with him, and realize. He has the divine, inexplicable faculty, once or twice in a round, of tearing off an astounding drive of 300 yards, by some subtle miracle of timing, which after hours of rolling finally comes to rest far out beyond any other ball ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... had happened at Wayne Hall. Since the evening when Elfreda had waited in vain for Laura Atkins, whose invitation to dinner she had accepted, this peculiar young woman had offered neither apology nor explanation for her inexplicable behavior. In fact, the next morning she had completely ignored Elfreda, who, feeling herself to be the aggrieved one, had made no attempt to discover what had prompted this glaring disregard of etiquette on the part of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Then it happened; the inexplicable incident which, though I knew it not, heralded the coming of strange things, and the dawn of a new power; which should set up its secret standards in England, which should flood Europe and the civilized ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... moderately distinct deflection from the perpendicular and from the attached object in only one radicle out of this large number of cases. In five other cases there was very slight and doubtful deflection. We were astonished at this result, and concluded that we had made some inexplicable mistake in the first six experiments. But before finally relinquishing the subject, we resolved to make one [page 142] other trial for it occurred to us that sensitiveness is easily affected by external conditions, and that radicles growing naturally in the earth in the early spring would ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... past that Cape and half way between it and C. Royds. This was far enough to make it evident that the ice was continuous to C. Royds, and has been so for a long time. Under these circumstances the continual appearance of open water to the north is most extraordinary and quite inexplicable. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... divine, till I saw that some of the crew were securing the stock of the anchor by means of a tackle to a stout beam, which projected over the bows of the ship. "Over to the fish," next shouted out the officer, an order at first equally inexplicable to me, till I saw the flukes of the anchor hauled up close to the bows—fished, as ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... these characters from public view, and the loss of importance which they once enjoyed in Scottish society, seem to me inexplicable. Have they ceased to exist, or are they removed from our sight to different scenes? The fool was, in early times, a very important personage in most Scottish households of any distinction. Indeed this had been so common as ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... gale! The dull warmth below was exquisite; the sly creatures which crept from their, dens and let the lamplight shine on their weird eyes—even the gamesome rats—had something merrily diabolic about them. Their thuds on the floor, their sordid swarming, their inexplicable daring—all gave a kind of minor current of diablerie to the rush and hurry of the stormy night; for they seemed to speak—and the creatures which on shore are odious appeared to be quite in place in the soaring groaning vessel. Ah, my brave forecastle lads, my merry ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... description. Its highest significance consisted in the publication which it made with reference to the new ideals in operatic representation which came in with the new movement. No doubt to a large portion of the audience, still judging by the old standards, much of it must have been inexplicable, much of it (especially the singing of Herr Schott) little short of monstrous. To a smaller portion, familiar with the opera, the language of its book and the spirit of the play, as well as the music, it came as a vivid realization ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... well that this was because Nutty, when in the presence of the bees, lost his head completely and behaved like an exaggerated version of Lady Wetherby's Dream of Psyche, whereas Bill maintained an easy calm; but at the moment she put the phenomenon down to that inexplicable cussedness which does so much to exasperate the human race, and it fed her annoyance with ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... we were all there, notables, counsellors, judges, advocates, physicians, schoolmasters; and ail, if my memory serves me,—all of us were assailed by this excess of furious folly! But what was there in that infernal music? It is inexplicable! Yet I certainly ate or drank nothing which could put me into such a state. No; yesterday I had for dinner a slice of overdone veal, several spoonfuls of spinach with sugar, eggs, and a little beer ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Adam de Gourdon; but the soft tones and refined accents were like a note of home to him; and though he had never seen the Princess before—she having been sent to the Court of St. Louis during the troubles—yet the whole of the interview gave him an inexplicable sense of being again among kindred and friends. He told himself that it was base, resolved that he would show himself determined to cast in his lot with his exiled brethren, and made up his mind to maintain a dignified silence during these two days, and at the end of them to leave ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... authorities and not by Pike[426] alone but by several of his subordinates and most often by Colonel Cooper.[427] The Indians had many causes of dissatisfaction and sometimes they murmured pretty loudly. Not even Pike's arrangements satisfied them all and his inexplicable conduct in establishing his headquarters at Fort McCulloch was exasperating beyond measure to the Cherokees.[428] Why, if he were really sincere in saying that his supreme duty was the defence of Indian Territory, did he not place himself where he could do something, where, for instance, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... des Sciences, had told her the day before of a comet which some day might meet the earth, envelop it with its flaming hair, imbue animals and plants with unknown poisons, and make all men die in a frenzy of laughter. She expected that this, or something else, would happen next month. It was not inexplicable that she wished to go. But that her desire to go should contain a vague joy, that she should feel the charm of what she was to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... monopoly of England, was seen to be putting in some sort up to auction the right of introducing into Europe the productions of America and India, loading several raw materials—such as cotton and wool—with enormous duties, and, by an inexplicable contradiction, rendering to the productions of English industry, by these very taxes, more advantages than prohibition caused them to lose. Then this fictitious system, which was to free the continent from the domination of English commerce, became ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... and try to keep up to the last the vain hope of recovering; those around them, by a cruel compassion, soothe them in the delusion; so that numbers die of chronic diseases as suddenly as if they had been shot through the heart. Perhaps the author had some reference to those inexplicable presages of death which some persons ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Toper-na-Fuosich (sic) is not the title of Clough's boisterous epic, or that Dante and his Cycle (sic) is not the name Rossetti gave to his collection of translations; and why Troy Town should appear in the index as Tory Town is really quite inexplicable, unless it is intended as a compliment to Mr. Hall Caine who once dedicated, or rather tried to dedicate, to Rossetti a lecture on the relations of poets to politics. We are sorry, too, to find an English dramatic critic misquoting ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Even Mr. Joyce at last admitted that this could not have failed to have produced a considerable effect. Thus also the large quantity of fine mould overlying the pavements can be accounted for, the presence of which would otherwise be inexplicable. My sons noticed that in one room in which the pavement had sagged very little, there was an unusually small amount of ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... family, one is bound to see in them likenesses with regard to mental traits, both large and small, which may sometimes be accounted for by example on the one hand or unconscious imitation on the other, but are often quite inexplicable on any other theory than heredity. It is difficult to understand how the inheritance of mental capacity can be denied by those whose eyes are open and whose ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... will never find happiness in those agitations into which I perceive you cast by the lurid ideas of superstition. In this path you will only encounter doleful chimeras, frightful phantoms, embarrassments without end, crushing uncertainties, inexplicable enigmas, and dangerous reveries, which are only calculated to disturb your repose, to deprive you of happiness, and to render you incapable of occupying yourself with that of others. It is very difficult to make those around us happy when we are ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... Imogene could not grasp. It was so inexplicable, so extravagant, so perverse, that her cheeks ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... most important affair of all, and that which cries most loudly for redress, remains inexplicable to this moment. For seven years was I at your royal court, where every one to whom the enterprise was mentioned treated it as ridiculous; but now there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not beg to be allowed to become a discoverer. There ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... such stories as curious facts. His religion was a religion of miracles, and, ignorant of natural laws, he was accustomed to refer any unusual occurrence to the influence of supernatural beings, a habit of thought which presented an ever-ready solution to mysteries and problems otherwise inexplicable. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the other hand, I found from the beginning until very recently that the so-called intellectuals exhibited a curious and almost inexplicable reticence in supporting Birth Control. They even hesitated to voice any public protest against the campaign to crush us which was inaugurated and sustained by the most reactionary and sinister forces in American ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... doubt that he is with David Garrick and Edmund Kean, rather than with other actors of great talents and great achievements—actors who rightly won high opinions from the multitude of their day, but who have not left behind them an impression of that inexplicable thing which we ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... mysterious broke the quiet routine of his life. The presence of Ume in the chamber seemed to fade a little, but, for some reason inexplicable to himself, this brought now no poignant grief. He did not tell the wonderful thing to Mata or old Kano, but hid the still unfinished picture where no one but himself could ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... their new quarters. The soldiers thronged the parapet in such numbers as to attract the attention of the troops on board the Nina. That vessel steamed up to the city in great haste, and communicated the startling intelligence that Fort Sumter, in some inexplicable manner, had been fully re-enforced.[7] The chagrin of the authorities was intense. Messengers were at once dispatched to all parts of the city, to ring the door-bells and arouse ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... "My first visits have generally been failures, and I have more than once been told that my own temperament is most unfavourable to the success of a seance. Nevertheless, I have in some cases witnessed marvels perfectly inexplicable by known natural laws; and I have heard and read of others attested by evidence I certainly cannot consider inferior to ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... communism, is the resume of all the great events that have taken place in France since the declaration of the republic on the 24th of February last. This key unlocks them all, and the efforts of this principle to establish itself, and to overthrow its opponents, explain events otherwise inexplicable, and show us in the clearest possible manner what are and what are not the great opposing forces that have since been at feud. All other forces in France have been as nothing compared with these two. The friends of monarchy, whether of the Orleans ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... well-nigh been lost even to our most learned Mobeds, they ought to be credited at least with some possession of a knowledge, the key to which has been revealed to them, and lost to us, and which opens the door to the meaning of those hitherto inexplicable sentences and doctrines in our old writings, about which we are still, and will go on, groping in the dark, unless we listen to what they have to tell us ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... as government has enlarged its scope, the governed have worked out and applied protective principles of personal liberties. The Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the uprisings of oppressed populations throughout the nineteenth century, would be quite inexplicable in other than modern times. In fact the whole political history of the last four centuries is in essence a series of compromises between the conflicting results of the modern exaltation of the state and the modern exaltation of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... and three small batteries, but which the Cavalier host of Prince Maurice, trying storm, stratagem, blockade, day after day, and week after week, failed to reduce or dishearten. 