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More "Vague" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a shock of surprise that I was no longer seated on the ground. I seemed, for an instant floating, suspended as though perhaps immersed in water. The sweep of the ground level was a vague shadowy line of gray, but my legs had dropped beneath it. I was drifting down, sinking, with only ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... uncomfortable. As I knew, he commenced his business career with ten pounds' capital, and could hardly speak plain English, while now his goods were known in every bazaar from Cairo to Singapore. This knowledge fostered a vague but daring hope ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... heavily on the back of a chair. "Crailey?" She looked at Mrs. Tanberry with vague interrogation, but Mrs. ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... poison gas that we have heard vague rumours about," I remarked to the Captain. The gas rose in great clouds as if it had been poured from nozzles, expanding as it ascended; here and there brown clouds seemed to be mixed with the general yellowish green ones. "It looks like chlorine," I said, "and ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... against which her husband was contending; to Lizzie, life consisted of three babies, whom it was her duty to feed and protect, and a husband, who was her instrument for carrying out this duty. The world outside of these was to her a vague and shadowy place, full of vague and shadowy terrors. Somewhere up in the sky was a Holy Virgin who would help when properly appealed to, but Lizzie was handicapped in appealing to this Virgin by the fact that her husband despised ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... allured him, and so had Old Burgundian: he had had designs also upon Visigothic, and had finally chosen Lombard rather than the others because the material was not merely defective but also delightfully vague, affording a wide opportunity for genuine philological insight. And indeed to classify a language on the basis of a phrase scratched on a brooch, the misquotations of alien chroniclers, the shifting ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... forbidden. When some proclamation prohibited the boys from going out in the streets after nine o'clock in the evening, or some article declared carnal love unlawful, it was to his mind clear and definite; it was forbidden, and that was enough. For him there was always a doubtful element, something vague and not fully expressed, in any sanction or permission. When a dramatic club or a reading-room or a tea-shop was licensed in the town, he would shake ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... entire rental value there would be no chance for the land monopolist to exploit the earnings of labor. Man's means should not be "drained and exhausted by excessive taxation," as the Pope seems to fear, showing that he has a vague idea of the method by which it is proposed to destroy ownership. But as the rental value to-day is already paid by labor, the proposed plan could not drain or exhaust labor any more than at present, while such a tax falling ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... return, and during the winter months, he was constant in his attendance at the meetings of the Entomological and Zoological Societies. It was at one of these evening gatherings that he first met Huxley, and he also had a vague recollection of once meeting and speaking to Darwin at the British Museum. Had it not been for his extreme shyness of disposition, and (according to his own estimation) "lack of conversational powers," he would doubtless ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... a wistful sadness in the fall of evening, a vague regret for the fading glories of the day which, passing out of our lives for ever, leaves us so much the richer or poorer, the nobler or more unworthy, according to the use we have made of the opportunities it has offered us for the doing of good ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... among the classical poets. "The Essay," says De Quincey, "is a collection of independent maxims tied together into a fasciculus by the printer, but having no natural order or logical dependence; generally so vague as to mean nothing. And, what is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no man so often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so often as in ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... laughing. "He told many a bold truth," says the author of Guerre des Auteurs anciens et modernes, "that sent bishops to their dioceses, and made many a coquette blush. He possessed the art of biting when he smiled; and more ably combated vice by his ingenious satire than by those vague apostrophes which no one takes to himself. While others were straining their minds to catch at sublime thoughts which no one understood, he lowered his talents to the most humble situations, and to the minutest things. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and content myself with the possession of his love, and with the assurance that he will return to me as soon as possible. As soon as possible! but what a vague hope! He sails with the first fair wind. What a dreadful certainty! Perhaps to-morrow! Oh, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... names that made memorable those wonderful days touch chords of association that still vibrate in the life of the hour. For the most part the artists and their associates have gone their way—not into a Silent Land, a land of shadows and vague, wandering ghosts—but into that realm wherein is the "life more abundant," of more intense energy and of nobler achievement; the realm in which every aspiration of earth enlarges its conception and every inspiration ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... artistic sight, sound, or idea will most probably be used up in bringing to life again some of the many millions of sights, sounds, and ideas which lie inert, stored up in our mind. The artistic emotion will therefore not give rise to an active impulse, but to that vague mixture of feelings and ideas which we call a mood; and if any alteration occur in subsequent action, it will be because all external impressions must vary according to the mood of the person who ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... foreigner the advantage of their own indigenous Jus Civile. It is true that we, at the present day, should probably take a very different view of the Jus Gentium, if we were performing the operation which was effected by the Roman jurisconsults. We should attach some vague superiority or precedence to the element which we had thus discerned underlying and pervading so great a variety of usage. We should have a sort of respect for rules and principles so universal. Perhaps we should speak of the common ingredient as being of the essence ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... terrible truth, that of all men in the world he was the most lonely, separated as he was from all that he had known and loved by an impassable gulf of nearly four long centuries—that his well-loved Golden Star was but a memory known to few, a name in a vague tradition; that the resting-place, even of her mummy, was unknown, and that all that the darkest prophecy could have foretold had in very truth fallen upon the land of the Incas and the Children of ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... Many minds were yearning for something to fill the void,—for a more substantial ground of rest and of hope. They longed for a goal on which their aspirations might center, and to which their exertions might tend. The burden of sin and of suffering that rested on the common mass excited at least a vague yearning for deliverance. The Roman Empire, with all its treasures and its glory, failed to satisfy the hearts of men. The dreams of philosophy could not be realized on the basis of ancient society, where the state was every thing, and where ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the sparrow of city streets! But his impudence is not a manner of prudence, an art of remaining vague, an elegant method of having no opinion. His eyes always express either wrath or delight. Do you care to know the secret by which the little beggar, with his "Chappie" and his "See" can steal away our hearts? It is that he is frank and fearless that he believes, ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... unlike what Tess had expected to hear that she drew a long, disappointed breath. There had been a vague wish within her heart that she were going to be of infinite benefit to him. It was such a little thing to lose a fine supper. His life had not been in ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Switzerland without seeing him. But when I had somewhat recovered from the agitation of admiration, it was followed by a feeling of very marked fear. Bonaparte then had no power: he was thought even to be more or less in danger from the vague suspiciousness of the Directory; so that the fear he inspired was caused only by the singular effect of his personality upon almost every one who had intercourse with him. I had seen men worthy of high respect; I had ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... an acquaintance. Hints were thrown out of an exciting nature; stories were told of perilous bargains made in a hurry and repented of at leisure; and instances were adduced of unaccountable capacities, vague longings, and unnatural inclinations implanted by the author of all evil for ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... temperatures, make blood counts and record blood pressure, reckon the heart-beats, and think we are wondrous wise. But wig-wag as we may, signal with what mysterious wireless of evanescent youth-fire we still hold in our blood, we get nothing but vague hints, broken reminiscences, and a certain patchwork of our own subconscious chop logic of middle age in return. There is no real communication between the worlds. Youth remains another planet—even as age and childhood are ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... pupils should come to an understanding that two languages should be regarded as distinct whenever the speakers of them are unable to converse together, or freely to exchange ideas, whether by word or writing. Scientifically speaking, such a test might be vague and unsatisfactory, like the test of species by their capability of producing fertile hybrids; but if the pupil is persuaded that there are such things in nature as distinct languages, whatever may have been their ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... give such specific directions as will qualify the novice to hive a swarm of bees, under almost any circumstances; for I know the necessity of such directions and how seldom they are to be met with, even in large treatises on Bee-Keeping. Vague or imperfect directions always fail, just at the moment that the inexperienced attempt to ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... gone! But he had bequeathed to Marian a purpose and an object, which gave her a spirit to try hard and feel out a way for herself in this confused tangle of a world around, her. She was happier, though perhaps more anxious; for now it was not mere vague dislike and discontent, but a clearer perception both of the temptations around and of the ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Diana gave a vague assent. She had, in truth, two recent letters from Marsham in her pocket at that moment, giving a brilliant and minute account of the Parliamentary situation. But she hid the fact, warm and close, like a brooding bird; only drawing on her companion to talk politics, that she ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... whether I had been sleeping or musing, I started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious. It ceased, but my heart beat anxiously; my inward tranquillity was broken. The clock, far down in the hall, struck two. Just then my chamber-door was touched as if fingers ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... materializations followed one another just as they had the summer before. The only difference Eliphalet could detect was a stronger flavour in the spectral profanity; and this, of course, was only a vague impression, for he did not actually hear a single word. He waited awhile in patience, listening and watching. Of course he never saw either of the ghosts, because neither of them could appear to him. At last he got his dander up, and he thought it was about time to interfere, so he ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... throne, and appears inclined to be quiet. There is another great warrior chief, named Moselekatsee, who revolted from Chaka, and who is much such another character; but our accounts of these people are vague at present, and require time to corroborate their correctness. You will have to act and decide when you arrive there, and must be guided by circumstances. With the caravan you propose to travel with, I think there will not be much danger; and if there is, you must ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... readily the influence of his models. He used especially the meter of the common evangelical hymns, and cultivated the vague personification of the poets of the eighteenth century. He himself, however, was essentially a romantic poet, as was evinced by his fondness for Byron and Marlowe. His common style is represented by the following lines from his poem entitled ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Certainly this was vague explanation, yet though the main object might be asserted "to put the act in force against the insurgents," the hint was given that the commerce of friendly neutrals might be "incidentally and indirectly affected." ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... that he is right in so doing. I am aware that it has been not unusual, especially perhaps of late years, to apply the name of God to very different conceptions, to empty it of all implication of personality, and to reduce it to signifying something very large and very vague, such as the Infinite or the Absolute (whatever these hard words may signify), the great First Cause, the Universal Substance, "the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being,"[1] and so forth. Now without expressing any opinion as to the truth or falsehood of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... power of winning confidence, many patients, especially ladies, consulted him when suffering from any misery, as a sort of Father-Confessor. He told me that they always began by complaining in a vague manner about their health, and by practice he soon guessed what was really the matter. He then suggested that they had been suffering in their minds, and now they would pour out their troubles, and he heard nothing more about the body...Owing to my father's skill in winning ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... was wet with the vague horror of something. He made an effort to speak, to straighten up; gave her a dreadful look of appeal which turned into ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... with love intense, Which smiles o'er sleeping innocence; Sweet when the lost arrive: Sweet the musician's ardour beats, While his vague mind's in quest of sweets, The choicest ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... windowless walls began to crawl up the stripped skyscraper between them and the lake. Daisy pulled the black-out curtains on that side. For a day or two longer their thoughts and conversations were haunted by Gusterson's vague sardonic visions of a horde of tickler-energized moles pouring up out of the tunnels to tear down the remaining trees, tank the atmosphere and perhaps somehow dismantle the stars—at least on this side ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... had an odd one," said Miss Oliver absently. "It was one of those vivid dreams I sometimes have—they are not the vague jumble of ordinary dreams—they are as clear ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... mean? I mean that this is all too unbusinesslike. It's too vague. I'm risking my life to put this business through, and I want to get what I deserve. It's the biggest thing I've ever done, and I won't do ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... Christianity we make a distinction without alleging much difference between the Father and the Son, even so in ancient times a distinction of a similarly vague kind was made between the All-Father Fire and His Image and First-begotten Son Light. The disc of the Sun seems to have represented the former and the Sun-star or radiate Sun the latter where both were represented in one illustration, as for instance in ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... that, natural proof of a God there is none, and our trust must be placed solely in revelation; while Brougham, another Immense Being worshipper, declares that revelation derives its chief support from natural Theology, without which it has 'no other basis than vague tradition.' ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... said to her: "I have a strange feeling that I have known you always." She had cherished the saying in her heart, hoping—believing that it might, in some vague, mysterious way, be true. And not at all aware that this pretty sentiment is as old as the race and the merest banality on the masculine tongue, signifying: "At this moment I am drawn to you, as to no other woman; but an hour hence ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... old and white before me now, beseeching me to speak for them, and most lovingly will I do it. Howells, Hay, Aldrich, Matthews, Stockton, Cable, Remus—how their young hopes and ambitions come flooding back to my memory now, out of the vague far past, the beautiful past, the lamented past! I remember it so well—that night we met together—it was in Boston, and Mr. Fiends was there, and Mr. Osgood, Ralph Keeler, and Boyle O'Reilly, lost to us now these many years—and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... frankness with which he had expressed himself. He retained but a very slight recollection of all that he had said, but he thought it was quite sufficient to have aroused the ridicule of those around him. Most painful of all sensations, the vague sense of a folly committed, the extent and the consequences of which are alike unknown to us! As he approached his home it seemed to him that he had profaned his affection for Marguerite by mentioning her name in that ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... no pride of life. And why? Because always before them and above them there stood some great principle, some idea, some duty to which their life belonged, not to themselves. All work is modest, all idle self-contemplation is vain. And what the young man needs with his vague aspirations and conceits is to make himself the servant of some worthy purpose. And what the merchant needs with his growing business is to count himself the steward of some worthy Master. And what the student needs ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... in coming, yet her nerves did not assert themselves unpleasantly, as usual. In fact, she had forgotten her nerves, in the strange, vague gladness that was half pain which flooded her being. She would berate herself for being "an old fool," though conscious at the same time of little, warming heart-thrills that exulted over her reason. As Polly had said, the president ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... inhabitants of Cap, they thronged the court of Government-House and the Jesuits' Walk; and even in the Place d'Archer and the Rue Espagnole, passengers found it difficult to make their way. The assemblage could scarcely have told what detained them there, unless it were the vague expectation of more news, the repetition of the praises they loved to hear, and, perhaps, some hope of getting one more glimpse of Toussaint on this night of his triumph. From mouth to mouth circulated the words which General Laveaux had ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... as little harm as may be—to be of some use at home—and to make turnips grow in the upland at Inglewood, I have some vague fancy to see foreign parts, especially now they are all in such a row—it would be such fun—but I suppose you would not trust me there now. Here I am for you to do as you please with me—a gracious permission, considering that you did not ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the mind, to abstraction and generalization. In the numberless changes of these languages, their bewildering flexibility, their variable forms, and their rapid deterioration, they seem to betray a lack of individuality, and to resemble the vague and tumultuous history of the tribes who employ them. They exhibit an almost incredible laxity. It is nothing uncommon for the two sexes to use different names for the same object, and for nobles and vulgar, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... foreign countries, that they had originally fled on account of their share in the Porteous Mob. But little credit can be attached to these surmises, as in most of the cases they are contradicted by dates, and in none supported by anything but vague rumours, grounded on the ordinary wish of the vulgar, to impute the success of prosperous men to some unpleasant source. The secret history of the Porteous Mob has been till this day unravelled; and it has always been quoted as a close, daring, and calculated act of violence, of a nature ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in some old marvellous tale, Some legend strange and vague, That a midnight host of spectres pale ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... was about, I seized and clung to the branches of a small tree with the tenacity of a drowning man—unable to open my eyes while sticks and leaves, huge limbs of trees and deluges of water flew madly past, filling my mind with a vague impression that the besom of destruction had become a veritable reality, and that we were all about to be swept off the face of ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... come in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you love English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can't do better, the next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon Road or Shrivenham station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for the vague old stories that haunt country-sides all about England, will not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours' stay; for, glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for its relics of bygone ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... to manifest itself upon his good-natured features. Psycho-analysis was not his strong point. In a vague way he began to suspect that Gladys Norman's devotion to Malcolm Sage was not strictly in accordance ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... the vague feeling which had depressed them all, ever since the discovery of the murder; that here was something vastly greater than the accidental finding of a person killed by an outsider, that the crime touched Sloanehurst personally. The foreboding had been patent—almost, it seemed, a tangible thing—but, ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... whom De Vaux addressed thus hastily, the equerry and his fellow-servants of the royal chamber rushed hastily into the tents of the neighbouring nobility, and quickly spread an alarm, as general as the cause seemed vague, through the whole British forces. The English soldiers, waked in alarm from that noonday rest which the heat of the climate had taught them to enjoy as a luxury, hastily asked each other the cause of the tumult, and ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... (sec. 19) to vague schemes of colonial control suggested during the war. More serious measures were impending. When George Grenville became the head of the cabinet, in April, 1763, he took up and elaborated three distinctly new lines of policy, which grew to be the direct ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... Brandan; and 200 leagues west of the Canaries lay somewhere the lost Island of the Seven Cities, that two valiant Genoese had vainly endeavored to discover, and in search of which, yearly, the merchants of Bristol sent expeditions, even before Columbus sailed. In his northern journey, too, some vague and formless traditions may have reached his ear of the voyages of Biorn and Lief, and of the pleasant coasts of Helleland, Markland, and Vinland that lay toward the setting sun. All were hints and rumors ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... and took away my strange, deformed companion. The hapless creature had been at times a heavy charge; I could not take her out beyond the garden, and I could not leave her a minute alone: for her poor mind, like her body, was warped: its propensity was to evil. A vague bent to mischief, an aimless malevolence, made constant vigilance indispensable. As she very rarely spoke, and would sit for hours together moping and mowing, and distorting her features with indescribable grimaces, it was more like being prisoned with some strange tameless animal, than associating ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... The vague telepathic bond that always links identical twins (they "think alike", they say) becomes unbalanced under such conditions. Normally, there is a give-and-take, and each preserves the sense of his own identity, since the two different sets of sense receptors give different ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... subordinate angel, the true Devil does not appear. In the Apocrypha he is said (Wisdom ii. 24) to have brought death into the world. The New Testament does not teach a doctrine of Satan, or the Devil, as something new and revealed then for the first time, but assumes a general though vague belief in such a being. This belief evidently existed among the Jews when Christ came. It as evidently was not taught in the Old Testament. The inevitable inference is that it grew up in the Jewish mind from its ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... lay inert, her brain reeling with vague, swift ideas that burnt her in passing, like flames. She remembered her husband's infamous behaviour, his humiliating conduct to her, his threats, his plans for a divorce; and she gradually came to understand that she was the victim of a regular conspiracy, that the servants had ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... not have been altogether effaced from his heart. Full of doubt and anxiety, therefore, she paused at the stile, against which she felt it necessary to lean for support, not without a touch of interest and somewhat of curiosity, to control the vague apprehensions which she could not help feeling. We need scarcely inform the reader that the meeting on both ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... that I craved from the fount of knowledge was enlightenment concerning the character known as A Man About Town. He was more vague in my mind than a type should be. We must have a concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we can comprehend it. Now, I have a mental picture of John Doe that is as clear as a ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... him out standing quite still, gnawing at his mustache ends, and staring, absent-mindedly, into a vague distance, that saw nothing of the expression of gentle inquiry that covered the nervousness in Anton. Yet Nicholas' sudden apprehension seemed, on reflection, to be unwarranted. Certainly, thought he, Anton's attitude towards Ivan had completely changed. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... disordered, poor thing!" Isabel said in her gentle way when she returned them—"at least, judging by these. They are hopelessly mixed and vague." ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... of that, Eachin," said Simon, in that vague way in which lukewarm comforters endeavour to turn the reflections of their friends from ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, half animated by vague personifications and sensational narrative. Like Harold, and Scott's Marmion, it just misses being a great poem. The Coliseum is its masterpiece of description, the appeal, "Astarte, my beloved, speak to me," its nearest approach to pathos. The lonely death of the hero ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... said the other. Her placid acceptance of these facts was very comforting to Miss Mary. She did not realise how different she herself was from the vague, scared woman of a week ago; nor how her quiet, well-dressed taciturnity ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... was Saint Michael and not the saints who had appeared to her.[2347] She herself found it difficult to unravel the tangled web of her dreams and her ecstasies. And from these vague visions of a child the doctors were laboriously essaying to elaborate a ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... had preceded them, but many dragged their pitiful belongings along with them, and the murmur of their alien voices rang through the bustle of the station. Hetty Torrance was not unduly fanciful, but those footsteps caused her, as she afterwards remembered, a vague concern. She believed, as her father did, that America was made for the Americans; but it was evident that in a few more years every unit of those incoming legions would be a citizen of the Republic, with rights equal to those enjoyed by Torrance of Cedar Range. She had seen that as yet the constitution ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... could only make requisitions upon the thirteen members of the confederacy in proportion to the assessed value of their real estate, and it was not provided with any means of enforcing these requisitions. On this point the articles contained nothing beyond the vague promise of the states to obey. The power of levying taxes was thus retained entirely by the states. They not only imposed direct taxes, as they do to-day, but they laid duties on exports and imports, each according to its own narrow view of its local interests. The only restriction upon this was ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... elicited from them contemptuous sneers or strong denunciations. I have a right to complain of this treatment, and I do strongly protest against it as unchristian, hurtful and ungenerous. To prejudge and condemn an individual, on vague and apocryphal rumors, without listening to his defence or examining evidence, is tyranny. Perhaps I am in error—perhaps I deserve unqualified condemnation; but I am at least entitled to a privilege which is granted to the vilest criminals, namely, the privilege of a fair trial. I ask nothing ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... Child-dreams—more vague and fragmentary than my animal ones; and yet more calm, and simple, and gradually, as they led me onward through a new life, ripening into detail, coherence, and reflection. Dreams of a hut among the valleys of Thibet—the young of forest animals, wild cats, and dogs, and fowls, brought ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... more. His mother's fame as a flannel-washer was against him; Brougham Street was against him; and, chiefly, his poverty was against him. True, he had gorgeously given a house away to an aged widow! True, he succeeded in transmitting to his acquaintances a vague idea that he was doing well and waxing financially from strength to strength! But the idea was too vague, too much in the air. And save by a suit of clothes, he never gave ocular proof that he had money to waste. He could not. It was impossible for him to compete with even the more modest ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... talking to him directly over the register: "I think you'll have to get along without the name for the present. I'll tell you by and by." As Mr. Ransom pronounces these words, Miss Reed, on her side of the partition, lifts her head with a startled air, and, after a moment of vague circumspection, listens keenly. "But she was beautiful. She was a blonde, and she had the loveliest eyes—eyes, you know, that could be funny or tender, just as she chose—the kind of eyes I always liked." ...
