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More "Unintelligible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deposit their arms. As the inhabitants arose from their slumbers, and sallied forth into the streets to inquire the cause of the disturbance, they soon discovered that they had, in some mysterious manner, been entrapped. Wild Irishmen, with uncouth garb, threatening gesture, and unintelligible jargon, stood gibbering at every corner, instead of the comfortable Flemish faces of the familiar burgher-guard. The chief burgomaster, sleeping heavily after Sir William's hospitable banquet, aroused himself at last, and sent a militia-captain to inquire ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... till, at the usual time, he performed a probationary exercise by explaining a psalm. His diction was so poetically splendid, that Mr. Hamilton, the professor of divinity, reproved him for speaking language unintelligible to a popular audience; and he censured one of his expressions as indecent, if ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... clearness of intellect enough to pursue a truth to its limits, nor boldness enough to hold it in its simplicity; but he was always saying things and unsaying them, balancing his thoughts in impossible attitudes, and guarding his words by unintelligible limitations. As to the men and opinions of the day and place, he would in the main have agreed with them, had he let himself alone; but he was determined to have an intellect of his own, and this put him to great shifts when he would distinguish ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... give no answer to this as regards the unintelligible clauses, for what we come to in the end is just as abhorrent to and inconceivable by reason as what they offer us; but as regards what may be called the intelligible parts—that Christ was born of a Virgin, died, rose from the dead—we say that, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... dead to us, until experience vitalises them. The old Greeks used to send messages from one army to another by means of a roll of parchment twisted spirally round a baton, and then written on. It was perfectly unintelligible when it fell into a man's hands that had not a corresponding baton to twist it upon. Many of Christ's messages to us are like that. You can only understand the utterances when life gives you the frame round which to wrap them, and then they flash up into meaning, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... English in a very hasty manner by the Editor and one of his friends who had the good nature to assist him, during his avocations of business. It was thought better to add these translations, such as they are; than to let the Work come out unintelligible to those who do not ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... prospects around me, still struck with new sense of pleasure; when I found by the voice of my friend, who walked by me, that we had insensibly strolled into the grove sacred to the widow. "This woman," says he, "is of all others the most unintelligible; she either designs to marry, or she does not. What is the most perplexing of all, is, that she doth not either say to her lovers she has any resolution against that condition of life in general, or that ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... Papageno sets the blackamoors to dancing in "Die Zauberflote"), the orchestra talks of the matronly renunciation of the princess, enthusiastic Straussians of a musical parallel with the quintet from Wagner's "Meistersinger," and the opera comes to an end after three and one-half hours of more or less unintelligible dialogue poised ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... all deliberation: and putting her finger under the line to keep the exact place of the word she was reading, she would strive in good earnest to read out the directions given; but when every fourth word had to be spelt, it was rather hopeless work, especially as all these words were unintelligible to the open-mouthed listener, however intent he might be. He had generally to fall back on his own experience; and, guided by that, things were not doing badly in his estimation, when, one day, Sylvia said to him, as they were in the hay-field, heaping up the hay into ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... glimpses into the internal world of Teufelsdrockh; his strange mystic, almost magic Diagram of the Universe, and how it was gradually drawn, is not henceforth altogether dark to us. Those mysterious ideas on TIME, which merit consideration, and are not wholly unintelligible with such, may by and by prove significant. Still more may his somewhat peculiar view of Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribes to Nature. How all Nature and Life are but one Garment, a "Living Garment," woven and ever a-weaving in the "Loom of Time;" ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... as an epic poem. What rouses laughter cannot rank as high as what rouses tender emotion. Moreover, with the passing away of the generation familiar with the corruption it satirizes, the comedy often becomes unintelligible save to scholars. Hence the utter valuelessness to us of to-day of the comedies of Aristophanes as works of wit. Their only value to-day is as fragmentary records of Greek manners. The comedy is thus writ not for all times, but only for a time; while "Taras Bulba," though generations ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... pronunciation and the quantity, and disusing many words and terms of great significance. In consequence of these innovations, the works of our best poets, such as Chaucer, Spenser, and even Shakespeare, were become, in many parts, unintelligible to the natives of South Britain, whereas the Scots, who retain the antient language, understand them without the help of a glossary. 'For instance (said he), how have your commentators been puzzled by ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... their slippers. Harriet knew, too, that they had been sitting outside clad in their wrappers, for they got into bed immediately. There were a few whispered words, which she failed to catch, then silence settled over the tent, broken occasionally by Tommy's unintelligible mutterings. Tommy was dreaming again—giving promise of having a mild form of ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... advice when he discovered I was erring (Which is just the very favour which on you I am conferring), My story would have made a rather interesting idyll, And I might have lived and died a very decent indiwiddle. This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter Isn't generally heard, and if it ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Fleda thought now it was but half from ignorance of the mischief she was doing, and the other half from the mere desire of selfish gratification. The times and ways in which Lot and Abraham were walked into the conversation were incalculable, and unintelligible, except to the person who understood it only too well. On one occasion, Mrs. Evelyn went on with a long rigmarole to Mr. Thorn about sea-breezes, with a face of most exquisite delight at his mystification and her own hidden fun, till Fleda was absolutely ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Yezidees. These sects, in their social intercourse, used only the Koordish language; but in their prayers, the Armenians used the ancient Armenian, the Jacobites the ancient Syriac, and the Koords the Arabic, all wholly unintelligible to them. And it was a new thought to them, that God could be ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's fantastic metrical romance of Lalla Rookh the system was carried to an extent that now seems ridiculous, for certain passages are loaded with outlandish phrases or metaphors that are unintelligible except by reference to the notes. Nevertheless the English public, being then quite ignorant of the true East, tolerated Moore's sham Orientalism, even though Byron's fine poems were just then exposing the difference between working up the subject in a library and wandering in Asiatic ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly unintelligible articles—a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the word "left" and the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... the twilight stillness. A lamplighter passed, torching the grim lamps. A sauntering carrier threw the evening newspaper over the gate, with his unintelligible cry. A dog-cart rumbled by, and later, a brougham; people were not yet returned from driving on the country turnpikes. Once, some belated girls clattered past on ponies. But already little children, bare-armed, bare-necked, swinging lanterns, and attended by proud ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... of the night, came a call from the direction of the woods, and unintelligible at ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... yellow oak, even to the polished floor, she took her place by her hostess's side. She had already been presented to the fashionable guests who sat around the ample table, and a good deal of the awe which she had felt in anticipation, had begun to ooze away. Although much was said that was unintelligible to her, she could see that this was not the result of intellectual deficiency on her part, but merely of an ignorance of the ground on which the conversation was founded. As Cornelia stole glances at the faces, pretty or pretentious, of the young ladies, or at the mustaches, whiskers, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... important is memory, that it has been justly denominated by the German philosopher, Kant, "the most wonderful of our faculties." Without it, the words of a book would be unintelligible to us, since it is memory alone which furnishes us with the several meanings to ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... scarlet; and, to Lancelot's astonishment, pulled off her slipper, and brandishing it daintily, uttered some unintelligible threat, in an Oriental language, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... to the roots of the hair, bent forward to plead some unintelligible excuse; the fast Maria took hold of his finger as if she was cross; and at that instant another finger was pressed upon his shoulder, and looking up, he gazed into the eyes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... midst of a tribe of savages, swarthy and of vicious appearance. Such yelling, hallooing, jumping, and cutting wild antics, you never saw before, nor could pen describe. Nobody could have understood their chattering, which was a species of growl and shortly accented muttering. Forsooth! it was as unintelligible as that language so generally diffused through diplomatic notes and protocols. Now hideous squaws ran one way, young children another. Dogs and cats brought up the rear, their music combining in most ungrateful medley. John's fears became excited as he saw the chiefs rushing furiously ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Benowm assured me that he could read the writings of the Christians: he showed me a number of barbarous characters, which he asserted were the Roman alphabet; and he produced another specimen, equally unintelligible, which he declared to be the Kallam il Indi, or Persian. His library consisted of nine volumes in quarto; most of them, I believe, were books of religion—for the name of Mohammed appeared in red letters in almost every page of each. His scholars wrote their lessons upon thin boards, paper ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... and, before he could divine their intentions, they