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More "Undefined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... future as she had sometimes been, "everything was so uncertain," she said. Clement asked himself whether she felt quite as sure that her attachment would last as she once did. But there were no reproaches, not even any explanations, which are about as bad between lovers. There was nothing but an undefined feeling on his side that she did not cling quite so closely to him, perhaps, as he had once thought, and that, if he had happened to have been drowned that day when he went down with the beautiful young woman, it was just ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... a strange penetrating glance that in some undefined way increased his irritation. "It's quite possible," she said quietly. "But I don't think even you, Martin, can call her handsome. As to her intelligence, she never gave me ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... more is implied than mere curative drugs, or a system of curative practice. Among all the tribes of American Indians, the word is used with a double signification,—a literal and narrow meaning, and a general and rather undefined application. It signifies not only physical remedies and the art of using them, but second-sight, prophecy, and preternatural power. As an adjective, it embraces the idea of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... that, because of this young girl with the mocking laugh, he was losing the climacteric expression of the three- weeks' campaign, his displeasure grew. Within him was an undefined thought vibration akin to surprise, caused by the serenity of the hushed sky. Was it not incongruous that the heavens should be so peaceful with their quiet star-beacons, while man was exerting himself to the utmost of gesture and noise to glorify the Maker of that ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... cottages harbored Maya for the night; and then her way at dawn lay through a vast forest, where the dim tree-trunks stretched far away till they grew undefined as a gray cloud, and only here and there the sunshine strewed its elf-gold on ferns and mosses, feathery and soft as strange plumage and costly velvet. Sometimes a little brook with bubbling laughter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... dear boy, I can similies find For a heap of similitudes so undefined. And why should I censure tastes not my concern? 'Tis as well for the arts that all ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... few hours after Mrs. Home had left her yesterday; how undefined, how dim, and yet how dark had been her suspicions! She did not know what to think, or whom to suspect; but she felt that, cost her what it might, she must fathom the truth, and that having once fathomed it, something might be revealed to her that would embitter ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... assumed the defensive; and a common topic of conversation in American female society has often been the general servile war which in one form or another was going on in their different families—a war as interminable as would be a struggle between aristocracy and common people, undefined by any bill of rights or constitution, and therefore opening fields ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... self-accusations, slumbering often, but now aroused into an activity that could not be laid to rest. This morning, for the first time, beneath all her perplexity and fear and hope to find him dead, there came to her a strange, undefined, scarcely conscious tenderness towards the miserable man, whom she had last seen standing in her presence, an uncouth, ragged, weather-beaten peasant. The man had been her husband, the father of her children, and a deep, keen pain was stirring in her soul, partly of the old love, for she had ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... the "cosmical current" which bears the solar system towards its unknown goal carries also with it nebulous masses of undefined extent, and at an undefined remoteness, fragments detached from which, continually entering the sphere of the sun's attraction, flit across our skies under the form of comets. These are, however, almost certainly so far strangers to our system that they had no part in the long processes of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... dwarfed oaks, which at that distance were but mossy excrescences on the surface, barely raised above the dead level. On the other side the marsh took up the monotony and carried it, scarcely interrupted by undefined water-courses, to the faintly marked-out horizon line of the remote bay. Scattered and apparently motionless black spots on the meadows that gave a dreary significance to the title of "the Crows" which the rancho bore, and sudden ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress of experimental ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... though he had a compass on board the raft, he had no binnacle, and no lamps by which to illuminate the compass card. It is true the island was still in sight, some four miles astern, but the night had grown so dark and the atmosphere so thick that the land merely loomed like a vast undefined blot of darkness against the black horizon, being so indistinct indeed that only the practised eye of a seamen could have detected its presence at all; it was therefore useless as an object to steer by, even to so keen-eyed an old sea-dog ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... in that lonely forest—with not a friend nigh that could render her assistance—with no hope of escape from the awful doom to which she was hastening? Or was she thinking of him, for whom her heart yearned with all the thousand, undefined, indescribable sympathies of affection?—of him who so lately had been her companion?—for the heart of love measures duration, not by the cold mathematical calculation of minutes and hours, and days and weeks, and months and years, but ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... Coast, or Coast of Guinea, the Danes had long held certain positions or forts, named Christiansbergh, Augustabergh, Kongensteen, and Prindsensteen; connected with these was an undefined amount of territory. The Danish merchants, who at first derived some profit from these establishments, soon found that they could obtain from Great Britain more cheaply the various articles of that commerce, than by direct communication ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... pardons, my lord; I come directly," answered the Jew, not daring to offend a scion of the omnipotent aristocracy of Florence, yet filled with some misgivings, the more painful because they were so vague and undefined. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... for it. Afterwards, when analysis plays its part, one may talk about physical attractions, about common intellectual interests, about spiritual bonds, about what you please, but one knows that the essence of that meeting is undefined. ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the tram-men nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. After this the letters L. D. S. were written at the foot of the page, and, having hidden ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... not inclined at that moment to ask Kate Vavasor to dance with him. He was possessed by an undefined idea that Kate had snubbed him, and as Kate's fortune was, as he said, literally nothing, he was not at all disposed to court her favour at the expense of ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... have never, till recently, during my happy intimacy with Mr. Joes, been so bright and blissful, be clouded now? I know not; I know not why it should be so; but lately my bosom has become disturbed by strange misgivings, and my mind perplexed by dark and undefined apprehensions. I must not, however, indulge them; and your presence, I know, would entirely dissipate them. I repeat, therefore, come, and ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... the apostasy on the scaffold of the man whom they had worshipped as a prophet, the ultra-faction among the Protestants became now powerless. The central multitude, whose belief was undefined, yielded to the apparent sentence of Heaven upon a cause weakened by unsuccessful treason, and disavowed in his death by its champion. Edward had died on the anniversary of the execution of More; God, men said, had visited his people, and "the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... bright to him, very easy, and very peaceful. He could hardly have thought of anything at all likely to happen which could darken the future, or even give him reasonable cause for anxiety. There was no imaginative sadness in his nature, no morbid dread of undefined evil, no melancholy to dye the days black; for melancholy is more often an affliction of the very strong in body or mind than of the weak, or of average men and women. Marcello was delicate, but not degenerate; he seemed gentle, cheerful, and ready to believe ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... more than three hundred in the town. As perfect peace prevailed, the rest, according to their custom, had been allowed to go to their villages and attend to their crops. Then, possessed by a rather undefined nervousness, at which the others were inclined to laugh, I caused the Zulus to arm and generally make a few arrangements to meet any unforeseen crisis. This done I sat down to reflect what would be the best course to take if we should happen to be attacked by a large force in that ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... clothed thee, undefined, As for some being of another race; Ah, not with it, departing—growing apace As years did bring me manhood's loftier mind, Able to see thy human life behind— The same hid heart, the same revealing face— My own ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... over fifty battles with the Turks who, in their impotent rage, poured army after army into the land, but entirely failed to break the courage of this brave little people. His people gave him the title of Voivoda of the Zeta, but the limits of his principality seem to have been very undefined. The position of his son Ivan was, however, of greater danger, for in 1444 the kingdom of Hungary had fallen before the Turk, and they captured Constantinople nine years later; after this Servia, Bosnia, Albania (on the death of Skenderbeg), and Hercegovina ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... which she was hardly conscious: any misgiving that had sprung into an indistinct and undefined existence since that recent night when she had gone down to her father's room: that Walter's accidental interest in her, and early knowledge of her, might have involved him in that powerful displeasure and dislike? Had Walter any such idea, or any sudden ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... at this window, with peace and humble serenity. They were full of joy, his awakenings of a man engaged, since he had the assurance of meeting Gracieuse at night at the promised place. The vague anxieties, the undefined sadness, which accompanied in him formerly the daily return of his thoughts, had fled for a time, dispelled by the reminiscence and the expectation of these meetings; his life was all changed; as soon as his eyes were opened he had ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... Clarissa Lovel was not light-hearted. She had discovered of late that there was something wanting in her life. The days were longer and drearier than they used to be. Every day she awoke with a faint sense of expectation that was like an undefined hope; something would come to pass, something would happen to her before the day was done, to quicken the sluggish current of her life; and at nightfall, when the uneventful day had passed in its customary blankness, her heart ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... agreed. The wandering and uncontrollable train of thought, suggesting sudden recollections of things distant and long forgotten and remote from each other—the vague restless craving for something undefined, which nothing could satisfy—the swift flight of the minutes, fusing themselves into hours, as if by enchantment—the rapid coming of the solemn night—the shadow of death always upon them, and yet ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Brunetiere, has laid it down that there is more truth, more fidelity to the facts of actual life, in any single romance by Ponson du Terrail or by Gaboriau than in all the works of the Goncourts put together, and so long as we leave truth undefined, this opinion may be as tenable as any other. But it may be well to observe at the outset that the creative work of the Goncourts is not to be condemned or praised en