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More "Vague" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was 'ware her looks beheld him Out of the mirror white; And at the window yearning arms she held him, Out of the vague and sombre fold ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... think, a wistful sadness in the fall of evening, a vague regret for the fading glories of the day which, passing out of our lives for ever, leaves us so much the richer or poorer, the nobler or more unworthy, according to the use we have made of the opportunities it has offered us for the doing of good ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... time on the height of the Janiculum near the statue of Garibaldi. Bagster made a vague gesture toward the city that lay beneath us. There seemed to be something in the scene that worried him. "I can't make it seem real," he said. "I have continually to say to myself, 'That is Rome, Italy, and not Rome, New York.' I can't ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... his migrations to the eastward of a line passing through Repulse Bay, or about the meridian of 86° west, while in a northern direction we know that he travels as far as the seventy-sixth degree of latitude. In Greenland this animal is known only by vague and exaggerated report; on the western coast of Baffin’s Bay it has certainly been seen, though very rarely, by the present inhabitants; and the eldest person belonging to the Winter Island tribe had never seen one to the ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... specter of an aged lady, with lips that trembled and eyes that never faltered, and the latter as a serious, silent, tall girl with the black hair and oval Madonna face of her country and he knew her, too, as a vague and aching disturbance in his mind, a presence that troubled ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... broader views to the world. As capital has progressed in its action it is seen that at every step labor is becoming—slowly, but surely, as Heaven's law—identified with it. The harmony of interests is now no longer a vague Fourieristic notion,—for nothing is plainer than that the more the operative becomes interested in the success of the enterprise which employs him, the better is it for him and it. And all work in it—the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... not perhaps have done in the old days because he was then so alien to it—he began to love this Judaism with an intense fervor. Although in his own eyes he could not, at first, clearly justify this new yearning, it became so powerful at length that it crystallized from vague emotions into a definite idea which he must needs express. It was the conviction that there was only one solution for ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... delightful region—for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney-tops of great houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in the vague places of the horizon, of far-away towns and sites that one had always heard of—was conditioned upon having "property" in the neighborhood, so that the little girls in the town should suddenly drop courtesies ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... afraid, Mr. Kenyon, that you have vague ideas of how companies are formed. Perhaps your friend Wentworth, being an accountant, may know ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... many people is that they are not willing to make present sacrifices for future gain. They prefer to have a good time as they go along, rather than spend time in self-improvement. They have a sort of vague wish to do something great, but few have that intensity of longing which impels them to make the sacrifice of the present for the future. Few are willing to work underground for years laying a foundation for the life monument. They yearn for greatness, but their yearning is not ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Fouquet, it was not that I meant," returned the king, sorry to have shown the bitterness of his thought in such a manner. "Well! I assure you that, notwithstanding the mask with which the villain covered his face, I had something like a vague suspicion that he was the very man. But with this chief of the enterprise there was a man of prodigious strength, the one who menaced me with a force ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Emperor under the ban of the Church and harassed by vehement remonstrances from the Pope, entered again into negotiations with France in the winter of 1338; and Lewis, alarmed in his turn, listened to fresh overtures from Benedict, who held out vague hopes of reconciliation while he threatened a renewed excommunication if Lewis persisted in invading France. The non-arrival of the English subsidy decided the Emperor to take no personal part in the war, and the attitude of Lewis told on the temper ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... every question with which he dealt was accompanied by so complete a knowledge of its smallest details that vague or inaccurate statements were intolerable to him; but I think the patience with which he sifted such statements was amongst the finest features in the discipline of working under him. One felt it a crime to have wasted that time of which no moment ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... afternoon. Just where he was last seen was a mystery. One said he saw him coming from the pine grove with Tim Short about dusk; others tried to convince themselves and their friends that they had met him in this place or that, while a vague report stated that he was last seen by the river bank passing hurriedly from ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... King are in existence; and the governors were expressly informed that they were to expect none.[64] Messengers went into the provinces with letters requiring that the verbal orders which they brought should be obeyed.[65] Many governors refused to act upon directions so vague and so hard to verify. Burgundy was preserved in this way. Two gentlemen arrived with letters of recommendation from the King, and declared his commands. They were asked to put them on paper; but they refused to give in writing what they had received by word of mouth. Mandelot, the Governor of ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... shut the door. As he did so two vague echoes seemed to faint on his ear. One was male, a dreamlike—"First post, Thursday!" The other was female, a ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... in concealing, however, at the circumstance that the ships to windward made no more sail; though he refrained from signalling the rear-admiral to that effect, from tenderness to his friend, and a vague apprehension of what might be the consequences. While the crews were eating, he stood gazing, thoughtfully, at the noble spectacle the enemy offered, to leeward, occasionally turning wistful glances at the division that was constantly drawing nearer to windward. At length Greenly, himself, ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... because Rob was a woman-hater, or thought he was. We decided to have Beth pay her visit first and later take Rob with us on our vacation trip to some place where the fishing facilities would be to our liking. However, summer vacation time like our plans was yet far, vague ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... chevalier; "and the Sybil of Cuma could not have got out of it better. A little vague, as in all horoscopes, but a great fund of truth, nevertheless. Let us come to the present, ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People." They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society, to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves." ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... allegory is here vague and somewhat discontinuous. There is a hint, however, of the attempts of Mary Queen of Scots to bring England back to Romanism. The pride and corruption of the false church and its clergy are set forth. There ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... Christian's state as one in which he walks together with God, because the two have been set 'at one.' Or you have to deal with the following, 'to redeem,' 'Redeemer,' 'redemption.' Lose not yourselves in vague generalities, but fasten on the central point of these, that they imply a 'buying,' and not this merely, but a 'buying back'; and then connect with them, so explained, the whole circle of statements in Scripture which rest ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the deaf.[136] Being thrown intimately with them but seldom, people often come to form curious ideas respecting the deaf, but ideas which are more or less unhappy ones. There is frequently an attitude towards them combined of wonder, misgiving, fear, aversion—a vague feeling or belief that the deaf are more or less distinct in their thoughts and actions from other people, that they are ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... things took the place of trifling ones,—sacred sorrows of wives and mothers, pangs of fathers and husbands, self-denials, sympathies, new desire to bear one another's burdens. Men and women grew fast in those days of the nation's trouble and danger, and Jane awoke from the vague dull dream she had hitherto called life to new hopes, new fears, new purposes. Then after a year's anxiety, a year when one never looked in the newspaper without dread and sickness of suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the vague thought which had been troubling him in regard to her attitude; and now that he understood what his thought had been he was incensed by what seemed his own disloyalty. And yet, the girl was asking him to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... years to collect. When he had heartlessly rejected all she didn't need, she had one small trunk and a venerable carpet-bag. Everything else was nailed up. The house itself was to be looked after by the town marshal, who was also the town real-estate agent. Peter was very vague ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... A vague idea came across Lizzie's mind that this glowing language had a taste of the Bible about it, and that, therefore, it was in some degree impersonal, and intended to be pious. She did not relish piety at such a crisis as this, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... done to end it, the neophytes would most certainly rise in rebellion, and slay their masters. Fortunately all danger was removed, a few days after Diego's tragic end, by the arrival of a messenger with letters from Santa Barbara. The news they contained was most grave. The vague, intangible anxiety, so long experienced, had culminated at last in the uprising of the Indians at Mission Purezima. On the Sabbath morning previous, they had made a sudden assault on the mission, and had burned many of the buildings, almost ruined the church, and, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... she had ascribed his behaviour of the previous day, his first, false version, his reticence and his confusion to scruples of conscience and vague apprehensions. Anxious about the consequences of the business and dreading lest his testimony might complicate it, he had tried to avoid ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... time, when everything would be made free and so "simple" that there would be no restrictions. Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and his invasion were connected in their minds with the same sort of vague notions of Antichrist, the end of the world, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... journey are inclined to regard a stranger's approach with some suspicion, and to be ever on the alert against adventurers. A vague mistrust of this sort concerning the young stranger may have been aroused by the mere fact that, Hungarian though his language indicated him to be, he and the ladies' escort indulged in no interchange of courtesies so natural among fellow-countrymen ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Penautier sooner than to his own family: then the papers about the conditions of partnership disappeared, no one knew how, and d'Alibert's wife and child were ruined. D'Alibert's brother-in-law, who was Sieur de la Magdelaine, felt certain vague suspicions concerning this death, and wished to get to the bottom of it; he accordingly began investigations, which were suddenly brought to an ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... vague rumors you were interested in this Erik Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it now. Here we are, as blooming ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... river, until he was a bare few miles north of the railroad and thirty miles south of the point farthest north he had been able to reach. Here he seems to have held fast, for further reports of fighting on the Danube front become vague and contradictory. At any rate, the Russo-Rumanian advance stopped short of victory, as the recapture of the Cernavoda-Constanza railroad would have been. That Mackensen's retreat may have been voluntary, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... slowly and dispiritedly that a sort of vague curiosity stirred in Micky's heart; here, at least, was some one even more fed-up with life than he himself, and with a sudden impulse he turned from the window, and, snatching up a hat and coat which he had thrown down when he came in ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... from Durbelliere, and marrying her during the confusion which the Revolution had caused in the country. At first he had no distinct idea of treachery towards the royalists with whom he had sided; though vague thoughts of bringing the soldiers of the Convention to Durbelliere, in the dead of night, had at different times entered his mind, he had never reduced such thoughs to a palpable plan, nor had he ever endeavoured to excuse to himself the ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... comfort. For a few years the father earned a few coppers by playing before public-houses in the East End, and then took to the road. Somehow or other he found himself on the Continent, and after many years he had turned up here. It was all very vague and incoherent. Often starving, homeless, and speaking no language but his own, is it to be wondered that the man had lost count of days, years, and time? Now he had a desire to journey to Greece, why, he knew not, but he clung to ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... follow. The foundation of the rumour was slight enough in all conscience. It had simply been announced that Lalande would read before the Academy of Sciences a paper entitled 'Reflections on those Comets which can approach the Earth.' That was absolutely all; yet, from that one fact, not only were vague rumours of approaching cometic troubles spread abroad, but the statement was definitely made that on May 20 or 21, 1773, 'a comet would encounter the earth.'[43] So great was the fear thus excited, that, in order to calm it, Lalande ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... doom came the necessity to know. He was hit in the head. It was only a vague surmise at first. But in the swinging of the pendulum of pain, swinging ever nearer and nearer, to touch him into an agony of consciousness and a consciousness of agony, gradually the knowledge emerged—he must be hit in the head—hit ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... standing, and some idea of the extent of the wreck of the town may be gathered from the fact that of 300 prominent buildings only 16 are uninjured. For the first day or so people were dazed by what had happened, and for that matter they are dazed still. They went about helpless, making vague inquiries for their friends, and hardly feeling the desire to eat anything. Finally the need of creature comforts overpowered them and they woke up to the fact that they ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... arise in grapes. But not more than two or three of the 2000 varieties now under cultivation are suspected of having arisen in this way. It is true that mutations seem to occur rather often in grapes, but they are easily confused with variations due to environment and are usually too vague to lay hands on. Until the causes of these mutations are known and until they can be produced and controlled, but little can be hoped for in the amelioration ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... no more, and could tell no more. Nor could she summon up any curiosity about her brother, possessed and absorbed as her mind was by other thoughts and images. But in a vague, anxious way she felt for her mother; and if Lady Coryston had ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in fact a girl who couldn't grow up, because whenever she visited a little mystery island in the Outer Hebrides "they" who lived in a "lovely, lovely, lovely" vague world beyond these voices would call her vaguely (to Mr. NORMAN O'NEILL'S charming music), and she would as vaguely return with no memory of what had passed and no change in her physical condition. This didn't matter so much when, as a mere child, she disappeared ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... fact that the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Trade Supplement an endeavour was made to answer Mr Kitson's rather vague and general insinuations and charges against our bankers concerning the manner in which they do their business. Now let us examine the larger and more interesting problem raised by his ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... gate he saw but the back, and his voice he did not hear, though by the man's gesture he was evidently replying. Lionel paused a moment irresolute; but as the man continued to speak, he saw Darrell's face grow paler and paler, and in the impulse of a vague alarm he hastened towards him; but just within three feet of the spot, Darrell arrested ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... exhibiting in his cups the real cosmopolitan feelings which inspired him—the feelings of most old soldiers of fortune. They start probably with some vague notions of seeking honour and glory, but, finding the objects at which they aim thoroughly unsatisfying, they in most cases become intensely selfish, and think only how they can make themselves most comfortable under any circumstances in which they are ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... among ferns and the mastlike stems of trees, the rude huts of Tibara nestled in the forest, blending with their surroundings, until only the knowing observer could identify them by vague form. Barra shifted his viewpoint to the central ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... So vague and inclusive were these phrases that many important questions immediately sprang from them. What were the privileges and immunities of the citizen? Did those of the citizen of the United States differ from those of the citizen of a state? Was a corporation ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... and, being pressed by my family, who could not imagine that, situated as I was, it could be difficult for me to obtain a command for a good soldier, I determined to go and ask the Comte d'Argenson. I made my request, and presented my memorial. He received me coldly, and gave me vague answers. I went out, and the Marquis de V——-, who was in his closet, followed me. "You wish to obtain a command," said he; "there is one vacant, which is promised me for one of my proteges; but if you will do me a favour in return, or obtain one for me, I will give ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... the subject of John Cabot's first voyage are the family letters of Lorenzo Pasqualigo, a Venetian merchant resident in London, to his brother, and the official correspondence of Raimondo di Raimondi, Archpriest of Soncino. The latter's account is somewhat vague. He says, in his letters to Duke Sforza of Milan, August 24th, and December 18th, 1497, that Cabot, "passing Ibernia on the west, and then standing towards the north, began to navigate the eastern ocean, leaving in a few days the north star on ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... mass of the people, occupying the rich and fertile tracts which bordered the various branches of the Nile, and the long and verdant valley which extended so far into the heart of the continent, knew nothing of the conflict but by vague and distant rumors. The pursuits of the agricultural population went on, all the time, as steadily and prosperously as ever; so that when the conflict was ended, and Cleopatra entered upon the quiet and peaceful possession ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... Theodore Vail learned the dramatic story of Morse at his mother's knee. As a boy, he played around the first telegraph line, and learned to put messages on the wire. His favorite toy was a little telegraph that he constructed for himself. At twenty-two he went West, in the vague hope of possessing a bonanza farm; then he swung back into telegraphy, and in a few years found himself in the Government Mail Service at Washington. By 1876, he was at the head of this Department, which he completely ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... a vague wish that she had been more merciful, and resolved another time to help, ...
