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More "Obscure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... returned to the room to examine the contents of his flask. But even the flask was now nowhere to be seen. There was not a single forgotten object, not a single indication to give him a clue in this obscure confusion. What could have happened here?—he had ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... tall man of fifty, in spectacles, with a dark beard, and a pencil behind his ear—usually expressed his ideas vaguely in roundabout hints, while his sly smile betrayed that he attached particular significance to his words. He liked to obscure his utterances with bookish words, which he understood in his own way, and many such words he used in a wrong sense. For instance, the word "except." When he had expressed some opinion positively and did not want to be contradicted, he would stretch ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... George is having an anxious time; Edgar goes into some obscure details about crops and cattle-raising. Then he hints at some exciting adventures they have had as a result of supporting a body that's ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... my name is not entirely unknown to the commander in chief," said the major, a little proudly; "nor are you as obscure as your modesty would make you. I believe you, Frances, when you say that you pity me, and it must be my task to continue worthy of such feelings. But I waste the precious moments; we must go through the hills to-night, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Is the approaching visitation of the power more strongly felt than the power itself in presence? Chaucer says distinctly the contrary, and why with a word lose, or obscure, or hazard the appropriation of the month entire, so conspicuous a tenet in the old poetical mind? And is Eve here taken strictly—the night before May-day, like the Pervigilium Veneris? Or loosely, on the verge of May, answerably to 'ayenes May' afterwards? To the former sense, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... certainly shown some speed in adapting yourself to conditions," Carr observed facetiously. "There was a time when I didn't believe you could. Which shows that even wise men err. Material factors loom bigger and bigger on your horizon, don't they? Don't let 'em obscure everything though, Thompson. That's a blunder plenty of smart men make. Well, we've progressed since Lone Moose days, haven't we—the four of us that ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Caesar, and acted Things as memorable, had they been done in some Part of the World replenished with People and Historians, that might have given him his Due. But his Misfortune was, to fall in an obscure World, that afforded only a Female Pen to celebrate his Fame; tho' I doubt not but it had lived from others Endeavours, if the Dutch, who immediately after his Time took that Country, had not killed, banished and dispersed ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... gave birth to a baby girl, an obscure London newspaper printed, "A Malthusian Warning to the East India Company," which no doubt reflected a certain phase of public interest, but Mill continued his serene ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the time about certain circumstances which have since made a great deal clear to me that was obscure before. ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... the keen eyes of the sergeant, who was very evidently on no new job so far as he was concerned. 'Moll' too seemed jealous of Jane's laurels, and went thoroughly into the business. She and the serjeant peeped together under beds and into closets, and she laughed brazenly at certain not very obscure hints of his as to the great services I should render to the search-party if I kept my eye on the house-place. She even said, "Master Noll, don't 'e think as 'ow th' ale be gettin' flat downstairs? It wunna be wuth ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... to Kent, until she had heard that Margery was to be home in time for the graduating exercises. As June came on and the tenth drew near, a little forlorn sense of the unfairness of things began to obscure Lydia's pride and joy in her honor. On the ninth, the last rehearsal of the speech had been made; the dress was finished and hung resplendent in the closet; Amos himself had taken Lydia into town and bought her white slippers and stockings, taking care to inform ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... set up an extensive mining plant, may come to an end which is unexpectedly abrupt. You may put your money into roller-skating rinks and find that cinemas have become the rage with the fickle public; sometimes "the market" may decline for causes which remain obscure but with consequences which are disagreeably plain. But while risk is always present in some degree, the degree varies enormously from one industry to another. Now, it is obvious enough that in an ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... for lion. Euphonic changes were very arbitrary and various, differing for the same termination; but the adverbial ending -ly was always -osh; terribly, terriblosh. A certain percentage of words were absolutely independent, or at least of obscure origin. The grammar tended to Chinese or infantine simplicity; ta represented any case of any personal pronoun. A proper name might vary in sound according to the euphonic requirements of the different Christian names by which ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... which he was presently submitted drew nothing from him that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from Frey Miguel, after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations, that the full truth—known to himself alone—was extracted by ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... content to collect their prey only in obscure and little-known regions, for a chance was seen to commercialize the small birds of the forests and fields. Warblers, Thrushes, Wrens, in fact all those small forms of dainty bird life which come about the home to cheer the hearts ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... Adams took his seat in Congress, the movement for the abolition of slavery was begun by a few obscure agitators. It did not at first attract much attention, but as it went on it gradually exasperated the overbearing temper of the Southern slaveholders. One fruit of this agitation was the appearance of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the House of Representatives. ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, l. ii. c. 44, p. 176-192. A critical reader will discern some inconsistencies in different parts of this account; but they are not more obscure or more stubborn than the establishment and effectives, the present and fit for duty, the rank and file and the private, of a modern return, which retain in proper hands the knowledge of these ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... finished verse will be A stroke that's like a steeple when Seen suddenly upon a plain. My soul longs for your breath again To warm it. Oh, return—come here With laugh and babble—and no fear When with your shadow you obscure The book I read, for I am sure, Oh, madcaps terrible and dear, That you were right and I was wrong. But who has ne'er with scolding tongue Blamed out of season. Pardon me! You ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... seems to call for this extended reply which I hope will be of service to you. If I have left anything obscure that you would like to know about, or if I can assist you in any other way, please ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... caution the four nobles had gradually retreated to an obscure recess, half concealed by some heavy drapery; and Bassompierre, in an attitude of easy indifference, stood leaning against the tapestried panels that divided the sumptuous apartment which they occupied from an inner closet that ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... we know it to exist. What a character would that man make for himself, of whom it was notorious that he consecrated his faculty of speech to the refuting unjust imputations against whomsoever they were directed, to the contradicting all false and malicious reports, and to the bringing forth obscure and unrecognised worth from the shades in which it lay hid! What a world should we live in, if all men were thus prompt and fearless to do justice to all the worth they knew or apprehended to exist! Justice, simple justice, if it extended no farther ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... that you thoroughly comprehend me, I have become so much a part of you that your innermost thoughts are as plain to me as though they were mine. But let me finish. I realized when I lay ill and about to die that I had permitted my theory of happiness to obscure my perception of the actual. As you know, my whole life has been given over to imagination—all save that portion of my existence, which I shall not dignify by calling life, when I was forced by circumstances to bring myself down to realities. I did not live whilst in commercial pursuits. It was ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... politicians, corruption. I, think that, by holding the subjects of your majesty in pay, he trespasses upon the royal prerogative, and cannot, if this continues so, be long in placing your majesty among the weak and the obscure." ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... theological tracts and single sermons. While at college, our author's conduct seems not to have been uniformly regular. He was subjected to slight punishment for contumacy to the vice-master,[26] and seems, according to the statement of an obscure libeller, to have been engaged in some public and notorious dispute with a nobleman's son, probably on account of the indulgence of his turn for satire.[27] He took, however, the degree of Bachelor, in January 1653-4, but neither became Master of Arts,[28] ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... doctrine of Thales, that cold and damp origin seemed doubtful to Scala in the case of a creature so fond of warmth; a fish were perhaps the better comparison, or, when the power of flying was in question, an eagle, or indeed, when the darkness was taken into consideration, a bat or an owl were a less obscure and more apposite parallel, etcetera, etcetera. Here was a great opportunity for Politian. He was not aware, he wrote, that when he had Scala's verses placed before him, there was any question of sturgeon, but rather of frogs and gudgeons: made short work with Scala's ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the furniture heights and in the wall-paper, which, if in pronounced patterns, must balance in conspicuous wall members and show the broken junctures or bad matchings in inconspicuous or obscure corners. ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... choose to let her refuse, Nor hae't in her power to say na, man: For though I be poor, unnoticed, obscure, My stomach's as ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the conduct of the Kohlhaas affair at the wish of his hard-pressed master, asked the Elector what charge he now wished to have lodged against the horse-dealer in the Supreme Court at Berlin. As they could not refer to Kohlhaas' fatal letter to Nagelschmidt because of the questionable and obscure circumstances under which it had been written, nor mention the former plundering and burning because of the edict in which the same had been pardoned, the Elector determined to lay before the Emperor's Majesty at Vienna ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... coming over from Asia into Europe to make war on the Roman people, has, during the whole length of the winter, accomplished no more memorable exploit, than the taking a wife, for passion's sake, out of a private house, and a family obscure even among its neighbours; and now as a newly married man, surfeited as it were with nuptial feasts, comes out to fight. His chief reliance and strength was in the Aetolians,—a nation of all others the most faithless and ungrateful, as you have formerly experienced, and as Antiochus ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... he could take offence. Only he had the air of a man who praises his neighbor without stint, with a calm consciousness that he himself is out of reach of comparison in the possessions or qualities which he is admiring in the other. Clement was right in his obscure perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while he was making his phrases. That gentleman was, in another moment, to have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature he had just begun to tame. He was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... I shall not deal with obscure newspapers or obscure men. What a private citizen like Allen G. Thurman may have said in 1861 is ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... attack, but he never recovered consciousness, and refused to eat. Ten days afterwards he died without a complaint; to the last he had not spoken a word. Mme. Topinard nursed him, and Topinard laid him by Pons' side. It was an obscure funeral; Topinard was the only mourner who followed the son of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the ends of such affairs as they naturally and rather rapidly arrive. It had been a pleasure, and was no longer a pleasure; but this apparently did not dissolve it, or absolve him. He felt himself bound by an obscure but deep instinct to go on pretending that he was not tired of her, so long as she was not tired of him. And he sat there trying to remember any sign, however small, of such a consummation, quite without success. On the contrary, he had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... come back to me after you have become acquainted with all the facts, and we will discuss the matter together. That you may call me your friend goes without saying, as you ought to know by this time; and although I am only an obscure East-End practitioner I am not wholly without friends able and willing to do me, or any friend of mine, a good turn, if necessary. So come back here when you have threshed out the matter, and we will see ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... consciousness of novelty and freedom as any boy coming to seek his fortune. Chatty's feelings were all very mild in comparison with her mother's. She was greatly pleased to see the clouds clear off, and the humid sweetness of the skies, which even the breath of the great city did not obscure. "After all, Theo will have a nice evening for his drive home," she said, unexcited. Though it was all very agreeable, Chatty did not know of anything that might await her in town. She knew more or less, she believed, what awaited her,—a few parties, a play ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... in that one just as much if that one had been the other." Mrs. Brook was sagacious, though a trifle obscure, and she pursued the next moment: "Mamma was so sincere. The fortune was nothing to her. That ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... like to sleep over this cable—so plain seemingly; really so obscure. At face value, how splendidly it simplifies the Dardanelles problem! Had I been, all along, as this cable seems to make me, the C.-in-C. of the Eastern Mediterranean with Maxwell administering my Egyptian Base, then, ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... a contenir que celle des villages ou on avait deja couru tant de perils. Monsieur, le Sous-Prefet, prenant avec lui le Lieutenant des gend'armes et six gend'armes, se mit en route vers la Calade. La nuit etait obscure, et le temps froid; cette double circonstance protegea Napoleon beaucoup mieux que n'aurait fait la plus forte escorte. Mons. le Sous-Prefet et la gend'armerie rencontrerent le cortege peu d'instants apres avoir ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... bore a pattern of dirty hands. Dozens of empty bottles clinked together in corners to the rolling of the ship. One of the doctor's medical books lay open on the table, half of the leaves gutted out, I suppose, for pipelights. In the midst of all this the lamp still cast a smoky glow, obscure and brown ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... many have raised the question, and asserted that caste had an idolatrous origin, and was the invention of an idolatrous priesthood, it may be worth while to gather together such facts as we can lay our hands on regarding this somewhat obscure subject. And it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to clear away the rubbish which has been piled upon it in common with most Indian institutions—to ask what is evidence, and what is not. Our missionaries have asserted that caste can be clearly ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... errand, while I was out to-day, was to go and see a person who has thought proper to go out of her mind about me. She is poor and obscure, the sister of a tailor in this town; she had a little independence of her own, but lent it to the State of Pennsylvania, after the fashion of Sydney Smith, and has lost it, or at any rate the income of it, which, after all, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Dublin will, by reason of numerical majority, be analogous to Ministerialists at Westminister. DONELAN remarked that in his capacity as Nationalist Whip he intended to move issue of writ next Monday. This fully explained why O'BRIEN'S young man moved it to-day. Otherwise cause of quarrel obscure. What they fought each other for dense mind of Saxon could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... thick-set pillars with their deep-fluted trunks, whose capitals were formed by four heads of bulls, placed forehead to forehead, and bound together by knots of serpents that seemed striving to devour them, an obscure cosmogonie symbol whereof the meaning was no longer intelligible, and had descended into the tomb with the hierophants of preceding ages. The gates were neither of a square nor rounded form. They described a sort of ogive much resembling the mitre of the Magi, and by ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... trifling question to ask the Duchess; since all the news of her shadowy world came to her ears in some swift obscure manner. ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... and led Esperance to her fiancee. At that moment anyone who had suspected the Duke of intentions to flirt with the plighted girl, must have abandoned their idea; and the motive of the duel, which was to bring one of these two perfect gentlemen to his death, became more and more obscure. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... who am but a country gentleman in a small way—an obscure bachelor, abiding from year's end to year's end on my insignificant farm—have witnessed things in my time, which, had they been said and done nearer the tropics, would have been cited far and near in evidence of the turbulence of human passions, and that "the heart is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... [1] Certain obscure paragraphs relating to a crocodile, kept at the Museum, had been perplexing the readers of the Oxford Magazine for some time past, and had been distorted into an allegory of ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had a spice of Quixotism in it, seems to have completely lost his wits at this last reverse of fortune. Overwhelmed with shame at his own credulity, he felt himself unable to encounter the ridicule which awaited his return to Portugal, and secretly withdrew, with two or three domestics only, to an obscure village in Normandy, whence he transmitted an epistle to Prince John, his son, declaring, "that, as all earthly vanities were dead within his bosom, he resolved to lay up an imperishable crown by performing a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and devoting himself to the service of God, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... silence and solitude of his apartment he surrendered himself to his recollections and dreams. "It had been better to die young in a foreign land, while all the stars of hope were beaming above me, than to protract a miserable, obscure life here, and see all the stars fade ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... them were gone before the latter year. Lincoln was dead; Grant had had two terms; Stevens was gone; Sumner had been driven from party honor before his death; Chase had died Chief Justice, but unhappy. With these men living, lesser men had remained obscure. As they dropped out, a host of minor leaders, trained to a disproportionate view of the war and ignorant ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... the past hour she had innocently and dreamily bestowed upon the Greek caresses which might easily have been misunderstood; and that all the while, the door having been partly open, a person standing outside and concealed by the obscure gloom of the antechamber, could have covertly witnessed whatever had transpired within. But AEnone knew that whatever might be her husband's other faults, he was not capable of countenancing the self-imposed degradation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in hearing distance, had turned away, and was ostentatiously examining the sky and the treetops; the man who had spoken to her joined him, and they said something in a low voice. They turned again and came slowly towards her. She, from some obscure sense of imitation, stared at the treetops and the sky as the second man had done. But the first man now laid his hand kindly on her shoulder and ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... rich 145 In all abundance; many a field possess'd Of wheat, well-planted gardens, numerous flocks, And was expert in spearmanship esteem'd Past all the Grecians. I esteem'd it right That ye should hear these things, for they are true. 150 Ye will not, therefore, as I were obscure And of ignoble origin, reject What I shall well advise. Expedience bids That, wounded as we are, we join the host. We will preserve due distance from the range 155 Of spears and arrows, lest already gall'd, We suffer worse; but we will others urge To combat, who have stood too long aloof, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... an eye-witness, "slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and grave, he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words. . . . He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth." Another story indicates the temper of that time. Carlyle, whose writing had strongly influenced Huxley, and whom Huxley had come to know, could not forgive him for his attitude toward evolution. One day, ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... all. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns, in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.' And again, 'There is another way of God's providence full of meanders and labyrinths and obscure methods: that serpentine and crooked line: that cryptic and involved method of His providence which I have ever admired. Surely there are in every man's life certain rubs, and doublings, and wrenches, which, well examined, do prove the pure hand of God. And to be true, and ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... some examples of contemporary published criticism which it is now not uninteresting to glance over. In selecting these he has been aided by the kindness of Mrs. Ogilbie. From the Abbotsford manuscripts and other sources he has added notes on points which have become obscure by lapse of time. He has especially to thank, for their courteous and ready assistance, Lady Napier and Ettrick, who lent him Sir Walter's letters to her kinswoman, the Marchioness of Abercorn; Mr. David Douglas, the editor and publisher ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... is always his own style. He does not make the mistake of being relevant on one page and irrelevant on another; he is irrelevant on all of them. He does not make the mistake of being lucid in one place and obscure in another; he is obscure all the time. He does not make the mistake of slipping in a name here and there that is out of character with his work; he always uses names that exactly and fantastically fit his lunatics. In the matter of undeviating consistency he stands alone in authorship. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... poor man's cottage and to the gate of the palace; and protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America offered a thousand new paths to fortune, and placed riches and power within the reach of the adventurous and the obscure. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... he looked back upon these winter months, Piers could distinguish nothing clearly. It was a time of confused and obscure motives, of oscillation, of dreary conflict, of dull suffering. His correspondence with Olga, his meetings with her, had no issue. He made a thousand resolves; a thousand times he lost them. But for the day's work, which kept him in an even tenor for a certain ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... what they decided should be their destination, almost at the end of the road and in a dense bit of wooded section which would obscure them from enemy observers, they brought their tractor to a stop. With pick and shovel they began building an earthen oven, in which they might cook their food, and from which they might keep reasonably ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... what it was, whether man or beast and the dusk only served to make it more obscure. Then the object scrambled up on to the trail and Jim at once recognized the dwarf Mexican with his high-crowned sombrero and his velvet suit richly slashed. With his crooked back and one eye, he was anything but a prepossessing-looking creature. Caliente, when he, too, recognized ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... had, by fair means or foul, induced an enormous number of witnesses to come forward and prove the truth of his statement, and day after day there were the most wearisome references to old diaries, to reports of meetings held in obscure places, perhaps more than a dozen years ago, or to some hashed and mangled report of a debate which, incredible though such meanness seems, had been specially constructed by some unscrupulous opponent in such ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... not apply to errors which are openly and plainly at variance with the rubrics of the Missal and Breviary. However, it may be well to revise and to recall the student days' lessons on the Church's Calendar. The study is not an easy one, and in labouring to be brief, probably, I may be obscure and incomplete. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... agents of office-brokers, making the business of dickering about spoils as weighty to them as their duties as legislators. It introduces the patronage as an agency of corrupt influence between the Executive and the Legislature. It serves to obscure the criminal character of bribery by treating bribery with offices as a legitimate practice. It thus reconciles the popular mind to practices essentially corrupt, and thereby debauches the popular sense of right and wrong ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... performed his task in a way to deserve the warmest praise. The difficulties he has overcome are very great, consisting not merely of intricate rhyme and assonance, which he has faithfully reproduced, but a text often corrupt and meaning often obscure. He says himself in his preface that "The life-blood of rhythmical translation is this commandment—that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one;" and this commandment, as far as we can see, he has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... said the Philosopher. "This course, however, is rarely followed by the fairy people: they do not ordinarily steal for ransom, but for love of thieving, or from some other obscure and possibly functional causes, and the victim is retained in their forts or duns until by the effluxion of time they forget their origin and become peaceable citizens of the fairy state. Kidnapping is not by any means confined to either humanity or ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... together. At present you close against men of talents that broad, that noble entrance which belongs to them, and which ought to stand wide open to them; and in exchange you open to them a bye entrance, low and narrow, always obscure, often filthy, through which, too often, they can pass only by crawling on their hands and knees, and from which they too often emerge sullied with stains never to be washed away. But take the most favourable case. Suppose that the member who ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... obscure; but it appears that Raleigh, failing to discover the mines, attacked and plundered the little town of St. Thomas, which the Spaniards had built on the territories of Guiana, which Raleigh had acquired three-and-twenty years before for the English crown, ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... found in occupation of the tap-room were by trade cutlers. Natives of some obscure town in Prussian Silesia, of which I have forgotten the name, they were wandering about through Bohemia with the intention by-and-by of proceeding into Saxony, and so round by Berlin and Potsdam to their homes. Their knapsacks, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... cabin study with its many pleasant accommodations, and become a scribbler of all work in a London garret. Here his existence ran on for a while in an obscure and probably miserable current. It is said that Murray, the bookseller, the father of 'the' John Murray, of Albemarle Street, wished to take the poet into partnership,—upon terms of great advantage,—but that Falconer, for reasons which are not known, declined ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... flattery which the young artist's attention conveyed, and scarcely needed the entreaties of Trevethick to persuade him to throw off his native reticence. What he forgot, and had mentioned in former narrations, the landlord supplemented; and when "Sol" became technical and obscure the other performed the part of chorus or explainer. If the former had been some gifted animal, and the latter its proprietor, he could not have taken a greater pride in the exhibition of its talent than did the landlord in ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... found it difficult to get any attention paid to his compositions, Clara, from childhood, was able both to conquer their difficulties and to express their deep meanings. While Schumann was earning his living and a wide reputation by publishing the praises of other composers, by burrowing in all the obscure meaning of new geniuses, and revealing their messages to the world, his own great works were lying ignored and uncomprehended and seemingly forgotten. At this time he found a young girl of brilliant fame, honoured by Chopin, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... however, set her at rest in regard to his visits to Marian Vosburgh, and she felt that there was scarcely the slightest danger that he would compromise himself by serious attentions to the daughter of an obscure American official. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... of any of those I saw in the list, except two or three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and scurrilous party pamphlets. I made this observation to Fontanes, who replied that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification; and that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men of greater talents. He granted also that men of true genius and literary eminence were, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... she wandered into the obscure corner of a church. It was evening service, and at first she was only glad to get away from the cold, biting air; but she had not been there long before a strange feeling of gladness rose up in her heart. The organ awoke from its stillness, and the tones gladdened her as the tambourine, ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... unfeigned penitence, he retired from the audacity, back foremost: Would never even in dreams have presumed, had not his Prussian Majesty authorized; would now, since HER Prussian Majesty had that feeling, withdraw silently, and live forgotten, as an obscure Royal Highness in the abstract (though fallen Widower lately) ought to do. And so at least there was an end of that matter, one might hope,—though in effect it still abortively started up now and then, on Papa's part, in his frantic humors, for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Om. Haer." iii. 3, Sec. 3. Bunsen has justly remarked that, "with Telesphorus the most obscure period of the Roman Church terminates."—Hippolytus, iv. pp. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... insignificant remains of such rich stores. In the tombs have been found here and there fragments of popular songs. The pyramids have furnished almost intact a ritual of the dead which is distinguished by its verbosity, its numerous pious platitudes, and obscure allusions to things of the other world; but, among all this trash, are certain portions full of movement and savage vigour, in which poetic glow and religious emotion reveal their presence in a mass of mythological phraseology. In the Berlin ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... real in this world but that which lives in the heart.... My life has been wrapped up in the obscure little village where she lives.... Life is only endurable when I tell myself: 'This autumn I shall spend a month beside her.' I should die in this hell of a Paris if she did not allow me to write to her, and if from time to time I had not letters ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... called attention to a recently published article which appeared to be of a good deal of importance. By a curious coincidence, the other scientist had that very day been reading an article published twenty years before in an obscure local scientific ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... twitched and he stirred uneasily. His face was haggard, and behind his closed lids, somewhere in the center of thought and memory, a train of fiery words burned in an ever-widening circle, round and round and round, ploughing, searing their way through some obscure part of him that had heretofore been without feeling, but was now all quick and ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... marvellous beauty and strength, but their doom is upon them, and after numerous adventures they slay their fathers or some other unfortunate relative. But the most characteristic part of what seems an almost universal legend is that these children are born in the most obscure circumstances, afterward rising to a height of splendour which makes up for all they previously suffered. It is not necessary to explain nowadays that this is characteristic of nearly all sun-myths. The sun is born in obscurity, and rises to a height ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... composition in the modern spirit, and to the simplifying of planes and values, Manet owed these attacks, though at that time his colour was still sombre and entirely influenced by Hals, Goya and Courbet. From that time the artist became a chief. As his friends used to meet him at an obscure Batignolles cafe, the cafe Guerbois (still existing), public derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the Angels at the Tomb of Christ, a souvenir of the Venetians; Lola de Valence, commented upon by Baudelaire in a quatrain which ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... GREAT MEN who will smile at seeing these observations connected with a subject so humble and obscure as the boiling of potatoes, but GOOD MEN will feel that the subject is not unworthy ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... of an account of economic development should not obscure the meaning of its details. Increased population, with its horde of incoming aliens, created a demand for standing room, necessitated westward expansion, and made the West more than ever a new country with new problems. The growth of agriculture enlarged a class ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... least regard for his own character and quiet, would venture to preach up moderation, or even advise a suspension of belief until more certain information could be received. Fresh fuel was continually thrown in by obscure authors of pamphlets and newspapers, who stigmatized and insulted with such virulent perseverance, that no one would have imagined they were actuated by personal motives, not retained by mercenary booksellers, against that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... under the superintendence of the author," evidently does no justice to the original. We have not seen the book in French, but we venture to say that M. Guizot never wrote French which could answer to this version, awkward, careless, and sometimes obscure. A certain picture of dull and ancient aspect, which had long passed for an original from the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, and, despite the raptures of sentimental people who sought to tickle their own vanity by pretending to perceive in it the marks of its high origin, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... separate himself from his alliance with Austria, and to throw her into the arms of Russia. But with regard to the Polish-Russian provinces, Napoleon declared he would see what he could do, should Providence favour the good cause. These vague and obscure expressions did not define what he intended to do for the Poles in the event of success crowning his vast enterprises. They excited the distrust of the Poles, and had no other result. On this subject, however, an observation occurs which is of some force as an apology for Napoleon. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... (render service) fari komplezon. Obliged, to be devi. Obliging servema. Oblique oblikva. Obliquity oblikveco. Obliterate surstreki. Oblivion forgeso. Oblivious forgesa. Oblong longforma. Obnoxious ofendega. Obscene malbonmora, malcxasta. Obscure mallumigi. Obscure malhela. Obscurity senlumeco, mallumeco. Obsequies enterigiro. Observance (rite) ceremonio—ado. Observant observema. Observation observo—ado. Observatory observatorio. Observe (make ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... at the telling of some actual adventure, something big with life. Her heart and good will went out to the man who won against odds. Strangely enough, soldier's daughter though she was, the pomp and glamour and cruelty of war were detestable to her. It was the obscure and unknown hero who appealed to her: such a one as this man ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... is, simply, a coquette. But he "can't tell what her look said." Certainly not any "vile cant" about giving her heart to him because she saw him sad and solitary, about lavishing all that she was on him because he was obscure, and she the queen of ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... oblivion the Platirs, the Tablantes, the Olivantes and Tirantes, the Phoebuses and Belianises, with the whole herd of famous knights-errant of days gone by, performing in these in which I live such exploits, marvels, and feats of arms as shall obscure their brightest deeds. Thou dost mark well, faithful and trusty squire, the gloom of this night, its strange silence, the dull confused murmur of those trees, the awful sound of that water in quest of which we came, that seems as though it were precipitating and dashing itself down from the lofty ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Uniformity had laid a mulct of a hundred pounds on every person who, not having received episcopal ordination, should presume to administer the Eucharist. The Five Mile Act had driven many pious and learned ministers from their houses and their friends, to live among rustics in obscure villages of which the name was not to be seen on the map. The Conventicle Act had imposed heavy fines on divines who should preach in any meeting of separatists; and, in direct opposition to the humane ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mist like fields of distant crusted snow. Castellated crags loomed from the mystic river like fortified islands. Cattle, silent, enormously aggrandized, emerged like fabled beasts of the eld, and stared upon him, their jaws dripping with dew. Bulls roared from the obscure deeps. Dead trees, with stark and sinister arms, menaced warningly. All was as unreal as the world of pain's delirium, and yet was as beautiful as the poet's vision; and the ranger, feeling that he ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... Chapter of his Works are all along quoted in the Margin; nothing being added, but some few lines here and there, to continue the Discourse, and render it more clear: Notwithstanding which precautions, some things may possibly still remain obscure, in which case the Reader must have Recourse to the whole Works of Vitruvius, where he will find all ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... the contents of this paper took possession of Mr. Mandeville, and in spite of the breach of good manners, and the violation of every principle of honor, he retired to an obscure corner of his garden, opened and read so much of the epistle as was intelligible to him, ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... "If I'm willing to go, why is she so exercised? Women are all alike—except Alice." He smiled as he thought of his girl, and instantly the hardness in his face lifted, as a cloud shadow lifts and leaves sunshine behind it. Then some obscure sense of fitness made him pull himself together, and put his mind on affairs that had nothing in common with Helena; affairs in which he could include his girl without offending ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... these young people the high school teacher should understand those marvelous changes—physical, mental, and moral—thru which they are passing. How else can one know how to check where checking is needed (and it usually is needed somewhere along the line); to guide where the pathway is obscure (and every adolescent is sure to pass thru valleys of darkness during the high school course); and to inspire where inspiration is lacking (and with some it is lacking a good deal of the time)—in a word, how else than thru a knowledge ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... unobserved through life like millions of other men, looked upon as possessing a good-natured and affectionate disposition, but without either elevation of mind or brightness of intellect. During many years of his life the Duke of Clarence was an obscure individual, without consideration, moving in a limited circle, and altogether forgotten by the great world. He resided at Bushey with Mrs. Jordan, and brought up his numerous children with very tender ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... said, "Turn at the grave," and he walked on till he reached the spot, and stood by the low railing enclosing a sunken grave, whether of man or woman he could not tell, the lettering on the discolored stone was so obscure. Studying it very carefully, he thought he made out "Mrs." before ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... quite true if we add a proviso to it—a proviso, to be sure, of no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called. He was not so great a metaphysician ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... thought the Indian tone of feeling was not rightly appreciated—their customs not clearly stated, perhaps not fairly estimated. The red man, considered generally as a creature to be carried about and exhibited for money, was, in very truth, a being immortally endowed, though under a dispensation obscure to the more highly-favored white race. As they affirmed a belief in the traditions of their tribe, with what strength and beauty of diction they clothed their thoughts—how energetic in gesture! Alas! for the people who had no higher creed, ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... the macaroni of the trattoria, trusting that the world will some day do them justice by strewing their paths with millions. Beginners, in the first place, who, to make their start, will accept contracts in any obscure municipal theatre of the Milan district, in hopes of a paragraph in a musical weekly to send to the folks at home as evidence of promise and success; and with them, overwhelming them with the importance of their past, the veterans ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... official report the extent of the disaster in the winter battle of Mazurian Land is either concealed or an attempt is made to obscure it. It is unnecessary to go further into these denials. As evidence of the extent of the defeat, the following list of the positions held by the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And the cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about "Town," ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow! Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday night in Elmira! And ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... from the original Hebrew and Greek, in which it was penned by the inspired writers. Hence it should not seem surprising that there are some inaccuracies connected with this translation; nor that certain words, allusion, and forms of speech, appear obscure and unintelligible. There is a plain and simple rule by which all obscure and disputed words and passages should be understood. Give them such construction as will most perfectly correspond with the attributes and character of God, as revealed in his word and works, ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... many of the maxims, axioms and precepts of THE KYBALION, accompanied by explanations and illustrations which we deem likely to render the teachings more easily comprehended by the modern student, particularly as the original text is purposely veiled in obscure terms. ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... comedy was being played at the Vatican,—a mock- solemn farce, which had the possibility of ending in serious disaster to the innocent,—and he, as a student of the wily and treacherous side of human nature, was rather interested in its development. Cardinal Felix Bonpre, a man living far away in an obscure cathedral-town of France, where he had become renowned for good works and saintly living, had now, after many years, come out of his long voluntary retirement, and had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the impression that an author's price would be asked, they took the alarm, and made difficulties. Finding me firm, and indisposed to yield to some threats of doing as they pleased, the matter was suspended for a few days. Just at this moment, I received through the post a single number of an obscure newspaper, whose existence, until then, was quite unknown to me. Surprised at such an attention, I was curious to know the contents. The journal contained an article on my merits and demerits as a writer, the latter being treated with a good deal of freedom. When one gets a paper in this ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... fear, and then read the Bible, they will see that the truth or falsity of the dogma of inspiration has nothing to do with the question of immortality. Certainly the Old Testament does not teach us that there is another life, and upon that question, even the New is obscure and vague. The hunger of the heart finds only a few small and scattered crumbs. There is nothing definite, solid, and satisfying. United with the idea of immortality we find the absurdity of the resurrection. A prophecy that depends for its ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... Her lips drew ominously down, and reprimand of some sort was plainly to be detected hovering there, but, for some obscure reason, she also ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... scientific insight into character and life." This value consists, as he indicates, in the fact that she interprets the inner personality as it is understood by the scientific student of human nature. She describes those obscure moral tendencies, nascent forces, and undertones of feeling and thought, which enter so much into life. She lays much stress on the subconscious mental life, the domain of vague ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... we shall be able to distinguish between fracture and dislocation in obscure cases. Thus Mr. Gray ("British Medical Journal," March 7, 1896), in a case of injury to an elbow, was enabled to diagnosticate and successfully to replace a very rare dislocation, which could not be made out by manipulation, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... king, who excited the jealousy of the patricians, was assassinated B.C. 578, and Servius Tullius reigned in his stead. He was the greatest of the Roman kings, and arose to his position by eminent merit, being originally obscure. He married the daughter of Tarquin, and ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... vicinity of Lawrenceville, Lawrence County, in the State of Illinois, of a Negro mother by a white father. His father, lately from North Carolina, fell under Gen. Harrison fighting the Indians. Like so many other great men he was born in an obscure place—a wigwam. At the time of his father's death he was quite a young baby. He was now left to the care of a mother who, in many respects, was like her husband, bold and courageous for the truth, and yet as gentle as a child. It is peculiarly ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... ten miles farther which brought us as low down as where Collier's bridge now crosses the river. Here we imagined that the Indians were possibly as cunning as ourselves, and would doubtless take the more obscure way and endeavor to meet us on the east side. On which account we waded the stream and struck into the woods crossing the Indian path, toward a place now called Craft-town." (Priest's Collection of Stories of the Revolution, published in 1836. "McKeon's Scouts ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... compelled to dissolve. The best legal authorities believe that the new interpretation of "reasonableness" and "unreasonableness" of restraint of trade has increased rather than decreased the effectiveness of the law, inasmuch as the meaning has always been obscure. The new policy is a notification to combinations of capital that to exist without prosecution they must not resort to any unfair, oppressive, or illegal methods to control competition ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... things serve a brave soul. Combat difficulty manfully; sustain misfortune bravely; endure poverty nobly; encounter disappointment courageously. The influence of the brave man is contagious and creates an epidemic of noble zeal in all about him. Every day sends to the grave obscure men who have only remained in obscurity because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who, if they could have been induced to begin, would in all probability have gone great lengths in the career of usefulness and fame. "No ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... face with her hands as Philip, with no steady pace, walked up and down the small room. Again, with all the vividness of colouring, did the scenes half forgotten recur to his memory. Again did he penetrate the fatal chamber—again was it obscure. The embroidery lay at his feet, and once more he started as when the letter appeared upon ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... he obtained what he considered reliable information that they had proceeded in the direction of the Borders, to be married at Gretna Green, a village celebrated as a place where many distinguished and obscure persons have been married by a blacksmith. As the reader already knows, the offended father went ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... illuminations but even the light of the gospel, and law of God, that someway enters his soul, changeth the nature and name,—it is all but darkness and flesh in him, because the flesh hath a dominion over all that. The clouds and vapours that arise from the flesh, bemist(166) and obscure all these; the corruptions of the soul are most strengthened in this sort, and most vented here. Sin is become connatural to the flesh, and so a man, by the flesh, is ensnared and subjected to sin. Christ comprehends ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... title of "cook and steward." The story of how poor boys of the beginning and middle of the century and right up to the latter part of the 'sixties started sea-life is always romantic, often sensational, and ever pathetic. They were usually the sons of poor parents living for the most part in obscure villages or small towns bordering on the sea, which sea blazed into their minds aspirations to get aboard some one of the numerous vessels that passed their homes one way or the other all day long. The notion of becoming anything but sailors never entered their heads, and the parents ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... reader, you say it is a fabrication, I tell it to you as they told it to me.' Len Medina, "Frases literarias afortunadas," Revue hispanique, Vol. XVIII, p. 226, states that these two verses are a quotation from Juan de Castellanos, an obscure poet of the sixteenth century, author of Elegas de Varones Ilustres de Indias. (The first three parts of this work may be found in Vol. IV of the Biblioteca de Autores Espaoles; Part IV has been edited by Paz y Melia for the Coleccin de Escritores Castellanos, Vols. XLIV and XLIX. The ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... Batten as an obscure fellow, and, although unknown to the service, a good seaman, who was in 1642 made Surveyor to the Navy; in which employ he evinced great animosity against the King. The following year, while Vice-Admiral to the Earl of Warwick, he chased a Dutch man-of-war into Burlington ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Occupation, etc.—Unfortunately for the sake of authenticity, all the instances of extreme age in this country have been from persons in the lower walks of life or from obscure parts of the country, where little else than hearsay could be procured to verify them. It must also be said that it is only among people of this class that we can expect to find parallels of the instances of extreme longevity of former times. The inhabitants of the higher ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the manner which the cause requires, when either that point which is advantageous to the opposite party is explained in a clear and elegant manner, or when that which may be of benefit to the speaker is stated in an obscure or careless way. Wherefore, in order that this fault may be avoided, everything ought to be converted by the speaker to the advantage of his own cause by passing over all things which make against it which can be passed over, by ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... the first two of a series of valuable papers on the development of the vegetable ovulum in Santalum, Loranthus, Viscum, and some other plants, the anomalous structure of which appeared calculated to throw light on this still obscure and difficult subject. These papers are entitled ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... permanent and regular system. The agitation occasioned by so many unexampled scenes is succeeded by an habitual terror, and this depressing sentiment has so pervaded all ranks, that it would be difficult to find an individual, however obscure or inoffensive, who deems his property, or even his existence, secure only for a moment. The sound of a bell or a knocker at the close of the evening is the signal of dismay. The inhabitants of the house regard each other with looks of fearful interrogation—all the precautions ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... thought of loving one so handsome. No; it is impossible that those Parisian women are so stupid as not to have seen their dreams fulfilled in you. You neglected! you unloved! I do not believe a word of all that you have written me about your lonely and obscure life, your hunger for an idol,—sought in vain until now. You have been too well loved, monsieur; your brow, white and smooth as a magnolia leaf, reveals it; and it is I who must be neglected,—for ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising World of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless Infinite! Thee I revisit now with bolder wing, Escaped the Stygian Pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight, Through utter and through middle Darkness borne, With other notes than to the Orphean lyre I sung of Chaos and eternal Night, Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to re-ascend, Though hard and rare. Thee I revisit ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... spread of Luther's books and doctrines, the cardinals entreated the Pope to summon him to Rome. Printing had been invented, and poor as well as rich could easily be roused to inquire into the truth of the doctrines taught by Rome. Leo X had been disposed to ignore the sermons of the obscure German monk, for he had many schemes to further his own ambition. He yielded, at last, and sent the necessary summons. Luther was loth to go to Rome, where he was sure of condemnation. The Elector Frederick ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... that sent at once, by special delivery, to every physician and surgeon in town, no matter how obscure. See to it that not one is overlooked. Even those on the staffs of the different hospitals must be notified, although they are the least likely to be called upon. Above all, don't forget the old retired one, those of shady professional reputation and ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... spurs of the Feldberg, the eastern one coming down to the town of Waldshut on the Rhine, the western one to Saekkingen. It is also called Hozzenland (see note to page 15). The early history of the country is somewhat obscure until the time of the Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburg, when it acknowledged the sovereignty of Austria. In the times of the fight for the German throne between Albrecht of Austria and Adolphe of Nassau, and between Frederick the Beautiful and Ludwig of Bavaria, when Suabia was without a duke ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... would understand his mood and that he would achieve in her presence a position he had long been wanting to achieve. In the past when he had been with her and had kissed her lips he had come away filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one being used for some obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had suddenly become ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tried to walk sedately along the path. The long grass that grew beside the path wet his shoes, and his hands were wet and muddy. Farmers turned on their wagon seats to stare at him. For some obscure reason he could not himself understand, he was terribly afraid to face Hugh McVey. In the bank he had been in the presence of men who were trying to get the best of him, to make a fool of him, to have fun at his expense. He had felt that and had resented it. The knowledge ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... from the subject matter proper to poetry, while we appear to have no clear idea as to what the legitimate subject matter is? Precisely what are we looking for, that we are led to complain that the massive outlines of the poet's figure obscure ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the Secret Treaty of 1815, whereby Austria gained a legal right to prevent any departure from absolute Government at Naples, was communicated to the British Ministry and received its sanction. This sanction explains the obscure and embarrassed language of Castlereagh in 1820, which in its turn gave rise to the belief in Italy that England was more deeply committed to Austria than it actually was, and probably occasioned the forgery of the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... sink the mighty low by Fate opprest!— 25 Perhaps, O Kettle! thou by scornful toe Rude urg'd t' ignoble place with plaintive din. May'st rust obscure midst heaps of vulgar tin;— As if no joy had ever seiz'd my breast When from thy spout the streams did arching fly,— 30 As if, infus'd, thou ne'er hadst known t' inspire All the warm raptures of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... one to make a man quarrel with his food, more especial when there ain't no more going of the rounds; and as for that there claim, well, she's been a good nigger to me; but between you and me, stranger, speaking man to man, now that there ain't any filthy lucre between us to obscure the features of the truth, I ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... hard yesterday; but I had so much reading, and so many proofs to correct, that I did not get over the daily task, so am still a little behind, which I shall soon make up. I have got Nap., d—n him, into Italy, where with bad eyes and obscure maps, I have a little difficulty in tracing out his ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... before reaching the author of our Latin text," would account for the "confusion of motifs"; and the fact that we have not now that form of the story with which the Hroar-Helgi story came in contact would obscure some of the points of relationship between the two. But the hiding of a dog, whose name is given, in an oak tree of a particular species (ilex) is so definite and unique a point of identification that there is ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... her intellect. And he leads her, too, spellbound by that incomparable verve and intellectual agility of his; she surrenders herself to the illusion of his brilliant assurances, dancing like some triumphant will-o'-the-wisp over the obscure deeps and perplexities of things. In a hundred ways, evil and good, she will remain the pupil of Voltaire. He has his part in her social test of philosophical speculations; he has his part also, be sure of it, in her long devotion to ideals of monarchy expressed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... hatred to the Catholics is very obscure. You will find all that is known in Dean Milman's History of Latin Christianity. A simple explanation may be found in the fact that the Catholics considered the Arians, and did not conceal their ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... curious revolutions in literary history is the sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of Francois Villon[6]. His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of biography exhumed after four centuries. To readers of the poet it will recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which he bequeaths ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made him infinitely interesting. The slight satire that was ordinarily wont to twist his smile was smoothed away, and a certain sadness stole into its place; his green eyes lost their keenness of observation and looked into a space obscure to others. In these rare moments he was essentially of his race and ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of things among the Jews, Jesus appeared. His parentage was obscure; his condition poor; his education null; his natural endowments great; his life correct and innocent: he was meek, benevolent, patient, firm, disinterested, and of the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in making circuits round in the woods to avoid parties of the enemy, who were seasonably discovered by the wary guide to be still at work, in several places, in trying to improve some of the worst portions of the road, the progress of our heroine was slow and obscure. And it was not till after a dreary and fatiguing ride of several hours, that she and her attendant began to emerge into the more open country ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... that so mysteriously burned on top of it, or in the pungently aromatic smoke which exhaled from the kindled weed. The figure, after a few doubtful attempts, at length blew forth a volley of smoke extending all the way from the obscure corner into the bar of sunshine. There it eddied and melted away among the motes of dust. It seemed a convulsive effort, for the two or three next whiffs were fainter, although the coal still glowed and threw a gleam over the scarecrow's visage. The old witch clapped ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... expected many Favours and Immunities; wherein, however, they were miserably disappointed: Which, with a Train of other Hardships and antiparental Severities, (particularly his alienating, at one Stroke, six of the best Counties in the Kingdom, on the procured Testimony of an obscure wretched Individual, one Teige Lenane,) is too sufficient and too lasting a Proof of: Heu! tot Conquesta Annorum, hauserit una Dies! The Possession of at least twenty Centuries, of the great and good, the ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... "Contrivance"; and for him contrivance is most certain where production is most obscure. He points out the physiological advantage of the valvulae conniventes to man, and the advantage for teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed by "action and pressure." What is not due to pressure may be attributed to design, and when a "mechanical" process more ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... will become more positive and far-reaching. This can be done without surrendering the general principle of individual freedom. It will not reduce but increase the number of natural love-marriages. The errors of crude and superficial or overenthusiastic eugenists should not obscure the enormous possibilities of the science for the human race. Eugenic knowledge is, therefore, not only a personal ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... where Christendom was at its most acute activity in the struggle against Asia, then in the north-west, in England and in France. And indeed, in one form or another, throughout all the old limits of the Empire. It died, its fossil was preserved in one or two small and obscure communities, its ancient rules and form were captured by the English squires and merchants, and it was maintained, a curious but vigorous survival, in this country. When the Revolution in 1789 began the revival of democracy in the great nations the old representative scheme of the French, ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... but it is only occasionally that we are allowed glimpses of it now, and we must go usually among unknown people, and read unpopular or comparatively obscure publications if we seek a wider range of vision. In December, 1914, Mrs. Jackson, wife of a golf professional, returned from Germany to Clacton-on-Sea. Her husband had been in the employ of the Cologne Golf Club. ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... neighborhood in which she had been reared, made Tillie feel that in yielding her lips to this man for whom she did not care, and whom, if she could hold out against him, she did not intend to marry, she was desecrating her womanhood. Vague and obscure as her feeling was, it was strong enough ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... age, and whose brother-in-law, Martial de la Roche-Hugon, was a minister, and who himself was under-secretary of State, and about to marry, rumor said, the only daughter of the Baron de Nucingen,—a girl with an illimitable "dot"; seeing, moreover, in the diplomatic body an obscure writer whom he had formerly known translating articles in foreign journals for a newspaper turned dynastic since 1830, also professors now made peers of France,—he felt with anguish that he was left behind on a ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... soul can walk the dusty track Where hangs our flowering under vapours black, And bear to see how these pervade, obscure, Quench recollection of a spacious pure. They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve, Hard at each other point and gape, Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve, To reappear with one they drape For criminal, and, Father! shrieking name, Who such ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to giue any iudiciall approbation or allowance to things mearely vnfrequented, doe I publish, within my booke, this relation of the setting of Corne, but onely because I would not haue our English Husbandman to be ignorant of any skill or obscure faculty which is either proper to his profession, or agreeable with the fertillitie and nature of our clymates, and the rather, since some few yeeres agoe, this (as it then appeared secret) being with much admiration bruted ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... shaken, crumbling, and what was worse, excessively arid. There was as little certainty of salvation as in the heart of that Priest saying Mass at Bolsena; but the miracle came to mankind at large some seventy years before it came to him. It had begun, no doubt, unnoticed in scores of obscure heresies, in hundreds of unnoticed individuals; it became manifest to all the world in the persons of Dominick, of Elizabeth of Hungary, of King Lewis—above all, of Francis of Assisi. As in the hands of the doubting priest, so in the hands of all suffering ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... and dissatisfied expression. He had spent the afternoon in a whirlwind of energy in which he had done many things. He had explored the moat-house from top to bottom, squeezing his vast bulk into every obscure corner of the rambling old place. He had rowed round the moat in a small boat, scrutinizing the outside wall for footmarks. He had mustered the male servants, and superintended an organized beat of the grounds, the woods, and the neighbouring ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... a salute in which mock deference could not entirely obscure the respect beneath, and set about on his commissions, while Grant devoted the afternoon to a session with Murdoch and Jones, to neither of whom would he reveal his plans further than to say he was going west "to engage in some development ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... solemnly my mind, that I never will, that I never can be your's; nor, if so, any man's upon earth. All vengeance, nevertheless, for the wrongs you have done me, I disclaim. I want but to slide into some obscure corner, to hide myself from you and from every one who once loved me. The desire lately so near my heart, of a reconciliation with my friends, is much abated. They shall not receive me now, if they ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... was, of course, Lilia's, who was extremely generous, and was quite willing to know anybody so long as she had not to live with them, relations-in-law being on her nerves. She liked nothing better than finding out some obscure and distant connection—there were several of them—and acting the lady bountiful, leaving behind her bewilderment, and too often discontent. Gino wondered how it was that all his people, who had formerly seemed so pleasant, had suddenly become ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... of the printer's device.[32] Also in its typical location at the bottom of the title page is found "a curious mark, a sort of hieroglyphic or cypher," which Burton almost always affixed to his books. The significance of this device remains obscure; it "has usually been supposed to represent the three 'R's' in ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... circumstances could, in the eyes of every normal Verity, hardly fail to argue a certain obtrusiveness and absence of good taste. He had heard, moreover, disapproving allusions to the extravagant affection Sir Charles Verity was said to lavish upon this fruit of a somewhat obscure marriage—his only surviving child. But the said family talk, in Tom's case, had gone in at one ear and out at the other—as the talk of the elder generation mostly does, and will, when the younger generation is solidly and wholesomely convinced of the overwhelming importance of its own personal ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... number and character of the emendations in MR. COLLIER'S volume, I have the less hesitation in proposing this one. The language of Shakspeare is, as we know it, for the most part so clear, harmonious, distinct, and forcible, that I think we are justified in considering any obscure, inconsistent, or harsh passage, as having met with some mishap either in hearing, transcribing, or in printing. Some months ago, and certainly before MR. COLLIER'S volume of corrections appeared, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... other allied fields. Already in 1842 a law had been passed regulating labor in mines. This act was passed in response to the needs shown by the report of a commission which had been appointed in 1840. They made a thorough investigation of the obscure conditions of labor underground, and reported a condition of affairs which was heart-sickening. Children began their life in the coal mines at five, six, or seven years of age. Girls and women worked like boys ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... the importance of private recollections. The gossip of one epoch forms part of the history of the next. It is therefore to be deplored that those whose more or less obscure lives run their course in the shadow of some public career are seldom sufficiently aware of the fact at the time to note ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... "was descended from the Douglasses of Pettendreich" (Laing's Knox, i. 286 n.) Principal Lee has said: "All the accounts of Douglas which I have ever seen in modern books abound with errors. He is represented as having been an obscure Carmelite friar whom the Earl of Argyle chose to employ as his chaplain, and for whom the Archbishop of St Andrews expressed the strongest aversion. He was quite a different man—a man of family undoubtedly, and most probably related to James ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... reproduced the grandeur of those ancient nations, and nearly equal their prosperity. And what has become of them? A sad skeleton. What remains of their riches, of their splendour, and of their vast dominions? An obscure recollection; a vain memory. Thus fall empires; thus vanish nations, which have no better guardians than their prosperity. But "we have," will you say, "we have a better guardian—our freedom, our republican institutions; our confederation uniting so many glorious stars into one mighty galaxy—these ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... stern determination to inflict summary justice upon every unnecessary line, I must own to my regret that I have found but little which it was possible to omit without rendering the after narrative obscure, and without injuring whatever of more stirring interest the story, as it opens, may afford to the general ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... them on hire in the theatre," replied Stingaree at a venture. The pawnbroker's face instantly advised him that his observation was wide of the obscure mark. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... did not cry out. As he was brought close to the staring eyes, and felt their sinister gaze run over him, it flashed through him for some obscure reason that the monster knew him for what he was, the leader, from the tiny bars on each shoulder of his sea-suit.... He waited for the ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... wonderful people, these Romans, as even this obscure corner of Europe can witness," said Lady Mabel, her eyes dwelling on the beautiful colonade, and tracing out the exquisite symmetry of the shafts, and the rich foliage of the ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... Josephus says here that this Ananelus, the new high priest, was "of the stock of the high priests," and since he had been just telling us that he was a priest of an obscure family or character, ch. 2. sect. 4, it is not at all probable that he could so soon say that he was "of the stock of the high priests." However, Josephus here makes a remarkable observation, that this Ananelus ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... recognized. Never again might she be thus near to him, alone with him—the normal routine made it wholly improbable.—And at midnight too. For the unaccustomed lateness of the hour undoubtedly added to her ferment, provoking in her obscure and novel hopes and hungers. Hence she blindly and—her action viewed from a certain angle—quite heroically precipitated herself. Heroically, because the odds were hopelessly adverse, her equipment, whether of natural or artificial, being so conspicuously ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a step at that sound, but instantly recovered himself, and read into an intelligible language many of the otherwise obscure and learned details of the work. As ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies. Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy soft nights ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... must accept the existence of a London in the old obscure period when something very like modern Welsh was the language of the south-eastern part of Britain, and though we know that London was situated on a river which also had a Welsh name, we do not know directly on which side of that river it stood, and have nothing ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the supreme moment of his life, in which the scales of his fortunes wavered in the balance. All the long years of preparation, of faithful devotion to obscure duty awaiting the opportunity that might never come—all the success attending the two brief years in which his flag had flown—all the glories of the river fights—on the one side; and on the other, threatening to overbear and wreck all, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... general title of "Rhyncholites;" and in their form and function they resemble the horny, parrot-like beak of the existing Cephalopods. The ink-bag or leathery sac in which the Cuttle-fishes store up the black pigment with which they obscure the water when attacked, owes its preservation to the fact that the colouring-matter which it contains is finely-divided carbon, and therefore nearly indestructible except by heat. Many of these ink-bags have been found in the Lias; and the colouring-matter is sometimes ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Lord, we may conclude with probability, that the Greek Hymn was originally a loose allegorical Poem, in which Imagination was permitted to take its full career, and sentiment was rendered at once obscure and agreeable, by being screened behind a veil of the ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... liable to damage unless handled with great care. It is obvious that anything which alters the weight of a single piece in an analytical set will introduce an error in every weighing made in which that piece is used. This source of error is often extremely obscure and difficult to detect. The only safeguard against such errors is to be found in scrupulous care in handling and protection on the part of the analyst, and an equal insistence that if several analysts use the same set of weights, each shall ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... Thales, that cold and damp origin seemed doubtful to Scala in the case of a creature so fond of warmth; a fish were perhaps the better comparison, or, when the power of flying was in question, an eagle, or indeed, when the darkness was taken into consideration, a bat or an owl were a less obscure and more apposite parallel, etcetera, etcetera. Here was a great opportunity for Politian. He was not aware, he wrote, that when he had Scala's verses placed before him, there was any question of sturgeon, but ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... "Everything is obscure in the idea of creation, if we think of things which are created and a thing which creates." If we follow the lead of our logical, scientific faculties, then, we shall all be mechanists and materialists. Science can make no ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... was really doing during these days was this. These barges and several others which she picked up now and then were filled with ammunition for her guns and fuel for her engines, and she dropped them here and there in obscure creeks and rock-bound bays from Newcastle to the Clyde, where they lay looking like abandoned derelicts, until such times ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... nutriment only in arithmetical ratio—and that vice and misery, the natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by providence as the counterpoise. I have here no means of procuring so obscure a book, as Rudgard's; but to the best of my recollection, at the time that the Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts created so great a sensation in England, under the Protectorate, and the beginning of Charles the Second's reign, Rudgard, or Rutgard (I am not positive even of the name) wrote ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... grant you that, Dick," said I, making sure that his excitement would obscure the double meaning in the admission. And then I added, sincerely enough: "She has never given me the right to ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... the little hill-town a last time. Though there had not been sound nor sight of Berthe nor the group around her, during the three days, Peter was different afield, as if he missed a certain personal identification with that obscure Galician settlement where so much had happened. He moved about as if there were something dead inside. His world ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... in my obscure corner, and watch the progress of events. It is the position that pleases me best, and, I believe, the most favorable one. Everything confirms me in my radicalism; and, without any desire to hasten matters, indeed with surprise to see them rush so like a torrent, I seem to see them all ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... conversation, and which often, even in his busy and preoccupied days, had made him sit on rail fences in young Western towns, in the twilight, in gossip hardly less than fraternal with humorous loafers and obscure fortune-seekers. He had notions, wherever he went, about talking with the natives; he had been assured, and his judgment approved the advice, that in traveling abroad it was an excellent thing to look into the life of the country. M. Nioche was very much of a native and, ...