were lowering him down the slippery side. When his feet struck the cold water he struggled violently, shouting something which his splashing and the echo of the well made unintelligible. Presently they hoisted him, ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... which appear here, the first was probably written early in the thirteenth century, while the rest all date from the early twentieth century. It might therefore be supposed that the earliest of these stories was written in a language more or less unintelligible to modern Icelanders, and that there was a gap of many centuries in the literary production of the nation. This, however, is not ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... principles; nor is at all difficult of execution; but it must be so divulged as not to be understood by the vulgar, and yet be clear to the sharp-sighted.' After this, he proceeds to describe a mechanism the details of which are confusing and unintelligible, nor did it appear to bear any resemblance ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... have made them think alike, it would have been necessary to melt up the two generations and pour them into one—a task as hopeless as an endeavour to blend the Dinwiddie Young Ladies' Academy with a modern college. Jenny's clearly formulated and rather loud morality was unintelligible to her mother, whose conception of duty was that she should efface herself and make things comfortable for those around her. The obligation to think independently was as incomprehensible to Virginia as was that wider altruism which had swept Jenny's sympathies ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... is that the character of Maximus is very indistinctly drawn, and that of Eudoxia nearly unintelligible. These two pure tragedies are contrasted with two comedies, The Little French Lawyer and Monsieur Thomas, which deserve high praise. The fabliau-motive of the first is happily contrasted with the character of Lamira and the friendship ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... his memory, or perhaps more properly, to discharge it. Dave had said first thing when he opened his eyes:—"The worty will be all over the hedge. Let me go to stop the worty." Of course, this had been quite unintelligible to his hearers. However, Mr. Alibone and Uncle Mo were au fait enough of the engineering scheme that had led to the accident, to supply the explanation. Dave's responsibility as head engineer had been on his conscience all through his ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the threatening gaze of Ned Rector. He mumbled some unintelligible words, settled back in his chair and made himself as ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... the doctrines which he really delivered were defective as a whole, and fragments only of what he did deliver have come to us, mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... syntactic anomalies and errors. In almost all cases this conscious and due to an editorial decision for the first Gutenberg edition to transmit transparently all but the most egregious flaws found in the source text Scribner edition of 1903. Furthermore, a number of sentences may be virtually unintelligible to the English reader due to the architecture of relative clauses, prepositions, and verbs as carried over from the original German. It is the preparer's ambition for a second Gutenberg edition of the History of Rome ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... She bends over her book with a look of intense interest, and as the forefinger of her left hand runs along the line, she spells out the words with the other hand; but often her motions are so rapid as to be unintelligible even to those accustomed to reading the swift and varied movements of ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Mind divested of all those structural traits under which alone I am conscious of mind in myself, I cannot do it. I know nothing of thought save as carried on in ideas originally traceable to the effects wrought by objects and forces on me. A mental act is an unintelligible phrase if I am not to regard it as an act in which states of consciousness are severally known as like other states in the series that has gone by, and in which the relations between them are severally known as like past relations in the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... something unintelligible and drove on. It was market day, and there were several farmers he wanted to interview before the excitement, or the local ale, or a combination of both, rendered their ideas a little more vague than ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... was, however, so absorbed in the information he had received—and so confident that the English, in which it had been told, would be unintelligible to anyone who might overhear it—that he paid no attention to the boys who—one of them limping badly—went slowly down the street; stopping, occasionally, to look in at the shop windows. It was not ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... considered that there was harm in reading the Scriptures without notes: he replied that there was certainly no harm in it, but that simple people, without the help of notes, could derive but little benefit from Scripture, as the greatest part would be unintelligible to them; whereupon I shook hands with him, and on departing said that there was no part of Scripture so difficult to understand as those very notes which were intended to elucidate it, and that it would never have been written if not calculated of itself to illume the minds ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... thought that, on learning what important folk I was in the habit of mixing with, the Graps would no longer think it worth while to pretend to me). However, just as they were leaving, I invited Ilinka to come and see me another day; but he only murmured something unintelligible, and it was plain that he meant never to set foot in the ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... sweet as honey. The woman looked at her, and answered again with the unintelligible grunt, of unbelieving wonder, which Daisy had heard once before. Daisy thought on the whole the safest way was not to talk but to fetch her beautiful "Jewess" flowers to speak for themselves. So she ran off and ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... Honourable Hilary, the name standing out in red letters before his eyes. He had never read a line of the philosopher's writings, not even the charge to "hitch your wagon to a star" (not in the "Book of Arguments"). Sarah Austen had read Emerson in the woods, and her son's question sounded so like the unintelligible but unanswerable flashes with which the wife had on rare occasions opposed the husband's authority that Hilary Vane found his temper getting the best of him—The name of Emerson was immutably fixed in his mind as the synonym for incomprehensible, foolish habits and beliefs. "Don't talk Emerson ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses of the Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set were climbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they meet and exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but not unguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of the author, like those of Aristophanes, were with the old school. It is the pilgrims who reach the top and the modern young women who collapse. And the modern young man fares no better; he is beaten by a coolie and ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... does not mean that he is able to kill us, or consign us to eternal flames. The Divine Power is always interpreted in a completely human signification; but the Divine Goodness and Justice must be understood to be such only in an unintelligible sense. Is it unfair to surmise that this is because those who speak in the name of God, have need of the human conception of his power, since an idea which can overawe and enforce obedience must address itself to real feelings; but are content that his goodness should be conceived ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... her, that was all she knew. When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible, that she could have ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... by my custodians evidently afforded them great gratification, and though they spoke a patois which was quite unintelligible to me, the gesticulations which accompanied the closing portion of the narrative, and the shouts of laughter and applause with which it was received, showed me that the exploit of the amiable Guiseppe was duly ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... spirit of Athena in renewed life prevailing over ruin is embodied for the whole of futurity; while the Greeks, to whom, in a happier climate and higher life than that of Egypt, the vulture symbol of cleansing became unintelligible, took the eagle instead for their hieroglyph of supreme spiritual energy, and it thenceforward retains its hold on the human imagination, till it is established among Christian myths as the expression of the most exalted ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... advice. O brother, what think you? You was hardly gone out of hearing, when you set out for London, when who should arrive but that impudent fellow with the odious Irish name—that Fitzpatrick. He broke in abruptly upon me without notice, or I would not have seen him. He ran on a long, unintelligible story about his wife, to which he forced me to give him a hearing; but I made him very little answer, and delivered him the letter from his wife, which I bid him answer himself. I suppose the wretch will endeavour to find us out, but ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... contract. That was Rousseau's starting point, and it was Godwin's work (after Hume) to shatter this heritage which French and English speculation had been content to accept from Locke. There are passages in which Burke appears to accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, or as he put it, "primitive," rights of man. He reserved his contempt for those who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would always brush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question, what in the given ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... will. I wish you had been more critical, and had pointed out the faults and defects of the book, of which there are no doubt some, if not many, to be found. I flatter myself that I have made more clear some passages utterly unintelligible in our A.V., such as, "He shall deliver the island of the innocent, yea," etc., chap. xxii. 30, and chap, xxxvi. 33, and the whole of chap. xxiv. and chap. xx. What a fierce, cruel, hot-headed Arab Zophar is! How the ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... eloquent flow of words, mostly unintelligible to me, comes to a close. A hymn is sung, and the New Testament blessing pronounced. Then the procession from the missionary benches files out through the schoolroom into the mission-house and the people disperse to their homes. ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... earth, never resting until they have extinguished every other race? It may be so, but long before they have dispersed the other inhabitants of the globe, they must themselves have become scattered, divided, opposed. Already, the English language is unintelligible in Germany, though Englishman and German are offshoots from the same stock, the German of the North can hardly understand the German of the South; Dutch and English vessels have fought desperately at sea, in the past, and to-day, ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... agnostic was to be almost an outcast Whether every human motive was not selfish Whitman's public use of his privately written praise Wit that tries its teeth upon everything Women's rights Wonder why we hate the past so—"It's so damned humiliating!" Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible Work would be twice as good if it were done twice Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity Wrote them first and last in the spirit ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... lines of light in the shutters, came the sound of voices, Lem's deep and insistent, and another, pitched in a high nasal key, deprecatory and protesting. There was still another, a harsh one that growled something unintelligible, and Wetherell guessed, from the fragments which he heard, that the judge before sitting down to his duty was trying to dissuade the stage driver from a step that was foolhardy. He guessed likewise that Lem was not to be dissuaded. At length a silence followed, then the door ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... blasts of a siren, unintelligible shouts from the steamer's bridge, a churning of propellers; foam; a waft of black smoke—then silence, the white, clammy veil again about us, and only the muffled throb of the liner's reversed engines and the uneasy lurch ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... bad pronunciation. A native's pronunciation of his language is invariably incorrect. That is why the average Parisian is totally unintelligible to the intelligent foreigner. All foreigners are intelligent. Ah! here are our devilled kidneys. I suppose you and I are devilled, Reggie. People say we are so wicked. I wish one could feel wicked; but it is only good people who can manage to do that. It is the one prerogative of ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... attention from social and political philosophers—the tenacious and half-unconscious memories of a race. Injustice comes home to roost, sometimes after an astonishingly long interval. The disaffection of Catholic Ireland would be quite unintelligible without the massacres of the sixteenth century and the unjust trade-legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth. The bitterness of the working class in England has its roots in the earlier period of the industrial revolution (about 1760-1832), when the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... purify radically. The punishments it can inflict on itself, are rather gratifications and refreshments than otherwise. Indeed, the manner in which He corrects His chosen, must be felt, or it is impossible to conceive how dreadful it is. In my attempt to explain it, I shall be unintelligible, except to experienced souls. It is an internal burning, a secret fire sent from God to purge away the fault, giving extreme pain, until this purification is complete. It is like a dislocated joint, which is in incessant torment, until the bone is replaced. This pain is so severe, that ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... communication was opened between our shores and that part of Europe in which the traces of ancient power and policy were yet discernible. Many noble monuments which have since been destroyed or defaced still retained their pristine magnificence; and travellers, to whom Livy and Sallust were unintelligible, might gain from the Roman aqueducts and temples some faint notion of Roman history. The dome of Agrippa, still glittering with bronze, the mausoleum of Adrian, not yet deprived of its columns and statues, the Flavian amphitheatre, not yet degraded into a quarry, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in my eyes. A look of gratified spiteful complacency overspread her features, as she swept on ahead and descended the stairs before me. I followed her to the drawing-room door. She stopped suddenly, and murmuring something unintelligible hurried back again. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... girl passionately, but at the ancient woman's commanding gesture she fell mute, though she scowled in sullen defiance and I saw the knife glitter where she gripped it, half concealed by a fold of her petticoat. Here one of the men muttered some unintelligible word and pointed scornfully at me, whereupon the old woman rapped him smartly over the knuckles and fixed her uncomfortably shrewd gaze on my person, scanning me over very keenly, more especially ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... sun. In this last work the author refers to a few notes, which completely destroy the theory of gravitation in terms "perfectly intelligible as well to the unlearned as to the learned": to me they are quite unintelligible, which rather tends to confirm a notion I have long had, that I am neither one thing nor the other. There is an ambiguity of phrase which delights a writer on logic, always on the look-out for specimens of homonymia or aequivocatio. The author, as a physician, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... words in some unintelligible dialect. He was, indeed, a strange being, with narrow shoulders, a sly look, and such an agitated air in my presence that I had no longer any real doubt that he was a spy. He seemed very aged and feeble. He kept staring at me from ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... unintelligible!! Surtur, according to Fin Magnusen, the invisible, unintelligible being whom the ancient Scandinavians regarded as "the great First Cause least understood" of ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... relic of a once vigorous institution. They are the rocks and the sands which the flood of civilization is first isolating, then undermining, and at last overwhelming, and hiding from our view. They are (to change the figure) survivals of an earlier state of existence, unintelligible if regarded singly, made to render up their secret only by comparison with other survivals, and with examples of a like state of existence elsewhere. Taken collectively, they enable us to trace the evolution of civilization from a period before ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... could not understand. The silence held; he could feel the Rhamda Geos at his side, and hear him murmur something which, in itself, was quite unintelligible: ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... special branches to meet the different conditions of the crowded Jurassic age. Even now they afford a most interesting page in the story of evolution, and their total disappearance from the face of the earth in the next geological period will not be unintelligible. We turn from them to the remaining orders of ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... fixed gaze, Raskolnikoff slowly advanced toward Elia Petrovitch. Resting his head upon the table behind which the lieutenant was seated, he wished to speak, but could only give vent to a few unintelligible sounds. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... with them and barking tremendously. There is a dog residing in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind man. He may be seen most days, in Oxford Street, haling the blind man away on expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the man; wholly of the dog's conception and execution. Contrariwise, when the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the money-tray like an ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... States by the use of money. The translation of these cryptogramic messages by a working journalist, and their publication in the New York Tribune, was a great success, as it made clear what had previously been unintelligible. When a Committee of the House of Representatives undertook to investigate these cipher telegrams, the principal witness was Colonel Pelton, the nephew and private secretary of Mr. Tilden. His ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... when my ideas upon philosophy were well consolidated that I came to understand that I had been fortunate enough during my youth to contemplate a truly wise man. I had no difficulty in reconstructing his ideas by piecing together a few words which at the time had appeared to me unintelligible, but which I had remembered. God, in his eyes, was the order of nature, from which all things proceed, and he would not brook contradiction upon this point. He loved humanity as representing reason, and ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... stood with open mouth and eyes, and elevated eyebrows, looking at his young friend, who capered and danced round the fire in a manner that threw the cook's performances in that line quite into the shade, while he continued all the time to shout fragments of sentences that were quite unintelligible to anyone. It was evident that Harry was in a state of immense delight at something unknown save to himself, but which, in the course of a few minutes, was revealed to ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... military virtue, was succeeded by a farce, that debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and a Scythian buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators, by their deformed figure, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the Gothic, and the Hunnic languages; and the hall resounded with loud and licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of this intemperate riot, Attila alone, without a change of countenance, maintained his steadfast and inflexible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... jungle had been cleared, and we saw screens and houses of green thatch and palm leaves. A very brown Britisher came out of his tent as we passed, his face half white with soap lather, and his shirt sleeves rolled up; he did unintelligible semaphore signalling with both arms, a razor in one hand, paper in the other. He likewise spoke to us in words that were barely audible for the sound of the rush of the water. When we pieced together ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... like what they have in their churches, because I saw her do it—out of a candle, and then she got a great long pin and stuck it in the gas and runned it into the little dollie." As Cherry grew excited her speech became slightly unintelligible. "And I know it was Nurse Marg'ret 'cos she wrote a great big 'M' on a bit of paper and pinned it on to show who it ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... bitterly, her emaciated face for the second was convulsed with rage, and her sore lips writhed on the verge of unconsidered speech. But only a splutter of gasping, unintelligible sounds issued forth, and then, by a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... into "Zanoni," which he had read in the days of his boyhood as one reads a fairy-tale, and he and Mrs Ray Jefferson, being the greatest enthusiasts, held long and learned and quite unintelligible discussions over these mysterious subjects, with a view to being able to hold their own with the beautiful proselytiser when she should deign to come amongst them all ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... All this was perfectly unintelligible to Henri, and was attributed by him to the frenzy of madness; but, in fact, there was truth in it. Denot's irregular spirit had been cowed by de Lescure's cold reasoning propriety, and he now felt it impossible to submit himself to the pardon of a man who, he thought, would forgive ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... yet with eager impatience, I opened the packet and trimmed my lamp. Conceive my dismay when I found the whole written in an unintelligible