— Randy and Her Friends • Amy Brooks
... Jersey, stupid irritating Jersey, where the passengers are always asking which line they are on, and where they are to come out, and whether they have yet reached Elizabeth. Launched into Jersey, one has a vague notion that he is on many lines and no one in particular, and that he is liable at any moment to come to Elizabeth. He has no notion what Elizabeth is, and always resolves that the next time he goes ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... Diana looked vague. In spite of tilts and tournaments with the Grizzly Bear, she had no more knowledge of that affliction of bitterness to which April referred than of the bitterness of affliction. The fact was patent in the gay light of her sherry-brown eye ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... century baptism was described as a bath in which the health of the soul is restored, and the Lord's Supper as the potion of immortality. Similar notions present in the ethnic faiths take the Christian facts into their service, the belief of the multitude without essential change remaining vague and undefined. While the theologians discussed doctrine the people longed for mystery, as it satisfied their religious natures. By sacraments they felt themselves brought into the presence of God, and to sacraments they looked for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... distinguishing the races are entirely transmitted by social heredity, it is maintained that this is very largely the case—far more largely than is usually perceived or admitted. Such inherent differences, if they exist, are so vague and intangible as practically to defy discovery and clear statement, and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... truth, and without importance whether true or not. For all his gravity and Colonelship, it would appear the old spirit of frolic has not quitted him. Here are two small incidents, pointing that way; which stand on record; credible enough, though vague and without importance otherwise. Incident FIRST is to the following feeble effect; indisputable though extremely unmomentous: Regiment Goltz, it appears, used to have gold trimmings; the Colonel Crown-Prince petitioned that they might ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... it very wonderful that he was to live with her always. He felt happy and excited—so happy and excited that the parting when it came slipped over him lightly. Miss Trevor even thought he took it too easily and had a vague wish that he had shown more sorrow. Stephen said farewell to the boy he loved better than ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... chief, and his inferior tenants slip also from his control. He is no longer one in a pyramid of grouped social organisation, but stands now as an individual answerable only to the head of the State. He has duties still; but no longer a personal relationship to his lord. It is the King and that vague abstraction called the State which now claim him as a subject; and by so doing are obliged to recognise his individual status. This new and startling prominence of the individual disturbed the whole concept of ownership. Originally under the influence ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... long schoolmaster in the little district school on Hiper Hill, came in hesitatingly, clutching with each arm half a dozen books which struggled to escape with the ingenuity of inanimate objects. Nahum's hair was white; his face was vague—lovably vague.... A man of considerable, ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... in somewise since she had come to womanhood. The names of the saints her lips invoked were dull and cold, and evolved no image of human or superhuman love and power. What need of intercessors whose personality was vague and dim, whose earthly histories were made up of truth so interwoven with fable that she scarce dared believe even that which might be true? In the One Crucified was help for all sinners, gospel and creed, the rule of life here, the promise of ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... in his testimony before the Committee on the Conduct of the War, Howe speaks as if he had received from Sedgwick only general—in fact, vague—and rare instructions, as to the dispositions to be made of his division; and that all his particular manoeuvres were originated and completed on his own responsibility, upon information, or mere hints, from headquarters of the corps. His line, over two miles long, was covered by less than ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... only vague, capricious, and unprincipled. It grows by becoming definite, self-controlled, and conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call personality. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... personified in McCullough's embodiment of Virginius, and that same nameless thrill of fear was imparted by its presence,—even before the tragedian, with an exquisite intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... religious mind of laying too much stress on this, or of seeming to encourage too much an aesthetic emotion. If the first business of religion is to purify life, there will always be a suspicion of idolatry about ritual, a fear of substituting a vague desire for beauty for a practical devotion ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... neokupata. Vacate forlasi. Vacation libertempo. Vaccinate inokuli. Vacillate sxanceligxi. Vacillating sxanceligxa. Vacuous malplena. Vacuum malplenajxo. Vagabond sentauxgulo, vagisto. Vagary kaprico. Vagrant vagisto. Vague malpreciza. Vain (fruitless) vana. Vain (conceited) vanta. Vain, in vane. Vainly vane. Vale valeto. Valet lakeo, servisto. Valiant brava. Valid legxa. Valise valizo. Valley valo. Valorous ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... is rather vague," I observed. "You might almost as well say 'Southern Asia.' Have you any idea in what part ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... its top moved, and that stirred vaguely. Star-shells floated overhead and bathed it in pitiless light. And it remained motionless.... Sergeant Walpole had a vague impression of colossal detonations taking place miles above his head, but the sound was lost in the drumfire of artillery nearer ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... at him with the vague fear that accompanies a new and doubtful experience; and he, dissatisfied with his way of putting the case, added, "It is of greater importance that you should enjoy yourself for an hour than that my book should be ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... street's loud clang and clatter, screams of rage and cries of pain, And the endless plodding, thudding, of tired feet in quest of gain Muffled by a shroud of silence sounds a thousand miles away, And the past is hovering round us with its ghostly, dim array, Flitting by in vague procession, up the aisleway, down the hall, While we lurk here, snugly sheltered, shadowed by the ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... ridiculous and impossible was the wild longing that had sprung up in his heart. Here, by his side, wistfully sympathetic and friendly in manner, sat the "one woman in the world," yet he felt awkward and constrained, and took refuge in a vague expression of anxiety on behalf of Handyside, a man who at least might be trusted to extricate himself safely from ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... of the weeping nurse who, holding his sister in one arm dragged him away from the bedside and out of the door, by the hand. There was much hurried tramping to and fro, opening and closing of doors and drawing to of window-blinds. These unusual sounds filled the boy with a vague fear. ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... things which, though they carry his name, agree not with his doctrine." This is not surprising, since that we have often proved that these things have not been written by himself, nor by his apostles, but that for the greatest part they are founded upon tales, upon vague reports, and put together by I know not what half-Jews, with but little agreement between them; and which they have nevertheless published under the name of the apostles of our Lord, and have thus attributed to them their own errors and their lies. [I have taken these ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... promised to keep me well informed of his movements months passed in silence. Then some ugly and ominous rumours came to hand to the effect that he had been arrested as a spy in Germany, had been secretly tried and had been shot. I did not attach any credence to these vague, wild stories. I knew he had never been to Germany before, and was au courant with the harmless nature ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... this letter," he said, "which I brought over myself from Berlin, signed and written not more than three weeks ago. I ask you to believe in no vague promises. I bring you the pledged faith of the greatest ruler on earth. What do you say, Nikasti? Will you accept our mission? Will you go back to ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and power. "Man can learn to transcend the limitations of finite thought at will. The Divine Presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague twilight, or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy. It is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... I want it for anything," Venner admitted. "I have a vague idea, a shadowy theory, that I am on the right track at last, but I may be wrong, especially as I am dealing with so unscrupulous an opponent as Fenwick. All the same, I think I'll step round to that agent's office this afternoon and get the key. Sooner or later, I shall want a town house, ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... instant, caught by a vague foreboding that he could not explain. But in the end he nodded, as though in answer to the unspoken question in his thoughts. "Will you come down into the cabin, Mark?" he invited quietly. "I've much to ask you; and you must ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... hungry. And then they went on and on, hugging the shore, the captain said, until it was a kind of shadowy waving blur, but on the other side most beautiful. It made her think of coming from India, but she was glad to see the vague outline ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Lordship, possessing the feelings of a man, and the honour of a gentleman, could avail yourself of the power and the trust which had been committed to you by His Majesty, wantonly to traduce a private character, by insinuations expressed in terms so vague and unqualified, as to make it impossible publicly to refute them. From the rank which you hold in society, I must presume, if you thought it your duty to impeach my conduct as a servant of the Crown, you would have adopted the fair and manly course of advancing direct and specific ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... given over trying to explain what he did not understand, but in a vague way he regarded Mrs. Taylor as an unconscious fakir, whose spiritual communications bore the earmarks of something she had learned ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... action so intense or so dramatic in character that the remembrance of it aroused a great deal more objective emotion than the composer was conscious of while writing the music. In the third instance, the music may have been influenced strongly though subconsciously by a vague remembrance of certain thoughts and feelings, perhaps of a deep religious or spiritual nature, which suddenly came to him upon realizing the beauty of the scene and which overpowered the first sensuous pleasure—perhaps ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... different from any Mrs. Wilson had ever seen on his countenance, and gave an entirely novel expression to his face; it was full of meaning it was knowing—spoke more of the man of the world than anything she had before noticed in him, and left on her mind one of those vague impressions she was often troubled with, that there was something about Denbigh in character or condition, or ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... great deal about their black and white magic, in which they are hugely interested, and a fair amount about certain valiant men of olden times who are now worshipped by them as helpful spirits, and a little about some vague spirits who are in the sun and the air and the fire and other places, and are very high and great, but ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... we'd run across each other I'd find him looking at me in a queer, vague fashion, too; but I felt safe enough with him; like I did with Moran—until this case came up. After it was over, he and I happened to be alone, and, in a round-about way, he began asking me questions. He did it so clumsily, though, that my suspicions were aroused at once. Of course I bluffed ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... not move. Nor did Deveny change his position. A queer, cold chill had come over Deveny—a vague dread, a dragging reluctance—an indecision that startled him and made of his thoughts an odd jumble of half-formed impulses that seemed to die ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the kind. Distance was lending enchantment to Eileen Lorimer. He was sure this was not infatuation. She was not the first; he had had affairs; oh, numbers of them! But they were mere fragments of his adventurous life. They were milestones, shadowy and vague and very far away now. Dear ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the most in this situation is, that his time may as completely be lost as another's peace, by waiting for the effects of distant events, vague, bewildering, and remote, and quite as likely to lead to ill as to good. The very waiting, indeed, with the mind in such a state, is in itself an evil scarce to ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... all—since those truths which to us were of the most enduring importance could only be reached by that analogy which speaks in proof tones to the imagination alone and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men—the poets—living and perishing amid the scorn ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... which he had spent in or about the colony, Hadden followed many trades, and did no good at any of them. A clever man, of agreeable and prepossessing manner, he always found it easy to form friendships and to secure a fresh start in life. But, by degrees, the friends were seized with a vague distrust of him; and, after a period of more or less application, he himself would close the opening that he had made by a sudden disappearance from the locality, leaving behind him a doubtful reputation ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... heart to the inquiry. The heat of a woman and a monarch personally offended is in all she says, as well as a keen practical power of keeping to her point. It is she who refers to the corpus delicti, carrying the question out of mere vague discussion distinctly to the act complained of. Knox had said in his letter that the prosecution of the men who had interrupted the service at Holyrood was the opening of a door "to execute cruelty upon a greater multitude." "So," said the Queen, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... wind on the heath Whistled its song of vague alarms; All night in some mad dance of death The poplars tossed their ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... cathedral town itself probably tittered at his drolleries, and chattered over his sentiments; his social graces undoubtedly found recognition among county families and in provincial society, and his reputation as a wit had probably spread in a vague, uncertain, transitory fashion beyond the boundaries of the county. Yet the facts of local notoriety and personal vogue are without real significance save in the light of later developments; and we may well date his career in the world ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... and vague, and Master Richard began to yearn for a share in the high enterprise upon which his friend had entered. He had half a mind to run away from home himself, though, to be sure, there was nothing else to run away from. In Joe's case ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... mother and son was curiously strong to-night. It was always so on Christmas. At other times they were much like two children in companionship, but Christmas never came without bringing a vague sense of cowering close together as though some danger stood near them. There was something half fierce, now, in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... unpleasant than one would have believed possible. The day-room was in its usual state of disorder. The fire was not lit. There was a vague smell of apples. Life was very, very grey. There seemed no brightness in it ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... After this was written, a letter of Durham's appeared couched in vague but conservative language, and without any allusion to the Ballot or the ...
— 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
... the night expedition to the castle. All the boys' answers consisted in dark allusions to the fact that the ghost was wandering about Wildenstein more than ever. As not one of them wanted to admit the hasty retreat before the ghost had even been properly inspected, they only dropped vague and terrifying words ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... fire, in which the sun should be turned into blackness and the moon into blood, and the powers of heaven should be shaken. Already the noonday sun was shrouded in unnatural eclipse; might not some awful form at any moment rend the heavens and come down, touch the mountains and they should smoke? The vague anticipation of conscious guilt was unfulfilled. Not such as yet was to be the method of God's workings. His messages to man for many ages more were not to be in the thunder and earthquake, not in rushing wind or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... had left no surviving children. My father greatly doubted whether being heir-at-law would prove to avail him anything, since it was likely that so distant a relation would have made a will in favour of some nearer connection on his wife's or mother's side. He was very vague about Chantry House, only knowing that it was supposed to be a fair property, and he would hardly consent to take Griffith with him by the Western Royal Mail, warning him and all the rest of us that our ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the full force of this interrogatory, the reader must recall the fact that the "popular sovereignty" of the Nebraska bill was couched in vague language, and qualified with the proviso that it was "subject to the Constitution." The caucus which framed this phraseology agreed, as a compromise between Northern and Southern Democrats, that the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... systematically. The lands in Brazil are not measured, and everything is done by the eye. The quantity of cane which a piece will require for planting is estimated by so many cart-loads; and nothing can be more vague than this mode of computation, for the load which a cart can carry depends upon the condition of the oxen, upon the nature of the road, and upon the length of the cane. Such is the awkward make of these vehicles, that much nicety is necessary in packing them, and if two ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... portieres, no modern devices of decoration. Everything was solid and comfortable, worn, and of a long and honourable descent. The dining-room and large square hall were striking because of the blackness of their oak walls, the many family portraits, and certain old trophies of the chase, as vague in their high dark ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... to the shield-faith fawning on political expediency and egoism, and turning brigand. Without doubt many Christians went on the Crusades impelled by religious conviction. But how many nourished less vague ideas in their hearts? Not to mention those whose only aim was to escape from the consequences of their misdeeds and obtain absolution and indulgences, not to mention those who were animated by a foolish sense ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... night,—one o'clock,—and Kate is not yet asleep, and the captain is still down-stairs, reading. He is not looking well at all, and Kate is sorely anxious about him. It was his evidence that brought years of ostracism and misery upon Lieutenant Hayne, and there are vague indications that in his own regiment the officers are beginning to believe that possibly he was not the guilty man. The cavalry officers, of course, say nothing to us on the subject, and I have never ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... opened his eyes Ralph caught the vague hum of a lingo of switch pidgin, smut-faced, blear-eyed men near by, himself stretched at full length on sleeping car cushions on the floor of the doghouse. He sat up promptly. There was a momentary blur to his sight, but this quickly ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... language of attack, and a good deal was spoken in the hotel. I had occasion to buy a great many things, but, according to my custom, not a photograph was among them; therefore, when I go back, I shall receive perfectly new and fresh impressions of the place, and can cherish no vague memories, encouraged by an album at home, in which the nameless cathedrals of many countries confuse themselves, and only the Coliseum at Rome stands forth, not to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... showed it to be possible that the sun may have already illuminated the earth for as many as one hundred million years, but at the same time rendered it almost certain that he had not illuminated the earth for five hundred millions of years. The estimates here are necessarily very vague; but yet, vague as they are, I do not know that it is possible, upon any reasonable estimate founded on known properties of matter, to say that we can believe the sun has really illuminated the earth for five ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... me out of the room, sending with me the impression that inside the frock-coat, behind the bland gold-rimmed spectacles, there was yet something left of manhood and that vague quality called fight, which is surely hard put to live long between ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and home. When did we learn these? Not yesterday nor today, but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of fancy." Books will not yield to us so richly when we are older. ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... more instructive than vague generalities. About seven years ago a gentleman was engaged by one of our colleges to take charge of a new department until a permanent appointee might be found. The resident faculty committed one blunder after another. It added the new study outright without ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... bring back the white dreams she had dreamt when she had sat alone in the shadow before the other two had come out to quarrel. She did her best to bring back that vague, soft joy of yearning for something beautiful and unknown. She tried to drop the silver veil of fancy-threads woven by the May moon between her and the world. But it would not come. Instead of it, she saw the flat platform, the man and woman standing in the unnatural ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... conclusions, 545:15 and do not accord infinity to Deity. Error tills the whole ground in this material theory, which is entirely a false view, destructive to existence and happiness. Out- 545:18 side of Christian Science all is vague and hypothetical, the opposite of Truth; yet this opposite, in its false view of God and man, impudently demands ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... his gaze to that point in the shore, felt the undercurrent of vague meaning in his voice, guessed what was his cue, and said: "Somewhere, sometime; but now only Belle Amour. I have had a long travel. I have found an open door. I will stay—if you please—hein? If ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the claimant during the war. If this great threat against our revenues is to have no other check, certainly Congress should supply the Department of Justice with appropriations sufficiently liberal to secure the best legal talent in the defense of these claims and to pursue its vague search ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... tract of rough land, half-swamp, known as "Bear Swamp." There was an opinion, more or less correct, that bears might be found there. Some had been shot in that vicinity. Why Ann turned her footsteps in that direction, she could not have told herself. Possibly the vague impression of conversations she and Hannah had had, lingering in her mind, had something to do with it. Many a time the two little girls had remarked to each other with a shudder, "How awful it would be to ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... the quiet of the room. A child lies asleep with his head under the mother's left arm. Whenever one of them rises, walks, or makes a gesture, his movements seem to be grave, slow, rare, and, as it were, spiritualized by the distance, the light, and the vague veil of the windows. The old man and the ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... as it were, crying out to be born, and only to be born through the struggle of man's spirit with matter. This is one function of matter, perhaps the supreme function, to be the material through which alone man's vague ideal can become definite and actual, just as an artist can only get close to his own conception through the effort to embody it in visible form or ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Butler, shows us. Nor, in the third place, do I mean by Theology polemics of any kind; for instance, what are called 'Evidences of Religion,' or 'the Christian Evidences.'... Nor, fourthly, do I mean by Theology that vague thing called 'Christianity,' or 'our common Christianity,' or 'Christianity the law of the land,' if there is any man alive who can tell what it is.... Lastly, I do not understand by Theology, acquaintance with the Scriptures; for, though no person of religious ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of redemption, Paradise Found, the better Eden, the "Paradise within thee, happier far." Milton had applied his test, and learnt—what every great poet has to learn—that he must trust more to the vague impression of truth, beauty, and high thought, that can be made upon thousands of right- hearted men and women, than to the clear, full understanding of his work. The noblest aims of the true artist can make themselves felt by all, though ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... prediction of a negro sorceress, who, while Marie Joseph was but a child, prophesied she should rise to a dignity greater than that of a queen, yet fall from it before her death.[10] This was one of those vague auguries, delivered at random by fools or impostors, which the caprice of fortune sometimes matches with a corresponding and conforming event. But without trusting to the African sibyl's prediction, Bonaparte may have formed his match under the auspices of ambition as well as love. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... denied that, when he had made up his mind to even this extent, he felt an unaccustomed sense of freedom—a vague and indistinct impression of holiday-making—which was very luxurious. He had his moments of depression and anxiety, and they were, with good reason, pretty numerous; but still, it was wonderfully pleasant ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... originally left vague, because, in the first place, to perform public and personal fantasias with one's spear on the shield of a champion, with whom one does not intend to fight out the quarrel, seems to me bad chivalry, and secondly, because those readers who were likely to be interested could hardly mistake ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life is cooeperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I suppose business is more often like a game than is life—your gain is often ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... little to be telling when little things only are in the memory, and yet the days with little to be remembering are the happy days, that go past quickly like youth, and leave but vague memories of sunshine and laughter—of nights, and song, and dance. And there were great nights of happiness, for in these days the folk had the time to be knowing one the other, and neighbourly. And maybe in an evening there would ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... of this river, and talked of setting up a trading-fort here; but, from some cause unknown, they gave up their design and went away. Maximus has been telling me all he knows about the matter; but his reports are vague, and the event must have occurred, if it occurred at all, when he ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... herself down on the bed between laughter and tears, murmured a vague promise to follow. She changed her mind later and decided on ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... imagination did not prefigure the mode or the time of his decease, but was fraught with an incurable persuasion that his death was at hand. He was likewise haunted by the belief that the kind of death that awaited him was strange and terrible. His anticipations were thus far vague and indefinite; but they sufficed to poison every moment of his being, and ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... my fancy at such a time. I remember now, that the idea of that insensate thing becoming animate, and attacking me, did not occur to me with any sense of possibility or reality. I thought rather, in a vague way, of some invisible monster of outer space fumbling at the dagger. I remembered the old Rector's description of the attack on the butler.... of the void. And he had described the stupendous force of the blow as being 'like the kick of a great horse.' You can see how uncomfortably ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... impenetrable to my entreaties; a secret enemy has had power to make me odious in your sight, though for her enmity I can assign no cause, though even her existence was this morning unknown to me! Ever ready to abandon, and most willing to condemn me, you have more confidence in a vague conjecture, than in all you have observed of the whole tenour of my character. Without knowing why, you are disposed to believe me criminal, without deigning to say wherefore, you are eager to banish me your presence. Yet scarce could a consciousness of guilt itself, wound me so ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... disquietude in regard to the designs of Persia and Russia which the communications of our envoy in Persia had fostered in the Home Government, but it would appear that he was wholly undecided what line of action to pursue. 'Swayed,' says Durand, 'by the vague apprehensions of a remote danger entertained by others rather than himself,' he despatched to Afghanistan Captain Burnes on a nominally commercial mission, which, in fact, was one of political discovery, but without ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... that three short weeks ago he had been a happy man. Lonely, perhaps, but only in a vague, impersonal way. Not lonely with this aching loneliness that tortured him now. What was there left for him? As regards any triumphs which the future might bring in connection with his work, he was, as Mac the stage-door keeper had said, "blarzy". Any success ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... since the truce established on the 19th. [Footnote: Id., p. 250.] Mr. Davis had remained at Charlotte in the interval between the two conventions, but when the separate surrender of Johnston's army was determined, he started southward with a vague purpose of joining some of the smaller organized armies released from the armistice by our administration's rejection of the terms of Sherman's first convention. He tells us that he still hoped that he might cross the Mississippi with such forces as could ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... themselves upon her. They wound their arms chokingly about her neck; they petted and caressed, and besought her not to cry; they bewailed their own shortcomings, and made unconditional promises of perfection in the future. And even Tim sidled up, and volunteered a vague hint ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... scheme, of which Lydia had given them a hint at the inn, was under frequent discussion between her parents. Elizabeth saw directly that her father had not the smallest intention of yielding; but his answers were at the same time so vague and equivocal, that her mother, though often disheartened, had never yet ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... do—the fathers and mothers of our faith in the tenement-houses," he explained, wistfully, to the young man. He pointed to other graves in the vicinity, short and narrow graves. Toys were spread on them, too. They were the poor treasures of dead children. The toys had been left there in the vague, helpless yearning of parents who strove to reach their human ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... eagle, of whom you have said, or thought, or heard others say, "It is scarcely possible to believe that such a man was once a squalling baby." If you had seen our hero in all the strength and majesty of full-grown doghood, you would have experienced a vague sort of surprise had we told you—as we now repeat— that the dog Crusoe was once a pup—a soft, round, sprawling, squeaking pup, as fat as a tallow candle, and as blind as ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... a cab, and drove off at once. George remained in the street; he paced up and down, and took no rest—he was far too excited and nervous for that. He had got a dangerous game to play, and his plans were vague and shadowy. He had promised Mr. Sanders he would make inquiries about the person he suspected had forged the cheque, and let him know in the morning. His plan was to try and raise the money, pay it to Mr. Sanders on account of the transgressor, and induce him to take no further steps until ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown; scurrying, moving, changing—each half recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind. ...