— The American • Henry James
... is a city of many beauties, and with a reckless prodigality she has done her best to obscure them all. Driven by a vain love of swift traffic, she assails your ear with an incessant din and your eye with the unsightliest railroad that human ingenuity has ever contrived. She has sacrificed the amenity of her streets and ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... kept in his house nearly three years, and begs of his lordship that he will make interest for her removal. Thus it should appear that this unfortunate lady did not sufficiently "remember her safety" in forming this connexion, obscure and humble as it was; for all matrimony had now become offensive to the austerity or the secret ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... at him with the air of polite interest with which she was wont to receive his obscure sayings; ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... have made the American people conscious of their interrelationship and their interdependence. They sense a common destiny and a common need of each other. Differences of occupation, geography, race and religion no longer obscure the nation's fundamental unity in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... that covered the first 42 years of his life. His home was afterwards located near the Kiamichi river, seven miles west of Doaksville. He grew to manhood and always lived in an unimproved, sparsely settled timber country in an obscure and inaccessible corner of ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... cold, nervous night, murmurous with obscure armies on the move, electric with patrols. From across the river, where loomed the darker mass of Peter-Paul, came a hoarse shout.... Underfoot the sidewalk was littered with broken stucco, from the cornice of the Palace where ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... Frederick William IV. Evidently the idea was ripening, and a near fruition could be anticipated. But neither to minister of state, count, nor prince—to no one among the distinguished of the earth—was the honor given of reviving the female diaconate. It was to a humble pastor of an obscure village church ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... disappears. The Fortune-teller no longer possesses the singleness of mind or purpose necessary to a clear reading of the symbols he or she consults. The amount of the fee is the first consideration, and this alone is sufficient to obscure the mental vision and to bias the judgment. This applies to the very highest and most conscientious of Fortune-tellers—persons really adept at foreseeing the future when no taint of monetary reward intervenes. ...
— Tea-Cup Reading, and the Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves • 'A Highland Seer'
... is the Temple of Solitary Thought." Lower down the slope lay a green-coated pond—green-coated ponds constitute a frequent spectacle in the gardens of Russian landowners; and, lastly, from the foot of the declivity there stretched a line of mouldy, log-built huts which, for some obscure reason or another, our hero set himself to count. Up to two hundred or more did he count, but nowhere could he perceive a single leaf of vegetation or a single stick of timber. The only thing to greet the eye was the logs of which the huts were constructed. Nevertheless the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and he was restored, and saw every man clearly. Now this must be done for you; and in order to have it done you must go to Christ Himself, not to one of His servants. Make your complaint, tell Him how obscure everything still looks to you, and beg Him to complete your cure He may see fit to try your faith and patience by delaying this completion; but meanwhile you are safe in His presence, and while led by His ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... confiding. Children of that character if reared by timid and over-fond parents, are deprived of the rough contact with society that is necessary to their development. There are many whom the lack of self-confidence, the lack of ambition, and lack of business energy condemn to an obscure life, when their intellectual capacities would fit them for an influential position. A kind but mistaken system of training confirms the defect, and dooms them to an inefficient life, or a stern system of repression deprives them of all self-confidence and energy. Millions of good ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... figure of one going down the steps following her, resembling Architecture, showing a scheme or model for building of the City, held in the right hand, and the left holding a square and compasses. Behind these two stands another figure, more obscure, holding up an hat, denoting Liberty. Next behind the king is the Duke of York, holding a garland, ready to crown the rising City, and a sword lifted up in the other hand to defend her. Behind this a third figure, with an earl's coronet on his head. A fourth figure behind all, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... "the eye beams its sun-splendour," or, "beams like a sun." For the construction that the Translator has put upon the original (which is extremely obscure) in the preceding lines of the stanza, he is indebted to Mr Carlyle. The general meaning of the Poet is, that Love rules all things in the inanimate or animate creation; that, even in the moral world, opposite emotions or principles meet and embrace each other. The idea is pushed into an extravagance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... paragraphing is often lost sight of by even experienced writers. Sometimes there is an absence of clear, definite thought. Hence it happens that we frequently find whole pages without any break to indicate the transitions of thought. Such writing is apt to leave a confused or obscure impression. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... individuality like Caesar's. More often her profounder movements proceed from impulses whose origin and motives cannot be traced, although a succession of steps may be discerned and their results stated. A few names, for instance, emerge amid the obscure movements of the peoples which precipitated the outer peoples upon the Roman Empire, but, with rare exceptions, they are simply exponents, pushed forward and upward by the torrent; at the utmost guides, not controllers, of those whom they represent ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... issue were not at all obscure. Any apparent obscurity was caused by the terms of reference to the Commission, which assumed the permanence of the Union, while it was absolutely impossible for the Commission, divided though its members ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... between the pines; for an instant he did not reply. Suddenly Sperry's face loomed before him and as instantly vanished, only to appear again as certain excuses hitherto explainable became for the first time obscure and suggestive. Then the words of Alice's song rang in his ears and a thrill ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... a young man of obscure birth—wholly uneducated, and, generally speaking, a savage, though a harmless one," said the lady, returning to the charge. "Now, Redbud, you cannot fail to perceive that it is impossible for you to marry an Indian whom nobody knows anything ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... understand the obscure lines of the original, Cellini wanted to kill two birds with one stone by this epigram—both Bernardone and his son Baccio. But by Buaccio ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... droughts; seasonal August winds blow from the west, carrying sand and dust across the country, which can obscure visibility ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... and the second line is rather obscure, but we should not measure by too high a standard the untutored utterances of artless nature. The opening lines of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the building; sometimes feeling her way in obscure places; sometimes calling to Lord Harry cautiously by his name. No living creature appeared; no sound of a movement disturbed the stillness of the night. The discovery of his absence, which she had ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... be found. No sign of violence will be discovered anywhere upon the body. Sudden heart failure—that will be apparent. The cause obscure. Organs seemingly healthy; no discernible disease. Muscular failure. Death from natural causes. A case interesting to the medical world, perhaps, but with no suggestion of foul play about it. Now let me ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... within him a secret fanaticism that was very old, a fatalism, obscure, and cruel, and strange, a lack of scruple that would have revolted almost any Englishman who could have understood it, an occasional childishness, rather Egyptian than Turco-Egyptian, and a quick and instinctive subtlety that came from no ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... quiet in Chinatown, for the time was noon and the section was pursuing its midday habit of calm. The padding figures were becoming a trifle obscure, owing to a cold, pale fog that was drifting up from the bay. In a moment the woman reappeared, examined the street again with hostile eyes, held up a square of rice paper, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... ship passes in the night And drags jagged reflections Like gilded combs Through the obscure water. Spun glass daisies float on a ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... the earliest meetings of the club were held at an obscure tavern in Shire Lane, which no longer exists, but ran parallel with Chancery Lane near Temple-bar. This was the tavern kept by Christopher Cat, and when he removed to the Fountain tavern in the Strand the club accompanied. Its principle place of meeting, however, was at the mansion of Tonson ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... portraits, we note an omission, a space that is occupied, not by a likeness but by a medallion, which represents a cherub with the forefinger of his right hand laid as a seal of silence upon the lips. Here-by indeed hangs a tale, obscure perhaps, but pathetic and human to the last degree. We all remember the broad frieze filled with Doges' faces which is carried round the great hall of the ducal palace in Venice, wherein the place assigned to the traitor, Marino Faliero, contains a black veil instead ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... country before the Roman Conquest is, as is history everywhere in the West before that event, vague and obscure. But this at least may be said: it was first in the occupation of the Etruscans, who in time were turned out, destroyed, or enslaved by the Gauls, those invaders who crossed the Alps from the west and who during nearly two hundred years, continually, though never with an ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... gild with fame Th' obscure, and raise the humble name; To make the form elude the grave, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... eyes and looked earnestly at the speaker. She had learned in the brief time that had elapsed since this black sorrow had come upon him to understand what it was in the character of Monte Irvin which had attracted Rita. It afforded an illustration of that obscure law governing the magnetism which subsists between diverse natures. For not all the agony of mind which he suffered could hide or mar the cleanness and honesty of purpose which were Monte Irvin's ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... pronunciation, grammar, prosody, explanation of obscure terms, religious rites, astronomy. These are considered appendants of the Vedas. The word angas ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... acquainted with him, and have brought him twice to my Lord's to dinner. He looks very simple. He telleth me that one Borrheus, that hath written well upon Aristot. priorum, &c., even now is printing goodly commentaries upon Aristotle's Rhetoric. But Sturmius will obscure ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... elephantiasis and which the mosquito takes from man and after a short time gives over to another subject. This discovery attracted world-wide attention and many looked again towards the innumerable species of biting insects that dwell in the Tropic Zone, as possible carriers of the obscure diseases which also ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... power were the exact sciences. They progressed too rapidly to be bound and limited by obscure old writings and prejudices; life and realities were their domain. Science brushed aside all sophistry and became a reality. Ethics is too fundamentally important a factor in civilization to depend upon a theological or a legal excuse; ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... most total defeat which has ever befallen an English army. Twenty-seven nobles were killed, twenty-two more and sixty knights made prisoners, and the number of obscure soldiers slain, drowned in the Forth, or killed by the peasantry, exceeds calculation. The camp was taken, with an enormous booty in treasure, jewels, rich robes, fine horses, herds of cattle, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a man whom he had observed before, but with little heed, pass and repass him, as he quitted the house of Citizen C—. Instantly and instinctively he knew that he was watched,—that he was pursued. The street he was in was obscure and deserted, for the day was oppressively sultry, and it was the hour when few were abroad, either on business or pleasure. Bold as he was, an icy chill shot through his heart, he knew too well the tremendous system that then reigned in Paris not to be aware of his danger. As the sight of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... hitherto never been above ten from home, filled us with apprehension, and the cries of the poor, who followed us for some miles, contributed to encrease it. The first day's journey brought us in safety within thirty miles of our future retreat, and we put up for the night at an obscure inn in a village by the way. When we were shewn a room, I desired the landlord, in my usual way, to let us have his company, with which he complied, as what he drank would encrease the bill next morning. He knew, however, the whole neighbourhood to which I was removing, particularly ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... you are not the only preacher who has been talked about by his church, and branded by his official board with the mark of the devil in the name of the Lord. It's easy enough! Go farther, get a little obscure congregation somewhere, stay long enough to get a letter, not long enough to make another name; try another in the same fashion. Lay low, keep quiet, stay away from conventions, watch your chance, and—when the time is ripe—make a hit with the state workers in some ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... Henderson, who comes from some obscure district far North even of this, is a little difficult to understand. I ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... mother brought them into the thickest and most obscure part of the forest, when, stealing away into a by-path, they there left them. Little Thumb was not very uneasy at it, for he thought he could easily find the way again by means of his bread, which he had scattered all along as he came; but he was very ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... clear eyes called forth in Foma a feeling of respect for Shchurov, although he heard it rumoured that this lumber-dealer had gained his wealth not by honest toil and that he was leading an evil life at home, in an obscure village of the forest district; and Ignat had told Foma that when Shchurov was young and was but a poor peasant, he sheltered a convict in the bath-house, in his garden, and that there the convict made counterfeit money for him. Since that time Anany began to grow rich. One day his ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... floated—which was less than Hope, Because it lack'd the power of perfect Hope; But which was more and higher than all Hope, Because all other Hope hath lower aim; Even that this name to which her seraph lips Did lend such gentle utterance, this one name In some obscure hereafter, might inwreathe (How lovelier, nobler then!) her life, her love, With my life, love, soul, spirit ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... and justify themselves in attempting its destruction?" Among the facts I have noted in my brief life, one is this: That the masses of men do not reason, but feel. A few minds give the cue, and the herd follow; and when passion takes possession of the heart, its fumes obscure the brain, and they can not see the truth. A general impression reiterated in a thousand forms, always affirmed and never denied, fills the mind, and is believed to be the truth. And thus it is with the people. "Are they sincere?" Yes, as sincere ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... his struggle to break free from his captivity, exactly as she had slowly and obstinately found her own way out. All that had been had vanished. Only the good was left. Evil had been burned away and for her now there was no stain upon the earth, no mist to obscure the sun. Her soul was as clear as this September day, and she knew that Rodd was as clear.... Of all that she had left she did not even think, so worthless was it. A career, money, power, influence? With love, the smile of a happy child, a sunbeam dancing into a dark room, a bunch of hedge-row ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... relating to the fine arts is 233. The number of its art illustrations is 3,284. Still it has no convenient rooms for its books, pictures, casts. They are highly valuable, but are scattered in different and obscure places. It has a good cabinet of specimens illustrating conchology. Where is the cabinet? A large part of it I have never seen. It is kept in the boxes in which it was sent to the academy. Where is the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... to me. How stupid the world is! There are times when I feel disgusted with everything, myself included! I'm getting old. I'm a failure. I'm losing my time and wasting my life over this ridiculous paper, which will never be anything but an obscure rag. I shall have ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... this was is more than legend can clearly explain. Whether his sacred majesty was led to execution through this cavity, or whether Charles the Second had it for one of his numerous hiding-places, or returned through it with Nell Gwynn from his exile, are other obscure points debated among the villagers. The truth is that the whole country about Walton is subterrened with strange and winding ways, leading no one knows whither, dug in the days of the monks or knights, from one long-vanished monastery ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... of the inventor of paraffin oil was comparatively obscure. He was born in the Drygate of Glasgow—a street on which the operations of the City Improvement Trust have effected a wonderful transformation—where his father was a working cabinetmaker. After receiving what little schooling his parents were able to afford, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Largs, "of grief," says Buchanan, "for the loss of his army, and of a valiant youth his relation;" and in the ancient Cathedral, his body, previous to its removal to Norway, was interred for a winter. The church and palace belong to the obscure dawn of the national history, and were Norwegian for centuries before ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the Pacific coast a normal girl, obscure and lovely, makes a quest for happiness. She passes through three stages—poverty, wealth and service—and works out ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... In his vengeance it was outraged love that he appeased; in liberty it was love which he sought and which delivered him; in study it was love which still illustrated his path. Entering his cell an obscure man, he quitted it a writer, orator, statesman, but perverted—ripe for anything, even ready to sell himself, in order to buy fortune and celebrity. The drama of life had been conceived in his head; he wanted only the stage, and that was being prepared for him by time. During ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... the vain observation of dreams, which, from a superstitious credulity, they mistook for salutary warnings from Heaven; those obscure and equivocal answers of oracles, beneath whose veil the spirits of darkness concealed their ignorance; and, by a studied ambiguity, reserved to themselves an evasion or subterfuge, whatever might ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... then, instead of continuing to interrogate him, made him a long speech upon the danger there is for an obscure citizen to meddle with public matters. He complicated this exordium by an exposition in which he painted the power and the deeds of the cardinal, that incomparable minister, that conqueror of past ministers, that example ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the phenomena of diffraction it is necessary that our source of light should be a physical point, or a fine line; for when a luminous surface is employed, the waves issuing from different points of the surface obscure and neutralize each other. A point of light of high intensity is obtained by admitting the parallel rays of the sun through an aperture in a window-shutter, and concentrating the beam by a lens of short focus. The small solar image at the focus constitutes a suitable point of light. The image ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... still indulge, there was revealed to Effie all the way by which God had led her sister; at the same time there was revealed all that He had permitted her to do for His glory, and at this she was greatly moved. She had only been a little servant-maid, plain and humble and obscure. There was nothing to distinguish her in the eyes of those who saw her from day to day. Yet God had greatly honoured her. He had made her a messenger of grace to one, to two—perhaps to more. When that little, worn-out frame was laid aside, it might be, thought Effie, that the immortal spirit, ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... see the keeper, unless indeed the shadow of the keeper obscures for a moment the light. What the sailor sees is the light; and he thanks, not the keeper, but the power that put the light on that dangerous rock. So the light-keeper tends his light in the dark, and a very lonely and obscure life it is. No one mounts the rock to praise him. The vessels pass in the night with never a word of cheer. But the life of the keeper gets its dignity, not {11} because he shines, but because his light guides other lives; and many a weary ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... only with those last manifestations of Hellenistic religion which probably formed the background of his philosophy. It is a strange experience, and it shows what queer stuff we humans are made of, to study these obscure congregations, drawn from the proletariate of the Levant, superstitious, charlatan-ridden, and helplessly ignorant, who still believed in Gods begetting children of mortal mothers, who took the 'Word', the 'Spirit', and the 'Divine Wisdom', to be persons called by those names, and turned ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the going of the five hundred and odd souls that made up the population. In the town itself the excitement grew rather than waned. Men talked themselves into a fever, others took fire, and the epidemic spread like some obscure nervous disease. Nobody slept, everybody drank and hurrahed, and said it was the greatest night in the history of Minook. In the Gold Nugget saloon, crowded to suffocation, Pitcairn organized the new mining district, and named it the Idaho Bar. French Charlie ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... tempest-driven clouds hanging in the sky, momentarily awaiting the transforming violence of a fresh onset. Sometimes continents of pale light are separated by narrow straits of comparative darkness; elsewhere obscure spaces are hemmed in by luminous ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... the rugs and blankets on the fire-endangered side of the pile of lumber and who were now soaking them with water under Muggles's direction. Now and then, as some part of the burning mass would collapse, a shower of sparks and smoke would obscure Muggles; then he could be seen brushing the live coals from his pajamas, darting here and there, shouting: "More water! More water! Here, on this end! All together now!" fighting his way with hand raised to keep the heat from blistering ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... cette sommite elevee qu'etoit situee une montagne qui s'eboula en 1751, avec un fracas si epouvantable, et une poussiere si epaisse et si obscure, que bien de gens crurent que c'etoit la ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... satisfy the judicious enquirer; by blending the true geography of above half the superficies of the earth with an endless variety of plausible conjectures, suggested by ingenious speculation; of idle tales, handed down by obscure tradition; or of bold ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... most part, no great persuasion was needed to turn a simple, imaginative, fatalistic people from a few vague animistic deities to the systematic iconology and the elaborate ritual of the Spanish Church. An obscure Bathala or a dim Malyari was easily superseded by or transformed into a clearly defined Dios, and in the case of any especially tenacious "demon," he could without much difficulty be merged into a Christian saint or devil. There was no organized ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... shall take, Hottest of war-waves, and your corpses consume, The lambent flame, so for you shall that lie 580 To leaving of life [surely] be turned. Ye may not prove that word, which ye just now in wrong Concealed 'neath heaps[1] of sins. Nor may ye hide that fate, Obscure its deepest might." In thought of death they were Of pyre and life's end, and delivered then one 585 Well-skilled in songs (to him the name Judas Was given 'fore kinsmen);—him they gave to the queen, Said of him very wise: "He may truth to thee tell, Fate's secrets reveal, as thou ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... sprung up and Brannan kept aloof from them. They were wild and full of "gall," Brannan was sad and sober. Howard used to write lots of letters then to some girl, Paine said, and go off and post them in obscure letter-boxes outside the gates when he could get leave, but he had quit writing long since, Haney knew, for he watched the new company clerk with jealous eyes. He knew and knew well that Howard was savagely glad ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... vivid style, but the simple facts were enough for Dick. He read once more of the last hope of the great man, never greater than then, praying in the snow, and his own soul leaped at the sting of example. He was only a boy, obscure, unknown, and the fate of but two rested with him, yet he, too, would persevere, and in the end his triumph also would be complete. He read no further, but closed the book and returned it carefully to his pocket. Then he stared into the fire, which he built ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... wrestling with George Meredith; and she asks me to explain 'Modern Love' to her. I can't make head or tail of it. Nor can she. But when people come to tea she begins to talk about Meredith, and asks them if they don't think him very obscure. And as most people here who come to tea have never heard of him, it keeps up her dignity. All the same, she is a dear old thing—and she put a large case of chocolate in my room before ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... silky; tail bright orange beneath; markings relatively obscure; size small; skull broad, flattened, and ...