'At Oxford, where Charles then was, the affair was an inexplicable marvel and mystery: every hour the court expected to hear that the "little vile fishing-town," as Clarendon contemptuously calls it, had fallen, and that Maurice had marched away to enterprises of greater moment; but every post brought word to the wondering council, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... Campian's box in the interval. Colonel Campian had quitted it, and Mr. Phoebus occupied his place. Whether it were disappointment at his own failure or some other cause, Lothair felt annoyed. He was hot and cold by turns; felt awkward and blundering; fancied people were looking at him; that in some inexplicable sense he was ridiculous; wished he had never ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... faith in these people, as a rule," replied Miss Seaton, "but it is a fact that some of them really have a strange and inexplicable power to foresee events. Whether it is a genuine science, or a mere application of general rules of physiognomy to the particular features of each visitor, I do not profess to say; but there is no ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... Anselmus, sitting down at the table to begin the copying of the manuscript, which Archivarius Lindhorst had as usual spread out before him. But on the parchment roll he perceived so many strange crabbed strokes and twirls all twisted together in inexplicable confusion, offering no resting-point for the eye, that it seemed to him well-nigh impossible to copy all this exactly. Nay, in glancing over the whole, you might have thought the parchment was nothing but a piece of thickly veined marble, or a stone sprinkled ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Bower are inexplicable. Her father sold farming machinery in Huntington, Illinois, and she had grown up with no acquaintances or experiences outside of that prairie town. Yet from her earliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common with the people about her,—the only people she knew. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... indulgent parent. When Raidler would leave the ranch McGuire would fall into a fit of malevolent, silent sullenness. When he returned, he would be met by a string of violent and stinging reproaches. Raidler's attitude toward his charge was quite inexplicable in its way. The cattleman seemed actually to assume and feel the character assigned to him by McGuire's intemperate accusations—the character of tyrant and guilty oppressor. He seemed to have adopted the responsibility of the fellow's condition, and he always met ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... celerity which she would display in detaching any shapeless lobe that might do for a stopper; and that disk, without further measurement, is of the right size to fit the pot. Let whoso will explain this geometry, which in my opinion is inexplicable, even when we allow for memory ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... not answer. He had a strange sense of fear that was inexplicable to him. He seemed to be outside himself, outside his own fear, looking on at it and wondering what had caused it. He felt as if something were pulling at him, trying to force him to look round ... and he was afraid to ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... the walk to the gate, he kept repeating the words "tomorrow,—or next day." In some inexplicable way they had fastened themselves upon him. At the gate he turned and looked up at Alix's bedroom windows. The lace curtains hung straight and immovable. It pleased him to think that she was peering out at him from behind one of those screens of lace, ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... first two years that I spent among the Battas, at first all alone and afterward with my wife, were so hard that it makes me shudder even now when I think of them. Often it seemed as if we were not only encompassed by hostile men, but also by hostile powers of darkness; for often an inexplicable, unutterable fear would come over us, so that we had to get up at night, and go on our knees to pray or read the Word of God, in order ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... my aid in illustration of the early condition of Mexico, for, without this assistance, many phenomena that are witnessed in Mexico would be inexplicable. The effects of sudden wealth, the great accumulations of precious metals in few hands, the gross immoralities to which such a state of things gives rise, the almost fabulous state of society that arises ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... connection they are not charges, but pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to pass! As Clement bent down and took her hand and looked into her eyes his heart seemed to stop death-still for a few seconds—then something new and inexplicable took possession of him, and he stood before her calm and clear-eyed. "Don't move," he commanded, "I will draw a chair ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... of the hamlet of Heinrichsdorf, his left rested on a forest known as the Sortlack. When his arrangements were completed it was nine o'clock in the morning. What information he had is unknown, but what he did remains inexplicable. Starting to seize Heinrichsdorf, he was, after a short conflict, repulsed; for Lannes had stretched his line far to the left for the same purpose, and had been reinforced by Mortier's vanguard. Bennigsen withdrew about noon to his first position, and stood there in idleness for three ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... that ran up to the woods, and there, among the brilliantly varnished buttercups, the bees sounded like the tides coming in on the coasts of faery. Hazel forgot her dread—an inexplicable sickening dread of the quarry. She chased a fat bumble-bee all across the golden floor—one eager, fluffy, shining head after the other. They might have been, in the all-permeating glory on their hill terrace, with the sapphire-circled plain around—they might have been the two youngest citizens ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... seek a lodging in the Bastille. It was afterwards deemed advisable to put him to the torture, but the agonies of the rack wrung from him no deviation from, or contradiction of, what he had previously alleged. The affair had now become mysterious and inexplicable. However, a speedy termination was most imperatively called for; if it were permitted to become generally known, it could not fail of reaching the ears of the king, whose health was daily declining; and M. de Quesnay had assured us, that in ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... have seen, has made use of those difficulties much as the Romanists have used the doctrine of the Trinity when arguing with Trinitarians[19] in defence of transubstantiation. The Romanists said,—"Here are all these inexplicable difficulties in the doctrine of the Trinity, and yet you believe it." So Mr. Newman argues with those who hold the plenary inspiration of Scripture, that if they believe that, in spite of all the difficulties which ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... said to himself, "Shall I follow him any longer. I do not much care to do so. The master's conduct to me is very inexplicable. His great deeds allowed us to hope that he would restore again the kingdom to Israel. But he does not seize the opportunities that offer themselves, and now he constantly talks of parting and dying, and puts us off with mysterious words about ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... champagne-glasses, the table grew silent—the guests felt the apathy of digestion. The Dreamer looked at them, one after the other, and all the faces had satiated, blase expressions which disturbed and disquieted him. A sentiment, obscure, inexplicable, but so bitter! protested even from the depth of his soul against that repast; and when they rose at last from the table, he repeated softly and ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... earth's giving forth the scent of fresh whiskey, in a place so retired and unknown. While two or three of their number had certain inklings of the truth, as has been stated, to much the greater portion of their body it appeared to be a profound mystery; and one that, in some inexplicable manner, was connected with the recent digging up of the hatchet. Ignorance and superstition ever go hand in hand, and it was natural that many, perhaps most of these uninstructed beings should thus consider so unusual a fragrance, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... history have come to be attached to the ritual act or the words used to designate it. Neither the ethnologist nor the priestly apologist will, as a rule, admit that he does not know why such ritual acts as pouring out water or burning incense are performed, and that they are wholly inexplicable and meaningless to him. Nor will they confess that the real inspiration to perform such rites is the fact of their predecessors having handed them down as sacred acts of devotion, the meaning of which has been entirely forgotten during ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... nature of the subject of the book, unavoidable. Modern Christianity but very imperfectly explains why this rite was either neglected or abolished. Frequent reference is made to what Saint Paul said and did, but, as Saint Paul was not one of the Disciples, it is inexplicable wherefrom he received his authority in this matter, seeing that the Disciples themselves had no new views on the subject. To the student who prefers to study his subject from all its aspects, the question naturally arises, "Where, when, and why came the authority that ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... to whom this delay was as inexplicable as her impatience to see her father was great, was about to leave the room and seek or enquire the way to his apartment, when the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... British general in the winter of 1777 amazed Washington, his management of the next campaign was even more inexplicable. The army of Burgoyne was then moving slowly southward from Canada by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. It was the intention of the ministers that Howe should cooeperate with the northern ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Stretton Street there spread over my mind the strange and inexplicable events of that night when De Gex's man-servant Horton had dashed out after me, and suddenly implored me to see his master. Ah! I saw the amazing cleverness of the whole plot—a plot such as could only be conceived by a ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... unless I kept close to him. As a matter of fact, neither Fred nor I knew London well, but I resented being treated like an infant, and if Dennison only looked after us out of kindness, I did not see why he should do it at the top of his voice. I had an inexplicable feeling that it was the duty of every one to know something about London, and although I should not have recognized Piccadilly Circus when I saw it, I was quite prepared to put that down to the fog; for if Dennison had not taken so much for granted, I should never willingly have given ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... into relations with James, and his prospects began to improve. It is important for us to know what were his ideas upon government, upon parliaments, prerogative, and so forth, since a knowledge of this will clear up much that would seem inexplicable in his life. It seems quite evident[7] that Bacon, from position, early training and, one might almost think, natural inclination, held as his ideal of government the Elizabethan system. The king was the supreme power, the centre of law and justice, and his prerogative ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... sleep, are merely salutary precautions for maintaining the men in health and strength to do their work, it is obvious that the observance of these abstinences or taboos after the work is done, that is, when the game is killed and the fish caught, must be wholly superfluous, absurd, and inexplicable. But as I shall now show, these taboos often continue to be enforced or even increased in stringency after the death of the animals, in other words, after the hunter or fisher has accomplished his object by ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... to what I then felt, I do not know where to begin, if I were to describe it; it is utterly inexplicable. I felt a fire in my soul. I cannot see how it is possible to describe it. My bodily sufferings were unendurable. I have undergone most painful sufferings in this life, and, as the physicians say, the greatest that can be borne, such ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She was not vivacious in manner, except on ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... wherein I may consider that he asserts this. I will rather say boldly that the idea runs through every line he ever wrote; that unless seen in the light of that faith, the grounds of his philosophy ought to be as inexplicable to us, as they would, without it, have been impossible to himself. As has been well said of him: "Faith in God as the absolute ground of all human as well as of all natural laws; the belief that He had actually made Himself known to His creatures, and that it was possible ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... Newson. His well-known haughty indifference to the society of womankind, his silent avoidance of converse with the sex, contributed a piquancy to what would otherwise have been an unromantic matter enough. That such a poor fragile woman should be his choice was inexplicable, except on the ground that the engagement was a family affair in which sentimental passion had no place; for it was known that they were related in some way. Mrs. Henchard was so pale that the boys called her "The Ghost." ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... months aware. She was unable to distinguish between the affection she had always given him and the warming tenderness she was beginning to feel, save in her disinclination to make it manifest. When with him she was under a constraint as inexplicable to her as it was annoying. It brought grief to her tender heart, since it led her into little acts of rudeness or neglect, which in turn always led to tears. She often blamed Dic for the altered condition, though ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... spoke Romany with inflection and conjugation; they remembered the old rhymes and old words, which I quoted freely, with the Palmer. Little by little, the old man seemed to be deeply impressed, indeed awed, by our utterly inexplicable knowledge. I wore a velveteen coat, and had on a broad, soft ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... A man is treated with contempt on his return if he has not seen the Cumberland lakes and the Scottish Highlands. But I have relations in Scotland besides;—the old lady sitting by Mrs. Rennie in black MOIRE (is it that you call it?) is a sort of aunt of mine, and is connected in some inexplicable way with the Rennies. Your Scotch cousinships are an absolute mystery to me; it is a pity I cannot understand them, for I am indebted to them for a great deal of hospitality and kindness, of which this is one of the most agreeable instances;"—and Mr. Brandon looked at Elsie as ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... feeling, and it was instantly, than he corrected it, so that it never made its appearance again in his presence. In fact, a feeling of fear superseded the impertinence of the negro. There was something in the burning glare of Holden's eyes, and the deep tones of his voice, that exerted an inexplicable power over Felix. Much he turned it over in his mind, why, in spite of himself, he was obliged to be as civil to Holden as to white gentlemen, and at last concluded, the Solitary possessed some magic ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... and the strength of the Celtic national feeling would be inexplicable but for the circumstance that, amidst the greatest political disruption, the Celtic nation had for long been centralized in respect of religion and even of theology. The Celtic priesthood or, to use the native name, the corporation ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... no one hear her recitations, but her mother. Madame Darbois put all her heart into her efforts to help her daughter. Every morning she went through her work with Esperance. To her the role of "Henriette" was inexplicable. She consulted her husband, who replied, "'Henriette' is a little philosopheress with plenty of sense. Esperance is right to have chosen this scene from Les Femmes Savantes. Moliere's genius has never exhibited ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... fully or known the flavour of it so intimately as this evening. Looks and tones, and little nameless things of manner telling almost more yet, came back to me in a small crowd and overwhelmed me with their testimony. Affection, and tenderness, and pleasure; and something apart from these, an inexplicable assuming of me and delight in me as so assumed; they found me or made me very weak to-night. What was the matter? I believe it was, first, this happiness; and next, the doubt that rested over it and the certainty ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a course of many years, was bound by an inexplicable alliance with Lovat, was at this period about thirty years of age. He had already attained the highest reputation for eloquence, assiduity, and learning at the Scottish bar, and during his frequent ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... less on account of the touching affection of Onorina Pedrotti than by reason of an unknown incident, one of those crises of private life which are so instantly buried under the daily tide of interests that, at a subsequent date, the most natural actions seem inexplicable. ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... breath on the bright mirror he held to his mouth; then each of us by turns examined his arm, heart, and breath, but could not, by the nicest scrutiny, discover the least symptom of life in him. We reasoned a long time about this odd appearance as well as we could, and all of us judging it inexplicable and unaccountable; and, finding he still continued in that condition, we began to conclude that he had indeed carried the experiment too far; and at last were satisfied he was actually dead, and were just ready to leave him. This continued about half an hour. ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... midnight courage, and yet warn her against recklessness; I wanted to know whether she had been accustomed to such alarms; and if the gun she carried was really a necessity. But I could only respect her reticence, and I was turning away when I was struck by a more inexplicable spectacle. As she neared the end of the extension I distinctly saw the tall figure of a man, moving with a certain diffidence and hesitation that did not, however, suggest any intention of concealment, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Arcanum, of that secret whose revelation would overturn Earth and Heaven. Let no one expect us to give them its explanation! He who passes behind the veil that hides this mystery, understands that it is in its very nature inexplicable, and that it is death to those who win it by surprise, as well as ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... could satisfy them. Perhaps Judith recognized this. Of course, she recognized it!—as a bitter memory of her picture of marriage in Lost Chief returned to him. With a groan he bowed his head against the smooth trunk of an aspen. How utterly inexplicable women were! How bitter and how beautiful was this scourging ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... the sudden inexplicable isolation and aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other red-rimmed ...
— To Each His Star • Bryce Walton
... of the place filled me with tremblings, both because of its utter uncanniness and because of the inexplicable truth that I had seen it before. Most people will have experienced this kind of moral shock when on going to some new land they recognize a locality as being quite familiar to them in all its details. Or it may be the rooms of a house hitherto ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers. Jeanne of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination. She is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable, alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which are common to ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... as if instinctively to escape observation. The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks against the ribs. * * * That the skin is much affected under the sense of great fear we see in the marvelous and inexplicable manner in which perspiration immediately exudes from it. This exudation is all the more remarkable as the surface is then cold, and hence the term, 'a cold sweat'; whereas the sudorific glands ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... for without this concession our anatomical knowledge must be very imperfect. Thus the nature of life, whether it be developed in the vegetable creation, or display its admirable complications in the higher animals, is inexplicable on any of the principles that regulate our philosophy, and can only be referred to the contrivance and disposition of infinite wisdom: yet the vehicle in which these stupendous operations are conducted ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... cannot account for the fact known from ordinary experience that there are beings suffering pain and things causing suffering.—The Vedantin in his turn endeavours to show that on the Sa@nkhya doctrine also the fact of suffering remains inexplicable, and is therefore to be considered not real, but fictitious merely, the product ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... have not sent for you to load you with reproaches for your inexplicable conduct. But I must say this: deliberately to deceive and befool an honest gentleman, to trifle with his affections out of mere greedy vanity, is so base that I have no words strong ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... had all but accomplished his purpose, that of intervening between the Free State commandos and Yule's line of march, when one of those accidents of war, inexplicable because of the death of those who alone could explain them, largely increased his hitherto insignificant losses. Shortly before midday Colonel E. P. Wilford, commanding the 1st Gloucestershire, taking a company of ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... to find their feet very slowly. There was visible disinclination to go. Every man in some inexplicable way appeared to know that there was a new mystery hanging over the garrison, and that the colonel held the key. Every man felt that Billings had given him the right to expect to be told all about it when the colonel came. Some ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... comes a farce: the case was reversed with them, for they had enjoyed their farce, and had laughed over it heartily—and now there was danger of its ending in a tragedy. When their preparations were nearly complete for a sudden and inexplicable disappearance, our astrologers were horrified by the apparition, in the day time, of stars they had never consulted—stars of this gross, lower world—stars which, in case of resistance, become shooting stars, and which revolve, in very eccentric orbits, around the ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... first he resented it deeply. Everything seemed trivial to him compared to his own petty routine. But gradually his eyes were opened, and he began dimly to see that it was his work which was trivial when compared to this wonderful, varied, inexplicable world of which he was so ignorant. Vaguely he realised that the interruption to his career might be more important than the career itself. All sorts of new interests took possession of him; and the middle-aged lawyer developed ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Frank Merrill's conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy developed what Honey called "a case." It was scarcely a question of development; for with Pete it had been the "thin one" from the beginning. Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her Clara—and Clara she ultimately became. Among themselves, the men employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with Pete. To Ralph she was "the cat"; to Billy, "the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... solution. We know that beyond our horizon stretches the infinite universe. We grasp only one link of a chain whose beginning and end is eternity. So we readily adjust ourselves to mystery, and are content. We apply to everything inexplicable the test of partial view, and maintain our tranquillity. We fall into the ranks, and march on, acquiescent, if not jubilant. We hear the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry. Stalwart forms fall by our side, and brawny arms are stricken. Our own hopes bite the dust, our own hearts bury their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... hour or more before the Swedes returned to the Hoonah. Gregg looked out across the rolling, endless ocean. Although the sun was yet shining brightly there was a feeling of evening coming on. The cries of the gulls seemed to have taken on a tone of infinite sadness. All at once, for some inexplicable reason, he was overwhelmed by a sense of the futility of life—of living. No quest seemed worth pursuing. No dream worth dreaming. He had often felt this way during the past three months, and when he did—he drank. He longed, ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... headed by a tall, rangy sorrel she surmised was Whizzer, dashed down the hill. Weary and Chip galloped close behind. They did not look up, and so passed without seeing her. They were talking and laughing in very good spirits—which the Little Doctor resented, for some inexplicable reason. She heard them call to Slim to open the corral gate, and saw Slim run to do their bidding. She forgot her sketching and watched Whizzer dodge and bolt back, and Chip tear through the creek bed after him at peril of life ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... bought Rosendal, Herr Hardy?" asked Helga, looking full at him. She had all a woman's curiosity, and it was inexplicable to her what motive Hardy could have ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... of deceit and disloyalty? Certainly there was much that needed explanation. The loss of the diamonds did not directly concern her, although she felt that, too, was part of the mystery. But his strange aloofness of manner, his inexplicable loss of memory and nervousness, the frenzied outburst when she had mentioned Keralio's name that afternoon, the sudden craving for drink—was not all this to some extent, corroboration of what the fencing master has told ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... c. 1, bitterly taxeth all compound medicines, [4169] "Men's knavery, imposture, and captious wits, have invented those shops, in which every man's life is set to sale: and by and by came in those compositions and inexplicable mixtures, far-fetched out of India and Arabia; a medicine for a botch must be had as far as the Red Sea." And 'tis not without cause which he saith; for out of question they are much to [4170]blame in their compositions, whilst they make infinite ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... see that all men were not fitted for the work. It needed a beefy person with fat legs and a large amount of inexplicable dignity, a regular God-knows-why loftiness. Truth, in those days, real talent was usually engaged in some form of rascality, barring the making of books and sermons. When one remembers the impenetrable dulness of the great mass of the people, the frivolity of the gentry, the arrogance and wickedness ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... olden time of immense benefit to Paris. Their place will probably be forever marked by the sudden rise of the paved roadways at the spots where they opened,—another archaeological detail which will be quite inexplicable to the historian two centuries hence. One day, about 1816, a little girl who was carrying a case of diamonds to an actress at the Ambigu, for her part as queen, was overtaken by a shower and so nearly washed down the great drainhole in the rue du Temple that she would have disappeared had it ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... of his life my father's health perceptibly grew worse. Several times he had the most sudden and inexplicable sort of fainting fits, from which he used to recover the next day, but completely lost his ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... of the thirty-six variations still came very faintly over the water. The sun sent cataracts of warm light across all the estuary. The water lapped against the boat, and Audrey was overwhelmed by the inexplicable marvel of being alive in ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... knows, or can figure what the Man Shakespeare was, by the first, by the twentieth perusal of his works? He is a Voice coming to us from the Land of Melody: his old brick dwelling- place, in the mere earthly burgh of Stratford-on-Avon, offers us the most inexplicable enigma. And what is Homer in the /Ilias/? He is THE WITNESS; he has seen, and he reveals it; we hear and believe, but do not behold him. Now compare, with these two Poets, any other two; not of equal genius, for there are none such, but of equal sincerity, who wrote ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... long remained inexplicable afforded some distraction to my thoughts for a few days. At first I had refused to go ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... little—scarcely at all, I'm glad to say. Those inexplicable creatures called firemen, who seem to me what you may call fire-fiends of a good-natured and recklessly hilarious type, say that her having fallen down with her nose close to the ground, where there is usually a free current of air, saved her. At all events ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... said—a residuum does remain of inexplicable misery and distress, and there are times when we are all of us constrained to cry out with Darwin that it is "too much," and to ask whether there is not some further clue to the mystery. And then it may well be that there comes to our mind an answer that has been given from ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... brain, though we know not how, is the only seat for us of thought and mind and spirit. Let him have never so firm a faith in life immortal, yet this immortal has, he knows, put on mortality, through an inexplicable contact with matter; and his faith is not in the least shaken by learning that this point of contact is the brain. He can admit with the utmost readiness that the brain is the only instrument through which supernatural life is made at ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... you?" cried Joe, upon entering and looking round in vain for his host, who had vanished in a most inexplicable manner. Joe stared in astonishment. The lighted lamp remained on a box, that was designed for the breakfast-table, and on which there was in truth an abundance of dried venison and smoking potatoes. ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... least one spy, a real authentic one, afterward shot in England, who had stayed near-by, and the nerves of the inhabitants had that jumpiness on this subject with which the inhabitants of other countries have long been familiar. All the customary inexplicable lights were seen; all the customary mysterious big motor cars rushed at forbidden and yet unhindered speeds along unusual roads at unaccountable hours; all the customary signalling out to sea was observed and passionately sworn to by otherwise calm people. It was possible, the inhabitants found, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... with Finn story. With Messianic tradition. Epitaph of Bishop Aberkios. Voyage of Saint Brandan. Connection of Fish with goddess Astarte. Cumont. Connection of Fish and Dove. Fish as Fertility Symbol. Its use in Marriage ceremonies. Summing up of evidence. Fisher King inexplicable from Christian point of view. Folk-lore solution unsatisfactory. As a Ritual survival completely in place. Centre of action, and proof ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... believe that you are of another world," she said, "for otherwise such ignorance were inexplicable. Do you really mean that you do not know that the Sagoths are the creatures of the Mahars—the mighty Mahars who think they own Pellucidar and all that walks or grows upon its surface, or creeps or burrows beneath, or swims within its lakes and oceans, or flies through ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... says Tolstoi, "is obliged to admit an inexplicable force, which acts upon his elementary forces." Power and Liberty, p. 28 (Eng. Trans., ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... rate, Lady Tranmore was often inclined to think that since the return to London—now about a twelvemonth since—both she and William had had to do with a different Kitty. Young as she still was, the first exquisite softness of the expanding life was gone; things harder, stranger, more inexplicable than any which those who knew her best had yet perceived, seemed now and then to come to the surface, like ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... They then must have perceived that they were approaching the sea, for they had wheeled with the regularity of cavalry, and had returned back in as straight a line as they had advanced. The guanacos have one singular habit, which is to me quite inexplicable; namely, that on successive days they drop their dung in the same defined heap. I saw one of these heaps which was eight feet in diameter, and was composed of a large quantity. This habit, according to M. A. d'Orbigny, is common ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the species of large genera present a strong analogy with varieties. And we can clearly understand these analogies, if species once existed as varieties, and thus originated; whereas, these analogies are utterly inexplicable ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... not even the most remote reference to the Bull of Adrian, conferring the island of Ireland on Henry, although this Bull had been obtained some time before. In whatever light we may view this omission, it is certainly inexplicable. ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... created, with its roses and its fountains, its alleys and its bowers—and look westward at the sea? The end came in June 1839. Her servants immediately possessed themselves of every moveable object in the house. But Lady Hester cared no longer: she was lying back in her bed—inexplicable, grand, preposterous, with her nose ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... tell me when I next sit by you—'I will undeceive you,—I am not the Miss B.—she is up-stairs and you shall see her—I only wrote those letters, and am what you see, that is all now left you' (all the misapprehension having arisen from me, in some inexplicable way) ... I should not begin by saying anything, dear, dearest—but after that, I should assure you—soon make you believe that I did not much wonder at the event, for I have been all my life asking what connection there is between the satisfaction at the display of power, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... roused and given to understand by unmistakable signs that their presence was desired at home, they seemed astonished beyond all bounds. Some of them simply declined to believe it; they merely turned round a few times and lay down again on the same spot. They had to be flogged home. Can anything more inexplicable be imagined? There they lay, three miles from their comfortable home, where they knew that abundance of food awaited them — in a temperature of -40deg.F. Although they had now been out for twenty-four hours, none of them ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... was a young Hussar, the friend and assistant General of Leclerc, who became the husband of Paulette, the giddy little schoolgirl sister of Napoleon. Josephine, at this period of her history was famous for her aversion to chastity, so that it is not altogether inexplicable that she should have sought the distinction of making Hippolyte Charles her lover. He was fascinating, witty, dressed with splendour, and was quite up to her standard of moral quality. The friendship grew into intimacy, so that he became ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... His kingdom, should have been occasioned by, and have followed immediately upon, our Lord's solemn and pathetic announcement of His sufferings. But the connection is not difficult to trace. The disciples believed that, in some inexplicable way, the sufferings which our Lord was shadowing forth were to be the immediate precursors of His assuming His regal dignity. And so they took time by the forelock, as they thought, and made haste to ensure their places in the kingdom, which they believed was now ready to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... drowned, at the junction of the creek with the river. Although the banks of the Roper were steep and muddy, the large creek we had passed was scarcely two miles distant, and offered an easy approach to the water on a rocky bed. It remained, therefore, inexplicable to us how the ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... previously contained nothing mental, and one ground for this belief is that matter is too dissimilar from mind to have been able to cause it. Or, more particularly, what are termed the nobler parts of our nature are supposed to be inexplicable, unless the universe always contained something at least equally noble which could cause them. All such views seem to depend upon assuming some unduly simplified law of causality; for, in any legitimate sense of "cause" and "effect," science seems to show that they are usually very widely ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... their General, upon condition Mr. Mackenzie and Lord Holland were sacrificed to them, and, tacitly, Lord Northumberland, whose government they bestow on Lord Weymouth without furnishing another place to the earl, as was intended for him. All this is granted. Still there are inexplicable riddles. In the height of negotiation, Lord Temple was reconciled to his brother George, and declares himself a fast friend to the late and present Ministry. What part Mr. Pitt will act is not yet known—probably not a hostile one; but here are ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... beings that in the long forgotten past lived their earthly lives here below and after their mortal course was run were in some inexplicable way changed into diuta. Though belonging now to a different and more powerful order, they still retain a fondness for the tribesmen who sojourn here below. Selecting certain men and women for their favored friends [14] they keep in touch with worldly affairs and at the call of ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... leave all that is inexplicable to Him, and thank him for the love and the hope with which he feeds my heart and keeps it from hardening. I thank him too," she went on hoarsely, "for the terrible moments when I feel my loss afresh, those early morning moments, when the bright sunshine ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... morning. My host soon provided a good substantial breakfast—excellent new potatoes, which had escaped the blight, butter, new milk, and a slice of the flesh of fried badger. He then proposed to accompany us with his