cipher. I present the reader with ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... mood, In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... careless colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly recognized his pupil. Whether or ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... that in his progress to the tea-table, Mr. Tiffany adopted a tottering and uncertain step, indicating a dilapidated old age, only kept together by the clothes he wore, which was altogether unintelligible to the Peabody family, seeing that Mr. Carrack was in the very prime of youth, till Mrs. Carrack remarked, with an affectionate smile ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... soul. She was out in the cedars when someone grasped her from behind. She felt the hands as the coils of a snake. Then she was ready to faint, but she must not faint. She struggled away, stood free. It was the man Bill who had caught her. He said something that was unintelligible. She reached for the snag of a dead cedar and, leaning there, fought her weakness, that cold black horror which seemed a physical thing in her mind, her ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... while these things are the most serious realities in the world, and undoubtedly more important than any other thing, little attempt is made by humanity to unravel or classify them. I cannot here enter into the details of these instructions, which indeed would be unintelligible, but they showed me at first what I had not at all apprehended, namely the proportionate importance and unimportance of all the passions and emotions which regulate our relations with other souls. These discourses were given at regular intervals, and much ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... should have warned "The Seven." But it did not. Under their orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the letter. I got an injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt corporation fashion—they sent my matter, but so garbled that it was unintelligible. I appealed ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... anticipation, and yet puzzled by a doubt that it could not resolve. And I said to myself as I went along: How in the world can a queen like her, who laughs all other women to utter scorn, for beauty and understanding and gentleness and sweetness, and some unintelligible magic charm that is somehow spread all over her, and echoes in the tone of her delicious voice that makes every fibre of my heart tremble every time I hear it; how can such a queen as she show such extraordinary favour ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... Bada' valley, lie masses of ruin now become mere rubbish; bits of wall built with cut stone, and water-conduits of fine mortar containing, like that of the Pyramids, powdered brick and sometimes pebbles. We carried off a lump of sandstone bearing unintelligible marks, possibly intended for a man and a beast. We called it "St. George and the Dragon," but the former is afoot—possibly the Bedawin stole his steed. There was a frustum or column-drum of fine white marble, hollowed to act as a mortar; ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... remarkable, as it largely consisted of coining long and almost unintelligible words. This he laid great store by, and he speaks wrathfully of one who translated his "Piers Penniless," into what he calls "maccaronical language." In his "Lenten Stuffe or Praise of the Red Herring," i.e., of Great Yarmouth, he calls those who despised Homer in his ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Meldola,— ... I am now reading a wonderfully interesting book—O. Fisher's "Physics of the Earth's Crust." It is really a grand book, and, though full of unintelligible mathematics, is so clearly explained and so full of good reasoning on all the aspects of this most difficult question that it is a pleasure to read it. It was especially a pleasure to me because I had just been writing an article on the ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... feet six inches], clad in skins of wild beasts, darker-complexioned than would have been expected in that part of the world; and when some of our men went on shore and showed them bells and pictures, they began to dance round our men with a hoarse noise and unintelligible chant, and to excite our admiration they took arrows a cubit and a half long, and put them down their own throats to the bottom of their stomachs without seeming any the worse for it. Then they drew them up again, and seemed much pleased ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... about—I shouted loudly to attract their attention. On this, two men, dressed in skins, came out of the hut, and answered me in so extraordinary a dialect, that even I did not comprehend what they said. I then hailed them in Russian, but their answers were perfectly unintelligible. I next tried French, but they shook their heads, as was, I thought, but natural for Esquimaux who were not likely to have been sent to Paris for their education. I then spoke a little Spanish to them, but I was equally at a loss to understand their answers. Portuguese ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... noight and day with ancient history. She's after asking me now if Queen's ever run away!" To Polly's remorseful confusion here her good father equally proud of her precocious interest and his own knowledge, at once interfered with an unintelligible account of the abdication of various Queens in history until Polly's head ached again. Well meant as it was, it only settled in the child's mind that she must keep the awful secret to herself and that ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte
... requisites? And then there was the disheartening fact that the situation was not a permanent one, but terminable from day to day, according to the terms of the advertisement. The more I pondered over it the more unintelligible did it become; but at the end of my meditations I always came back to the ground fact that, come what might, I had nothing to lose, that I was completely at the end of my resources, and that I was ready for any adventure, however ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... second—the interval before another shoe-print formed in the rug in their direction. Jim gasped something unintelligible and started to back away; but no sooner did Partridge start to follow suit, than a compulsion to stand still came over them. Caught where they were, unable to move, they saw the shoe-prints come towards them. Slowly, step by step, twelve inches apart, they came, and did ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... opened a magical work and muttered some unintelligible words in a sepulchral voice, looked at the remaining millet-seeds, and watched the way in which the toad retired. Then after seven or eight minutes, she turned her white eyes on the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the house, for all that. Aided by the pony, I easily solved the mystery of the housekeeper's otherwise unintelligible narrative. Passing through the dining-room (where the supper-table was already laid for us), I looked ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... to be wholly admirable. I was reminded of this bit of ancient history when, some time ago, I read a criticism on George Meredith from the pen of Mr. George Moore. Mr. Moore represented his subject as a shouting, gesticulating man in a crowd, who, in spite of great efforts to be heard, remained unintelligible. As a description of a curiously calm sage who soliloquises for his own amusement in a study this is perfect. The enormous growth in the number of unthinking readers, and the corresponding increase in our ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... commenced giving Maxwell a history of her mother,—which, however, we must reserve for another chapter. "And my mother gave me this!" she said, drawing from her pocket a paper written over in Greek characters, but so defaced as to be almost unintelligible. "Some day you will find a friend who will secure your freedom through that," she would say. "But freedom-that which is such a boon to us-is so much feared by others that you must mark that friend cautiously, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... to be driven into a difficulty by my difficulty. But as he had a reputation to maintain, he was ashamed to admit before the company that he could not answer my challenge or determine the question at issue; and he made an unintelligible attempt to hide his perplexity. In order that the argument might proceed, I said to him, Well then Critias, if you like, let us assume that there is this science of science; whether the assumption is right or wrong ...
— Charmides • Plato
... after a few shuffles on the threshold, and an unintelligible murmur of words, walked in with painful awkwardness, and took a seat upon a corner of the chair which Pet offered him, as if the whole chair were more of a favor than he could conscientiously accept; He was a bony, strongly built stripling, with a record of anywhere from seventeen to nineteen ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... time, Locke Morgeson, Jr., took Mary Warren from her father's house as his wife. Grandfather Warren prayed a long, unintelligible prayer over them, helped them into the large, yellow-bottomed chaise which belonged to Grandfather Locke, and the young couple drove to their new home, the old mansion. Grandfather Locke went away in the same yellow-bottomed chaise a week after, and returned in a few days with a tall lady ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... 1915 Mr. Maurice Baring was sent to Rome on business connected with aircraft, he records how he had speech with General Morris, who was in charge of Italian aviation. 'What I am going to say to you', said General Morris, 'will be absolutely unintelligible and unthinkable to you as Englishmen, but I regret to say that here, in Italy, it is a fact that there exists a certain want of harmony—a certain occasional, shall I say, friction?