— Viewpoint • Gordon Randall Garrett
... admiration for the scene, till suddenly your path leads you out on to the dizzy brink of an awful precipice—a sheer fall, so exaggerated in horror that your most stirring memories of Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, and the hideous arete of the Pitz Bernina, sink into vague insignificance. The gulf that divides you from the distant mountain seems like a huge bite taken bodily out of the world by some voracious god; far away rise snow peaks such as were not dreamt of in your Swiss tour; the bottomless valley at your feet is misty and gloomy with blackness, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... are, perhaps, the most puzzling. These are the true Sylvia, the real wood-birds. They are small, very active, but feeble songsters, and, to be seen, must be sought for. In passing through the woods, most persons have a vague consciousness of slight chirping, semi-musical sounds in the trees overhead. In most cases these sounds proceed from the warblers. Throughout the Middle and Eastern States, half a dozen species ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... a Persian rug, and, beside the various objects scattered upon it, you notice a bunch of carnations in an artistically wrought Venetian glass. These carnations, like the motto, awake in us an image, a poetical reminiscence. Sentiment, Germanic in its essence, mingled with dreams and vague ideals, is introduced into this ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... near, the field of Cressy. By the aid of the books, we fancied we could trace the positions of the two armies; but it was little more than very vague conjecture. There was a mead, a breadth of field well adapted to cavalry, and a wood. The river is a mere brook, and could have offered but little protection, or resistance, to the passage of any species of troops. I saw no village, and we may not have been within a mile of the real field, after ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the sword of Damocles. Nelson himself seems to have been possessed already by vague premonitions of the coming end, which deepened and darkened around him as he went forward to his fate. The story told of his saying to the upholsterer, who had in charge the coffin made from the mast of the "Orient," ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... present day have had a profound influence upon my views of economic subjects. The conception which the masses of the present time have of how their ancestors lived in the early years of the century are so vague and shadowy as not to influence their conduct at the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... she had her small fixed allowance from home; for credentials she was furnished with an introduction or two to literary men from her friends in the country who had some appreciation, more or less vague, of her intellectual powers. Though courageous and determined, she was far from self-confident; she asked herself if she might not be mistaking a mere fancy for a faculty, and her first step was to seek the opinion of ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... new grandeur was born when these tattered crags appeared above storm-clouds. Fleeting glimpses of the crests through a surging storm arouse strange feelings, and one is at bay, as though having just awakened amid the vast and vague on another planet. But when the long, white evening light streams from the west between the minarets, and the black buttressed crags wear the alpine glow, one's feelings are too ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... managed to reply. He glared at me for having interrupted. And stopped to pick his words before he spoke; Like one who turns all personal remarks Into a general survey of the world. Choosing his phrases with a finicky care So they might fit some vague opinions, Taken, third-hand, from last year's New York Times And jumbled all together into a thing He thought was his philosophy. "Never mind; There's more in Foster than you'd understand. But," he continued, darkly ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... remembered that just as the beaver, when pursued, jettisons some one of its organs—I forget which—and thus evades capture, so the careful mechanic removes some vital portion of his engine to thwart the unauthorised. I had a vague idea that the part in question was of, with, or from the magneto. I had not even a vague idea that the latter was protected by a network of live wires, and that one had only to stretch out one's finger to induce a spark about a foot long and a shock from which one will never wholly recover.... ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... reforming government the people would remain orderly, as they had generally remained in America during the transition from British rule to selfgovernment. Burke maintained that if the existing political order were broken up there would be no longer a people, but "a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more." "Alas!" he exclaims, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass, which has a true personality." For the sake of peace Paine wished the revolution ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... on the firing line express the utmost confidence that what was done yesterday and this morning they can keep on doing until the war has been won. They never hear the vague, unverified reports circulated in Paris, sometimes of tremendous and impossible victories, sometimes sinister hints of disaster. They know what they have done since March 9, when they were ordered to act on this part of the Aisne. They talk as a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... with them working desperately above him, it was almost possible to see the strength ebbing back into his veins. They dashed water upon his head, inverted bottles of it into his face, and emptied it from his eyes, but during that long half minute the vague smile never left his lips—nor his eyes the face ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... of the earliest human genera have been little or not at all investigated. And also the hypothesis of Haeckel, that the cradle of mankind was a land between Africa and Asia, now sunk in the sea, and called Lemuria, can be neither proved nor denied. Such vague possibilities have indeed not the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... McGuire had only a vague impression of a great building beyond, of lower stories decorated in barbaric colors, of towers above in strange forms of the crystal, colorful beauty they had seen. He walked toward it unseeing; his thoughts were only of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... age with his, recalling the fact, to be precise, of his forty-seven years, created a vague questioning dissatisfaction. Suddenly he saw himself—a comfortable body in a comfortable existence, a happy existence, he added sharply— objectively; and the stout figure in knickerbockers, rough stockings, a yellow buckskin jacket and checked cap pulled over a face which, he felt, was brightly ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of those who use that very vague, grandiloquent word 'Ambrosial' know that it has reference to the 'ambrosia' ([Greek: ambrotos], immortal), the food of the gods! It has, however, a secondary signification, namely, that of an unguent, or perfume, hence fragrant; and this is probably the prevailing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... soul? Do departed spirits in verity retain any knowledge of what transpires in this world, and take any part in its scenes? All that revelation says of a spiritual state is more intimation than assertion; it has no distinct treatise, and teaches nothing apparently of set purpose; but gives vague, glorious images, while now and then some accidental ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... for the first time HOUSEHOLDERS in Germany - real Teutons, with no deception, spring, or false bottom. About half-past one there began such a trumpeting, shouting, pealing of bells, and scurrying hither and thither of feet as woke every person in Frankfurt out of their first sleep with a vague sort of apprehension that the last day was at hand. The whole street was alive, and we could hear people talking in their rooms, or crying to passers-by from their windows, all around us. At last I made out what a man was saying in the next room. It was a fire in Sachsenhausen, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day of the adjourned inquest drew near Brent became aware that there were rumours in the air—rumours of some sensational development, the particulars of which were either non-obtainable or utterly vague. He heard of them from Peppermore, whose journalistic itching for news had so far gone unrelieved; Peppermore himself knew no more than that rumour was busy, ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... (evidently drunk for some time in the royal honour) are slowly removing them, and on the whole it is more like the clearing away of "The Frozen Deep" at Tavistock House than anything within your knowledge—with the exception that we are not in the least sorry, as we were then. Vague ideas are in Arthur's head that when we come back to Hull, we are to come here, and are to have the Town Hall (a beautiful building), and read to the million. I can't say yet. That depends. I remember that when I was here before (I came from Rockingham to make a speech), I thought them a dull ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... you never seen them march across the grass-lands in the daytime, cohort after cohort, hurrying to the call of the unseen trumpets? In the woods, have you never heard strange sounds, when you put your ear to the ground—sounds untraceable to any animate life? Have you never heard vague voices in the trees? Have you not heard distant, mysterious noises in the forest, whose cause you could never learn, seek no matter how you might? These were the voices of the shadows, the people who live there. Who else should it be to whisper and sing to you and make you happy when ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... monuments. Dim but seemingly unmistakable traces are now discovered of enterprises, not only of exploration and trade, but also of evangelization, reaching along the mainland southward to the shores of New England. There are vague indications that these beginnings of Christian civilization were extinguished, as in so many later instances, by savage massacre. With impressive coincidence, the latest vestige of this primeval American Christianity fades out in the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... whippersnapper, God knows why. This whippersnapper has a father, a parson, who can write the most offensive letters imaginable. I received one of them this morning, accusing the whippersnapper of all sorts of vague things, and me and my fellow trustee, who is at present enjoying himself travelling, of abetting him. I repeat, damn Ranson, Richards and Son; damn the parson, damn Helen—no, I won't say that, for she is dead—and especially damn the whippersnapper. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Mediterranean, the same expanse of eternal sapphire that he had watched from the same Riviera window, day in and day out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the same forlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week by week seemed to grow too strong for him. He turned away from the soft, exotic loveliness of the sea and sky before him, with ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... have kept up his vague complaints, but right in the midst of them Daddy Jack stuck his head in at ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... in the water on the wreck, of seeing some one approaching me, of being held down first by a drowning man and then by a rope, of trying to free myself, and then I must have swooned, for I remember nothing more. I have now a vague remembrance of some one talking to me about a dream I ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... come to Pao-yue. After he had heard these ballads, so diffuse and vague, he failed to see any point of beauty in them; but the plaintive melody of the sound was nevertheless sufficient to drive away his spirit and exhilarate his soul. Hence it was that he did not make any inquiries about the arguments, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... enjoyed her outing, else it would not seem consistent for her to wish to come again to-morrow; and she must, she must come again! Her poor contradictory little heart found itself clinging to the one vague, ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... and took to his heels until he was out of shot from stone or word. It seemed to him that in this country of England there was no protection for a man save that which lay in the strength of his own arm and the speed of his own foot. In the cloisters he had heard vague talk of the law—the mighty law which was higher than prelate or baron, yet no sign could he see of it. What was the benefit of a law written fair upon parchment, he wondered, if there were no officers to enforce ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would not die. No, she would not die! She would see her beloved, her child once more! With a sudden jerk she freed her arm from the hand that held her prisoner. She knew not what to do, whither she could flee. She had only a vague consciousness that to be alone with him meant death—that she would he safe only outside the castle. Without, on the street, Schwarzenberg would not venture to seize her, for he knew that she possessed his secret and that she would accuse him. She flew across the vestibule, tore open the ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... That, by the vague and indefinite term of evasion, the said Warren Hastings did introduce a loose and arbitrary principle of interpreting formal engagements, which ought to be regarded, more especially by guaranties, ill a sense the most literally ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... very well, Lawrence," said Lewis, with a touch of sarcasm, "to talk in a vague way about the sun's action, but it's quite plain, even to an unphilosophical mind like mine, that the sun can't lift a block of stone some tons in weight and clap it on the top of a pillar of ice ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... standpoint. In this very prosaic and materialistic age, when very few persons have profound beliefs on any subject, the spectacle of one of the sovereigns of the earth still claiming a divine origin is one that appeals to the ludicrous susceptibilities of that vague entity "the man in the street." It is not well, however, that people should criticise statements in royal proclamations or in royal assertions too seriously. Even in this country there are documents issued from time to time bearing ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... heard men's voices raised in anger. She recognized one. Bower was speaking German, Stampa a mixture of German and Italian. Millicent had a vague acquaintance with both languages; but it was of the Ollendorf order, and did not avail her in understanding their rapid, excited words. Soon there were other sounds, the animal cries, the sobs, the labored ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... It is possible that there is a vague and obscure reference here to the doctrine that the fruits of our deeds are reaped in ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... I remember very well!" I said as we shook hands. I could not but note that the acquaintanceship seemed a relief to Miss Trelawny. There was a certain vague uneasiness in her manner which took my attention; instinctively I felt that it would be less embarrassing for her to speak with me alone. So I said ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... remarks, and once, after reading one of Cooper's novels, as an Indian Maiden. This was, I believe, the only instance when she had borrowed from another's fiction. Most of the characters that she assumed for days and sometimes weeks at a time were purely original in conception; some so much so as to be vague to the general understanding. I remember that her personation of a certain Mrs. Smith, whose individuality was supposed to be sufficiently represented by a sun-bonnet worn wrong side before and a weekly addition to her family, ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte
... think it a vision of his own brain, when suddenly a vague suspicion of the truth flashed upon his mind. He barred the door, and hastened wildly back. Yes, there she was, - there, in the chamber he had quitted, - there in her old innocent, happy home, so changed that none but he could trace one gleam of what she had been, - there upon her knees, - with ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... all, is not this a somewhat vague and nebulous conception of "The Church". If it is to go into all the world, how, from a business point of view, is this world-wide mission, in all its grandeur, to be accomplished? The answer is seen in our ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... move. Nor did Deveny change his position. A queer, cold chill had come over Deveny—a vague dread, a dragging reluctance—an indecision that startled him and made of his thoughts an odd jumble of half-formed impulses that seemed to die before they could ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... regulated her pace and her husband's as to keep just in the rear of the other three, which it was easy to do without notice in such a stream of pedestrians. Her answers to Cartlett's remarks were vague and slight, for the group in front interested her more than all the rest of ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... her kitchen window, was conscious of a vague sense of worry as to her friend over the fence. It appeared to her that Susan was looking more thin and peaked than nature had intended. It is true that Miss Clegg was always of a bony and nervous outline, but it seemed slowly but surely borne in upon her older friend ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... the angels on the chalices, he did not hate them; on the contrary, he saw in them the reflection of those vague images of loveliness and innocence which haunt every artist's soul at times, and the mere manual skill necessary to produce expression in things so minute, fascinated a mind accustomed to cope with difficulties, and so inured to them ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Rome by 200 B.C. and that of Isis and Serapis in the time of Sulla. In the early centuries of the Christian era the cultus of Mithra prevailed not only in Rome but in most parts of Europe where there were Roman legions, even in Britain. These religions may be appropriately labelled with the vague word oriental, for they are not so much the special creeds of Egypt and Persia transplanted into Roman soil as fragments, combinations and adaptations of the most various eastern beliefs. They differed from the forms of worship indigenous to Greece and Italy in being personal, not national: ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... swear at once 800 That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce— Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown— O I do think that I have been alone In chastity: yes, Pallas has been sighing, While every eye saw me my hair uptying With fingers cool as aspen leaves. Sweet love, I was as vague as solitary dove, Nor knew that nests were built. Now a soft kiss— Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss, An immortality of passion's thine: 810 Ere long I will exalt thee to the shine Of heaven ambrosial; and we will shade Ourselves whole ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... again, And beat the cross to earth, and break the King And all his Table.' Then they reached a glade, Where under one long lane of cloudless air Before another wood, the royal crown Sparkled, and swaying upon a restless elm Drew the vague glance of Vivien, and her Squire; Amazed were these; 'Lo there' she cried—'a crown— Borne by some high lord-prince of Arthur's hall, And there a horse! the rider? where is he? See, yonder lies one ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... the door. No one spoke a word. The silence as he crossed the room seemed a little ominous. He looked over his shoulder. They were all three standing in their places, looking at him. A vague sense ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... book itself which can make clear that by "mystical" its author does not imply a conception which relies more on vague feelings than on "strictly scientific statements." It is true that "mysticism" is at present widely understood in the former sense, and hence it is declared by many to be a sphere of the human soul-life with which "true science" ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... politely, with the usual vague American notion of the Balkan states. The Bulgarian's ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a lot better and more clear-headed than he'd been feeling. Maybe the sleep had done ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... restlessly, and her heart throbbed anxiously, as she told herself that she had done little to smooth his rugged pathway. The vague feeling, that he had not been entirely to blame, if she had not found perfect happiness by his side, alarmed her. Did not her former conduct justify him in expecting hindrance rather than support and help in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... me; but which I should use in London in redeeming bonds and coupons, and should leave in the bank on deposit unless by the peculiarity of their rules, I should be obliged to withdraw it. They objected to taking the money as a Government deposit, or as an official deposit in my name, having some vague idea that if they took it and opened an official Government account they should be liable for the appropriation of the money unless documents from the United States were filed with them taking away that liability, but they could not tell ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... the "great store of firre" found lying "at their whole lengths" in the "fens and marises" of Lancashire and other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure what species of evergreen Caesar intended by abies. The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. PINUS, PINE, has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and KIEFER, FICHTE, and TANNE are often confounded in German.