son, aged about thirteen, who by some inexplicable privilege seemed exempt from any portion of the drudgery which was the lot of the family. The other man who brought the baggage was persuaded to leave his horse and car, and accompany us with my bundle, as far as the summit of the hill. To climb the steepest ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... said Lesley, with a sudden, inexplicable flush of color: "It is not that—it is ugly, of course; but I do not ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... repressed opinion on politics, and all the sentiments of the English gentleman, at a small expense of vital energy. Also, he may be obstinate or persistent at the same low rate, and may even show sudden impulses which have a false air of daemonic strength because they seem inexplicable, though perhaps their secret lies merely in the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in—good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt or ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... entire species. These conditions will also determine the population of a species; and by a careful consideration of all the circumstances we may be enabled to comprehend, and in some degree to explain, what at first sight appears so inexplicable—the excessive abundance of some species, while others closely allied to ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... by-contract, like any poor-house proposal for 'clods' and 'stickings' of beef, to low undertakers, such as Broome and Fenton. Considering the ample fortune which Pope drew from the whole work, we have often been struck by the inexplicable indulgence with which this scandalous partition is treated by Pope's biographers. It is simply the lowest act of self- degradation ever ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... of the Messiah's lowliness, contains, in addition, a special designation of it which is found again in the nomen and omen of his native place. This appears especially from the circumstance that, if it were otherwise, the quotation: in [Greek: hoti Nazoraios klethestai], would be inexplicable, since it is very forced to suppose that "Nazarene" here designates generally one low and despised.[2] But he chose the general formula of [Pg 112] quotation (comp. Gersdorf, Beitraege zur Sprachcharacteristik 1. S. 136), in order thereby to intimate that in ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... instant believe in the coarse interpretation which others might have given to the elopement; had that been possible, the keenest of her pain might have been dulled by contempt. No, no! The worst that she thought was that Harrington, for some inexplicable reason, had withdrawn Lina from her home to marry her in private; but this was enough. It had broken up that confidence, unexpressed, but always a holy principle in both, which had so long held those two souls together, spite of everything that ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... in the ethics of Madigan warfare to explain the inexplicable. Florence was on her feet, flying as though for her very life, before Split, shaken down from her dreams, quite realized what had happened. And she was still sitting as she had fallen when Jim, the Indian, ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... commiserate them profoundly for living in a place they are so anxious to leave. A lovely girl of Madrid once said to me she never wished to travel,—some people who had been to France preferred Paris to Madrid; as if that were an inexplicable insanity by which their wanderings had been punished. The indolent incuriousness of the Spaniard accepts the utter isolation of his city as rather an advantage. It saves him the trouble of making up his mind where to go. Vamonos al Prado! or, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... of the water almost immediately tore him free again. And still that awful, implacable downward drag continued, until he began to wonder dreamily whether he would ever return to the surface alive, or whether, after all, deliverance from his wretchedness—which in some inexplicable way already seemed much less poignant to him—was coming to him down there in those black depths. The pressure upon his body was rapidly becoming unendurable; the air was being forced from his lungs; he was suffocating! Involuntarily he began to struggle, throwing out his arms ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... complain of Monsieur de Maulincour, who had given some ground for it during his former intimacy with Monsieur de Ronquerolles' sister, the Comtesse de Serizy. That lady, the one who detested German sentimentality, was all the more exacting in the matter of prudery. By one of those inexplicable fatalities, Auguste now uttered a harmless jest which Madame de Serizy took amiss, and her brother resented it. The discussion took place in the corner of a room, in a low voice. In good society, adversaries never raise ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the old Sault au Matelot, with his hands in his pockets, and steadfastly staring at them. He did not relax the severity of his gaze when they returned to join him, and appeared to find little consolation in Kitty's "O Dick, I forgot all about you," given with a sudden, inexplicable laugh, interrupted and renewed as some ludicrous image seemed to come and go in ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... converted. He was born into a new life that was as real to him as his consciousness was real. This psychological change will be understood by some of my readers; others may regard it as they do any other inexplicable phenomenon in that mysterious inner world of the human soul, in which are lived the real lives of us all. In Ah Lee's heathen soul was wrought the gracious wonder that makes joy among ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally, perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own brains.—3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... murder, he opened the papers and read that the woman whom he had left for dead with her brain pierced by a hat-pin, had been found on that same floor crushed under a fallen cabinet; and what explanation he was ever able to make to himself for a fact so inexplicable. ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... gallant garrison was now reduced by famine, disease, and war increased the earnest desire of officers and men to engage the enemy and, even at the greatest price, to break his lines. In spite of the various inexplicable features which the actions of Colenso and Spion Kop presented, the confidence of the army in Sir Redvers Buller was still firm, and the knowledge that he himself would personally direct the operations, instead of leaving their conduct ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of Matthew's strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Carlshoff is laid down by Arrowsmith in lat. 15 deg. 45' S. as in the text, and long. 145 deg. 28' W. The first meridian used for the longitude in the text is quite inexplicable, and was probably assumed on very erroneous computation. It is 190 marine leagues due west ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... Whether his visit to the old mansion had been somehow discovered or suspected, or whether she was removed by some preconcerted or antecedent plan, he could not conjecture.—Still, the situation in which he found the mansion the night he went to convey her away, left an inexplicable impression on his mind. He could in no manner account how the candle could be placed at the window according to agreement, unless it had been done by herself; and if so, how had she ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... or any lower motive, which may induce the literary character to hold an unwearied pen. Another equally powerful exists, which must remain inexplicable to him who knows not to escape from the listlessness of life—it is the passion for literary occupation. He whose eye can only measure the space occupied by the voluminous labours of the elder Pliny, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... felt emphatically by the very greatest dramatists; and this fact offers, of course, an explanation of the otherwise inexplicable negligence of such authors as Shakespeare and Moliere in the matter of publishing their plays. These supreme playwrights wanted people to see their pieces in the theatre rather than to read them in the closet. In his own lifetime, Shakespeare, who was very scrupulous about the ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... two essences so diverse, who was walking alone toward his dwelling, through the night and the rain, began again in the depth of his double being to feel the anxiety of inexplicable reminiscences. ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... practical matter, his best bet was probably to investigate the nine inexplicable ships overhead. They hadn't co-operated with the Waldenians. It could be inferred that no confidential relationship existed up there. It was possible that the nine ships and the Waldenians didn't even know of each other's presence. There is a lot ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark, who possessed more humility than is usual at twenty-one, did not fancy that he should be successful. The ambition to become a friar was revived by an incomprehensible, or if not incomprehensible, certainly by an inexplicable impulse to put himself in tune with the landscape, to proclaim as it were on behalf of that dumb heart of England beating down there in the flowery Vale of Wield: God rest you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay! There was revealed ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... fliers on the market gave him enough surplus to send his sister Mary through the high school of his country home in New Hampshire, and afterward through Wellesley College; although just why a woman should want to go through college was inexplicable to John Taylor, and he was still uncertain as to the wisdom ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... years of his life my father's health perceptibly grew worse. Several times he had the most sudden and inexplicable sort of fainting fits, from which he used to recover the next day, but completely lost his memory ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... next would have appeared unbelievable to any who have not over and over watched the inexplicable happenings of a gaming table. Kendric made his second throw and lifted his eyebrows quizzically at the result. He had turned out the deuce, the lowest number possible. A little eagerly, while men began to mutter in their excitement, Rios snatched up cup and die and threw. Once already he ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... Callahan; and when the train-master was gone, he ordered Shovel to oil around while he did two or three things which, to an initiated onlooker, might have seemed fairly inexplicable. First he disconnected the air-hose between the car and the engine, tying the ends up with a stout cord so that the connection would not seem to be broken. Next he crawled under the Naught-seven and deliberately ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... so unusual and inexplicable in all this, Mr. Powis, that it strikes me you have been to blame, in not inquiring more closely into the circumstances than, by your own account I should think had ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... now look back to the result of former lectures. It was this: After we had explained everything in the growth of language that can be explained, there remained in the end, as the only inexplicable residuum, what we called roots. These roots formed the constituent elements of all languages.... ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... because they were not suitable to any thing of which they had a knowledge; they believed that incomprehensible beings must have inconceivable qualities. These were the materials of which theology availed itself to compose those inexplicable shadows before which they commanded the human race to bend ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... signs, in the inexplicable shrinking of capital to its hiding places, and in the universal darkening of business, it would seem that all might have discovered the approach of that storm which has since burst with such fury upon the land. But this was not the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... paradise. And ever and anon came on the still air the soft eternal pulsations of the distant sea, sound mournfulest, most mysterious, of all the harpings of Nature. It was the sea,—the deep, eternal sea,—the treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea; and he was perhaps at this moment being borne away on it,—away, away,—to what sorrows, to what temptations, to what dangers, she knew not. She looked along the old, familiar, beaten path by which he came, by which he went, and thought, "What if he never should come ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... on the other hand, I found from the beginning until very recently that the so-called intellectuals exhibited a curious and almost inexplicable reticence in supporting Birth Control. They even hesitated to voice any public protest against the campaign to crush us which was inaugurated and sustained by the most reactionary and sinister forces in American life. It was not inertia or any lack of interest on the part of the masses that stood ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... was so astonished that she could make no answer, and let this queen of beauty depart, and believed her to be a fairy, until a workman told her that the fairy was Madame de l'Ile Adam. Although the adventure was inexplicable, she told her father that she would not give her consent to the proposed marriage until after the autumn, so much is it in the nature of Love to ally itself with Hope, in spite of the bitter pills which this ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... some inexplicable disquietude from the situation in which his master lay, he set off at a pace which soon brought him to the house, where he scratched with great violence at the door for immediate admittance. This obtained, the parents were in the utmost alarm and consternation at his appearance, especially ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... the Author is disposed to express his suspicion that the entire story of the tripartite league is the creature only of invention, originating in some inexplicable mistake, or fabricated for the purpose of exciting feelings of contempt ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... exceeding cruel crying was nothing else but the conflict between the love of the woman which went out to her earthly lover, and would fain make him happy, and the nature of the inhabitant of heaven, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. This was the key to her inexplicable sorrow during the past weeks. This explained why, though she loved him so tenderly, the thought of becoming his wife ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... her to leave the immortal world of fairies in order to share the fate of her earthly lover, as his wife. In a moment of deepest despair about the state of his country, the fairy queen appears to him and purposely destroys his faith in her by deeds of the most cruel and inexplicable nature. Driven mad by a thousand fears, Arindal begins to imagine that all the time he has been dealing with a wicked sorceress, and tries to escape the fatal spell by pronouncing a curse upon Ada. Wild with sorrow, the unhappy fairy ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakespeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... In The Blue Dryad the cat is exhibited in his useful capacity as a killer of vermin. A Psychical Invasion is a successful attempt to exploit the undoubted occult powers of the cat. Poe's famous tale paints puss as an avenger of wrongs. In Zut the often inexplicable desire of the cat to change his home has a charming setting. Booth Tarkington in Gipsy has made a brilliant study of a wild city cat, living his own independent life with no apparent means of support. I should state that the ending of the story, which is ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... impressed him, and now it came upon him heavily. The shrilling of a solitary locust somewhere in the gums, the brisk crackle of dry bark and twigs as he trod, the melancholy sighing of the wind-stirred leafage, offered him those inexplicable contrasts that ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... the court where licentiousness in either sex had long been the surest road to royal favor. She began by making a regulation, that she would receive no lady who was separated from her husband; and she abolished a senseless and inexplicable rule of etiquette which had hitherto prohibited the queen and princesses from dining or supping in company with their husbands.[9] Such an exclusion from the king's table of those who were its most ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... conventional life. He ran over the incidents of the cruise—Kitchell, the turtle hunt, the finding of the derelict, the dead captain, the squall, and the awful sight of the sinking bark, Moran at the wheel, the grewsome business of the shark-fishing, and last of all that inexplicable lifting and quivering of the schooner. He told himself that now he would probably never know the explanation of ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... ambition, has allured, as you are aware, more than one youthful fowler to an uncertain swampy hunting ground, called "politics." Mr. Frechette was one of the unfortunate. This game preserve, I pronounce "uncertain" because owing to several inexplicable eventualities sportsmen innumerable, therefrom return empty handed, whilst others, Mr. Chairman, make up, we know, pretty good bags. The Son of Apollo, whilst thus hunting one gruesome, windy morning, fortunately for us, sank in a boggy, yielding quicksand. Luckily he extricated himself in time, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... full expression of the infinite beyond. He cannot derive any moral strength or comfort from the world about him because he conceives that world to be an implacable instrument of a god's uncertain, inexplicable will. He therefore cosmically projects, in a frenzy of despair, his crying human demand. And out of the wastes of space there arises for him a ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... with much surprise, with some slight sense of annoyance; she had bent far in tendering her influence at the French court to a private soldier, and his rejection of it seemed as ungracious as it was inexplicable. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Willie, a bright and promising boy, to whom his father was devotedly attached. "This," says Dr. J.G. Holland, "was a new burden; and the visitation which, in his firm faith in Providence, he regarded as providential, was also inexplicable. Why should he, with so many burdens upon him, and with such necessity for solace in his home and his affections, be brought into so tender a trial? It was to him a trial of faith, indeed. A Christian lady of Massachusetts, who was officiating as nurse in one of the hospitals, came in ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... not explain it, but as the girl emerged from the curtains, a strange, confused memory of something and somebody she had known in the past came over her. But when the girl spoke, a more inexplicable sensation took possession of the listener, for her voice was the feminine of Preston Cheney's masculine tones, and then as she looked at the girl again the haunting memories of the first glance were explained, for she was very like Preston Cheney as the Baroness remembered him when ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... occasionally squinted along the massive iron tube over which he was placed in command; nor was that familiar and paternal care, which distinguishes the seaman's interest in his particular trust, wanting in his manner. Still, an air of broad and inexplicable surprise had possession of his rugged lineaments; and ever, as his look wandered from the countenance of Wilder to their adversary, it was not difficult to discover that he marvelled to find the two in opposition. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... The elucidation of this inexplicable phenomenon was reserved for Christian Huygens, who, with an improved telescope of his own construction, was able to declare that Saturn's appendages were portions of a ring which surrounds the planet, and is ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... discontent or cheerlessness should be regarded as occasioned by an accession of the attribute of Passion into the mind. Whatever state, as regards either the body or the mind, exists with error or heedlessness, should be known as indicative of Darkness which is incomprehensible and inexplicable. The organ of hearing rests on space; it is space itself (under limitations); (Sound has that organ for its refuge). (Sound, therefore, is a modification of space). In perceiving sound, one may not immediately acquire a knowledge of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... between the sublime and the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir. Hence, appreciation is inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the courage to proclaim it or not. Just why it has not been written into the course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the educational process. It is far from clear why the superintendent permits teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that arithmetic is their final destination, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... little, little boy! you will forgive me if what I write hurts you, won't you?) I awoke suddenly, and it seemed that everything was clear to me. I recalled your story of loving the woman whom you didn't think it right for you to marry, of your inexplicable stay at Ravenel through an entire summer, your depression afterward, and your sudden plunge into business. I couldn't help putting these things together and believing that this little Irish girl was the ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... to the woman living in the miasma of perfume and secret fear. He heard again her wistful voice pronounce the names of far places, of Tarragona and Seriphos, investing them with the accent of an intense hopeless desire. He thought of the inexplicable place of her birth and of the riven, unsubstantial figure of the man with the blood pulsing into his ocherous face. Some old, profound error or calamity had laid its blight upon him, he was certain; but the most lamentable ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... fingerprint against that when you board the ship. Skylift isn't till dawn, but you can go aboard as soon as the process crew finishes with her." He glanced at the monitor screen, where the swarming crew were still doing inexplicable things to the immobile spacecraft. "It will be another hour or two. Where are you ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... her in a manner which appears inexplicable, she seeks and finds excuses for him. She is so innocent that not only she cannot believe herself suspected, but she cannot conceive the existence ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... inhabited city being slightly warmer—i. e., thinner—than the atmosphere of the surrounding country, a plane drops a little on entering the rarefied area, precisely as a ship sinks a little in fresh water. Hence the phenomena of "jolt" and your "inexplicable collisions" with factory chimneys. In air, as on earth, it ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... there is nothing that is not expressive—not a curl of the hair, not a lift of the eyebrows, not a trick of speech or gait. The body becomes, as it were, transparent and pervious to the soul; and that inexplicable element of sense, which baffles us everywhere else, seems here at last to receive its explanation in presenting itself as the perfect ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... overcome by the bitter memory of the past, and I wanted no formal application now to give me the clue to her strange preference for the accident ward and her hitherto inexplicable fondness for "railway cases." Poor thing, with what inexpressible vividness must the circumstances in which this New Year's night was passing with her have recalled the sad remembrances of that other New Year's night the narrative of which she had just given me! Presently she recovered ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... sir; you think all these inexplicable terms are connected with Sir Wycherly's religious feelings. You may certainly be right, for it exceeds my knowledge to connect them with any thing else. I wish, notwithstanding, he had not disowned this noble young lieutenant of ours! Is ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... delicate matter for a girl brought up in Roberta Holland's school. Several times after the restaurant encounter she essayed it; trying both the indirect approach and the method of extreme frankness. Neither answered. Julien responded to her advances by alternate moods of extreme gloom and slyly inexplicable amusement. Bobbie gave it up, concluding that he was in a very queer mood, anyway. She was ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... marvellous glow of a deep violet color shot over the whole room, and the two men turned and faced each other both with inquiry in their looks, so unexpected was this theatrical effect to the one, and so inexplicable its cause and ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... inexplicable. There was really the smell of meat. I had also that peculiar sensation of fulness which is apt to succeed a dinner, and a dish well filled with bones was in plain view. I took up one of the latter, in order to ascertain its genus. The captain kindly informed me that ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and pushed the whole load back up the tunnel, his thoughts running in unhappy circles. A dead robot was a terrible thing, and one of his family too. But there was something wrong about this robot, something that was quite inexplicable, the number on the plate had been "17," yet he remembered only too well the day that a water-shorted motor had killed Venex 17 in ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... abstruse, inexplicable, recondite, cabalistic, inscrutable, secret, dark, mystic, transcendental, enigmatical, mystical, unfathomable, hidden, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the Manichee or Gnostic idolatry?" Account of the Temple Church by R. W. Billings, p. 5 London. 