—between the military and naval branches of our flying service.' Mr. Baring was amused by this speech, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... specific unity, which is nothing but a logical notion, nor a collective unity, which is nothing but a company who are naturally many: but a true subsisting numerical unity of nature; and if the difficulty of explaining this, and his zeal to defend it, forced him upon some unintelligible niceties, to prove that the same numerical human nature too is but one in all men, it is hard to charge him with teaching, that there are three independent and co-ordinate Gods, because we think he has not proved that Peter, James, and John, are but one man. This will make very ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... oddly companioned, and my exit thence was equally so, though greatly in contrast. For a day or two I was storm-bound, and felt the depression natural in a remote solitude, wrapped in by rain and fog, with no society but an unintelligible mountaineer or two. At last it cleared and the revulsion was inspiring. I found myself in a little green vale hemmed in by magnificent heights whose rocky summits were covered with freshly-fallen snow. Close at hand rose the Watzmann, a soaring pyramid whose summit was cleft into two sharp ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... page it is uniformly spelled "Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct. Such amazing verses ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Virgie, and her mother all standing around her bed at once, exclaiming something unintelligible together. It was late morning, the whole family having slept long, after the several experiences of two such days, and the sun was shining through the great trees before Teackle Hall and burnishing the windows, so that Vesta could ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... upstairs, while Lane sat there trying to adapt himself to a new and unintelligible environment. His mother began washing the dishes. Lane felt her gaze upon his face, and he struggled against all the weaknesses ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the last word was unintelligible to the hidden listener, who knew only that it veiled an insult and drew nearer to the door. The girl remained silent and Baudouin presuming on this continued in a tone still more aggressive, "Times are changed, mademoiselle, changed in the last month. You, living out of the world, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... ordinarily termed a pantheist, and his theory, which in the light of much fuller knowledge I am advocating, Pantheism. I do not care to consider a difference of terms, where the only distinction resides in so unintelligible an idea as that of the creation of substance. It is more to the purpose to observe that in the mind of its first originator—and this a mind which was sufficiently clear in its thought to die for its perception of astronomical truth—the theory of Pantheism was but a sublime extension ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. We may then, I believe, without missing a single step, skip 1800 years. Early last century we find in Malebranche's "Recherche de la Verite," the statement that "la durete de corps" depends on "petits tourbillons." [1] These words, embedded in a hopeless mass of unintelligible statements of the physical, metaphysical, and theological philosophies of the day, and unsupported by any explanation, elucidation, or illustration throughout the rest of the three volumes, and only marred by any other single sentence or word to be found in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... Madre Moreno's red cloak showing out brightly from behind the rank growths of nightshade, the tenderer leaves of which she seemed to be carefully gathering. She was muttering to herself words unintelligible to me, and did not seem to notice me, although I stood for a long time very near where ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... Relying on their memories, and, no doubt, aided by some manuscripts secretly preserved, many natives set to work to write out in this new alphabet the contents of their ancient records. Much was added which had been brought in by the Europeans, and much omitted which had become unintelligible or obsolete since the Conquest; while, of course, the different writers, varying in skill and knowledge, produced ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton
... Church's treasure of indulgences did not consist of the merits of Christ, and that faith on the part of the recipient was necessary for the efficacy of the sacrament. With respect to the second point, the religious principles upon which Luther based his doctrine were altogether strange and unintelligible to the scholastic standpoint of Cajetan; mere tittering and laughter followed Luther's observations, and he was required to retract this thesis unconditionally. The first point settled the question ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... turning a corner, I came suddenly upon a little village green, around which some half dozen cottages were scattered at irregular distances. I directed my steps towards one of these, before which a 45crazy sign, rendered by age and exposure to the weather as delightfully vague and unintelligible as though it had come fresh from the brush of Turner himself, hung picturesquely from the branch of ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... to Transcribe the Chinese Character, or to put their Alphabet into our Letters, because the Words would be both Unintelligible, and very hard to Pronounce; and therefore, to avoid hard Words, and Hyroglyphicks, I'll translate them as well as ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... conjecture that the "inside" was all right. Judging from Peggy's crestfallen air, it was all wrong. The note was not written in Lucy's usual regular hand. The letters straggled, the lines zig-zagged across the page, and the name signed was almost an unintelligible scrawl. But Peggy thought less of these superficial matters than of the ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... summer evenings. He ran his own car, and was never so happy as when Mary was on the driver's seat beside him, where he could amuse her with the little news of the day, or repeat to her long and, to Mary, unintelligible business conversations in which he had ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... circumstances to which they applied at the time they were used, have been erected into prophecies, and made to bend to explanations at the will and whimsical conceits of sectaries, expounders, and commentators. Every thing unintelligible was prophetical, and every thing insignificant was typical. A blunder would have served for a prophecy; and a dish-clout for ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... associates it with the exercise of actual physical brutality on the part of the man. And she sees, in you, a reflection of her own sufferings and her own case. It's curious—to a student of human nature. And it explains, what is otherwise unintelligible—her overlooking her own instructions to the servant, and letting you into the house. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... more eloquently depicted upon his face. The eyes widened, the features stiffened into a mask, the outstretched hand fell limply to his side. He opened his lips to say something, several things, but the words were unintelligible; a mere broken stammer of apology, as he wheeled round and walked ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... circle of masculine Goths who understand the patois of the gridiron, the diamond, and the padded ropes and prefer it to the language of civilization. But such diction is always limited in its range of acquaintances and followers. A current bit of slang in Memphis may be unintelligible in Pittsburg. A colloquial ephemeralism in a city may be undecipherable in the country districts twenty-five miles away. A large percentage of the athletic jargon of the sporting club and field is enigmatical to the uninitiated. And since a newspaper man writes for the world at large rather ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... has at least four marked dialects: Northern, spoken in Sutherland, part of Caithness, and Ross; Western, spoken in Inverness-shire and Argyle and in the Islands; and the rather broken-down dialects of Arran and of Perthshire, but the speakers of these are not very unintelligible to one another. Even Manx has a tendency to a “north side” and a “south side” dialect. Welsh has two fairly well marked dialects, of North Wales and South Wales, and the Welsh of Glamorgan, once the classical form of the language, before ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... to the dramatic system of the Hindus, the reader is referred to the notes appended to the present translation. It is hoped that they will be found sufficient to explain every allusion that might otherwise be unintelligible to the English reader. ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... which the flood of civilization is first isolating, then undermining, and at last overwhelming, and hiding from our view. They are (to change the figure) survivals of an earlier state of existence, unintelligible if regarded singly, made to render up their secret only by comparison with other survivals, and with examples of a like state of existence elsewhere. Taken collectively, they enable us to trace the evolution of civilization from ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... the movement of her lips and the sudden gesture of resolution that shook her frame, as though she were about to speak that word. But all at once she appeared stupefied and dumfounded, pronounced a few unintelligible syllables, and fell huddled into a chair, sobbing convulsively and uttering cries ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... decision of the more fortunate ones assembled within. More than one hand began pounding on the door, and we could hear cries of: "The train was behind time!" "Your clock is fast!" "You are cheating us; you want it all for yourselves!" "We will have the law on you!" and other bitter adjurations unintelligible to me from my ignorance of the circumstances which called ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... of being dumb, incoherent, unintelligible, foolish, inarticulate in a foreign land, for lack of words! It is unwise, I fear, to have at the outset too high an ideal either in grammar or accent. As our gondola passed one of the hotels this afternoon, we paused long enough to hear an intrepid lady converse with an Italian ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... there for, and thought it might be to wind the clock—of which he perceived that the only visible specimen had stopped. He knew that the southern races communicated with each other in the language of pantomime, and was mortified to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible. At length she returned with a lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together a phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer: "La signora e fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took to mean: "She's out—but ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... brain like the sound of a language which has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily—that was all! There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he was saying, to cling to her own part in the talk—but it was all as meaningless as ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... in the strangers' gallery over night, and then to read the speeches, to which he has listened, in the newspapers next morning, can readily appreciate. Hazy ideas have become clear, mutilated and unintelligible sentences have been neatly and properly arranged, needless repetitions and tautological verbiage have disappeared; there is no sign of hesitation; hums and haws, and other inexpressible ejaculations, grunts, and interpolations find no place; the thread of an argument is shown where none was visible ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... devoir, the trite little anecdote of Alfred tending cakes in the herdsman's hut, to be related with amplifications. A singular affair most of the pupils made of it; brevity was what they had chiefly studied; the majority of the narratives were perfectly unintelligible; those of Sylvie and Leonie Ledru alone pretended to anything like sense and connection. Eulalie, indeed, had hit, upon a clever expedient for at once ensuring accuracy and saving trouble; she had obtained access somehow to an abridged history ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... of a siren, unintelligible shouts from the steamer's bridge, a churning of propellers; foam; a waft of black smoke—then silence, the white, clammy veil again about us, and only the muffled throb of the liner's reversed engines ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... Pavlovna had made on him, he himself proposed to introduce him to her, adding that he was like one of the family with them; that the general was not at all proud, and the mother was so stupid she could not say "Bo" to a goose. Lavretsky blushed, muttered something unintelligible, and ran away. For five whole days he was struggling with his timidity; on the sixth day the young Spartan got into a new uniform and placed himself at Mihalevitch's disposal. The latter being his own valet, confined ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... to come to an understanding with Wittenberg, without which their position would have been extremely perilous. Bucer claimed to represent a middle doctrine, such as was later asserted by Calvin. As no middle ground is possible, the doctrine is unintelligible, being, in fact, nothing but the statement, in strong terms, of two mutually exclusive propositions. After much humiliation the divines succeeded, however, in satisfying Luther, with whom they signed the Wittenberg Concord on May 29, 1536. The Swiss ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... correspondents. Figure to yourself a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible. His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners corresponded with both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic mystery, even while ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... these propositions would require long details altogether foreign to our present purpose, as we are not writing on ethnology. We will take them for granted, as otherwise we may say that the whole history of man would be unintelligible. If, however, writers are found who apply to their notion of race all the inflexibility of physical laws, and who represent history as a rigid system of facts chained together by a kind of fatality; if a ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipestem, and discoursing of the glorious times before the great war, 'when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than there hands.' 'Poor human nature,' thought Lancelot, as he tried to follow one of those unintelligible discussions about the relative prices of the loaf and the bushel of flour, which ended, as usual, in more swearing and more quarreling, and more beer to make it up: 'poor human nature! always looking back, as the German sage says, to some fancied golden age, never ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... think of this crowning calamity, and could only utter broken, unintelligible sounds to express my gratitude for ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... Fletcher stood like a sentinel against the doorpost. He might have been part of it for his immobility. The girl within continued to talk to the horse while she provided for his comfort, low words unintelligible to the silent watcher, till, as she finished her task, she suddenly threw her arms about the animal's neck and leaned her head ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... get at the real state of her feelings; but he was too much agitated for reflection. On gaining his lodging, he felt faint, and put himself immediately to bed. All night long he tossed about in sleepless excitement; and, in the morning, fell into a feverish doze, broken by unintelligible dreams. When he awoke, he rose up, and felt so giddy as to be unable to stand, and again went to bed. During the day, he felt shivering and unwell; and, the next day, the same symptoms continued, and with increased violence. Another day arrived—another, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... tightly by his clasped hands—those very hands, small and marble-white, forming a ghastful contrast to the raven hair that fell thickly on his back. He had not spoken since he rose. Indeed, since his first appearance, he had said nothing but the unintelligible word which he had uttered four times in my presence, and which Dr. Mayhew now believed to be the name of the lady whose portrait he wore. That he could speak was certain, and his silence was therefore the effect of obstinacy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... great offence, and was highly disapproved of by all but Mrs. Hunter. And Aurelia could not like her, for her gossip had been far broader and coarser than that of the Mistresses Treforth, who, though more bitter were more of gentlewomen. Happily much of what passed was perfectly unintelligible to Betty's carefully shielded pupil, who sat all the time with the cat on her lap, listening to its purring music, but feeling much more inclined to believe nothing against my Lady, after her father's example, than to agree with ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense—mere common-sense—it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... fire-side. Here the cordial, combined with previous exhaustion and agitation, and the genial warmth of the fire, soon threw him into a profound sleep. He slept as powerless as a child that is rocked by its nurse, lulled by the unintelligible songs which the old woman continued to murmur to her spinning-wheel—and which still echoed through his dreams, though they had lost their power ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... it is so easy to transpose one alphabet into another that the mere language would afford no security. Therefore, I expect that, when the experts translate this document, the translation or transliteration will be a mere farrago of unintelligible nonsense. But we shall see, and meanwhile the facts that we have offer several interesting suggestions which ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... during his will; and the men are liable to be called upon for any service; yet, by breaking in upon these usages, many difficulties have occurred on board ship, and even come into courts of justice, which are perfectly unintelligible to any one not acquainted with the universal nature and force of these customs. Many a provocation has been offered, and a system of petty oppression pursued towards men, the force and meaning of which would appear as nothing to strangers, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... words I have quoted unintelligible, like the parrot's prating? Perhaps the language may be reconstructed; perhaps it may be found to embody something worth a hearing. Success is most likely to come by considering the growth of alchemy; by trying to find the ideas which were ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... hissed something unintelligible between his teeth. Dempsey and the board exchanged looks. And then Dempsey looked at O'Sullivan without anger, as one looks at a stray dog, and nodded his head in ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... and I should be dumb not to have inquired the road I was to journey; and if dumb there would be an end to my calling." After simpering in a small way, like one whose modesty prohibited a more open expression of his admiration of a witticism that was perfectly unintelligible to his hearers, he continued, "It is not prudent for any one of my profession to be too familiar with those he has to instruct; for which reason I follow not the line of the army; besides which, I conclude that ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... beseeching glance at her lover, and murmured some unintelligible words, but they did not save her. Montgomery crossed himself over the stool, and, after running his fingers over the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... break, this forest of the church under whose shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The shapes, faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred every outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells that held ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... but the land-hunger of the dispossessed capitalists might to some extent be appeased by a measure that was not only tolerable, but welcome; and modifications, so gradual and subtle that their meaning would be unintelligible to the masses, might subsequently be introduced to remedy observed defects, to calm the apprehensions of the allies, and perhaps to secure the continuance of large holdings, if economic causes ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... opposite the telegraphic machine, from which the "tape" was issuing with a monotonous click. On this "tape"—a narrow strip of paper seemingly endless, which fell on the floor in serpentine coils—were inscribed at regular intervals some cabalistic characters unintelligible to the general public, but full of ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... in this form, and took it section by section. 'Pepys,' that was unintelligible. 'Buttered toast,' no sense in that. 'Suede gloves,' yes, she had told Frank that when she came to town, she would buy some suede gloves at a certain shop in the City, where she could get for three and threepence a pair which ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... situations have their drawbacks, was greatly annoyed by the unearthly noises made by the sentries during the night. Not a person could pass, but he was hailed, and every half hour I was awakened by the guard yelling out some unintelligible words, which were caught up in every direction, in the most discordant tones, until echo herself grew hoarse and disgusted with the repetition. I was well guarded to be sure, but could have dispensed with the attention, and would have bargained for less ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... by, breathing heavily, but to Murray's horror it seemed as if, faintly spoken as it was, the big sailor's warning had reached the sensitive nerves of both the wounded, making them stir uneasily and mutter something unintelligible, while the light of morning, which had before been so sluggish in its approach, seemed now to be coming on by a steady glide, as if the black darkness which had pressed so heavily upon the spirits of two of the party was now being swept away like ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... own times we can see how, through the help of all the cheapest and most perishable household wares, the poorest Japanese is able to enjoy that special peculiarity and synthesis of line and colour and perspective which strikes even initiated Westerns as so exotic, far-fetched and almost wilfully unintelligible. ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... darlint's head is filled noight and day with ancient history. She's after asking me now if Queen's ever run away!" To Polly's remorseful confusion here her good father equally proud of her precocious interest and his own knowledge, at once interfered with an unintelligible account of the abdication of various Queens in history until Polly's head ached again. Well meant as it was, it only settled in the child's mind that she must keep the awful secret to herself and that no one ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte
... instant there was a start, and a low growling voice asked what was apparently a question as to what was the matter. The response came from the man who had struck the blow; but what he said was unintelligible to the listeners, who had immediately shrunk flat upon the deck, conscious as they were that two of the crew had been sleeping within touch, while for aught they knew ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... distinct species of Euploea and Diadema, having broad bands or patches of white, which do not exist in any of the allied species from the larger islands. These facts seem to indicate some local influence in modifying colour, as unintelligible and almost as remarkable as that which has resulted in the modifications of form ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... sallied forth into the streets to inquire the cause of the disturbance, they soon discovered that they had, in some mysterious manner, been entrapped. Wild Irishmen, with uncouth garb, threatening gesture, and unintelligible jargon, stood gibbering at every corner, instead of the comfortable Flemish faces of the familiar burgher-guard. The chief burgomaster, sleeping heavily after Sir William's hospitable banquet, aroused himself at last, and sent a militia-captain to inquire the cause of the unseasonable drum-beat ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dread. A thousand impalpable fears and doubts beset his mind. He had grown timid as a woman. The old happy audacity had been destroyed by sleepless nights and a torturing anxiety. It was a new thing for Keith Macleod to have become a prey to strange unintelligible forebodings. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... the agricultural colleges and the experiment stations offered good advice to the Southern farmer, but they reached only a small proportion. Their bulletins had a small circulation and were so full of technical expressions as to be almost unintelligible to the average farmer. Recently the writers have attempted to make themselves more easily understood, and the usefulness of their publications has consequently increased. The bulletins of the Department of Agriculture are read in increasing numbers, ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... indifferent—detest, indeed, as interfering with their love. When he ends Tristan knows he has no explanation to offer—none that Mark could possibly understand: human affection and elemental human passion are unintelligible to one another. He replies that he cannot answer Mark's "Why?" and turning to Isolda asks whether she will follow him whither he is now going—the land of eternal night. He, not Mark, plans his death. Isolda answers straightway that she will follow. Tristan and Melot fight, but Tristan allows ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... vainly endeavoring to give utterance to various exclamations, but she could only gasp out some unintelligible sound, while her eyes flashed fire and her ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sacredness of life is extended over all those of the same race, tested generally by their speaking somewhat the same language. That was the condition in classic antiquity: it was "Jew and Gentile," "Greek and barbarian"—the very word "barbarous" coming from the unintelligible sounds, to the Greeks, of those who spoke other than the Hellenic tongue. Even Plato, with all his far-sighted humanism, says, in the Republic, that in the ideal state, "Greeks should deal with barbarians as Greeks now deal with one another." ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... artificial. Thought is not a mechanical calculus, where the elements and the method exhaust the fact. Thought is a form of life, and should be conceived on the analogy of nutrition, generation, and art. Reason, as Hume said with profound truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could not be otherwise if reason is to remain something transitive and existential; for transition is unintelligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic of existence. Philosophers, however, having perceived that the function of thought is to fix static terms and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... preparing the contents of Volume II, I became convinced that I had made a mistake and that the work to be exhaustive should comprise every message of the Presidents transmitting reports of heads of Departments and other communications, no matter how brief or unintelligible the papers were in themselves, and that to make them intelligible I should insert editorial footnotes explaining them. Having acted upon the other idea in making up Volume I and a portion of Volume II, quite a number of such brief papers were intentionally omitted. Being convinced that all the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... inasmuch as it affected the personal arrangements, if they may be so termed, of the sovereign, was settled in the same session, and on a new principle. What was called the Civil List had hitherto been placed on a footing which was at once unintelligible and misleading. The expression was first used at the Revolution, and was applied not only to that portion of the revenue which was devoted to the personal expenses of the sovereign, but also to many branches ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... the maggot of which he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his life-blood. In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies written in a bad, unintelligible hand-writing, but with great feeling, endless misunderstandings, explanations, disappointments, then debts, a second mortgage, the allowance to his wife, the monthly borrowing of money—and all this for no benefit to any one, either himself or others. And in the present, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... have beside me the original opinion written by Mr. Lynx; and shall treat the reader to a taste of it—giving him sufficient to enable him to appreciate the very ticklish position of affairs with Mr. Titmouse. To make it not altogether unintelligible, let us suppose the state of the pedigree to be something like this, (as far ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... before her. Nedda and Derek, Derek and Nedda! The news was almost unintelligible; those two were still for her barely more than little creatures to be tucked up at night. Engaged! Marriage! Between those who were both as near to her, almost, as her own children had been! The effort was for the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... traffic which would take place if no such metals existed, and the trade between countries were purely a trade of barter." Of this principle, so fertile in consequences, previous to which the theory of foreign trade was an unintelligible chaos, Mr. Ricardo, though he did not pursue it into its ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... be a more certain proof that the power by which the whole operation is performed, so far from being directly and fully known by an inward sentiment or consciousness, is to the last degree mysterious and unintelligible? Here the mind wills a certain event: Immediately another event, unknown to ourselves, and totally different from the one intended, is produced: This event produces another equally unknown: Till at last, through ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... passed the period of boyhood, and are asked about their religious feelings up to that time, are reported to tell the same story. They say that the meaning of the church service whither they had accompanied their parents, and of the kneeling to pray, had been absolutely unintelligible, and a standing puzzle to them. The ritual touched no chord in their untaught natures that responded in unison. Very much of what we fondly look upon as a natural religious sentiment is ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... interrupted the jockey by observing that his discourse was, for the greater part, unintelligible to me. ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... chatted as we walked together through the streets, but I know that my answers were unintelligible. I felt I was not myself. All my senses were keen as far as I could gauge—all save that of my memory of ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... Atherlys of centuries; recumbent in armor or priestly robes, upright in busts that were periwigged or hidden in long curls, above the marble record of their deeds and virtues. Some of these records were in Latin,—an unknown tongue to Peter,—some in a quaint English almost as unintelligible; but none as foreign to him as the dead themselves. Their banners waved above his head; their voices filled the silent church, but fell upon his vacant eye and duller ear. ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... here, the first was probably written early in the thirteenth century, while the rest all date from the early twentieth century. It might therefore be supposed that the earliest of these stories was written in a language more or less unintelligible to modern Icelanders, and that there was a gap of many centuries in the literary production of the nation. This, however, is not ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... rose unsteadily, and Henrietta, with frozen tears on her cheeks, and an unintelligible expression of wretchedness and rage, appeared. After an instant of amazement, he sprang to her and clasped her in his arms, and she, against her will, and protesting voicelessly, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... volubility is rather a contradiction to the yea and nay appellation of the country. A respectable Frenchman informed us, that the peasants of Languedoc were considered to possess much wit and ingenuity by those who could understand their patois, which he frankly owned was unintelligible to himself. Their liveliness and animal exuberance are as strong a contrast to the immoveable form into which they are swathed when infants, as the flutter of a butterfly is to its torpidity as a ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... half through breakfast, Selphar came down, blushing, and frightened half out of her wits, her apologies tumbling over each other with such skill as to render each one unintelligible,—and evidently undecided in, her own mind whether she was to be hung or burnt ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... concerning things which can only be known by their manifestations. But they soon found themselves in a strange land, confused with sights and sounds unknown, in the explanation of which they, of course, choose terms as unintelligible to their readers, as the ideal realities were to them. This course, adopted by Aristotle, has been too closely followed by those who have come after him.[2] But a new era has dawned upon the philosophy of the mind, ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... discovered. Then he looked at the clock again, and was almost angry at the imperturbable monotony of its face. Then he took out his pocket-book to amuse himself by reading his memorandums, but they were very few, and very unintelligible. Then he rose up from his seat, and went to the window; and looked at the people in the street; he thought they looked very stupid, and wondered what they could all find to do with themselves. He looked at the carriages, and saw none with coronets, except now ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... younger sister, had gone to Quebec also, but after a week of rebellion, bad temper and sharp speaking, had come home again without ceremony, and refused to return. Despite certain likenesses to her mother, she had a deep, if unintelligible, admiration for her father, and she never tired looking at the picture of her great-grandfather in the dress of a chevalier of St. Louis—almost the only thing that had been saved from the old Manor House, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... remarked Larry; while Nat tried to express himself intelligently along similar lines; but being suddenly seized with one of his spasms, was obliged to take it out in numerous mouthings, and a working of his facial muscles, all the while making unintelligible sounds. ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... This claim, though unintelligible to the savages in its legal aspects, was practically understood by them to be fatal to their independence and territorial rights. Although in a certain degree the border tribes had been defeated in their conflicts with the United States, they still retained ...
— Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United States: Illustrated by Those in the State of Indiana • C. C. Royce
... first edition in 3 vols. Saunders & Otley, 1836. On page 360 a few words, enclosed in square brackets, have been inserted from the magazine version, as the abbreviated sentence, always hitherto reproduced from the first edition, is unintelligible. ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... went forward to him with the green bough, and accompanied by Yuranigh. We found him in a profuse perspiration about the chest, (from terror, which was not, however, obvious in his manner,) and that he had nothing at all to say to us after all; indeed his language was wholly unintelligible to my native, who, moreover, apprised me that he was the big bully from the tribe at our former encampment, then distant some twenty-five miles. He handled my hat, asked for my watch, my compass, and was about to examine my pockets, when Yuranigh desired ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... going on; they called to those in the village, and on being answered we again went on for about half a mile, when every bundle was put down and a halt called, and again we had to listen to the unintelligible story of the wild animal or animals that would destroy us. We sat down and tried to get them to see as we did, that a house was necessary for our comfort. A thunderstorm was working up, and soon the rain would be down on us—let ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... Family believed that it was only abdicating its political power, whilst retaining all ancient ceremonial rights and titles. Plainly the conception of a Republic, or a People's Government, as it was termed in the native ideographs, was unintelligible ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... he had not accustomed himself to a fictitious hesitation, a stuttering—which disfigured his speech, and which, redoubled when important things were in question, became insupportable and sometimes unintelligible. He had wit, learning, knowledge of the world; much desire to please and insinuate himself, but all was spoiled by an odour of falsehood which escaped in spite of him through every pore of his body—even in the midst of his gaiety, which ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... frightened. The method of operation of the higher intelligences was Tom Finnegan's theme, and he desired to find out if Jurgis had ever considered that the representation of things in their present similarity might be altogether unintelligible upon a more elevated plane. There were assuredly wonderful mysteries about the developing of these things; and then, becoming confidential, Mr. Finnegan proceeded to tell of some discoveries of his own. "If ye have iver had onything to do wid shperrits," said he, and looked inquiringly at ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... Gilberte, or, rather, you think you know her, but do we ever understand women? All their opinions, their ideas, their creeds, are a surprise to us. They are all full of twists and turns, cf the unforeseen, of unintelligible arguments, of defective logic and of obstinate ideas, which seem final, but which they alter because a little bird came and perched on the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... she could have wept, so vital, so entrancing, had been the vision. Piteously she tried to plead with him, but it was as though an obscuring veil had been dropped upon her. She could only utter unintelligible murmurings. She sought for words ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... a good deal of what was said was unintelligible. The Marshall children were quite accustomed to incessant conversations between their elders of which they could gather but the vaguest glimmering. They played about, busy in their own absorbing occupations, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... and Venters had one glimpse of his great breadth and bulk, his gold-buckled belt with hanging guns, his high-top boots with gold spurs. In that moment Venters had a strange, unintelligible curiosity to see Oldring alive. The rustler's broad brow, his large black eyes, his sweeping beard, as dark as the wing of a raven, his enormous width of shoulder and depth of chest, his whole splendid presence so wonderfully charged with vitality ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... constant access to all parts of the ground. There we saw the cock rising up and singing, then taking his turn upon the eggs; and by-and-by, we observed him cease to sing, and saw them both constantly engaged in bringing food to the young ones. No unintelligible hint to fathers and mothers of the human race, who have, before marriage, taken delight in music. But the time came for mowing the grass! I waited a good many days for the brood to get away; but, at last, I determined on the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... other birds and quadrupeds, at unlawful seasons, and contrary to the laws of this realm, which have secured, in their wisdom, the slaughter of such animals for the great of the earth, whom I have remarked to take an uncommon (though to me, an unintelligible) pleasure therein. Now, in humble deference to his honour, and in justifiable defence of my friend deceased, I reply to this charge, that howsoever the form of such animals might appear to be similar to those so protected by the law, yet it was a mere DECEPTIO ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... the relation between prestige and prejudice? When what is unintelligible, or mysterious, is at one time received with enthusiasm, at another with indignation, what renders necessary these two extreme sentiments of appreciation which, though appearing under apparently identical circumstances, are diametrically ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... when we return, and are asked our opinion of what we have seen or heard, we are only able to answer, as I hinted above the scenery is fine, the company splendid and genteel, the music charming for the time, the action not extraordinary, the language unintelligible, and, for all these ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... they seem to be its only readers now except the reluctant parsons at the church lecterns, who communicate their discomfort to the congregation by gargling the words in their throats in an unnatural manner that is as repulsive as it is unintelligible. And this is because the imposition of the legends as literal truths at once changes them from parables into falsehoods. The feeling against the Bible has become so strong at last that educated ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... were two golden chairs which they understood they were expected to sit upon, and occupied accordingly. A mitred and coped ecclesiastic, who appeared to be some kind of Bishop, then shepherded them benevolently through a series of mystic rites that, besides being hopelessly unintelligible, seemed unreasonably protracted. However, they reached the climax at last, and amidst the tumultuous acclamations of the spectators the previously anointed heads of King Sidney and Queen Selina, as they must henceforth be described, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... earnest entreaties of her poor old nurse—but reason's light, from that fearful moment, was darkened evermore. She would suffer herself to be led out into the open air, and soon grew fond again of being with her old playmates, the children; but her words were unintelligible now to them, and she would often throw down the wreath she was twining, and starting up, would exclaim, in a tone that thrilled to one's very heart, "Oh, has he come? Are you sure he has not come yet—my rose ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... they do not fight with their neighbours, they fight among themselves. They are divided into sections, which abuse, plunder, and sometimes murder each other, and on the most frivolous points of difference that would be unintelligible to us if we had not read history, and seen that we too have passed through the same early state of ignorance and barbarism. Any trifle is sufficient to set them together by the ears. They pretend to be all equals, and the more ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... drawing-room. Had he been permitted, he would have held forth to Monica by the hour on the history of the business firm which he had served for a quarter of a century. This subject alone could animate him. His anecdotes were as often as not quite unintelligible, save to people of City experience. For all that Monica did not dislike the man; he was a good, simple, unselfish fellow, and to her he ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss. "In them the burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened." They stood awhile perfect, but they afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight—their tears "such ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the dinner, when rumors of Genevieve Ryan's engagement to Lord Hastings were in lively circulation, Faraday called at the lion-guarded mansion on California Street, and, in answering to his regulation request for the ladies, received the usual unintelligible Chinese rejoinder, and was shown into the gold drawing-room. There, standing in front of a long mirror, looking at her skirts with an eye of pondering criticism, was Miss Genevieve, dressed to go out. She caught sight ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... such as the two fliers had never seen before, like humans except that their skins were a light green instead of the normal white and pink. They were dressed in dark short tunics, and kept talking to each other in a tongue quite unintelligible to Norman and Hackett. They came closer, flocking curiously around the two men, with a babel of voices quite meaningless to the two. Then one of the men uttered an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... minutes after, a gentleman handed Melinda to the piano, and there was a brief pause as she struck the instrument, and commenced going through the unintelligible intricacies of a fashionable piece of music. She could strike all the notes with scientific correctness and mechanical precision. But there was no more expression in her performance than there is in that of a musical box. After she had finished her task, she left the ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... his sleep when Gwyn reached his side, but for a time his words were unintelligible. Then quite plainly ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... Faleile-langi—House roofed by the heavens, that is to say, no house at all, and alluding to the remote tradition of a time when people had no houses. This lady was the daughter of the god Tangaloa, and had a child who was dumb, and from that child she named the island Tau. U expresses the hollow unintelligible sound emitted ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... are at once unintelligible, irrelevant, and untrue. But they are immaterial; and serve only to lug in, (not to introduce,) the assumption that the "power, whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man whose life reaches from ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... All generosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is it to be concealed, that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age. "Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot his children: and whoso ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... this apparently unintelligible custom have any reference to the 21st verse of the IXth chap. of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"—the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... public benefit in this respect, rose to the consulship (556) and to the censorship (560). His treatise —the "-Tripartita-" as it was called—was a work on the Twelve Tables, which appended to each sentence of the text an explanation—chiefly, doubtless, of the antiquated and unintelligible expressions—and the corresponding formula of action. While this process of glossing undeniably indicated the influence of Greek grammatical studies, the portion treating of the formulae of action, on the contrary, was based on the older collection of Appius(69) and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... away the hybrid government which still claimed allegiance in the name of Rome. The provincials of the fifth century possessed the writings in which those lessons were recorded, but possessed them only as symbols of an unintelligible past. A long training in new schools of thought, under new forms of government, was necessary before the European mind could again be brought into touch ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... had only a wild rhythm, and flowed forth in the fitful measure of a wind-harp, did not clothe itself in the sharp brilliancy of the Italian tongue. The words, so far as they could be distinguished, were German, and therefore unintelligible to the Count, and hardly less so to the sculptor; being softened and molten, as it were, into the melancholy richness of the voice that sung them. It was as the murmur of a soul bewildered amid the sinful gloom of earth, and retaining only enough memory of a better state to make sad ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the man was almost winded, and his breath was coming in quick gasps, a faint, far-off cry floated down to him through the ghostly aisles of the naked wind-swept forest. At first it was so faint as to be almost unintelligible, but as they pressed on, it grew louder and clearer, until the man recognized the pitiful ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... we speak in England, and in the language of the Greeks, there are identical verbal roots, or elements entering into the composition of words. That fact remains unintelligible so long as we suppose English and Greek to be independently created tongues; but when it is shown that both languages are descended from one original, the Sanscrit, we give an explanation of that resemblance. In the same way the existence of identical structural roots, if I may so term them, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
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