— The Register • William D. Howells
... summons came I dodged a committee-meeting, and ascended the marble stairs with trepidation, and underwent the doubting scrutiny of an English lackey, sufficiently grave in deportment and habiliments to have waited upon a bishop in his own land. I have a vague memory of an entrance-hall with panelled paintings and a double-staircase with a snow-white carpet, about which I had read in the newspapers that it was woven in one piece, and had cost an incredible sum. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... change has taken place in the king's affections. You know whom that concerns. Afterwards, the news continues, people are talking about one of the maids of honor, respecting whom various slanderous reports are being circulated. These vague phrases have not allowed me to sleep. I have been deploring, ever since yesterday, that my diffidence and vacillation of purpose, notwithstanding a certain obstinacy of character I may possess, have left me unable to reply ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... when he doesn't. Now I felt sure that when Dr. Farr heard the news he would have a fit. I expected him to use language and even his umbrella. But nothing of this kind happened. He simply sat there like a slightly faded and vague old gentleman and said ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... indifferent music till all hours. It was this second event which brought about the third excitement. For having been a little imprudent one night, in the matter of "night-caps," or careless as to draughts, my Aunt was taken seriously ill. At least she chose to think herself so, though I now have vague suspicions that the singing lady knew more about it all than she cared to tell. All I know is that the doctor was sent for, and that, after a long confab in the sick room, he came to me and ordered my immediate return home. "Your poor Aunt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... kennel of evil savours, Heale was slowly trying to poke things into something like order; and dragging out a few old drugs with a shaky hand, to see if any one would buy them, in a vague expectation that something must needs have happened to somebody the night before, which would ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night. Vague but agonising miseries possessed his mind. It was not only Anne who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life in general, the universe. "This adolescence business," he repeated to himself ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... difficulties such as are met with in our American wilderness. The crossing of a stormy ocean, the reclamation of the soil from nature, the fighting with savage men are mere generalities wherein some vague idea may be gained of true pioneer life. But it is only by following woman in her wanderings and standing beside her in the forest or in the cabin and by marking in detail the thousand trials and perils which surround her in such a position that we can obtain the true picture of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... country seven years, appeared at the Shoals two years before the date of the murder. He lived about the islands during that time. He was born in Ueckermuende, a small town of lower Pomerania, in Northern Prussia. Very little is known about him, though there were vague rumors that his past life had not been without difficulties, and he had boasted foolishly among his mates that "not many had done what he had done and got off in safety;" but people did not trouble themselves about him or his past, all having enough to do to earn their bread and keep the wolf from ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... possibly have hit something, and from roofs with ordinary guns and revolvers which could not possibly have hit anything at all. In the gray haze that hung over Paris the next morning, I wandered through empty streets and finally, with some vague notion of looking out, up the hill of Montmartre. All Paris lay below, mysterious in the mist, with that strange, poignant beauty of something trembling on the verge. One could follow the line of ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... most puzzling. These are the true Sylvia, the real wood-birds. They are small, very active, but feeble songsters, and, to be seen, must be sought for. In passing through the woods, most persons have a vague consciousness of slight chirping, semi-musical sounds in the trees overhead. In most cases these sounds proceed from the warblers. Throughout the Middle and Eastern States, half a dozen species or so may be found in almost every locality, as the redstart, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... passed since I had read the remarkable manuscript of this remarkable man; this man who remembered no childhood and who could not even offer a vague guess as to his age; who was always young and yet who had dandled my grandfather's great-grandfather upon his knee; this man who had spent ten years upon the planet Mars; who had fought for the green men of Barsoom and fought against them; ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Diderot's only contributions to aesthetic criticism. He could not content himself with reproductions, in eloquent language upon paper, of the combinations of colour and form upon canvas. No one was further removed from vague or indolent expansion. He returns again and again to examine with keenness and severity the principles, the methods, the distinctions of the fine arts, and though he is often a sentimentalist and a declaimer, he can also, when the time comes, transform himself into an ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... way of talking about "miracles," and "the impossible," and "genius" is quite vague and popular. What do we mean by "genius"? The Latin term originally designates, not a man's everyday intellect, but a spirit from without which inspires him, like the "Daemon," or, in Latin, "Genius" of Socrates, or the lutin which rode the pen of Moliere. "Genius" is claimed for Shakespeare ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... themselves came forward to testify to the falsity of these charges, and the fact that Richard had himself placed Conrad of Montferat upon the throne, and had no possible interest in his death, was alone more than sufficient to nullify the vague rumors brought against him. Richard himself in a few a scornful words disposed of this accusation. The accusation that he, Richard of England, would stoop to poison a man whom he could have crushed in an instant was too absurd to ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... you shake and swing, Our hearts shape the message We would have you bring. Dreams of happy Springtimes We hope yet to share; Vague, but pleasant visions All to ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... voluminous folds of a single piece of grey-white stuff. Something supernatural about her terrifies the beholders, who throw themselves on their faces. Her outline flows and waves: she is almost distinct at moments, and again vague and shadowy: above all, she is larger than life-size, not enough to be measured by the flustered congregation, but enough to affect them with a ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... vague path beginning at the rear of the malocas marched the twenty-four, the two northerners bending under the weight of their packs, the pair of Brazilians sweeping the jungle with practiced eyes, the score of Mayorunas ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... sense or that sense out of it, but at the end of the ends the "Divine Comedy" will stand for the patriotism of medieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound and lofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned. This is vague enough and slight enough, I must confess, but I must confess also that I had not even a conception of so much when I first read the "Inferno." I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was that sort which finds ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... such a twitter as she did it! All that old delight in doing somebody else up, a vague somebody whose meannesses she didn't know, was as nothing to the joy of doing Tausig up. She was dancing on a volcano again, that incorrigible Nance! Oh, but such a volcano, Maggie! It atoned for a year of days when there was nothing doing; no excitement, no risk, nothing ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... of the thirteenth century the Templars had become suspect, not only in the eyes of the clergy, but of the general public. "Amongst the common people," one of their latest apologists admits, "vague rumours circulated. They talked of the covetousness and want of scruple of the Knights, of their passion for aggrandizement and their rapacity. Their haughty insolence was proverbial. Drinking habits were attributed to them; ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... revenues is to have no other check, certainly Congress should supply the Department of Justice with appropriations sufficiently liberal to secure the best legal talent in the defense of these claims and to pursue its vague search ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... Shape in words a mortal's prayer! Prayer, that, when my day is done, And I see its setting sun, Shorn and beamless, cold and dim, Sink beneath the horizon's rim,— When this ball of rock and clay Crumbles from my feet away, And the solid shores of sense Melt into the vague immense, Father! I may come to Thee Even with the beggar's plea, As the poorest of Thy poor, With my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he finds himself wrong. But can we, for that reason, run ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change, of which he himself has given no intimation? Can we safely base our action upon any such vague inference? Now, as ever, I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas's position, question his motives, or do aught that can be personally offensive to him. Whenever, if ever, he and we can come together ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... at the helm obeyed, and the next send of the sea drove the Scud down upon the quarter of the ship, so near her that the old mariner himself recoiled a step, in a vague expectation that, at the next surge ahead, she would drive bows foremost directly into the planks of the other vessel. But this was not to be: rising from the crouching posture she had taken, like a panther about to leap, the cutter dashed onward, and at the next instant she ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... imperilled all our dispositions, and Colonel Whitehead wisely kept A Company at Asiago in case the enemy should drive a wedge between the two Brigades. It was the more unfortunate that O.C. D Company, acting on one of those vague orders which often circulate during battle, whose source it is impossible to trace with certainty, had withdrawn his company somewhat from the slopes, believing himself to be conforming to the desires of the 144th Brigade. Monte Catz was therefore left in a dangerously salient position on the west, ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... organically connected. They become incipiently reflex; and, on the occurrence of the appropriate stimulus, the whole nervous apparatus which in past generations was brought into activity by this stimulus, becomes nascently excited. Even while yet there have been no individual experiences, a vague feeling of pleasure or pain is produced; constituting what we may call the body of the emotion. And when the experiences of past generations come to be repeated in the individual, the emotion gains both strength and definiteness; and is accompanied ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... could not imagine that, situated as I was, it could be difficult for me to obtain a command for a good soldier, I determined to go and ask the Comte d'Argenson. I made my request, and presented my memorial. He received me coldly, and gave me vague answers. I went out, and the Marquis de V——, who was in his closet, followed me. "You wish to obtain a command," said he; "there is one vacant, which is promised me for one of my proteges; but if you will do me ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... arms, and Aunt M'riar had to do it for her in the end. Not, however, unwillingly, because it enabled her to give her mind to pinking or gauffering, or whatever other craft was then engaging her attention. We do not ourself know what pinking is, or gauffering; we have only heard them referred to. A vague impression haunts us that they fray out if not done careful. But this ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... cared to come to listen; and I remember with delight those hours when perhaps twenty boys would come and sit all about my study, filling every chair and sofa and overflowing on to the floor, to listen to long, vague stories of adventure, with at all events an appearance ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dreamily in pairs, is a vague line of the motto,—a foreshadowing of the heroic idea, as are the soft calls of the wind with wooing harp ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... attendant who came to them deftly aided Geoffrey to force a little cordial between the sufferer's teeth. Savine made no sign. Forgetting her indignation in her terror Helen glanced at Geoffrey in vague question, but he merely raised his ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... OR HIS UNDERSTANDING HAS NOT AS YET BEEN PAINED by the confused and perplexing ideas resting on no fixed point of view, leading to no satisfactory result, sometimes dull, sometimes fantastic, sometimes floating in vague generalities, which we are often obliged to hear and read on the conduct of War, owing to the spirit of scientific investigation having hitherto been little directed to ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... became possessed of a dollar to buy a steamboat like Craig's. But Mr. K., who had furnished the additional capital, looked in vain for the improved service. The new rolling stock was not in evidence, and explanations were vague and unsatisfactory, as is often the case in the railroad game at which men play. It took a stern court of inquiry to develop the fact that the railroad and steamship had simply changed hands—and at a mutual profit of one hundred per cent. And Mr. K., as he ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... ridiculous humbug have we known to be passed off on children, in 've-ry expensive' 'first-class' ladies' schools in Philadelphia and in New York, for instruction in Chemistry. The young brains were vexed and wearied day after day to acquire by vague description and by rote the details of an almost ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... doctor's peep from Parnassus has afforded, may furnish the imagination of the reader with materials to create in his own mind a vague yet not unjust notion of Neck-or-Nothing Hall; but certain details of the Hall itself, its inmates and its customs, may be desired by the matter-of-fact reader or the more minutely curious, and as the author has the difficult ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... exposure, imprisonment, disgrace. A peculiar apathy of peace seemed to envelop him. There was no longer hope to entice, no further struggle to be waged against the terror of fear, or the joy of love, or the horror of remorse; all seemed gone from him, even to the vague interest in things transpiring ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... of revolt against her duty, unable altogether to abandon the hope, the longing to see Iver again, filled with vague terror of what the future might bring forth, she remained as struck with paralysis, kneeling, speechless, with head bowed, hands fallen at her side, seeing, hearing, knowing nothing; and was roused with a start by the voice of Jonas ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... part of those in it. There is nothing to prevent this—no fence, or boom; no mark, even, between what is dangerous and what is not; no division whatever. Persons ignorant of the river may just as likely as not row right into danger. A vague caution on a notice-board may or may not be seen; in either case it gives no directions, and is certainly no protection. Let the matter be argued from whatever point of view, the fact remains that these accidents occur from the want of an efficient ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... those strong feelings of respect and attachment, which her rank and station alone would have easily won from people of the middle class. You may suppose how deeply the quiet women in Somersetshire must have been interested, when they slowly learned by vague and uncertain tidings that the intrepid girl who had been used to break their vicious horses for them was reigning in sovereignty over the wandering tribes of Western Asia! I know that her name was made almost as familiar to me in my childhood as the name of Robinson Crusoe—both were associated ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... of poetry who is trying to find some English poem that he can get no trace of except from vague memory, would be quite apt to meet ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... among the rocky coves of the island. Others, that he was one of the ancient comrades of Kidd or Bradish, returned to convey away treasures formerly hidden in the vicinity. The only circumstance that throws anything like a vague light on this mysterious matter is a report which prevailed of a strange, foreign-built shallop, with much the look of a picaroon,[1] having been seen hovering about the Sound for several days without landing or reporting herself, though boats were seen going to and from ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... was a voucher for his message, to gain his way through. But how could Amos Green, a foreigner and a civilian, hope to pass? It was impossible, clearly impossible. And yet, somehow, in spite of the impossibility, he still clung to a vague hope that a man so full of energy and resource might find some way out of ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... got this despatch from Mine City: you see it's pretty vague: 'bodies of two men found forty miles from branch of P. & O. Line, thought to be drovers overcome by heat and thirst.' I wired for more particulars; but the railway hands had shovelled ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... Then suddenly that "h" would appear or disappear, and the illusion was over. It was like a sudden shock of cold water down the back. I never discovered the origin of his family; it was a matter of which he did not speak, perhaps because he was vague about it himself; but if an earl of Norman blood had married a handsome Cockney kitchenmaid of native ability, I can quite imagine that Samuel Savage might have been a child of the union. For the rest he was a good man and a faithful one, for whom I ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... more and more vague, the voice of Marmaduke the parrot came across the water out of the rigging; a far-away voice, which grew fainter and fainter as the ship grew dimmer, until it died away as ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... universal sweep of the scythe of persecution, and he felt himself moved and incited to go to some of the Lords and leaders of the Congregation to warn them of what he feared; but, considering that he had only a vague and unaccountable suspicion for his thought, he wavered, and finally returned home. Thus, though manifestly and marvellously instructed of the fruition of some bloody business in hand that night, he was yet overruled by the wisdom which is of this ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... to be evaded, but it is an excellence. The future just as future lacks urgency and body. To get ready for something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the leverage that exists, and to seek for motive power in a vague chance. Under such circumstances, there is, in the second place, a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination. The future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will intervene before it becomes a present. Why be in a hurry about getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... was perfectly soundless, and for the time, at least, lonely; the splendid afternoon had begun to fade, and there was a fascination in the object I had come to see. It came to pass that at the same time I discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality. That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in the nice adaption of the means to the end. The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... assented to." On this Dr. Parr observes, "Why Dr. Warburton was ever suspected of secret infidelity I know not. What he was inclined to think on subjects of religion, before, perhaps, he had leisure or ability to examine them, depends only upon obscure surmise, or vague report." The words inclined to think seems a periphrase for secret infidelity. Our critic attributes these reports to "an English dunce, whose blunders and calumnies are now happily forgotten, and repeated by a French buffoon, whose morality ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... me," said Jones—Then vague recollections began to stir in his mind, that long glabrous face, the set of that jaw, that ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... be good enough to complete it by sending what precedes and follows; for we have here nothing authentic relating to your affairs. All that we know of you, we get from the gazettes, imperfectly, by scraps, in a vague and uncertain manner, a ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... been the chances beyond those limits? Considering how fatal to the identity of a word the change of a single consonant would be in monosyllabic languages, we might expect that monosyllabic roots, if their meaning was so general, vague, and changeable, would all the more carefully have preserved their consonantal outline. But this is by no means the case. Monosyllabic languages have their dialects no less than polysyllabic ones; and from the rapid and decisive divergence of such dialects, we may learn how rapid and decisive ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... or, even where neither facts nor arguments are suppressed, to give a party character to his work by an unfair distribution of lights and shades. The strong and vivid epithets are chiefly reserved for the good or bad deeds on one side, the vague, general and comparatively colourless epithets for the corresponding deeds on the other side; and in this way very similar facts are brought before the reader with such different degrees of illumination and ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of this book to trace the story of Japan from its beginnings to the establishment of constitutional government. Concerned as this story is with the period of vague and legendary antiquity as well as with the disorders of mediaeval time and with centuries of seclusion, it is plain that it is not an easy task to present a trustworthy and connected account of the momentous changes through which ...
— Japan • David Murray
... interlaced with trees as black as if they were drawn in India ink on the wavering background of the mist. A broad, very low bed on a platform a few steps above the floor, two or three small lacquer screens with vague fanciful decorations in gold, denoting, as did the double doors and the heavy woollen carpet, a dread of cold carried to excess, chairs of various styles, long chairs and low chairs, placed at random, all well-stuffed and of lazy or voluptuous ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... perhaps have done in the old days because he was then so alien to it—he began to love this Judaism with an intense fervor. Although in his own eyes he could not, at first, clearly justify this new yearning, it became so powerful at length that it crystallized from vague emotions into a definite idea which he must needs express. It was the conviction that there was only one solution for this Judennot—the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... justified by faith for which Ignorance pleads may well be called "fanatical," as well as "false"; for it is nowhere laid down in Scripture; and it not only changes the way of acceptance, but it takes away the rule and standard of righteousness, and substitutes a vague notion, called sincerity, in its place, which never was, nor ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that encounter had kept his lips as firmly closed upon the subject as though Harpocrates, the god of silence, had sealed them with his finger, and that was Gyges, chief of the guards of Candaules. One day Gyges, his mind filled with various projects and vague ambitions, had been wandering among the Bactrian hills, whither his master had sent him upon an important and secret mission. He was dreaming of the intoxication of omnipotence, of treading upon purple with sandals of gold, of placing the diadem upon the brows ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... the world—except by the Masons themselves. Often these writers imply, if they do not actually assert, that our order begged, borrowed, or cribbed its emblems from Kabbalists or Rosicrucians, whereas the truth is exactly the other way round—those impalpable fraternities, whose vague, fantastic thought was always seeking a local habitation and a body, making use of the symbols of Masonry the better to reach the minds of men. Why all this unnecessary mystery—not to say mystification—when the facts are so plain, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... he encountered the lady who, a week before, had taken possession of the rooms on the ground floor, the "parlours" of Mrs. Bundy's terminology. He had heard her, and from his window, two or three times, had even seen her pass in and out, and this observation had created in his mind a vague prejudice in her favour. Such a prejudice, it was true, had been subjected to a violent test; it had been fairly apparent that she had a light step, but it was still less to be overlooked that she had a cottage piano. She had furthermore a little boy ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... a protector to Bootea," she said. "Sometimes I wondered if such men lived; yet I suppose a woman always has in her mind a vague conception that such an one might be. But always that, that is like a dream, is ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... their properties, that is, while the plants themselves seem to possess some medical value, the Indian mode of application is so far at variance with recognized methods, or their own statements are so vague and conflicting, that it is doubtful whether any good can result from the use of the herbs. Thus the Unaste[']tstiy[^u], or Virginia Snakeroot, is stated by the Dispensatory to have several uses, and among other things is said to have been highly recommended in intermittent fevers, although ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... His eyes were fixed on Lucilla—absorbed in watching her. He spoke to Nugent, without looking at him; animated, as it seemed, by a vague fear for Lucilla, which was slowly developing into a ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... was aware of something new. The whole air was throbbing with sound. From all sides it came, rumbling, indefinite, an inarticulate mutter, low, but thick and strong, rising, falling, reverberating among the rocks, dying away into vague whispers, but always there. He looked round at the blue, cloudless sky in bewilderment. Then he scrambled up the rocky pinnacle above him, and sheltering himself in its shadow, he stared out over the plain. In his wildest dream he had never imagined ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of silence, and jubilee Of long-hushed voices; and faces sweet Were thronging the shadowy side of the street As far as the eye could see; Dreaming again, in anticipation, The same old dreams of our boyhood's days That never come true, from the vague sensation Of walking asleep ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... knew she must resign it when Rosamond married. But, secretly disliking and distrusting Franval as she did, the thought that he was soon to become the husband of her beloved sister filled her with a vague sense of terror which she could not explain to herself; which it was imperatively necessary that she should conceal; and which, on those very accounts, became a daily and hourly torment to her that was almost more than she ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... concerning certain psychal impressions which, of late, have occasioned me much anxiety and surprise. I need not tell you how sceptical I have hitherto been on the topic of the soul's immortality. I cannot deny that there has always existed, as if in that very soul which I have been denying, a vague half-sentiment of its own existence. But this half-sentiment at no time amounted to conviction. With it my reason had nothing to do. All attempts at logical inquiry resulted, indeed, in leaving me more sceptical than before. I had been advised to study Cousin. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... carefully designed by the French manipulator of underground wires. Louis Delgado he already knew, and held in contempt, yet Louis was the only possible instrument for use in converting certain vague possibilities into definite realities. Changing the nebulous into the concrete; shifting the dotted line of a frontier from here to there on a map; changing the likeness that adorned a coin or postage-stamp: these were things to which Monsieur Jusseret lent ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague opposition of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of delay, was help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had to be made perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep, and ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... to incur a huge vague debt for cleaning sewers; our house was (of course) riddled with hidden cesspools, but that was infallible. I have the fever, and feel the duty to work very heavy on me at times; yet go it must. I ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... near, the field of Cressy. By the aid of the books, we fancied we could trace the positions of the two armies; but it was little more than very vague conjecture. There was a mead, a breadth of field well adapted to cavalry, and a wood. The river is a mere brook, and could have offered but little protection, or resistance, to the passage of any species of troops. I saw no village, and we may not have been within a mile of the real ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of this unknown mountain, to which, for want of a better, we gave the name of Notre Dame. For the old bellringer was not alone in his ignorance. Ask whom we would, we invariably received the same vague reply—it was a mountain "on the Italian side." They knew no more; and some, like our friend of the Campanile, had evidently "not noticed ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... of the great tower with a vague consciousness that he was going to do something up there—perhaps sketch a general plan of the structure. But he began to discern that this Stancy-Castle episode in his studies of Gothic architecture might be less useful than ornamental to him as a professional man, though it was too agreeable ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... jar and fret. Love is made a vague regret. Eyes with idle tears are wet. Idle habit links us yet, What is love? for we forget: ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... a latch. There is nothing so interesting to the juvenile mind, as the wonderful; there is no power that it so eagerly covets, as that of astonishing spectators by its miraculous exertions. Mind appeared, to my untutored reflections, vague, airy, and unfettered, the susceptible perceiver of reasons, but never intended by nature to be the slave of force. Why should it be in the power of man to overtake and hold me by violence? Why, when I choose to withdraw ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... purpose but to make the reader's spine creep. The mildest of these horrors is "The Fall of the House of Usher," which some critics place at the head of Poe's fiction. It is a "story of atmosphere"; that is, a story in which the scene, the air, the vague "feeling" of a place arouse an expectation of some startling or unusual incident. Many have read this story and found pleasure therein; but others ask frankly, "Why bother to write or to read such palpable nonsense?" With all Poe's efforts to make it real, Usher's ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... They have a vague idea of a future state; many have dreamed of it. Some of their medicine men pretend to have had revelations from bears and other animals; and they thus learned that their future existence would be but a continuation of this. They will go ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... black majesty the dome of St. Paul's; its vastness suffered no diminution from this high outlook, rather was exaggerated by the flying scraps of mirky vapour which softened its outline and at times gave it the appearance of floating on a vague troubled sea. Somewhat nearer, amid many spires and steeples, lay the surly bulk of Newgate, the lines of its construction shown plan-wise; its little windows multiplied for points of torment to the vision. Nearer again, the markets of Smithfield, Bartholomew's Hospital, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... I like to recall it as one of those days about which we ask ourselves why we did not value them more when we had them. I speak of it here, because, in the soothing peace of the Fal that twilight, the AEsthetic seemed to stir in me—not so as to wake, but so as to wake soon. I felt some vague premonition of all the love, the sentiment, and the sorrow which would be mine in the manhood that was brightening to a pale, but ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... quietly without being seen by his mother and tiptoed up to his room, where, in sour meditation, he spent the intervening time until supper was ready. In a vague way he realized that he had, by deserting the team, betrayed himself to all his comrades as a fellow swayed by petty jealousy; but this thought, which seemed trying to force itself humiliatingly upon him, he beat back and thrust ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... she even gave way to a gesture of impatience when Mrs. Blankley asked for a fifth cup of tea. Mrs. Blankley is a great advocate of temperance. In connection with which, Aunt Anna once said that she thought there should be temperance in all things beginning with "t." Which vague saying, as illustrative of her wit, was treasured up by her indulgent husband and quoted "As ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... five, six, and seven and eight thousand dollars a year. Pride prevented her from discussing these prices with Mr. Cuthbert; and in truth, when lunch time came, she had seen nothing which realized her somewhat vague but persistent ideals. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of a sound new in that house. His door stood open for ventilation and it came floating up the old stairs. He was aware of a vague pleasure before he localised the sound. It was music; a piano—but not the usual rooming-house instrument; a piano in tune, softly played. It drew him to the door and to the banisters outside, a poignant, haunting melody rippling in a minor treble, a melody that queerly ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... gravelled flat of each enclosure, and perpendicularly down steps cut in the sandstone or let into the walls. I counted 800 houses from the river, and there must be many more: the inhabitants are Bengalees and Khasias, and perhaps amount to 3000 or 4000; but this is a very vague estimate. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... father Parmenides," the centre of the school of Elea; Heraclitus, thirdly, author of the doctrine of "the Perpetual Flux": three teachers, it must be admitted after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost degree fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of giving that knowledge greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual influence ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... criticism, fashion, customs, the pulpit; and under each head are grouped, without formal system, those notes on life and studies of society that had gradually accumulated in the author's mind. A final chapter, "Des Esprits Forts," expresses a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably was not insincere, and which at least served to commend the mundane portion of his book to pious readers. The special attraction of the whole lies in its variety. A volume merely of maxims would have been too rigid, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... there is in the Library an antique chair, venerable by age and association, which is used only on Commencement Day, when it is occupied by the President while engaged in delivering the diplomas for degrees. "Vague report," says Quincy, "represents it to have been brought to the College during the presidency of Holyoke, as the gift of the Rev. Ebenezer Turell of Medford (the author of the Life of Dr. Colman). Turell was connected by marriage with the Mathers, by some ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... a reply to this shout, and Jack, with a vague feeling of fear in his heart, hurried forward, climbed the fence that separated the field from the highway, and fairly ran ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... cab, and drove off at once. George remained in the street; he paced up and down, and took no rest—he was far too excited and nervous for that. He had got a dangerous game to play, and his plans were vague and shadowy. He had promised Mr. Sanders he would make inquiries about the person he suspected had forged the cheque, and let him know in the morning. His plan was to try and raise the money, pay it to Mr. Sanders on account of the transgressor, and induce him to ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... the unending columns press In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow, Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness. Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless, And turn with profound gesture vague and slow, As who would pray good for the world, but know Their benediction empty as ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... a home and a person to whom he could trust; and she was so abhorred, and the reports against her so shocking where she resided, that she was glad to leave a place where every one, as she passed, would get out of her way, as if to avoid contamination. Yet these reports were vague, although hinting at some horrid and appalling crimes. No one knew what they exactly were, for the old woman had outlived her contemporaries, and the tradition was imperfect; but she had been handed down to the next generation as one to be ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... by the lively attentions of a fiercely foreign town, he deliberately resolved to take his pleasure regardless of consequences and of the sacred ties of Belgrave Square. We prefer to think that some vague idea of combining two duties—that which he owed to himself and that which he owed to Mrs. Greyne—moved him in all he did, and that the subterfuge into which he was undoubtedly led was not wholly selfish, not wholly criminal. Nevertheless, ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... had received many communications, all of which, however, were made with the vague hope of getting a reward. None were at all reliable. At length he thought that it was useless to wait any longer in Canada, and concluded to go to New York as a ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... his greater self, of the man he had contrived to be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute, and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again, but he did not want to throw ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... A vague depression of spirits had overtaken Aurora, reaction, perhaps, from the excitements of the day, and she sought her friend with the instinct to make herself feel better by ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... not in any popular appreciation of his merits, but in the contrary truth,—that the mass of people could place no intelligent estimate upon him at all, either for good or for ill. Outside of Illinois a few men, who had studied his speeches, esteemed him an able man in debate; more had a vague notion of him as an effective stump speaker of the West; far the greatest number had to find out about him.[104] In a word, Mr. Lincoln gained the nomination because Mr. Seward had been "too conspicuous," whereas he himself was so little known that it was possible ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... at which life began to be manifest at the Bar T ranch after the stirring events of the night before. Bud Larkin himself, worn out with his nights and days of vigil, had gone to sleep on his bed almost in the act of taking his boots off. Vague ideas of escape had coursed through his mind only to be overtaken and killed by the slumber he had ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... suddenly as if he had run against the trunk of a tree. Despite his broken utterance, a vague sense of his situation was ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... a vague energetic disposition to improve material things. In another part of England ingenious people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal in abundance and metal castings in ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... were covered with beautiful vegetation and full of animal life, yet the sight of that leaden-coloured barrier of cloud resting on the forest tops, whilst the savannahs were bathed in sunshine, ever raised in my mind vague sensations of the unknown and the unfathomable. Our course was nearly parallel to this gloomy forest, but we gradually approached it. The line that separates it from the grassy savannahs is sinuous and irregular. In some places a dark promontory ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... as I entered the breakfast-room, a vague steam as of frying sausages, which, creeping in from the neighboring kitchen, obscured in some degree the six white faces of your wife and children. The breakfast-table was amply covered, for you were always what is termed by judicious housewives "a good provider." I remember ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... logical statement of reasonings consist in the use of vague or figurative language, or in the substitution for one another of expressions supposed to be equivalent, though, in fact, dangerously discrepant. Against such occasions of error the logician can provide no safeguard, except the advice to be careful and discriminating in what you say ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the thoughtful with a silent, vague dismay, And from its unholy magic we are fain to steal away; Out here in the quiet moonlight we may pause awhile and rest, Whilst the solemn stars of heaven bring back ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... which might break through at any moment and land them in the water below. There, certain death awaited them, for they would smother and drown under the hideous pall. With his heart in his throat Eric turned sharply to the right, trusting only to a vague sense of direction. A score of steps brought him to a slight billowing of the ash, and with a sigh of relief he knew he was on ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the period of energy to sixty or even seventy; but Nature's laws must be obeyed, and the period of decline begins, and goes on with accelerated rapidity. Then comes Old Age; and as we descend the semicircle towards eighty, we find that the remnant of life becomes vague and cloudy. By shading off, as I have done, the portion of the area of the diagram according to the individual age, every one may see how much of life is consumed, and what is left—D.V.. Here ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... walk up the road a little way, or shall we stand and wait for him here?" said Ellen, trembling half from exertion and half from a vague fear ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... and the metropolitan East had faded and become as hazy and vague as the Highwoods. Ten days, and the witchery of the West leaped in her blood and held her fast ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... to have enjoyed her outing, else it would not seem consistent for her to wish to come again to-morrow; and she must, she must come again! Her poor contradictory little heart found itself clinging to the one vague, absurd hope, despite ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... but more systematically. The lands in Brazil are not measured, and everything is done by the eye. The quantity of cane which a piece will require for planting is estimated by so many cart-loads; and nothing can be more vague than this mode of computation, for the load which a cart can carry depends upon the condition of the oxen, upon the nature of the road, and upon the length of the cane. Such is the awkward make of these vehicles, that much nicety is necessary ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... does this. Who can be more nearly a fiend than he who habitually overhauls the register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife and put money in his pocket? A moral tone ought to be infused into the profession which should drive such men out of it." "There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... evidence touching unsoundness of mind, and the application thereto of the legal test of criminal responsibility. In point of fact, juries are hardly to be blamed for this, since the law itself is antiquated and the subject one abounding in difficulty. Unfortunately the opportunity for vague yet damaging testimony on the part of experts, the ease with which any desired opinion can be defended by a slight alteration in the hypothetical facts, and the practical impossibility of exposure, ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... and a half after sailing night had settled down. The English shore was but a vague, distant line. A short, choppy sea was running. In the sky was a new ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... to fill all the horizon of these preachers' vision, was to him little better than another tumult of words; while, far beyond all the tumults, hung still, in the vast of thought unarrived, unembodied, that something without a shape, yet bearing a name around which hovered a vague light as of something dimly understood, after which, in every moment of inbreaking silence, his soul straightway began to thirst. And if the Truth was not to be found in his own heart, could he think that the blows by which he ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... somehow. I wish you'd talk with her and try to have her let up on Viola. I don't think they're doin' right by her. If she was my own girl I'd stop it—I would so." Then he added, in a curious tone, this vague defence: "As for Viola, she would be all right if they would leave her alone. She's gifted in a way I don't understand; but if she isn't twisted by Clarke's foolishness she's going to make some man a good wife. She's a good girl, and, as I say, if she was my ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... of the sixteenth century, and long before the seventeenth, a vague rumor, a confused tradition, had located, in the neighborhood of the Vermilion Sea, a famed land, whose rivers rolled over gold, and whose mountains rested on golden foundations; the treasures of Mexico and Peru were nothing in comparison with those which were to be gathered there. ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... visage expressed some deep but chilling thought, dried up all pity in the hearts of those who looked at him by the scowling look and the sarcastic attitude which announced an intention of treating every man as an equal. His face was of a dirty white, and his wrinkled skull, denuded of hair, bore a vague resemblance to a block of granite. A few gray locks on either side of his head fell straight to the collar of his greasy coat, which was buttoned to the chin. He resembled both Voltaire and Don Quixote; he was, apparently, scoffing but melancholy, full of disdain and philosophy, but half-crazy. He ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... that any previous judgment as to what ought to occur is as nearly impossible as may be. We predict from knowledge, real or supposed, of facts which are associated in our minds with any new subject under consideration. Children often know in a general, vague, and indefinite way that which, for the sake of a full and systematic knowledge, we may desire them to study. What they know will unconsciously modify their expectations, and their expectations in turn ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... day, she realized with vague wonder, her slowly formed theories had been set at naught, her whole philosophy turned upside down. Had these years of protest and rebellion done no more than lead her in a wide circle, past empty gain, and joyless ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... young man of thirty or thereabouts, smooth-faced, good-looking and athletic. It was quite true that he wore a red coat when tramping through his woods and vales, not because it was fashionable, but because he had a vague horror of being shot at by some near-sighted nimrod from Manhattan. A crowd of old college friends had just left him alone in the hills after spending several weeks at his place, and his sole occupation ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... them. The times and tides of business and debate tarry for no man. A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill informed respecting a question; all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must; and if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully. He finds that there is a great difference between the effect of written words, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... than that that kept him gazing in idle happiness. He was delighting in the sense of his own property around him, the most substantial pleasure possible to man. His feeling, deep though it was, was quite vague and inarticulate. If you had asked Gourlay what he was thinking of he could not have told you, even if he had been willing to answer you civilly—which is most unlikely. Yet his whole being, physical and mental (physical, indeed, rather than mental), was surcharged with the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... to be forgiveness and restoration at all, they must come in such a fashion as that there shall be no doubt whatsoever of their reality and power. The vague kind of trust in a doubtful mercy, about which I have been speaking, may do all very well for people that have never probed the depths of their own hearts. Superficial notions of our sin, which so many of us have, are contented ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... This was rather vague, and Pignaver, who read the classics and prided himself on his memory, was reminded of those Lacedaemonians who answered the wordy fugitives from Samos by saying that they had already forgotten the first half of their ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... heard a policeman's step coming softly towards my house—pad, pad! A dreadful moment, then he passed by. I went into the room again all shaken, wondering whether I had done right, whether Allen would hawk the letter about—a thousand vague apprehensions. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... natural that the keenest curiosity should have been excited; not only because of that peculiar and indescribable charm of the man, which all recognized and which won all hearts, but also because of that hidden chapter—that sojourn in the desert, about which he preserved silence. It was felt in a vague way by his intimates that he had met with unusual experiences which had profoundly affected him and changed the course of his life. To me alone was the truth known, and I must now tell, briefly as possible, how my great friendship and close ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... conscious of new and vague horizons. "I once smelled summat sweet," he said dreamily. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... suddenly resounds through the stillness, a long-drawn, mysterious utterance, passing drearily, difficult to locate, more difficult to name—one of those sounds by which Nature at times reaches to the dark places of our spirit and terrifies us with vague dread of the unknown. Is it the wail of an owl or other bird of the night? It pervades the air wildly and lingeringly. Those who come late to the ford and hear this sudden strange call draw rein and turn backward; ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... evening, feels that the air is perfumed with strange odors and loaded with golden dust wafted from those other blossoms with which its double life is shared,—this almost overwomanized woman, might well have bewitched him, but that he had a vague sense of a counter-charm. It was, perhaps, only the same consciousness that some one was looking at him which he himself had just given occasion to in his partner. Presently, in one of the turns of the dance, he felt his eyes drawn to a figure he had not distinctly recognized, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... from which stands out, on the right, close to the footlights, the trunk of a large oak, with a board nailed to it. A vague, milky, impenetrable light prevails. TYLTYL and MYTYL are at ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... signatures. Three of the remainder (Nos. 1, 3, and 6) may be classed as uncertain in their properties, that is, while the plants themselves seem to possess some medical value, the Indian mode of application is so far at variance with recognized methods, or their own statements are so vague and conflicting, that it is doubtful whether any good can result from the use of the herbs. Thus the Unaste[']tstiy[^u], or Virginia Snakeroot, is stated by the Dispensatory to have several uses, and among other ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... Jesuits Garnet, Gerard, and Greenway, for whose arrest a proclamation was issued. Garnet had undoubtedly done much to persuade Catesby from having recourse to outrage or violence, and had never been consulted except in such a vague way that he could not possibly have suspected what was in contemplation. He had even secured from Rome a condemnation of violent measures, and had communicated this to Catesby. Greenway was consulted after the plot had been arranged, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... Venetian and Chinese lanterns of various colours. These had been hung from hooks in the rocks and pillars with infinite good taste at long intervals, so as to illuminate not too brilliantly the mystical darkness of the scene. Looking upon the vague, indefinite vista, as it glimmered away into an indefinable distance, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... hope of the new life, when programmes would never be neglected. In less than a month he would be thirty years of age. At twenty, it had seemed a great age, an age of absolute maturity. Now, he felt as young and as boyish as ever, especially before his father, and he perceived that his vague early notion about the finality of such an age as thirty had been infantile. Nevertheless, the entry into another decade presented itself to him as solemn, and he meant to signalise it by new and mightier resolutions to execute vaster programmes. He was ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... V. Despite a vague belief (referred to by Plato) of a remote and perished era of civilization, the most popular tradition asserts the Pelasgic inhabitants of Attica to have been sunk into the deepest ignorance of the elements of social life, when, either ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I think, a wistful sadness in the fall of evening, a vague regret for the fading glories of the day which, passing out of our lives for ever, leaves us so much the richer or poorer, the nobler or more unworthy, according to the use we have made of the opportunities it has offered us for the doing of ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Mr. Saintsbury apparently thinks that Jefferies made a mistake in drawing his philosophy from an open-air study of nature, for he writes: "Unfortunately for Jefferies his philosophic background was not like Wordsworth's clear and cheerful, but wholly vague and partly gloomy." It was neither vague nor gloomy, we may remark, parenthetically, but we may admit that Jefferies saw too deeply into nature's workings, and had too sensuous a joy in life to interpret all Nature's doings, a la ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... courtship: "True courtship consists in a number of quiet, gentlemanly attentions; not so pointed as to alarm, not so vague ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... quietly, resting his shaky old hands on the crook of his cane. And as soon as old Lisa and Cowhouse Martha saw where Pickaxe Bengt had taken refuge, they, too, came tottering up, and sat down at Ingmar's feet. They did not speak to him, but somehow they must have had a vague idea that he would be able to protect them—he who was ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... his eyes, he could just see the vague outline of the big collie. The dog arose from a bundle of straw, stretched himself fore and aft, and walked gravely forward to welcome the visitors who were so kindly easing his loneliness. He was barely visible, ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... agony of Christianity. These people here are among those who plume themselves on having abandoned Christian dogma. But deep down in their natures, there is not the inkling of the supernatural of which you speak, but simply the religious habit,—the habit of believing in something vague and indemonstrable, the habit of services and congregational worship. And while they are dropping away from the old Church in all directions, they simultaneously, from sheer habit, create new-fangled creeds very much more absurd than anything ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... for a moment could it be supposed that the former document referred to Chichikov; yet, as each man pondered the position from his own point of view, he remembered that no one REALLY knew who Chichikov was; as also that his vague references to himself had—yes!—included statements that his career in the service had suffered much to the cause of Truth, and that he possessed a number of enemies who were seeking his life. This gave the tchinovniks further food for thought. Perhaps his ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... be called "fanatical," as well as "false"; for it is nowhere laid down in Scripture; and it not only changes the way of acceptance, but it takes away the rule and standard of righteousness, and substitutes a vague notion, called sincerity, in its place, which never was, nor ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... these vague anticipations added a shade of gloom to that already gloomy place of travel: Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, scowled in my face at least, and seemed to point me back again to that other native land of mine, the Latin Quarter. But when the Sierras had been climbed, and the train, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of the bay, Radisson heard of another lake leagues to the north, whose upper end was always frozen. This was probably some vague story of the lakes in the region that was to become known two centuries later as Mackenzie River. The spring of 1663 found the explorers back in the Lake of the Woods region accompanied by seven hundred Indians of the Upper Country. The company filled three hundred and sixty canoes. ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... which there had been four Commissions on Oxford and Cambridge, and three on the Scottish Universities. The terms of reference of the Commission of 1901 on its appointment under the chairmanship of Lord Robertson were vague. A Judge of the High Court in Ireland threatened to resign if Trinity College—the main centre of University education in the island—were included in the scope of the inquiry of a Commission on the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... explains it by natural similitude; he that lays his hand on his breast, when he expresses pity, enforces his words by a customary allusion. But theology has few topicks to which action can be appropriated; that action which is vague and indeterminate will at last settle into habit, and habitual peculiarities ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... mother, he was a frequent hearer of Bishop Skinner, to whose church he was in the habit of carrying me. He died when I was very young, but not before my mind was impressed in favour of Episcopacy.... I readily confess, that in respect to Church Government, my principles were sufficiently vague and unformed; for to this important subject my attention was never particularly drawn till I came to this country, when my venerated friend, the late Dr. Stewart, of Kingston, urged me to enter the Church, and as I ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... inclined to think it a vision of his own brain, when suddenly a vague suspicion of the truth flashed upon his mind. He barred the door, and hastened wildly back. Yes, there she was, - there, in the chamber he had quitted, - there in her old innocent, happy home, so changed that none but he could trace one gleam of what she had been, - there upon her knees, - with ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... shed a pleasant odour which mingled pleasantly with that of the dressing-table; and she wandered about the room, her mind filled with vague meditations, studying the old engravings, principally pictures of dogs and horses, hounds and men, going out to shoot in bygone costumes, with long-eared spaniels to find the game for them. There was a multitude of these pictures on the walls, and Evelyn wondered who was her next-door ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... dressed the body swore that there were marks of hard skinny fingers on her throat. Estenega had made no secret of his admiration of her. At different times girls of the people had left Monterey suddenly, and vague rumors had floated down from the North that they had been seen in the redwood forests where Estenega's ranchos lay. I asked him, point-blank, one day, if these stories were true, prepared to scold him as he deserved; and he remarked coolly that stories of that sort were ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... not sufficient documents to carry us back to the origin of that tradition that would have it that the human form has been given to certain food preparations from remote times. Savants will not be slow to see in this a vague relic of the horrible festivities that succeeded human sacrifices among primitive peoples. For want of prisoners and of designated victims, a symbolic representation would have gradually developed, and been kept up, though losing its religious character. We merely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... which runs through the second, third, and fourth cantos, may possibly owe some of its details to a vague recollection of incidents which happened, or were supposed to happen, at Tahiti, in the interval between the final departure of the Bounty, September 21, 1789, and the arrival of the Pandora, March 23, 1791; but, as a whole, it is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... collected for carrying an army." "Great preparations at Ostend," he notes a week later; "Augereau commands that part of the Army. I hope to let him feel the bottom of the Goodwin Sand." It was just this sort of apprehension, specific in direction, yet vague and elusive in details, that Bonaparte was skilled ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... the youth in order to force him by this last means to a realization of his wrong-doing. And here the punishment must not be given for general bad conduct or for a perverse disposition—those being vague generalities—but for a special act of wrong-doing at that time. He should not be punished because he is naturally bad or because he is generally naughty, but for this one special and particular act which he has committed. Thus ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... with slight olive tinge to it, a strong, intelligent face, not strictly beautiful, yet strangely attractive, the forehead low and broad, the nose straight, the lips full and inclined to smile. Suddenly a vague remembrance ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... just come back after a long, vague holiday, feeling well and keen about my work. The boys are not back yet, and I have returned to put things ready for next half. But my serene mood has received ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... answer—but I was beginning to think; and to wonder, too, in a vague, not very pleasant fashion. Was this—was Crone's death, murder, whatever it was—at all connected with the previous affair of Phillips? Had Crone told me the truth that night I went to buy the stuff for Tom Dunlop's rabbit-hutches? or had he kept something ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... applies to commodities, services, capital, to anything which can be said, literally, or by analogy, to have a price. "A short period" is, however, a vague expression and, since precision is the hallmark of an important law, we must accord to this one a status inferior to that which the preceding three can ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... up stairs, where Kat was lying on the bed, moaning and trying not to cry, with the painfully swollen wrist, laid out on a pillow. Twenty minutes' later the doctor was there with splints and bandages, and Kat, looking into his eyes with a vague alarm, asked, after he had examined it: "How long before I can ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... returned with her husband; but Jacopone had shrunk into a crippled tremulous old man, who pulled a vague forelock at Odo without sign of recognition. Filomena, it was clear, was master at Pontesordo; for though Giannozzo was a man grown, and did a man's work, he still danced to the tune of his mother's tongue. It was from her ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... in the most enviable of all humours: that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only by the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be but the symbol for a vague feeling of tension, irritation or stimulation, which seeks relief or expression by the performance of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the landscape broadened before them. The bit of rugged shore line which lay there like a vision might be a point of land on the continent of North America or of Asia. Then again it might be the side of an island. Phi thought of this in a vague sort of way. His chief desire to put foot once more on something that did not drift with wind and tide, he bent every effort to ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... official intercourse. Intelligent, grave, dignified; conscientious in all his relations, from the student upwards to the teacher, the pastor, the professor; nothing empty as a scholar, nothing unsettled or inconsistent as a divine, nothing vague or groundless as an instructor; sincere, generous, honorable, devout; keenly sensitive in respect to the proprieties and charities of life; warm in his affections, strong in his attachments, stern in his integrity; above the arts ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... very wonderful that he was to live with her always. He felt happy and excited—so happy and excited that the parting when it came slipped over him lightly. Miss Trevor even thought he took it too easily and had a vague wish that he had shown more sorrow. Stephen said farewell to the boy he loved better than ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... throwing me off my guard with that plea was shrewd enough to get away with a very large sum of my hard-earned money. Besides"—and I was laughing, though not too good-naturedly—"I've noticed that you 'gentlemen' become vague about business only when the balance is against you. When it's in your favor, you manage to get your minds on business long enough to collect to the last fraction ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... silver quarter, on Christmas Eve, and I hied myself to Rag Hall at once to divide it with the poorest family there, on the express condition that they should tidy up things, especially those children, and generally change their way of living. The man took the money—I have a vague recollection of seeing a stunned look on his face—and, I believe, brought it back to our house to see if it was all right, thereby giving me great offence. But he did the best for himself that way, for so Rag Hall came under the notice of my mother too. And there ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... continue the musical business when the elders retire to the country. At first a passionate lover, Claude was afterwards a good and devoted husband. Phlipote never again opened her lips regarding the vague love which for a moment had flowered in her heart: only sometimes, a cloud of reverie veiled her eyes, which seemed to seek sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm life, a brilliant but chimeric image visible for ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... days of immediate demands and quick results, this question is too vague and too far-reaching to bring instant consolation. Apart from that, too, it cannot decide whether any war, however great, can ever abolish the natural and primitive fighting ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... the trail. It had seen a lot of use, but less in recent weeks. There were sharp hoof-prints of the animal he had caught, larger hoof-prints, vague pad-marks of various sizes, but nothing that looked human. The trail went under a charred tree trunk at a height that was not comfortable for a man, and the spacing of the steps around the gnarled roots of an old slump did not fit ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... children felt but did not comprehend. She was a woman of not very much intelligence, and she had a secret, and she carried it ill, and knew not what to do with it; but they could not tell that. They only felt a vague sense of disturbance and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... cruel fingers for them. She shook off the bewildered, dazed feeling, but it came again as the tempest of flame and smoke went racing to the north. Street and house and steeple and the vast crowds seemed sailing away on some swift crescent river to a great, vague, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... interests, and its organization, is to study sociology in the most natural way and to obtain the necessary data for generalization. To attempt to study sociological principles without this preliminary investigation is to confuse the student and leave him in a sea of vague abstractions. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... had ascribed his behaviour of the previous day, his first, false version, his reticence and his confusion to scruples of conscience and vague apprehensions. Anxious about the consequences of the business and dreading lest his testimony might complicate it, he had tried to avoid the annoyance ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... of his Essay relates to the ends of government. The conception on this subject, he tells us, which exists in the minds of most men is vague and undistinguishing. He first assumes, justly enough, that the end of government is "to increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains, which men derive from each other." He then proceeds ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... graves. Even the pyramid texts reappear after one thousand years of practical oblivion. The value of master words was so firmly fixed in the Egyptian mind that misunderstood texts of all sorts were copied out and placed in the graves to secure to the dead some vague benefit ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... guess, guesswork, speculation; rough guess, shot, shot in the dark [Coll.]; conjecturality^; surmise, suspicion, sneaking suspicion; estimate, approximation (nearness) 197. inkling, suggestion, hint, intimation, notion, impression; bare supposition, vague supposition, loose supposition, loose suggestion. association of ideas, (analogy) 514.1; metonym [Gramm.], metonymy [Gramm.], simile (metaphor) 521. conceit, idea, thought; original idea, invention (imagination) 515. V. suppose, conjecture, surmise, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... period of European peace which began in 1815 was not one of internal repose; the very absence of those engrossing and imperious interests which belong to a time of warfare gave freer play to the feelings of discontent and the vague longings for a better political order which remained behind after the convulsions of the revolutionary epoch and the military rule of Napoleon had passed away. During thirty years of peace the breach had been widening between those ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... those of the other gospels. They were wrought at Jerusalem, under the eyes of the rulers, who did their utmost to detect them, and could not; but in frenzied despair, plotted to kill Lazarus. How different from the frequently vague and wholesale statements of the other gospels concerning events which happened where no enemy was watching to expose delusion! many of them in ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... it, and yet, years after you had thought that all had been disposed of for ever, the mention of a name wakes up associations in the mind of some one who heard the calumny, but never heard or never attended to the refutation, or who has only a vague and confused recollection of the whole, and he asks the question doubtfully, "But were there not some suspicious circumstances connected ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... a small tribe of the nation called Snake Indians, a vague denomination, which embraces at once the inhabitants of the southern parts of the Rocky mountains and of the plains on each side. The Shoshonees with whom we now are, amount to about one hundred warriors, and three times that number of women and children. Within ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... escape; and now, when weakened and depressed alike by bodily and mental suffering, such fancies obtained so much possession of her that she became more and more restless. The exertions of Sir Nigel and his companions, even of her own friends, failed in rousing or infusing strength. Sometimes it was vague conjectures as to the fate of her husband, the dread that he had fallen into the hands of his foes—a catastrophe which not only herself but many stronger minds imagined could scarcely be avoided. She would dwell on these fancies till suspense became intolerable; and then, if these were ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... golden glass and drank a vague toast heartily. Others in the Club were frankly intoxicated and many a heated scene marked the progress of unceremonious and impromptu revels. Young officers, who carried their lives in their hands every hour, showed their contempt of life in many bottles. Old men, stern and gray at dawn, ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... 18th centuries you will find that nearly all its expressions, having reference to the country, show something of this kind; either a foolish sentimentality, or a morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignorance. You will find all its descriptive expressions at once vague and monotonous. Brooks are always "purling;" birds always "warbling;" mountains always "lift their horrid peaks above the clouds;" vales always "are lost in the shadow of gloomy woods;" a few more distinct ideas about hay-making and curds and cream, acquired in the neighborhood of ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting which had been but a vague palpitation of the air ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... great many of them, and which had superficially nothing to recommend it. The young lady who trod the turf beside him had come from a queer country across the sea which he knew a good deal about; her antecedents, her associations were very vague to his mind except in so far as they were generic, and in this sense they showed as distinct and unimportant. Miss Archer had neither a fortune nor the sort of beauty that justifies a man to the multitude, and he calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He had ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... insisting that the King of Portugal had moved first in this matter, and therefore should be the plaintiff. As to the rest he said that the suit was obscure, vague, and general, insufficient to form a case on possession, and to pass a sure sentence upon it, let them specify wherein they thought the treaty was not observed, and let them attempt the fitting remedy and interdict, and he will ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... occasion for a commission to sit on Tilden. If it had struck us in 1880, Hancock would have been elected. Neither result would have its occasion in the superiority of the Democratic party, but in the belief that the Republican party was in some vague way blamable for the condition of things, and there should be a change. The Republican party is not as strong as it used to be. The old leaders have dropped out and no persons have yet taken their places. Blaine has dropped ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... spectators who were not familiar with the game. The old women, however, surrounded the curate in order to converse with him about spiritual matters, but Fray Salvi apparently did not consider the place and time appropriate, for he gave vague answers and his sad, rather bored, looks wandered in all ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... far in this vague description to show that Estotiland was an American country, except its western direction and perhaps its trading with Greenland. The points of unlikeness are at least as numerous as the points of likeness. But in what follows ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... his eyes was to him like a vast panorama, in the contemplation of which he forgot, for the moment, even his beloved fields and woods. Of the life of the majority of human beings, particularly the dwellers in large towns, Clare had as yet but very vague and indistinct notions, and was surprised, therefore, at many of the scenes before him. What struck him most was the feverish anxiety manifested in the countenances of the hurrying crowds, and the restless tumult of the never-ending wave of human life which kept floating up and ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... unimportant matters. For he scared up some grouse, and this is the tragedy. The open season for grouse is September 1st in Chelan and September 15th across the line. And the birds would not cross the line. They were wise birds, and must have had a calendar about them, for, although we were vague as to the date, we knew it was not yet the 15th. So they sat or fluttered about, and looked most awfully good to eat. But they never went near the danger-zone or ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... eyes were upon him, he tried to cross the hall and mount the stairs with dignity. The great leathern bag did not conduce to this, and he succeeded in appearing awkward in the extreme, and had a vague, uncomfortable impression that such ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... was left alone in life, with a common school education, a thorough knowledge of the Bible and of "Robinson Crusoe," a vague tradition of God everywhere, and a deep distrust of those who should ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... tidings of the battle fought at Minden the defamation of this officer arrived. He was accused of having disobeyed orders, and his conduct represented as infamous in every particular. These were the suggestions of a vague report, which no person could trace to its origin; yet this report immediately gave birth to one of the most inflammatory pamphlets that ever was exhibited to the public. The first charge had alarmed the people of England, jealous in honour, sudden and rash in their sentiments, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... mathematics; but, as she knew very well, it was necessary that she should see her father before he went to bed. The case of Cyril Alardyce must be discussed, her mother's illusions and the rights of the family attended to. Being vague herself as to what all this amounted to, she had to take counsel with her father. She took her letters in her hand and went downstairs. It was past eleven, and the clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather's clock in the hall ticking in competition with the small clock on ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... few or of many books may find "reminders" in these pages. The author hastens to confess echoings from bygone days, hintings of vagrant fancies, and whimsical reveries wherein appeared the vague ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... quarters, viz, by the dissolute companions of Nero, to whom the mention of such an example served as an apology for their own extreme dissipation; (392) and by those who envied him for the affluence and dignity which he had acquired. The charge, however, is supported only by vague assertion, and is discredited by every consideration which ought to have weight in determining the reality of human characters. It seems totally inconsistent with his habits of literary industry, with the ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... kindnesses—in particular the splendid paint-box, which remained Iskender's own—and, sobbing, prayed from the heart that he might live. The hooting of an owl, or the bark of some dog in the distance, alone broke the stillness, of which the rustle of the tamarisks seemed part, so faint and vague it was. At moments, looking up at the stars, he could have deemed them living creatures, for they seemed to throb in time with ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... whom I found working a loom in a cottage by the side of the river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself—now under a gray sky—on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... was not that I meant," returned the king, sorry to have shown the bitterness of his thought in such a manner. "Well! I assure you that, notwithstanding the mask with which the villain covered his face, I had something like a vague suspicion that he was the very man. But with this chief of the enterprise there was a man of prodigious strength, the one who menaced me with a force ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... written to Arthur without getting any reply. Yes, he must go. And mingled with that reluctance and nameless apprehension which he felt at the thought of returning into her neighbourhood, he was acutely conscious, all the time, of a certain vague but sweet pleasure at the thought that fate had so ordained it. Perhaps it would be necessary for him to see her! A thrill of pleasure passed through him at the thought, followed almost immediately by a reaction of keen and bitter ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of insanity attacking the worrier and the delicate than the robust and the indifferent. In fact, the temperament which produces the faulty habits we are considering rarely culminates in insanity. It seems worth while, however, to replace the vague fear of insanity by a knowledge of the variety of mental unbalance remotely threatening the person who lacks the desire or the will, to place a check upon these faulty habits of mind. We may thus, in the worrier whose fears have taken this ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... Jack found her when he came home. The stillness of the whole place showed him the children must be absent, and a vague alarm seized upon him. His fears for Estelle were easily roused. Yet fear or danger seemed very far from that bright, cheerful kitchen. Putting down the armful of things he was carrying, he gazed tenderly at his mother as he warmed his fingers over the genial flames. He could not bear ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... shuddered, looked through the window apprehensively in the gloaming, saw some vague, misty wraith approaching. Then he felt for the aureus ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... knowing each has a different meaning. Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside. The face of Fortune is radiant and alluring; that of Adventure is flushed and heroic. The face of Chance is the beautiful countenance—perfect because vague and dream-born—that we see in our tea-cups at breakfast while we growl over ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... a chance visit to the Museum in Cincinnati, he saw a plaster cast of Houdon's "Washington." It was the first bust he had ever seen, and he says it moved him strangely. He had an intense desire to know how it was done, and a vague consciousness that he could do work of the same kind if he could find an instructor. The instructor he soon found in a German living in the city, who made plaster casts and busts, and from him he learned the secret of the art. He proved an apt pupil, and surprised ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... happened then. I have a vague memory of the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some unintelligible account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted the ambiguous telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was dead. That was ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... So vague an answer was of course unsatisfactory, and the haughty Prussian king reiterated his demand in very ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Mr. Lovel pleaded his feeble health as a reason for declining their hospitality. A very dull life for a girl, perhaps; but for Clarissa it was not altogether an unhappy life. She was at an age when a girl can make an existence for herself out of bright young fancies and vague deep thoughts. There was that in her life just now which fades and perishes with the passing of years; a subtle indescribable charm, a sense of things beyond the common things of daily life. If there had been a closer bond of union ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... of the old man caused the little boy to open his eyes. The moon, just at its full, cast long, vague, wavering shadows in front of the cabin. A colony of tree-frogs somewhere in the distance were treating their neighbors to a serenade, but to the little boy it sounded like a chorus of lost and long- forgotten whistlers. The sound was wherever the imagination ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... in these phases of animal life, which winter has so emphasized and brought out, begins to decline. Vague rumors are afloat in the air of a great and coming change. We are eager for Winter to be gone, since he too is fugitive, and cannot keep his place. Invisible hands deface his icy statuary; his chisel has lost its cunning. The drifts, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... best to make certain changes delicately, imperceptibly, so that Innes would not, above all things, be perplexed into seeking for their reason. The walks and rides came to a vague conclusion, and Miss Anderson no longer kept the Viceroy or anybody else waiting, while Innes finished what he had to say to her in public, since his opportunities for talking to her seemed to become ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... fresh and attractive conception. The book deals almost wholly with the outside aspects of things, with picturesque rather than moral traits, though a breath of feeling true and sweet is wafted across it and heightens its fine vague beauty. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... their India rubber soles slithered on the wet decks. "We shall see from here, eh? See something at last?" He still whispered. O'Malley's sudden anger died down. He could not give vent to it without making noise, for one thing, and above all else he wished to—see. He merely felt a vague wonder how long Stahl ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... colouring, showing a perfect knowledge of perspective, but their details not arranged according to the rules of composition acknowledged by our artists—wanting, as it were, a centre; so that the effect was vague, scattered, confused, bewildering—they were like heterogeneous fragments of a ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... period of enlistment having expired, and the difficulty of obtaining other troops prevented anything being attempted on the St. John for a year or two. Lawrence and Shirley, however, continued to discuss the details of the proposed expedition. Both governors seem to have had rather vague ideas of the number of the Acadians on the river and the situation of their settlements. Shirley says he learned from the eastern Indians and New England traders that their principal settlement was about ninety miles ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... still hesitated—in truth, the summons had turned my vague misgiving into intense though equally vague alarm and even terror, which as unmanly and unworthy I strove to repress, but which asserted its domination in a manner as unwonted as unwelcome—he drew aside a fold of his robe, and showed within the silver Star of the Order, supported by the golden ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... conspirators the information given by the traitor was vague and general. Nor was the city able to elicit from the informant of this man, who had been promptly arrested and subjected to examination, any disclosures of a more specific or satisfactory character. He was, in truth, in possession of but few particulars ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... them and asked for arguments; at the same time he, like every one else, felt the influence of a vague dread of some imminent and terrible disaster hanging over the earth and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... made of the whole retrospect; and the ethnological scheme remains so vague and shadowy that it fails to displace crude conceptions of mankind's beginning which still dominate religious thinking, and keep back the spiritual progress of the age. The decadence and ultimate disappearance of Atlantean civilisation ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... to warn him. From experience, he would recognize the first vague blurring, narrowing of vision, and other signs of anoxia. Despite this, the "blackout" explanation was accepted ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... Madame Pfeiffer's about Frederick "paying his score to the Austrians," is somewhat vague. The facts are these. In 1757 Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Bohemia, and laid siege to Prague. Before this city an Austrian army lay, who were attacked with great impetuosity by Frederick, and completely defeated. But the town was defended with great valour; and during ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... the dying man's eyes lit up as they rested on her pink face and brown eyes filled with a vague wonder. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... now—the decision that had been taking vague form for several hours, and which had crystallized as he trudged across the spacefield toward the Valhalla. "I brought you back Steve, Dad. You still have one son aboard ship. I want off. I'm resigning. I want to stay behind on Earth. By our charter ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... peccata mundi' and such things mean. But when one, like I, has been initiated from earliest childhood in the mystical sanctuary of our religion; when there one does not know whither to go with all the vague but urgent feelings, but waits with a heart full of devotion for the divine service without really knowing what to expect, yet rises lightened and uplifted without knowing what one has received; when one deemed ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... a century later in a cold and critical light, Bonaparte's proclamations of the same period seem stilted, jerky, and theatrical. In them, however, there may still be found a sort of interstitial sentimentality, and in an age of romantic devotion to ideals the quality of vague suggestiveness passed for genuine coin. Whatever else was lacking in those compositions, they had the one supreme merit of accomplishing their end, for they roused the French soldiers to ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... had heard of a retired naval officer named Foraker, who was supposed to be in command. As a matter of fact, there was a Captain Foraker aboard the schooner who navigated her and instilled the "run and jump" discipline that had so excited Code's admiration. Outside of this vague fact, ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... the portrait of a woman with a swelling bosom and alluring eyes and be seized with desire, either at their sight or only on remembrance. This desire is not concentrated especially on the sexual act, as with an adult who is already experienced in these matters; it is more generalized and vague, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... was no game I detested more than "consequences," and no young ladies less open to instruction than the Misses Redwood, I did not jump at the offer. It was evident, however, Tempest and Redwood wanted to talk, and with a vague sense that by leaving them to do so I was somehow acting for the benefit of Low Heath, I sacrificed myself, and sat down to assist in the usual composite stories; how, for instance, the square Dr England met the mealy-faced Sarah (the little girls knew my nickname as well as the ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... and a woman in soft black skirts whispered in. The room was lighted only by the radiance from the sky, and the mysterious woman was mysteriously vague against ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... sentences in which Milton speaks of his hard fate in being tied by accident or law to the constant companionship of people with whom he had no sympathy, while those whom he really cared for were distant or dead, may have been read by Dati with only a vague general construction of their meaning, and perhaps would not have been written by Milton to any one capable of a more exact construction from knowledge of the circumstances. We can now discern in them, however, a reference by Milton to his domestic troubles, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... alarmed and shouting lustily. My voice raised echoes in the deserted thoroughfare, which brought vague flickers of faces to unexpected chinks and cracks in the doors, telling me that this desert of a city was really inhabited by a race made panic-striken prisoners in their own houses by the sudden entry of avenging European troops. There were really ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... began to come to herself she had no knowledge of where she had been, or for how long her mind had been astray; all was irretrievable confusion, crossed with cloud-like trails of blotted dreams, and vague survivals of gratitude for bread and pieces of money. Everything she became aware of surprised her, except the child in her arms. Her story had been plain to every one she met, and she had received thousands of kindnesses which her memory could not ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... Only in the vague conception of a harmonising or formative structural influence derived from the germ, perishing in each cell from internal causes, but handed from cell to cell till the formative influence itself degrades into molecular discords, does it seem possible to form any physical ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... appropriate to the herd. When he saw his delicate originalities, as well as his faint flourishes of draper's fantasy, squashed flat under the calm and solid foot of vulgar Dame Fortune, he fell into fits of depression bordering on mysticism, and talked to his wife in a vague way of higher influences and the angel Israfel. She, poor lady, was thoroughly scared by Israfel, and completely unhooked by ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... through from the dilapidated roof. Between the oft-repeated figures of Hercules were frescoed niches, wherein heads of Roman emperors and other illustrious historical characters had been depicted in glowing tints; but all were so vague and dim now that they were but the ghosts of pictures, which should be described with the shadows of words—ordinary terms are too substantial to apply to them. The very echoes in this deserted hall seemed startled and amazed ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... would ask your friend . . . but I will ask You, sir, how if in place of numbers vague, Your sad exceptions were to break that mask They wear for your cool mind historically, And blaze like black lists of a PRESENT plague? But in that light behold ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. It was understood that Passion only survived to point a moral or provide the materials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith, were so far paramount as to govern Destiny and mould the world. A vague, decided flavour of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was felt to pervade the moral universe, a chill but seemly halo of Golden Age was seen to play soberly about things in general. And it was with confidence anticipated that those perfect days ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... contradictory stories told by the men who had entered the portals of inland America. It is not surprising, therefore, that theories and prophecies about the interior were vague and conflicting nor that most of the schemes of statesmen and financiers for the development of the West were all parts and no whole. They all agreed as to the vast richness of that inland realm and ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... previously determined to quit Oxford, and this new goad did but quicken my departure. My preparations were soon made; and from some vague, and to myself undefined ideas, partly of expedition, and partly of letting the president, the college, and the whole university see that I, Hugh Trevor, was no ordinary person, a chaise and four waited my ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... parcel post system was extended so that it embraced the sister Provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the rate remaining at 25c per lb. Apparently the weight and size of a parcel acceptable by the postal authorities still remained delightfully vague and indefinite and was simply limited by "the carrying capacity of an ordinary ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... in the sewage machina is, of course, a germ—the Bacillus typhosus of Eberth. The astonishing recentness of much of our most important knowledge is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of typhoid. Although there had been vague descriptions of a fatal fever, slow and lingering in its character and accompanied by prolonged stupor and delirium, which was associated with camps and dirty cities and famines, from as far back as the age of Caesar, the first ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... though it is to be noticed that the narrator falls to motivate the hero's return to the house that he had apparently left for good when he was paid off. The episode of the shooting is obscure, and appears to be only a vague echo of the detail definitely connected with one of the three gifts in some of the European literary forms. Again, in "Cecilio" the musical instrument is a guitar instead of the usual violin or fife; while in the variant "Andoy" the magic cane is the only enchanted ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... trifling obstacle with which I was about to come into collision, I was far more cast down than I ought to have been. Then I would devise vast plans, would dream of glory, and betake myself to work; but a pleasure party would divert me from the noble projects based on so infirm a purpose. Vague recollections of these great abortive schemes of mine left a deceptive glow in my soul and fostered my belief in myself, without giving me the energy to produce. In my indolent self-sufficiency I was in a very fair way to become a fool, for what is a fool but a man ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... of the room, sending with me the impression that inside the frock-coat, behind the bland gold-rimmed spectacles, there was yet something left of manhood and that vague quality called fight, which is surely hard put to live long between four ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... cocked its head. "Ain't ye afeard o' me?" It gave a feeble chirp. "Well, I'm damned!" said the man, and after this mild expression of his feelings, forgot to curse again. He even began to eye the island with a vague questioning wonder, as if asking himself what means might be thought of that would enable him to reach it; but the problem seemed to be beyond solution. The wreckage, like a great lump, lay supinely on the surface of the water; he could not hope ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... country theatricals displayed in his Adventures of a Strolling Player, or may be a story suggested by them. All this part of his career, however, in which he must have trod the lowest paths of humility, are only to be conjectured from vague traditions, or scraps of autobiography ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... are, perhaps, the most puzzling. These are the true Sylvia, the real wood-birds. They are small, very active, but feeble songsters, and, to be seen, must be sought for. In passing through the woods, most persons have a vague consciousness of slight chirping, semi-musical sounds in the trees overhead. In most cases these sounds proceed from the warblers. Throughout the Middle and Eastern States, half a dozen species or so may ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... himself as pleased to oblige her, but he would probably have been somewhat chagrined had he known how little Helen really attended to his remarks; her mind was in a whirl, and all that he said sounded distant and vague; her one wish was that he might stay and give ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... flickering on all the home-like objects, and her new-blown roses breathing her a sweet good-night. She no longer felt an injured, hard-working, unhappy Polly, but as if quite burdened with blessings, for which she was n't half grateful enough. She had heard of poverty and suffering, in the vague, far-off way, which is all that many girls, safe in happy homes, ever know of it; but now she had seen it, in a shape which she could feel and understand, and life grew more earnest to her from that minute. So much to do in the great, busy world, and she had done so little. ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... taking with it all its own wild sweetness and daring. Even the young-eyed cherubim, choiring on meadows of asphodel, might cease their harping for a time to listen to a tale of the vanished earth, told by that golden tongue. Some vague thought of this was in our minds as we looked at her; and somehow it comforted us. Not even the Judgment was so greatly to be feared if after it we were the SAME, our own ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... easily observable. Men did not write on that brand. So much gained. Then she recalled a French play in which a perfume had convicted a person of theft. She held the envelope to her nose; nothing, not even tobacco. She tried the letter itself. Ah, here was something tangible: heliotrope, vague, but perceptible. Who among her friends used heliotrope on her kerchief? She could not remember; in fact, any or all of them might have worn it, so far as she could recall. She would go over her invitations and visitors' cards; she would play detective; ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... I imagine." Ask him if his ambition and pride are gratified, and he will tell you "Yes." Ask him if ambition and pride can fill his life to the exclusion of all else; he will tell you "No." Ask him again if he has a thousand vague, passionate desires unfulfilled, and his handsome face will cloud and his ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... that he would receive only an agent sent him "with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country." The rebel Secretary of State proposed, in order to make the instructions "as vague and general as possible," the simple direction to confer "upon the subject to which it relates"; but his chief refused the suggestion, and wrote the following instruction, which carried a palpable ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... the character and bent of their thoughts upon such points, that we are very likely to misunderstand and misrepresent their real opinions. It appears to me that different tribes give a different account of their belief, but all generally so absurd, so vague, unsatisfactory, and contradictory, that it is impossible at present to say with any certainty what they really believe, or whether they have any independent belief at all. Mr. Moorhouse, who has taken great pains in his inquiries among the natives around Adelaide upon questions of this nature, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... him, he returned to Leipsic, more than ever determined to find them. It was the only idea he had: to find them—to find them—to find them. His other thoughts were without stimulating power—irresolute, vague, uncertain. This one idea grew and grew until it became an obsession. He could no longer bear the sound of music; so it was no sacrifice to him to give up his profession. He hated the very streets he walked in, for had Elene not walked in them? He must find her; he must ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... to show you more fun in five minutes, than you'll get over there in two: (with a vague suspicion that this is rather a lame conclusion)—in ten, I should say! This 'ere's a simple enough little game, when you know the trick of it, and I'm on'y a learnin' it myself. I ain't doin' ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... endorsement of such diverse protagonists as Royall and Randolph, the wording of the executive order was in part both vague and misleading. The vagueness was there by design. The failure to mention either segregation or integration puzzled many people and angered others, but it was certainly to the advantage of a president who wanted to give the least offense ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... melancholy manner called baying. All dogs do not do so; and, according to Houzeau (21. ibid. 1872, tom. ii. p. 181.), they do not then look at the moon, but at some fixed point near the horizon. Houzeau thinks that their imaginations are disturbed by the vague outlines of the surrounding objects, and conjure up before them fantastic images: if this be so, their feelings may almost be ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... of yelps and howls from our dogs, it was not a welcome visit. Above the medley rose one big, deep, full voice that I knew at once belonged to Sounder. Then all was quiet again. Sleep gradually benumbed my senses. Vague phrases dreamily drifted to and fro in my mind: "Jones's wild range—Old Tom—Sounder—great name—great ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... him, turning her profile. Her expression was inscrutable. After a silence he dropped her wrists with a vague laugh. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... ground that, "after more than seventy years of wear and tear, of collision and abrasion, it should be no cause of wonder that the machinery of government is found weakened, or out of repair, or even defective." Frequently he uttered the wish, vague and of fine sound, but enervating, that the Republicans might "meet secession as patriots and not as partisans." On November 9 the Democratic New York "Herald," discussing the election of Lincoln, said: "For far less than this our fathers seceded ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... shrewdly that perhaps it would relieve the stranger from embarrassment to engage him in conversation, with beautiful tact brought him to tell the company of his own country, remarking that "We insular people have but a vague idea ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... watching him with a puzzled frown. She wondered why his hands gave her such a vague sense of discomfort as she watched him light another cigarette. It was not until she was in her bunk that night that she remembered that his nails were bitten and ragged—one ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... crossed the fearful dust flat Carmena was walking as slowly as the pony. At the far side she sank down beside a thick-stemmed cactus. Lennon, half delirious from fever, sought to spring off, with the vague idea of forcing her to ride. He succeeded only in tumbling upon the sand. The startled pony shied clear. With a smothered cry, Carmena leaped up ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... verge of a vast stony level, upheaved so far above the surrounding country that its vague outlines, viewed from the nearest valley, seemed a mere cloud-streak resting upon the lesser hills. The rush and roar of the turbulent river that washed its eastern base were lost at that height; the winds that strove with the giant pines that half way climbed its flanks spent their fury below ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... happen to keep a grocery store in the country, or to run the village post-office, it is not unlikely that you know what a green-goods man is; but in case you don't, and have only a vague idea as to how he lives, a paragraph of explanation must be inserted here for your particular benefit. Green goods is the technical name for counterfeit bills, and the green-goods men send out circulars to countrymen all over the United States, offering to sell them $5,000 worth of counterfeit ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... spirit a divine prevision Of vast vague passions stored in days to be When some strong souls shall conquer their division And two shall ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... the black population a degree of reluctance to labour far exceeding the reality. Those who pay a reasonable price for work, and are punctual in their payments, do not fail to get as many labourers as they require. I assert this not from any vague hearsay, but from various unquestionable and authentic documents, amongst which are the examinations taken by Committees of the House of Assembly appointed to inquire into the causes and difficulties alleged to exist in ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... you remember me, ma'am," said the Baron, in rather a loud voice; for, as the lady was elderly, he had a vague idea that she was deaf—which impression, I may mention, was altogether unfounded—"I suppose you remember me, ma'am? But I haven't had the pleasure of a regular introduction to you; so we'll waive ceremony, if you choose, and I'll introduce ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... repeated her scornful laugh, which this time but ill concealed a certain vague terror that was rising in her mind. "Is our chancellor mad, or does he sport with us? This rebel, whom you talk of sentencing—of condemning, we presume, to the block—stands at the head of a greater army than his Majesty can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... off, this was the darkest hour of the night, so that even the sounds of dockland were muted and the riverside slept as deeply as the great port of London ever sleeps. Vague murmurings there were and distant clankings, with the hum of machinery which ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... and Southern Europe. Most of the countries, that he had been compelled to hurry over, I had loitered through in days past, and I ought to have been shamed by the contrast in our recollections—his, so clear and systematical—mine, so vague and dim. An intellectual American travelling through strange lands does certainly look at nature, animate and inanimate, after a practical business-like fashion peculiar to his race; but it would be unfair ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... had a vague hope that the shock of the accident might have destroyed the impression of the dream; but ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... the prince knew nothing. When he understood from what they said that she had disappeared, and that she must have gone somewhere in the said direction, he plunged at once into the wood to see if he could find her. For hours he roamed with nothing to guide him but the vague notion of a circle which on one side bordered on the house, for so much had he picked up from the talk he ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... unsuspecting, pure, and extremely modest, she was far from dull—she was not now to learn the difference between the language of ordinary trifling and general compliment, and that to which she now listened, and which, however vague, was still so particular as to induce her to remain silent. The looks and manner of the youthful female, at that moment, would have been a study to those who love to dwell on the better and purer beings of creation. ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... happy hours of ease, When thought is still, the sight of some fair form, Or mournful fall of music breathing low, Will stir strange fancies, thrilling all the soul With a mysterious sadness, and a sense Of vague yet earnest longing. Can it be That the dim memory of events long past, Or friendships formed in other states of being[74], Flits like a passing shadow ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... the sewing club was in full activity, but even apart from the affairs of that enterprise, Wenna Rosewarne seemed to be everywhere throughout the village, to know everything, to be doing everything that prudent help and friendly counsel could do. Mrs. Trelyon grew to love the girl in her vague, wondering, simple fashion. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... machinery down-stairs sent a faint quiver through the planks under his feet. "The mill will net a good profit this year," he said to himself, absently. "'Thalia can have pretty nearly anything she wants." And even as he said it he had a sudden, vague misgiving: if she didn't have everything she wanted, perhaps she would be happier? But the idea was too new and too subtle to follow up, so the result of that troubled hour in the mill-chamber was only that he made no ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... them with a cry, "Here. . . . Here it is!" The old folks tried to run, almost falling at every step. All the family were soon grouped around a heap of earth in the vague outline of a bier, and beginning to be covered with herbage. At the head was a cross with letters cut in deep with the point of a knife, the kind deed of some of his comrades-at-arms—"DESNOYERS." . . . Then in military abbreviations, the rank, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... conventional as this we drop readily into purely geometric forms, as will be seen further on. These and the preceding drawings are all executed on broad surfaces, where fancy could have free play. The modifying or conventionalizing forces are, therefore, quite vague. Variation from natural forms is due partly to a lack of skill on the part of the painter, partly to the peculiar demands of ceramic embellishment, and partly to the traditional style of treatment acquired in still more primitive stages of ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... intoxicating, and yet ... Joan would have to push the disturbing thoughts from her and run to find Gilbert if he were anywhere in their tiny domain, to perch on the arm of his chair and rub her face against his coat. His presence could drive away the vague feeling of uneasiness, his hands could win her back to placid contentment or wake in her the restless passionate desire which ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... seen similar burying-places of the Chaco Indians, and he knows as much about them as he cares to know. Nor is his object, in returning to this particular one, of a very definite character; but rather because a vague idea or instinct has come into his mind which prompts him to the act—a sort of presentiment that he may there see something to throw light on much of what has been all along mystifying him. To go thither will in no way interfere with his duties ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... compassion which attended his fate. The public, where their own prejudices are not concerned, are easily engaged on the side of disinterestedness and humanity, admired Wilson's behaviour, and rejoiced in Robertson's escape. This general feeling was so great, that it excited a vague report that Wilson would be rescued at the place of execution, either by the mob or by some of his old associates, or by some second extraordinary and unexpected exertion of strength and courage on his own part. The magistrates thought it their duty to provide ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... attack was known to Penautier sooner than to his own family: then the papers about the conditions of partnership disappeared, no one knew how, and d'Alibert's wife and child were ruined. D'Alibert's brother-in-law, who was Sieur de la Magdelaine, felt certain vague suspicions concerning this death, and wished to get to the bottom of it; he accordingly began investigations, which were suddenly brought to an ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... fringe; whispering leaves and crackling twigs sounded sharp as a shower of stones in the stillness. Great trees reared their majestic heads to mingle their foliage and shut out the light; every creeping, flying, walking creature seemed awed into a vague murmuring that was deeper than silence. The Grove of Mysteries was a semicircular space of cool, mossy sward, bowered in great trees and tangled vine screens; its background was the bare rock of the cliffside itself—actually, though unknown to the ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy. The most extraordinary thing that had happened to him—though he had given that name to other matters as well—took place, after his immediate vague stare, as a consequence of this impression. The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man had, to make him by the ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... Romans were not to blame for the war itself, but that on the contrary, the foolish perfidy and the feeble temerity of the Greeks compelled the Roman intervention. The abolition of the mock sovereignty of the leagues and of all the vague and pernicious dreams connected with them was a blessing for the country; and the government of the Roman commander-in-chief of Macedonia, however much it fell short of what was to be wished, was yet far better than the previous confusion and misrule of Greek confederacies and Roman commissions. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... thirteen members of the confederacy in proportion to the assessed value of their real estate, and it was not provided with any means of enforcing these requisitions. On this point the articles contained nothing beyond the vague promise of the states to obey. The power of levying taxes was thus retained entirely by the states. They not only imposed direct taxes, as they do to-day, but they laid duties on exports and imports, each according to its own ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... Yan went up and Guy went down in the old man's opinion, for he spoke his own mind that day when he gave first place to grit. He invited Yan to come to his shanty to see a pair of snow-shoes he was making. The invitation was vague and general, so the whole Tribe accepted. Yan had not been there since his first visit. The first part of their call was as before. In answer to their knock there was a loud baying from the Hound, then a voice ordering him back. Caleb opened the door, but now said ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... treaty. In these treaties we have been more than just to the Indians; we have been abundantly generous, for we have paid them many times what they were entitled to; many times what we would have paid any civilized people whose claim was as vague and shadowy as theirs. By war or threat of war, or purchase we have won from great civilized nations, from France, Spain, Russia, and Mexico, immense tracts of country already peopled by many tens of thousands of families; ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Beaconsfield called the Turf a vast engine of national demoralization, he uttered a broad general truth; but, unfortunately, he did not go into particulars, and his vague grandiloquence has inspired a large number of ferocious imitators, who know as little about the essentials of the matter as Lord Beaconsfield did. These imitators abuse the wrong things and the wrong people; they mix up causes and effects; they are acrid where they should be tolerant; ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Vague reports had reached Jack before he had left on his trip, of the uprising of the people, and of the guerrilla warfare being carried on by the straggling armies of the North and South. Still he did not think he would be molested, and he felt in good spirits, ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... my tutor and is now my frequent correspondent. Not a bad sort of mentor, either!" The new arrival paused and smiled reflectively. "Only recently I received a letter from him, with private details of the flight of the king and vague intimations of a scandal in the army, lately ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... very content to remain where we were. The night had fallen; the streets, as they lost themselves in dim turnings, in mysterious alleyways, and arches that seemed grotesquely high in the vague blur of things, were filled for us with the charm of a new and lovely beauty. At one end the street ended in a towering mass of stone; that doubtless was the cathedral. At the right, the narrow houses dipped suddenly; their roof-lines were lost in vagueness. Between the slit made by the street ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... which swathed the court-yard. Eugenie found a novel charm in the aspect of things lately so insignificant to her. A thousand confused thoughts came to birth in her mind and grew there, as the sunbeams grew without along the wall. She felt that impulse of delight, vague, inexplicable, which wraps the moral being as a cloud wraps the physical body. Her thoughts were all in keeping with the details of this strange landscape, and the harmonies of her heart blended with the harmonies of nature. When the sun reached ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... Schillingschen would die, for it was a hard problem what to do with him. He had no papers in his possession, beyond a diary written in German schrift that even Will could not make head or tail of, for all his knowledge of the language; and a very vague map bearing the imprint of the British government, filled in by himself with the names of the villages he had passed on his way. There was no proof that we could find that would have condemned him of nefarious practises in ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... tell me! I am very much interested. Do you never have any remembrance of your former existence? Do not odors or sounds or sights bring some vague ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... Suddenly a vague shadow loomed up from amongst the grass which grew so rankly in the cemetery. Up, up it rose, black even against the background of utter darkness in which the forest was bathed. Hervey leaned forward, his eyes straining and every nerve tense-drawn. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... 'The vague impressions which are all that many people carry away from the concert-room would be replaced by ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... vest, no shoes. In one hand he held a crumpled collar and a high, black silk stock; with the other he grasped the julep. His hair was tousled, his face shriveled up and pinched by his heavy nap, his eyes watery and vague. He reminded me of the man one sometimes meets in the aisle of a sleeping-car when one boards the train at a way station in ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was sure, were departing from me, and I had a vague idea that I was falling through unlimited space, while wild winds and loud thunders were all around me; then all became a ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... followed, and more interesting, than ever, though our hopes are all vague, and we neither guess how or by whom they are ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... splendidly; presents were made to him, which, being considerably in debt, he gladly accepted; but as regards his mission he was put off with evasions and blandishments, and he returned home with a reply from the king containing some vague promises of reform in financial and other matters, but an absolute refusal to modify the decrees against heresy. Rather would he sacrifice a hundred thousand lives, if he had them, than concede liberty of worship in any form. For some months however no attempt was made ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... of his glorious mind." One of his chief delights, as he mentioned in his "Memoranda," was, when bathing in some retired spot, to seat himself on a high rock above the sea, and there remain for hours, gazing upon the sky and the waters[1], and lost in that sort of vague reverie, which, however formless and indistinct at the moment, settled afterwards on his pages, into those clear, bright pictures which will ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... him and pained him. He was nearly thirty-five, and hitherto all had been admiration, vague aspiration and despair; he had produced in painting nothing but a few sketches and studies, and in literature only a few ephemeral articles, a collection of youthful letters and a pamphlet on the Resurrection; moreover, to none of his work had anyone paid the slightest ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... to a quadrille party at night. City people and rather dull. Intensely cold coming home, and vague reports of a fire somewhere. Frederick says the Royal Exchange, at which I sneer ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... in black," whom he hurried across the street to meet, could be heard of, or was seen for full two days afterwards, to the great disappointment of the young Mays. Ursula, especially, who had been entertaining vague but dazzling thoughts of a companionship more interesting than Janey's, more novel and at the same time more equal than that which was extended to her by the Miss Griffiths in Grange Lane, who were so much better off and had so ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... a little angular, most winningly and girlishly awkward, as she wanders on to the stage with an air of vague distraction. Her shoulders droop, her arms hang limply. She doubles forward in an automatic bow in response to the thunders of applause, and that curious smile breaks out along her lips and rises and dances in her bright light-blue eyes, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... shoulder. Taking for a guide the first Indian whom I met, I made long excursions, less occupied in shooting than in admiring the magnificent scenery. I knew a little Spanish, and soon acquired a few Tagaloc words. Whether it was for excitement's sake, or from a vague desire of braving danger, I know not, but I was particularly fond of wandering in remote places, said to be frequented by robbers. With these I occasionally fell in, but the sight of my gun kept them in ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... all very well, Lawrence," said Lewis, with a touch of sarcasm, "to talk in a vague way about the sun's action, but it's quite plain, even to an unphilosophical mind like mine, that the sun can't lift a block of stone some tons in weight and clap it on the top of a pillar of ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... two Krishnas are the same. Nothing, however, is stated of this early Krishna's career and although parts of the sage's teachings have been compared to passages in the Gita,[3] Krishna himself remains a vague and ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... so, Since she first heard the name of the city, that Zoe Dreamed of life in New York. It was thither she turned To smother the heart that with restlessness burned, And to quiet and calm an unsatisfied mind. Her plans were but outlines, crude, vague, undefined, Of distraction and pleasure. A snug little home, With seclusion and comfort; full freedom to roam Where her fancy and income permitted; new faces, New scenes, new environments, far from the places Where brief joy and long sorrow had dwelt with her; free From the curious eyes that seemed ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... I believe, affords a fair idea of the opinion of educated and unprejudiced Englishmen on the Irish question. They do not know much about Irish history; they have heard a great deal about Irish grievances, and they have a vague idea that there is something wrong about the landlords, and something wrong about the ecclesiastical arrangements of the country. I believe a careful study of Irish history is essential to the comprehension of the Irish question; and it is obviously ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... association was not yet a force. Each state, being in square miles ample enough for an empire, retained to a great extent the consciousness of an independent nation. The state was near and palpable; the central government seemed a vague and distant thing. Loyalty was conceived as binding one primarily ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... was a mention of something—in a vague sort of way—that I was to inherit when I grew up. Whether it was land or money no one can tell. The reference is so veiled. Even Uncle John, and he is a stock and bond broker, you know, says he is puzzled. ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... turn their conversation had taken had filled her with a vague unrest as she looked back at the life she had led. Three or four years ago it had seemed filled with glamour and excitement, and she had entered on its pleasures with eager zest, but of late she had begun to find them wearisome. They no longer satisfied her. If ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... any definite intentions, and scarce knowing what I was about, I seized and clung to the branches of a small tree with the tenacity of a drowning man—unable to open my eyes while sticks and leaves, huge limbs of trees and deluges of water flew madly past, filling my mind with a vague impression that the besom of destruction had become a veritable reality, and that we were all about to be swept off the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... somewhere, I know not In what diviner sphere, Of memories that stay not and go not, Like music heard once by an ear That cannot forget or reclaim it, A something so shy, it would shame it To make it a show, A something too vague, could I name it, For others to know, As if I had lived it or dreamed it, As if I had acted or schemed ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... buttressed trunks, and by the stems of colossal vines, hanging from the boughs like cables, or the arms of an oriental banyan; while their luxuriant tops rolled in union with the leafy roofs that supported them. The vague and shadowy prospects opened by these occasional glades stirred the imagination, and produced a feeling of solitude in the mind, greater perhaps than would have been felt had the view been continually bounded by a green wall ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... where the precipice sinks steepest; while a more ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by a double row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keep has lost its genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition attributes its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said to have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son of M'Donald of the Isles; but it is added that, owing to the jealousy of his elder brother, he was not permitted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... sand-heap. The roaring Easter with its shrieks and whistles at her ribands was not favourable to speech. His 'Anywhere!' had a penetrating significance, the fuller for the break that left it vague. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bordering upon the upper Mississippi and the Ohio on the one hand, and of the merchants and planters of the Gulf on the other. Thus he was fully prepared to enter warmly into the idea that had taken possession of the minds and hearts of the people of the Northwest. From a vague longing this idea had now grown into a deep and settled sentiment. Indeed in all the West the opening of the Mississippi played a part that can only be realized by comparing it with the prevailing sentiment of the East, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... should place before them what is good and then allow them to make a good choice as they please. I do not know which Leandra chose; I only know her father put us both off with the tender age of his daughter and vague words that neither bound him nor dismissed us. My rival is called Anselmo and I myself Eugenio—that you may know the names of the personages that figure in this tragedy, the end of which is still in suspense, though it is plain to see it must ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... he hailed loudly. Then, guided as it seemed by instinct, almost as much as by the vague direction of the moaning call, he ploughed his way through brush and briar, on ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... first time—and in Mesmerism every thing is new. An objection may be made that the article has rather a Magazinish air; Mr. Poe having evidently written with a view to effect, and so as to excite rather than to subdue the vague appetite for the mysterious and the horrible which such a case, under any circumstances, is sure to awaken—but apart from this there is nothing to deter a philosophic mind from further inquiries regarding it. It is a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... lips and visage worn by suffering, at first gazed at the closed door with vacant eyes. Closed? The word unconsciously roused a vague fancy in his mind, the fancy that he had seen for an instant the light of the lanterns through a chink between the door and the wall. A morbid idea of hope, due to the weakness of his brain, stirred his whole ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... its warm, heady air, from which the nostrils dilate avidly, with its aromas, gliding from unseen gardens and flower-beds,—the head of each one of them was aflame and the heart quietly and languishingly yearning from vague desires. It was joyous and arrogant to sense after the rest the new, fresh strength in all the sinews, the deep breathing of the lungs, the red, resilient blood in the veins, the supple obedience of all the members. And—without words, without thoughts, without consciousness—one was drawn ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... he received a vague reply, desiring him to have patience. The affair got wind in the town, and a gentleman came to him, asking if he would accept him as bail. Efforts had been made in his favor, and the police were ready to set him free. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... have got his wits together by this time, and to have a vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he meant for anybody's ears.—I have been talking a little wild, Sir, eh? he said.