bloc, for the simple reason that it is not a spontaneous, uniform ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... point out the place and the powers with which the story deals. For this Tollan, where Quetzalcoatl reigned, is not by any means, as some have supposed, the little town of Tula, still alive, a dozen leagues or so northwest from the city of Mexico; nor was it, as the legend usually stated, in some undefined locality from six hundred to a thousand leagues northwest of that city; nor yet in Asia, as some antiquaries have maintained; nor, indeed, anywhere upon this weary world; but it was, as the name denotes, and as the native historian Tezozomoc long since translated it, where the bright ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... hour's debate the House gave the CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER power to borrow a trifle of two hundred and fifty millions, to square this year's account, plus an undefined sum to enable him to fund the floating debt, now amounting to close on two thousand millions. Even Sir FREDERICK BANBURY had no serious objection to raise, his chief anxiety being that everyone, and not merely the plutocratic holders of Treasury Bills, should be permitted to subscribe to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... of the district were already gone, and their wives and children were anxious to follow them, but the poor creatures did not know which way to turn. They did not know where the army was, or in what quarter they would be most secure. They had an undefined fear that the blues were coming upon them with fire and slaughter, and that they would be no longer safe, even in ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... she? And why was not this counterfeit in its coffin, in which it had been buried with all the rites of the Church? The coffin? Yes, the coffin was there at his feet, with its brass plate, which had rusted at the corners; and below it, in some undefined depth, was another coffin, the sarcophagus of Tudor himself. He stooped and shifted the candle. On Camilla's coffin were a number of screws, rolled about in various directions; only one screw was in its place. He seized the screwdriver—and in that moment a tiny part of his intelligence ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... I drew near, and put the lamp through the opening, showing a few stone steps; perhaps there were a dozen of them; at least, they went down into undefined darkness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... water's edge—scarce above the line of foam she cuts—her lower deck lies black and undefined in the shadow of the great mass above it. Suddenly it lights up with a lurid flash, as the furnace-doors swing wide open; and in the hot glare the negro stokers—their stalwart forms jetty black, naked to the waist and streaming with exertion that makes the muscles ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... a sort of undefined hope, an obscure confidence, that some lurking remains of virtue, some degree of shame, might exist in the breasts of the oppressors of France, has been among the causes which have helped to bring on the common ruin of king and people. There is no safety for honest men, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the first to begin the dissociation of pastoral from the conditions of actual life, and just as his shepherds cease to present the features and characters of the homely keepers of the flock, so his landscape becomes imaginary and undefined. This peculiarity has been noticed by Professor Herford in some very suggestive remarks prefixed to his edition of the Shepherd's Calender. 'The profiles of the Sicilian uplands,' he writes, 'waver uncertainly amid traits drawn from the Mantuan plain. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... work did not succeed in absorbing all my attention. That old document kept working in my brain. My head throbbed with excitement, and I felt an undefined uneasiness. I was possessed with a presentiment of ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... still lying on his stomach, almost holding his breath, he saw the thin line of light from an electric torch steal out along the surface of the sea, obviously from the hand of his fellow watcher. Almost at that same moment the undefined agitation which had assailed him passed. He set his teeth and watched that line of light. It moved slowly sideways along the surface of the sea, as though searching for something. Julian drew himself cautiously, inch by inch, to the extremity of ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mists of my mind cleared; I moved no longer in a deaf, blind stupor. A flash of lightning danced vividly before my eyes, followed by a crashing peal of thunder, I saw to what end of a wild journey I had come! Those heavy gates—that undefined stretch of land—those ghostly glimmers of motionless white like spectral mile-stones emerging from the gloom—I knew it all too well—it was the cemetery! I looked through the iron palisades with the feverish interest of one who watches the stage curtain rise on the last scene of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... and projects upward. If not corrected while in its earlier stages, it progresses very rapidly, and a second curvature is developed. The symptoms vary in different cases, and in the early stages are somewhat obscure and undefined, but generally the patient feels a sense of uneasiness, languor, stupor, and nervousness, loss of energy and ambition, general debility, poor appetite, gradually declining health, loss of strength and flesh, and, as the disease progresses, a slight elevation of one of the shoulder-blades is noticed, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... we will neither help you, nor be helped by you. To the blacks we say: This cup of Liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how. If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it. If, on ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... no active service, insatiate war had claimed many victims, who had perished ingloriously by the malarial fevers of that marshy district. The naval officers were especially elated at the change. Their duties and their authority being alike undefined, there resulted a deplorable want of harmony between them and the military. This was, indeed, the inevitable consequence of the anomalous position held by the former; and this want of concert of action subsequently contributed, in some measure at least, to the disastrous issue ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... neither parts nor magnitude. Thirdly, The conception of the same is, first of all, identified with the one; and then by a further analysis distinguished from, and even opposed to it. Fourthly, We may detect notions, which have reappeared in modern philosophy, e.g. the bare abstraction of undefined unity, answering to the Hegelian 'Seyn,' or the identity of contradictions 'that which is older is also younger,' etc., or the Kantian conception of an a priori ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... rose, the moon being very bright, offered to show me where the beacons had been placed years before by a Boer Commission. I accepted, as the night was lovely for a stroll after the hot day. Also I was half conscious of another undefined purpose in my mind, which perhaps may have spread to that of Marnham. Those two young people looked very happy together there on the stoep, and as they must part so soon it would, I thought, be kind to give them the ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... however, as the Greek-speaking Jews received more books than their Palestinian brethren, the apostles and their immediate successors were not wholly disinclined to the use of the apocryphal productions. The undefined boundary of the canon facilitated also the recognition of all primitive records of ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... paces away, breathing their ether into our faces. We do not know what to do. We have no more cartridges. We fix bayonets, our ears filled with that endless, undefined murmur which comes from their mouths and the hollow rolling ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... admonitions that we should regard not words but things (States.). But upon the whole, the ancients, though not entirely dominated by them, were much more subject to the influence of words than the moderns. They had no clear divisions of colours or substances; even the four elements were undefined; the fields of knowledge were not parted off. They were bringing order out of disorder, having a small grain of experience mingled in a confused heap of a priori notions. And yet, probably, their first impressions, the illusions ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... so many times at the portrait which was in the panel that at length he felt an undefined sensation of terror creep over him whenever he took ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... lamp to be lit stood beside Anne's sofa. The effect of the illumination was to make the lady in the window turn on her settee. Across the space between, her eyes, obscure lights in a face still undefined, swept with the turning of her body, and fastened upon Anne's face, bared for the first time to their view. They remained fixed, as if Anne's face had a peculiar fascination ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... mood, to make one feel the air of higher regions, and wish to rise "above the smoke and stir of this dim spot". The best influences which bear upon us are of this vague sort—powerful upon the heart and conscience, although undefined to the intellect. ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... describes the Coalition as an "invertebrate and undefined body." Meaning that they have rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... had pictured Solomin to herself as quite different. At first sight he had struck her as undefined, characterless. She had seen many such fair, lean, sinewy men in her day, but the more she watched him, the longer she listened to him, the stronger grew her feeling of confidence in him—for it was confidence he inspired her ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... Vassilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into space. He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of missionary work. His whole attention was turned upon the spiritual agony which was torturing him. It was a dull, vague, undefined anguish akin to misery, to an extreme form of terror and to despair. He could point to the place where the pain was, in his breast under his heart; but he could not compare it with anything. In the past he had had acute toothache, he had had ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... about whom these things are said. But the mistake into which the present generation is far more likely to fall than that of substituting theology for Christ, is the converse one—that of substituting an undefined Christ for the Christ of the Gospels and the Epistles, the Incarnate Son of God, who died for our salvation. And that is a more disastrous mistake than the other, for you can know nothing about Him and He can be nothing to you, except as you grasp the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... with him when he took his departure, having refused tea from a certain undefined feeling that he could not even sit in the same room as the man whom he intended to do out of the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... The very terms, moreover, by which his ratification was conveyed, secured his supremacy, and conferred upon his successors and himself the privileges of a court of ultimate appeal. At no previous period in the history of the Church had so wide, so undefined, and so unlimited an authority been accorded to the See of Rome. Thus Pius IV. was triumphant in obtaining conciliar sanction for Pontifical absolutism, and in maintaining the fabric of the Roman hierarchy unimpaired, the cardinal dogmas of Latin Christianity unimpeached and after formal ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... like the old wistfully reverential voice in which he used to mention 'Mrs. Egremont.' It smote Mary Nugent's quiet heart with a pang. Was it that the alteration from the old kindly fatherliness of regard to 'little Nuttie' revealed that any dim undefined hope of Mary's own must be extinguished for ever; or was it that she grieved that he should again be wasting his heart ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... He invited his former secretary, a Roman Catholic, to join the new society, but he made it clear that Orange, a man of real distinction, was in no sense a prominent member. The precise dogmata of Mirafloreanism—a nickname given, I believe, in ironic sympathy by Mr. Disraeli—were undefined, but the term gradually became associated with those ideals of conduct, government, and Art which poets imagine, heroes realise, and the ignorant destroy. Men of all, sundry, and opposing beliefs presumed to its credentials. Some, because the club appeared ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... endures the unpleasant interval, steeled against definite pleasures and evident life of today, and worried into an intoxicated colored belief in the expected happiness of the undefined future. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... Philippine, and Caroline Islands, eastern China, Manchuria, and eastern Siberia; (3) the third zone, not clearly defined, including especially the Netherlands Indies, Indo-China, and the whole of China, a zone of undefined extent. The outward form of this subjugated region was to be that of the Greater Japanese Empire, described as the Imperium of the Yellow Race (the main ideas were contained in the Tanaka Memorandum ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the lowest step of the stairway and thought, and thought, and a great dread came over her and would not be beaten back, a dread of something nameless and undefined, a sinister something that hovered over her with great dark wings, like the Thunder Bird. In an agony of love and sorrow Sahwah faced the fact which her prophetic soul, in its new insight, told her, even while her loyal ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... girl's ears in ever increasing volume until the agony she suffered deadened her power to think. She wandered aimlessly about the room, trying to collect her senses, but her mind was a blank. After a few minutes she ran back to the queen, having an undefined purpose of doing something to avert the consequences of her mad act. She at first thought to tell the queen that the Information she had given concerning Mary Stuart's presence in Rutland was false, but she well knew that a lie seldom succeeds; and in this case, even through her clouded ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... was as difficult to read as Colonel Carter's voice had been. It might have meant pleasure at the thought of rest, or anger, or contempt, or almost anything. It was undefined and indefinable. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... rough; and the mules that carried the guns met with such difficulties that the infantry had to turn to, and improve the paths—if paths they could be called, for they were often little better than undefined tracks. As the expedition moved up the valley, the tribesmen opened on them a distant fire; but scattered after a few shells from the mountain guns were thrown among them. The fortified houses, however, were stubbornly held; and indeed, ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... period of refined and exquisite [192] tectonics (as the Greeks called all crafts strictly subordinate to architecture), that Greek art actually begins, in what is called the Heroic Age, that earliest, undefined period of Greek civilisation, the beginning of which cannot be dated, and which reaches down to the first Olympiad, about the year 776 B.C. Of this period we possess, indeed, no direct history, and but few actual monuments, great or small; ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... investigation that guided us through it now flares out upon new regions we did not see before. Like one who goes with a candle into some immense cavern, presently a little circle becomes clear, the shadows vanish before him, and undefined forms grow distinct, he thinks he is near the end, when lo! what seemed a solid boundary of rock dissolves and floats away into a depth of darkness, the path opens into an immense void, new shapes of mystery start out, and he learns this much that he did not know before, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... into its face, he saw a something reigning there: a lofty something, undefined and indistinct, which made it hardly more than a remembrance of that child—as yonder figure might be— yet it was the same: the same: and wore ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... of opinion, I see," wrote the King to Alexander, "of some grave men of wisdom and conscience, that the limitation of time, during which the heretics may live without scandal, may be left undefined; but I feel very keenly the danger of such a proposition. With regard to Holland and Zeeland, or any other provinces or towns, the first step must be for them to receive and maintain alone the exercise of the Catholic religion, and to subject themselves to the Roman church, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ghostly stillness, the exhortation to the living to prepare for death, the solemn prayer, the mournful chant, the funeral cortege, the solemn, tolling bell, the burial. How I suffered during those sad days! What strange undefined fears of the unknown took possession of me! For months afterward, at the twilight hour, I went with my father to the new-made grave. Near it stood two tall poplar trees, against one of which I leaned, while my father threw himself on the grave, with outstretched arms, as if to embrace ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... aurora australis, succeeds a day of perpetual sunshine. All these are on such a scale of sublimity that no pen can adequately describe nor brush portray them. Nowhere else on the face of the globe does there exist such a wide expanse of utter desolation. Yet an undefined attraction lures bold men to fathom the mysteries of these forbidding regions. Dating from 1772, many exploring expeditions have visited the south polar regions ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... tasks, and the other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards—I think I see him now—along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... but with a low vibration of tone; and as he came to his feet he looked very tall and terrible. Ray's blood began to rise, and as he looked about for something undefined he felt the heat and smelled the smoke of the grass fire ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... spoke Stratton saw the man's eyes rest for a moment on the banknotes beneath the letter weight, and an undefined sensation of uneasiness attacked him. He mastered it in an ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook. His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in him. It was constantly in his ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... his eyes on the unmoved and manly countenance of his companion. There was a vague and undefined suspicion in the look; but it vanished, as the practised organs drank in the assurance, which so much physical promise afforded, of the aid of a bold and active mariner. Rather amused than offended by the freedom ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... own story Mr. Hansson informs us that it dealt with "a man who commits a forgery and then tells about it, doing both in a sort of somnambulistic state whereby everything is left vague and undefined." At that moment "Raskolnikov" was in the air, so to speak. And without wanting in any way to suggest imitation, I feel sure that the groundnote of the story was distinctly Dostoievskian. Strindberg himself had been reading Nietzsche ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... general he listened to Chilo's words with pleasure. Though his feeling for Lygia assumed at times the seeming of hatred, he felt a relief when he heard that the religion which she and Pomponia confessed was neither criminal nor repulsive. But a species of undefined feeling rose in him that it was just that reverence for Christ, unknown and mysterious, which created the difference between himself and Lygia; hence he began at once to fear that ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... fire-rimmed by the flickering torchlight. A sound came from afar—a sound not unmelodious but singular beyond power of language to express—a whisper of sinister significance to him who knew its meaning, of sheer mystery to all others. A murmur filled the air, a murmur of undefined noises still far distant. They might have been human, they might have arisen from the flight and terror of beasts, from the movement of vast bodies, from the reverberations of remote music; Earth or Heaven might have bred them, or the upper chambers of the air midway between. ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... pursued. There was, nevertheless, much to be done before the end they both so earnestly desired could be attained. It seemed a simple plan to go to Cardinal Antonelli and to demand the arrest of Del Ferice for his misdeeds; but as yet those misdeeds were undefined, and it was necessary to define them. The Cardinal rarely resorted to such measures except when the case was urgent, and Saracinesca knew perfectly well that it would be hard to prove anything more serious against Del Ferice than the crime of joining in the silly talk ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... into the war through fear or interest. When the war is also maritime, the theater may embrace both hemispheres,—as has happened in contests between France and England since the time of Louis XIV. The theater of a war may thus be undefined, and must, not be confounded with the theater of operations of one or the other army. The theater of a continental war between France and Austria may be confined to Italy, or may, in addition, comprise Germany if the ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... the men of Macedon; and neither one tribe nor the other found any adequate resistance in the luxurious occupants of Babylonia. We may add, with respect to these two earliest monarchies, that the Assyrian was undefined with regard to space, and the Persian fugitive with regard to time. But for the third—the Grecian or Macedonian—we know that the arts of civility, and of civil organization, had made great progress before the Roman strength was measured against ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... does not appear to be any good and valid reason why a Constitution should not be as clearly defined as an Act of Parliament. Undefined Constitutions have worked well at certain periods when there was a tacit general consent as to their meaning, but they have not always been able to withstand the strain of fierce controversy and the coming into ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... the launch on to the rough rocks, aided by Santoris, I was for a moment faint and giddy. The dark mountain summits seemed to swirl round me,—and the glittering water, shining like steel, had the weird effect of a great mirror in which a fluttering vision of something undefined and undeclared rose and passed like a breath. I recovered myself with an effort and stood still, trying to control the foolish throbbing of my heart, while my companion gave a few orders to his men in a language which I thought I knew, though I ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... have!" cried Jane; and both ladies rushed into the kitchen, gave simultaneous and hurried orders to the servant-girl, and sent her out of the house impressed with an undefined feeling that life or death depended on the instant procuring of two ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... astronomy, it borders on the limitless; like geology, it reaches into the vast, undefined past; and like biology, it comprehends all life science; but unlike each, it has no limitation to any sphere. It is equally at home with living forms and with dead matter—equally at home in the humbler spheres of human life and human infirmity, and in the higher spheres of the spirit ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... say. I hope that is all; but be it what it may, I'll make him let you come, and immediately, too.' After she had gone, I experienced a repetition of those undefined doubts which had tortured me for some time after my conversation with Dr. Bryerly. I had truly said, however, I was well enough contented with my mode of life here, for I had been trained at Knowl to a solitude ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... of this passage is of very undefined sense; we can guess at what is meant by the sneer upon the "vaunted Italian schools." There are not only immense gaps, but great gulfs, over which there is no legitimate passage. If these schools have "done so much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... is happy indeed that it is troubled with none of the miscreants. He owned niggers innumerable; but they were only common stock, all of whom he could have lost without feeling any more than ordinary disappointment at the loss of their worth in money. For this one, however, he had a kind of undefined love, which moved his heart most