1838. This is, at all events, a curious coincidence, especially considered in connection with the extensive dissemination of the Paulician opinions among the common people of Europe. At any rate, in so inexplicable a matter, we are inclined to catch at any explanation, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... the soldiers were stalking the renegades, the commissioner of Indian affairs sent out to stalk the soldiers. Investigation as to the cause of this inexplicable outbreak was demanded. Those very chiefs had left the capital in unbounded good humor not two months before, and who was responsible for this sudden and baleful change of heart? It was a matter soon and easily settled. In ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... went on: "Blood will tell. All this accounts for the peculiar, inexplicable attraction that Kathleen has held for me. It is like a chapter out of ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... enigma," whispered Caroline in her ear. "What queer discoveries I make day by day now!—I who thought I had your confidence. Inexplicable creature! even ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... talking to Garnet, who was on her other side, but the indifference was only put on from pride. An inexplicable penetrating sadness fell upon her soul, and took complete possession of her without leaving her power to ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... discussion has, therefore, great significance for our view of the vital processes in the plant; it proves beyond doubt that these processes are in no way of a purely mechanical nature, but that there is something underlying all this, a hitherto inexplicable something, which we call "life." In all vital activities, physical and chemical processes certainly do occur; they do not, however, take place spontaneously but are made use of by the vital element ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... Richard Royson associated with Westmoreland ever since Coeur-de-Lion returned from Palestine. That is the kind of family asset a boy will brag of. Joined to a certain proficiency in games, it supplies a ready- made nickname. But the wonderful and wholly inexplicable thing is that while I have been standing here, watching our head-light dancing over the desert, the fantastic conceit has invaded my very soul that I share with my kingly ancestor his love of this land, his ambition to accomplish great deeds ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... too not better understood in the one case than in the other, namely, by generation and birth. There remains, therefore, only the redemptive act itself, and this is transcendant, ineffable, and 'a fortiori', therefore, inexplicable. Like the act of primal apostasy, it is in its own nature a mystery, known only through faith in ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... into the marsh. Looking in the direction whence the sounds came, she saw indistinct and vague against the night sky, an enormous rounded thing rise in the air and descend, whereupon was borne to her another of the strange crashings. These inexplicable sounds and the inexplicable sight would have frightened Miss Sullivan had she not the resources with which modern science fortifies the mind against credulity and superstition. The round object, she told herself, was some sudden puff of smoke on a railway track far beyond; the crashing was the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... all. The play-bills show us that after a tragedy there generally comes a farce: the case was reversed with them, for they had enjoyed their farce, and had laughed over it heartily—and now there was danger of its ending in a tragedy. When their preparations were nearly complete for a sudden and inexplicable disappearance, our astrologers were horrified by the apparition, in the day time, of stars they had never consulted—stars of this gross, lower world—stars which, in case of resistance, become shooting stars, and which revolve, in very eccentric orbits, around the central police station. ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... given agent—a chemical solution or an electric current—is profoundly modified by the dose a given intensity, producing one effect and a different intensity giving rise to an effect diametrically opposite. This is the reason of the inexplicable anomalies which have baffled many investigators. Numerous are the forces which act on growth some helping, others retarding, the effects being further modified by the strength and duration of application. These ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... to myself for this knowledge, or feeling. I felt that it was more than intuition. I felt that it was experience, not the experience of sight or hearing or any of the senses, but experience nevertheless—subconscious, if you wish to call it so in these days. Though the experience was inexplicable, it was none the less valid. I wondered at myself for thinking this, yet I did not doubt. There are many avenues to the soul. To know that a man is alive, seeing him walk is not essential, nor hearing ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, 95 Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,—disentangle them who may. Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie, And some odd volumes of old chemistry. Near those a most inexplicable thing, 100 With lead in the middle—I'm conjecturing How to make Henry understand; but no— I'll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo, This secret in the pregnant womb of time, Too vast a matter for so weak ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... D'Alcano (sic), or that The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (sic) is not the title of Clough's boisterous epic, or that Dante and his Cycle (sic) is not the name Rossetti gave to his collection of translations; and why Troy Town should appear in the index as Tory Town is really quite inexplicable, unless it is intended as a compliment to Mr. Hall Caine who once dedicated, or rather tried to dedicate, to Rossetti a lecture on the relations of poets to politics. We are sorry, too, to find an English dramatic critic misquoting ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... allowed details of the affair to be published in the evening papers, including what purported to be a translation of a note dropped by the German, saying: "The German army is at the gates of Paris. Nothing remains for you but to surrender.—Lieutenant von Heidssen." This is an example of the inexplicable working of the censorship. The people tonight all seemed to believe that the ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... was solved! the inexplicable longings of his soul, which had so often perplexed him, were at length explained. The want, the indefinable want, which he had so constantly experienced, was at last supplied; the grand object on which to bring ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... or no imagination to exercise, and he only tolerates a performance in the theatre when little or no demand is made on the exercise of the imaginative faculty. "The groundlings," said Shakespeare for all time, "are capable of [appreciating] nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise." They would be hugely delighted nowadays with a scene in which two real motor cars, with genuine chauffeurs and passengers, raced uproariously across the stage. That is realism in its nakedness. That ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... remains to be seen whether this whole affair is not a most unworthy fraud. The circumstances are inexplicable - I had almost said incredible; and until I see a little more daylight, and some plausible motive, I confess I should be very sorry to put a hand to the transaction. I appeal to you in this difficulty for information. I must learn what is at ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... left to himself, was rather inexplicable. He opened the closet, counted the teaspoons, weighed the sugar-tongs, closely inspected a silver milk-pot to ascertain that it was of the genuine metal, and, having satisfied his curiosity on these points, put on his cocked hat corner-wise, and danced with much gravity ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... horrible invisible spirit was following us from this scene of terror. "The devils of disease?" "The pictures of horror and misery?" "The souls of men who have been sacrificed on the altar of darkness of Mongolia?" An inexplicable fear penetrated into our consciousness from whose grasp we could not release ourselves. Only when we had turned from the road, passed over a timbered ridge into a bowl in the mountains from which we could see neither Jahantsi Kure, the dugun nor ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... came over her to shock and repulse that inexplicable thing in him which set him apart from her and made him one with the world in which those others moved; that stout gentleman and the young lady who had called him Jimmie. She ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... must be attended to, so advance carefully towards him through a plantation of young coffee, apologising humbly for intruding on his domain. He smiles and bows beautifully, but—horror!—he knows no English, I no French. Situation tres inexplicable et tres interessante, as I subsequently heard him remark; and the worst of it is he is evidently bursting to know who I am, and what I am doing in the middle of his coffee plantation, for his it clearly is, as ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... but—" said Loretz, afraid to hear what was coming; not that he guessed, but because Spener sat there with a face so—so inexplicable. Loretz could not make out its meaning when just now he glanced that way; and the face was full of meaning. What was passing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... thousand dollars life was at best a hard struggle in the State, and I imagine there was less surprise at the sacrifice of the place than at the fact that your grandfather should have been able to put down the ready money. The making of a fortune is always, I suppose, more inexplicable than the losing of one. The Blakes had always been accounted people of great wealth and wastefulness, but within five years from the close of the war they had sunk to the position in which you find them now —a change, I dare say, from which it is natural much lingering bitterness should result. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... was deceiving her. He had some sinister motive in thus endeavouring to plant seeds of suspicion within her mind. It was plain that he was endeavouring in some way to secure his own ends. Those ends, however, were a complete and inexplicable mystery. ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... boldly skirted the cabin and dropped into the race-way at its side. Following it a few hundred yards he came upon a long disused shaft opening into it, which had been covered with a rough trap of old planks, as if to protect incautious wayfarers from falling in. Here a sudden and inexplicable fear overtook Johnny, and he ran away. When he reached the hotel, almost the first sight that met his astounded eyes was the spectacle of the paragon, apparently still in undisturbed possession of all his perfections—driving coolly off in a buggy ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... mothers thought, and as their daughters will think, expressing the thoughts of the countless generations behind and in front of them. But this woman was moved merely by impulses; and what is more inexplicable than an impulse? What is the spring but an impulse? and this woman was mysterious, evanescent as its breath, with the same irresponsible seduction. He was certain that she was at last clear to him, though she might become dark to him again. ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... and the powerful restorative did its work upon the boy, he began to understand that this was no vision, and that something utterly inexplicable had befallen him, whether for weal or woe his confused senses would not tell him. He heard as in a dream the hurried explanations of the boys, drawing his brows together in the effort to understand. But when they spoke of flight he shook his head, and pointed to the door ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... his youth by inexplicable aversions, by shudderings which chilled his spine and made him grit his teeth, as, for example, when he saw a girl wringing wet linen. These reactions had long persisted. Even now he suffered poignantly when he heard the tearing of cloth, the rubbing of a finger against a piece of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... between the captain and the count that it would be desirable in every way to maintain the most rigid silence upon the subject of the inexplicable phenomena which had come within their experience. It was to them both a subject of the greatest perplexity to find that the shores of the Mediterranean had undergone no change, but they coincided in the opinion that it was prudent to keep their bewilderment entirely to themselves. ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... paper, thick with dust; 'Mid glasses, boxes, where eye can see, Filled with old, obsolete instruments, Stuffed with old heirlooms of implements— That is thy world! There's a world for thee! And still dost ask what stifles so The fluttering heart within thy breast? By what inexplicable woe The springs of life are all oppressed? Instead of living nature, where God made and planted men, his sons, Through smoke and mould, around thee stare Grim skeletons and dead men's bones. Up! Fly! Far out into the land! And this mysterious volume, see! By Nostradamus's[5] own hand, Is it not ...