—Rossmassler, Der Wald, pp. 256, 289, 324. A similar confusion in the names of this family ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... there. In Paris he once more visited Turgenev, and then crossed over to London, where he saw the great Russian critic Herzen almost every day. Herzen was not at all impressed by Tolstoi's philosophical views, finding them both weak and vague. The little daughter of Herzen begged her father for the privilege of meeting the young and famous author. She expected to see a philosopher, who would speak of weighty matters: what was her disappointment when ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... evidence, that I was nightly removed from the mess-room to my bed in the mode I mention, it would have puzzled me sorely to prove the fact in any direct way; inasmuch as by half-past nine, as the clock chimed, and Tim entered to take me, I was very innocent of all that was going on, and except a certain vague sense of regret at leaving the decanter, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... had conceived a great passion for Tabea, and now that his apprenticeship was about to expire he amused her with surreptitious notes. To-day, for the first time, Tabea began to think of the possibility of marrying Scheible, chiefly, perhaps, from a vague desire to escape from the convent, which could not but be irksome to one of her spirit. Scheible was ambitious, and it was his plan, as she knew, to go to Philadelphia to make his fortune; and she and he together, what ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... He could not analyse his unutterable sense of shame. He had been afraid to fight. He knew he was a coward, but there was a deeper shame in which his mother was involved. She was a Quaker, he knew, and he had a more or less vague idea that Quakers would not fight. Was she then a coward? That any reflection should be made upon his mother stabbed him to the heart. Again and again Mop's sneering, grinning face appeared before his eyes. He felt that he could ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... gave, as is well known, an impulse to the investigation of the use of organs—and thus created the great school of what is known in Germany as Biology—a department of science for which no English word exists except the rather vague term Natural History. This was especially the case in floral biology, and it is interesting to see with what hesitation he at first expressed the value of his book on Orchids ("Life and Letters", III. page 254.), "It will perhaps serve to illustrate how Natural History may be worked ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... an assault did not greatly move him now. He was too tired and sleepy to have more than a vague impression of anything. He saw the coals glowing before him, and then he did not see them. He had gone sound asleep in ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Pulteney inveighed against such a vague and general way of accounting for the public money, as tending to render parliaments altogether insignificant, to cover embezzlements, and to screen corrupt and rapacious ministers. The commons having taken into ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... childish days I remember to have had a vague but profound admiration for a certain legendary person called the Lord Mayor's fool. I had the highest opinion of the intellectual capacity of that suppositious retainer of the Mansion House, and I really regarded ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... young gentleman be a Conservative, he has usually some vague ideas about Ireland and the Pope which he cannot very clearly explain, but which he knows are the right sort of thing, and not to be very easily got over by the other side. He has also some choice sentences regarding ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the keen speculator on theological problems and for the mystic who, because he feels God, declines to reason about Him—for a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn, but also for a Nachmanides, a Vital, and a Luria' (M. Joseph, op. cit., p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism stands for spiritual inwardness. Religion without mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume. This saying is no more precise and no more informing than Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as morality touched with emotion. Neither mysticism nor ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... Katherine's marriage, there was a long era noticeable only for such vicissitudes as were incident to their fortune and position. But in May, A.D. 1774, the first murmur of the returning tide of destiny was heard. Not but what there had been for long some vague and general expectation of momentous events which would touch many individual lives; but this May night, a singular prescience of change ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... rainwater and indicated that here they would camp for the night, Margaret was too weary to question the decision. It had not occurred to her that she would be on the way overnight before she met her friends. Her knowledge of the way, and of distances, was but vague. It is doubtful if she would have ventured had she known that she must pass the night thus in the company of two strange savage creatures. Yet, now that she was here and it was inevitable, she would not shrink, but ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... deep, fiery eyes of the gunfighter, stepped into the room to minister to his patient. He had a vague feeling that, if Bull Hunter died, Pete Reeve would blame him for lack of care. In truth, Pete seemed ready to blame everyone. He threatened to destroy the whole village if a dog was allowed to howl ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... said the voice, which was to me as the fiat of life and of death, so utterly did it fill my existence: "why should we thus yield to a vague terror? Listen, my beloved! I know where the waters of the fountains of life roll their eternal waves—I know I can bear you thither and bid you drink from their source, and over lips so hallowed death hath ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... recognised" Jewish teaching on this subject. The belief that God would deliver his people, and that his sovereignty would be recognised throughout the world, was no doubt part of the belief of every pious Jew, but the details were vague and there was no systematic teaching ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... baby for the last time, blessed it for the vague sweet hope it had infused into her heart, and then laid it in its nurse's arms and left ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... woman made a gesture as wide and vague as Rita's own of a few minutes before. "Our home, noble lady? the wilderness is our home to-day. Our little farm, our cottage, our patch of cane, all gone, all destroyed. Only the graves of ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... away from him, turning her profile. Her expression was inscrutable. After a silence he dropped her wrists with a vague laugh. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... universities provide so liberally, except dabbling in literature. Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction—which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond. In his own eyes he did well enough, and a good deal better. Gifted not ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... description be worth? It would be, at the best, vague and indefinite. Besides, they've not even found the boy. Now, to return ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... the United States to entrust him with a negotiation with England relative to the Commerce of the two countries. M. Gouv. Morris acquitted himself in this as an adroit man, and with his customary zeal, but despite his address (insinuation) obtained only the vague hope of an advantageous commercial treaty on condition of an Alliance resembling that between France and the United States.... [Mr. Robert Morris] is himself English, and interested in all the large speculations founded in this country for Great ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of Rome with the somewhat more distant Caere were on the whole far more peaceful and friendly than those which we usually find subsisting between neighbours in early times. There are doubtless vague legends, reaching back to times of distant antiquity, about conflicts between Latium and Caere; Mezentius the king of Caere, for instance, is asserted to have obtained great victories over the Latins, and to have imposed upon ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that this was the charge selected first for proof; for so effectual had been the precautions which he had taken to conceal his crime in this case, that he was confident that, instead of any substantial evidence against him, there could be, at worst, only vague grounds of suspicion, and these he was confident he could easily show were insufficient to establish so serious ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... her face toward the fire as a flower seeks the sun, but her deep eyes looked beyond it, into the fires of Life itself. A haunting sense of unfulfilment stirred her to vague resentment, and she sighed as she rose and moved restlessly about the room. She lighted the tall candles that stood upon the mantel-shelf, straightened a rug, moved a chair, and gathered up a handful of fallen rose-petals on her way to the window. She was about to draw down ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... The idea of Ukridge married was something too overpowering to be assimilated on the instant. If ever there was a man designed by nature to be a bachelor, Stanley Ukridge was that man. Garnet could feel that he himself was not looking his best. He knew in a vague, impersonal way that his eyebrows were still somewhere in the middle of his forehead, whither they had sprung in the first moment of surprise, and that his jaw, which had dropped, had not yet resumed its normal posture. Before committing ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... in a proud, self-satisfied, almost triumphant manner, and I felt profound pity, mingled with a feeling of vague contempt, for this vainglorious and simple reproducer ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Eric's, although it was coming to weigh heavily on his buoyant spirit, was not the worst of his troubles. The girl from Orange—there lay the sting. He had sent her a note as well, but there was little he was free to say without betraying Billy, the note was mostly vague expressions of regret, and Rex knew her clearheaded directness too well to hope that it would count for much. No answer had come, and, day by day, he had grown more dejected, ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... rose suddenly to her feet and expression came to her face—a very wonderful expression wherein were blended fear, awe, and something of vague but violent joy—as though one suddenly beheld a loved ghost from ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... ten minutes later Jimmy's saddle horse clattered off at a gallop. The visitors were gone silence was left behind them. But Conscience did not at once turn into the house and close the door behind her. She stood by one of the tall pillars and the boy strained his gaze to make out more than the vague outline of a shadow-shape. Then slowly she came down the stairs and out onto the moonlit lawn, walking meditatively in the direction of Stuart Farquaharson's hiding place. The boy's heart leaped into a heightened tattoo and he bent eagerly forward ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... that she had taken to sit in the old study of Stephen Verner; a room which she had rarely entered during his lifetime. Perhaps some vague impression that she was now a woman of business, or ought to be one, that she herself was in sole charge for the absent heir, had induced her to take up her daily sitting amidst the drawers, bureaux, and other places which had contained Mr. Verner's papers—which contained them still. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... incongruity of human nature, the mingling of the beast and the divine, which cannot find satisfaction in the same woman; whatever the fire in her, she cannot gratify the instincts which rage below passion in man, without losing the purity of mind which he adores in her. She, too, feels a vague regret that some portion of his nature is a sealed book to her, forever beyond her ken. But her regret is nothing to his: he knows, and she ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to a stranger, that there was some subject of care not vague nor undefined pressing upon Mr. Ringgan's mind as ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... little at home those days, for the house in Brooklyn disturbed me now. Poor old Dad. Since I had secured my contract he had tried so hard to help me, to be eager, interested, alive, to talk it all over with me at night. And this I did not like to do. A vague feeling of guilt and disloyalty would creep into my now boundless zest for the harbor that had crowded him out. And I think that he suspected this. One night, when with this feeling I stupidly tried to talk as though I still hated all its ugliness, its clamor, smoke and grime, I ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... and more observers and thinkers have enlarged the boundaries and developed the territory of the known. The history of human thought itself demonstrates an evolution which began with the savages' vague interpretation of the "what" and the "why" of the universe, and culminates ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... understood and to become amenable to further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines, distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be called ...
— Progress and History • Various
... it, his eye was caught by an indistinguishable object moving across the plain from the direction of Cameron City. He regarded it as he might have regarded the progress of a coyote or prairie-dog, till it stopped at his own gate, half a mile to the northward. A vague feeling of dissatisfaction came over him at the sight, but he did not disturb himself, nor make any remarks to the dogs on the subject. They however soon pricked up their ears, and sprang to their ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... France did not look far forward into the future or attempt to trace the definite lines on which the human race might be expected to develop. They contented themselves with principles and vague generalities, and they had no illusions as to the slowness of the process of social amelioration; a rational morality, the condition of improvement, was only in its infancy. A passage in a work of the Abbe Morellet probably reflects faithfully enough the comfortable though not ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... romancer was the son of the Widow Hathorne. Now it so chanced that her family had long ago occupied a house on Union Street, looking off into the garden of the old Manning family mansion; and she remembered no son, though a vague image came back to her of a strong and graceful boy's form dancing across the garden, at play, years before. Her mind therefore fastened upon one of the sisters, who, she knew, had shown great facility in writing: indeed, Hawthorne used at one time to say that it was she who should have been the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... different from those adopted in a school meant for the special instruction of the artisan in his own business. I do not think this distinction is yet firmly enough fixed in our minds, or calculated upon in our plans of operation. We have hitherto acted, it seems to me, under a vague impression that the arts of drawing and painting might be, up to a certain point, taught in a general way to everyone, and would do everyone equal good; and that each class of operatives might afterwards bring this general ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a smile, "do you think I am to be turned from my quest after this great truth by the stringing together of words without meaning—at least words vague and incomprehensible?" ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... who seized and subdued this island in the year 1066 and following years. The fourth contribution came to us by the aid of the Revival of Learning— rather a process than an event, the dates of which are vague, but which may be said to have taken place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Latin left for us by the Romans is called Latin of the First Period; that brought over by the missionaries from Rome, Latin of the Second Period; that given us by the Norman-French, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... clothes, snowy from collar to shoe tips, like the trappings of the White Knight, and started to walk down into the Settlement to find Martha. I intended to stop at Mother Spurlock's "Little House Beside the Road," and some vague idea was in my mind of having her dispatch a messenger to summons Martha to the interview I was about to bestow upon her. That is not the way it all happened and I was hot and dusty and sweat-drenched before I had been on my quest more than ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... The irrelevant ideas might consist of thoughts about a German lesson which you are going to study, visions of a face, or thoughts about some social engagement. These marginal objects are in the mind even when you conscientiously focus your mind upon the history lesson, and, though vague, they try to force their way into the focus and become clear. The task of paying attention, then, consists in maintaining the desired object at the centre of the mental field and keeping the distractions away. With this definition of attention, we see that ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... previous century, by the nations of the Tigris and Euphrates, but all Asia, from the Indus to the Hellespont, was about to fall on her to crush her. She was destitute of all human help and allies, and the gods themselves appeared to have forsaken her. The fellahin, inspired with vague alarm, recognised evil omens in all around them. Rain is rare in the Thebaid, and storms occur there only twice or three times in a century: but a few days after the accession of Psammetichus, a shower of fine rain fell at ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... in fog, now drenched in rain, were overpowering and terrifying to me. Beyond that general seeming of terror there is little I remember of the early city, except the glimmer of white tent tops against gray fog or blue water, the loud voices in the streets, and a vague, general impression of rapid and violent changes of place and circumstance. Through their confusion three figures only, move with any clearness,—my tall, teasing, father, my grim nurse Abby, and my pale-haired mother. Indeed, the first distinct incident that stands forth from ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... running through a part of the State, the letters "r" and "c" hard, which spell 47. A more exact Exclusion might be found in the word "{r}i{ng}," which spells 47. For if we consider the shape of the boundary of New York we would see that in no vague sense a ring, as a circle, is the ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... stand separation. The memory of Jahel, smarting at first, was smoothed down little by little, and nothing remained but a vague irritation, of which she was no ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... care much whether we did or didn't," retorted Vixen, shrouding her personality in a vague plural. "If you had cared you would have been with us. Sultan," meaning the chestnut "must have felt cruelly humiliated by being ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... by means of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... at the little pearl brooch, a hundred vague doubts and dreads which had previously been resolutely thrust aside, darting back into her mind with a new and terrible significance. She felt stunned and bewildered, but the predominant sensation was the necessity for caution. ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... earliest remembered observation, when I first began to "take notice," as nurses say of vague babies, with pinafore comparison and judgment, Aunt Judy was an old woman; I knew that, because she had explained to me why I had not wrinkles like hers, and why she could not read her precious Bible without spectacles, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... this world ignorant, yet full of presentiments and questions. I learn my first vague lesson about myself and God. I naturally ask: For what purpose has God put me here? What does He wish me to do? The Catechism answers: To do His will, to keep His commandments. Here they are, and this is what they mean. I study them, and the more I study them, ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... limits of common observation. You are now demanding that a circumstance, which, even if it were proved up to the hilt, would not prejudice me in the eyes of a good judge, should be fatal to me when, as it is, it rests on vague suspicion, uncertainty, and ignorance. You will perhaps, as is your wont, say, 'What, then, was it that you wrapped in a linen cloth and were so careful to deposit with the household gods?' Really, Aemilianus! is this the way you accuse your victims? You produce no definite evidence ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... scholars, too, echoed the voices of their hearts, some of them sonorous with religious bliss, others sad, still others happy-go-lucky. Although absorbed in my book, I would have a vague consciousness of the connection between the various singsongs and their respective performers. I would be aware that the bass voice with the flourishes in front of me belonged to the stuttering widower from Vitebsk, that the squeaky, jerky intonation ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate programs, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a man," or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan." It is no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso" or "Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading strings, of the resonant, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... this feeling of urgency that stimulated her, and the vague ideas which had been floating in her brain suddenly crystallised, and a plan took shape which she promptly communicated to Alice. The latter, she proposed, should go to Paris, to the pastor's family at Neuilly, Barbara lending her the necessary money, for the girl was only given a ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... not, as I cannot, describe our meeting. It was the meeting of brothers—yet of strangers—and a confusion of wonder, curiosity, vague expectation, and doubt, possessed the soul of each. I trust and believe, that notwithstanding the different political bias which sways each, the ancient ties which bound us together as brothers will again unite us. The countenance of Calpurnius, though dark and almost ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Francis, he was beginning to be piqued by Elsie's gentle indifference, and he had a vague suspicion that Wayne was carrying on a flirtation with her instead of attending to Mrs. Verdon. Lily's light-grey eyes were not as beautiful as Elsie's brown orbs, but they were pretty enough when they glanced at him in mute reproach. He felt he ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... These three references are considered spurious by many scholars, and even if they were all to be accepted it would mean that the total pagan testimony as to the historicity of Jesus is confined to three very vague and brief references written a century after the reputed time of Jesus. The longest reference to Jesus is in the writings of the Jewish historian, Josephus. The passage referring to Jesus in his "Jewish Antiquities" has been considered as spurious even by conservative scholars. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... striking episodes, they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside, and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience. Immediate experience is the intermittent ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... resignation similar to the lime-stone formation deposited on objects by certain springs. And a kind of interest for the thousand-and-one little insignificant things of daily life, a care for the simple, ordinary everyday occupations, awakened in her heart. A sort of pensive melancholy, a vague disenchantment with life was growing up in her mind. What did she lack? What did she want? She did not know. She had no worldly desires, no thirst for amusement, no longing for permissible pleasures. What then? ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of religion Bonaparte's ideas were very vague. "My reason," said he, "makes me incredulous respecting many things; but the impressions of my childhood and early youth throw me into uncertainty." He was very fond of talking of religion. In Italy, in Egypt, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and gazing in vague trouble after her rapidly disappearing visitor, murmured to herself, "Who ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... measure, but they were quite sensible that everything had changed in their little world, and that they were out of tune with it. Some few of their number had made their way to India or Canada, and there was a vague dissatisfaction which only required a prospect of change to develop. As time went on, and the laird's plan for opening the coal beds on his estate got known, the men ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... preserve the obscurer materials of history. The Collection Du Puy, which has now became national property, comprised more than 800 volumes of fugitive pieces, memoirs, instructions, pedigrees, letters, and all the other miscellaneous documents that were classed by D'Israeli 'under the vague title of State Papers.' It has been said that the object of their 'Titanic labour' was to ease the way for the historian De Thou; but it is more likely that the brothers obeyed an instinct for the acquisition of secret history; 'life would have been too short to have ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... picket fence and holding desultory converse with Mabel Rorebeck, an attractive member of the Friday Afternoon Dancing Class, that hated organization of which Sam and Penrod were both members. Mabel was a shy little girl; but Penrod had a vague understanding that Sam considered ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... a woman grown, yet of a strangely vague and childlike look. The figure, never very large, was thin and shrunken unbelievably. The features, waxy-white, were mercifully spared by the flames which had licked at the shielding hands and arms that had borne her hither. ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... hour on the day he is to leave. Thus gives the guest clearly, and without discourtesy, the precise time he is expected to remain at the home of the hostess, and he may remain the full time without any vague pre monitions of undesired presence. If the hostess did not state the time of arrival and departure the guest should in her acceptance give suggestive dates leaving them subject to change at the discretion of the hostess. Any other plan is embarrassing ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... student finds himself already possessed of a vague, general knowledge of literature, but nothing definite or satisfying, nothing that inspires interest. He it is who may profitably take up the first attractive unread book at hand; but he should endeavor to read it, not as an isolated fragment of literature, but ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... you will be reading a Letter I hurried off for you by Dr. Russell in the last steamer; and your friendly anxieties will partly be set at rest. Had I kept silence so very long? I knew it was a long while; but my vague remorse had kept no date! It behoves me now to write again without delay; to certify with all distinctness that I have safely received your Letter of the 30th October, safely the Bill for L25 it contained;—that you are a brave, friendly man, of most ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... detective is a mysterious way. Far be it from us to presume to point it out, or elucidate or expound it in any degree. We can only give a vague, incomplete, it may be even incorrect, view of what the man in grey did and achieved, nevertheless we are bound to record what we know as to this officer's proceedings, inasmuch as they have to do with the thread ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... Mona, "and I seemed to smell them quite strong," and she told them her dream—at least a part of it. She left out about the forget-me-nots that she rowed and rowed to try and get. She could not have told why she left out that part, but already a vague thought had come to her—one that she was ashamed of, even though it was so vague, and it ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... consciousness. Her first sensation was one of drowsy well-being. For some minutes she lay while her brain groped in a vague, listless way to find itself. She and Win were going West—there was a ranch for sale—and ... she suddenly realized that she was uncomfortable. Her shoulders and hips ached. Where was she? She felt cold. She tried to move and the effort caused her pain. She heard a sound nearby and opened ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... was reckoned a little adventure to accomplish it. Besides, the Highlands, though now as peaceable as any part of King George's dominions, was a sound which still carried terror, while so many survived who had witnessed the insurrection of 1745; and a vague idea of fear was impressed on many as they looked from the towers of Stirling northward to the huge chain of mountains, which rises like a dusky rampart to conceal in its recesses a people whose dress, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... Rachael Gregory admitted to herself months later, there had been a cloud in the sky—a cloud so tiny and so vague that for many days she had been able to banish it in the flooding sunshine all about her whenever it crossed ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... associations with the newly born moon than that poetic sentiment which delights in the vision of the faint sickle silver through the twilight; if they possess any further association with the planet, it is likely to be no more than a vague dread of the effect of its radiance falling on a sleeper. Women, on the contrary, will remember that the moon should be first seen not "full face," but "over the the[TN-1] right shoulder;" they will ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... gilt should be wholly dimmed. The country, in short, so far as bustle and movement went, was more quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its restless elements had been drawn towards the seat of the conflict. But the air was full of a vague disturbance. To me, at least, it seemed so, emerging from such a solitude as has been hinted at, and the more impressible by rumors and indefinable presentiments, since I had not lived, like other ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... realised, in the first place, how undefined is the Hindu's religious position. From the rudest polytheism up to pantheism, and even to an atheistic philosophy, all is within the Hindu pale, like fantastic cloud shapes and vague mist and empty ether, all within the same sky. To the student of Hinduism, then, the first fact that emerges is that there are no distinctive Hindu doctrines. No one doctrine is distinctive of Hinduism. There is no canonical book, nowhere any stated body of doctrine that might be called the Hindu ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... all this vague unrest and incipient division came a Presidential election, the most strangely unreal in the whole history of the United States. The issue about which alone all men, North and South, were thinking was carefully excluded ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... disposed in a circle, and that a magic ring, being suspended over the centre, was conceived to point to the initial letters of the name of him who should be the future emperor. Theodorus, a man of most eminent qualifications, and high popularity, was put to death by the jealousy of Valens, on the vague evidence that this kind of trial had indicated the early letters of his name. [141] It may easily be imagined, that, where so restless and secret an investigation was employed as to the successor that fate ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... those who think the spirits are always trivial or foolish, I wish to say that "Mitchell's" remarks were dignified and very suggestive. He produced in my mind the distinct impression of a serious man of seventy, ornate of rhetoric, but never vague or wandering in his thought, and he never went outside the circle of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... ceased, the wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a faint ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of mine who wanted a wife, and said there were only two things he would stipulate for—1,500 a year, and an angel. But it brings us to another definition, you see. We shall agree as to the brains, but how about goodness! What is your definition of that very wide, not to say vague, term?" ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrested from the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination is concerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasy that peoples with images the interlunar vague. Still, one of these lyrics, in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the sublimer works of a supernatural cast,—Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" of Goethe, "Manfred," or even those ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... constant want of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but I had no pattern, and consequently never ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... indicated an ivy-grown tower, to which the knight made his way. The whole place struck him as strangely sombre and weird, a castle of shadows and vague horror. He was shown into a gloomy chamber by an aged attendant, and there awaited the coming of the lord. Opposite him was hung a veiled picture, and half hoping that he might solve the mystery which pervaded the place, he drew aside the curtain. From the canvas there looked out at ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... and grew more friendly. "Frankly," said he, "I experience difficulty. My remark was vague. I meant it ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... man which shrank from plain courses. And, with all his cleverness, he missed the occasion of fame. Rowley and I were suffered to walk out of his door, with all our baggage, on foot, with no destination named, except in the vague statement that we were come 'to view the lakes'; and my friend only watched our departure with his chin in his hand, still ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... new decree. The agents of the Committee of General Security, of whom Heron is the chief, have from to-day powers of domiciliary search; they have full powers to proceed against all enemies of public welfare. Isn't that beautifully vague? And they have absolute discretion; every one may become an enemy of public welfare, either by spending too much money or by spending too little, by laughing to-day or crying to-morrow, by mourning for one dead relative or rejoicing over the execution of another. He may be a ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Randolph, the whole of Fauchet's letter, and Randolph's remarks. "From the nature of the circumstances," says Sparks, "Mr. Randolph had a difficult task to perform, as he was obliged to prove a negative, and to explain vague expressions and insinuations connected with his name in Fauchet's letter." The statements which he made in proof of his innocence were not such as to produce entire conviction. "He moreover," continues Sparks, "allowed ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Ingram. He believed the man to be sincere with him and he trusted him. And yet, as he looked up now and saw Ingram, relapsed into his luxurious arm chair, blowing rings of smoke, he seemed to detect something in his expression that filled him with a vague distrust about the genuineness of his professed interest in him. There was a sort of swagger in his whole posture, a slickness about his well-dressed, well-fed body, and a self-satisfaction in his somewhat burly face, nay, even in the ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... out?" Joy broke into a laugh, and Gypsy, now quite awake, joined in it merrily. For the first time a vague notion came to her that she was rather glad Joy came. It might be some fun, after all, to have somebody round all the time to—in that ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... graciousness. He was entertained splendidly; presents were made to him, which, being considerably in debt, he gladly accepted; but as regards his mission he was put off with evasions and blandishments, and he returned home with a reply from the king containing some vague promises of reform in financial and other matters, but an absolute refusal to modify the decrees against heresy. Rather would he sacrifice a hundred thousand lives, if he had them, than concede liberty of worship in ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... intended to call at Primrose Croft that very afternoon, to see Mr Roberts, or if he were absent, Mistress Grena; but he preferred the gentleman, as being usually more manageable than the lady. He meant to terrify the person whom he might see, by vague hints of something which he had heard—and which was not to be mentioned—that it might be mournfully necessary for him to report to the authorities if more humility and subordination to his orders were not shown. But he was detained, first by a brother priest ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... too vague in its outlines to be any particular individual's; but as all its points fit many an Italian priest who became a Cardinal or a Bishop and a chief minister to a prince, in the time of the Renaissance, as well as in the period immediately before it, and that immediately ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... especially through the vascular and nervous systems. In these children there is a state of exaltation, indeed as yet not comparable in intensity to that of the adolescent or adult, which is, nevertheless, erethistic in its nature. It is massive, vague, and generally distributed throughout the body. In some cases there is specific sexual excitement with erections of the penis and hyperaemia of the female genitalia. Such phenomena are seen only in the cases that seem to me to be precocious. This point will be more fully treated in the chapter ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... purity of her mind; and they admired themselves the more that they appreciated her cleverness. She was not only a woman to love but to idolise; she gave even these prosaic San Francisco youths vague promptings to distinguish themselves by some great and noble action, sending her shafts straight through the American brain to those dumb inherited instincts which had straggled down through the centuries from mediaeval ancestors. Her very selfishness—which ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... despair, sat down without a word, so crushed was he by the vague presence of approaching disaster. But after breakfast, when his friends gathered round him before a comfortable fire, Birotteau naively related the history of his troubles. His hearers, who were beginning ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... Maryland was almost wholly rural; her plantations and farms were reached with difficulty by roads hardly more than bridle-paths, or with ease by sailboat and rowboat along the innumerable waterways. Though here and there manors—large, easygoing, patriarchal places, with vague, feudal ways and customs—were to be found, the moderate sized plantation was the rule. Here stood, in sight usually of blue water, the planter's dwelling of brick or wood. Around it grew up the typical ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... the poison gas that we have heard vague rumours about," I remarked to the Captain. The gas rose in great clouds as if it had been poured from nozzles, expanding as it ascended; here and there brown clouds seemed to be mixed with the general yellowish green ones. "It looks like chlorine," ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... indisposition might be due to the fact that the executors were hinting at the eventual necessity of taking out probate in regard to Sir Mark's will; this done, a considerable change in affairs was inevitable. In consequence of the information, Gertie could not avoid looking about her in the vague hope of encountering Henry; she wanted to see him, although she knew a meeting would only disturb and confuse. She waited outside the street door after business was over, gazing up and down before ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... confided to the never-changing Glafira Petrovna the administration of his household, and the supervision of his agents, the young Lavretsky set out for Moscow, whither a vague but powerful longing attracted him. He knew in what his education had been defective, and he was determined to supply its deficiencies as far as possible. In the course of the last five years he had read much, and he had see a good deal with his own eyes. Many ideas had passed through his mind, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... peccata mundi' and such things mean. But when one, like I, has been initiated from earliest childhood in the mystical sanctuary of our religion; when there one does not know whither to go with all the vague but urgent feelings, but waits with a heart full of devotion for the divine service without really knowing what to expect, yet rises lightened and uplifted without knowing what one has received; when one deemed those fortunate who knelt under ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the frontier against all comers. Astonishment gave place to satisfaction, and satisfaction grew into delight. The haunting nightmare of Egyptian politics ended. Another dream began—a bright if vague vision of Imperial power, of trans-continental railways, of African Viceroys, of conquest and commerce. The interest of the British people in the work of regeneration grew continually. Each new reform was hailed with ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... were unjustifiable, but who was to tell them that? I mean who was wise enough and convincing enough to show them the inanity of their mental attitude? The whole atmosphere was poisoned with visions that were not so much false as simply impossible. They were also the result of vague and unconfessed fears, and that made their strength. For myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, I was careful not to allude to their character because I did not want the Note to be thrown away ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... two, to allow the tickets to be taken, just before entering the Sheffield station, and thence I had a glimpse of the famous town of razors and penknives, enveloped in a cloud of its own diffusing. My impressions of it are extremely vague and misty,—or, rather, smoky: for Sheffield seems to me smokier than Manchester. Liverpool, or Birmingham,—smokier than all England besides, unless Newcastle be the exception. It might have been Pluto's own metropolis, shrouded in sulphurous vapor; and, indeed, our approach to ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... defines the term citizen, and, in harmony with our best lexicographers, declares a citizen to be a person possessed of the right to vote. In the last year the question of woman's political status has been raised from one of vague generalities to one of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... felt the vague sadness that possesses the mind when we leave forever a place where we have been happy, but another thought ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... dusk, every unsightly blot obscured by the kindly night. But best of all, the fascination of the People I'd Like to Know. They pop up now and then in the shifting crowds, and are gone the next moment, leaving behind them a vague regret. Sometimes I call them the People I'd Like to Know and sometimes I call them the People I Know I'd Like, but it means much the same. Their faces flash by in the crowd, and are gone, but I recognize them instantly as belonging to my ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... Tuileries, the Louvre, interlaced with trees as black as if they were drawn in India ink on the wavering background of the mist. A broad, very low bed on a platform a few steps above the floor, two or three small lacquer screens with vague fanciful decorations in gold, denoting, as did the double doors and the heavy woollen carpet, a dread of cold carried to excess, chairs of various styles, long chairs and low chairs, placed at random, all well-stuffed and ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... when he finds himself wrong. But can we, for that reason, run ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change, of which he himself has given no intimation? Can we safely base our action upon any such vague inference? Now, as ever, I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas's position, question his motives, or do aught that can be personally offensive to him. Whenever, if ever, he and we can come together on principle so that our great cause may have assistance ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... miserable to give much thought to a matter of such slight importance, he glanced around for a place to finish his sleep. A tree some distance ahead of him looked inviting and towards it he rode. Habit made him picket the horse before he lay down and as he fell asleep he had vague recollections of handling a strange picket rope some time recently. The horse slowly turned and stared at the already snoring figure, glanced over the landscape, back the to queerest man it had ever met, and then fell to grazing in quiet ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... will enter the quaint old church that his fancy has thus restored—moving softly, for truly he is on holy ground and every step is over unknown dead—he may see in vague vision a very little of the ancient interior: the nave lighted by diamond-paned windows, not stained; the aisles between the rows of pews paved with brick; the chancel paved with tile; a gallery at the end next the tower; and, over all, the heavy timbers of ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... him fall, I saw my first-born tumbled from his throne! To me his arms were spread, to me his voice Found way from forth the thunders round his head! Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face. Art thou, too, near such doom? vague fear there is: For I have seen my sons most unlike Gods. Divine ye were created, and divine In sad demeanour, solemn, undisturb'd, 330 Unruffled, like high Gods, ye liv'd and ruled: Now I behold in you ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... the hour when the air is raw and the smell of the battle line is penetrating. The night was pitch black; in ponds and stagnant streams in the vicinity frogs were chuckling. Their hoarse clucking could be heard all round; when the star-shells flew up I could catch vague glimpses of the enemy's sandbags and the line (p. 177) of tall shrapnel-swept trees which ran in front of his trenches. The sleep was heavy in my eyes; time and again I dozed off for a second only to wake up as a shell burst in front or swept by my head. It seemed impossible to remain awake, often ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... flats, and the unceasing caress of the air, that was like an importunate lover ever unsatisfied, she watched from the height on which she was perched this evening scene of roaming, feeding animals, staring nomads, monotonous herbage and vague, surely-retreating mountains, with quiet, dreamy eyes. Everything which she saw seemed to her beautiful, a little remote and a little fantastic. The slow movement of the camels, the swifter movements of the circling pigeons about the square towers on the hill, the motionless, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... it looked, that Astley's; with all the paint, gilding, and looking-glass; the vague smell of horses suggestive of coming wonders; the curtain that hid such gorgeous mysteries; the clean white sawdust down in the circus; the company coming in and taking their places; the fiddlers looking carelessly up ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... As down the coast the reddening beacons leapt, The crackle and lapping splash of tacking keels, The bo'suns' low sharp whistles and the whine Of ropes, mixing with many a sea-bird's cry Disturbed the darkness, waking vague swift fears Among the mighty hulks of Spain that lay Nearest, then fading through the mists inshore North-west, then growing again, but farther down Their ranks to Westward with each dark return And dark departure, till ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Stonington, who shipped when a boy of fourteen, and, after four years' coasting, was made second mate of the brig "Herselias," bound around Cape Horn, for seals. On his first voyage the young mate distinguished himself by discovering the South Shetland Islands, guided by the vague hints of a rival sealer, who knew of the islands, and wished them preserved for his own trade, as the seals swarm there by the hundred thousands. The discovery of these islands, and the cargo of ten thousand ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... him. I asked him casually what part of the country he came from. He hesitated a moment, and then said, 'From the south of England.' Of course, I did not ask any further questions, as it was clear he did not care about naming the precise locality, or he would not have given so vague an answer. I feel as deeply indebted to him ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... a very melancholy one, but there are other circumstances which greatly heighten the effect. In a very ignorant or a very wretched population it is natural that there should be much vague, unreasoning discontent; but the Irish people are at present neither wretched nor ignorant. Their economical condition before the famine was, indeed, such that it might well have made reasonable men despair. With the land divided into almost microscopic farms, with a population multiplying ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... McDermott's down-town offices, she sat in the dark of the carriage with the paper Barney had given her clutched in her hand, with neither consideration of the coming interview nor formulated plans. In a vague way she knew that people stared after her, as she went through the corridor of the great building, the hood of her storm-cloak thrown back. Unminding, she rapped at McDermott's private door. She had no misgiving about his being there. She knew in some way, ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... be applied to Catharine, Frederick, Maria Theresa, or Joseph; for though they may shield themselves from personal accusation by acting under the vague titles of "powers," "states," or "governments," the evasion is mean and cowardly; for particularly in such despotic governments as theirs the passions and wills of the rulers are the directors of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... her gratefulness, And says again that life is good; And should the gift of God be less In him than in her motherhood, His fame, though vague, will not be small, As upward through her dream he fares, Half clouded with a crimson fall Of ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... automatically whether he has done it or not. Last come the Twins, who cannot be described because we should be sure to be describing the wrong one. Peter never quite knew what twins were, and his band were not allowed to know anything he did not know, so these two were always vague about themselves, and did their best to give satisfaction by keeping close together in an apologetic sort ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... falls of St. Anthony, extending nine miles on each side of the river, that the Sioux nation grants to the United States the full sovereignty and power over said district forever." The meaning of all this is extremely vague. ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... mean nothing, but it was curious all the same. The opening contre-danse was in full swing, and still they never came, and by the time of the second valse after it Tamara was a prey to a vague fear. While the Princess' uneasiness grew more ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... Miss Gordon, never fear, before three months are past," said Durnovo, in reply to a vague suggestion that his absence might extend to several months. "I am not the sort of man to come to grief by a foolish ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... recital of poverty, of suspicion, of mean makeshifts and compromises, of low pains and lower longings, of sorrows that were degrading, of a grief that was pitiable. Yet it was sincere in a certain kind of vague yearning for the presence of the degraded man to whom it was written,—an affection that was more like a ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... to Henriette. They sat in the garden one soft summer evening, with Henriette's mother occupied with her crocheting at a decorous distance. George, in reverent and humble mood, began to drop vague hints that he was really unworthy of his bride-to-be. He said that he had not always been as good as he should have been; he said that her purity and sweetness had awakened in him new ideals; so that he felt his old life had been ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... more drifting, no more purposelessness. If what Wetzel had told him was true, if he really had not loved in vain, then his cup of happiness was overflowing. Like a far-off and almost forgotten strain of music some memory struggled to take definite shape in his mind; but it was so hazy, so vague, so impalpable, that he ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... I received fresh particulars. I despatched a courier to Madame de Saint-Simon, requesting her to send me another the next day, and I passed the rest of this day, in an ebb and flow of feelings; the man and the Christian struggling against the man and the courtier, and in the midst of a crowd of vague fancies catching glimpses of the future, painted in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... my tennis clothes, snowy from collar to shoe tips, like the trappings of the White Knight, and started to walk down into the Settlement to find Martha. I intended to stop at Mother Spurlock's "Little House Beside the Road," and some vague idea was in my mind of having her dispatch a messenger to summons Martha to the interview I was about to bestow upon her. That is not the way it all happened and I was hot and dusty and sweat-drenched before I had been on my quest more than a ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... The vague, thoughtful look vanished as he jerked his head around. "Oh, sure—sure, baby." He grinned. "A rough one. If I'd known doctoring was like this I'd have been a ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... interpreted as a sign of immediate acquiescence. Fitzwilliam, before his actual appointment, was allowed to commit himself to a line of conduct to which Pitt afterwards objected; his instructions were somewhat vague, and he did not receive timely notice that the cabinet would not assent to the policy he was adopting.[259] Deeply immersed in the conduct of the war, Pitt seems to have neglected the affairs of Ireland at this time, and to have ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Half an hour afterward she had seen with the chevalier a man perfectly unknown to her, but whose appearance was not re-assuring; this was Captain Roquefinette. Bathilde had also remarked, with a vague uneasiness, that, as soon as the man with the long sword had entered, the chevalier ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... March the far-flung arrows of the geese went over. Honk! honk! A vague, prophetic sense crept into the world out of nowhere—part sound, part scent, and yet too vague for either. Sap seeped from the maples. Weird mist-things went moaning through the night. And then, for the first time, I saw my big brother ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... every thing in his power in the business. In a short time Mr. Falconer was acting on all these points as an agent and partizan of Lord Oldborough's. But there was one thing which made him uneasy; he was acting here, as in many former instances, merely upon vague hopes of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... that he thinks it is a duty incumbent on him, which I do not see, and it appears to me to be an act of great folly. He stands much too high, has performed too great actions, and the attacks on him were too vulgar and vague to be under the necessity of any such retaliatory measure as this, and he lowers his dignity by entering into a conflict with such an infamous paper, and appearing to care about its abuse. I think the Chancellor was right, and that he is wrong. There ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Gilian sat silently by, piecing out those scraps of old men's passion with his child's fancy. He found this new world into which he had been dragged, noisy, perplexing, interested apparently in the most vague trifles. That they should lay out his future for warfare and for hate, without any regard for his own wishes, was a little alarming. Soldiering—with the man before him in the picture, sitting propped up on his arms, frantic lest the horses should trample on him—seemed the last trade on earth; as ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... require reasons more vital than those of pounds, shillings and pence. Few men lay down their lives from self-interested motives. Courage is a spiritual quality which requires a spiritual inducement. Men do not set a price on their chance of being blown to bits by shells. Even patriotism is too vague to be a sufficient incentive. The justice of the cause to be fought for helps; it must be proportionate to the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded. But always an ideal is necessary—an ideal of liberty, indignation and mercy. If this is true of the men who go out to die, it is even ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... pulsating, scarlet embers, with here and there a flickering, half-burned timber, and the red-hot wreck of the tiny stove sticking up in the ruins. As soon as the ruins were cool enough to approach, Pete picked up a green pole, and began poking earnestly among them. He had all sorts of vague hopes. He particularly wanted his axe, a tin kettle, and something to eat. The axe was nowhere to be found, at least in such a search as could then be made. The tins, obviously, had all gone to pieces or melted. But he did, at least, scratch out a black, charred ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the week, Mrs. Day, attending in the vague and preoccupied manner which had been hers since Franky's death to her few customers, marvelled greatly and with supreme uneasiness of mind about Mr. Boult. He took no notice of her letter, he did not come to the house. "He is too much offended," she said to herself, wondering ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... soldierly. An occasional sarcastic remark by the Iron Count, meant for his ears, made no impression upon the deadly composure of the new guard who had had his lesson. Miss Calhoun was conscious of a vague feeling that she had served Baldos an ill-turn when she ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... crime that once estranges from the virtues Doth make the memory of their features daily More dim and vague, till each coarse counterfeit Can have the passport to our confidence Sign'd by ourselves. And fitly are they punish'd, Who prize and seek the honest man but as A safer lock to guard ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Elisha inspected the great man with interest. He had a vague memory of a portrait in a volume of "Pickwick" at home. "Oh, I ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of Delphi on the success that would attend his invasion of the Medes. He was told that by passing the river Halys a great empire would be ruined. He crossed, and the fall of his own empire fulfilled the prophecy. Sometimes they were couched in vague and mysterious terms, leaving those who solicited advice to put whatever construction upon them their hopes or fears suggested. Compare, for example, the first specimen of writing given in this article with the descriptions we read in ancient ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... were Nationalists, and when the proposal for a Uniate Church was mooted, declared they would adhere to Rome. The news of this having spread, upset the Orthodox Powers to such an extent that a Russian Vice-Consul was sent hurriedly to the spot. The Spata men, however, who were vague enough about religious doctrines, were very certain that they did not want anything Russian, and the Russian who had been instructed to buy them with gold if necessary had to ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... aware of another strange thing. This, too, like the color, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of ten thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first—it sunk into your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like the murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest; it suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It was only by an effort that one could realize ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... a great deal of curiosity about her, but no one ventured to question her since Mrs. Reffold's defeat. Mrs. Reffold herself rather avoided her, having always a vague suspicion that Bernardine tried to make fun of her. But whether out of perversity or not, Bernardine never would be avoided by her, never let her pass by without a: few words of conversation, and always went to her for information, much to the amusement of Mrs. Reffold's ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... medium of his fancy, to soften and refine his heart, were now exchanged for a host of actual, ignoble vexations, which it was even more humiliating than painful to encounter. His misanthropy, instead of being, as heretofore, a vague and abstract feeling, without any object to light upon, and losing therefore its acrimony in diffusion, was now, by the hostility he came in contact with, condensed into individual enmities, and narrowed into personal resentments; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... though uncertain, antiquity. Whatever be the geological age of the latter skull, I conceive it is quite safe (on the ordinary principles of paleontological reasoning) to assume that the former takes us to, at least, the further side of the vague biological limit, which separates the present geological epoch from that which immediately preceded it. And there can be no doubt that the physical geography of Europe has changed wonderfully, since the bones of Men and Mammoths, Hyaenas and Rhinoceroses were washed pell-mell into ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... inconsiderable section of the public which has been aptly described as dominated by a "longing to combine a picturesque certainty devoid of moral discipline with unlimited transcendental speculations." All these cults combine a vague optimism with an extravagant subjectivity; all would have us believe that so far from things being what they are, they are whatever we may think them to be; all with one accord treat evil in its various manifestations as unreal, and maintain, as it has been neatly phrased, that ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... his past conduct, but found my tongue tied in his presence. I could not bear to inflict so much shame and mortification; and besides, the past being irrevocable, it would only aggravate the disappointment which I was determined every future application should meet with. After some vague apology for non-payment, he applied for a new loan. He had borrowed, he said, of a deserving man, a small sum, which he was now unable to repay. The poor fellow was in narrow circumstances; was saddled with a numerous family; had been prevailed upon to lend, ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... black ribbon aforesaid. For an unreasoning, fierce desire was upon him—very alien to his usual gentle attitude of mind—to shield this beautiful woman from all acquaintance with the foul story set forth in those little books. To shield her, indeed, from more than merely that.—For a vague presentiment possessed him that she might, in some mysterious way, be intimately involved in the final developments of that same story which, though august, were so full of suffering, so profoundly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... report is, so says the news, that a change has taken place in the king's affections. You know whom that concerns. Afterward, the news continues, people are talking about one of the maids of honor, respecting whom various slanderous reports are being circulated. These vague phrases have not allowed me to sleep. I have been deploring, ever since yesterday, that my diffidence and vacillation of purpose should, notwithstanding a certain obstinacy of character I may possess, have left me unable to reply to these insinuations. In a word, therefore, M. de Wardes was setting ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... could not at first find courage to open the envelope. There was a certain physical thrill in handling it, in turning it over, and in looking at the stamps and the postmark. The stamps were French and the postmark was of Paris. That fact brought a vague gleam of joy. Rossi had been travelling, and perhaps he had ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... After he had heard these ballads, so diffuse and vague, he failed to see any point of beauty in them; but the plaintive melody of the sound was nevertheless sufficient to drive away his spirit and exhilarate his soul. Hence it was that he did not make any inquiries about the arguments, and that he did not ask about the matter treated, but simply ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... But now these vague dreams of a somewhat better lot, to be determined by future chance circumstances, rolled away like a shapeless cloud, and left in their place one bright image as the settled object of her ambition. So lofty, so dazzling seemed the prize, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... strike it in some new and unfamiliar light, before they rouse more than a passing curiosity; and though Madelon would sometimes question her father as to the meaning and intention of this or that procession passing along the streets, he found no difficulty in putting her off with vague answers. It was a wedding or a funeral, he would say, or connected with some other ordinary event, which Madelon knew to be of daily recurrence; though none such had as yet had part in the economy of her small world; and priests, and nuns, and monks ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... opinion that Billy did come. Not that he saw Billy come, but he had a vague suspicion, from a feeling of numbness some two feet from the base of the brain, that William had arrived in that immediate vicinity, and while he was recalling his scattered thoughts and feeling for any pieces of spine that might have become detached from the ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... ten, for the first time householders in Germany—real Teutons, with no deception, spring, or false bottom. About half-past one there began such a trumpeting, shouting, pealing of bells, and scurrying hither and thither of feet as woke every person in Frankfurt out of their first sleep with a vague sort of apprehension that the last day was at hand. The whole street was alive, and we could hear people talking in their rooms, or crying to passers-by from their windows, all around us. At last I made out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the mind's dumb whisper, THE WASP ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... thus the stimulus to education. Its exercise awakens and develops the sense of self-reliance and responsibility, and illuminates the relation of the individual to society and to the race in a manner that otherwise remains vague and academic. It reveals sex not merely as an untamed and insatiable natural force to which men and women must submit hopelessly and inertly, as it sweeps through them, and then accept with abject humility the hopeless and heavy consequences. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... possibly have hit something, and from roofs with ordinary guns and revolvers which could not possibly have hit anything at all. In the gray haze that hung over Paris the next morning, I wandered through empty streets and finally, with some vague notion of looking out, up the hill of Montmartre. All Paris lay below, mysterious in the mist, with that strange, poignant beauty of something trembling on the verge. One could follow the line of the ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... science. That is the second thing to grasp. Yoga is a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... patriotism! They have no energy, no courage, no civism. Why, you might have remained for a twelvemonth under their very nostrils before they would have found you out. Gilet is the man for the service of his country." Merely to stop the torrent of his complainings, I asked him some vague questions relative to the nobleman whom I was now following to Paris. But the patriot was not to be moved ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... be sure I will,' replied Pyetushkov with a vague wave of his hand. 'I'll have mercy on you, and forgive you. I forgive every one, I forgive you, and Vassilissa I forgive, and every one, every one. Yes, my lad, I've been drinking.... Dri-ink-ing, lad.... Who's that?' he cried suddenly, ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Europe. He knew well that many who talked in high language about sacrificing their lives and fortunes for their country would hesitate when the prospect of another Bloody Circuit was brought close to them. He wanted therefore to have, not vague professions of good will, but distinct invitations and promises of support subscribed by powerful and eminent men. Russell remarked that it would be dangerous to entrust the design to a great number ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... told by those who had felt themselves obliged by circumstances to go out into the baffling gloom. He guessed that something of a like nature had fallen upon the town again. The gas-light on the landings and in the melancholy hall burned feebly—so feebly that one got but a vague view of the rickety hat-stand and the shabby overcoats and head-gear hanging upon it. It was well for him that he had but a corner or so to turn before he reached the pawnshop in whose window he had seen the pistol he ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... can. To begin with, I have a very indistinct remembrance of either the form or the colouring. Even at the time my impression of both was very vague; what so overwhelmed and transfixed my attention, to the exclusion of everything besides itself, was the look ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... Harry sat for some considerable length of time ruminating upon the strange turn affairs had taken, and indulging in vague speculations upon whether the next would be as unfavorable; and at this point of our story we will divulge somewhat ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... as to the origin of Scottish folk-songs was due to ignorance of the comparative method, and of the ballad literature of Europe in general. The result of the discussion was to leave a vague impression that the Scottish ballads were perhaps as old as the time of Dunbar, and were the production of a class of professional minstrels. These minstrels are a stumbling-block in the way of the student of the growth of ballads. The domestic annals of Scotland ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... to her eyes. "Haow interesting. But after all, we've had roboteachers for years, haven't we—or have we—?" She made a vague gesture toward the school, and looked ...