indescribably. Disappointed in the gratification of his desires, he is mortified and maddened to desperation. Why should a slave he had invested so much money in, and ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... unpremeditated reply relieved Zashue of an undefined feeling of suspicion that had arisen within him. During his moment of thoughtfulness he had been led from the accusations of Hayoue against Tyope unconsciously to the accusation which Tyope had launched before ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... away full of that undefined discomfort experienced by generous young spirits when their elders, more worldly-wise (or foolish), fail even to comprehend the purity or loftiness of motive which they themselves thoroughly believe. Yet, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which had been reclaimed, and were inhabited by a considerable population of prosperous farmers. Nowhere did the sudden coming of the flood cause greater consternation than here—strange as that statement may seem. The people had an undefined idea that they were protected by a sort of barrier from ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... for besides the motives supplied by prudence and politeness, the painter experienced a kind of chill and oppressive sensation, something like that which is supposed to affect a man who is placed unconsciously in immediate contact with something to which he has a natural antipathy—an undefined horror and dread while standing in the presence of the eccentric stranger, which made him very unwilling to say anything which might ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... himself to those sacrifices which are incumbent on him; this is a natural, matter-of-course part of a man's duty. As there is no Bible, there is no religious instruction, and the doctrine is quite vague and undefined. The ritual, however, is fixed by tradition in every detail, and if a man attends to it he does his duty; religion is a set of acts properly and exactly done, the proper person sacrificing always to the proper object ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... of any one of these three qualities leaves us in doubt as to the character of a color, just as truly as the character of this studio would remain undefined if the length were omitted and we described it as 22 feet wide by 14 feet high. The imagination would be free to ascribe any length it chose, from 25 to 100 feet. This length might be differently conceived by every individual who tried ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... longing, the while, for a beaker or two of Donatello's Sunshine. It would have been just the wine to cure a lover's melancholy, by illuminating his heart with tender light and warmth, and suggestions of undefined hopes, too ethereal for his morbid humor to examine and ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of any foreign influence working upon him—he could not see that Ashton had in any way exerted a power over him; nor in the new and undefined feelings which had taken possession of him could he recognise the presence of evil. He had consulted conscience, and, he fancied, had satisfactorily met the warnings ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... of deity soon diverged into various ramifications. Only a few of the hymns appear to contain the simple conception of one divine, self-existent, omnipresent Being, and even in these, the idea of one God, present in all nature, is somewhat nebulous and undefined." One of the earliest deifications that we can trace was that of Varuna, who represented the overhanging sky. The hymns addressed to Varuna are not only the earliest, but they are the loftiest and most spiritual in their ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a reflection cast by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this monster face, far away in the rear, on the top of those undefined and gently undulating sandhills, three apocalyptic signs rise up against the sky, those rose-coloured triangles, regular as the figures of geometry, but so vast in the distance that they inspire you with fear. They seem to be luminous of themselves, so vividly do they stand out in their ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... given in a former chapter. With regard, again, to the civil government of the country, it has been remarked that the pashas are so frequently changed, or so often at war with each other, that the jurisdiction of the magistrates in cities is so undefined, and the hereditary or assumed rights of the sheiks of particular districts are so various, that it is extremely difficult to discover any settled rule by which the administration is conducted. The whole Turkish empire, indeed, has the appearance of being so precariously balanced, that the ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... an undefined, half-recognized force in nature which leads many to seek to balance themselves by marrying their opposites in temperament. While the general working of this tendency is, no doubt, beneficent, it not unfrequently brings together those who are so radically different, that they ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... dwelling together like Tekke Turcomans, of whom we read that they live for plunder only, and that each man of them is entirely independent, acknowledging no constituted authority, but that some among them exercise a tacit and undefined influence over the others. Let us suppose these molecules capable of memory, both in their capacity as individuals and as societies, and able to transmit their memories to their descendants from the traditions of the dimmest past to the experiences of their own lifetime. Some of these ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... that had brought him so far was too strong for such undefined warnings. Once more he turned the key in the lock, and ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... once I saw a shape, ghostly and undefined, flit swiftly from the gloom of the boat-house, and next moment a convict was standing beside the Imp, gaunt and tall and wild-looking in the moonlight. His hideous clothes, stained with mud and the green slime of ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... sunlight here and there, streaming upon it, but less than you now have falling on the wall. As it is now, the cool gray of the dress is not sufficiently thrown up, it, like the wall, is in shade except where the sun touches the head and face; but, with a dark cool green, somewhat undefined, and not too much broken up by the forms of the foliage, the figure would be thrown forward, although still remaining in the shade, and I am sure the picture would gain at once in strength and repose. Now, as ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... viewless, sightless; inconspicuous, unconspicuous^; unseen &c (see) &c 441; covert &c (latent) 526; eclipsed, under an eclipse. dim &c (faint) 422; mysterious, dark, obscure, confused; indistinct, indistinguishable; shadowy, indefinite, undefined; ill- defined, ill-marked; blurred, fuzzy, out of focus; misty &c (opaque) 426; delitescent^. hidden, obscured, covered, veiled (concealed) 528. Phr. full many a flower is born to blush ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in this play is singularly varied and composite; the names of the persons being a mixture Of Spanish, Italian, and English. Though the scene is laid in Illyria, the period of the action is undefined, and the manners and costumes are left in the freedom of whatever time we may choose antecedent to that of the composition, provided we do not exceed the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the bank parlor, where Roland was usually to be met with at this hour. There was an unspoken hope in their hearts that he would be there, and so deliver them from the undefined trouble and terror they were suffering. But only Acton was there, seated at Roland's desk, and turning over the papers in it with a rapid and reckless hand. His face was hidden behind the great flap of the desk, and though he glanced over it ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... like her—no. And then as he rolled along he began to wonder what part Gray might be playing in her mind and heart. The vision of her seated in the porch thinking—thinking—would not leave him, and a pang of undefined remorse for leaving her behind started within him. She, too, had outgrown his and her people as he had—perhaps she was as rebellious against her fate as he was against his own, but, unlike him, utterly helpless. And suddenly the boy's remorse merged into a sympathetic terror for the loneliness ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... thereby augmented. If he succeeds in obtaining the presence of three generals, he obtains a victory over a rival who cannot obtain more than two. The general, on his side, gets a first-rate dinner, a la russe, and acquires an undefined right to request subscriptions for ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... not grasp it so well then as I did afterwards, though I had an undefined feeling that my fellow clerk's company would not be agreeable to them; and when I left them that night, it was with the feeling that it was quite certain that my new friends would start, possibly before the month was out; while as far as I was concerned, my ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... as Hetty's had been to her. He had lived more within himself; and he had never ceased to sorrow. His sorrow, being for one dead, was without hope; save that intangible hope to which our faith so pathetically clings, of the remote and undefined possibilities of eternity. Hetty's sorrow was full of hope, being persuaded that all was well with those whom she did ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... two, more or less, I rule and possess, One man, for some cause undefined, Was least to ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... clung to his hand, pressing it close against her heart. Instinctively she understood the power of her weakness, and exercised it to the full. Perhaps, also, an undefined fear of Kresney gave her courage to persist; and the least mention of the man's name at that instant might ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... class in which we might expect to find the 'just.' 'Not-just is not-honourable' is neither a false nor an unmeaning proposition. The reason is that the negative proposition has really passed into an undefined positive. To say that 'not-just' has no more meaning than 'not-honourable'—that is to say, that the two cannot in any degree be distinguished, is clearly repugnant to the common use ...
— Sophist • Plato
... called a vitalist, and in a sense I am; but I am not a vitalist if vitalism means an appeal to an undefined 'vital force' (an objectionable term I have never thought of using) as against the laws of chemistry and physics." "There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about every vital action, but for a complete understanding of it something beyond ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... reclaimed, and were inhabited by a considerable population of prosperous farmers. Nowhere did the sudden coming of the flood cause greater consternation than here—strange as that statement may seem. The people had an undefined idea that they were protected by a sort of barrier ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... side, regarded the scene with much interest. She could not avoid remarking the glances of admiration which the young chief cast at her, and was compelled more than once to turn round and speak to Nigel, who remained close to her. He himself observed the looks of the young chief, which created an undefined feeling in his breast, though his pride forbade him in any way to ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... laid a little weight on my heart, which had just been springing with undefined hope. I had been thinking of somebody else who might perhaps be ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... enigma!—whose magnetic glances and countless charms subdue man's sterner nature—to you I dedicate the following pages. The subject on which I am about to treat is the gravest, the lightest, the most decided, the most undefined, the most earthly, the most spiritual, the saddest, and the gayest, the most individual, and at the same time the most universal you can imagine. To you, ladies, I address myself. You who form the keys on which the eternal and infinite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... palpitated as she thought that she might have to undergo another tete-a-tete with her lover. But it palpitated in vain. It so turned out that Alaric either avoided, or, at any rate, did not use the privilege, and Linda returned home with an undefined feeling of gentle disappointment. She had fully made up her mind to be very staid, very discreet, and very collected; to take a leaf out of her sister's book, and give him no encouragement whatever; she ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... BEGINNING.