— The Baculum in the Chipmunks of Western North America • John A. White
... pull it across the pebbles and under the low cliff beneath the overhanging fringe of the wood. In the uncertain light—for there was no moon and since our setting out from the yawl masses of cloud had come up from the south-east to obscure the stars—the wood looked ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... converted to Christianity in his old age, about 360 A.D. The story of his conversion, and the joy which it caused in the Christian community, is told by St. Augustine[188]. He was a deep thinker of the speculative mystical type, but a clumsy and obscure writer, in spite of his rhetorical training. His importance lies in his position as the first Christian Neoplatonist ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... feast, vide Daniel, cf. Hdt. Why plural, "the trenches"? Is Xenophon obscure? His obscurity is mostly this: he expects his reader ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... revolt of Philippopolis, which passed into the hands of the Franks. One contemporary writer says that his hands and feet were cut off, and he was thrown into a valley where he died on the third day; but the manner of his death is obscure. King John himself wrote to Pope Innocent III. that he died in prison. His brother Henry ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Mahaffy with Yancy and Cavendish; they understood that what was obscure and meaningless to them held a tragic significance to these two men. The judge's heavy face, ordinarily battered and debauched, but infinitely good-natured, bore now the markings of deep passion, and the voice that rumbled forth from his capacious chest came ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... commencing one of those unusually transparent, full-starr'd, blue-black nights, as if to show that however lush and pompous the day may be, there is something left in the not-day that can outvie it. The rarest, finest sample of long-drawn-out clear-obscure, from sundown to 9 o'clock. I went down to the Delaware, and cross'd and cross'd. Venus like blazing silver well up in the west. The large pale thin crescent of the new moon, half an hour high, sinking languidly under a bar-sinister of cloud, and then emerging. Arcturus ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Unexplained dyspnea. 4. Dyspnea unrelieved by tracheotomy calls for bronchoscopic search for deeper obstruction. 5. Paralysis of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, the cause of which is not positively known. 6. Obscure thoracic disease. 7. Unexplained hemoptysis. 8. Unexplained ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... understanding. To illustrate this, poetry again might be cited, for any one can read poetry, though many declare they cannot understand it. The simplest looking prose may be obscure to the mind which is slow in comprehending. When we read we get general ideas, cursory impressions; we catch the drift of the author's meaning. Reading for material must be more thorough than that. It ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... am aware of that. He will bring his instructions. I am old enough in state affairs to understand how people can be supplanted, without being actually deprived of office. First, he will produce a commission, couched in terms somewhat obscure and equivocal; he will stretch his authority, for the power is in his hands; if I complain, he will hint at secret instructions; if I desire to see them, he will answer evasively; if I insist, he will produce a paper of totally different import; and if this fail to satisfy me, he ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... to determine what ought to be accomplished but to determine how to accomplish it. The affairs with which statutes have to deal as a rule involve the working of a great number and variety of motives incident to human nature, and the working of those motives depends upon complicated and often obscure facts of production, trade, social life, with which men generally are not familiar and which require study and investigation to understand. Thrusting a rigid prohibition or command into the operation of these forces is apt to produce quite unexpected and unintended results. Moreover, ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... had any chance in life. He was born in an obscure hamlet of West Sussex, England, in Eighteen Hundred Four. His father was a poor farmer, who lost his freehold and died at the top, whipped out, discouraged, when the lad was ten years old. Richard Cobden became a porter, a clerk, a traveling ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... offered him, but sent to let Pericles know their intentions, that he might return home and resume his lawful right. It was matter of great surprise and joy to Simonides, to find that his son-in-law (the obscure knight) was the renowned Prince of Tyre; yet again he regretted that he was not the private gentleman he supposed him to be, seeing that he must now part both with his admired son-in-law and his beloved daughter, whom he feared to trust to the perils of the sea, because Thaisa ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... may have fully decided the foot is at fault, our case of lameness may remain obscure so far as a cause is concerned. Nothing remains, then, but to acknowledge the inability to discover it, to advocate poulticing, or some other expectant palliative measure, and to bring the case up for further examination at no distant date. Where, though ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... give the preference to him. The managing partner merely carries out this feeling to a noble, not to say sublime extent, and becomes the philanthropist par excellence. Philanthropy is virtue, and virtue, we all know, is its own reward—that is, we all say; for in reality the idea is somewhat obscure. Perhaps we mean that it is the feeling of being virtuous which rewards the act of virtue, and if so, how happy must the managing partner be! Troubled by no vulgar ambition, by no hankering after notoriety, by no yearning to join ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... sufferance, so to speak—why she should writhe inwardly with remorse because she had once thought of getting rid of a life which was nothing in every respect but a curse—that I could not understand. I thought it was very likely some obscure influence of common forms of speech, some traditional or inherited feeling—a vague notion that suicide is a legal crime; words of old moralists and preachers which remain in the air and help to form all the authorized moral conventions. Yes, I ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... lips twitched and he stirred uneasily. His face was haggard, and behind his closed lids, somewhere in the center of thought and memory, a train of fiery words burned in an ever-widening circle, round and round and round, ploughing, searing their way through some obscure part of him that had heretofore been without feeling, but was now all quick ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Faun:" the first poem written in accordance with the theory of symbolism. But when it was given to me (this marvellous brochure furnished with strange illustrations and wonderful tassels), I thought it absurdly obscure. Since then, however, it has been rendered by force of contrast with the brain-curdling enigmas the author has since published a marvel of lucidity; and were I to read it now I should appreciate its many ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... remark that this post of Prophet to his Nation was not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty years quietly obscure, before he became conspicuous. He was the son of poor parents; had got a college education; become a priest; adopted the Reformation, and seemed well content to guide his own steps by the light of it, nowise unduly intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor in gentlemen's families; preaching when ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... muffled. He determined to profit: by the circumstance, and turn aside, in the hope that his fleet pursuers would pass him unseen. A sheer was accordingly given to the boat, and instead of pulling directly toward the land the fugitives inclined to the westward; the sea appearing the most obscure in that direction, on account of the proximity of Capri, This artifice was completely successful. Yelverton was so eager in the chase, that he kept his eyes riveted before him, fancying from time to time that he saw the boat ahead, and he passed within a hundred and fifty yards ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... "Garrison." Great happiness can obscure, befog like great sorrow. And there are some things that touch the heart too vitally to admit of analyzation. But long afterward, when time, mighty adjuster of the human soul, had given to events their true proportions, that meeting with "Cottonton" loomed ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... of such a one as you. No, no,—I have been bred to humble toil all my days, and I could not be to you what you ought to ask. I am accustomed to a kind of loneliness and self-dependence. I have seen nothing, almost, of the world, such as you were born to move in. Leave me to my obscure place and duties; I shall at least have peace;—and you—you will surely find in due time some one better fitted by Nature and training to ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of kindlier build, In fair Compassions skilled, Men of deep art in life-development; Watchers and warders of thy varied lands, Men surfeited of laying heavy hands, Upon the innocent, The mild, the fragile, the obscure content Among the myriads of thy family. Those, too, who love the true, the excellent, And make their daily moves ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... deepest depths. Its tortures were more than she could endure. For her there were, indeed, worse things waiting at the gate of life than death, and she resolved by suicide to escape from them. This part of her story is very obscure. But it is certain that her suicidal intentions were so nearly carried into effect, that she had written several letters containing her, as she thought, last wishes, and which were to be opened after all was over. There is no exact account of the manner in which ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... teacher was forced to pay her scanty dollars. There were bulletins, rules, counter-rules. As she talked, Sommers caught the atmosphere of the great engine to which she had given herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger. The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work," "discipline," etc., had no special significance to him, typifying merely the exactions ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... to a Doctor Mayle, who was conducting a special research into the cause of an obscure fever; and to the other officers of this headquarters of a Province. They were all young, Hillyard himself was older than ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... and startling reverses of fortune. During that period of revolution and restless activity, we have seen peasants become princes, private soldiers occupying the thrones of great and civilized countries, obscure individuals in every walk of life raised by opportunity, genius, and the caprice of fate, to the most exalted positions. Some of these have maintained themselves on the giddy pinnacle on which fortune placed them. They are the few. Reverses, even more sudden and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... mankind in masses,—the very thing from which the younger regular officers at least had been rigidly excluded. From a monastic life at West Point they had usually been transferred to a yet more isolated condition, in some obscure outpost,—or if otherwise, then they had seen no service at all, and were mere clerks in shoulder-straps. But a lawyer who could manoeuvre fifty witnesses as if they were one,—a teacher used to governing young men by the hundred,—an orator ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... scandal to the community. But the members were bound to take other measures for finding out the truth, and they resolved on praying and drawing lots. This resolution can be a ground of surprise only to those who are unacquainted with that obscure religious life which has gone on in the alleys of our towns. Silas knelt with his brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning behind for him even then—that ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... surroundings, none the less than in its fabric, to warrant a deviation from well-worn roads in order to visit it. Chiefly of a late period, it possesses in the Tour de Hasting, named after the Danish pirate (though why seems obscure), which enfolds the north transept, a work of the best eleventh-century class. This should place the church, at once, within the scope of the designation of a "transition" type. In this tower the windows and pilasters are of the characteristic round variety ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... conditions it should be necessary to place the army on a war footing, only one course is left: we must meet the situation by calling out strategic reserves, which must be all the stronger since the political conditions are so complicated and obscure, and those opponents so strong on whose possible share in the war we must count. The strategic reserve will be to some extent a political one also. A series of protective measures, necessary in any case, would have to be at once set ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... unshaved, from a long boat passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish schoolmaster. But he had been seen landing. The inhabitants had identified him for a Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the dark and dwarfish aboriginal people of the land. Immediately the obscure ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door with fearful whisperings. For some time the schoolmaster held ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not say so, my sister," said the pilgrim; "and yet, true it is, that the cousin of the obscure parasite Gaviston, on whom the king wished to confer my poor hand, was neither by birth, merit, nor circumstance, worthy of such an alliance. Meantime, I heard of the fame of Sir John de Walton; and I heard of it not with the less interest that his feats of chivalry were said to adorn a ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... in his path, glared a pair of red fiery orbs, with something dusky and obscure linked to them; but whether of man or beast he could ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 'the well turned and true filled lines in each of which he seems to shake a lance as brandished in the eyes of Ignorance,' without suspicion—without challenge, from the crowned Ignorance, or the Monster that crowned it. It is the history of this unknown, obscure, unhonoured Father of the Modern Age that unlocks ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... himself. He was here on his own ground, for he is familiar with all that is known of the authentic history of Melrose and the popular tales connected with it. He pointed out many pieces of beautiful sculpture in obscure corners which would have escaped our notice. The Abbey has been built of a pale red stone; that part which was first erected of a very durable kind, the sculptured flowers and leaves and other minute ornaments ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... Grace. The day was almost carried when the eloquent Alcalde, in glowing rhetoric, painted the splendid future awaiting the girl, under the patronage of the Bishop. How cruel to retain her in dreary little Simiti, even though Diego's claim still remained somewhat obscure, when His Grace, learning of her talents, had summoned her to Cartagena to be educated in the convent for a glorious future of service to God! Ah, that a like beautiful career awaited all the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... so that the smoke was caught and held under the obstruction. Then they lifted it clear of the fire altogether, and the smoke, released, rose straight up in a long, tall column, that was visible for miles where the trees did not obscure the view. Once and again they repeated this, making three separate columns of smoke before they left the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... is to account for the rapid progress of the Revolution, to point out the principal causes which enabled a few comparatively obscure men to overthrow in six weeks a ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... were any pickings." He did not himself know Mr. Newell's address, but opined that it might be extracted from a certain official at the Consulate, if Garnett could give a sufficiently good reason for the request; and here in fact Mrs. Newell's emissary learned that her husband was to be found in an obscure street of ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... most capital consideration with regard to this, as to every object, is the extent of it. And here it is necessary to premise, this system of penalty and incapacity has for its object no small sect or obscure party, but a very numerous body of men,—a body which comprehends at least two thirds of that whole nation: it amounts to 2,800,000 souls, a number sufficient for the materials constituent of a great ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... leagues which lay between him and the city to which he was journeying with a power of prophetic vision that enabled him to realise a portion of the future that awaited him, he might have experienced some degree of misgiving. But, happily for him, no cloud arose to obscure the sunny picture which his imagination had drawn of the life that was opening before him. Roseate, indeed, were the hues in which his fancy had painted that picture, and foremost of all the objects that it contained was the famous cathedral, with its magnificent spire pointing into ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... has asked a friend in Surrey to send him some flower seeds for a garden in his camp. We hear that Mr. LYNCH, M.P., is convinced that this is merely an inspired attempt to obscure the real ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... are not easy reading; his German style, though grammatical and idiomatic, is generally very involved and obscure, often turgid. There is a want of self-discipline about the thought, and he is too hasty in committing ill-digested thoughts ill-arranged to print, while his style is full of tedious mannerisms, such as his constant use of futile superlatives ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... lost touch with the elderly accompanist; they had sent each other cards at Christmas and infrequently exchanged picture postcards, Miss Nippett's invariably being a front view of "Poulter's," with Mr Poulter on the steps in such a position as not to obscure "Turpsichor" ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... this prophecy is obscure. The word translated "pierced" in the English version, may also in the opinion of Grotius, and I add of Rosenmuller too, as quoted by Mr. Everett in the 104. p. of his book, be best rendered "blasphemed or reproached." It may refer to the time ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... letter he shut up Coke upon Lyttleton for that term, and shook the dust off his feet on the threshold of Mr. Die's chambers. Why should he work? why sit there filling his brain with cobwebs, pouring over old fusty rules couched in obscure language, and useful only for assisting mankind to cheat each other? He had had an object; but that was gone. He had wished to prove to one heart, to one soul, that, young as he was, poor as he was, she need not fear to trust herself ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... off, while the male bird may be seen hopping or flying from tree to tree in the neighborhood of the nest and doing all he can to induce intruders to withdraw from the neighborhood. The eggs have a light clay-colored ground, marked with obscure blotches of lavender and darker lines, dots, and blotches of purplish brown. The Longspur is a strong flier, and seems to delight in breasting the strongest gales, when all the other birds appear to move with difficulty, and to keep themselves ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Hawaii, where he collected a large sum of money for the Church of the Latter Day Saints. At a given moment, he dropped his saintship and appeared as a Christian and the owner of a part of the island of Lanai. The steps of the transformation are obscure; they seem, at least, to have been ill-received at Salt Lake; and there is evidence to the effect that he was followed to the islands by Mormon assassins. His first attempt on politics was made under the auspices of what is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was so bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods. I called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a printer's slip in his poem (a great favourite ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... great case, which was pleaded and argued at considerable length, some years ago, in this country—I mean the case of the "King v. Peltier," in the court of King's Bench. That was the case of an action brought against an obscure individual, for a libel which he had published upon the sovereign of a neighbouring country, with whom we were then in a state of peace and amity. Now, I ask your lordships whether, supposing, in the course of the late Polish revolution, ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... an unrecorded tragedy. In an obscure corner of the morning papers one learned the next day that a Frenchman, who had apparently come to the end of his means, had committed suicide in a furnished flat of Shaftesbury Avenue. Two foreigners were deported without having been brought up for trial, for ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that you are not the only preacher who has been talked about by his church, and branded by his official board with the mark of the devil in the name of the Lord. It's easy enough! Go farther, get a little obscure congregation somewhere, stay long enough to get a letter, not long enough to make another name; try another in the same fashion. Lay low, keep quiet, stay away from conventions, watch your chance, and—when the time is ripe—make a hit with the state workers in some other ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... that these can be obscure intimations of that bygone time when WE were rocked in the bosom of the Divine consciousness? Perhaps.... And now if the reader will pardon a piece of moralizing, we would say that these expressions teach us in the most emphatic way that—'This ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... you speak this to oppose The saying of a sister Song of mine: This lowly Lady whom you call divine, Your sister called disdainful and morose. Though Heaven, you know, is ever bright and pure, Eyes may have cause to find a star obscure. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... men were some fighting, some fleeing, some actually plundering and murdering by themselves in order that they might be taken for the invaders and so preserve their lives. Vitellius in dread put on a ragged, dirty, little tunic and concealed himself in an obscure alcove where dogs were kept, intending to run off during the night to Tarracina and join his brother. But the soldiers found him after a short search, for he could not long be sure of remaining hid, seeing that he had been emperor. They seized him, a mass of shavings and blood—for the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... the air, destiny or fate inevitable. The moving on process or progressive spirit was about to infect the obscure, remote, ignorant, contented little paroisse of Juchereau de St. Ignace when one April morning there stood upon the edge of rock nearest the great fall, still partly frozen into stiff angular masses, two men of entirely different aspects, tastes, and habits, yet both strongly agreed ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... of their band. At any rate, there is always a profound mystery connected with the hidden treasure, that envelops it with a tinge of romance and a spice of danger to those who seek to break the spell and lift the veil. There is also just enough known about it, which has leaked out through some obscure channel, to lend some slight probability to the story, and many have been the attempts to discover the bonanza by credulous and adventurous ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... Smerdyakov is accused only by the prisoner, his two brothers, and Madame Svyetlov. But there are others who accuse him: there are vague rumors of a question, of a suspicion, an obscure report, a feeling of expectation. Finally, we have the evidence of a combination of facts very suggestive, though, I admit, inconclusive. In the first place we have precisely on the day of the catastrophe that fit, for ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... stayed quite a while at the studio, listening to Mere Bideau's garrulous confidences. Now and again he had asked her a question, forced thereto by some obscure but none the less intense desire to know what Nancy Dampier's husband was like. And the old woman had acknowledged, in answer to a word from him, that her master was not ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... it. And no one ever measured the sacred values of humanity as He measured them. And now, in the perfect mercy of God, there is no man but may dwell in the house of God alway and feel life's sacredness amidst a thousand desecrations, and know its preciousness amidst all that seeks to obscure, ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... I before remarked, my good fellow," the voice was saying, "I am not a disciple of the semi-obscure. If a man has a thought which is worth declaring, let him declare it with a free and noble utterance—don't let him wrap it up in multifarious parcels of dreary verbosity! There's too much of that kind of thing going on nowadays—in England, at least. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... of a man who praises his neighbor without stint, with a calm consciousness that he himself is out of reach of comparison in the possessions or qualities which he is admiring in the other. Clement was right in his obscure perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while he was making his phrases. That gentleman was, in another moment, to have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature he had just begun to tame. He was going ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... eyes and gleaming teeth, smoke their hookahs and converse in low tones, as if planning some wicked deed.... To say that Tartarin walked through this fearsome township unmoved would be to lie. He was on the contrary moved a good deal, and in those obscure alleys where his large stomach took up almost the entire width, the brave fellow advanced with the greatest caution, his eyes alert, his finger on the trigger of his revolver, just as he used to be at Tarascon on his way to the club. At any moment he expected to be jumped on from ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... was obscure—that the play of the Lady's Kerchief was a cover for matter more serious. Those who had taken part in it had scarcely deigned to pretend. Colonel John had been duller than the dullest if he had not seen in the white shreds for which the men had scrambled, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... tenderness amounting to acute sensibility, for dumb animals, and to have dreaded killing a fly more than many a man who could not, like him, be brought to kill a fellow-being His mental acquirements, though remarkable for an unaided man of obscure origin, would not probably have attracted wide attention, had it not been for the notoriety caused by the detection of his crime. How many fair girls have shed tears over 'his ill-starred love' and melancholy fate, who little dreamed that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... to the Romans the most profound work in existence; and I hardly believe that the writings of the old Stoics, now lost, could have been deeper. Undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from the form in which the Epistle appears. If we could now arrange this work in the way in which we may be sure St. Paul would himself do, were he now ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... families—a house all to myself—things beautiful wherever I turn—and absolutely nothing to do for it all! I should have been hard put to it to defend myself. In those days I was feelingly reminded, hour by hour, with what a struggle the obscure multitudes manage to keep alive. Nobody knows better than I do quam parvo liceat producere vitam. I have hungered in the streets; I have laid my head in the poorest shelter; I know what it is ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... not satisfied with metaphor. "We affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the eternal in each perishing man; that it distances and degrades all statements of whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and confused stammerings before its silent revelation. They report the truth. It is the truth." In this last extract we have Emerson actually affirming that his dogma of the Moral Law is Absolute Truth. He thinks it not merely ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... enough the first use of this word which has been found is in one of Sterne's letters, written in 1740 to the lady who subsequently became his wife. (Letters, p.25). But these letters were not published till 1775, long after the word was in common use. An obscure Yorkshire clergyman can not be ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain—I am trying to account to myself for—for—Mr. Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Hugo took his companion by the arm, and walked for a little way down the street, then summoned a hansom from the door of a public-house, and gave an address which Dino did not hear. They drove for some distance. Dino thought that his new friend's lodgings were situated in a rather obscure quarter of London; but he made no remark in words, for he knew his own ignorance of the world, and he had never been in England before. Hugo's lodgings appeared to be on the second-floor of a gloomy-looking house, of which the ground-floor was occupied by a public ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... attempt to move; an obscure reluctance restrained him. If any thought emerged from the tumult of his sensations, it was that he must let her go if she wished it. He had spoken last night of his rights: what were they? At the last issue, he and she were two separate beings, not made ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... hold up to shame, send to Coventry; tread under foot, trample under foot; show up, drag through the mire, heap dirt upon; reprehend &c. 932. bring low, put down, snub; take down a peg, take down a peg lower, take down a peg or two. obscure. eclipse, outshine, take the shine out of; throw into the shade, cast into the shade; overshadow; leave in the background, put in the background; push into a corner, put one's nose out of joint; put out, put out of countenance. upset, throw off one's center; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... diet, so as to determine its cause and possible remedy. He did not look upon our knowledge of pathology and our skill in diagnosis as being sufficiently advanced or perfect to make him feel but that a treatment for an obscure disease like his own would be pretty much a matter of guess-work. Charles Reade, in his "Man and Wife," shows an intimate knowledge of medical science where he philosophizes on the effects of an irregular life and of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... end of this remarkable achievement, one which for boldness, intrepidity, and skill in expedients has few to rival it in the annals of history, and which, if performed by men of note, instead of by an obscure band of robbers, would have won for them a high ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... position of a wealthy heir to that of a hanger-on, he would not slay any longer. In Petersburg, the society in which he had grown up closed its doors upon him. For the lower ranks of the public service, and the laborious and obscure life they involved, he felt a strong repugnance. All this, it must be remembered, took place in the earliest part of the reign of the Emperor Alexander I[A]. He was obliged, greatly against his will, to return to his father's country house. Dirty, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... shall turn from its sorrow this wavering soul, let this city be besieged; I consent. Let Louis go; I will allow him to strike a few poor soldiers with the blows which he wishes, but dares not, to inflict upon me. Let his anger drown itself in this obscure blood; I agree. But this caprice of glory shall not derange my fixed designs; this city shall not fall yet. It shall not become French forever until two years have past; it shall come into my nets only on the day upon which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... said the Knight, "connected with this. Be sure the obscure varlet would not have sought thee out for such a purpose of his own motion, but was instigated ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... pre-established as the object of desire to all things, so far it appears to be in a certain respect indigent of the things to which it is related. It has therefore, if it be lawful so to speak, an ultimate vestige of indigence, just as on the contrary matter has an ultimate echo of the unindigent, or a most obscure and debile impression of the one. And language indeed appears to be here subverted. For so far as it is the one, it is also unindigent, since the principle has appeared to subsist according to the most unindigent and the one. At the same time, ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... the capture of the same city, first under kings, then under consuls, and dictators, and decemvirs, and consular tribunes, their wars abroad, their dissensions at home, I have exhibited in five books: matters obscure, as well by reason of their very great antiquity, like objects which from their great distance are scarcely perceptible, as also because in those times the use of letters, the only faithful guardian of the memory of events, was inconsiderable ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... rather unprepared for; and if the truth must be told, he was far more perplexed than Fitzgerald. He knew the girl, but he did not know and could not imagine what purpose she had in aiding Fitzgerald to win his wager or luring him out to an obscure village ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... Shi-tai-mu. Numerous traces of small-roomed houses can be seen on this mound and on some of the lower surroundings. The uneven summit is about 300 by 200 feet, and the village seems to have been built in the form of an irregular ellipse, but the ground plan is very obscure. ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... expanded and modified by a much later writer with the purpose of covering up the traces of the early schism between the Pauline and the Petrine sections of the Church. Along with this, Schwegler's work on the "Post-Apostolic Times" deserves mention as clearing up many obscure points relating to the early development of dogma. Finally, the "New Life of Jesus," by Strauss, adopting and utilizing the principal discoveries of Baur and his followers, and combining all into one grand historical ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... influence remains to be noticed, which was in its nature more strictly theological, and limited to the church. When after the return of peace the tercentenary of the Reformation was celebrated in 1817, an obscure theologian at Kiel, named Harms,(747) published a set of theses as supplements to the celebrated theses of Luther, which, by the excitement and controversy unexpectedly occasioned by them, turned attention anew to the study of the reformational and biblical theology, and created a revival of the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... place in the story. The origin of Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was not known: according to one tale, he was the natural son of a great lord; another account declared that he was the offspring of poor people, but that, disgusted with his obscure birth, he preferred a splendid disgrace, and therefore chose to pass for what he was not. The only certainty is that he was born at Montauban, and in actual rank and position he was captain of the Tracy regiment. At the time when ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... times is so obscure, the monuments which convey it down to us so contrary to each other, and the systems of the moderns(955) upon that matter so different, that it is difficult to lay down any opinion about it, as certain and incontestable. But where certainty is not to be had, I suppose a reasonable person ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... horizon. The exegesis of the vision has been various, some thinking that it means a Military Despot—though in that case the force of cavalry would seem to be inadequate,—and others the Pony Express. If it had been one rider on two horses, the application would have been more general and less obscure. In fact, the old cry of Disunion has lost its terrors, if it ever had any, at the North. The South itself seems to have become alarmed at its own scarecrow, and speakers there are beginning to assure their hearers that the election of Mr. Lincoln ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dales, savannas, and vast cane-meadows, and watered by innumerable rivulets and brooks. During the day the horses were excessively tormented by flies of several kinds, and the numbers of which were almost incredible. They formed, around the caravan, a vast cloud, so thick as to obscure every distant object. The heads, necks, and shoulders of the leading horses were continually covered with blood, the consequence of the attacks of these tormenting insects. Some of them were horse-flies, as large as humble-bees; and others were different ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... of my brother lurking gloomily yet observantly in obscure corners, ready at any moment for a sortie in my defence; but when I sneaked, sidled, and slid into the ballroom, making myself as small as possible that I might pass unobserved in spite of my sensational redness, I had a surprise. Near the door stood the chauffeur in evening dress, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... indeed insists upon it, knows that they have no independent importance, that they derive all their potency and value from the inner reality which they were fashioned to represent and embody, but which they often misrepresent and obscure. He therefore never confuses the life with the clothing, and well understands how often the clothing has to be sacrificed for the sake of the life. Thus, while the utility of clothes has to be recognised to the full, it ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of caution the four nobles had gradually retreated to an obscure recess, half concealed by some heavy drapery; and Bassompierre, in an attitude of easy indifference, stood leaning against the tapestried panels that divided the sumptuous apartment which they occupied from ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... adventurer, traveller, statesman. I have been lover, husband, father—poor and opulent; obscure and conspicuous. There are few sensations of our nature, or circumstances of our life, which I have not undergone. Alternately suffering to the verge of ruin, and enjoying like an epicurean deity: I have been steeped in poverty to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... only the vessels of our friends coming to trade with us, but our own also. They have carried them off under pretence of legal adjudication; but not daring to approach a court of justice, they have plundered and sunk them by the way, or in obscure places where no evidence could arise against them, maltreated the crews, and abandoned them in boats in the open sea, or on desert shores without food or covering." In view of these things, the President recommended the building ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... 1830, which placed Louis Philippe of Orleans on the throne, and sent Charles X. to end his days in an obscure corner of Germany, was the first of four revolutions which I have lived to witness; and since then I have often thought of a lady who, during the next political catastrophe, by which Louis Philippe ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... gond I should have something to say had not a diversion occurred which relegated that lively and elusive creature to an obscure place in the background. We had finished the beat, and most of us had emerged from the swamp to higher ground where an open space, or maidan, corresponding to a drive in an English preserve, but on the grand scale, divided it from the jungle—all our thoughts being set upon lunch—when ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... neither in embarrassment nor in pride. Many readers there must be who would like nothing better than to dip into chapters from just such a life as mine. Witness how Edward FitzGerald, half author of the "Rubaiyat," sighed to read more lives of obscure persons, and that Arthur Christopher Benson, from his "College Window," repeats ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... entertainment, the haying field, and the factory had not been attained without some corresponding loss. Close upon the heels of the reform in the domestic and social habits of the people there was spawned a monstrous brood of obscure tippling-shops—a nuisance, at least in New England, till then unknown. From the beginning wise and effective license laws had interdicted all dram-shops; even the taverner might sell spirits only to his transient guests, not ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... out his language to a gigantic sublimity, corresponding to the vast dimensions of his personages. Hence he abounds in harsh compounds and over-strained epithets, and the lyrical parts of his pieces are often, from their involved construction, extremely obscure. In the singular strangeness of his images and expressions he resembles Dante and Shakspeare. Yet in these images there is no want of that terrific grace which almost all the writers of antiquity commend ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of the "Liberty Party" in the United States, is now conducted by one who requires not a notice from such an obscure source—we mean Frederick Douglass, of Rochester, N.Y. His history is well known—it was written by more faithful hands than ours—it was written by himself. It stands enrolled on the reminiscences of Germany, and France, and in full length oil, in the academy of arts, and ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... remain obscure long," remarked Burns, "if he has brains enough to turn the navy department topsy-turvy ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... as you say," agreed the Doctor. "In that case, my dear Dick, come back to me after you have become acquainted with all the facts, and we will discuss the matter together. That you may call me your friend goes without saying, as you ought to know by this time; and although I am only an obscure East-End practitioner I am not wholly without friends able and willing to do me, or any friend of mine, a good turn, if necessary. So come back here when you have threshed out the matter, and we will see what—if anything—can ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and ignorance! No wonder the few strong men do about as they please with such a race of nincompoopery. If they didn't grow old and tired, what ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... archives of Borgo San Sepolcro,[1] not only gives the name of the generous friend of Francis, and many picturesque details, but it fixes with precision a date all the more important because it occurs in the most obscure period of the Saint's life. It was on May 8, 1213, that Orlando dei Catani, Count of Chiusi in Casentino, gave the ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the Platirs, the Tablantes, the Olivantes and Tirantes, the Phoebuses and Belianises, with the whole herd of famous knights-errant of days gone by, performing in these in which I live such exploits, marvels, and feats of arms as shall obscure their brightest deeds. Thou dost mark well, faithful and trusty squire, the gloom of this night, its strange silence, the dull confused murmur of those trees, the awful sound of that water in quest of which we came, that seems as though it were precipitating and dashing itself down from ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... spadassin arrived in our midst about this period. He was most anxious to draw a blade for Don Carlos, but he had a decided objection to serve in any capacity but that of command. He did not appreciate the fun of losing the number of his mess as an obscure hero of the rank and file, though he would not mind sacrificing an arm, I do think, at the head of a charging column, provided that he had a showy uniform on, and that the fact of his valour was properly advertised in the despatches. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... was being swept along rapidly, now appearing to my eyes somewhat whiter on top, although the surrounding red was so glaringly prominent as to obscure everything else. Suddenly the creature gave a kick and whirled over, turning the white expanse directly toward us. At the same moment De Noyan dropped the point of his rapier against the side of the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... a sick friend," I ruminated. "And by the way, his case is obscure and curious. I could interest any doctor in ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... manliness. As the King's keen eye had seen from the first, and as Esclairmonde had felt, there was an elevation, tenderness, and refinement in his cast of character, which if left to his natural destiny would have either worn out his life early in the world, or carried him to the obscure shelter of a convent. In the novelty of the secular life, and temptations of all kinds, dread of ridicule, and the flood of excitements which came with reviving health, that very sensitiveness led him astray; and the elevated aims fell with a heavier fall when diverted from ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the eighteenth century to believe absolutely in (their) own slogans about patriotism, purity, and a better system of conducting government."[25] On the other hand they differed as to what these terms meant. The intent was good, the timing was wrong. Pitt, for reasons still somewhat obscure, accepted a peerage and became Lord Chatham and opened the door to cries of corruption and sell-out by the "Great Commoner." More significantly, Chatham was trying to lead a ministry from the House of Lords. He could not bring it off and sank deeper ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... mortal is not lived in vain; But lives like thine God grants as shining lights That we in darkness Him aright may see. Nay more, such lives the more by ills beset Do shine the more and better teach His ways. Alas! thou'rt gone that wert so kind to one Obscure—a stranger in a distant land. Accept from him this wreath uncouth of words Which do but half ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... the Abolitionists, who hitherto had refused to make common cause with any other faction, entered the negative coalition of the new party. So did Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats, as well as other factions then obscure which we should now label ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... "Neo-Greek" words are extraordinary in themselves and obscure in their origin, though not through antiquity. In his Student's Pastime, at p. 293, Dr. Skeat says "Nowhere can more ignorant etymologies be found than in works on Botany and 'scientific' subjects. Too often, all the ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... a grey canopy of clouds was spread over the sky, sufficiently thick to obscure the stars. Thus the night was more than usually dark. Still, as the atmosphere was free from mist, seamen's eyes could distinguish objects at a considerable distance off. With much anxiety we watched the rover, in the hope that the growing darkness would hide her from our view; but ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... So far he had not made enough by his brain to purchase a collar button, but ideas were coming thick and fast, and he was convinced that the day was not far distant when he would make a great fortune. That is why, all things considered, he believed himself, despite his obscure origin and lack of education, a desirable match for the proudest girl ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... left by my mother. As I did not visit my mother's grave at the time, the Garlands were much surprised, but I offered no explanation. The reason is not difficult to understand. My mother was buried in a public ground, and the marks of her grave, as I learned, were so obscure that the spot could not be readily designated. To look upon a grave, and not feel certain whose ashes repose beneath the sod, is painful, and the doubt which mystifies you, weakens the force, if not the purity, of the love-offering from the ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... tortoise would be puzzled to run at even a moderate trot. To be sure, when he has once filled his great lungs with air, he has enough for a long time. Most tortoises are aquatic, and, as divers, leave the cetaceans far behind. Mery, an obscure French naturalist of the days of the Empire, pretended that he had kept in his house, for a month, some tortoises, whose breathing he had completely stopped. Only imagine from this how far their life must be below ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... something like that we imagine a Roman to have felt on learning that a Christian was capable of giving up his fish-ponds and nightingales' tongues, and his afternoons at the amphitheatre, for the sake of what he called 'Truth' proclaimed by an obscure few." ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... unconsciously waiting for the day when they should become notable to all the world. Their Idolatries appear to have been in a tottering state; much was getting into confusion and fermentation among them. Obscure tidings of the most important Event ever transacted in this world, the Life and Death of the Divine Man in Judea, at once the symptom and cause of immeasurable change to all people in the world, had in the course of centuries reached into Arabia too; and ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... irregularity of its front, and numerous peculiarities of formation which had escaped him hitherto. Suddenly his puzzled face brightened to the birth of an idea. By heavens! it might be done! Surely it might be done! Inch by inch he traced the obscure passage, seeking to impress each faint detail upon his memory—that narrow ledge within easy reach of an upstretched arm, the sharp outcropping of rock-edges here and there, the deep gash as though some giant axe had cleaved the stone, those sturdy cedars growing straight ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... upon the commands which they pretend have been issued by the sovereign, whose servants they call themselves. They defame one another, and mutually treat each other as impostors and false teachers. The decrees and ordinances, they take upon themselves to promulgate, are obscure; they are enigmas, little calculated to be understood, or even divined, by the subjects, for whose instruction they were intended. The laws of the concealed monarch require interpreters; but the interpreters are always disputing upon the true manner of understanding ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... line where the ink had run, with only a letter or two distinct at intervals. Then half a blank line, and then, very much blurred and obscure, more resembling a row of blots ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... out of some deep, rutty lane, where the hedgerows obscure the prospect, and where the footsteps of some unknown passenger have left tracks in the moist red clay. The confused tracery of green leaves overhead seems to weave fanciful patterns against the dim blue of the sky; the very air is low-pitched and oppressive. All ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... General Method for the dimension of Curve Lines, &c. Besides, having a perfect knowledge in Antiquity, he was consulted from all parts upon the difficulties that did emerg therein: he hath explained abundance of obscure places, that are {16} found in the Antients. There have been lately printed some of his Observations upon Athenaeus; and he that hath interpreted Benedetto Castelli, of the Measure of running waters, hath thence inserted in his Work a very handsome one upon an Epistle of Synesius, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... evidence, which, though brought against Rebecca Nurse, bears harder, as we read it now, upon Ann Putnam than any one else, and makes it more difficult to palliate her conduct on the supposition of partial insanity. It is, all along, one of the obscure problems of our subject to determine how far delusion may have been accompanied by fraud and imposture. Edward Putnam testified, that "Ann Putnam, Jr., was bitten by Rebecca Nurse, as she said, about two of the clock of the day" after Rebecca Nurse had been committed to ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this man is of an ardent and melancholy character. Those ideas which, in others, are casual or obscure, which are entertained in moments of abstraction and solitude, and easily escape when the scene is changed, have obtained an immoveable hold upon his mind. The conclusions which long habit has rendered familiar, and, in some sort, palpable to his intellect, are drawn ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... profitable enough to sustain a woman of letters. Eliza Haywood was sufficiently catholic in her taste to attempt all these means of gaining reputation and a livelihood, and tried in addition a short-lived experiment as a publisher. Beside these literary pursuits we know not what obscure means for support she may have ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... the very obscure clerk who had filed away the Thorne affidavits and who happened to be a friend of the man to whom in devious ways and through many mouths had come an expression of the Gay wishes. It was O.K.'d by a dozen others. The High Official added his O.K. to the others. Then he promptly forgot ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... is obscure in regard to the fourth island. The best way to find it is to "plot" the courses FORWARD from the third island and the courses and distances BACKWARD from the fifth. These lead to Fortune for ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... solid friendship was soon formed between the two brothers-in-law. M. Pelletier's mind was inquisitive and receptive; he had read much, and in the family circle we called him our "Encyclopedia." He made it his duty and pleasure to clear up any obscure point which might embarrass any of us, and often undertook long researches to spare my husband's time. They regularly sat up together long after the other inmates of the house had gone to their rest, talking and smoking, or walking out in the refreshing ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... upon some basis which might make an accommodation between the two wings of the party possible; and there was an attempt by a small group of Liberal M.P.'s to bring this about. The treatment of this incident in Professor Skelton's volume is obscure. In any case it had no significance and it came to nothing. Laurier alike by choice ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... been derived from noble families of their name. In that case, however, they were certainly not in the direct line of descent, for their names do not appear in the pedigree of those families. On the other hand many of the names would seem to indicate that their possessors came from obscure families. In several cases, for example, esquires practically gave up their own names and were called by occupational names. So the Richard des Armes of the records was probably "Richard de Careswell vadlet del armes" [Footnote: Exchequer K. R. Accts. 392, 15.] who had charge of the king's personal ...
— Chaucer's Official Life • James Root Hulbert
... the quarrel was a woman of light character. He has also been accused of gross vices not to be particularised, and of atheism. The accusation is certain; and Mr. Boas's researches as to Kyd, who was also concerned in the matter, have thrown some light on it; but much is still obscure. The most offensive charges were due to one Bame or Baines, who was afterwards hanged at Tyburn. That Marlowe was a Bohemian in the fullest sense is certain; that he was anything worse there is no evidence ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... main river courses. Each one of these millions of terraces, set about by its raised rim, was a silvery sheet of water dotted in the daintiest manner with bunches of rice just transplanted, but not so close nor yet so high and over-spreading as to obscure the water, yet quite enough to impart to the surface a most delicate sheen of green; and the grass-grown narrow rims retaining the water in the basins, cemented them into series of the most superb mosaics, shaped ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... and Gildon, and later Pope, Echard's aim, whether translating by himself or collectively, was to imitate the spirit of his author in English. "A meer Verbal Translation is not to be expected, that wou'd sound so horribly, and be more obscure than the Original . . . . We couldn't have kept closer . . . without too much treading upon the Author's Heels, and destroying our Design of giving it an easie, Comick Style, most agreeable to our present Times" (Terence's Comedies, p. xx). To this end it was necessary to tone down the "familiarity ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... the turn of the Clydevalley to yield up her obscure identity, and to assume an historic name appropriate to the adventure she was bringing to a triumphant climax—a name of good omen in Ulster ears. Strips of canvas, 6 feet long, were cut and painted with white letters on a black ground, and ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... thoughts. Short lyrical pieces were growing under his hand, and began to form a considerable group. And one fortunate day as he strolled alone in the Dulwich wood—his chosen resort of meditation—"the image flashed upon him of one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it."[22] In other words Pippa had suddenly passed her poet in ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... solicit her heart and hand, and she had consented to meet him. What should she say to him? Why should he, having an acquaintance with the noble families of England, come across the sea and offer his attentions to an obscure New England girl, and desire to make her mistress at Halford Castle? Ought she not to feel flattered in having a noble lord for a lover? The thought did not stir her blood. Why was she averse to receiving his attentions? What was there about him that ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... cousin of Roderigo's, and the widow of Lodovico Orsini, by whom she had a son, Orso Orsini, who from early youth had been betrothed to Giulia Farnese, the daughter of a patrician family, still comparatively obscure, but destined through this very girl ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... my Lord, to the fame with which your genius has surrounded you, for an unknown and obscure individual to express his admiration of it. I had rather be numbered with those who wish and pray, that 'wisdom from above,' and 'peace,' and 'joy,' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... their voices, even were they to venture to raise them, could not stem the tide of public indignation. The most offended are naturally the military men.... In short, Senor Gutierrez, who has been passing four years abroad, in countries where hundreds of obscure scribblers daily advocate republicanism or any wild theory that strikes their fancy, with the most perfect security, was probably hardly aware of the extraordinary ferment which such a pamphlet was likely to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... her Empire. To act otherwise, he said, would be to separate himself from his alliance with Austria, and to throw her into the arms of Russia. But with regard to the Polish-Russian provinces, Napoleon declared he would see what he could do, should Providence favour the good cause. These vague and obscure expressions did not define what he intended to do for the Poles in the event of success crowning his vast enterprises. They excited the distrust of the Poles, and had no other result. On this subject, however, an observation ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... suddenly passed from the position of a wealthy heir to that of a hanger-on, he would not slay any longer. In Petersburg, the society in which he had grown up closed its doors upon him. For the lower ranks of the public service, and the laborious and obscure life they involved, he felt a strong repugnance. All this, it must be remembered, took place in the earliest part of the reign of the Emperor Alexander I[A]. He was obliged, greatly against his will, to return to his father's country house. Dirty, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... Saint or church-woman, might do so very occasionally. But the individuality of the ordinary wife was merged in that of her husband, and for one Abbess of Shrewsbury or Whitby, for one St. Clare or St. Hilda, there were how many thousand obscure sisters, who were buried in the daily routine of a life hidden with Christ in God! Doubtless the artistic temperament burst out now and again in woman, and would take no denial. It blew where it listed, appearing in the most unexpected places. A young nun in ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... fighting. The roads that sidled off to the east bore battle names, St. Mihiel, Troyon, and the road that we followed was still marked at every turn with the magic word "Verdun." Our immediate objective was Souilly, the obscure hill town twenty miles, perhaps, south of the front, from which Sarrail had defended Verdun in the Marne days and from which Petain was now defending Verdun against ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... to examine the contents of this paper took possession of Mr. Mandeville, and in spite of the breach of good manners, and the violation of every principle of honor, he retired to an obscure corner of his garden, opened and read so much of the epistle as was intelligible to him, which ran ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... incur reproaches, which * Disturb her temper and her mind obscure, Patient I'll bear them; e'en as generous youth his case to cure.'' * Beareth the burn of brand his case ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... knowledge of faith is dark and obscure, according to 1 Cor. 13:13: "We see now through a glass in a dark manner." Now in their original state there was not obscurity either in the angels or in man, because it is a punishment of sin. Therefore there could be no faith in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... reactionaries whom her influence made powerful with the Czar, were bent on ending the war prematurely in the interests of reaction. The Ministers set up under these auspices for over two years acted in defiance of public opinion. Their policy was not obscure: they hampered the army in respect of munitions, disorganized the country in respect of its distributive services, brought about artificial famine in a land which is one of the world's chief food-producers, and themselves, through police agents, sought to stir up abortive ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Madrid, in 1792, by Risco, under the title of "Castilla, o Historia de Rodrigo Diaz," etc., which the worthy father ushered into the world with much solemnity, as a transcript of an original manuscript coeval with the time of the "Cid," and fortunately discovered by him in an obscure corner of some Leonese monastery. (Prologo). Masdeu, in an analysis of this precious document, has been led to scrutinize the grounds on which the reputed achievements of the "Cid" have rested from time ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... that sun-stricken Cottage from the rocks, that all around it are floating in a blue vapoury light! Were we so disposed, methinks we could easily write a little book entirely about the obscure people that have lived and died about that farm, by name LOGAN BRAES. Neither is it without its old traditions. One May-day long ago—some two centuries since—that rural festival was there interrupted by a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... and, prompted by an obscure desire to help himself and her through their miserable last hour, he went on discursively: "Ain't it funny we haven't been down together but ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... out in this obscure way to vindicate his unneighbourliness and the seclusion of his daughters from the society of girls of their age and condition; nor was it hard for Rhoda to assure him, as she earnestly did, that he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of this brief conversation between Mrs. Gaston and Michael left the store of Mr. Berlaps, she walked slowly in the direction of her temporary home, which was, as has before been mentioned, in an obscure street at the north end. It consisted of a small room, in an old brick house, which had been made by running a rough partition through the centre of the front room in the second story, and then intersecting ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... he said, addressing Mary Avenel, "it much rejoiceth me, being, as I am, a banished man from the delights of mine own country, that I shall find here in this obscure and silvan cottage of the north, a fair form and a candid soul, with whom I may explain my mutual sentiments. And let me pray you in particular, lovely lady, that, according to the universal custom now predominant in our court, the garden ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have written." We must set this statement down to one of those fits of dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods that often came upon him. What he meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and grandfather, but coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, and other liberating influences of the nineteenth century, he was bound to be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of his ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... Birmingham, in 1733, to be near an old schoolfellow, named Hector, who was apparently beginning to practise as a surgeon. Johnson seems to have had some acquaintances among the comfortable families in the neighbourhood; but his means of living are obscure. Some small literary work came in his way. He contributed essays to a local paper, and translated a book of Travels in Abyssinia. For this, his first publication, he received five guineas. In 1734 he made ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... could it be that some horrible fowl of the air—some creature unknown to Western naturalists—had been released upon the common last night? I thought of the marks upon Forsyth's face and throat; I thought of the profound knowledge of obscure and dreadful things possessed by ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... value, proving, what I believe was not established before, that the Secret Treaty of 1815, whereby Austria gained a legal right to prevent any departure from absolute Government at Naples, was communicated to the British Ministry and received its sanction. This sanction explains the obscure and embarrassed language of Castlereagh in 1820, which in its turn gave rise to the belief in Italy that England was more deeply committed to Austria than it actually was, and probably occasioned the forgery of the pretended Treaty of July 27, 1813, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... sophistries and illusions with which the pundits clothe them. The real work of the reformers is to hack away these encumbering theories. The average European has not followed, and could not follow, the amazing and never-ending disputation on obscure theological points round which raged the Reformation; but the one solid fact which did emerge from the whole was the general realization that whatever the truth might be in all this confusion, it was quite evidently wicked and futile to attempt to compel ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... thankful to God, who wills everything that God willeth, who receives everything as an instance of God's goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it. "Perhaps the shepherd's boy," says Thomas Scott, "may refer to the obscure and quiet stations of some pastors over small congregations, who live almost unknown to their brethren, but are in a measure useful and very comfortable." Perhaps he does. And, whether he does or no, at any rate such a song will suit some of our brethren very well as they go about among ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... with pleasure, relating that she had found a gem, a delightful little place right in the centre of Paris. Little by little, at the end of a few days, in her conversations of an evening, the damp, obscure shop in the arcade became a palace; she pictured it to herself, so far as her memory served her, as convenient, spacious, tranquil, and replete with a ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... collapsed." On this Mr. Craik observes, "It is difficult to conjecture what can be here meant by collapsed, unless it be fallen off to Romanism." Now it is not a little curious, and it proves Mr. Craik's capability for the task of illustrating family history from the obscure allusions in letters and documents, that there exists cotemporary authority for fixing the meaning Mr. Craik has conjectured to be the true one, to the word collapsed. A pamphlet, with the title A Letter to Mr. T.H., late ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... embark on that adventure. At the same time a great and troubled curiosity, and a certain chill of fear, possessed his spirits. The conduct of the man with the chin-beard, the terms of the letter, and the explosion of the early morning, fitted together like parts in some obscure and mischievous imbroglio. Evil was certainly afoot; evil, secrecy, terror, and falsehood were the conditions and the passions of the people among whom he had begun to move, like a blind puppet; and he who began as a puppet, his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me to thinking. If, I said to myself, a man uses wine, beer or spirits habitually, is there no danger that at some time when great interests, or even life itself, may be at stake, a glass too much may obscure his clear intellect and make him the instrument of loss or disaster? I pursued the subject, and as I did so was led to this conclusion—that society really suffers more, from what is called moderate drinking than it does ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... not unlike that of a man, who, strongly assailed, has made up his mind to do battle to the end. With whom? How many? He might put out his hand, clench it; the thin air made no answer. He regarded the shadows now; they seemed to wave around him, intangible, obscure. A dark day in town, the streets were oppressive; the people below passed like poorly done replicas of themselves; the rattle of the wheels resembled a ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Lawrenceville, Lawrence County, in the State of Illinois, of a Negro mother by a white father. His father, lately from North Carolina, fell under Gen. Harrison fighting the Indians. Like so many other great men he was born in an obscure place—a wigwam. At the time of his father's death he was quite a young baby. He was now left to the care of a mother who, in many respects, was like her husband, bold and courageous for the truth, and yet as gentle as a child. It is ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... visit of George Cannon's to Hornsey she had kept her bed throughout the day, afraid to meet him, ashamed to meet him, inexplicably convinced that to meet him would be a crime against filial piety. There were obscure grottoes in her soul which she had not had the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... clerks—the people of the middle classes, who wore no white plumes in their hats; they were indeed allowed to enter the opera-house, but through a side passage, and their boxes were entirely separated from those of the court circle. These people of the middle classes seemed obscure and unimportant, but they were educated and intelligent; even then they were a power; proud and independent, they could not be bribed by flattery, nor blinded by glitter and pomp. They judged the king as they judged the beggar, the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Slav nations of the hinterland will almost certainly divert their trade, on which Fiume's commercial importance entirely depends, to some non-Italian port, in which event the city would inevitably retrograde to the obscure fishing village which it was less than half a ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... cared little for cock-fighting or the bull-ring, was of placid demeanor, and was altogether the sort of man who could be relied on not to attend secret meetings or lose valued sleep by drilling in hot barns or chigger-infested clearings in the woods. Yet it was on Morelos's oath that this obscure citizen was arrested. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... clause in the body of it. (The present Bill looked pettish and undignified, as if framed in anger as a return for the insult, and not a correction of the state of the law.) He thought the Law very complex and obscure, and never found it acted upon. He would have proposed therefore that Committees of both Houses should enquire into the whole subject; the state of the Convents; whether subjects were detained against their will; whether ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... well-informed men, and I was not surprised at their wishing to get rid of their insane chief, although, in any other case, it might have proved to them a difficult and probably a dangerous experiment. A few days afterwards I called on him. I found him in small lodgings in an obscure part of the town. I was accompanied by Captain J., an old messmate of his in former times. He neither knew us nor asked us to take a seat. He had a large loaf under his left arm, and in his right hand a dinner knife. He appeared to wear the same chocolate-coloured chemise ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... and we dare say it was a very sensible plan after all, and might have been imitated with success before Sebastopol. A stout steel Umbrella would offer no contemptible shelter to a rifleman. This circumstance, too, may throw a light on a hitherto obscure passage in "Macbeth," where Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane—for it is just possible that the soldiers cut down the branches to serve them as a protection from the rain. We throw out this as a hint to ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... speak, too oppressed with the needless anguish of this their last night. At their feet the tiny shining windows of Etretat were dropping back into the night, as though sinking under the rise of that black, mysterious flood that came luminously from the obscure regions of the faint sky. Overhead, the swollen August stars had faded before the pale flush that, toward the lighthouse on the cliff, heralded the red ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... of a child, a frightened, bewildered child. Helena Richie caught her breath; for a single strange moment she forgot her agony of fear for her son; the woman in her was stronger than the mother in her; some obscure impulse ranged her with this girl, as if against a common enemy. "My dear, my dear!" she said, "he shall not have you. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... encaustic painter, and was employed by Praxiteles to apply his art to his statues. The glorious art of these masters, as far as regards light, tone, and local colors, is lost to us, and we know nothing of it except from obscure notices and later imitations. It is not thus necessary to speak at length of the various schools of painting in Greece, their works being all lost, the knowledge of the characteristics peculiar to each school would be at the present day perfectly ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... them to the devil. Voltaire has not inaptly designated him "De l'or encroute de toutes les ordures de son siecle;" but the crust of superstition that enveloped his powerful mind, though it may have dimmed, could not obscure the brightness of his genius. To him, and apparently to him only, among all the inquiring spirits of the time, were known the properties of the concave and convex lens. He also invented the magic lantern; that pretty plaything of modern days, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... department; one man for the whole work would mean stagnation, the worker never getting beyond his first crude attempts. Animal industry is a little like our own: it does not attain its perfection save with the aid of obscure toilers, who, without knowing it, prepare the final masterpiece. I see no other reason for this need of a gratuitous lodging for the Megachile's leafy basket or the Anthidia's cotton purses. In the case of other artists who handle delicate things that require protection, ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... them. At times they appear to our eyes to be not quite devoid of life, not entirely deaf to our voice. Not unfrequently the meaning of some sculpture, of some character, of some painting,—till then obscure, unintelligible, puzzling,—all of a sudden becomes clear, easy to understand, ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... discovers the same taste and sagacity in estimating the merits of individual writers, which he had shown in discussing the general principles of the art. Had I read his work sooner, it would have greatly facilitated my own inquiries in the same obscure path; and I should have recognized, at least, one brilliant exception to my sweeping remark on the apathy manifested by the Castilian scholars to the antiquities of ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Returning home on the top of the coach, the full moon would appear and reappear, but was generally under a cloud. Irving remarked: "I do much better with that old moon in my theatre. I make it shine or obscure it with clouds, as the ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... completely fogged in his mind. He couldn't see light anywhere. He asked himself in vain what possible connection could exist between this murder in an obscure quarter of London and the man at his side who, he knew, held in his firm hands lines that stretched to the uttermost ends of the earth? What kind of an affair was this, seemingly so commonplace that could take the Chief's attention from the hundred urgent matters ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... holds fast for us that London of the eighteenth century which has passed out of sight, in giving place to the capital of the Anglo-Saxon race today. In like manner the sober little New England town which has played a so much more obscure, though in its way hardly less significant part, sits quietly enshrined and preserved in Hawthorne's ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... men of their word, too—that I should only die by their hands. Where are these wretches? Four at Cayenne, one at Brest; I've had news of them. But the other two? I've lost their track. Who knows whether one of them hasn't followed me here, and whether to-morrow, at the turning of some obscure road, I shall not get six inches of ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... pilgrims. He saluted our leader as an old acquaintance, and mounting on a camel, offered to guide us on our way during the night. It is no easy matter at any time, even for the Arabs, to find the way in a direct line across the boundless Desert; and when clouds obscure the stars, it is almost impossible without a compass. The old recluse, on seeing white strangers, cast a look of disgust and disdain at us, expressing his surprise that any true believers should allow infidel Nazarenes to remain in their ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... will be surprised to see the old Royalist bestowing his eldest daughter on a Receiver-General, possessed, indeed, of some old hereditary estates, but whose name was not preceded by the little word to which the throne owed so many partisans, and his second to a magistrate too lately Baronified to obscure the fact that his father had sold firewood. This noteworthy change in the ideas of a noble on the verge of his sixtieth year—an age when men rarely renounce their convictions—was due not merely to his unfortunate residence in the modern ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... to be free, intelligent, and unbiassed, the true manifestation of the public will, I desire to prepare the country for another appeal, which I perceive is about to be made to popular prejudice, another attempt to obscure all distinct views of the public good, to overwhelm all patriotism and all enlightened self-interest, by loud cries against false danger, and by exciting the passions of one class against another. I am not mistaken in the omen; I see the magazine whence the weapons of this warfare are to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... raising from the lower soil rich substances, which, strewed on the surface by quick decay, will form food for plants higher than themselves; while they, by their variety and beauty, both of form and colour, might well form studies for any painter, and by the obscure laws of their reproduction, studies for any philosopher. Why, there is not a heap of dead leaves among which by picking it through carefully you might not find some twenty species of delicate and elegant land-shells; hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould, you might not find ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... Family Heraldry," and he laughed. The passage in the play brought forward vividly the thought that those who really live in the aristocratic world may smile at our high-life dramas just as they do at the stories that appear concerning the nobility in obscure "family" papers. There is, and during a long time has been, a mania among playwrights for putting aristocratic characters upon the stage. It may be that this is due to the snobbishness of players, who, in comedy, love to represent a lord: they can be kings and queens only in tragedies; or ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... achievements being to go and pull down London Bridge. This peculiar kind of "distraction" (as the French call it) seems to have had the desired effect, as is evident in the romantic incident of his second marriage, when the Irish Princess Gyda chooses him—apparently an obscure stranger—to be her husband, out of a hundred wealthy and well-born aspirants to her hand. But neither Gyda's love, nor the rude splendours of her father's court, can make Olaf forgetful of his claims upon the throne of Norway—the inheritance of his father; and when that object of ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... or "poor priests" to gather the people in fields and byways and to preach the simple truths of the Christian religion. They were unpaid, and lived by the kindness of the common people. They came to be called Lollards, though the origin of the name is obscure. Their followers received the same name. A few years after Wiclif's death an enemy bitterly observed that if you met any two men one was sure to be a Lollard. It was the "first time in English history that an appeal ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... in support of it. Comly, Russell, Alger, Ingersoll, Greenleaf, Fisk, Merchant, Kirkham, T. Smith, R. C. Smith, Hall, Hiley, and many others, have copied it into their grammars, as being better than any definition they could devise. Murray himself unquestionably took it from some obscure pedagogue among the old grammarians. Buchanan, who long preceded him, has nearly the same words: "The Superlative increases or diminishes the Positive in Signification, to the highest or [the] lowest Degree of all."—English ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Mandell is an obscure village on the rim of the polar sea. It is not large, and the people are peaceable, more peaceable even than those of the adjacent tribes. There are few men in Mandell, and many women; wherefore a wholesome and necessary ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... also the style of EZEKIEL, who sings the development of the obscure prophesies of his master. His writings abound in dreams and visions, and convey rather the idea of the terrible ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... that the project conceived in the obscure dreams of an out-at-elbows young man, and born a foundling upon his money, should have been adopted at sight as the spoiled darling of fashion's ultra-fashionable. Undoubtedly, astute Mr. Dayne had had somewhat to do with ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of this passage is obscure. Many explanations have been attempted, none of which, to my ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... country in Europe, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The possibility of transmutation was so generally admitted, that every chemist was more or less an alchymist. Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Poland, France, and England produced thousands of obscure adepts, who supported themselves, in the pursuit of their chimera, by the more profitable resources of astrology and divination. The monarchs of Europe were no less persuaded than their subjects of the possibility of discovering the philosopher's ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... picture of the manners and customs of the Merovingian epoch we cannot do better than to tell the stories of these queens, Fredegonde and Brunehild by name, whose rivalry and enmity, with their consequences, throw a striking light on the history of those obscure times. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... conquest, men saw only the triumph of chaos. All unity, all general civilization disappeared, on all sides was seen society falling into dissolution; and, in its stead, arising a multitude of little, obscure, isolated communities. This appeared to all the contemporaries nothing short of universal anarchy. The poets, the chroniclers of the time, viewed it as the approach of the end of the world. It was, in truth, the end of the ancient world; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... great stain in the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively few remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from the back ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... no higher ambition than to see my only child grow up an honest man, diligent in his calling, whatever it may be. My first wish is, that my boy may be a Christian: it will never trouble me that he must work hard and be obscure; for if he is pious, honest, and happy in his own mind, he will be a greater man than those who fill high stations without ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... overthrow of autocracy. Feudalism and monarchical autocracy fell in western Europe before the might of a powerful rising class. That this class in every case drew to its side the masses and benefited by their co-operation must not be allowed to obscure the fact that in these other countries of all the classes in society the bourgeoisie was the most powerful. It was that fact which established its right to rule in place of the deposed rulers. The Russian middle ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... in another place people of good social position forge false banknotes; in Moscow of late a whole gang has been captured who used to forge lottery tickets, and one of the ringleaders was a lecturer in universal history; then our secretary abroad was murdered from some obscure motive of gain.... And if this old woman, the pawnbroker, has been murdered by someone of a higher class in society—for peasants don't pawn gold trinkets—how are we to explain this demoralisation of the civilised part ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... are quite desolate and untenanted. Here, to the geologist, there were scenes of high interest, showing successive changes and complicated disturbances. According to my views, St. Helena has existed as an island from a very remote epoch: some obscure proofs, however, of the elevation of the land are still extant. I believe that the central and highest peaks form parts of the rim of a great crater, the southern half of which has been entirely removed by the waves of the sea: there is, moreover, an external wall of black basaltic rocks, like ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... activity, and which was learning to regard with steadier view the problems it had hitherto shirked. He could not change the direction nature had given to his thoughts, and prepossession would in some degree obscure his judgment where the merits and trustworthiness of a man in Peak's circumstances called for scrutiny; but self-respect guarded him against vulgar artifices, and a fine sensibility made it improbable that he would become the victim of any man in ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... almost resolved to give up the search as fruitless, I perceived a volume lying in an obscure corner of the room. I opened it. It was a charming print; the letters were almost as large as the type of the Family Bible. In the first page I looked into I saw the name of my favourite Ishmael, whose face I knew so well from the tapestry, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of uncertain and obscure existence did the moths lead for many years in Liberty Forest. There were no insect folk in the whole country that were so scarce, and they would have remained quite harmless and powerless had they not, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... proverbially attributed by Castilian authors to a certain Juanito or Jack, (perhaps an offshoot of our giant-killing mythus,) his name will still remain one of the most illustrious of modern times. But the impartial historian owes a duty likewise to obscure merit, and my solicitude to render a tardy justice is perhaps quickened by my having known those who, had their own field of labour been less secluded, might have found a readier acceptance with the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... will go, especially Loudon will, at a winged rate. They are understood to be approaching Sagan Country; happily, as yet, well to westward of it, and from Sagan Town well NORTH-westward;—but all accounts of them are vague, dim: they are an obscure entity to Friedrich, but a vitally important one. Sagan Town may be about 70 miles northward of where Friedrich now is: from Sagan, were they once in the meridian of Sagan, their road is free eastward and northward;—to Crossen is about 60 miles north-by-east from ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that the cup of the larynx subtly changes its shape for each tone produced, makes the hitherto obscure subject of registers of the voice, which many writers have written around but none about, perfectly clear. The cup assumes what may be called a generic shape for each register, and then goes through subtle adjustments of shape for the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... stupendous sequence, age on age, Thro' storm and peace, thro' shine and gloom, thro' warm And pregnant periods of teeming birth, And seething realms of thunderous overthrow,— In the obscure and formless dawn of life, In gradual march from simple to complex, From lower to higher forms, and last to Man Through faint prophetic fashions,—stands declared The God of order and unchanging purpose. Creation, which He covers, Him contains, Even to the least up-groping atom. His The ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... this paradise on earth, there is a criminal class—not very terrible, but, legally, a criminal class. It seems that a portion of the old, restless, warrior-spirit must have trickled along in obscure by-ways of the sanguineous system of many of these people, for among the youths of each generation several thousand out of the whole population (residing on a hundred islands, large and small), would, despite every effort of their elders, become unmanageable. These—after each young man had been ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... well as the virtues of the honest man. The oath is a mask that falsehood puts on, and for a moment is mistaken for truth. It gives to dishonesty the advantage of solemnity. The tendency of the oath is to put all testimony on an equality. The obscure rascal and the man of sterling character both "swear," and jurors who attribute a miraculous quality to the oath, forget the real difference in the men, and give about the same weight to the evidence of each, because ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... we come to understand many things which otherwise abide obscure and utterly unknown, because this doctrine is accompanied with the Holy Ghost, that revealer of secrets, and searcher of the deep things of God (1 Peter 1:2; Eph 1:17; 1 Cor 2). The Holy Ghost comes down with this doctrine as that in which it alone delighteth; therefore is it called 'the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... arose from some obscure corner and placed a chair for her near the head of Ishmael's bed on his ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... thrilled to hear of this heroic being. They entreated Isabelle to have him visit her, but she assured them that it was out of the question. This superman, this leader of society and Wall Street, could never find time to visit so obscure a spot. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... journey, and carried with him an increasing weight of honour: he has deposited it safely where misfortune can not tarnish it; where malice can not blast it. Favoured of heaven, he departed without exhibiting the weakness of humanity; magnanimous in death, the darkness of the grave could not obscure his brightness. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... had endeavoured to break free from that strong but unseen influence, but she always became weak and easily led as soon as she fell beneath the extraordinary power which the obscure doctor possessed. Time after time he called her to his side, as on this occasion, on pretence of prescribing for her, and yet with an ulterior motive. Enid Orlebar was a useful tool in the hands of this man who was ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... clear, flexible treatment of the recitation is offered in this volume. We feel that it will be particularly welcome to the practical teacher since so many previous treatments of this subject have been formal or obscure. Combining the training of a psychologist with the experience of a class teacher, Professor Betts has given us a lucid, helpful, and common-sense treatment of the recitation without falling into ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... Robert's ideas were expanding and he was rapidly growing more fastidious. He instinctively felt that he was about to turn a new leaf in his book of life and to enter on new scenes, in which he was to play a less obscure part than had been his hitherto in the little ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... about everything in it. The furniture is nothing to speak of, and the bed, which is called a catre, closely resembles a tressled apple-stall with a canvas tray. When not in use, the catre is shut up and whisked away into an obscure corner. When required for sleeping purposes, it is opened, and the bed having been 'made' with a couple of sheets and a pillow, it is planted in a cool place, which often happens to be the centre ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... of this plan. But whatever may be its advantages or inconveniences, the method adopted in this work is such, that a young pupil, who should occasionally recur to it, with a view to procure information on particular subjects, might often find it obscure or unintelligible; for its various parts are so connected with each other as to form an uninterrupted chain of facts and reasonings, which will appear sufficiently clear and consistent to those only who may have patience to go through the whole work, ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master as it has been irksome to have had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... mankind, promised to introduce him to a really lovable old character. Of this man Des Hermies spoke much, and one day he said, "You really ought to know him. He likes the books of yours which I have lent him, and he wants to meet you. You think I am interested only in obscure and twisted natures. Well, you will find Carhaix really unique. He is the one Catholic with intelligence and without sanctimoniousness; the one poor man with ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... that action begins with reality only, though our thoughts be never so large and disinterested and admirable in themselves. 'For all that goes to build up what is truly our destiny is contained in those of our thoughts which, hurried along by the mass of ideas still obscure, indistinct, incomplete, have had strength sufficient—or been forced, it may be—to turn into facts, into gestures, into feelings and habits. We do not imply by this that the other thoughts should be neglected. Those that surround our actual life ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... about the dinner at the Dallas house will always be obscure to me. Dallas was something in the Fish Commission, and I remember his reeling off fish eggs in billions while we ate our caviar. He had some particular stunt he had been urging the government to for years—something about forbidding ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to be rather too vague and obscure to warrant the inference drawn from it. This also may ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... invariable good luck,—scarcely has he started this little shack than the bridge upon the highway burns down and the obscure country road becomes a thoroughway for automobiles. Pee-wee reaps a large profit from his business during the ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... person whom he pursued with any especial hatred was Probus; whom from the first moment that he saw him he never ceased to threaten, and to whom he never softened; and the causes of this animosity against him were not obscure nor trivial. When Probus first obtained the rank of prefect of the praetorium, the power of which he was continually labouring to extend by all kinds of means (I wish I could say by all lawful means), he forgot ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... certain respect indigent of the things to which it is related. It has therefore, if it be lawful so to speak, an ultimate vestige of indigence, just as on the contrary matter has an ultimate echo of the unindigent, or a most obscure and debile impression of the one. And language indeed appears to be here subverted. For so far as it is the one, it is also unindigent, since the principle has appeared to subsist according to the most unindigent and the one. At the same time, however, so far as it is the one, it is ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... made a certain figure in the House of Commons, but it has been explained to me by a person who knows him well. He was originally a merchant, and had a quantity of counting-house knowledge. He became member of a club of political economists, and a scholar of M'Culloch's. In this club there were some obscure but very able men, and by them he got crammed with the principles of commerce and political economy, and from his mercantile connections he got facts. He possessed great industry and sufficient ability to work up the materials he thus ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... would be altogether stunning," suggested Betty judicially, her head on one side, "if you cocked it just a little further over one eye so as to obscure the ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... cruising four-wheeler overhauled her. In its obscure and stuffy refuge she sat hugging her precious canvas and pondering ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... did not move fast enough. Their only other arms seemed to be bows and arrows. The march was a very weary one, and through a wild, mountainous country which would have been impassable for men who did not know it thoroughly. Occasionally they seemed to be following obscure paths, but as often there was no sign of a track, and the thick, tropical vegetation made progress difficult. For an hour or two they climbed up the half-dry bed of a mountain torrent, and more than once they were ankle-deep ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... winter by killing deer. In consequence of this behaviour, and the expression of his countenance, I requested him to leave us, and to go to the southward by himself. This proposal increased his ill-nature, he threw out some obscure hints of freeing himself from all restraint on the morrow{47}; and I overheard him muttering threats against Hepburn, whom he openly accused of having told stories against him. He also, for the first time, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... the militia-like aspect of the array, wonderfully irregular as are its members in stature and style. Pennsylvania's pavilion, costing forty thousand dollars, or half as much as the United States building, plays the leading grenadier well; but little Delaware, not content with the obscure post of file-closer, swells at the opposite end of the line into dimensions of ninety by seventy-five feet, with a cupola that, if placed at Dover, would be visible from half ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of these livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the vault of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy's sake or for the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... of the summer-house, "these great volcanoes of wealth, always in eruption, always squirting out town houses, country houses, butlers, chefs, under-chefs, diamonds, lady's-maids, horses, carriages, seaside gardens, thousand-acre poultry-yards, private sidewalks, and clouds of money which obscure the sun, daze my eyes and amaze my soul! John Gayther, I wish you would send me one of your turnip-hoers; I want him to take my second-best shoes ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... creative art, but we must nip in the bud our dreams of discovering it. If the critics take up a scientific attitude no good will come of it: they will waste a dozen years, write a lot of rubbish, make the subject more obscure than ever—and nothing more. It is always a good thing to think scientifically, but the trouble is that scientific thinking about creative art will be bound to degenerate in the end into searching for the "cells" or the "centres" which control the creative faculty. Some stolid German will ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... failed, and perverted that of other men. But Michael Angelo is great enough to make praise and blame alike necessary, and alike inadequate, in any true record of him. My friend sees him as a traveler sees from a distance some noble mountain range, obscure in golden clouds and purple shade; and I see him as a sullen miner would the same mountains, wandering among their precipices through chill of storm and snow, and discerning that their strength was perilous and their substance sterile. Both of us see truly, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... made trouble—the very worst kind of trouble. He descended on Bridgeport and completely overwhelmed poor Miss Sara in his wrath. He laughed at the idea of countenancing an engagement between a child like Marcella and an obscure country doctor. And he ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... thy pride forgot, like Nature pass Into the winter night's extinguished mood? Canst thou shine now, then darkle, And being latent, feel thyself no less? As, when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye, The river, hill, stems, foliage are obscure, Yet ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... serious, for every eulogium that was bestowed upon them. He could not stand aloof as entirely as he or even his friends desired, since it was usual with some members of the Society to seek from him elucidations of obscure passages which, without these, it was declared, would be a stumbling-block to future readers. But he disliked being even to this extent drawn into its operation; and his help was, I believe, less and less frequently invoked. Nothing could be more false than ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Packard's boot factory, at a dance. Struck by her skill in dancing, he courted her in the larrikin fashion. At night he stood in front of the house, and whistled till she came out. Then they went to the park, where they sprawled on the grass in obscure corners. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... accurate theological exposition of doctrines which are the life of Christianity and which make up the soul of the Christian religion.... A profound work, but so far from being dark, obscure, and of metaphysical difficulty, the meaning of each paragraph ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... who never could be taught anything—I very much doubt whether the dunces of this world are not the very happiest people in it—Yes, Clara; leave to others the vain and empty distinctions of literary renown, which is but a bubble, and be happy in the homely path of obscure ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... I brought you here and related you the history of your family. Later you shall know still more therefrom, that is yet secret and obscure before you. Now look once more around you, and ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... dwelling. He had reached it without remarking the streets through which he passed, without knowing how he had come; he pushed open the door, continued to advance, and ascended the staircase. The staircase, as in most of the houses at that period, was very dark, and the landings most obscure. Raoul lived on the first floor; he paused in order to ring. Olivain appeared, took his sword and cloak from his hands; Raoul himself opened the door which, from the ante-chamber, led into a small salon, richly furnished enough for the salon of a young man, and completely ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... called them, were waiting to weave into the warp and woof of life a pattern which would never fade; Amboise, where an end was to come—he had forgotten to ask Commines what end—an end which in some obscure way was to serve Commines and serve France. "If I lift a finger he hangs," said the King. That, no doubt, was the human slime of the gutter who had roused Commines' contempt, and yet who was his passport to the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... which were a witness of that joy Remained in their substantial lineaments 600 Depicted on the brain, and to the eye Were visible, a daily sight; and thus By the impressive discipline of fear, By pleasure and repeated happiness, So frequently repeated, and by force 605 Of obscure feelings representative Of things forgotten, these same scenes so bright, So beautiful, so majestic in themselves, Though yet the day was distant, did become Habitually dear, and all their forms 610 And changeful colours by ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... was the author. His "Leonard and Gertrude" was read by every cottage fireside, while Froebel's writings were intelligible only to his disciples. Pestalozzi had an exuberant imagination and delightful directness and simplicity of expression; Froebel's style was labored and obscure, and his doctrines may be better known through the "Child and Child Nature" of the Baroness Marenholz von Buelow than through his own "Education ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... earth, but with a suddaine flight, They spread this Ile, and as Deucalion once Ouer his shoulder backe, by throwing stones They became men, euen so these beasts became, Owners of titles from an obscure name. He that by riot, of a mighty rent, Hath his late goodly Patrimony spent, And into base and wilfull beggery run This man as he some glorious acte had done, With some great pension, or rich guift releeu'd, 80 When he that hath by industry ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... seems to have been done with Merodach's net—probably it was placed in the heavens as a constellation, as was his bow, to which several names were given. Later on, the winds were bound and assigned to their places, but the account of the arrangement of other things is mutilated and obscure, though it can be recognised that the details in this place ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... and Sweden. The effect of German philosophy has been to develop intense intellectual activity. The habit of searching into the hidden mysteries of being has inclined the German mind to what is deepest, and sometimes to what is most obscure in thought; and the tendency to rise to the absolute, which is characteristic of this philosophy, manifests its influence not only in the blending of poetry and metaphysics, but in every department of science, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... "of an aged man of no plebeian mien or bearing, albeit most shabbily attired in the skins, now fabulously cheap, of the vermin that torment us; who, professing to practise as an herbalist, some little time ago established himself in an obscure street of no good repute. A tortoise hangs in his needy shop, nor are stuffed alligators lacking. Understanding that he was resorted to by such as have need of philters and love-potions, or are incommoded by the longevity of parents and uncles, ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... the genuine anecdote be contrasted with this. The person thus represented as being harshly treated, though a very celebrated lady[1054], was then just come to London from an obscure situation in the country. At Sir Joshua Reynolds's one evening, she met Dr. Johnson. She very soon began to pay her court to him in the most fulsome strain. "Spare me, I beseech you, dear Madam," was his reply. She still laid it on. "Pray, Madam, let us have no more of this;" he rejoined. Not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... matters not whether the sun actually sinks behind the hills, or the hills interpose between it and us; whether the landscape recedes from our view, or the shades of night intercept so as to obscure our vision. The habit of thought is the same, and the form of expression must agree with it. We say the sun rises and sets, in reference to the obvious fact, without stopping to inquire whether it really moves or not. Nor is such an ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... the authors of the proviso being aware of the uses to which the fund would be applied, but causing its insertion for the purpose of preventing its erection from being attributed to the influence of Mr. Adams. To such disreputable subterfuges party spirit can condescend, to gratify malignity, or to obscure merit from the knowledge of the world, to the power of which it is ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... great deal of evidence adduced in recent years by students of abnormal psychology concerning the results of the frustration of native desires. When the individual is "balked" in respect to particular impulses or desires, these may take furtive and obscure fulfillments; they may play serious though obscure and unnoticed havoc with a man's whole mental life. Unfulfilled desires may give rise to various forms of "complex," distortions of thought, action, and emotion ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... between good spelling in Queen Anne's time and good spelling now are never of a kind to obscure the sense of a word, or lessen the enjoyment of the reader, it has been thought better to make the reproduction perfect, and thus show not only what Steele and Addison wrote, but how they spelt, while restoring to their style the proper harmony of their own methods of punctuating, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... advances of a young friend of his own, in his own drawing-room, he himself remaining present and apparently taking no notice; the younger man was astonished, but accepted the situation. In such a case, when the motives that led up to the episode are obscure, we must not too hastily assume that masochism or even mixoscopy is involved. For information on some of the points mentioned above see, e.g., I. Bloch, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, pp. 200 et seq.; Teil II, pp. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... prisoners to go away on their parole in American vessels, Mr. Aken, who still remained at the hospital, conceived hopes that his might pass amongst the rest, if he applied. In this notion I encouraged him, since my own prospects were so obscure; and recommended that his plea should turn wholly upon his long-continued ill health, and to say nothing of his connexion with me. The application was made accordingly; and on the 7th, he came to the Garden ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... cruel taunt. The wonder is not that colored persons do not more generally visit our sanctuaries, but that they ever should attend. If they go, they are thrust into obscure, remote and unseemly pens or boxes, as if they were not embraced in the offers of redeeming love, and were indeed a part of the brute creation. It is an awful commentary upon the pride of human nature. I never can look up to these scandalous retreats ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... was in fact—drunk. It's disgraceful to be drunk, but there was some excuse. Now I tell you, sir" (all through his story he was always making use of that expression, it seemed to infuse fresh spirit into him, to help his memory in obscure places, to give him the mastery of his emotions; it was like the piece of paper a nervous man holds in his hand to help him through a speech), "there never was a man with a finer soul than my friend Dalton. He was not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... differences, united in the joint settlements of Eryx and Egesta. We hear of Podalerius both in Italy and on the coast of Caria; of Acamas, son of Theseus, at Amphipolus in Thrace, at Soli in Cyprus, and at Synnada in Phrygia; of Guneus, Prothous, and Eurypylus, in Crete as well as in Libya. The obscure poem of Lycophron enumerates many of these dispersed and expatriated heroes, whose conquest of Troy was indeed a "Cadmean" victory (according to the proverbial phrase of the Greeks), wherein the sufferings ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... May, 1749, Boyse died in obscure lodgings near Shoe Lane. An old acquaintance of his endeavoured to collect money to defray the expenses of his funeral, so that the scandal of being buried by the parish might be avoided. But his endeavours were in vain, for the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the reader will be most inclined to adopt will perhaps be either that of Mr. Hallam, "Concise and energetic in expression, reduced to those short aphorisms which leave much to the reader's acuteness and yet save his labour, not often obscure, and never wearisome, an evident generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of profundity; they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the world, and must be read ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... bank of clouds rolled up to obscure somewhat the light of the moon. This was what Kid Wolf had been waiting for. It was ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... result of the expansion of the cattle population; desertification; limited natural fresh water resources natural hazards: periodic droughts; seasonal August winds blow from the west, carrying sand and dust across the country, which can obscure visibility international agreements: party to - Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Law of the Sea, Nuclear Test Ban, Ozone Layer Protection; signed, but not ratified ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... scene of so much desperate fighting. The roads that sidled off to the east bore battle names, St. Mihiel, Troyon, and the road that we followed was still marked at every turn with the magic word "Verdun." Our immediate objective was Souilly, the obscure hill town twenty miles, perhaps, south of the front, from which Sarrail had defended Verdun in the Marne days and from which Petain was now defending Verdun against a still more ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... all the power of Jesus' life, and has the other side, too. It means the wilderness, the intense temptation. It may mean the obscure village of Nazareth for you. It may mean that first Judean year for you—lack of appreciation. It may mean for you that last six months—the desertion of those hitherto friendly. It will mean without doubt a Gethsemane. Everybody who comes along after Jesus has a Gethsemane in ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... kings and rulers of the earth have received it as good and sure in every point. But that of the Galileans was preached by some country peasants, poor and common men, a mere handful, not exceeding twelve in number. How then should one prefer the preaching of these few obscure countrymen to the ordinance of the many that are mighty and brilliantly wise? What is the proof that your teachers be right and the ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... it farther, Mr. Colleton—I would not willingly hear of it again. It is enough that you are now free from all such danger—enough that all things promise well for the future. Let not any thought of past evil, or of risk successfully encountered, obscure the prospect—let no thought of me produce an emotion, hostile, even for a ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... parched and scanty harvest. The Germans too often justify the unfriendly definition of an aphorism as a form of speech, that wraps up something quite plain in words that turn it into something very obscure. As old Fuller says, the writers have a hair hanging to the nib of their pen. Their shortness does not prevent them from being tiresome. They recall the French wit to whom a friend showed a distich: "Excellent," he said; "but isn't it rather ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... these words had, year after long year, been existing in some obscure cell at the back of my brain!—forgotten but all the while existing, like the trunk in that cupboard. What released them, what threw open the cell door, was nothing but the fragment of a fan; just the butt-end of an inexpensive fan. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... and from England's preference for us who spoke her language and thought her thoughts about liberty, law, what a man should be, what a woman should be, issued the Monroe Doctrine. And you will find that no matter what dynastic or ministerial interruptions have occurred to obscure this recognition of kinship with us and preference for us upon the part of the English people, such interruptions are always temporary and lie always upon the surface of English sentiment. Beneath the surface the recognition ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... symptoms of liver diseases are more obscure than in the small animals. In certain parasitic diseases and in mixed and specific infectious diseases, the liver may show ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... was done by Lincoln and one that was to have an immediate effect upon the course of the war. This was the appointment of General Ulysses S. Grant to the position of Commander in Chief of the Union forces. General Grant, like Lincoln, came from obscure beginnings. He had volunteered his services at the beginning of the war, and had won his way upward through sheer merit. On the Fourth of July, 1863, he had captured the Southern city of Vicksburg, while General Meade in the same year beat the Confederates decisively ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... line, as heir to the throne of David; St. Luke gives the natural descent. Thus, the real father of Salathiel was heir of the house of Nathan, but the childless Jeconiah (Jer. 22:30) was the last lineal representative of the elder kingly line. The omission of some obscure names and the symmetrical arrangement, into tesseradecads were common Jewish customs. It is not too much to say that after the labors of Mill (On the Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, pp. 147-217) ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the fact that the divine is in some image in every created thing, but is less and less manifest with the descent over degrees, and still less when a lower degree, parted from the higher by being closed, is also choked with earthy matter. These concepts cannot but seem obscure unless one has read and understood what was shown in the treatise Divine Love and Wisdom about the spiritual sun (nn. 83-172), about degrees (nn. 173-281) and about the creation of the ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... poor fellow, was long since dead of his dragging ailment. His old father was dead, too, the house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a boarding-house, and the shifting life of New York had passed its rapid sponge over every trace of their obscure little history. Even the optimistic McCarren seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of seeking for proof in ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... to this request; all was profoundly silent. Frank, however, was determined to fathom the mystery; accordingly, he began a careful search throughout the cellar, and finally discovered in an obscure corner an iron door, which was secured on the outside by a bolt—to draw back this bolt and throw open this door, was but the work of a moment; and our hero was about to enter the cell thus revealed, when ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... name is Iyaghchi Eennu Sepe, or the River of the Blackfeet, literally the "River of the Strange People." The lake itself bears the same name, and even now is never called Slave Lake by the Indians in their own tongue. This fact, to my mind, casts additional light upon an obscure prehistoric question, namely, the migration of the great Algic, or Algonquin, race. Its early home was, perhaps, in the far south, or south-west, whence it migrated around the Gulf of Florida, and eastward along the Atlantic coast, spreading up its bays and inlets, and along its ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... There are four successive archivolts, one within the other, forming the great central entrance of St. Mark's. The first is a magnificent external arch, formed of obscure figures mingled among masses of leafage, as in ordinary Byzantine work; within this there is a hemispherical dome, covered with modern mosaic; and at the back of this recess the other three archivolts follow consecutively, two sculptured, one plain; the one with which ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Our vile and obscure prison, termed The Dungeon, is a farther proof how little that prison has been an object of ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... Precision or clearness demands the precise value and meaning of words. It requires that words have the power of denotation. It appeals to the intellect of the reader or listener and demands that language be neither vague nor ambiguous nor obscure. Energy or force demands that perfect form have the quality of emotion. It requires that words have especially the power of connotation. It appeals to the emotions of the reader or listener and has ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... then directed their steps towards the street-door, the one conducting the other. The counsellor, having reached the last step, lighted a little lantern to guide him through the obscure streets of Quiquendone, which Doctor Ox had not yet lighted. It was a dark October night, and a light ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... considering the struggles of men who have risen from obscure positions in life, by the aid of their own genius, industry, and courage, to the front rank of their respective callings. We shall now relate the story of one who having already won fortune, periled it all upon an enterprise in which his ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the vast city whose population now approximates four millions is obscure. It was a British settlement before the Romans came to England, and its name of Llyn Dyn, the "City of the Lake," was transformed by the conquerors into Londinium. When Caesar crossed the Thames he thought the settlement of too little importance for mention, and it does not seem ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... delightful a consciousness of novelty and freedom as any boy coming to seek his fortune. Chatty's feelings were all very mild in comparison with her mother's. She was greatly pleased to see the clouds clear off, and the humid sweetness of the skies, which even the breath of the great city did not obscure. "After all, Theo will have a nice evening for his drive home," she said, unexcited. Though it was all very agreeable, Chatty did not know of anything that might await her in town. She knew more or less, she believed, what awaited her,—a few parties, a play ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Zanzibar. That this brilliant affair did not come off is owing to my own lack of enterprise; for I did not want to go across the continent, and I do not hanker after Zanzibar, but only to go puddling about obscure districts in West Africa after raw fetish and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... mode; others, whose garments bespoke direst poverty. There were women, too, whose costume emulated the classic drapery of the ancients, and who displayed, in their looped togas, no niggard share of their forms; while others, in shabby mourning, sat in obscure corners, not noticing the scene before them, nor noticed themselves. A strange equipage, with two horses extravagantly bedizened with rosettes and bouquets, stood at the door; and as I looked, a pale, haggard-looking man, whose foppery in dress contrasted oddly with his care-worn expression, hurried ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... on the departure from usage by the Austro-Hungarian press in prominently reporting the remarks of the most obscure Serbian newspapers, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... the outer gate and crossed the thronged courts of el-Azhar, he meditated on the old man's words. What did they mean? What had his eyes seen? Locked away in his obscure cell in the centre of the Moslem university-mosque, how could he know what was going to happen in the great countries of Europe? He would find it difficult, no doubt, to assign to England her correct position ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... of any particular sum of money, we sometimes mean nothing but the metal pieces of which it is composed, and sometimes we include in our meaning some obscure reference to the goods which can be had in exchange for it, or to the power of purchasing which the possession of it conveys. Thus, when we say that the circulating money of England has been computed at eighteen millions, we mean only to express ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be possible, by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope, to know whether its owner could be insulted with impunity. He then became more and more obscure, so that I was obliged to give up all attempt at translation; neither did I follow the drift of his argument. On coming to the next part which I could construe, I found that he had ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... no greater size than that of the mirror; the zone which it illuminates has precisely the same dimensions, at whatever distance, and, unless we employ a number of similar reflectors differently inclined, there will be a number of large spaces in the horizon completely obscure, from which the pilot will never see any signal whatever. This serious objection has been removed by imparting, by means of clock-work, a uniform rotatory motion to the reflector. The collection of rays proceeding from the mirror is thus directed to all the points of ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... a play with words unworthy the writer, to make Satan, who possessed all the seven, himself an 'eighth', and still worse if 'the eighth': 2. that it is not only a great and causeless inconcinnity in style, but a wanton adding of obscurity to the obscure to have, first, so carefully distinguished (c. xiii. 1-11.) the [Greek: drakon] from the two [Greek: thaeria], and the one [Greek: thaerion] from the other, and then to make [Greek: thaerion] the appellative of the [Greek: drakon]: ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... The anxiety of the servants to preserve their incognito, the carriage without blazon, the obscure place where it was drawn up, and the advanced hour of the night, all inspired the chevalier with a sentiment of mistrust; but reflecting that he gave his arm to a woman, and had a sword ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... against a particular disease, in a quite specific fashion, in the same way that an antidote acted against a specific poison; second, the effectiveness was a matter of direct experience, based on empirical observation; and third, the mode of action remained relatively obscure, but nevertheless the medicines did not seem to behave as did the so-called "Galenicals." Thus, whether they acted by "sympathy," or by a special hidden virtue, or by a peculiar microcosmic energy, we cannot say. But the fact remains that many people asserted the specific effectiveness[66] of this ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... Chase, by Lichfield and Leicester, they rode, finding hospitality at many a great house on the way, rather to the dismay of Sarah, who would have preferred the accommodation of some modest inn, and who marvelled not a little that her husband, the obscure artist, should be known to and welcomed by such great folk. But was he not her hero, one of "Nature's gentlemen," and as such the equal of any man ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... had also within him a secret fanaticism that was very old, a fatalism, obscure, and cruel, and strange, a lack of scruple that would have revolted almost any Englishman who could have understood it, an occasional childishness, rather Egyptian than Turco-Egyptian, and a quick and instinctive subtlety that came ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... lines would be present, and would mix with outsiders, who should be admitted only on payment of a certain sum of money. The commonplace inhabitants of this country could thus meet the truly great; and if I know them well, as I think I do, they'll pay readily for the privilege. The obscure love to rub up against the famous here as well as they do ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... the hard face of earth the sun's bright hue Not yet its veil obscure and dark did rend; The Lycaonian offspring scarcely through The furrows of the sky his ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... sand; but, to the amazement of the lads, instead of this being smooth and wind-swept, as that of their own place when they first discovered it, the floor was covered with footmarks leading from the mouth inward to where the great cave grew dim and obscure. There were sails, too, and ropes. Several small yards and spars lay together by the side of the wall, and farther in were sails ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... [5067]Castilio noteth, in the night, Diem ut glis odit, taedarum lucem super omnia mavult, she hateth the day like a dormouse, and above all things loves torches and candlelight, and if she must come abroad in the day, she covets, as [5068]in a mercer's shop, a very obfuscate and obscure sight. And good reason she hath for it: Nocte latent mendae, and many an amorous gull is fetched over by that means. Gomesius lib. 3. de sale gen. c. 22. gives instance in a Florentine gentleman, that was so deceived with a wife, she was so radiantly set out with rings and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... understand that. For Auchincloss, in this will, read Hazen; but how about her husband? How about her friends and the general community? Do you not think they will ask why a beautiful and socially well-placed young woman like your sister should leave so large a portion of her wealth to an obscure man in another town, of whom her friends and even her business agent have never heard? It would have been better if she had left you her ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... frame,—will he maintain that such an untiring and persistent mental activity as this is incapable of apprehending the first principles of ethics and natural religion, which, in comparison with the complicated and obscure ratiocinations of Boodhism, are clear as water, and lucid as atmospheric air? In other connections, this theorist does not speak in this style. In other connections, and for the purpose of exaggerating natural ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... speaks not well who doth his time deplore, Naming it new and a little obscure, Ignoble and unfit for lofty deeds. All times were modern in the time of them, And this no more than others. Do thy part Here in the living day, as did the great Who made ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... of Nature's obscure and cheerless jokes; and in this instance, as in some few others, she is beyond Art. She even assists the illusion by a very slight depression of the plain in the right place. In fact, an artist's picture of a mirage would be his picture of a level-brimmed, unruffled lake; also, the most skilful ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... whole: it has no meaning piecemeal; at any rate, not that best, wholesome meaning, as of a frank and genial friend who talks, not for himself or for his phrase, but for you. It is questionable morals to dismember a living frame to seek for its obscure fountains ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... to an obscure story, he was offered the continuance of his employment, and, being pressed by his wife to accept it, answered: "You, like other women, want to ride in your coach; my wish is to live and die an honest man." If he considered the Latin secretary ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... we were likely to be favoured with weather fine enough to permit of our pursuing our voyage under the most favourable conditions. This symptom of approaching change merely consisted in the gathering in the heavens of a thin veil of mottled, fine-weather cloud, just dense enough to obscure most of the lesser stars and render the night rather dark, while a few of the brighter stars peeped through the openings between the clouds at tolerably frequent intervals, permitting us to steer our course without having recourse ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... third place, notwithstanding all the diligence of Casaubon, Stelluti, and a Scotch gentleman whom I have heard extremely commended for his illustrations of him, yet he is still obscure; whether he affected not to be understood but with difficulty; or whether the fear of his safety under Nero compelled him to this darkness in some places, or that it was occasioned by his close way of thinking, and the brevity of his style and crowding of his ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... known it. It had returned to that aspect. But something had gone from it for ever. It was not, and never could be again, as once we had known it. The security of our own place had been based on the goodwill or indifference of our fellow-creatures everywhere. To-night, over that obscure and unimportant street, we had seen a celestial portent illuminate briefly a little of the future ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... I have had more cooking than usual," and with this she delivered another point-blank look as before, and dived into the palpable obscure, and came to light in ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... Amarkantak hill in the north-west corner of the division, the Nerbudda flowing nearly due west to the Bombay coast, the Sone ultimately falling into the Ganges in Lower Bengal. Protected on both sides by ranges of hills, the district was, until late years, the least known portion of the most obscure division of India, but recently it has been opened up by the Bengal-Nagpur railway, and has developed into a great grain-producing country. Its population is almost pure Hindu, except in the two great tracts of hill and forest, where the aboriginal tribes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... from the public eye longer than he thought was suitable to the success of his career. He particularly disliked obscurity for he had found that in his case obscurity had meant comparative poverty. An obscure man, as he observed early in life, had nothing to sell. Now, Undy had once had something to sell, and a very good market he had made of it. He was of course anxious that those halcyon days should return. Fond of him as the electors ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... wind. I do not know, indeed, why the Committee have changed the phrase "male inhabitant or citizen," which is uniformly used in a constitutional clause limiting the elective franchise. Under the circumstances, the word "man" is obscure, and undoubtedly includes women as much as the word "mankind." But the intention of the clause is evident, and the report of the Committee makes it indisputable. Had they been willing to say directly what they say indirectly, the eighth line and what follows would read, "Provided that idiots, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Cemetery is likely to prove immortal, was worthy to be compared with Poe; and another, Paul Hamilton Hayne, certainly deserved a higher rank and a better fortune than either of these struggling poets has been accorded. But perhaps the most original writings of the time were those of a certain group of obscure men in Georgia and the lower South. A. B. Longstreet, the author of Georgia Scenes, William Tappan Thompson, of Major Jones's Courtship, and Joseph B. Baldwin, of Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi, struck a rich vein of ludicrous humor which Mark Twain worked out ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... old-time enemies had not disappeared. No one really liked him,[1261] while party managers, the shadow of whose ill-will never ceased to obscure his chances, shook their heads. Reasons given in 1868 were repeated with greater emphasis, and to prevent his nomination which now seemed imminent, influences that had suddenly made him strong were as quickly withdrawn. It was intimated that the President preferred Woodford, and to defeat ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... paddle-wheel grow in importance and estimation as a means of propulsion only in turn to be supplanted by the screw-propeller, which gradually increased in engineering favor from the days of its obscure infancy until it became the only means employed for the propulsion of ships navigating the high seas, while it had become a most serious rival to the paddle-wheel even for the purposes of interior and shallow-water navigation,—long a field considered as peculiarly suited to the paddle-wheel ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... to fill a gap in weaving literature caused by the neglect of many obscure points connected with the industry. A short review is given of the power-loom as a whole, followed by a description of the different parts of the machinery with their advantages and defects.... The book is severely technical, ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... to which their exposition belongs. Such have been, and are, my convictions, and upon them I shall act. I fervently hope that the question is at rest, and that no sectional or ambitious or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our institutions or obscure the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... pride, and to aggravate their misery. But happiness is exclusively and unalterably attached to the cultivation of the affections,—to the acquisition of moral excellence;—so that it is equally within the reach of every individual, however obscure, or however talented. Few men can be intellectually great,—fewer still can be rich or powerful; but every man may, if he pleases, be good,—and therefore happy. In choosing the subjects and exercises ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... an obscure family, with whom I had lodged during these terrible times. So great was the terror and misery in the city that those who lived envied the dead. It was death to bury even a relative, and both within and without the city lay heaps of bodies, decaying ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... I am confident. No presentation of the facts, however bald and inadequate it be, can obscure the truth that this little book deals with a great and an inspiring literature. It is possible to question whether the books of great Jews always belonged to the great books of the world. There may have ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... life, which interested and amused Fleda to the last degree, Mr. Carleton shewed her many an obscure part of Paris where deeds of daring and of blood had been, and thrilled the little listener's ear with histories of the Past. He judged her rightly. She would rather at any time have gone to walk with him, than with anybody else to see any show that could be devised. His object in all this ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... His obscure rebellion against the power that forced him to drag his love out into the light impelled him to say, without quite knowing why, "Did Thor ever speak of you and ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... even at the most loathsome moments, and which at such moments nearly made me curse. Already even then I had my underground world in my soul. I was fearfully afraid of being seen, of being met, of being recognised. I visited various obscure haunts. ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... proposal, and promising to visit Tchang the following morning, returned to his home. In the evening, when Ming-Y left the house of Tchang, a servant followed him unobserved at a distance. But on reaching the most obscure portion of the road, the boy disappeared from sight as suddenly as though the earth had swallowed him. After having long sought after him in vain, the domestic returned in great bewilderment to the house, and related what had taken place. Tchang immediately ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... thrown up into a prominent position; and it is usually pressed toward the end of the sentence, nearer to the sentence which is its consequence. In a paragraph quoted on page 222, where this same subject is taken up in connection with sentences, there is an excellent illustration of this. "Slow and obscure," "inadequate ideas," "small circle," and the numerous phrases which repeat the thought, though not the words, are firm words binding the sentences ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... endeavour to picture to himself the scene which followed the introduction of the neighbours to this weird and most novel court of inquiry. Imagine the place to be an humble cottage in a remote and obscure hamlet; the judge and jurors, simple unsophisticated rustics; and the witness an invisible, unknown being, a denizen of a world of whose very existence mankind has been ignorant; acting by laws mysterious and inconceivable, in modes utterly ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... with the air of polite interest with which she was wont to receive his obscure sayings; then ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... Scripture had been done by an obscure scribbler, or by an infidel quoting the word of God merely for a purpose, it would not have been matter of such profound astonishment. But is it not unspeakably shocking that a Christian man, nay, that a Christian minister and doctor of divinity, should thus ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the newspapers of that era ought to have at least given me a "puff" for, but they didn't; in fact, I never, like Byron (Lord Byron, I mean), awoke one morning to find myself famous, because my football was that of days long ago, in an obscure (to football, at least) country town; and, besides, the game then was conducted in rather a rude and undignified fashion. Talk about rules, we had those which might, for all I know, have been framed by the "Chief Souter ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... knew nothing of processes that were employed to provoke the hypnotic sleep. As soon as her husband left the house she looked for some book in the library that would enlighten her. But the dictionary that she found gave only obscure or confused instructions in which she floundered. The only exact point that struck her was the method employed to produce sleep; to make the subject look at a brilliant object placed from fifteen to twenty centimetres in front of the eyes. If this were true she had no fear ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... not once outside his native Germany; Haydn left Austria only to make those visits to England which had so important an influence on the later manifestations of his genius: His was a long, sane, sound, and on the whole, fortunate existence. For many years he was poor and obscure, but if he had his time of trial, he never experienced a time of failure. With practical wisdom he conquered the Fates and became eminent. A hard, struggling youth merged into an easy middle-age, and late years found him in comfortable circumstances, with a solid ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... applied only to the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was rejected. For that mass, from earliest childhood until death, there was only toil in squalor—squalid food, squalid clothing, squalid shelter. And when she read one day—in an obscure paragraph in her newspaper—that the income of the average American family was less than twelve dollars a week—less than two dollars and a half a week for each individual—she realized that what she was seeing and living was not ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... with the exception of their pastors, are the only class our rural population know and revere. As to the generality of our statesmen, good, bad, or indifferent, their names, brilliant as they may be, are not half so well known in our villages as that of the most obscure labourer, the humble artizan who knows how to file a saw or make ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... the elements of a style which, under, early discipline, nicer culture, and a richer vocabulary, might have made it a model for all times. There are, here and there, some involved, unfinished, and obscure passages, which seem, indeed, to be the offspring of haste, or perhaps of careless and inadequate proof-reading. But in general his style is without ornament, simple, dignified, concise, and clear. While he was not a diffusive writer, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... misfortune was on the way to obscure the star of Beauregard. His soldiers, elated with their wonderful victory, broke into disorderly plundering of the captured Federal camps. Except for a few thousand sternly disciplined troops under Bragg's command the whole Southern army suddenly ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... looked back upon those scenes of horror and outcry which filled London but a week or two ago, when danger was not confined to night only, and the environs of the capital, but haunted our streets at midday. Here, I could wander over an entire city; stray by the port, and venture through the most obscure alleys, without a single apprehension; without beholding a sky red and portentous with the light of fires, or hearing the confused and terrifying murmurs of shouts and groans, mingled with the reports of artillery. I can assure you, I think ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... be ascertained, is the truth about the arrival of Columbus in Portugal. The early years of an obscure man who leaps into fame late in life are nearly always difficult to gather knowledge about, because not only are the annals of the poor short and simple and in most cases altogether unrecorded, but there is always that instinct, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... people were talking much or little, but she had an obscure desire to shift ever so slightly the ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... This is Keil's ingenious interpretation of an obscure passage. We may compare the English designation of a church yard as "God's acre." What Licinius Crassus actually did was, while haranguing from the rostra, to turn his back upon the Comitium, where the Senators gathered, and address himself directly to the people assembled in the Forum. ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... brought them into the thickest and most obscure part of the forest, when, stealing away into a by-path, they there left them. Little Thumb was not very uneasy at it, for he thought he could easily find the way again by means of his bread, which he had scattered all along as he came; but he was very much surprised when ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... raised the picture to a level with his face, and with bent head and extended neck, appeared to be trying to decipher upon the canvas some microscopic writing or obscure hieroglyphics. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... howe of lithe Myrine (II. 814). We do not know that women were usually buried in howe, but Myrine was a warrior maiden of the Amazons. We know, then, minutely what the Homeric mode of burial was, with such variations as have been noted. We have burning and howe even in the case of an obscure oarsman like Elpenor. It is not probable, however, that every peaceful mechanic had a howe all to himself; he may have had a small family cairn; he may not have had ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall, to which the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change. Deepened in its gravity by the fire-light, and gazing from the darkness of the panelled wall like life, the sedate face in the portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under its verdant ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... the other earliest operas, he played the harpsichord and Haym the violoncello. Dieupart, after the small success of the design set forth in this letter, taught the harpsichord in families of distinction, but wanted self-respect enough to save him from declining into a player at obscure ale-houses, where he executed for the pleasure of dull ears solos of Corelli with the nicety of taste that never left him. He died ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... true—but they could acquire it, with practice. My quality travels ahead of me in the most mysterious way. I write my family name without additions, on the register of this hotel, and imagine that I am going to pass for an obscure and unknown wanderer, but the clerk promptly calls out, 'Front! show his lordship to four-eighty-two!' and before I can get to the lift there is a reporter trying to interview me as they call it. This sort of thing shall cease at once. I will hunt up the American ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... delicate, gentle child. Twelve summers and winters had passed over her little head without a cloud to obscure the sunshine of her life save one—but that one was a terribly dark one, and its shadow lingered over her for many years. When Alice lost her mother, she lost the joy and delight of her existence; and ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... etymological mysteries must be probed. Perhaps the German professors, after the war, can usefully wreak themselves on this complex and obscure research. Meanwhile the above notes are offered not as a serious contribution to a subject so immense, but rather as a warning. The infectiousness of slang is incredible; and this gigantic inter-association of classes and clans has brought about a hitherto unheard-of levelling-down ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... present we are only on the threshold of investigation concerning the physical causes of insanity, and have scarcely done more than recognize the possibility of molecular disease of the brain. Hereafter science will, probably, succeed in unveiling the obscure facts of molecular brain pathology, and enable the medical psychologist to predicate disease of recognized classes of brain elements from the special phenomena of mind disturbance. This is the line of inquiry, and the result, to which the progress ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... only an excellent scholar, but she had the art of imparting knowledge, and, what is very important, she was able in a few luminous words to explain difficulties and make clear what seemed to her pupil obscure. ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... pupil who knows his lesson; nor is evil condemned to an eternal Hell. Both belong together in the sphere of all that is human. Often enough it is seen that evil triumphs over good, while virtue, ever highly praised in words, is rarely practiced. It is set aside to become dusty and dirty in some obscure corner. Only at some opportune moment is it brought forward from its hiding place to serve as a cover for some vile deed. We can no longer believe that beyond and above us there is some irrevocable, irresistible Fate, whose duty it is to punish all evil and wrong and to reward ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... very definite opinion at present," I replied guardedly. "The symptoms are rather obscure and might very well indicate several different conditions. They might be due to congestion of the brain, and, if no other explanation were possible, I should incline to that view. The alternative is some narcotic poison, such as ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... it, as well as the issues and upshot of all things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to history, it seems ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... lady," said De Bracy, "though you may think it lies too obscure for my apprehension. But dream not, that Richard Coeur de Lion will ever resume his throne, far less that Wilfred of Ivanhoe, his minion, will ever lead thee to his footstool, to be there welcomed as the bride of a favourite. Another suitor might feel jealousy while he touched this string; ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... he said, nodding his head. "I've done with larking now." He began rolling up the sleeves of his sweater. For some obscure reason—possibly because his deliberation seemed to connote implacability—this simple action filled her with a terror that she had not known before even in the midst of their ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... Pacific coast a normal girl, obscure and lovely, makes a quest for happiness. She passes through three stages—poverty, wealth and service—and works out ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... been much criticised as being too near to easy journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of English; but this much must be recognised to his great credit—he never wrote an obscure sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his works may be searched in vain for a foreign idiom or even a foreign word. He possessed an infallible memory, absolute perspicuity, and a scholarly taste. He detested oppression wherever enforced, and never ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... either lessen or increase the sterility of self-sterile species; and why the individuals of some species should be even more fertile with pollen from a distinct species than with their own pollen. And so it is with many other facts, which are so obscure that we stand in awe ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... staying in seaside lodgings, I had the misfortune to break a homely vessel of thick blue glass which had evidently begun life as a fancy jam jar, but had been relegated, for some reason obscure to me, to the proud position of mantel 'ornament,' if that be the term. To my surprise the worthy landlady wept bitterly over the pieces, and when I spoke of gorgeous objects wherewith to replace her treasure, explained snappishly: 'Nothing won't make it good to ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... prayers, so that I may imitate many apostolic laborers whom we have had here, and of whom we have at present many, who have come from all those provinces of Espana; they have made and are making gardens pleasant to the sight of God, from the obscure forests which the devil has possessed so many thousands of years and still possesses in these islands. For, as we have been told, there are eleven thousand islands, of which that of Manila is the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... entire neighborhood. The pride seemed to be, not that the new bonnet was a superb affair, but that such a fashionable artist produced it, and that it cost so much money. Had it been equally beautiful at half the cost, or the handiwork of an obscure milliner, it would have been considered mean. Thus, instead of a necessity for being extravagant, it struck me there was a desire to be so, and principally in order that others, when they looked on the display, might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... lib. 2. de causis sympt. 1. For Galen imputeth all to the cold that is black, and thinks that the spirits being darkened, and the substance of the brain cloudy and dark, all the objects thereof appear terrible, and the [2660]mind itself, by those dark, obscure, gross fumes, ascending from black humours, is in continual darkness, fear, and sorrow; divers terrible monstrous fictions in a thousand shapes and apparitions occur, with violent passions, by which the brain and fantasy are troubled and eclipsed. [2661]Fracastorius, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... particular sections of it. "The scope," it has been well observed, "is the soul or spirit of a book; and, that being once ascertained, every argument and every word appears in its right place, and is perfectly intelligible; but if the scope be not duly considered, every thing becomes obscure, however clear and obvious its meaning may really be." Horne's Introduct., vol. 2, p. 265, edit. of 1860. This language is not too strong. It is by a neglect or perversion of the scope that the meaning of the inspired writers is perverted, and they are ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... in, strung up for the occasion. Or the uniform comes forward with Roger inside it. He has been a very ordinary nice boy up to now, dull at his 'books'; by an effort Mr. Torrance had sent him to an obscure boarding-school, but at sixteen it was evident that an office was the proper place for Roger. Before the war broke out he was treasurer of the local lawn tennis club, and his golf handicap was seven; ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... Miss Lady, occupying a dark corner of Mr. Gooch's outer office. Here, with feet hooked under a rung of a stool, and fingers grasping his pompadour, he doggedly wrestled with the cases he heard in court, laboriously puzzling out obscure points by the aid of the ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... dog. When the moon was in the sky, he barked at the moon. When only the stars shone out, he barked at the stars; when clouds shut in both moon and stars, he barked at the clouds; and when the darkness was so deep and black as to obscure even the clouds, he barked at the darkness. Through all the long night he barked, barked, barked! It was not a bark of defiance, nor of alarm, nor of astonishment, nor of warning. It was not a note of danger, breaking the hush of midnight, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... not well who doth his time deplore, Naming it new and a little obscure, Ignoble and unfit for lofty deeds. All times were modern in the time of them, And this no more than others. Do thy part Here in the living day, as did the great Who made ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... as the horses quickened their trot. Heads were stretched out in Gaga's direction; Maria Blond and Tatan Nene turned round and knelt on the seat while they leaned over the carriage hood, and the air was full of questions and cutting remarks, tempered by a certain obscure admiration. Gaga had known her! The idea filled them all with ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... answer that it is what I work at."[4] Again, in reference to J. G. Droysen's Precis of the Science of History, a certain critic expressed an opinion which was meant to be, and was, a commonplace: "Generally speaking, treatises of this kind are of necessity both obscure and useless: obscure, because there is nothing more vague than their object; useless, because it is possible to be an historian without troubling oneself about the principles of historical methodology which ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... northwest is tolerably certain; but to trace their previous wanderings back to Shinar, India, or Persia would be a waste of time, as the necessary data are lacking. Even within their appointed domain the accounts of their early history are too obscure to be accepted as to any ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... are so obscure as not to be intelligible, unless perhaps the passage between Cape Breton Island and Newfoundland is here meant ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... water from the ambrosial fount? Thee, lastly, nuptial bower! by me adorned With what to sight or smell was sweet, from thee How shall I part, and whither wander down Into a lower world, to this obscure And wild? how shall we breathe in other air Less pure, accustomed ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Lady Jane exchanged smiles; and poor crotchety Mr. Adair leaned forward his large, bald brow, obscured by many obscure ideals. After a ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... unrivalled. The Society has issued some twenty-four volumes of its own publications, in addition to numerous essays and addresses. Besides these, its library contains some seventy-three thousand volumes of printed works, chiefly Americana, many of them relating to the Indians and obscure early colonial history. Eight hundred and eleven genealogies of American families—the fountain-head of the national history—are a feature of the collection. The library also possesses one of the best sets of Congressional documents extant, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... roads, and all towns, with suspicious care. But sometimes they paused, for food and rest, at the obscure hostel of some scattered hamlet: though, more often, they loved to spread the simple food they purchased by the way under some thick, tree, or beside a stream through whose limpid waters they could watch the trout glide and ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of this, and the time spent in making circuits round in the woods to avoid parties of the enemy, who were seasonably discovered by the wary guide to be still at work, in several places, in trying to improve some of the worst portions of the road, the progress of our heroine was slow and obscure. And it was not till after a dreary and fatiguing ride of several hours, that she and her attendant began to emerge into the more open ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... morning last August (yes, there was one), I stepped out of my diggings in an obscure Cornish fishing-village to find a gentleman busily engaged strangling a lady on the cliff side. He had her by the throat and was gradually forcing her over the edge. Once in Bristol I interposed in a slogging contest between husband and wife and was very properly chastised ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... in which he was born and brought up. As certain lilies draw their colors from the subtle qualities of the soil hidden beneath the water upon which they float, so are men profoundly affected by the obscure and insensible influences which surround their childhood and youth. The art of the chemist may discover perhaps the secret agent which tints the white flower with blue or pink, but very often the elements, which analysis detects, nature alone can combine. The analogy is not strained ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... his new lodgings, and, in revenge, gave information to the publican. This creditor took out a writ accordingly, and the bailiff had just secured his person, as Captain Crowe and Timothy Crabshaw chanced to pass by the door in their way homewards, through an obscure street, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... what it did. And tharefor, yit agane we say, that such as in that suddane dejectioun beholdis not the hand of God, feghting against pride for fredome of his awin litill flock, injustly persecutted, dois willingly and malitiouslie obscure the glorie of God. But the end thairof ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... Fortune was still against them. A German opera appeared on the bill. Carmina turned to the music-seller in despair. "Is there no music, sir, but German music to be heard in London?" she asked. The hospitable shopkeeper produced a concert programmed for that afternoon—the modest enterprise of an obscure piano-forte teacher, who could only venture to address pupils, patrons, and friends. What did he promise? Among other things, music from "Lucia," music from "Norma," music from "Ernani." Teresa made another approving mark with her ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... the third member of our triangle—perhaps, if I take a moment to outline the events of that evening, the Professor's part in what follows will be less obscure. We had called on him, M. S. and I, at his urgent request. His rooms were in a narrow, unlighted street just off the square, and Daimler himself opened the door to us. A tall, loosely built chap he was, standing in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... of the Babylonians we may now pass to their science—an obscure subject, but one which possesses more than common interest. If the classical writers were correct in their belief that Chaldaea was the birthplace of Astronomy, and that their own astronomical science was derived mainly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... Philosopher. "This course, however, is rarely followed by the fairy people: they do not ordinarily steal for ransom, but for love of thieving, or from some other obscure and possibly functional causes, and the victim is retained in their forts or duns until by the effluxion of time they forget their origin and become peaceable citizens of the fairy state. Kidnapping is not by any means confined to either ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... he could not find out their race: nor did he know from what part of the world they originally came, nor to what country they afterwards betook themselves. I may appear presumptuous in pretending to determine a history so remote and obscure; and which was a secret to this learned Grecian two thousand years ago. Yet this is my present purpose: and I undertake it with a greater confidence, as I can plainly shew, that we have many lights, with which the natives of Hellas were unacquainted; besides many advantages, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... were vain to ask in what remote city, in what fantastic riddle of narrow nameless streets, in what obscure little temple known only to the poorest poor, she waits for the darkness before the Dawn of the Immeasurable Light,—when the Face of the Teacher will smile upon her,—when the Voice of the Teacher will say to her, in tones of sweetness deeper than ever came from human lover's lips:—"O my daughter ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... on the hands of an obscure Clancy, havin' the entertainment of the representative of a great foreign filibusterin' power. I first bought for the general and myself many long drinks and things to eat that were not bananas. The general man trotted along at my side, ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... (Plate X.). A peak 6,000 feet in height rises in the centre of its floor, while a series of terraces diversity its interior slopes; but it is the mysterious bright rays that chiefly surprise us. When the sun rises on Tycho, these streaks are utterly invisible; indeed, the whole object is then so obscure that it requires a practised eye to recognise Tycho amidst its mountainous surroundings. But as soon as the sun has attained a height of about 30 deg. above its horizon, the rays emerge from their obscurity and gradually increase ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... of this relic is unknown, and is as obscure as that of the other 'Relics of the Holy Blood' which are to be found in various places. But there can be no doubt whatever that in the twelfth century the Christians at Jerusalem believed that it had been in existence since the day of the Crucifixion. ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... wrong side; but, contrary to all our expectations, and when we had hardly room to veer, the ship came about, and having filled on the starboard tack, we stood off N.E. Thus we were relieved from the apprehensions of being forced to anchor in a great depth, on a lee shore, and in a dark and obscure night. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... never subscribe for your picture of "Shakspeare's Study." Great intelligence runs quickly through our primers, our cities, constitutions, galleries, traditions, cathedrals, creeds. The long invention of the race is a tortuous, obscure way. Must I creep all my fresh years in that labyrinth, and postpone youth to the end of age? What need of so much experience and contrivance, if without contrivance, if by simplicity, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... is not difficult to understand, although there has arisen a host of commentators to obscure his meaning, although Nietzsche himself delights in expressing himself in the form of cryptic and mystic aphorism, although he continuously contradicts himself. But apart from those difficulties, his ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... according to an obscure story, he was offered the continuance of his employment, and, being pressed by his wife to accept it, answered: "You, like other women, want to ride in your coach; my wish is to live and die an honest man." If he considered the Latin secretary as exercising any of the powers of government, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... without the aid of superstition. But all the same, there was the chance of others having an object in watching us, so every spadeful was thrown out in silence, every word spoken in a whisper. The night came on impenetrably black and obscure, but we worked on, feeling our way lower and lower, taking turn and turn, till once more we stood in the pit we had dug, and commenced groping about with our hands, for the spades told us that we had come to whatever ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity, and some obscure recollections will always remind him of the home ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... The wife's name is interpreted "maid of the god Nebo." It is thought that Gudea reigned in her right. The inscription goes on to say: "Mother I had not, my mother was the water deep. A father I had not, my father was the water deep." The passage is obscure, but it is explained if we regard this as one of the legends of miraculous birth so frequent in primitive societies under mother-descent.[243] Another relic of some interest is an ancient statue of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... show the view Darwin took of his own work, and what it was that he alone claimed to have done, the concluding passage of the introduction to the Origin of Species should be carefully considered. It is as follows: "Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists until recently entertained and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... brooks. During the day the horses were excessively tormented by flies of several kinds, and the numbers of which were almost incredible. They formed, around the caravan, a vast cloud, so thick as to obscure every distant object. The heads, necks, and shoulders of the leading horses were continually covered with blood, the consequence of the attacks of these tormenting insects. Some of them were horse-flies, as large as humble-bees; ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... contained his name in the list of the steamer passengers who arrived that morning. It might meet HER eye, although he had been haunted during the voyage by a terrible fancy that she was still in Europe, and had either hidden herself in some obscure provincial town with the half-crazy Pendleton, or had entered a convent, or even, in reckless despair, had accepted the name and title of some penniless nobleman. It was this miserable doubt that had made his homeward journey at times seem like a cruel ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... parents or his education, surnamed the Cappadocian, was born at Epiphania in Cilicia, in a fuller's shop. From this obscure and servile origin he raised himself by the talents of a parasite; and the patrons, whom he assiduously flattered, procured for their worthless dependent a lucrative commission, or contract, to supply the army with bacon. His employment was mean; he rendered it infamous. He ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... contemporaries and the judgment of historians unite in crediting to William Bradford that rare combination of intelligence and industry, of judicial and executive ability, by which a small and obscure band of persecuted fugitives laid in an unexplored wilderness the foundations of a ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... slumbers; that the animal had been on its way up the ravine,—perhaps seeking shelter from the sand-storm; but what had caused it to return so suddenly back down the slope? Above all, why had it made the downward journey in such a singular manner? Obscure as had been their view of it, they could see that it did not go on all-fours, but apparently tumbling and struggling,—its long limbs kicking about in the air, as if it was performing the descent by ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... some few of the many testimonies in favour of Sir Bartle Frere, because he,—a man beloved and respected by many of us,—was the subject of a hastily formed judgment which continues in a measure even to this day, to obscure the memory of ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... which the outline becomes gradually more definite; one by one, the peaks catch the exquisite Alpine glow, lighting up in rapid succession, like a vast illumination; and when at last the steady sunlight settles upon them, and shows every rock and glacier, without even a delicate film of mist to obscure them, he feels his heart bound, and steps out gaily to the assault—just as the people on the Rigi are giving thanks that the show is over and that they may go to bed. Still grander is the sight when the mountaineer has already reached some lofty ridge, and, as ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... rejoined Abner. "I might"—with the emission of an obscure, self-conscious sound between a chortle and a gasp, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... A cloud is in his head, That doth but show how wisdom's covered With its own mantles, and to stir the mind To a search after what it fain would find. Things that seem to be hid in words obscure, Do but the godly mind the more allure To study what those sayings should contain, That speak to us in such ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... doom pronounced, nor changed a whit his wonted gaiety; but dying, as he had lived, in abandoned luxury, sent under seal to the emperor, in lieu of flatteries, the unblushing record of their common vices. The obscure playwright is no less impressive than the world-renowned historian. While Antonius and Enanthe are picturing to themselves the consternation into which Petronius will be thrown by the emperor's edict, the object of their commiseration presents himself. Briefly dismissing the ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... more obscure than any returned from the oracular tripod at Delphi, the interpretation of which I left to the infatuated Madame d'Urfe, she discovered herself—and I took care not to contradict her—that the Countess Lascaris had gone mad. I encouraged her fears, and succeeded ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for him—poor Tom!—and into his tortured heart there fell a poisonous drop of spiritual pride. Public reprobation applied to a certain order of offences makes a very marketable kind of fame, as the author of Manfred knew very well. David in his small obscure way was supplying another illustration of the principle. For the past year he had been something of a personage in Clough End—having always his wits, his book-learning, his looks, and his ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... men, women and children, schools, clubs, libraries, authors, eds., 936; poets, "cranks," adventurers, 937; let. from child, slave to correspond., "if young women fail, octogenarian will work harder," 938; trib. to obscure women, devoting closing yrs. to permanent fund for wom. suff. and Press Bureau, Hist. Soc. invites to Berkshire, 939; official and pressing invit., she invites natl. suff. com. and other friends, arrang. for family reunion, "Old Hive" swarms, 940; pres. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... not meet Johnny on this particular night was that he had a pressing engagement with other persons. Just at seven o'clock he might have been seen emerging from an obscure street. He hailed a taxi-cab and getting in, drove due north across the river and straight on until, with a sharp turn to the right, he drove two blocks toward the lake, only to turn again to the right and cross the river again. He had ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... speak) a refugee from the other side and, in a sense, a spiritual ancestress of Bolshevism. Miss HARRADEN would however object, and justly, that the clean-purposed conspirators of the earlier revolution had little in common with the unsavoury individuals who at present obscure the Russian dawn. Soon after this, Patuffa's papa begins to go quite dreadfully off the rails, even to the extent of wishing to elope with her governess and eventually losing all his money and shooting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... "Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles". Cyclopoma spinosum Agassiz. Volume 4 tab 1, pages 20, 21.) It is interesting both as a psychological fact and as showing how, sleeping and waking, his work was ever present with him. He had been for two weeks striving to decipher the somewhat obscure impression of a fossil fish on the stone slab in which it was preserved. Weary and perplexed he put his work aside at last, and tried to dismiss it from his mind. Shortly after, he waked one night persuaded that while asleep he had seen his fish with all the missing features perfectly ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... again, why should Dante go about to make me believe in devils? Me! the ruler of all the devils in the teatrino! As though I did not know more about devils than anyone. Dante is the Emperor of Words, but the buffo is the Emperor of Deeds. And then his obscurity! As a theme for discussion Dante is as obscure as religion. One says: 'It is so.' While another says: 'It is not so.' As men discuss a melon and one says: 'Inside it is red.' While another says: 'Inside it is white.' Who can bear testimony to the truth of Dante's words? We cannot cut his poem open and see his ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... quote them occasionally, it is to avoid the suspicion of proudly despising them, or of failing to read, and to give sufficient consideration to, their writings. While we read them intelligently, we do so with critical discrimination, and we do not permit them to obscure Christ, and to corrupt the ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... tosauten pistin euron] (St. Matt. viii. 10), we are invited henceforth to read [Greek: par' oudeni tosauten pistin en to Israel euron];—a tame and tasteless gloss, witnessed to by only B, and five cursives,—but having no other effect, if it should chance to be inserted, than to mar and obscure ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... principle as chaste As this is gross and selfish! over which Custom and prejudice shall bear no sway, That govern all things here, shouldering aside The meek and modest Truth, and forcing her To seek a refuge from the tongue of strife In nooks obscure, far from the ways of men, Where violence shall never lift the sword, Nor cunning justify the proud man's wrong, Leaving the poor no remedy but tears; Where he that fills an office, shall esteem The occasion it presents of doing good More than the perquisite; ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... clothes nervously, and looked hard at Ah Fe. Wanting the quick-witted instinct of affection that sharpened Carry's perception, she even then could not distinguish him above his fellows. With a recollection of past pain, and an obscure suspicion of impending danger, she asked him when he ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... gigantic schoolboy. His wrists, and large sinewy hands, both employed at the bridle of his hard-mouthed charger, were markedly visible; for it was the Corporal's custom whenever he came into an obscure part of the road, carefully to take off, and prudently to pocket, a pair of scrupulously clean white leather gloves which smartened up his appearance prodigiously in passing through the towns in their route. His breeches were of yellow buckskin, and ineffably ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be one. On the contrary, he looked with mistrust on silver-tongued orators. "You know," he said in the Diet on February 3, 1866, "I am not an orator.... I cannot appeal to your emotions with a clever play of words intended to obscure the subject-matter. My speech is simple and clear." And a few years later he said: "Eloquence has spoiled many things in the world's parliaments. Too much time is wasted, because everybody who thinks he knows anything wishes to speak, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... vale, Thick mists obscure involv'd me round; Though oft I turn'd the wistful eye, Nae ray of fame was to be found: Thou found'st me, like the morning sun That melts the fogs in limpid air, The friendless bard and rustic song Became alike ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... his lightnings are less to him than his fireworks; and his pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams and gorgeous images and fantastic locutions that the mind would welcome dulness as a bright relief. He is tediously amusing; he is brilliant to the point of being obscure; his helpfulness is so extravagant as to worry and confound. That is the secret of his unpopularity. His stories are not often good stories and are seldom well told; his ingenuity and intelligence are always misleading him into treating mere episodes as solemnly ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... gloomy impress on him, Added years of bitter pining. May the dove of peace brood over Every blighting grief and trial, May all past despair and anguish Hold abeyance till the Judgment. The Confederates were rallied, Oft in haste and stealth and darkness. All the archives of their columns Are obscure, or lost forever. See Appendix, for the gathering Of the names that float about us, Whether officers or privates; Let the blanks be duly pardoned. H. D. Brown,[6] was First Lieutenant Of command of Captain Logan; J. T. McQuery was Lieutenant; James ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
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