— Faust • Goethe
... "Then the crime is inexplicable, M. Dollon. You have just told me yourself that there was no one in the chateau but Mme. de Langrune, the two young people Therese and Charles, and the two maids: it certainly is not any one of those who can be the guilty person, for the way in which ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... come to pass! As Clement bent down and took her hand and looked into her eyes his heart seemed to stop death-still for a few seconds—then something new and inexplicable took possession of him, and he stood before her calm and clear-eyed. "Don't move," he commanded, "I will draw ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... overwhelming array of evidence, was far greater than that of previous discussions. With one or two reservations as to the logical completeness of the theory, Huxley accepted it as a well-founded working hypothesis, calculated to explain problems otherwise inexplicable. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... follow the gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example, opportunity—all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable phenomenon—one to be regarded with distaste and wonder. He persisted in thinking of the type as a juvenile one—an energetic and clever boy, who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an apercu or a Weltanschauung ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... Goethe has put these enchanting and voluptuous customs into poetry, and his verses are so perfect, so harmonious, so tasteful, so soft, that it seems really surprising that he should ever have been able to have brought the German language to this state of suppleness. The charm of the book is inexplicable; it is a votive nosegay sent from the West to the East, composed of the most precious and curious plants: red roses, hortensias like the breast of a spotless maiden, purple digitalis like the long finger of a man, fantastically formed ranunculi, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... Many inexplicable things happen "on Labrador." Thus, one year while visiting at the head of Hamilton Inlet, a Scotch settler came aboard to ask my advice about a large animal that had appeared round his house. Though he had ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... and depth, but not the river-like channels which actually exist. If, again, we suppose the last movement to have been one of subsidence, reducing the size of the islands, these channels are quite as inexplicable; for subsidence would necessarily lead to the flooding of all low tracts on the banks of the old rivers, and thus obliterate their courses; whereas these remain perfect, and of nearly uniform width from end ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious, the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was something more than a name in ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... come to her. She did not attribute this sensation to fatigue. She did not try to analyse it. She only felt as if she had never seen or heard anything that was not cheerless, as if she had never known anything that was not either sad, or odd, or inexplicable. What did she remember? A train of trifles that seemed to have been enough to fill all her life; the arrival of the nervous and badly-dressed recruits at the wharf, their embarkation, their last staring and pathetic look at France, the stormy voyage, the sordid illness ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... como impulsado por un resorte, 15 al oir semejante clamor dentro de su casa, y apoyose en la mesa para no caer de nuevo sobre la silla. Tendio en torno suyo una mirada de inexplicable regocijo, dejo ver en sus labios la inmortal sonrisa del triunfador, y asi, transfigurado y hermoso, con el doble temblor de la muerte y del entusiasmo, pronuncio 20 las siguientes palabras, entrecortadas y solemnes como las campanadas del ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... drained the writer dry of every particle of suggestiveness, and then recreated the material in new and imperishable forms. The process of reproduction was individual, and is not to be shared by others; it was the expression of that rare and inexplicable personal energy which we call genius; but the process of absorption may be shared by all who care to submit to the discipline which it involves. It is clear that Shakespeare read in such a way as to possess what he read; he not only remembered it, but ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... barometer wagged to and fro like pendulums; and overhead, seamen were singing out at their work, and coils of rope clattering and thumping on the deck. Yet it was long before I had divined that I was at sea; long before I had recalled, one after another, the tragical, mysterious, and inexplicable events that ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that ...
— To Each His Star • Bryce Walton
... was such considerations that explained the relative silence of the champions of the Copernican theory, accounting for the otherwise inexplicable fact that about eighty years elapsed after the death of Copernicus himself before a single text-book expounded his theory. The text-book which then appeared, under date of 1622, was written by the famous Kepler, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... he had been considerably startled by the inexplicable occurrence himself, "you know there are no such ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... effect that, if Austria drew the sword for Napoleon III. she would have to reckon with an irruption of the Russians into her open Galician frontier. Probably this accounts for the conduct of the Hapsburg Power, which otherwise is inexplicable. A war of revenge against Prussia seemed to be the natural step to take. True, the Emperor Francis Joseph had small cause to like Napoleon III. The loss of Lombardy in 1859 still rankled in the breast of every patriotic Austrian; and the suspicions which that enigmatical ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the manner in which this can be carried out, and incidentally, an insight into the preparedness of Germany for the war, is seen in an analysis of the extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable network of railways recently erected by Germany to tap the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... course of life that we are driven by some inexplicable fatality to suffer those very afflictions we dread the most. We are told of persons who trembled for a lifetime at the horrid anticipation of being one day mad; it was the shadow of the judgement that was creeping on them, which cast them finally amongst ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the blood which had been shed there, and with the tower of unknown origin looming above me, I became very uncomfortable again, nor did I envy Van Roon his eerie residence. The proximity of a tower of any kind, at night, makes in some inexplicable way for awe, and to-night there ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... not a ragged baron who has levied toll for passage through the public squares, a privileged robber who has shut up for you a pleasant street or waylaid you at an interesting church, but he is sure to be there. How they got there is as inexplicable as how the apples got into the dumplings in Peter Pindar's poem. But at the first ring of a festa-bell, they start up from under ground, (those who are legless getting only half-way up,) like Roderick Dhu's men, and level their crutches at you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... old buffer in scarlet and gold who periodically takes an inexplicable interest in Tommy's belt and brass buttons. An excuse for his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... puzzled the vegetable physiologist than the alternations of forest growths which are everywhere occurring without the apparent interposition of natural seeds, and which have been considered as wholly inexplicable except as one unsatisfactory theory after another has been suggested to account for the wide dissemination and distribution of their seeds. We have had any number of these theories, more or less ingeniously constructed, but it is safe to say that none of them satisfactorily ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... it was strange and inexplicable that the suggestion of the girl's probable fate should have affected Billy Byrne as it did. He did not stop to reason about it at all—he simply knew that he felt a mad and unreasoning rage against the creatures that had borne the girl away. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... remarkable fact that the human race on this particular world has, in some inexplicable way, come to look upon the future as non-existent until we arrive at, and are able to perceive, with our senses, what is happening there; this is all the more inexplicable when we realise that in traversing Space we certainly have to move to get anywhere, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... house. Nevertheless, supposing it was Hilda, Maggie would assuredly come into the drawing-room—she could not do otherwise— and the three-cornered interview would, he felt, be very trying. He knew that Maggie, for some reason inexplicable by argument, was out of sympathy with Hilda, as with Hilda's son. She had given him regular news of George, who was now at about the same stage of convalescence as him sell, but she scarcely mentioned the mother, and he had not dared to inquire. These thoughts flashed through ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... at first all alone and afterward with my wife, were so hard that it makes me shudder even now when I think of them. Often it seemed as if we were not only encompassed by hostile men, but also by hostile powers of darkness; for often an inexplicable, unutterable fear would come over us, so that we had to get up at night, and go on our knees to pray or read the Word of God, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... superfluous exertion. His idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well. He was in a manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps rather with a fanatical inertness. Born of industrious parents for a life of toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as profound as inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which directs a man's preference for one particular woman in a given thousand. He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour. It was too much trouble. He required a more perfect form of ease; or it ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... compared; and, by God's teaching and the assistance of his sent servants, the child of God becomes mighty in the Scriptures. Let not mystery stagger you: we are surrounded with mysteries; we ourselves are mysteries inexplicable: nor let the doctrine of election stagger you; how small a part of God's ways do we know, or can comprehend! rejoice that he has given you the heritage of his people—leave the rest to him: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... and the natives had kept so close a watch all night along the slopes at the lower end, and at the mouth, that they felt sure that their prey could not have escaped them unseen. And yet at last they were forced to come to the confusion that in some inexplicable way this must have been the case, for how else could they have escaped? The thought that they had reascended by the rope before it was removed, and that they were hidden in the cave at the time ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... involved forms of all, as seen in the orchid—the multifarious, multiversant orchid; the beautiful orchid; the ugly orchid; the fragrant orchid; the fetid orchid; the graceful, homely, grotesque, uncanny, mimetic, and, until the year 1859, the absolutely non-committal and inexplicable flower; the blossom which had waited through the ages for Darwin, its chosen interpreter, ere she yielded ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... strong contrast to the contents of his store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there, off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an impression, vague, inexplicable, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... shall ever forget it; but now I must first ascertain where the will of the late Sir William is to be found. We can read it for a shilling, and then I may discover what are the grounds of Melchior's conduct, for, to me, it is still inexplicable." ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... navigation before them, they had time to improve their acquaintance with Vilcamapata, who was never tired of expressing his gratitude to Dick and Stukely for having saved him from a terrible death. But it soon became apparent that, for some inexplicable reason, he regarded Stukely as much the more important personage of the two, his devotion to Phil being of such a pronounced character that it almost amounted to worship. This, of course, might have been accounted for to some extent by the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... attracts the mind and gives rise to manifold contemplation; so the ancient tragedy leads us forward to the highest reflections involved in the very sphere of things it sets before us—reflections on the nature and the inexplicable mystery of man's being. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the door of the tent, apprehending something new and inexplicable in her attitude. In the music of her voice as she spoke to the sick man was the love-note of the mate. "You may come in," she called back, and Nash, stooping, entered the ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... of profound peace. No wars nor rumors of war disturbed the humble mind, and the blow was utterly unexpected and inexplicable. ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... had grown so strong that she felt more warmly toward the sick Caesar than was justifiable. She could not deny it, for she could not without a blush have described to her lover what she felt when that mysterious, inexplicable power had drawn her to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Carley found herself carrying a bountiful basket on her arm, faring forth on an adventure that both thrilled and depressed her. Long before this hour something about Glenn's work had quickened her pulse and given rise to an inexplicable admiration. That he was big and strong enough to do such labor made her proud; that he might want to go on doing it ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... James felt a long shudder creep over him. He had never been afraid of anything except fear. Now he was afraid of fear, and there was something about the man which awakened this terror, yet it was inexplicable. He was a middle-aged man, and distinctly handsome. He was something above the medium height, and very well dressed. He wore a fur-lined coat which looked opulent. He had gray hair and a black mustache. ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... It may seem inexplicable that the Power which stood up boldly at the Treaty of Utrecht as the shameless champion of negro slavery was the very one which was celebrated in South Africa for its morbid love of the natives; the explanation, however, is that it was not so much love for the native that ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... jealousies. He was to learn, a couple of months later, how much he had been mistaken in his estimate of Bazaine's talents and rectitude of purpose; and, indeed, Bazaine's conduct toward Gambetta and the Republicans from first to last was the more inexplicable, as it was unquestionably owing to their agitation that he was placed in the high ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... swarms amid the clouds of the volcanic dust; - why are their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Poet? Mystery inexplicable on the conceited notion which, making man forsooth the centre of the universe, dares to believe that this variety of forms has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and untrodden forests, only that ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... let fall the precious relic with gestures of horror. To these ingenuous souls the mystery that wrapped their unknown visitor became inexplicable, and the priest from that day forth forbade himself to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
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