—There is a charm in opening manhood which has commended itself to the imagination in every age. The undefined hopes and promises of the future—the dawning strength of intellect—the vigorous flow of passion—the very exchange of home ties and protected joys for free and manly pleasures, give to this period an interest and excitement ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Gold Coast, or Coast of Guinea, the Danes had long held certain positions or forts, named Christiansbergh, Augustabergh, Kongensteen, and Prindsensteen; connected with these was an undefined amount of territory. The Danish merchants, who at first derived some profit from these establishments, soon found that they could obtain from Great Britain more cheaply the various articles of that commerce, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... as admirably felt as expressed, and to those acquainted with and accustomed to love the works of the painter, it leaves nothing to be asked for; but we must again remind Lord Lindsay, that he has throughout left the artistical orbit of Giotto undefined, and the offense of his manner unremoved, as far as regards the uninitiated spectator. We question whether from all that he has written, the untraveled reader could form any distinct idea of the painter's peculiar merits or methods, or that the estimate, if formed, might not afterwards expose ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the meshes of subtle philosophical speculation, derived from the most complex sources. To deal with the facts of classic art, which is concerned with seeking a clearly-defined perfection, is a simple matter compared with the unbounded and undefined concepts of a school which waged war upon "the deadliness of ascertained facts" and immersed itself in vague intimations of glories that were to be. Its most authorized exponent declared it to be "the delineation of sentimental ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the curve. The curve indicates the range of possibilities, the ordinate shows the choice that has been made. Now it is clear at once that this choice has not been made suddenly but gradually. Halfway of the development, the choice is halfway determined, but the other half is still undefined. The first half is the same for all the organs of the plant, and is therefore termed individual; the second differs in the separate members, and consequently is known as partial. Which of the two halves is the greater and which the lesser, of course depends on ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... soon heard to utter shrieks and gasps of mingled delight and terror at the stories she told them, which stories invariably fascinated them to an extraordinary degree, yet left them with a sense of undefined horror that was half delightful, ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the peninsula of Florida, thence a strip along the gulf extending to and including the city of New Orleans, and she held all of that territory west of the Mississippi extending from the Father of Waters to the Pacific ocean, and from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the undefined boundaries of the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... the Afridi villages lay. The work had been fatiguing, for the country was very rough; and the mules that carried the guns met with such difficulties that the infantry had to turn to, and improve the paths—if paths they could be called, for they were often little better than undefined tracks. As the expedition moved up the valley, the tribesmen opened on them a distant fire; but scattered after a few shells from the mountain guns were thrown among them. The fortified houses, however, were stubbornly held; and indeed, were only carried after the ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... forfeited possessions of Ghibelline rebels, to hunt out suspected citizens, to prosecute them for Ghibellinism, to judge them, and to punish them as traitors to the commonwealth. This body, like a little State within the State, proved formidable to the republic itself through the unlimited and undefined sway it exercised over burghers whom it chose to tax with treason. In course of time it became the oligarchical element within the Florentine democracy, and threatened to change the free constitution of the city into a government conducted by a few ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... memories of his friends present to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters—for he wrote with abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to keep his letters—are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of romantic valetudinarianism. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... quite willing to acknowledge the part religion has played in the past in the evolution of rational life, and to look upon it as a necessary factor in the earlier stages of that process whose place is to be taken hereafter by some as yet undefined substitute. If indeed Nature thus works by illusions and justifies the lying means by the benevolent end, it is hard to believe in a moral government of the universe, or to hope that an "absolute morality"—righteousness ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... doomed no duty e'er to pay;- Grown, made, and smoked in a few short hours. Smoke not - smoke not! Smoke not, smoke not, the weed you smoke may change The healthfulness of your stomachic tone; Things to the eye grow queer and passing strange; All thoughts seem undefined - save one - to be alone! Smoke not ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Death had been kind to her; no one so dear had been thus carried up to the very brink of the grave. All that had been sweet and strong in her friendship with Elsie now flooded in upon her in a mighty wave of undefined emotion. She was immediately conscious only of the wasted figure before her, and its peril, but back of consciousness were unformed memories of their girlhood together, of the inseparable intimacy of their young womanhood, and of that shy and tender time ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... taken as the basis of the calculation. There were several talents in use in the currency of ancient days. But the very point of the expression is not the specification of an exact amount, but the use of a round number which is to suggest an undefined magnitude. 'Ten thousand talents,' according to one estimate, is some two millions and a quarter ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... commercial importance, considerable numbers having been gathered by the crew of the Dolphin at their leisure time, the aggregate value of which, I am told, is between 500 and 600 pounds; besides pearls, one of which has been valued by competent persons at 25 pounds. The limits of the bed are as yet undefined, but there is good reason to believe, from the position of it, that with proper apparatus ships could ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... there. His state of mind was that of the stable-puppy who knows he MUST not be found in the parlour. Not thrice in his life had Verman been within the doors of White-Folks' House, and, above all things, he felt that it was in some undefined way vital to him to get out of White-Folks' House unobserved and unknown. It was in his very blood to be sure ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... him, and it was quite her way to say what she thought; yet she did not say it. She had an undefined, shadowy impression that the hearing would not be grateful to her companion. Her reply was a very inconclusive remark, that she had not seen much of Mr. Masters; and an inquiry where Mr. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... the old and the new. The public mind had utterly revolted against the system of indulgences; but it would be very rash to assume that men's ideas of the eternal state were not largely and widely modified by an undefined tradition of purifying fires. Although this may not have been the case with the clergy and others who were familiar with controversy, there was certainly among them also a strong disinclination to pronounce any decided or dogmatical opinion about that ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 1864 by the court of appeals in Kentucky, and again in 1869 under the same presiding Judge Robertson. But Chief Justice Williams rebukes this strange ruling in most emphatic language. He says: "In all the vague, uncertain, intangible, and undefined theories of the most impractical metaphysician in psychology or moral insanity, no court of last resort in England or America, so far as has been brought to our knowledge, ever before announced ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... so, too," agreed Amy fervently. "I've tried Aunt Abigail's cooking once or twice." Whether it was due to the hope of arresting Aunt Abigail's supper preparations, before they had gone too far, or because of some other undefined anxiety, the line advanced ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... the boatbuilder's heart was, somehow, heavy with undefined dread as to what he was to ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... extraordinary splendour. September rains after a dry summer washed the air and filled the tarns and becks. Wherever she went she was accompanied by that most delicious sound of falling waters. The clouds, which through July and August had been nothing but undefined, barren vapour, gathered themselves together and the interspaces of sky were once more brilliantly blue. Day after day earth and heaven were almost too beautiful, for it was painful that her finite apprehension should ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... that rumors of the advent of a strange and mysterious race should have spread gradually among the Indian tribes along the great table-land of the Cordilleras, and should have shaken the hearts of the stoutest warriors with feelings of undefined dread, as of some impending calamity. In this state of mind, it was natural that physical convulsions, to which that volcanic country is peculiarly subject, should have made an unwonted impression on their minds; and that the phenomena, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... are perfectly undefined, but we do hope to escape England.... Robert talks of Egypt for the winter. I don't know what may happen; and in the meantime would rather not be pulled and pulled by kind people in England, who want me or fancy they do. You know everybody is as free ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... like Joan, fast asleep. Bambo also was hovering on the undefined borderland, when the sound of footsteps from the field above the kiln caught his quick ear, and with a sudden jerk of his great head he sat up to listen. At the same time a flare of light from a lantern streamed over the top ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... Vengeance. All suddenly, the mists of my mind cleared; I moved no longer in a deaf, blind stupor. A flash of lightning danced vividly before my eyes, followed by a crashing peal of thunder, I saw to what end of a wild journey I had come! Those heavy gates—that undefined stretch of land—those ghostly glimmers of motionless white like spectral mile-stones emerging from the gloom—I knew it all too well—it was the cemetery! I looked through the iron palisades with the feverish interest of one who watches the stage curtain rise on the last ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... unconscionable French librettist without this further desecration which effectually dispelled the last glimmer of the poetical light that ought always to shine about this strange child of the South. Too much of tropical passion, too much of undefined longing, too much of tenderness the part could hardly be invested with, but it is easily made silly by over-acting in the very place where the tendency to do so is strongest. The whole opera is one that must either be represented with extreme care in avoiding extravagant expression, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... her work the paramount object. But critics have lashed her out of these erratic ways, and she is now become the meek hand maid of Clio, creeping obediently in the track of the greater Muse, and never venturing on more than colouring and working up the grand outlines that her mistress has left undefined. Thus, in the present tale, though it would have been far more convenient not to have spread the story over such a length of time, and to have made the