—There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops of yours, and I doubt if my ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... together, and the little jealousies which deform the natures of us all have in their case, for this reason, freer scope, and tend more to isolation. Here, at last, we have a school, ignorant it may be, conceited possibly, as yet with but vague and unrealised objects, but working together with a common purpose, according to certain admitted principles, and looking to one another for help and sympathy. This is new in England, and we are very anxious it ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the application of it beyond its true limits and to make it include popular songs, stories, myths, and the like, regardless of its fitness of application. Some writers, no doubt, would apply this vague term to a large part of the poetical pieces which are given in this book. [Page 114] On the same principle, why should they not apply the term folklore to the myths and stories that make up the body of Roman and Greek mythology? The present author reserves the term folklore for application to those ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... keep out one pair?" said Ellen, who had a vague notion that by some mysterious means her stockings were to be prevented from ever looking ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... elections. At present there is every appearance of the return of a House of Commons very favourable to the present Government, but the Tory party keeps together in the House of Lords, and they are animated with vague hopes of being able to turn out the Ministry, more from a spirit of hatred and revenge than from any clear view of the practicability of their carrying on the Government. I conceive, however, that as soon as Parliament is up there will be a creation of Peers. In the House of Commons the Irish ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... like sweet potatoes when these trees catch," returned the sheriff grimly. "No." Even as he spoke, a dropping rain of fire spattered through the leaves from a splintered redwood, before overlooked, that was now blazing fiercely in the upper wind. A vague and indefinable terror was in the air. The conflagration no longer seemed to obey any rule of direction. The incendiary torch had passed invisibly everywhere. They scrambled out of the hollow, and again ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... wonder if they will keep fresh until I reach home. Once more:—I approach a city. I see woods and two gardens, either flower or vegetable, from which comes music. On a mound wild flowers are growing, some white, some small and dark. I gather them. Then very remote and vague,—my brother is there. I see a long snake which my brother puts on(?) and covers my flowers. Still another vision was of a branch of beautiful; fragrant apple blossoms growing through the wall of a room. Some of the flowers were ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... back for the next speaker that modicum of quiet attention which he, at all events, had the art of gaining and of keeping. As she came forward this time one of her auditors looked at the Woman Leader in the Crusade with new eyes—not with sympathy, rather with a vague alarm. Vida Levering's air of almost strained attention was an unconscious public confession: 'I haven't understood these strange women; I haven't understood the spirit of the mob that hoots the man we know vaguely for their ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... gained the corner of the Square and was lost from view, a lithe figure—kin of the shadows which had masked it—became detached from the other shadows beneath the trees of the central garden and stood, a vague silhouette seemingly looking up at her window as Gianapolis ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... writers, and the charming wicked Aristophanes (whom he vowed to be the greatest poet of all). But he went at such a pace that, though he certainly galloped through a considerable extent of the ancient country, he clean forgot it in after-life, and had only such a vague remembrance of his early classic course as a man has in the House of Commons, let us say, who still keeps up two or three quotations; or a reviewer who, just for decency's sake, hints at a little Greek. Our people are the most prosaic in the world, but ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Each time as he lifted one of his long feet and set it slowly down a special little effort had to be made. To move about at all was a painful performance, something he did not want to do. All physical acts were to him dull but necessary parts of his training for a vague and glorious future that was to come to him some day in a brighter and more beautiful land that lay in the direction thought of rather indefinitely as the East. "If I do not move and keep moving I'll become like father, like all of the people about here," Hugh said to ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... for the sake of those whom she loved and longed to befriend. She had known they must be poor, but she had not heard of their poverty from themselves. They resided in a remote and thinly peopled district in Scotland, where the means of communication were few and difficult. Nothing but vague reports had reached her. She had hoped against hope till the time came when she could set her fears at rest, or know the worst, by seeing them herself. Now, standing in the bare room, in the midst of many marks of want and sickness, it grieved ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the gold-rimmed glasses to her eyes, she looked into the landscape as if she were expecting someone to appear. The day was grimy with clouds; mist had risen, and it hung out of the branches of the elms like a veil of white gauze. Withdrawing her eye from the vague prospect before her, Mrs Norton played listlessly with the tassel of one of the blinds. "Surely," she thought, "he cannot have been foolish enough to have walked over the downs such a day as this;" then, raising her glasses ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... a somewhat trying ordeal; for the night was pitch dark—the moon being new and not a star visible, the sky overcast, and the wind fresh and at times gusty. Moreover, they could form but a very vague idea of the dangers by which they were surrounded, the chart showing nothing but a clear sea; and, to further increase their anxiety, there was a heavy ground-swell rolling in from the westward, which caused the ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... winter-quarters, in those Passau regions; postponing the explosion of the Broglio-Seckendorf projects, till Spring; and returned to Vienna for the Winter gayeties and businesses there. How the high Maria Theresa is contented, I do not hear;—readers may take this Note, which is authentic, though vague, and straggling over wide spaces ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... world, the elements, and the stars. In respect to the world, or rather the universe, the author's opinion is the same with that of several ancient philosophers, that it is a Deity, uncreated, infinite, and eternal. Their notions, however, as might be expected, on a subject so incomprehensible, are vague, confused, and imperfect. In a subsequent chapter of the same book, where the nature of the Deity is more particularly considered, the author's conceptions of infinite power are so inadequate, that, by way of consolation for the limited powers of man, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... his original state of perfec- tion, man has fallen into the imperfection that requires evil through which to develop good. Were we to [10] admit this vague proposition, the Science of man could never be learned; for in order to learn Science, we begin with the correct statement, with harmony and its Principle; and if man has lost his Principle and its harmony, from evidences before him he is inca- [15] pable of knowing the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... fully intended to call at Primrose Croft that very afternoon, to see Mr Roberts, or if he were absent, Mistress Grena; but he preferred the gentleman, as being usually more manageable than the lady. He meant to terrify the person whom he might see, by vague hints of something which he had heard—and which was not to be mentioned—that it might be mournfully necessary for him to report to the authorities if more humility and subordination to his orders were not shown. But he was detained, first by ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... too uncertain; I do not know the wants of the Maplewood people, and I must provide for Hector. I would not let these vague dreams interfere with her resolute work; but, Margaret, what a vision it is! I can see you laying the first stone on that fine ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... and meaningless to mortal sense; Its vague desire can never reach its goal Till knowledge vanishes in omniscience And God surrounds her soul, Breaking its barriers down and flooding in Through all her wounds in one almighty tide, Mingling her soul with that great Love wherein My soul ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... particulars. I despatched a courier to Madame de Saint-Simon, requesting her to send me another the next day, and I passed the rest of this day, in an ebb and flow of feelings; the man and the Christian struggling against the man and the courtier, and in the midst of a crowd of vague fancies catching glimpses of the future, painted in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the present occasion, I mention this name as one of many your institution can boast of, it is because I have more than one reason to do so. For what I have to tell you and to show you this evening concerns, in a large measure, that same vague world which Professor Crookes has so ably explored; and, more than this, when I trace back the mental process which led me to these advances—which even by myself cannot be considered trifling, since they are so appreciated by you—I ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... therefore the marvellously gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings or a man of mighty faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances, was vague and empty, because no high purpose had ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and sat beside him. Her attempt at a smile worried him. After all, she was just a kid, being bundled off in disgrace. He felt a vague regret that he meant so little to her. He wondered if she really loved any one. Then her search for "regular parents" came back to haunt him. Funny business this, having ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... handing about bills of fare, as if they had been programs. All this was sufficiently curious; but the agreeable thing, later, was to sit out on one of the great white decks of the steamer, in the warm breezy darkness, and, in the vague starlight, to make out the line of low, mysterious coast. The young Englishmen tried American cigars—those of Mr. Westgate—and talked together as they usually talked, with many odd silences, lapses of logic, and incongruities of transition; like people who ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... curious and undefined sense of pleasure in her words. In the act of crossing he had held her arm for a few moments, and though her assent to his physical guidance had been purely negative, there was yet something about it which had given him a vague pleasure. Instinctively he knew that she was of the order of women to whom the merest touch from a man whom they disliked would have ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this inn, an old garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea—alone as I thought at first, in the twilight—I became aware that the garden had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby bonnet was sitting, with her reticule lying by her, also drinking tea and gazing at the after-glow of the sunset. An elderly spinster I thought her, a dressmaker perhaps, or a retired ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... sheriff did not move. Nor did Deveny change his position. A queer, cold chill had come over Deveny—a vague dread, a dragging reluctance—an indecision that startled him and made of his thoughts an odd jumble of half-formed impulses that seemed to die ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... humped and feathers puffed, our thrush flew down to feed in the first pale-gold glimmer of very-much-diluted sunlight, the hedge-sparrow did not move. Now, in opening his wings, possibly from a vague idea of frightening the hedge-sparrow away from the magic swept circle on the lawn close by, and its bread, the thrush brushed heavily against that hedge-sparrow, so that—oh, horror!—it fell, or swung over backwards, rather, and hung head downwards, swaying slightly, like a toy acrobat on ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... writer then gives us a curious account of the present constitution of the House. The Dean, whom he calls "the right reverend gentleman," is, "in a kind of way, master of the College. The Canons, in a vague kind of way, are supposed to control the College." The Senior Students "dare not call their souls their own," and yet somehow dare "to vent their wrath" on the Junior Students. His hazy, mental picture of the position of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... You know just how it looks. You have turned to it often; there you seem to be joined to him, though only by the turning of a leaf. And over your thoughts, as you look at that page of the record, there sometimes wanders a vague shadowy fear, which will come,—that your own name may soon be there. You try to drop the notion, as if it were not fairly your own; you affect to slight it, as you would slight a boy who presumed on your acquaintance, but whom you have no desire to know. ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... fear of what was going to happen to him next. So much that was appalling had already happened to him! He wanted repose; he wanted surcease; he wanted nothingness. He was too tired to move, but he was also too tired to lie still. And thus he writhed faintly on the bed; his body seemed to have that vague appearance of general movement which a multitude of insects will give to a piece of decaying matter. His skin was sick, and his hair, and his pale lips. The bed could not be kept tidy ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... impressions which, of late, have occasioned me much anxiety and surprise. I need not tell you how sceptical I have hitherto been on the topic of the soul's immortality. I cannot deny that there has always existed, as if in that very soul which I have been denying, a vague half-sentiment of its own existence. But this half-sentiment at no time amounted to conviction. With it my reason had nothing to do. All attempts at logical inquiry resulted, indeed, in leaving me more sceptical than before. I had been advised to study Cousin. I studied him in his own works as well ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... (a fiery tear he put in every tone), "How should my child frequent your house where lust is sport, Violence—trade? Too true! I trust no vague report. Her angel's hand, which stops the sight of sin, leaves clear The other gate of sense, lets outrage through the ear. What has she heard!—which, heard shall never be again. Better lack food than feast, a Dives in the—wain Or reign or train—of Charles!" (His language was not ours: 'T is ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... then the papers about the conditions of partnership disappeared, no one knew how, and d'Alibert's wife and child were ruined. D'Alibert's brother-in-law, who was Sieur de la Magdelaine, felt certain vague suspicions concerning this death, and wished to get to the bottom of it; he accordingly began investigations, which were suddenly brought to an ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... endeavored, even at the risk of being tedious, to give such specific directions as will qualify the novice to hive a swarm of bees, under almost any circumstances; for I know the necessity of such directions and how seldom they are to be met with, even in large treatises on Bee-Keeping. Vague or imperfect directions always fail, just at the moment that the inexperienced attempt to put them ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... truth about the night expedition to the castle. All the boys' answers consisted in dark allusions to the fact that the ghost was wandering about Wildenstein more than ever. As not one of them wanted to admit the hasty retreat before the ghost had even been properly inspected, they only dropped vague and terrifying words ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... are hints, very vague, that, in 1593, Bothwell aimed at changing the dynasty. {140b} The fable that Gowrie was a maternal grandson of Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV, by Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, her third husband, and ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... me anything,' he said. 'I've mended her watch, and I always thought she was all right up to this, but the Lord only knows whether she did it.' He paused, and then, as if there were some vague connection in his mind between this charge and a general disposition towards acts of dishonesty, he added: 'She always ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... known in parts of Hampshire even. If one were far from the main road, where news might be had from the driver or guard of a coach, information could only come from some wandering pedlar to a remote village, and might or might not be true. Vague stories were told, and forgotten as soon as told. Men and women, with a hard living to earn, cared little what was happening fifty or a hundred miles away, unless a son or brother or friend had had part in the rebellion. At the village of Aylingford ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... Junes. Wrapped in his love, you float in a delicious rest, rocked in the bosom of purple, scented waves. Nameless melodies sing themselves through your heart. A golden glow suffices your atmosphere. A vague, fine ecstasy thrills to the sources of life, and earth lays hold on Heaven. Such friendship is worship. It elevates the most trifling services into rites. The humblest offices are sanctified. All things are baptized into a new name. Duty is lost in joy. Care veils itself ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... the void which Henry's absence would have made in my life, that I welcomed with pleasure the idea of entering upon a new scene. I had also a vague indefinite hope that far from Elmsley—away from the material objects which recalled to me continually my fatal secret—I should, perhaps, shake off, in some degree, the sense of oppression that weighed upon me. I was only seventeen, and prematurely miserable as I was become, still there remained ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... time, I had thought I could get away only by marriage. I was ready to marry anybody who offered me food and shelter, and I had even thought of prostitution as a means of escape from domestic drudgery. I had not the slightest idea of what prostitution in its accepted sense meant. I knew in a vague way that women sold their bodies to men for money, that they lived luxurious lives, went to theatres and balls, wore beautiful gowns and seemed to be gay and happy. I was willing to marry any man who ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Committee bustled off after telling our friends to make themselves perfectly at home, Pepita Le Roy came up to them. She was a handsome woman, in a foreign way, with large, dark eyes and an abundance of raven black hair. She was rather flashily dressed and walked with a sort of swagger that in a vague way ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... demanded by their self-chosen task. That they possessed some real affection for the country is doubtless true, but it was not the prime inspiration of their verse. They had the ambition to write poetry rather than the call; a slight bent towards the country, heightened by a vague dissatisfaction and weariness with the artificial luxury of Rome, led them to choose pastoral poetry. They make up for depth of observation by a shallow minuteness. In the seven eclogues of Calpurnius may be found a larger assortment ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... benefit from it, he wants it habitable, and habitable for Frenchmen of the year 1800. Consequently, he takes into account the habits and dispositions of his tenants, the pressing and permanent wants for which the new structure is to provide. These wants, however, must not be theoretic and vague, but verified and defined; for he is a calculator as close as he is profound, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... that Charles, who had seen so many instances of the jealousy of the commons, who had himself so much roused that jealousy by his frequent evasive messages during this session, could imagine that they would rest satisfied with an answer so vague and undeterminate. It was evident, that the unusual form alone of the answer must excite their attention; that the disappointment must inflame their anger; and that therefore it was necessary, as the petition seemed to bear hard on royal prerogative, to come early to some fixed resolution, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... up with the same vague wonder with which children look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible story as well as with the incidents of the day, incidents that recur year in and ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... to feel unhappy and a vague desire began to take possession of him. He drank water—it was not that; he stretched out to the port-hole and breathed the hot, moist air—it was not that; he tried to think of his native place and the snow—it was not that.... At last he felt ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... If the rather vague Victorian public did not appreciate the deep and even tragic ethics with which Stevenson was concerned, still less were they of a sort to appreciate the French finish and fastidiousness of his style; in which he seemed to pick the right ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... and took to his heels until he was out of shot from stone or word. It seemed to him that in this country of England there was no protection for a man save that which lay in the strength of his own arm and the speed of his own foot. In the cloisters he had heard vague talk of the law—the mighty law which was higher than prelate or baron, yet no sign could he see of it. What was the benefit of a law written fair upon parchment, he wondered, if there were no officers to enforce it. As it fell out, however, he had that very evening, ere ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... See preceding note (1), p. 168. In answer to the vague objection that the alleged leaders were two brothers, Mr. Thorpe observes that the circumstance of two brothers being joint-kings or leaders, bearing, like Hengist and Horsa, alliterative names, is far from unheard of in the annals of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... hostile. The two boats sent ashore found that the entrance to the river was effectually barred by a row of iron stakes and by an inner boom, and that a large and excited crowd forbade them to land. A vague promise was given that an opening would be made in the obstructions to admit the passage of the English ships; but on the boats repeating their visit on the succeeding day they found that the small ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... into the brakes. The others did likewise. Utter silence fell, save for the far, vague roar of the city. A vagrant little breeze was stirring the new foliage, through which a few stars curiously peeped. The four men seemed far, very far from ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... come Mrs. Catesby's decision to remove to the city that her daughter might have educational advantages. It was with genuine regret that Ree had learned her plans. He would never have admitted even to himself that he had, in a certain boyish, vague way, dreamed of a dim, distant time when he and Mary might be more than friends; but maybe some such thought had been in his mind at some time. Strange it would be had nothing of the kind ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... night than the Lloyds. Mr. Bowser and Frank came in to exchange congratulations, and they rejoiced together over the boys' success. Mr. Bowser was as delighted over Frank's passing as Mr. Lloyd was over Bert's scholarship. Like many men of defective education, he had very vague views about college. It was all a mystery to him, and that Frank, whom he was just finding out to be something more than a boy, should so easily penetrate these mysteries, and take a good place among the candidates for admission, was a source of ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... will sink with ill-concealed relief upon the dusty velvet cushions of the returning train, thoroughly disappointed in the vaunted marvels of Pompeii, which his imagination had led him to expect. A vague impression of low broken walls, of narrow—to his eyes absurdly narrow—streets, of broken columns and of peeling frescoes fills his tired brain, as he is borne back to his hotel in Naples. But this disenchantment is his own fault, for no one who sets foot ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... scalded. I was at the foot of a ladder up which a sailor was carrying a great pot of hot coffee. He slipped, and the boiling liquid poured down on me. I must have had some bad days after that, for I was terribly burned, but they are mercifully vague. My next vivid impression is of seeing land, which we sighted at sunset, and I remember very distinctly just how it looked. It has never looked the same since. The western sky was a mass of crimson and gold clouds, which took on the shapes of strange and ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... Pacific of philosophy,—that theory of the sole Divine Substance, the All-One, which Goethe in early life found so pacifying to his troubled spirit, and which, vague and barren as it proves on nearer acquaintance, induces at first, above all other systems, a sense of repose in illimitable vastness and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... world outside, and especially was there conveyed to her, through Alice for the most part, news that concerned the fortunes of Catholics. Politics, except in this connection, meant little enough to such as her. She heard, indeed, from time to time vague rumours of fighting, and of foreign Powers; and thought now and again of Spain, as of a country that might yet be, in God's hand, an instrument for the restoring of God's cause in England; she had heard, too, in this year, of one more rumour of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... wrote Bret Harte, "I took up Longman's Magazine* and began to lazily read something about the Spanish Armada. My knowledge of that historic event, I ought to say, is rather hazy; I remember a vague something about Drake playing bowls while the Spanish fleet was off the coast, and of Elizabeth going to Tilbury en grande tenue, but there was always a good deal of 'Jingo' shouting and Crystal Palace fireworks about it, and it never seemed real. In the article I was reading the style ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... leaving but a vague mark for our spears, and besides, there was the danger of striking Desiree. We were barely able to keep pace with the thing as it receded swiftly down the broad passage. Desiree had twisted her ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... regarded as a suggestion for purchase. Should such requests come from users of several branches at once, the desired book is very likely to be purchased. Often the demand is general rather than specific, as for "a book about the Caucasus" or for "more works on surveying," and sometimes they are vague or misleading, titles being wrong and authors' names spelled phonetically; yet the work made necessary in looking up these demands is more than repaid by the knowledge that it may result in making the library of more value to ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... time when the battle of Fair Oaks was fought, June 1, 1862. All the vessels of the Commission except "The Spaulding"—and she was hourly expected—were on the spot, and ready. "The Elm City" happened to be full of fever cases. A vague rumor of a battle prevailed, soon made certain by the sound of the cannonading; and she left at once (4 A. M.) to discharge her sick at Yorktown, and performed the great feat of getting back to White ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... long period of European peace which began in 1815 was not one of internal repose; the very absence of those engrossing and imperious interests which belong to a time of warfare gave freer play to the feelings of discontent and the vague longings for a better political order which remained behind after the convulsions of the revolutionary epoch and the military rule of Napoleon had passed away. During thirty years of peace the breach had been ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of the tower of Saint-Jacques, what wind is blowing up for the morrow, and what it will bring with it. In that great city of nerves, through which electric vibrations pass, there are invisible currents of fame, a latent celebrity which precedes the actuality, the vague gossip of the drawing-rooms, the nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade, which, at a given moment, bursts out in a puffing article, the blare of the trumpet which drives the name of the new idol into the thickest heads. Sometimes that trumpet-blast alienates the first ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Historia tripartita, lib. viii: Quum Valentinianus Imperator as oras Hesperias navigaret, id est ad Italiam, et Hispaniam. Elsewhere the same author mentions the islands off the west coast of Africa, of which he received some vague information as: Incognitam terram qui communi vocabulo Hesperi appellantur Ethiopes. Pliny, Strabo, in the last chapter De Situ Orbis, Diodorus, and others make similar usage of the terms. St. Anselm, De Imagine Mundi, lib. i., cap. xx., Juxta has, scilicet Gorgonas ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... be little doubt that Russia will gain the enormous advantage of a free opening into the Mediterranean and that the battle of the Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... on the girls, that carefully selected library, the porter's bell, these casual allusions to "discipline" that set her thinking of scraps of the Babs Wheeler controversy. There was a regularity, an austerity about this project that chilled her, she hardly knew why. Her own vague intentions had been an amiable, hospitable, agreeably cheap establishment to which the homeless feminine employees in London could resort freely and cheerfully, and it was only very slowly that she perceived that her husband was by no means convinced of the spontaneity of their coming. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... bad, he knew the day would be a hundred times worse. Already a gray light was sifting into the hollow of the sky. The vague misty outlines of the mountains were growing sharper. Soon from a crotch of them would rise a red hot cannon ball to pour its heat into the ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... appears strange that not less than twenty-five should here be described as new; and there can be no doubt many so described are included under the vague and uncertain descriptions of Lamarck and Lamouroux; but, in the absence of authentic specimens, or trustworthy figures, I have found it impossible to identify satisfactorily the species described by them, and have therefore thought ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... another signature, were composed or dictated by this man,—articles evading the censure and penalties of the law, but very mischievous in their tone. All who had come into familiar communication with this person were impressed with a sense of his powers; and also with a vague belief that he belonged to a higher class in breeding and education than that of a petty agent de change. My colleague set himself to watch the man, and took occasions of business at his little office to enter into talk with him. Not by personal appearance, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... BREAKFAST the invitation cards are similar in form to dinner cards. But since the manner of serving, the numbers invited, etc., are not so definitely fixed it is proper to add R.S.V.P. on cards that especially call for a reply in the judgment of the hostess. Otherwise many people with vague ideas of the "informality" of these occasions might omit ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... interview with the Cointets with a vague feeling of uneasiness; not, however, on account of the proposed partnership, nor for his own interests—he felt nervous as to their opinion of his work. He was in something the same position as a dramatic author before his judges. The inventor's pride in ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... I have a vague idea that one night I was taken from my bed, wrapped up in a mantle, and carried to a chalet on the Concha, belonging to one Errazu, who was a relative of my mother's. We lived there for a time in the cellar of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman. Britain was almost the only province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities. Roman camps still crowned hill and down. The old divisions of the land remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers. ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... downs," as Jimmy Hill would say in his weekly letters home. He rarely missed a fortnight that this sage observation did not appear in some part of his four-page epistle. Jimmy stuck religiously to four pages, though he knew enough of censorship rules to avoid mention of his work, except in vague generalities. This necessity made writing four pages dull work at times, and resulted in Jimmy's adoption of various set phrases as filling matter. His mother, who knew Jimmy as only mothers know their ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... on one occasion, how, after making my hearers cry over the natural and permanent tragedy of Shylock, I asked the fatuous question, addressing it, as one does, to the vague air— ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... genius move wonderfully to a perpetual music. In truth, however, these eminent Victorians of Lady RITCHIE'S circle must have been a rare company; I have no space for even a catalogue of them—Mrs. CAMERON, with her vague magnificence, pouring letters and an embarrassment of gifts upon her dear TENNYSONS; the KEMBLE sisters, LOCKHART, THACKERAY himself, a score of great and (to the kindly chronicler) gracious personalities live again in her pages. I should add that the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... dazed and confused, feeling that my six feet made me too conspicuous, and longing in a vague and futile way to let her know without words that I would do what ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of every piece makes you the link between classic and modern ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... its powers and virtues; and, at last, when he had grown tired of it, have bartered it for any more desirable article that might take his fancy. All these advantages were present to his mind in a vague shifting form, but he could not find either courage or ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... following the vague language of Columbus, the great discoverer, the New World is called the Indies, slightly distinguished, in grammatical number only, from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... standing before the advertisement board[4226] trying to spell out the Journal Officiel, whose abstract phrases, beyond their reach, pass over their heads in aerial and transient flight, like some confused rustling of vague and unknown forms. To guide them in political life, much more difficult than in private life, they require a similar guide to the one they take in the difficult matters of their individual life, a legal or business adviser, one that is qualified and competent, able to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... kept pace with the brilliancy of the menu. Repeated references on the part of the guests to the local political conditions and prospects in Sir James's constituency were met with vague "ahs" and "indeeds" from Lady Drakmanton, who might have been expected to ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... It was accepted, not, however, without a slight manifestation of reluctance. Mr. O'Royster's senses were somewhat clouded, but the shadows of the entry were dark enough to impress even him with a vague feeling of dread. ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... on deposit unless by the peculiarity of their rules, I should be obliged to withdraw it. They objected to taking the money as a Government deposit, or as an official deposit in my name, having some vague idea that if they took it and opened an official Government account they should be liable for the appropriation of the money unless documents from the United States were filed with them taking away that liability, but they ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... of mine," resumed Pendleton; "her mother was connected in some vague way with my mother; and because of this indefinite link, we've always been"—here he hesitated for an instant—"well, rather friendly. Last night we happened to meet at Upton's, and I took her in to dinner. Edyth is a nice girl, but I've noticed of late that she's not had a great deal to say. ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... along seen how Philip's wooing could issue successfully, if it ever came to the point of wooing; the elements were too discordant, and principles too obstinate; and yet she had worked on in hope, vague and doubtful, but still hope, thinking highly herself of Mr. Dillwyn's pretensions and powers of persuasion, and knowing that in human nature at large all principle and all discordance are apt to ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... Chief-Justice Osgoode's ancestry. A French-Canadian writer asserts that he was an illegitimate son of King George the Third. No authority whatever is assigned in support of this assertion, which probably rests upon no other basis than vague rumour. Similar rumours have been current with respect to the paternity of other persons who have been more or less conspicuous in Canada, and but little importance should be attached to them. He was born in the month of March, ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... words to the vague feeling which had depressed them all, ever since the discovery of the murder; that here was something vastly greater than the accidental finding of a person killed by an outsider, that the crime touched Sloanehurst personally. The foreboding had been patent—almost, ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy. The most extraordinary thing that had happened to him—though he had given that name to other matters as well—took place, after his immediate vague stare, as a consequence of this impression. The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... sat down to the morbid sort of a meal one gets in London lodgings: a calm soup; a segment of vague fish smothered painlessly in a pale pink blanket of sauce; a cut from the joint, rare and lukewarm; potatoes boiled dead; sad sea-kale; nonconformist pudding; conservative ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... men; and that while reforming government the people would remain orderly, as they had generally remained in America during the transition from British rule to selfgovernment. Burke maintained that if the existing political order were broken up there would be no longer a people, but "a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more." "Alas!" he exclaims, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass, which has a true personality." For the sake of peace ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... this sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... car seemed at rest; but although we saw nothing, we could hear a vague and distant murmur which charmed our ears after the long silence of space like a strain of music. Whether this was due to the sounds of the surface collected in the clouds, or to electrical discharges I cannot say, ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... every atom, explain and annihilate it, and yet, years after you had thought that all had been disposed of for ever, the mention of a name wakes up associations in the mind of some one who heard the calumny, but never heard or never attended to the refutation, or who has only a vague and confused recollection of the whole, and he asks the question doubtfully, "But were there not some suspicious ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... head with a smile and seemed to look beyond the Baron at something in the vague distance, while the glass top of the table, which had been clouded by her breath, cleared gradually, and revealed a large house almost hidden among trees. It was a photograph of the Baron's ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... and painful death—he could scarcely have acted otherwise, seeing that he had nothing to do but give orders for a few rope's ends to be dropped over the side to them. Then, although she had given no sign of it, his manner toward her had been such as to fill her with vague fear; while his behaviour toward Leslie, when that individual had unavailingly attempted to convince him of the presence of another survivor upon the floating wreckage, was scarcely of a kind to inspire a woman ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... before. I remember the worried, plaintive look that came into his eyes as he examined the ice. (This plaintive look always came into our eyes when we did not understand a thing, or when we felt the prod of some vague and inexpressible desire.) Red-Eye, too, when he investigated the ice, looked bleak and plaintive, and stared across the river into the northeast, as though in some way he connected the Fire People ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... remember, whether it was Otway Bethel who committed it; for I have always doubted Bethel, in an indefinite, vague manner. Richard replied it was not Bethel, but a stranger. Well, Barbara, in my dream I thought that stranger came to West Lynne, that he came to this house here, and we were talking to him of him, conversing as we might with any other visitor. Mind you, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... had he not one solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful, that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came before him at his most doleful moments—sometimes unsought by his imagination, though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadness played upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree he could die upon them in one wild ecstasy, her eyes for depth and purity the very mountain wells. She lived, breathed, moved, smiled, sighed ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... beginning of the eighteenth century. No doubt it existed and ravaged the herds of Europe for many years and perhaps centuries before that time, but veterinary knowledge was so limited that the descriptions of the symptoms and post-mortem appearance are too vague and too limited to admit of the identification of the maladies to which they refer. It has been supposed by some writers that certain passages in the writings of Aristotle, Livy, and Virgil show the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... in the eyes of its owners. They duly brought down the Union Jack and the American flag, and—as a concession to Diana—planted them side by side on its scanty soil. They decided not to tell seniors or juniors anything at all about it. Of course, in a vague way, the whole school knew of its existence, but nobody had troubled before to land on its few yards of surface. It was well hidden by the boat-house, so that any operations there were not visible from the garden or orchard. The ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... in the north where I had been seeing one of the country-house convalescent hospitals, to which Englishwomen and English wealth are giving themselves everywhere without stint, and made my way by train, through a dark and murky afternoon, towards a Midland town. The news of the raid was so far vague. The newspapers of the morning gave no names or details. I was not aware that I was passing through towns where women and children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is more followed, and more interesting, than ever, though our hopes are all vague, and we neither guess how or by whom they are to ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... health have been accessible for centuries, but never before have books and magazines on these subjects been as numerous as they are today. Most of the information is so general, vague and indefinite that only a few have the time and patience to read the thousands of pages necessary to learn what to do to keep well. The truth is to be found in the archives of medicine, in writings covering a period of over thirty centuries, but ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... conceived to point to the initial letters of the name of him who should be the future emperor. Theodorus, a man of most eminent qualifications, and high popularity, was put to death by the jealousy of Valens, on the vague evidence that this kind of trial had indicated the early letters of his name. [141] It may easily be imagined, that, where so restless and secret an investigation was employed as to the successor that fate might provide, conspiracy would not always be absent. Charges of this ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... himself in trying to put up the shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, "Won't you let me take your hat?" as such people do, in expression of a vague hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, "It is quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March," ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... perform the miracle of—Speech! To breed a fresh Soul, is it not like brooding a fresh (celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all is formless, powerless; yet by degrees organic elements and fibres shoot through the watery albumen; and out of vague Sensation grows Thought, grows Fantasy and Force, and we have Philosophies, Dynasties, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... saddle; my legs trembled in the stirrups as if I had ridden a thousand miles on end already. I imagine I must have fallen into a stupor; for I have only a vague impression of somebody's exculpating himself to me. As a matter of fact, Ralph, after having egged me on, in the intention of staying at home, had had qualms of conscience, and had come to the quarry. It was he who had cried ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... things worthy of your sublime calling it will soon escape from your control, and, flitting from one trifle to another, it will meddle with objects that might become dangerous to the peace of your soul. It will soon become preoccupied by puerile fears, unfounded apprehensions, vague sadness, which, when constantly indulged in, will deliver your soul over to melancholy which never fails to tarnish the purity of the heart and enervate the energy ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... headache. The usual remedy was a drive in a wheeled chair, and Rose was so urgent to be allowed to go and order one, that Ermine at last yielded, partly because she had hardly energy enough to turn her refusal graciously, partly because she would not feel herself staying at home for the vague hope and when the child was out of sight, she had the comfort of clasping her hands, and ceasing to restrain her countenance, while she murmured, "Oh, Colin, Colin, are you what you were twelve years back? Is this all dream, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... following weeks I worked on fairly regularly at the Tocsin and saw Kosinski not unfrequently, on which occasions he most carefully avoided any recurrence of personalities, however vague these might be. Giannoli's disappearance created considerable commotion, and every one was at a loss to imagine what could have become of him. My relations with those Italians whom he had suspected were naturally very strained and ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... on the 26th of March 1792, when I was informed of the serious illness of the Emperor, Leopold II, who died on the following day. In private companies, and at public places, I heard vague suspicions expressed of his having been poisoned; but the public, who were admitted to the palace to see the body lie in state, were soon convinced of the falsehood of these reports. I went twice to see the mournful spectacle, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... runner crouched for the start of that great trial; and somewhere in his subconsciousness a voice whispered that this day, this hour, marked the beginning of his mortal race. He comprehended a certain vague significance to ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... have more of the Bantu form of idea than the negro, although physically they seem nearer the latter), differ very considerably from the religious ideas of the Bantu South-West Coast tribes. The Bantu is vague on religious subjects; he gives one accustomed to the Negro the impression that he once had the same set of ideas, but has forgotten half of them, and those that he possesses have not got that hold on him that the corresponding or super-imposed Christian ideas have over the true Negro; ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... number of the populace to be supplied with grain, something previously left vague, to twenty myriads, and, as some say, he gave each one sixty denarii.. .. to Mars, and that he himself and his grandsons, as often as they pleased, and those who were passing from the classification ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... direct to Mara, and inquired gently after Mrs. Hunter. She replied quietly, without looking up. It was evident that the sound of his voice distressed the injured woman, who was barely conscious enough to have vague memories ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... he ran to the window, "and half leaped, half fell into the jail yard below. With his last dying energies he gathered himself up, and leaned in a sitting posture against the rude stone well curb. His stricken condition, his vague wandering glances, excited no pity in the mob thirsting for his life. A squad of Missourians, who were standing by the fence, leveled their pieces at him, and, before they could see him again for ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... than upon the rug before the fireplace while her mistress' breakfast was being served, and it seemed as though the splendid wolfhound, with a pedigree unrivalled in the world, stood as the very incarnation of outraged dignity, and a protest against insult. Perhaps some vague sense of having overstepped the bounds of good judgment, if not good breeding, was beginning to impress itself upon Mrs. Peyton Stewart. Certainly she had not so thoroughly ingratiated herself in the favor of her niece, or her niece's friends during that visit in New London the previous summer, ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the train to the city. I was determined to know the worst once for all. The time had come when I must. My doctor at home had put me off with vague hopes and perhapses. So I went to a noted physician in the city. I told him I wanted the whole truth—I made him tell it. Stripped of all softening verbiage it is this: I have perhaps eight months or ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... "is a rage for grandeur and gentility; and that same rage makes us quite sure of them in the long run. Everything that's lofty meets their unqualified approbation; whilst everything humble, or, as they call it, 'low,' is scouted by them. They begin to have a vague idea that the religion which they have hitherto professed is low; at any rate that it is not the religion of the mighty ones of the earth, of the great kings and emperors whose shoes they have a vast inclination to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... told her nothing of his inner self, of his past life, or his dreams for the future. All that they said might have been said to each other on their first meeting in Mrs. Hartley's drawing-room. It seemed as if some vague impalpable barrier had been erected between them, and Lettice puzzled herself from time to time to know how this barrier ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... go back from my digression, it was, as I have said, I had amazement at perceiving, in memory, the unknowable sunshine and splendour of this age breaking so clear through my hitherto most vague and hazy visions; so that the ignorance of, Aesworpth was shouted to me by the things which ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... he does not see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is not the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... had been thus two or three hours sitting opposite him, she felt herself getting daft, and longed to rush away and to escape into the open country in order to avoid that mute, eternal companionship and also some vague danger, which she could not define, but of which she had ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... he put in every tone), "How should my child frequent your house where lust is sport, Violence—trade? Too true! I trust no vague report. Her angel's hand, which stops the sight of sin, leaves clear The other gate of sense, lets outrage through the ear. What has she heard!—which, heard shall never be again. Better lack food than feast, a Dives in the—wain ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Twilight voices! Child of the spirit-world am I; How should I fear you? my soul rejoices, O speak plainer! O draw nigh! Fain would I fly! Tell me your message, Ye who are calling Out of the dimness vague and vast; Lift me, take me,—the night is falling; Quick, let us go,—the ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... packed away in proverbial sayings may always be a little suspected. We have a vague respect for a popular proverb, as embodying folk-experience, and expressing not the wit of one, but the common thought of a race. We accept the saying unquestioning, as a sort of inspiration out of the air, true because nobody has challenged ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... along this road from Dunfield station, Emily thought of the downs, the woodlands, the fair pastures of Surrey. There was sorrow at her heart, even a vague tormenting fear. It would be hard to find solace ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... her dear friends. It never occurred to her that it was none of her affair, for Patty was possessed of a healthy curiosity, and moreover she was innately of a helpful nature, and longed to know what the trouble was, in a vague hope that she might be of ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... begged the constable to wait. They went in to the magistrate. They told him who and what Bunyan was. The magistrate had not the least desire to be hard, and it was agreed that if he would himself give some general promise of a vague kind he might be let go altogether. Bunyan was called back. Another magistrate who knew him had by this time joined Wingate. They both said that they were reluctant to send him to prison. If he would promise them that he would ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... to whom the mention of such an example served as an apology for their own extreme dissipation; (392) and by those who envied him for the affluence and dignity which he had acquired. The charge, however, is supported only by vague assertion, and is discredited by every consideration which ought to have weight in determining the reality of human characters. It seems totally inconsistent with his habits of literary industry, with the virtuous sentiments which he every where ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... lessons of the, 334-u. Psalms of David indicate a loftier knowledge of Deity than the common, 617-u. Psyche represented the Soul; her suitor was Dionusos, who awakened her, 586-l. Psyche, representing the Soul, had an earthly and an immortal lover, 519-l. Public not a vague abstraction, 198-u. Public Opinion a Force; in free governments omnipotent, 90-l. Public service only justly entered through door of merit, 47-u. Punishment and reward are the satisfaction of demerit ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... wedlock with these words in former years was "Golden Hill," a chime of sweet counterpoint too rare to bury its authorship under the vague phrase "A Western Melody." It was caught evidently from a forest bird[10] that flutes its clear solo in the sunsets of May and June. There can be no mistaking the imitation—the same compass, the same upward thrill, the same fall and warbled turn. Old-time ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... By the vague light proceeding from it he saw a pit-hole occupying the entire width of the gangway, and apparently of great depth. Around its edge had been built a barrier of logs breast-high. Through age these had so decayed and fallen that, had Derrick continued ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... asked them and, of course, they were vague. Or perhaps it was just that I could not understand. It involves a projector for the focussing of thought and, even more than that, conscious attention on the part of both projector and receptor. It was quite a while before I realized they were trying to think at ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... was almost ridiculously simple. He had had no plan, beyond a vague one of breaking from his guardians when he was led back to the jail. But he formed a new one almost as soon as he had seated himself in the room where ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... I had known the school superintendent, he had always been reserved regarding his personal and family life. To me his home was a vague, blurred background in which possible members of his family moved. He surprised me this day by referring in detail to the bitter grief which had come to him in years gone by through ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... valleys of the heath nothing save its own wild face was visible at any time of day; but this spot commanded a horizon enclosing a tract of far extent, and in many cases lying beyond the heath country. None of its features could be seen now, but the whole made itself felt as a vague stretch of remoteness. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... wealthy, and now, with equal suddenness, threatened to make them poor again. It was like war—kill or be killed. It occurred to Dave that it was even worse than war. War has in it the qualities of the heroic; splendid bravery; immeasurable self-sacrifice; that broad spirit of devotion to a vague ideal which, for lack of a better name, is called patriotism. This System had none of that. It was more like ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... men who escorted the unhappy train were together in the room, I took the chief one aside and asked for information respecting this beautiful girl. All that he could supply was of the most vague kind. "We brought her," he said, "from the Hospital, by order of the lieutenant-general of police. There is no reason to suppose that she was shut ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... whether compensation or no compensation will be given, our Socialist leaders give us very vague and unsatisfactory replies, which rather contain highly respectable but perfectly irrelevant commonplaces than definite proposals. Most Socialists will answer the plain question of confiscation or no confiscation with a quibble or a conundrum, as the following examples ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... wife to the very last. I have suffered all, and I am resigned! . . . What fortitude did it require latterly to endure my situation, when, though no longer his wife, I was obliged to seem so in the eyes of the world! With what eyes do courtiers look upon a repudiated wife! I was in a state of vague uncertainty worse than death until the fatal day when he at length avowed to me what I had long before read in his looks! On the 30th of November 1809 we were dining together as usual, I had not uttered a word ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... that he was as pleased as he could be at the thought that he had succeeded in cheating a foolish gentleman, and away he went to drink the value of his cross. At that time everything that I saw made a tremendous impression upon me. I had understood nothing about Russia before, and had only vague and fantastic memories of it. So I thought, 'I will wait awhile before I condemn this Judas. Only God knows what may be hidden in the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wealth, education, and business capacity may command more or less respect, the deep-rooted feeling is a sense of the intrinsic superiority of the Middle Kingdom and its sons to the barbaric subjects of a vague territory known as the "Kingdom without"—that is, without the pale of the ancient civilisation. By grace, the Christian will welcome you as a fellow-subject of the Kingdom of God, but on this ground ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... beside Karl Steinmetz with gloomy eyes and a vague suggestion of flight in his whole demeanor was, like reader and writer, exactly what he seemed. He was the product of an English public school and university. He was, moreover, a modern product of those seats of athletic exercise. He had little education and highly developed muscles—that ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... now cast all his old cares away. During the next year he should be able to pay off what he owed, and then he would begin to put by. But, while he thus speculated, his eye fell upon his over-worked horses, and the anxious face of his old bailiff, and a vague fear crept, like a loathly insect, over the fluttering leaves of his hopes; for he had staked all on this cast; he had so mortgaged his land that at this moment he hardly knew how much of it was his own; and all this to raise still ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... instance, after Wally had left earlier than usual, she lay with her head snuggled on the pillow, full of vague dreams and visions—vague dreams of greatness born of the sunsets and stars and flowers—vague visions of proving herself worthy of the ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... asked what I don't like in my pupils of today, I should answer the question, not straight off and not at length, but with sufficient definiteness. I know their failings, and so have no need to resort to vague generalities. I don't like their smoking, using spirituous beverages, marrying late, and often being so irresponsible and careless that they will let one of their number be starving in their midst while they neglect to pay their subscriptions to the Students' Aid Society. They don't know ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Mr. Griffon lost his senses so entirely, that he threw himself into the sea, intending to drown himself. Mr. Savigny saved him with his own hand. His discourse was vague and unconnected. He threw himself into the water a second time, but by a kind of instinct he kept hold of one of the cross pieces of the raft: ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... again, in the way that Western coal fires in Western coal grates were then very much in the habit of doing. I was a young, and inexperienced minister. I had come to the West, fresh from a New England divinity-school, with magnificent ideas of the vast work which was to be done, and with rather a vague notion of the way in which I was to do it. My views of the West were chiefly derived from two books, both of which are now obsolete. When a child, with the omnivorous reading propensity of children, I had perused a thin, pale octavo, which stood on the shelves of our library, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... in modern Christianity we make a distinction without alleging much difference between the Father and the Son, even so in ancient times a distinction of a similarly vague kind was made between the All-Father Fire and His Image and First-begotten Son Light. The disc of the Sun seems to have represented the former and the Sun-star or radiate Sun the latter where both were represented in one illustration, as for ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... her pretty manor-house a nice vague Colonel. The Vicar's sister disapproves, because Betty is a grass-widow, and Penelope, the all-but-flapper, an insufficient chaperone. She expresses her disapproval with a hardy insolence which must be rare with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... rendering the heart a fit tabernacle for the reception of Gospel truths. The prejudices of many, perhaps the majority of the Southern people, against educating the negroes they hold in subjection, arise from some vague and indefinite fears of its consequences, suggested by the abolition and British theories built on the false assumption that the negro is a white man with a black skin. If such an assumption had the smallest degree of truth in it, the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... used; but, my friends, I have endeavored to tell the truth, and to do this on such a subject, does not admit of the use of delicate language. A mild hint at such a fact, clothed in flowery language, would only serve to give a vague impression, and would fall far short of the mission I wish this little book to accomplish, viz.: the opening of the eyes of the people, particularly parents, who are blind to the awful dangers there are for young girls in the dancing academy and ball-room, and of leading some, if possible, ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... the Czechoslovaks and the Jugoslavs, wishing to defend themselves, asked permission of the Supreme Council to deal drastically with the Hungarian menace. The reply, which was late in coming, was couched in vague and unsatisfactory language. Emboldened by the vacillatory attitude of the Powers, the Hungarians began a military offensive, invading Czechoslovakia and crossing the lines of the Armistice in Rumania and Jugoslavia. ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... general course in college. In a vague way, she was planning to become a teacher and partly because she had no aptitude for foreign languages, and partly because of the deep impression Miss Towne's little lecture on slang had made on her, she decided to teach English. She therefore took not only the required course ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Just that one vague, far hope, and for her how wide the world is, how very hard to compass! But she stands silent, in her well-learnt patience; and he is about to speak again, when suddenly from outside a girl's voice ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... painter's part in setting their splendid subject free. Two movements shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashing of constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vague bats flying. The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion. Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and returns, escapes and returns. Fitful in the steady night, those ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... coincidence, that, on that evening, and at that place, there should be assembled so many of the principal actors in the drama which he knew must ere long be enacted, and he was unable to shake off a vague presentiment that this was the opening scene. Just what would that drama be, he wondered, would it be comedy or tragedy? never, with all his foresight, dreaming the depth of tragedy so soon to follow, or recognizing ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... door of the hotel he ran across the Prince of Teutoburg's aide-de-camp. They had not met for some days, and Nick had a vague feeling that if the Prince's matrimonial designs took definite shape he himself was not likely, after all, to be their chosen exponent. He had surprised, now and then, a certain distrustful coldness under the Princess ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... did the quiet rooms, And all the paths around, With thy perpetual song resound, As thou didst sit, on woman's work intent, Abundantly content With the vague future, floating on thy mind! Thy custom thus to spend the day In that sweet ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... perhaps, the most puzzling. These are the true Sylvia, the real wood-birds. They are small, very active, but feeble songsters, and, to be seen, must be sought for. In passing through the woods, most persons have a vague consciousness of slight chirping, semi-musical sounds in the trees overhead. In most cases these sounds proceed from the warblers. Throughout the Middle and Eastern States, half a dozen species or ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... monasteries on the frozen coast of Greenland is abundantly proved by documents and monuments. Dim but seemingly unmistakable traces are now discovered of enterprises, not only of exploration and trade, but also of evangelization, reaching along the mainland southward to the shores of New England. There are vague indications that these beginnings of Christian civilization were extinguished, as in so many later instances, by savage massacre. With impressive coincidence, the latest vestige of this primeval ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... I write with greater hesitation. I can tell of her in this place but in vague outline. She was slender, not tall, brown-haired and with eyes like those of the deer or Jersey heifer, save that they had the accompanying expression of thought or mood or fancy which mobile human features with them give. She was a woman ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... principle were extended so that the tax would equal the entire rental value there would be no chance for the land monopolist to exploit the earnings of labor. Man's means should not be "drained and exhausted by excessive taxation," as the Pope seems to fear, showing that he has a vague idea of the method by which it is proposed to destroy ownership. But as the rental value to-day is already paid by labor, the proposed plan could not drain or exhaust labor any more than at present, while such a tax falling upon lands held ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... embrace cries of warning, appeals to affection, demands for help, calls for food supplies, threats, and other indications of passion, fear, or feeling. And the significance of these vocal sounds to animals may often be higher than we suppose. That is, they may not be limited to the vague character of the interjection, but may occasionally convey a specific meaning, indicative of some object or some action. In other words, they may advance from the interjection toward the noun or the verb, and approach in value the verbal root, a sound ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... asked Molly, at length, with a vague air of addressing the trees, mindful, as she spoke, of the manner in which Mr. Landale had practically dismissed her and her sister at a certain point of his version of his brother's history, "why Sir Adrian ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... number of variations seem to be due to the so-called congenital causes, which are sharply contrasted with the influences of the first and second classes. It is quite true that the influences of the third class cannot be surely and directly demonstrated like the others, but however remote and vague they themselves may appear to be, their effects are obvious and real, while at the same time their effects are to be clearly distinguished from the products of the other two kinds. Congenital factors reside in the physical heritage of an organism, ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... incense is grateful. For him the sunlight brightens, the skies grow rosy, and all the days are Junes. Wrapped in his love, you float in a delicious rest, rocked in the bosom of purple, scented waves. Nameless melodies sing themselves through your heart. A golden glow suffices your atmosphere. A vague, fine ecstasy thrills to the sources of life, and earth lays hold on Heaven. Such friendship is worship. It elevates the most trifling services into rites. The humblest offices are sanctified. All things are baptized ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... might learn manners from the gentlemen, and shake hands cordially," said Alice, trying to appear unconcerned, but oppressed by a vague dread ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... no hope that they will go now," Sssuri answered his vague question. "They are stubborn. And hours—or even days—will mean nothing. Also they can leave a guard there and rove at will, to return upon signal. That is ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... a good girl, Maud," he answered, with a vague, distracted air. "I have my children left—I have my children left! But all the world cannot make up to me ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... of it—to catch a late train to the north, and the solemn, echoing tramp of their heavy feet at midnight in the silent street of Eyemouth brought the stricken people from their beds with a start, and with vague apprehension of fresh disaster. But their dread was turned to rejoicing, except for the family of that man who came home never again. In all, on that Sunday night it was known that sixty-four of the men of Eyemouth had perished, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... something to drink they would see that I had been crying. The fire had gone out while I slept, and I felt cold and stiff, but my abandonment of restraint had relieved me, and my fear was now no more than a vague unrest. My mind thought slowly but very clearly. I saw that it was a pity that I had not been more ill than I was, for then, like my brother, I should have gone away for a month instead of a fortnight. As it was, everybody laughed at me ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... must be considered as belonging to the Celtic race, although they wrote in Latin, the most prominent is Gildas. He was the son of Caw, (Alcluyd, a British king,) who was also the father of the famous bard Aneurin. Many have supposed Gildas and Aneurin to be the same person, so vague are the accounts of both. If not, they were brothers. Gildas was a British bard, who, when converted to Christianity, became a Christian priest, and a missionary among his own people. He was born at Dumbarton in the middle of the sixth century, and was surnamed the Wise. His great work, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... in that last sentence he loses hold of his main idea, and to me the important one,—namely, the connexion of the form of stem with the quality of the air it requires. And that idea itself is at present vague, though most valuable, to me. A strawberry creeps, with a flexible stem, but requires certainly no less pure air than a wood-fungus, which stands up straight. And in our own hedges and woods, are the wild rose and honeysuckle signs of ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... remoter parts of the then known world; his latitudes and longitudes are accordingly frequently erroneous, but especially the latter. This arose partly from his taking five hundred stadia for a degree of a great circle, and partly from the vague method of calculating distances, by the estimate of travellers and merchants, and the number of days employed in their journies by land, and voyages by sea. As he took seven hundred stadia for a degree of latitude, his errors ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... the car!" cried Mrs. Wibberley-Stimpson, who was inside it already, a vague, bundled-up shape in the gloom. "It's part of the Pageant, of course! Get in, Clarence, get in! We're late as it is! and if there's a thing I detest, it's ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... in a strange state of mind. The fear I had spoken of had left me, but a vague shadow remained, through which, as through a mist, I saw the light in that far away window beckoning me on to what I felt was in some way to make an end of my present life. As I drew nearer to it, the feeling increased; then it, too, left me, and I found myself once more the daring avenger. ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... she sighed. But for a long while she said no word, only sat looking as before out into vague distance, as if ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... observation. You are now demanding that a circumstance, which, even if it were proved up to the hilt, would not prejudice me in the eyes of a good judge, should be fatal to me when, as it is, it rests on vague suspicion, uncertainty, and ignorance. You will perhaps, as is your wont, say, 'What, then, was it that you wrapped in a linen cloth and were so careful to deposit with the household gods?' Really, Aemilianus! is this the way you accuse your victims? You produce no definite evidence ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... had, as usual, revived the old superstition, and possibly some vague rumors from Yucatan or the Islands had intensified the dread with which the Mexican emperor contemplated the possible loss of his sovereignty. Omens were reported in the sky, on earth and in the waters. The ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... authentic genealogies, which were from time to time adjusted and collated with so much skill and scrupulous accuracy by the official antiquaries who met in the Hall of Tara? The reader unacquainted with such an out-of-the-way and rather weedy corner of literature, may think this vague exaggeration; and I shall finish it by quoting the latest printed, so far as I know, of the numerous solemn and methodical statements about the manner in which the records of these very distant ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... not that I meant," returned the king, sorry to have shown the bitterness of his thought in such a manner. "Well! I assure you that, notwithstanding the mask with which the villain covered his face, I had something like a vague suspicion that it might be he. But with this chief of the enterprise there was a man of prodigious strength, the one who menaced me with a force almost herculean, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... baby for the last time, blessed it for the vague sweet hope it had infused into her heart, and then laid it in its nurse's arms and ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... before I had time to speak you awoke, and I recognized your features in the glass. Knowing that I could not vindicate my innocence if you chose to seize me, I fled, and seeing an omnibus starting for St. Denis, I got on it with a vague idea of getting on to Calais, and crossing the Channel to England. But having only a franc or two in my pocket, or indeed in the world, I did not know how to procure the means of going forward; and whilst I was lounging about ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... is Understanding, and Kshetrajna is the Soul. What, however, is Chitta is difficult to ascertain, unless it means vague or indefinite perception. In some systems of philosophy the Chitta is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... and with the knowledge of country theatricals displayed in his Adventures of a Strolling Player, or may be a story suggested by them. All this part of his career, however, in which he must have trod the lowest paths of humility, are only to be conjectured from vague traditions, or scraps of autobiography gleaned from ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... when you have stillness and solitude, and when the body is in complete repose, there pour in on eye and ear floods of impressions so quickly varying that the mind feels quite unable to record them, and there is finally nothing left behind but a vague and indescribable sensation of all that is grand and beautiful and melodious in nature. For there are vast heights and gloomy depths and recesses, and varied forms of falling waters, and in the general surroundings everything to convey exalted ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... exuberant romantic faculty of Joseph Andrews and its pleasant satire; the mighty craftsmanship and the vast science of life of Tom Jones; the ineffable irony and logical grasp of Jonathan Wild, might have left us with a slight sense of hardness, a vague desire for unction, if it had not been for this completion of the picture. We should not have known (for in the other books, with the possible exception of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the characters are a little too determinately ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... lent to those he hoped to influence. Some of them took these books and promised, with the air of men who were conferring a great favour, that they would read them. As a rule, when they returned them it was with vague expressions of approval, but they usually evinced a disinclination to discuss the contents in detail because, in nine instances out of ten, they had not attempted to read them. As for those who did make a half-hearted effort to do so, in the majority of cases their minds were so rusty and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... would be an opportunity to test his theory that much of the evidence to the senses is worthless. From the moment he had determined upon this course he had based his hopes upon this test. Saul had made it clear that the descriptions given by the witnesses were vague, and now in the excitement of confronting their assailant they were apt to be still more unsubstantial. If he could succeed in terrifying them, he could convince them to a point where they would make all their excited visions fit ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... ceased, the wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... turned into a lane, and the lane entered a region where there were vague fields on either side, fields in which things had been planted. And then he stopped suddenly, not knowing whether he should continue on his way, or return to his companions by the side of the road. He had ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... gentleman in question is even now hastening toward the village." He waved a vague hand toward the open door through which, a little distance away, a man's figure ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... became national property, comprised more than 800 volumes of fugitive pieces, memoirs, instructions, pedigrees, letters, and all the other miscellaneous documents that were classed by D'Israeli 'under the vague title of State Papers.' It has been said that the object of their 'Titanic labour' was to ease the way for the historian De Thou; but it is more likely that the brothers obeyed an instinct for the acquisition of secret history; 'life would have been too short to have decided ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... sins." And in each case these are reasonably valid pleas. In the hour of triumph, however, it is certain that the author is apt to be forgotten, and that the lion's share of success is popularly awarded to the players. For the dramatist is a vague, impalpable, invisible personage; whereas the actor is a vital presence upon the scene; he can be beheld, noted, and listened to; it is difficult to disconnect him from the humours he exhibits, from the pathos he displays, from the speeches he utters. Much may be due to his own merit; ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... hoisted, not only at the peak, but also at every masthead. The four monitors, trusting in their iron sides, steamed in between the wooden ships and the fort. Every man in every craft was thrilling with the fierce excitement of battle; but in the minds of most there lurked a vague feeling of unrest over one danger. For their foes who fought in sight, for the forts, the gunboats, and, the great ironclad ram, they cared nothing; but all, save the very boldest, were at times awed, and rendered uneasy by the fear of the hidden and the unknown. Danger which is great ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... beginning, in the conception of a personal power, greater and higher than man, and having the good of the community at heart. The history of religion is, in effect, from one point of view, the story of the process by which this conception, however dim, blurred or vague, at first, tends to become ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... Cabeza de Vaca, commonly designated as his "Naufragios," is as yet the earliest printed source known with reference to the Rio Grande Pueblos, concerning whom it imparts some vague information. The briefness and vagueness of that information calls for no adverse criticism, for Cabeza de Vaca plainly states that he writes of these people from hearsay and that his information was obtained near the ...
— Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction • Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier
... were the only survivors of the gallant band which had manned the "Nottingham Galley." Captain Deane's first thought was, that possibly this might be the very island on which the "Venus" had been cast away, supposing it to be an island, of which he was not yet sure. A vague feeling that even now Elizabeth and Mistress Pearson might be living on it, induced him immediately to set forth to explore the country. He had not gone far before in front of him he saw several huts, constructed evidently out of the wreck of a vessel. ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... of genius, but genius of a peculiar character. Gleams of intuition into the most secret recesses of the heart, analyses of hidden feelings, flash brilliantly upon us from every leaf, and yet a vague mysticism broods over all. No steady light illumes the pages; scenes and characters float before as if shrouded in mist, or dimmed by distance. The shadowy forms, held only by the heart, shimmer and float before us, draped in starry veils and seen through hues of opal. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... back with nothing else to do. When your body gets kind of turned over in the ditch it's wonderful how your mind begins to hustle around the place. Until this thing happened my intellect was nothing more than a vague rumor. I had heard of it, now and then, in college, and I had hoped that it would look me up some time and ask what it could do for me, but it didn't. These days I would scarcely believe that I have a body, ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... Bruce Cheniston deepened steadily during these golden summer days. Had they met in different circumstances, had there been no question, however vague and undefined, of rivalry between them, it is possible there would have been no positive hostility in their mutual attitude. Any genuine friendship was naturally debarred, seeing the nature of the memory they ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... receive deputations from various cities, bidding him a hollow and trembling welcome, and deprecating his displeasure for any thing in the past which might seem offensive. To all such embassies he replied in vague and conventional language; saying, however, to his confidential attendants: I am here, so much is certain, whether I am welcome or not is to me a matter of little consequence. At Tirlemont, on the 22d August, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... [48] This vague account of the extent of Malabar is erroneous or corrupt, as sixty-one Portuguese leagues would barely reach from Cape Comorin to Calicut. The extreme length of the western maritime vale of India, from Cambay to Cape Comorin, exceeds 250 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... the sleighs stopped, Lady Mary gave in. Pauline and Rochester went forward on foot, and with a guide in front. Below them was a wonderful unseen world, unseen except when the snow for a moment ceased to fall, and they caught vague, awe-inspiring glimpses of ravines and precipices, tree-clad gorges, reaching down a dizzy height to the valley below. Above them was a plateau, black with pine trees. Higher still, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... passed I followed her with my eyes, and she still looked pityingly back at me. The old men she did not notice. Dear Christ, she pitied me, young and vigorous and strong, but she had no pity for the two old men who stood by my side! She was a young woman, and I was a young man, and what vague sex promptings impelled her to pity me put her sentiment on the lowest plane. Pity for old men is an altruistic feeling, and besides, the workhouse door is the accustomed place for old men. So she showed no pity for them, only for me, who deserved ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... give one's client some vague idea of the patient's suffering by likening the pain to the throbbing sensation of a festered finger-nail. Tell him that each hoof of the horse is similarly, or, if anything, more delicately, constructed, that in each foot the same process of 'festering' is going on, and that upon ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... near the close of a summer day. The evening meal is spread, and they are about gathering round the table, when a stranger enters. His words are vague and brief, his manner singular, his air slightly mysterious. Furtive, yet eager glances go from ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... only rumors, vague rumors, about these proceedings, and remained quietly in session. It met every day ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... and the reflections that I indulged in in the presence of the fossils I had brought from the mountains and cliffs, and placed in my museum, indicated that there had been bred in me a vague and unconscious pantheism. ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... local celebrity; but my attendant was positive in affirming that the people do not pray at such stations more than at any other spot whatever. There are many such venerated trees in different parts of the country. I believe that the reason as well as the amount of such veneration is vague and unsettled in the minds of the peasantry, yet the object remains a local monument from generation to generation, honoured now, as were in the Bible times—the oak of Deborah (Gen. xxxv. 8), the oak of Ophrah (Judges vi. II), for instance, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... no nostril. But how and whence was the needed event to come?—the influence that would justify partiality, and make him what he longed to be, yet was unable to make himself—an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague, social passion, but without fixed local habitation to render fellowship real? To make a little difference for the better was what he was not contented to live without; but how make it? It is one thing to see your road, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... raised in anger. She recognized one. Bower was speaking German, Stampa a mixture of German and Italian. Millicent had a vague acquaintance with both languages; but it was of the Ollendorf order, and did not avail her in understanding their rapid, excited words. Soon there were other sounds, the animal cries, the sobs, the labored grunts of men engaged ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... peaceful spot, that there was far more to be said for the simple pleasures of sense than northern folk would have us believe. The English have still much of that ancient puritanism which finds a vague sinfulness in the uncostly delights of sunshine, and colour, and ease of mind. It is well occasionally to leave the eager turmoil of great cities for such a place as this, where one may learn that there are other, more natural ways of living, that it is possible still to spend long days, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... she had received no letter from Russell; he was remarkably punctual, and this long, unprecedented interval filled her, at first, with vague uneasiness, which grew finally into horrible foreboding. For ten days she had stood at this hour, at the same window, waiting for Mr. Clifton's return from the post-office. Ten times the words "No letter" had fallen, like the voice of doom, on her throbbing heart. On this eleventh ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Parliament, Mr. O'Connell could no longer claim in that senatorial character. Such a pretension would be too gross for the understanding even of a Connaught peasant. And in that there was a great loss. For the allegation of a Parliamentary warfare, under the vague idea of pushing forward good bills for Ireland, or retarding bad ones, had been a pleasant and easy labour to the parish priests. It was not necessary to horsewhip[19] their flocks too severely. If all was not clear to 'my children's' understanding, at least my children had no mutinous demur ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... speaks no English, and appears to take for granted that no one speaks French. Mamma would be delighted to assure him of the contrary; she has never conversed with an Academician. She always makes a little vague inclination, with a smile, when he passes her, and he answers with a most respectful bow; but it goes no farther, to mamma's disappointment. He is always with the beau-frere, a rather untidy, fat, bearded ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... this mythical account of Sakadwipa embodies some vague tradition current in ancient India of some republic in Eastern Asia or Oceanic Asia (further east in the Pacific). Accustomed as the Hindus were to kingly form of government, a government without a king, would strike them exactly ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... feeling; pure, calm, disinterested, and immaterial. It was repose of the heart, after having met with the long sought-for, and till then unfound, object of its restless adoration; the long-desired idol of that vague, unquiet adoration of supreme beauty which agitates the soul until the divinity has been discovered, and that our heart has clung to as a straw to the magnet, or mingled with as ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... she couldn't help it, she didn't know why she became at once so taciturn and repellent. "Oh, she'll come again," she said in self-excuse, and with vague ideas of atonement, after Lois had gone away. Besides, the things that Lois had said in the way of solicitude, sympathy, and God made no appeal to her. If she felt regret it was from obscure motives ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... were taken by the French Government to appear to the English averse to the pretensions of James Stuart. It affords, indeed, another trait of the unfortunate tendency of the Stuart family to repose a misplaced confidence, that they should have relied on professions so hollow and so vague as those of France. But the dependent and desolate situation of that Prince may well be supposed to have blinded a judgment not ripened by any active participation in the general business of life, and narrowed within his little Court. Besides, there remained ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... don't mean seriously to pretend that so grand a thought as this could be entertained by his little optics intellectual; you might as well suppose the tiny eye of a black beetle to be scanning the vague, fanciful, and mysterious figure and proportions of Orion, or a kangaroo to be perusing and pondering over the immortal Principia. I repeat, that I have no desire of the sort, and am determined not again foolishly to attempt fine writing, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... source this belief in a "ghost" originated, it must be admitted that it is found among all peoples, and is apparently an universal idea. And, running along with it in the primitive peoples, we find that there is, and always has been, an idea, more or less vague and indistinct, that somehow, someway, sometime, this "ghost" of the person returns to earthly existence and takes upon itself a new fleshly garment—a new body. Here, then, is where the idea of Reincarnation begins—everywhere, at a certain stage ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... faintly. "But how?" Vague prophecies of the future were not much comfort to her in this moment of farewell. She wanted something more definite; but Rob had no time to enter into details, for even as she spoke the carriage drew up beside them, and, while the occupants congratulated ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... commencing to appreciate that the same principle applies to the teaching of history. Is it not true that most children can glibly recite dates and events in the history of their own and foreign countries, of whose significance they have only a vague appreciation, but who never secure any real historical point of view or an appreciation of the importance of history because it has not been made concrete and intimate, as must be the case in considering local events? If national history is taught to develop patriotism, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... Nature we here understand the time that every generation of men lives upon the earth. The Egyptians first employed this vague and uncertain method of calculating when they began to write the beginning of their history. These computed three hundred and forty-one generations from Menes to Sethon; and, having no fixed era, they supposed three generations ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... what is it? Tell me quick. Allan was so vague—though he said he'd always stand by you, no matter what you did. What have you done, Bernal? Is it ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Pollock kept her from turning back to reclaim it. She could not explain this sudden, almost frantic impulse,—she did not attempt to account for it. Somehow she sensed that it had to do with the look in Thane's eyes,—but it was all so vague and intangible that even the suggestion did not ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Pry introduced us, that the newcomer was the "young George" of whom I had heard. He was a fresh, high-coloured boy, whose features showed even now a slight forecast of General Bolingbroke's awful redness. Before I looked: at him I got a vague impression that he was handsome; after I looked at him I began to wonder curiously why he was not? His hair was of a bright chestnut colour, very curly, and clipped unusually close, in order to hide the natural wave of which, I discovered later, he was ashamed. He ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... the shire. The Church courts also had at first been guided by the customary law and traditions of the early English Church, which had grown up along with the secular laws and had a distinctly national character. So long, indeed, as the canon law remained somewhat vague, and the Church courts incomplete, they could work peaceably side by side with the lay courts; but with the development of ecclesiastical law in the middle of the twelfth century, it was inevitable that difficulties should spring up. The boundaries of civil and ecclesiastical law were wholly uncertain, ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... old boards of the lobby creak and strain, as if under the weight of somebody moving cautiously over them. My sense of hearing became unnaturally, almost painfully acute. I suppose the imagination added distinctness to sounds vague in themselves. I thought that I could actually hear the breathing of the person who was slowly returning down the lobby. At the head of the staircase there appeared to occur a pause; and I could distinctly hear two or three sentences ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... In the chapter of "Vivian" that he had just finished, the beautiful shopgirl was imprisoned on board the yacht of the millionaire kidnaper, while the hero, in his own yacht, was miles astern. But the hero's faithful friend, disguised as a stoker, was tampering with the villain's engine. A vague idea began to form in Issy's brain. Once get the would-be eloper aboard the Lady May, and, even though the warning note ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague (and, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... more thoroughly wide-awake now. "Did you get up while I was asleep? Did you begin to move away from me, and did I stop you, or was it a dream? I have a kind of vague recollection—or is it only imagination?—of stretching out my hand and saying, 'Don't leave me ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... daintily clocked; her hat must have been a French milliner's choicest creation. If good clothes could make Janet Orme a lady, there was no question of her social standing, yet even little Alora felt that Janet was out of her element—that she fell short, in some vague way, of being what she was ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... derived from official documents, of the existence of which it is probable Senor Marliani was not aware, it will be observed at once how extremely light and fallacious are the grounds on which he jumps to conclusions. What more preposterous than the vague assumption founded on data little better then guess-work, that one-fourth of the whole exports of British cottons to Italy and the Italian islands, say L.500,000 out of L.2,000,000, go to Spain, when, in point of fact, not one-tenth of the amount ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... pleads may well be called "fanatical," as well as "false"; for it is nowhere laid down in Scripture; and it not only changes the way of acceptance, but it takes away the rule and standard of righteousness, and substitutes a vague notion, called sincerity, in its place, which never was, nor can ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Occasionally horses are transversely barred on the legs, chiefly on the under side; and more rarely they have a distinct stripe on the shoulder, like that on the shoulder of the ass, or a broad dark patch representing a stripe. Before entering on any details I must premise that {57} the term dun-coloured is vague, and includes three groups of colour, viz. that between cream-colour and reddish-brown, which graduates into light-bay or light-chesnut—this, I believe, is often called fallow-dun; secondly, leaden or slate-colour or mouse-dun, which graduates into ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... been invaluable to him, now spoke low and gently to the merchant captain; and even smiled kindly upon his remarks to her, of whatever nature they might be. Doubtless, from the moment of their introduction, a vague suspicion of his true character crossed the English officer's thoughts, but now he needed no other incentive, than the fact that Miss Huntington received and entertained his addresses so agreeably, and with such ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... ascertain these points, we must examine, whether they appear to be grounded in knowledge, to have their root in strong and just conceptions of the great and manifold excellences of their object, or to be ignorant, unmeaning, or vague: whether they are natural and easy, or constrained and forced; wakeful and apt to fix on their great objects, delighting in their proper nutriment (if the expression may be allowed) the exercises of prayer and praise, and religious contemplation; or voluntarily omitting offered occasions of receiving ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... warn him. From experience, he would recognize the first vague blurring, narrowing of vision, and other signs of anoxia. Despite this, the "blackout" explanation was accepted as plausible by ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... furrowed, shadowy face. Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom there was some relentless driving power besides the lust for gold! Cameron felt that between this man and himself there was a subtle affinity, vague and undefined, perhaps born of the divination that here was a desert wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper, an unintelligible relation having its roots back in the past. A long-forgotten sensation stirred in Cameron's breast, one so long forgotten that ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... behind things for our admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic, a term of PROMISE. Returning with it into experience, we gain a more confiding outlook on the future. If not a blind force but a seeing force runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues. This vague confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present discernible in the terms design and designer. But if cosmic confidence is right not wrong, better not worse, that is a most important meaning. That much at least of possible 'truth' ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... attempt, it was pretty well done, and his companions watched the result with feelings of excited earnestness, that they felt half-ashamed to admit even to themselves. There was mingled with this feeling a sort of vague incredulity, and a disposition to ridicule the idea that they were actually endeavouring to wash gold out of the ground; but when Larry's panful began to diminish, and the black sand appeared, sparkling with unmistakeably-brilliant particles of reddish-yellow metal, they felt ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... ground, and, as he fell, Newman's words seemed to run through his head: "I wish as 'ow we was a bit closer to the devils so that they couldn't shell us." He was aware of a moment's acute terror, then something in his brain seemed to snap and everything that followed was vague, for ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... recent a date that few, if any, of the manuals on taxidermy do more than glance at it. True, they nearly all give directions, in an off-hand way, as to the skinning of mammals; but their instructions are so vague and meagre that, though confessing that the subject is no easy one to write upon, I yet feel that we may, perhaps, improve, in point of detail, on ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... in the Flemish peasant's relation with his Deity. It is all very vague to him: a jumble of veneration and familiarity, of sanctity and profanity, without any thought of being familiar, or any idea of ...
— Bebee • Ouida
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