catastrophe depend upon the heroes and heroines, instead of keeping them mere ineffective spectators, or only engaged ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... author of great industry and learning, but full of prejudices, and of no penetration, Mr. Carte, has taken advantage of the undefined terms of the Scotch homage, and has pretended that it was done for Lothian and Galloway: that is, all the territories of the country now called Scotland, lying south of the Clyde and Forth. But to refute this pretension at once, we need only consider, that if these territories were held in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... drawn into the war through fear or interest. When the war is also maritime, the theater may embrace both hemispheres,—as has happened in contests between France and England since the time of Louis XIV. The theater of a war may thus be undefined, and must, not be confounded with the theater of operations of one or the other army. The theater of a continental war between France and Austria may be confined to Italy, or may, in addition, comprise Germany if the German ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... through the murder of Charles, to the despotism of Cromwell—how again that produced a restoration which settled none of the great moral or political questions which had generated all those agitations, and which, in return, those agitations had complicated and inflamed—and how, at last, the undefined, discordant, and antagonistic pretensions of the royal and democratical elements were reconciled by the Revolution and the Bill of Rights—and finally, whether with too much or too little violence to the principles of the ancient constitution—all these topics, we say, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and remained gloomy; absent-minded rather than thoughtful, feeling in his soul a new anxiety as yet undefined, the secret ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... a darkness shaping itself forth from the air in very undefined outline. I can not say it was of a human form, and yet it had more resemblance to a human form, or rather shadow, than to anything else. As it stood, wholly apart and distinct from the air and the light around it, its dimensions seemed gigantic, the summit nearly touching the ceiling. While I gazed, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... all times a calm and confident repose in himself. But he, in whom talents, genius, and principle are united, will have a firm mind, in whatever embarrassment he may be placed; will look steadily at the most undefined shapes of difficulty and danger, of possible mistake or mischance; nor will they appear to him more formidable than they really are. For HIS attention is not distracted—he has but one business, and that is with the object before him. Neither ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... more than the sympathetic chords, in themselves meaningless. The gloomy world not merely accords with the desponding views, but seems somehow to back them. You are conscious of a great environing Presence standing by and looking on approvingly. From all points in the horizon a voice, soft and undefined, seems to whisper to your heart, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... edge—scarce above the line of foam she cuts—her lower deck lies black and undefined in the shadow of the great mass above it. Suddenly it lights up with a lurid flash, as the furnace-doors swing wide open; and in the hot glare the negro stokers—their stalwart forms jetty black, naked to the waist and streaming with exertion that makes the muscles strain out in great cords—show ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Hamlet's description—the ways of the world "flat, stale, and unprofitable;" the face of nature gloomy; the sky a "congregation of pestilent vapours." It was not the hazard of life; exposed, as it might be, in the midst of scenes of which the horrors were daily deepening; it was a general undefined feeling, of having undertaken a task too difficult for my powers, and of having engaged in a service in which I could neither advance with hope nor retreat ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... The soldier's frame was filled; and many a thought Of strange foreboding hurried through his mind, As underneath he felt the fevered earth Jarring and lifting; and the massive walls, Heard harshly grate and strain: yet knew he not, While evils undefined and yet to come Glanced through his thoughts, what deep and cureless wound Fate had already given.—Where, man of woe! Where, wretched father! is thy boy? Thou call'st His name in vain:—he can ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... there can be found in his plays any deep search into nature, any accurate discriminations of kindred qualities, or nice display of passion in its progress; all is general and undefined. Nor does he much interest or affect the auditor, except in Jane Shore, who is always seen and heard with pity. Alicia is a character of empty noise, with no resemblance to real sorrow, or to ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... for his sustenance, and still residing in the humble dwelling which he had occupied when he was a warehouse porter. In spite of his success he was a sad, silent, morose man, solitary in his habits, and possessed always of a vague undefined yearning, a dull feeling of dissatisfaction and of craving which never abandoned him. Often he would strive with his poor crippled brain to pierce the curtain which divided him from the past, and to solve the enigma of his youthful existence, but though he ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... spring, for his father took to his bed with the first winter frosts, and in spite of the duteous cares lavished upon him by his son and daughter-in-law, passed from his bed to his grave at the Christmas feast. Richard Talbot inherited house and lands, with the undefined sense of feudal obligation to the head of his name, and ere long he was called upon to fulfil those obligations by service to ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Wing do not rely solely on the religious base. They use all the arguments. It is, according to them, unsafe to live in Ireland. (Let us leave this insurrection of a week out of the question.) Life is not safe in Ireland. Property shivers in terror of daily or nightly appropriation. Other, undefined, but even more woeful glooms and creeps, wriggle ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... Lord Dun-severic's grave face, and his summons to Neal had filled Una's mind with an undefined dread of some threatening evil. She was nearly as anxious as her aunt to know what was to happen. The prospect of a scamper across country through the rain daunted her very little. She had no doubt of her ability to keep in touch with the horsemen without being discovered. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... on to Downside. He intended, should May not have returned, to leave Julia there, and go in search of the mad woman. An undefined fear seized him that something might have happened to May. On reaching the house, Harry threw himself from his horse. Miss Jane, in a state of great agitation, was at the front door directing Susan to summon the gardener, that he might ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... scarcely recognizable as the high-colored, powerful woman for whom he had helped build the shanty in March. There were times now when it seemed as if she were appealing to him, and his heart ached with undefined sorrow as he looked about her ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... training, as they would then be followed from choice rather than necessity; for his method of education made each of them into a lawgiver like himself. The trifling conventions of everyday life were best left undefined by hard-and-fast laws, so that they might from time to time receive corrections or additions from men educated in the spirit of the Lacedaemonian system. On this education the whole scheme of Lykurgus's laws depended. One rhetra, as we have seen, forbade the use of written laws. Another ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... the name passed his lips than the stranger drew back suddenly, with a hasty exclamation. Some suspicion seemed to engender a mixture of terror and defiance which placed him on his guard against undue intimacy, even when some undefined fear was knocking at his heart. "Who are you?" he demanded in a steadier tone. "How ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... see not: Yet the pagan builds his shrine, And keeps his fires divine Forever bright, nor darkly doubts there be not Enough of grace and power Within those eyes that glower To read his soul. To him they are not blind, For some dim, undefined Reward of faith that thrills his untaught breast Links up his baser mind To the clear eyes of God that burn behind The stony brow. It is a creed professed Before a deity not quenched in space, But one to whom his bands Can lift adoring hands, ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... have given in a former chapter. With regard, again, to the civil government of the country, it has been remarked that the pashas are so frequently changed, or so often at war with each other, that the jurisdiction of the magistrates in cities is so undefined, and the hereditary or assumed rights of the sheiks of particular districts are so various, that it is extremely difficult to discover any settled rule by which the administration is conducted. The whole ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... taken his mother and sister home, he stole off by himself for a solitary walk. The night was wonderful, and the young man, who was in a whirl of undefined emotion, unconsciously felt the need of a lesson of eternal peace. The advent of the strange girl, and her unprecedented conduct had caused in him a sort of masculine vertigo over the whole situation. Why in the name of common sense was that girl ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... "Still, I had an undefined feeling that Annie was in danger, and I wrote to Lucy about her, asking Lucy to induce her to break away from the gay life she was leading. Soon afterward, I went to sea again, and, during my absence, Henry was given command of one of the finest ships in the line. Two years passed quickly ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... proceeded the trees grew denser and the path more obscure. All at once, rounding a sharp turn, the path ended in a valley carpeted with fern. This was the place that always filled Emmeline with an undefined dread. One side of it was all built up in terraces with huge blocks of stone—blocks of stone so enormous, that the wonder was how the ancient builders had put ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Mason is at an end. I was very glad to hear it, for I thought that Sir Peregrine was going to do a very foolish thing." And then there were a few further remarks on that subject, made probably by Lady Staveley with some undefined intention of inducing her daughter to think that Peregrine Orme had come over ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... man looked at the young one with an air half apprehensive, half perplexed, as if scenting the far approach of some undefined difficulty. He passed his white hand over his forehead. "Everything seems out of joint-to-day, Helwyse. Nothing looks or seems natural, except you! What is the matter with me?—what is ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... of natural theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence: If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... compelled to dwell without death among rocks and hills, lakes and seas, bushes and forest, till the day of judgment, the fairies then have the chance of salvation. Indeed, the fairies are themselves believed to have great doubts of a future existence, though, like many men, entertaining undefined hopes of happiness; and hence the enmity which some of them have for mankind, who, they acknowledge, will live eternally. Thus their actions are balanced between generosity and ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... suffering women and children, by the keen excitement of the struggle, by the religious scruples sternly suppressed but occasionally asserting themselves, now on one side and now on the other, and by that undefined psychology of the crowd which we understand so little. All of these factors also influence the public and do much to determine popular sympathy and judgment. In the early days of the Pullman strike, as I was coming down in the elevator of the Auditorium hotel ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... drinking a flask of Montefiascone; longing, the while, for a beaker or two of Donatello's Sunshine. It would have been just the wine to cure a lover's melancholy, by illuminating his heart with tender light and warmth, and suggestions of undefined hopes, too ethereal for his morbid humor to examine and ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unexplored—that mysterious expanse of waters which filled navigators with awe and dread, and which was not destined to be crossed until the stars should cease to be the only guide. On the northwest was the undefined region of Scandinavia, into which the Roman arms never penetrated, peopled by those barbarians who were to be the future conquerors of Rome, and the creators of a new and more glorious civilization,—those ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... trustworthy gauge of probability that he has is an immediate appeal to consciousness as to whether he feels the probability. Thus every man learns for himself to endow his own sense of probability with a certain undefined but massive weight of authority. Now it is this test of relative conceivability which all men apply in varying degrees to the question of Theism. For if, from education and organised habits of thought, the probability in this matter appears to a man to incline in a certain direction, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... they drifted into the nebulous territory of dreams was undefined. The actual was dropping away into an impalpable mistiness as the earth drops ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... must look for practical guidance and encouragement in those unforeseeable cases when the mother perishes in connection with childbirth. It is he who is in the best position to prevent the father from unconsciously attaching blame to the unoffending child and harboring an undefined resentment which may adversely affect both lives. The doctor can help the bereaved father to cling to his dream of family life, can assist him in building a happy home for his motherless child or children, or can advise him on problems which ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... interested him, and, most unreasonably, he had felt himself to be provoked. When next he went to Bolton Street he found that Lady Ongar had left London. She had gone down to Ongar Park, and, as far as the woman at the house knew, intended to remain there till after Easter. Harry had some undefined idea that she should not have taken such a step without telling him. Had she not declared to him that he was her only friend? When a friend is going out of town, leaving an only friend behind, that friend ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... discarded wife, life had now but one hope. The only star that shone in the blackness of her heaven, was the undefined prospect of seeing her rival's blood flow. She would greatly have preferred taking her life herself; and as she left the wigwam of the chief, she grasped the handle of her knife—how quick her heart beat! it might be now ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... lack of skill. For they would not fly to the refuge of falsehood for any other reason than that they are not vigorous enough to elicit beauty from the subject itself. Truth, indeed, is limited and defined, but the realm of lies is unlimited and undefined. Hence the one offers difficulties for invention, the other is obvious and easy, and for that reason also ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... addition to this circumscribed application, it is moreover indistinct by reason of the use of the word Ideas, a word to which so many different significations have been attached by different writers that its meaning is vague and undefined—to convey the impression of Laws or Principles. The same defect exists in the detailed exposition is perhaps the most extended and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... would appear to indicate the serious disposition of the new Age. If we find the thinkers of humanity uniformly tending towards a given direction, we may be sure there is an undefined, perhaps unconscious, though none the less real, desire on the part of the age to be led thither. Thus, at the close of the last century, Immanuel Kant, while undermining the ground on which the faith of old rested, attempted that new presentation of religion, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... people he had known, saw their faces and heard their voices, but not one of them would do. No, he wanted a friend, the friend he had often dreamed of, whose thoughts would be his thoughts, with whom there would be no need of speech. Then his longing swelled, grew fiercer and more undefined, and a sudden burst of energy convulsed him and struggled to find vent. His breath came hard, and he stretched his arms out into the night, uncertainly, as if to grasp something he did not see; but they fell to his side ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... its Romance elements, it should be French and not Aquitanian. If the creation of Normandy had done much to weaken France as a duchy, it had done not a little towards the making of France as a kingdom. Laon and its crown, the undefined influence that went with the crown, the prospect of future advance to the south, had been bought by the loss of Rouen and of the ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the tram-men nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... this diverging path in portions of its length, and Stephen was reminded that the pair in front of him had taken this route by the occasional rattle of loose stones under their feet. Stephen climbed in the same direction, but for some undefined reason he trod more softly than did those preceding him. His mind was unconsciously in exercise upon whom the woman might be—whether a visitor to The Crags, a servant, or Elfride. He put it to himself yet more forcibly; could the lady be Elfride? A possible ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... same time, it is impossible not to observe that, quite irrespective of political opinions, there is a wide gulf between the great mass of the employers and the employed. There is dislike—there is undefined distrust. Those who doubt this will do well to investigate working-class opinions for themselves, not at election time, and in such a familiar manner as to get at the truth without compliments. Probably in times of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... the world in possession of certain characteristic and relatively fixed behavior patterns which we call instincts. This is his racial inheritance which he shares with all members of the species. He comes into the world, also, endowed with certain undefined capacities for learning other forms of behavior, capacities which vary greatly in different individuals. These individual differences and the instincts are what is called ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards—I think I see him now—along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... ingenuity of the prisoner would tell strongly in his favour. The woman and child would bear witness to his tenderness and skill, and plead for him. As he had said, the convict deserved a pardon. The mean, bad man, burning with wounded vanity and undefined jealousy, waited for some method to suggest itself, by which he might claim the credit of the escape, and snatch from the prisoner, who had dared to rival him, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... man above turned back into the room his face, wearing the look of one far gone in despair, was contorted with passion. Fear, confusion, and undefined soul-longing seemed to move rapidly across it, each leaving its momentary impression, and all mingling at times in a surging flood that swelled the veins of his temples to the point of rupture. Mechanically he paced ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... horror at the prospect before him, still clung to some vague and undefined hopes that at the very last moment some chance might intervene to prevent the terrible tragedy of a marriage with Rita. The appearance of Harry seemed a good omen. He hailed it as such; and had an angel appeared, the sight could ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... pervades this remarkable fragment was strangely recalled by the following passage in a recent book that has interested many:—"Masses of strange, nameless masonry, of an antiquity dateless and undefined, bedded themselves in the rocks, or overhung the clefts of the hills; and out of a great tomb by the wayside, near the arch, a forest of laurel forced its way, amid delicate and graceful frieze-work, moss-covered and stained with age. In this strangely ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... why was not this counterfeit in its coffin, in which it had been buried with all the rites of the Church? The coffin? Yes, the coffin was there at his feet, with its brass plate, which had rusted at the corners; and below it, in some undefined depth, was another coffin, the sarcophagus of Tudor himself. He stooped and shifted the candle. On Camilla's coffin were a number of screws, rolled about in various directions; only one screw was in its place. He seized the screwdriver—and in that moment a tiny ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... long day of events with Artheris, with Carter Hazzard, and young Rosenthal, she chanced to awaken one Saturday morning to a pleasant, undefined sensation that life was sweet. She thought of Mr. Hazzard, whom she had seen twice since their first meeting, but not alone again. And she reflected with satisfaction that she knew her part of "The Amazons" perfectly, and so was ready for the first rehearsal ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Madeira to Melbourne. For an hour or so we were furiously angry, and were possessed with an insane sense that we must go straight to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen and his men in some undefined fashion or other there and then. Such a mood could not and did not bear a moment's reflection; but it was natural enough. We had just paid the first instalment of the heart-breaking labour of making a path ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... battlements seen Parsifal approaching, who, thrust out from the Castle of the Grail, had, by the peculiar magic of the place, found the path to it obliterated. He had come forth with the exalted but undefined sense of a great task to perform. But, even as the road to the Castle of the Grail was difficult to find, the road to Klingsor's castle was easy and overeasy; it would seem that for the feet of a votary of the Grail all roads led to it. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... to him than fear. He fancied himself already relieved of the Colonel. But the spectacle presented to his eyes suddenly diverted the course of his ideas, and the inconsolable lover began laughing like a fool. A noise of kicks, blows, and slaps; an undefined group rolling on the floor in the convulsions of a desperate struggle—so much was all he could see and understand at the first glance. Soon Fougas, lit up by the ruddy glow of the candle, discovered that he was struggling with Gothon, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... country. That is something. But who or what determines the country? Is the country the whole territory of the globe? That will not be said, especially since the dispersion of mankind and their division into separate nations. Is the territory indefinite or undefined? Then indefinite or undefined are its inhabitants, or the people invested with the rights of society. Is it defined and its boundaries fixed? Who has done it? The people. But who are the people? ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... less than you now have falling on the wall. As it is now, the cool gray of the dress is not sufficiently thrown up, it, like the wall, is in shade except where the sun touches the head and face; but, with a dark cool green, somewhat undefined, and not too much broken up by the forms of the foliage, the figure would be thrown forward, although still remaining in the shade, and I am sure the picture would gain at once in strength and repose. Now, as to the other. It is almost painfully sombre, it wants relief. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... special class to take care of it; every one has to attend himself to those sacrifices which are incumbent on him; this is a natural, matter-of-course part of a man's duty. As there is no Bible, there is no religious instruction, and the doctrine is quite vague and undefined. The ritual, however, is fixed by tradition in every detail, and if a man attends to it he does his duty; religion is a set of acts properly and exactly done, the proper person sacrificing always to the proper object in ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... crater, remains accessible p 232 even during periods of eruption. It is impossible, without an exact representation of the configuration — the normal type, as it were, of fire-emitting mountains, to form a just idea of those phenomena which, owing to fantastic descriptions and an undefined phraseology, have long been comprised under the head of 'craters, cones of eruption', and 'volcanoes'. The marginal ledges of craters vary much less than one would be led to suppose. A comparison of Saussure's measurements ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... she tapped upon the wood-work with the handle of her sunshade. This summons eliciting no response, she repeated it; but by-and-by the opening of a door within the house let out upon her the sound of Sennacherib's voice, hitherto audible only as an undefined and surly buzz. ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... and perhaps because of the same conditions, had grown to regard Covington with even more cordial aversion. The only positive grievance he had against him was the success he had gained with Alice; but, in an undefined way, he felt instinctively that this man possessed every Machiavellian attribute in the calendar of dishonor. With an effort to be just, Allen mentally made a generous discount to offset any possible prejudice, but even then Covington measured up shockingly bad. If Alice ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... or even regard for Philip Rainham, whom he contemplated with that undefined disdain which a younger man so often feels for one who is too old to be on his own level, and too young to inspire reverence. The half-pitying regard which Mrs. Sylvester bestowed on the man who had been to her husband as a very dear younger brother ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... however, suppose that I even then entertained the purpose of taking away my enemy's life. No, I could not bring my mind exactly to that; but I had a vague, undefined hope, that if we met, some new provocation on his part would afford me just occasion for avenging myself on all; so ingenious, my dear friend, is the sophistry ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... from suicide! I accept with grateful submission whatever of after-life the Supreme Lord gives—or does not give. My desire cannot affect His actions, and in fact I never have been able to work myself into any desire for a future so undefined and unimaginable. This will show how ill I deserve a little of (shall I say) praise or compliment ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... four attendants, Valeria set off to the monastery, while Fabio remained at home, and wandered about the garden till his wife's return, trying to comprehend what had happened to her, and a victim to constant fear and wrath, and the pain of undefined suspicions.... More than once he went up to the pavilion; but Muzzio had not returned, and the Malay gazed at Fabio like a statue, obsequiously bowing his head, with a well-dissembled—so at least it seemed to Fabio—smile on his bronzed face. Meanwhile, Valeria had in confession ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... no word of her double sorrow and her irreparable loss. Her love for her remaining child never showed itself in caresses, and was not even discernible in her speech; but in spite of her reserve there was an undefined feeling in most people's minds that Mrs. Ogilvie idolized her son. Of the two who were dead no one ever heard her speak. Whatever she thought of them seemed to be buried in her heart as deeply as though that heart had been their graves. And there ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... before the date of the excursion, Eli had been solemn and tremulous, as with joy; but now, on the eve of the great event, he shrank back from it, with an undefined notion that it was like death, and that he was not prepared. Next morning, however, when they all rose and took their early breakfast, preparatory to starting at five, he showed no sign of indecision, and even went about his outdoor tasks ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... difficult to understand until you get the trick of it. And the trick of it is in the accent and intonation, and not so much in any peculiar form of words. They have a peculiar way of dropping their voices, too, which is sometimes disconcerting. But it is a clean wholesome language, undefined by the disgusting and childish obscenity which is too often a disgrace to other districts in England. It reminds me a little of the Scottish tongue, but rather more of the country speech in the northern parts of Yorkshire, but in some ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... myriads of little colored lights, and the extravagantly dented profile of the mountains is delineated on the starlit sky, blue upon blue, transparency upon transparency. A corner of the harbor also is visible, far up, undefined, like a lake lost in clouds the water, faintly illumined by a ray of moonlight, making it shine ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... eagerly anticipating this picnic, and now she seemed to be quite neglected, while every one else was gay and happy. She had not the courage to make her way through the visitors to reach Julia at the other end of the boat, for she had an undefined feeling that if she went she would not be welcomed there. Her thoughts flew back to the one spot of earth where she was always wanted and ever welcomed, and ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... not succeed in absorbing all my attention. That old document kept working in my brain. My head throbbed with excitement, and I felt an undefined uneasiness. I was possessed with a presentiment of ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... were the characters, that it was not easy to resolve them into letters, or to believe that they were anything but arbitrary and dismal blots and scrawls upon the yellow paper; without meaning, vague, like the misty and undefined germs of thought as they exist in our minds before clothing themselves in words. These, however, as he concentrated his mind upon them, took distincter shape, like cloudy stars at the power of the telescope, and became sometimes English, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... more correctly than the state to which the name is usually applied. I once took an enormous dose of this substance. After suffering from a series of symptoms which it is not necessary here to detail, I was seized with a horrible undefined fear, as of impending death, and began at the same time to have marked periods when all connection seemed to be severed between the external world and myself. During these periods I was unconscious in so far ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Miss Willis fell to surveying the room; with an undefined hope, perhaps, that it would throw some further light upon the young doctor's character. It was essentially the home of a busy man. Every article had a use and a definite one. The spirit of the place was contagious, and presently ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... and indifference, since no efforts will avail if they are not to be partakers of these, to them, forbidden streams of the river of the water of life. Or, perhaps, this gloomy doctrine produces a sullen suspicion, vague and undefined, of the rectitude of God, and thus alienates still more those hearts which are already adverse to ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... long delay of the Directory, and thought he could not do better to force the hand of the Directory than to start an expedition himself. Accordingly he took command of a force of about a thousand men in number which had been placed at his disposal for an undefined date, and with three or four ships to convey his men he made for the Irish shores. He landed at Killala Bay, in the province of Connaught, and he made his way inland as far as the county of Longford. The Irish peasantry rallied round him in considerable numbers, and were received by him ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... some fashion, filling the gaps after some possible plan, before action can even begin. In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... district and every village has its little leader, a preeminence accorded to birth rather than property; and, by a descending scale, certain members of the community, in right of relationship or connection, assume an undefined superiority, and are tacitly admitted to the exercise of what is technically called an 'influence.' In the hamlets, so universal is this feeling amongst the natives, so habitual the impulse to classify themselves and to look up to some one as their ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... I hope you'll never know! Pray don't try!' cried Lucy; but if she had had any knowledge of character, she would have seen that she had only provoked the little Berserkar's curiosity, and had made him determined on proving the undefined threat. So the unfortunate Algernon seldom descended the stairs without two childish faces being protruded from the balusters of the nursery-flight over-head, pursuing him with hissing whispers of 'Polysyllable' and 'Polly-silly,' and if he ventured on indignant gestures, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... harmony and stillness with his oft-recurring, discordant jar. Numberless unknown sounds came out of the unknown dusk; but all were of twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing. The odours of night arose, and bathed me in that luxurious mournfulness peculiar to them, as if the plants whence they floated had been watered with bygone tears. Earth drew me towards her bosom; I felt as if I could fall down and kiss her. I forgot I was in Fairy ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... The peacefulness of the hour stole into his heart, and his brain calmed down. The mountain suggested to him the past, and the pure, white mist shrouding it seemed like vapour risen from the merciful waters of Lethe. The Moon suggested hope, vague and undefined, lint still hope. With the swing as of a pendulum his consciousness swept back from the dark night of despondency and bathed its wings in light. Then his soothed spirit felt the need of sleep, so he entered the house and began to ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... tenderly upon Endymion. This fair creature, this lustrous Phoebe, was only young as yet, nor had nearly reached her full splendour: but crescent and brilliant, our young gentleman of the University, his head full of poetical fancies, his heart perhaps throbbing with desires undefined, admired this rising young divinity; and gazed at her (though only as at some "bright particular star", far above his earth) with endless delight and wonder. She had been a coquette from the earliest times almost, trying her freaks and jealousies, her wayward frolics and winning caresses, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rouse, to win, to fascinate, to melt, And by its spell of undefined control Magnetic draw the secrets of ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... been Clementina's thoughts since learning that Florimel had not run away with her groom? It were hard to say with completeness. Accuracy, however, may not be equally unattainable. Her first feeling was an utterly inarticulate, undefined pleasure that Malcolm was free to be thought about. She was clear next that it would be matter for honest rejoicing if the truest man she had ever met except his master was not going to marry such an unreality as Florimel—one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... warning. He has done more than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great thinkers and actors—Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Koerner, Stein, Goethe,—who taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his historical sketch of the Early ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... sheltered court of the city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter down the slates of the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the casement of her little room. The sense of vast, undefined space, pressing from the outside against the black panes of our uncurtained windows, was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street. The ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the consoling fancy unfounded. Lucilla's nerves were not at their usual pitch, and an undefined sense of loss of a safeguard was coming over her. Moreover, the desire for a last word to Robert was growing every moment, and he would keep on hunting out those boxes, as if ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
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