— There Will Be School Tomorrow • V. E. Thiessen
... have had qualms at times—vague, unassembled doubts that troubled her spirit. After Jennie was gone a little black chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore of Maryland and brought him to that remote Western village, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the 'Iliad.' A blind man, in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth. Dryden's lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless;[14] those of Pope, though he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain their hold ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... rest of that night are, for the most part, vague and indistinct; but in spots they stand out clear and vivid. The first thing I knew definitely was when Smith bent over me, cutting the sleeve out ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... be telling when little things only are in the memory, and yet the days with little to be remembering are the happy days, that go past quickly like youth, and leave but vague memories of sunshine and laughter—of nights, and song, and dance. And there were great nights of happiness, for in these days the folk had the time to be knowing one the other, and neighbourly. And maybe in an evening there would be ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... for a few minutes when he heard steps on the other side of the wall; a moment later a key turned in the lock and the gate opened. Dieppe turned to find himself confronted by a young man of tall stature; the dim light showed only the vague outline of a rather long and melancholy, but certainly handsome, face; the stranger's air was eminently distinguished. Dieppe raised ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... their first offense. There is no lack of statistics as to the various groups of defectives, but these figures cannot be reconciled. No two authorities agree as to percentages; the classifications are more or less uncertain; the dividing lines between the different groups are vague, one class easily fading into another. The investigations have largely been made by those not trained for the work, and above all the conclusions as to treatment are at variance, doubtful and necessarily not yet satisfactory. That the clearly insane and the plainly feeble-minded ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... friar put his hoe into his neighbor's patch, and worked until the sweat rolled down his thin cheeks. Gusts of rain added their moisture. As much light as the world was to have that day filtered through sheets of vapor. The bluffs bordering the Okaw could not be seen except as a vague bank of forest; and as for the lowlands across the great river, they might as ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... military, the moral, the political points of view, Verdun was a defeat for the Germans of the first magnitude. Conversely, the French victory filled the world with admiration. The French success at the Marne had been won in complete darkness, and after two years the world still has only a vague notion of the facts of this grandiose conflict. But there never was any possibility of concealment about Verdun. The fight was in the open, the issue was unmistakable, and French courage and skill, French steadiness and endurance, surprised the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... kind note in a vague hope of being heart-whole again by the seventh. The present state of my work, however (Christmas not being a very favourable season for making progress in such doings), assures me that this cannot be, and that I must heroically deny myself the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... full of strange, vague fears, Miss Wimple remained in the now awful gloom and stillness of the bridge till he had quite disappeared. Then gathering up her wits with an effort, she resumed her homeward way. As she emerged from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... mess-room to my bed in the mode I mention, it would have puzzled me sorely to prove the fact in any direct way; inasmuch as by half-past nine, as the clock chimed, and Tim entered to take me, I was very innocent of all that was going on, and except a certain vague sense of regret at leaving the decanter, felt ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... eyes wandered from Smith to my mistress. I saw that they were both pale, serious, silent. I did not know why they were thus, and I could not help repeating that there was but one cause, but one secret to learn; but that was not one of those vague, sickly suspicions, such as had formerly tormented me, but an instinct, persistent and fatal. What strange creatures we! It pleased me to leave them alone before the fire and to go out on the quay to ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... this reasoning be too abstract to be always practically applicable, neither the principles nor the reasoning can fail of approbation when contrasted with the gloomy misgivings for the future and the dark forebodings of evils, imaginary, vague and undefined, by dwelling upon which the opponents of this reform endeavor to stay its progress. Aggressive reasoning and positive principles like these must be met with something more than mere doubtful conjectures, must be resisted by something ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... floundered more hopelessly into the quicksand of Margaret's enchantment, and when he tried to write to Laura Nesbit, half-formed shames fluttered and flushed across his mind. So often he sat alone for long night hours in his attic bedroom in vague agonies and self accusations, pen in hand, trying to find honest words that would fill out his tedious letter. Being a boy and being not entirely outside the gate of his childish paradise, he did not understand the shadow that was ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... turned toward home. When Nan and Dick came up the road the other way, she had gone in, and they had been in the house five minutes or more before she knew of it. Then Dick wandered into the kitchen, on one of the vague quests always bringing the family there in search of her, and she called to ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... died, he retired from business, and reached the age when a man begins to feel there are not many years in front of him, and that all he has had to do in life has been done. His children married, lonesomeness began to creep about him; in the evening, when he looked into the fire-light, a vague, tender reverie floated up, and Margaret's soft eyes and name vivified the dusk. His wife and children passed out of mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense. But she was an old woman, ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... seems to me, certainly not a very attractive lad, whom I approached one bright summers eve wandering together in the starlight, with the proposition of eternal friendship. The pale lad possessed what is called common sense and replied that he had too vague a conception of eternity to dare accept this proposal. Later, among women I have seldom ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... foreigners, in proportion to the scale of his work. In the execution, Mr. Hildreth has carefully read and as carefully digested his various authorities, and presented the results of his studies succinctly, closely, and comprehensively. In many cases the compendious style is apt to fall into a vague generality, or the pith of the matter is liable to be missed; but such is not the case with Mr. Hildreth's. He states all that he sees, though he would see more if he possessed a loftier and imaginative mind. We know not his profession, but there ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... mind; and the frequency of her name on his lips brought tears of real self-reproach to her eyes as she sat alone with him through the dread small hours, not daring to glance into the darkest corners or to stir unless necessity compelled her; overpowered by those vague terrors that evaporate like mist in the cold light ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... old, too; but I hope God will spare me to see them before I die. My soldiers are nothing compared to a disciplined army, where thousands obey the command of one man." Evidently he still entertained some vague hope that the coming event might turn to his advantage, as on another occasion he said to Mr. Waldmeier, "We have a prophecy in our country that a European king will meet an Abyssinian one, and that afterwards a king will reign in Abyssinia ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... girl to her knee, brushed back the bright hair, and looked into the face so freely turned to hers. Through all the years they had been together, the elder sister had never seen before the expression which the younger's face now wore. A vague expectancy sat in her eyes, some nameless content sweetened her smile, a beautiful repose replaced the varying enthusiasm, listlessness, and melancholy that used to haunt her countenance and make it ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... "Harold" symphony was very beautiful, and has warmed my heart. I shall write to Berlioz tomorrow; he must send me his scores. HE will never know ME thoroughly; his ignorance of German prevents this; he will always see me in vague and deceptive outline. But I will honestly use my advantage over him, and bring him ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Clark, it might do. But he hesitated until, at seven, Dick opened his eyes and clearly did not know him. Then he knew that the matter was out of his hands, and that from now on whatever it was that controlled the affairs of men, David's God or his own vague Providence, was in charge. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Office was thus endeavoring to keep England neutral, its army was on the move against France. This does not rest upon vague allegation, but upon the detailed specifications in a communication from the French Foreign Office, which the French Ambassador in London submitted to Sir Edward Grey on July 31st. Its significance is apparent when it is remembered that simultaneously the Kaiser ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... this grave: the other a Scotchman full of intelligence, who proposed the flesh-soil for manure for turnips. The old Vicar, whose age reaches halfway back to the day of the Battle, stood tottering over the verge of the trench. Carlyle has shewn great sagacity in guessing at the localities from the vague descriptions of contemporaries: and his short pasticcio of the battle is the best I have seen. {137} But he will spoil all by making a demi- god of Cromwell, who certainly was so far from wise that he brought about the very thing he fought to prevent—the restoration ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... hat from box, puts it on, looks in mirror. She turns around and looks at him steadfastly for a minute. During this entire scene, from the time the curtain rises, she must in a way indicate a premonition of an approaching catastrophe, a feeling, vague but nevertheless palpable, that something is going to happen. She must hold this before her audience so that she can show to them, without showing to him, the disgust she feels. LAURA has tasted of the privations of self-sacrifice during her struggle, and she has ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... HENRI. L'excitabilite du vague cardiaque et ses modifications sous l'influence de la cafeine. Archives internationales ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... picture is deepened by the effects of the twilight on the plains. A wide outlook across a level country, like a view of the sea, is always impressive, but it has peculiar power in the vague light which follows the sunset. Many poetic natures have felt this mystic spell of the gloaming as it descends upon the plain. Robert Louis Stevenson was one of these, and upon visiting Barbizon he described vividly his ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... for a few minutes, my hostess left me a prey to vague and sinister thoughts, to romantic curiosity, and a religious dread, not unlike the deep emotion which comes upon us when we go into a dark church at night and discern a feeble light glimmering under a ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... most important authority on this side of the question. The systems which the German philosophers have propounded are more serviceable to themselves than edifying to the ordinary reader. High abstractions afford but a very vague and indefinite idea to the mind, nor can their application be fully understood but by those who have ascended the successive stages by which each philosopher has himself mounted. On the present subject, their opinions seem to have been influenced by their views on other subjects. As we ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... lives, and they were wildly excited over it. But much more important to them—to all but the big beaver who was now nursing his triumphant wounds—was the presence of Man in their solitude. Man had hitherto been but a tradition among them, a vague but alarming tradition. And now his appearance, yesterday and to-day, filled them with terror. That vision of the Boy, standing tall and ominous on the dam, and afterwards going forward and backward over it, pulling at it, apparently seeking to destroy it, seemed ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... discussed in the less giddy of Durdlebury ecclesiastical circles. The play over, it never occurred to him to do otherwise than drive decorously back to Sturrocks's Hotel. Suppers at the Carlton or the Savoy were outside his sphere of thought or opportunity. His only acquaintance in London were vague elderly female friends of his mother, who invited him to chilly semi-suburban teas and entertained him with tepid reminiscence and criticism of their divers places of worship. The days in London thus passed drearily, and Doggie was always ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... morning the traveller took leave of his kind host, who left first at 5.30 a.m. for some early little game of war, a description of which would probably have been as vague to a civilian as would the geographical position of Pura Pura, or the exact official status of X., to members of the company of the previous evening. The great soldier having driven off in full uniform through a throng of salaaming menials of various nationalities, X. entered his humble gharry, ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... which Hebrew Holy Writ left so vague and unsatisfactory, has become with the Arabs "Fir'aun", the dynastic name of Egyptian kings, as Kisra (Chosroes) of the Persians, Tobba of the Himyarites, Kaysar (Caesar) of the Romans, Jalut (Goliath) of the Phoenicians, Faghfur of the Chinese, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... fairness have been, the College would probably have spoken more doubtingly as to cholera, in any form, possessing the property of propagating itself from person to person. Much of what passes current in favour of the communication of cholera rests, I perceive, on statements the most vague, assertions in a general way, as to the security of those who shut themselves up, &c. To show how little reliance is to be placed on such statements, even when they come from what ought to be good authority, let us take an instance which happened in the case of yellow fever. Doctor, now Sir ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... American short stories, the best short stories in the world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... showed how entirely the soul is the slave of the body, the ethereal spirit dependent for its quality upon the tangible flesh and blood. It is hardly too much to say that she felt coerced by a force stronger than her own will, not only into the act of promising upon this singularly remote and vague matter, but into the emotion of fancying that she ought to promise. When the weeks intervening between the night of this conversation and Christmas day began perceptibly to diminish, her anxiety and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... come to Mark Molyneux. The time of depression and trial, the time when a vague sense of danger and a vague sense of aspiration had made him turn his eyes towards the cloister, had ended in his taking his work more and more earnestly and becoming surprisingly successful in his dealings ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I would like to know how "it felt" to preach, and vague fancies stirred in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I felt as though I had something to say and was able to say ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... was left alone in life, with a common school education, a thorough knowledge of the Bible and of "Robinson Crusoe," a vague tradition of God everywhere, and a deep distrust of those who should ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Baltimore, and by the constant movement of Federal armies through the State. Vincent was often employed in carrying dispatches from Major Ashley to Stuart, being selected for that duty as being the best mounted man in the troop. The direction was always a vague one. "Take this letter to Colonel Stuart, wherever he may be," and however early he started, Vincent thought himself fortunate if he carried out his mission before sunset; for Stuart's front covered over fifty miles ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... a very patriotic and loyal city, but I have been worried. There have been vague rumors going around. Nothing definite that we could pin down, but enough to make me ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... eyes went to the clock, and he thought of the meeting he was going to. The notes of his speech were upon the table, but he found great difficulty in rousing himself out of his chair; it was so pleasant to lie there, thinking of his wife, of his home, and of his child. But into this vague wandering sensation of happy and beautiful things there came a sudden vision and a thought. He saw his wife take the baby and put it to her breast, and he could not bear to think that that beautiful breast, so dear to him, should suffer harm. He had often thought of Ellen as a beautiful ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... aware of a vague necessity of pleasing the wife of the Snimmy, if one wanted to find out anything. However, she was quite honest; she really did think the Snoodle was lovely—except ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... marshal fresh troops from the Israelite mercenaries, who had already borne themselves valiantly in many a fray. Ere he had quitted the palace, Bai had made various mysterious allusions, which though vague in purport, betrayed that the priest was cherishing important plans and, as soon as the guidance of the government passed from old Rui's hands into his, a high position, perhaps the command of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... marriage with everybody—from the blacksmith up to the Mayor's notary. Once a Tessier was Mayor himself. Years and years ago Madame's great-uncle Jean had emigrated to America, and from time to time vague rumors of the wealth he had achieved in the new country reached the ears of his relatives—but ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... have been made thus to keep its own diary, then the whole of its history might have been recovered!" But words like these are born of day dreams merely. Vague imaginings of this kind may furnish much gratification to an idle life. When, awaking from these pleasant dreams of science, we seek to actualise the conditions imposed by them, we find ourselves face to face with a dead wall. For the doorway of nature's ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... of Marvell's conversion is emphatic but vague in its details. The "Jesuits," who were well represented in Cambridge at the time, are said to have persuaded him to leave Cambridge secretly, and to take refuge in one of their houses in London. Thither the elder Marvell followed in pursuit, and after ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... they have crumbled, may delight us with a more admirable representation than our own minds could have furnished of some one whose name we have long known, and of whose personal bearing, and habits, and daily thoughts, we had but a vague and misty idea; and acknowledging the fidelity of the portrait we may adopt it; and then this historical person becomes to us what the imagination of genius, not what history, has made him, and yet the portrait is probably one in which no contemporary could have recognized ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... with slight olive tinge to it, a strong, intelligent face, not strictly beautiful, yet strangely attractive, the forehead low and broad, the nose straight, the lips full and inclined to smile. Suddenly a vague remembrance ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... hour passed, but no signs of Jack or Bertie. Cecil kept up a desultory conversation with Mrs. Anderson; but a vague impatience and restlessness came over her. She looked in the direction of the big jump, and it seemed to her a point of attraction that gathered up the stragglers, who all converged towards it. There was quite a crowd there now. Mrs. Anderson's platitudes became ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... by Boswell what a shining light of those days meant by a somewhat vague remark, surmised that the speaker must have "meant to annoy somebody." The Doctor was probably right, being a pretty good judge of that sort of thing. There are many unmeaning remarks made, the why of which it is difficult to explain, unless ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... not so often at the Matthews place after Ollie had gone to the city. The girl could not have told why. She had a vague feeling that it was better to stay away. But this feeling did not prevent her climbing the Old Trail to the Lookout on the shoulder of Dewey, and she spent hours at the big rock, looking over the valley to where the smoke from Aunt Mollie's kitchen curled above the trees. ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... long stillness in the dim room; the dashing rain and the muttering thunder were the only sounds in the world. The white dress was motionless in the chair, vague, impersonal—he could see only the blurred suggestion of a face above it; it got to be fantastic, a dream, a condensation of the summer lightning and the storm-clouds; unrealities seized the quick imagination of the man; into his fancy came the low, ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... where people are for the most part packed like cattle in a pen. She shows no trace of dust or fatigue from the thirty or forty miles which I choose to fancy she has ridden from the handsome elm-shaded New England town of five or ten thousand people, where I choose to think she lives. From a vague horticultural association with those gauntlets, as well as from the autumnal blooms, I take it she loves flowers, and gardens a good deal with her own hands, and keeps house- plants in the winter, and of course a canary. Her dress, neither rich nor vulgar, makes me believe her fortunes modest and ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... got through his work at the office that day, he was at a loss to know, for nothing remained on his mind for a moment at a time, except the vague and curious report about the Fatal Chase, and the anticipated visit of the Doctor with further particulars. No sooner had the clock struck six, than he sped away from the office, trusting to his legs to carry him more quickly than the omnibus ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... an usurper, deriving his title to the crown, not from his ancestry or from any law of succession, but from a successful revolution, in which he played the principal part. It matters little that such a monarch, when he is settled upon the throne, claims, in a vague and general way, connection with the kings of former times. The claim may often have a basis of truth; for in monarchies where polygamy prevails, and the kings have numerous daughters to dispose of, almost all the nobility ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... the kilogramme as the standard of mass, and the law is certainly in conformity with the rather obscurely expressed intentions of the founders of the metrical system. Their terminology was vague, but they certainly had in view the supply of a standard for commercial transactions, and it is quite evident that in barter what is important to the buyer as well as to the seller is not the attraction ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... far off, this was the darkest hour of the night, so that even the sounds of dockland were muted and the riverside slept as deeply as the great port of London ever sleeps. Vague murmurings there were and distant clankings, with the hum of ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... wished to tell the whole truth, instead of making vague assurances to Mr. Harcourt, he would say: "I foresaw all the difficulties under which the Natives are suffering; and when Mr. Grobler proposed the summary stoppage of the sale and lease of land to Natives before the areas are ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... had been so preoccupied since his return to the city that he hadn't noticed the complete lack of any kind of psi sensation. The constant wash of animal reactions was missing, as was the vague tactile awareness of his PK. With sudden realization he remembered that it was always this way ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... seemed to be a failure to get compensation for the Negroes carried away by Great Britain. The stipulation, moreover, was not definite, for many constructions could be placed upon it. The words of the treaty, moreover, were too vague and uncertain to express accurately the intention of the signers. Whether Negroes whom the British carried away could any longer be considered American property, seemed to be the crux of the situation. Although no definite settlement could be reached by the two ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... enjoyed a slight acquaintance. In thinking the matter over he was greatly perplexed to determine how to introduce the subject. Of course it would not answer to allow the cashier to fathom his secret purpose, and yet he was oppressed with a vague consciousness that only a translucent film hid his thought from the world. Once or twice, in driving over on the unfamiliar errand, weak and irresolute he half resolved to turn back, but greed finally prevailed, and he kept on to ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... or any contract or agreement, the tenant may follow any system of cropping, and dispose of any of his produce as he pleases, but after so doing he must make suitable and adequate provision to protect the farm from injury thereby: a proviso vague and difficult to enforce, and not sufficient to prevent an unscrupulous tenant greatly injuring ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... "Don't think, try!" had noticed that milkmaids who had been infected with cowpox from the udder of the cow were insusceptible to smallpox. I show you here the hand of Sarah Nelmes with cowpox, 1796. A vague notion had prevailed among the dairies from time immemorial that this disease was a preventive of the smallpox. Jenner put the matter to the test of experiment. Let me quote here his own words: "The first experiment ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... gallantly. But if his dexterity were exquisite, his diligence was but fitful; and he served his brother for bed and board, and a trifle of pocket-money when he asked for it. He loved money well enough, knew very well how to spend it, and could make a shrewd bargain when he liked. But he preferred a vague knowledge that he was well to windward to any counted coins in the pocket; he felt himself richer so. Hob would expostulate: "I'm an amature herd." Dand would reply, "I'll keep your sheep to you when I'm so minded, but I'll keep my liberty too. Thir's no man can coandescend on what I'm worth." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Her confident answer drove away the moment's vague uneasiness without its having taken the form or the connection ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... these thoughts will be of much use to you. They may sound somewhat too philosophical. But I have more or less purposely put them in a philosophical form, because we are not thus so {73} easily led astray into vague pleasant feelings, which we sometimes get from rhetoric. But I do wish I could put a little more of my feelings into this cold paper, and cruel, unsympathetic ink. For what I have written is not a mere philosophy of life; it is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a moment to me; it is ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... fruit of active effort. Enterprise, the desire to keep moving, to be trying and accomplishing new things for our own benefit or that of others, is the parent even of speculative, and much more of practical, talent. The intellectual culture compatible with the other type is of that feeble and vague description which belongs to a mind that stops at amusement or at simple contemplation. The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... it is really expedient to take the burden off the leader of the Government. The next night came on the Civil List, and as the last Government was turned out on this question, there had existed a general but vague expectation that some wonderful reductions were to be proposed by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Great, then, was the exultation of the Opposition when it was found that no reductions would be made, and that the measure of this Government only differed from ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... Muche-Manito; but in what little worship he had engaged heretofore he had endeavoured to propitiate and turn away the malice of the evil spirit, rather than to worship the Good Spirit, in whom all Indians believe, but about whom he had very vague ideas until his visit to the Christian hunter's wigwam. Now, however, even before he skinned the bear, as the result of that visit, he prayed to that Good Spirit, the giver of all his blessings, and was grateful for his deliverance. Would that he had continued ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... They have a vague idea of a future state; many have dreamed of it. Some of their medicine men pretend to have had revelations from bears and other animals; and they thus learned that their future existence would be but a continuation ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... is a singularly original, fresh and attractive conception. The book deals almost wholly with the outside aspects of things, with picturesque rather than moral traits, though a breath of feeling true and sweet is wafted across it and heightens its fine vague beauty. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... the orchard-grass fly back from under his feet. It was as if each step trod on a nerve,—as if the very sound of the rustling grass was stirring something living and sensitive in her soul. And, strangest of all, a vague impression of guilt hovered over her. Had she done anything wrong? She did not ask him there; she had not spoken love to him; no, she had only talked to him of his soul, and how she would give hers for his,—oh, so willingly!—and that was not love; it was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... properly adjusted to show grace. But a charm more worthy of her was that of propriety, of candor, of goodness. A virtuous education and solitary studies had given to her all that culture can add to an excellent nature. In her, sentiment was perfect, but her thought was often confused and vague; instead of clearing her ideas, meditation disturbed them; in exaggerating them, she believed to enlarge them; in order to extend them, she wandered off into abstractions and hyperboles. She seemed to see certain objects only ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... some sort of a vague idea that he would like to go and look at the quaint old market-place by moonlight; and when he reached it, he stopped at the corner, interrupting his song to gaze in artistic appreciation at the silent ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... at all. It did in Cecille's. If it be so true, so inevitable, so frightful, surely it should be self-evident now and then, instead of a mere matter of report. And beautiful generalization, never anything but vague, becomes noticeable after a time, questionable. The things of glory in this world are not so tediously many that they will not bear once or twice the telling. Why not refuse, for once, to blink the facts, even though they may not be suitably sordid? Why not go into ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... stress of actual life, or in the theatre. In history—where we see things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times is brought before us, deplorably adulterated and defaced, fitted to very vague and pompous words, and strained through many men's minds of everything personal or precise—this speech of the widowed duchess startles a reader, somewhat as the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe. A human voice breaks in upon the silence of the study, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... can teach us nothing of the future beyond a vague surmise. All theories which proceed on an assumption of knowledge concerning finalities, whether in science or dogma, are cobwebs of the brain, not the fruit of knowledge, and obscure the faculty of intellectual perception. It is wasteful ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... the same piece, Harriet Penny, of vague age, and vaguer purpose, also watched the loading of the scows. Harriet Penny was Chloe Elliston's one concession to convention—excess baggage, beyond the outposts, being a creature of fear. Upon another ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... reservation would mean the getting into closer and closer touch with Perry Fuller,[189] the contractor, whose dealings in connection with the Indian refugees were to become matter, later on, of a notoriety truly disgraceful. Mistrust of Coffin was yet, however, very vague in expression and the chief difficulty in effecting the removal from the Neosho lay, therefore, in the disgruntled state of the refugees, which was due, in part, to their unalleviated misery and, in part, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... out in his memory boldly and clearly. Adam Salton's recollection was of an illimitable wait, filled with anxiety, hope, and chagrin, all dominated by a sense of the slow passage of time and accompanied by vague fears. Mimi could not for a long time think at all, or recollect anything, except that Adam loved her and was saving her from a terrible danger. When she had time to think, later on, she wondered when she had any ignorance of the fact that ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... reflecting of late upon the relation of lovers to the landscape, and questioning whether art has given it quite the same place as that which belongs to it in nature. In fiction, for example, and in the drama, and in music, I have some vague misgivings that romantic love has come to hold a more prominent and a more permanent position than it ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... the processes of Nature that they have ceased to be men and become gods, and as such alone can we deal with them. It is also permissible to point out that in the case of Tammuz, Esmun, and Adonis, the title is not a proper name, but a vague appellative, denoting an abstract rather than a concrete origin. Proof of this will be found later. Sir W. Ridgeway overlooks the fact that it is not the tragic death of Attis-Adonis which is of importance for these cults, but their subsequent restoration to life, a feature which cannot ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... of appearances a vague suspicion forced itself upon Rose, who, however, obeyed the summons and continued to approach the party, who now watched him with fixed attention. As he came closer to the group, the brave but unfortunate soldier saw that ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Bub below for his night-glasses. Everybody crowded to the lee-rail to gaze at the suspicious stranger, which already began to loom up vague and indistinct. In those unfrequented waters the chance was one in a thousand that it could be anything else than a Russian patrol. The captain was still anxiously gazing through the glasses, when a flash of flame left the stranger's side, ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... green light. It was a dazzling spectacle. Soon the different curves all joined in one point, and formed boreal crowns of a heavenly richness. At last the bows joined, the splendid aurora faded, the intense rays melted into pale, vague, undetermined shades, and the marvellous phenomenon, feeble, and almost extinguished, fainted insensibly into the dark southern clouds. Nothing can equal the wonders of such a spectacle under the high latitudes less than eight degrees from the Pole; ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... "A vague opinion prevails among men that society is moving onward to its appointed state by what is variously termed the 'force of circumstances,' 'the instinct of the race,' 'the general law of progress,' 'Divine guidance.' These loose ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... philosophers who so often seemed on the verge of our later discoveries did no more than vaguely anticipate their successors of this later century. To gain an accurate, really specific knowledge of the properties of elementary bodies was reserved for the chemists of a recent epoch. The vague Greek questionings as to organic evolution were world-wide from the precise inductions of a Darwin. If the mediaeval Arabian endeavored to dull the knife of the surgeon with the use of drugs, his results hardly ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... newly raised hopes vanished; she waited full two or three minutes, then gently disengaged her hand and dress from Ellen's still convulsive grasp; the door closed, with a sullen, seemingly unwilling sound, and Ellen was alone. She remained in the same posture, the same spot, till a vague, cold terror so took possession of her, that the room seemed filled with ghostly shapes, and all the articles of furniture suddenly transformed to things of life; and springing up, with the wild, fleet step of fear, she paused not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... adding, with a peculiar look, that if it were her wish, as he was all devotion to her slightest whim, he would never henceforth separate them. Scarcely knowing what to think, but dreading the worst from the ironical tone of mock gallantry with which he spoke, she followed him with faltering steps, a vague terror dimming her eyes and chilling her heart. He led her through many winding passages, opening heavy iron gates, until they at length reached the deep dungeons which are found beneath this castle. There, ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... the house, Antoine, who was restless, unhappy, and full of vague surmises, sat for some time with his head in his hands, and at last only roused himself with an effort. It was growing dusk already, for autumn had given place to winter, and the days were short. There was still light enough, however, for him to see to ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... of water from overside. As we emerged, from under the forecastle- head we heard a tremendous thumping and battering. Then, as the bow lifted, for an instant in the pencil of light that immediately lost it, I glimpsed a vague black object that bounded down the inclined deck where no water was. What became of ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... insensible, and the two sailors carried on board in the like state; and an opposite report, that the poor dear boys had only made themselves sick with dainties out of Mrs. Schnetterling's, and it was all a cruel notion of that teetotal ritualist clergyman. Some boys would not speak, others were vague and contradictory, and many knew nothing, Horner and Campbell were absent. Clement much relieved her by giving an account of the matter, and declaring that he feared his own elder nephew was the cause of all the scandal, though he believed ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had seemed so high, and then out toward the desert. The irregular ragged crack in the plain, apparently only a thread of broken ground, was the Grand Canyon. How unutterably remote, wild, grand was that world of red and brown, of purple pall, of vague outline! ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... were strained to the breaking point in order to raise money for this new campaign opening before it. Orde, returning to Lansing after a trip devoted to the carrying out of Newmark's directions as to finances, was dismayed at the tangle of strategy and cross-strategy, innuendo, vague and formless cobweb forces by which he was surrounded. He could make nothing of them. They brushed his face, he felt their influence, yet he could place his finger on no tangible and comprehensible solidity. Among these delicate and complicated cross-currents ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... invite her guests to a dinner, and upon their arrival indicate to them that she had made only vague plans to receive them. No special place for their wraps, no entertainment for their amusement, and then fancy her asking them to sit down to a warmed-up ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... bull, following the vague language of Columbus, the great discoverer, the New World is called the Indies, slightly distinguished, in grammatical number only, from India in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... immense majority of the French people would improve the first possible opportunity to re-establish the Empire; and consequently the conviction which he so confidently cherished, that he was destined to be the Emperor of France, was not a vague and baseless impression, but ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... him by the arm, led him to the window, where, drawing aside the curtain, he pointed out to him the stars already paling and a vague whiteness which appeared at the horizon. Then suddenly changing his tone, but still carried away by his impetuous nature, which stamped upon all the movements of his mind the character of passion, Stephane became much excited at the idea ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... satisfaction. It was the sort of revenge one reserved for a foe capable of appreciating its humor and malignity. The answer of laughter was one to which he was unused, and he was amazed to find that it had effected an understanding of some vague and intangible kind between him and Sylvia Garrison. She might not approve of him, he had no idea that she did; but she had struck a chord whose vibrations pleased and tantalized. She was provocative and, to a degree, mystifying, and the abrupt termination of their ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... gallop, obey the sound of our voice, feed from our hand; and, in fact, showed himself perfectly docile. Now our ingenuity was taxed to the utmost. How were we to saddle and bridle a bird? First, for a bit for his beak. Vague ideas passed through my mind, but every one I was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... name is inexplicably corrupted; and nothing more can be said of it than is contained in the text, which indeed is very vague.—E.] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... no answer; which caused Frank a vague feeling of apprehension. He speedily drove this impression from his mind, ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... dress and rubbing her hands. Garthorne, crushed into silence by the terrible vehemence of Dora's accusation, had dropped into an armchair close by his father's body. Sir Arthur, half-dazed with the horror of it all, threw open the door with a vague idea of getting into the fresh air out of that room of death. As he did so, the hall door opened, and an Inspector of Police followed by two constables and a gentleman in plain clothes entered. The sight of the uniformed ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Antarctic problem was more than ever desirable. In the Australian Quadrant, the broad geographical features of the Ross Sea area were well known, but of the remainder and greater portion of the tract only vague and imperfect ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Pall Mall, between Captain Fitzroy and Mr. Shepherd, the latter, like his predecessor of old, the "Gentle Shepherd," performed sundry vague evolutions with a silver-mounted cane, and requested Captain Fitzroy to consider himself horsewhipped. Not entertaining quite so high an opinion of his adversary's imaginative powers, the Captain floored the said descendant of gentleness, thereby ably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... had espoused the cause of Charles V.; and it further urged him to throw up his commission in the army of the usurping government, and to hasten to join his kinsman, who would receive him with open arms. Some vague hints concerning a nearer alliance between them, were more than was wanting to raise Don Baltasar's hopes to the highest pitch, and to induce him instantly to accept the Count's propositions. He at once resigned his commission and joined the Carlists, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... in the Iliad. A blind man, in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth. Dryden's lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless;[9] those of Pope, though he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain their hold upon public estimation,—nay, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Herbert is a hard-headed fellow, not likely to fly off on a vague notion. Is this Hall girl's ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his desire to hear the conversation was augmented by this discovery. His eyes took a strange expression, and with the step of a tiger-cat he advanced toward the hedge; but he had not been able to catch more than a few vague syllables without any positive sense, when a sonorous and short cry made him start, and attracted the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which I have since seen without emotion or remark. A deduction must be made from the opinion which even the wise express of a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing. The child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well as when you told it ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to me to give an of sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood sentries. Not so with the row of elms which you may see leading up ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... any good to us, why did they not make their presence known to us," he reasoned. "Mark my words, we have not seen the last of them,—but hush, here comes the captain and Chris, there is no need to worry them with vague conjectures." ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... century, the ecclesiastical society, the board of land proprietors, and the town proper, even when largely composed of the same members, acted as separate groups, though the line of separation was often vague and was sometimes not drawn at all. Town meetings continued to be held in the meeting-house, and land was distributed by the town in its collective capacity. Lands were parceled out as they were needed in proportion ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... had taken me in for the sake of the dead woman, whoever she was, and to have that boast of me and advantage of me; I saw, in the nurse's knowledge of it, an encouragement to goad me as she had done; and I saw, in the children's shrinking away, a vague impression, that I was not like other people. I left ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... was going on at Ramsgate—or at Dimchurch, as the case might be. Now that my mind was free from anxiety about my father, I don't know which tormented me most—my eagerness to set myself right with my sister-friend, or my vague dread of the mischief which Nugent might have done while my back was turned. Over, and over again I asked myself, whether Miss Batchford had, or had not, shown my letter to Lucilla. Over and over again, I wondered whether it had been my happy privilege ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... and military apparatus should be introduced in every part of the United States. No one who has not learned it from experience, can conceive the difficulty, expense, and confusion, which result from a contrary system, or the vague arrangements which ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... which good men in the Old World have sought for, but could never attain, and which imparts to America an exemption from the mutable leagues for common action, from the wars, the mutual invasions, and vague aspirations after the balance of power which convulse from time to time the Governments of Europe. Our cooperative action rests in the conditions of permanent confederation prescribed by the Constitution. Our balance of power is in the separate reserved rights of the States ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... left lonely At the gates of the far West Wait, so still, for the moon's stiller Stealing from her nest, I am held by a low vesper Haunting afar the vague twilight, Then with my soul ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... Nyssia, if we dare make use of the expression after so vague a description of her face. If our foggy Northern idioms had the warm liberty, the burning enthusiasm of the Sir Hasirim, we might, perhaps, by comparisons—awakening in the mind of the reader memories of flowers and perfumes, of music and sunlight, evoking, by ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... course to the sea coincided in every material point with the statements which were made by Boileau and Black Meat at Chipewyan, but they differed in their descriptions of the coast. The information however, collected from both sources, was very vague and unsatisfactory. None of his tribe had been more than three days' march along the sea-coast to the ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... our boats landed. There is nothing in his account of the port which contradicts this supposition. It was but natural for his people to give a name to the place, independent of so large a bay, where they lay so long at anchor. A port is a vague term, like many others in geography, and has been very often applied to places far ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... stopped in the entrance and looked at his wrist-watch; he wanted particularly to know the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and classified liked to chip things off cleanly. Later it would satisfy him in a vague way to be able to think "that thing ended at exactly twenty minutes after eight on Thursday, June 10, 1919." This was allowing for the walk from her house—a walk concerning which he had ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... forbear; but that now "these men have cast off all affection and are so imbitterated" that farther forbearance would be wrong, and the Assembly cannot but represent to the House that "it is high time to suppress them." That the Commons might not be left in the vague, a Mr. Picot in Guernsey, and a Mr. Knolles, recently in Cornwall (Hanserd Knollys?), of the Anabaptist sort, with a Mr. Randall, a Mr. Penrose, and a Mr. Simson, as of a worse sort still (see Randall among the Antinomians and Familists in our synopsis), were denounced by ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... boss." It was the expression of a vague hope that he might be able to do something. They gave way at his voice and stood back, many eyes turning on him in helpless appeal. Women, with blankets already in hand, were weeping aloud; children hanging to their skirts ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... be correct is regarded by the undersigned as a matter of no consequence in the settlement of the main question. The Government of the United States, never having acquiesced in the decision of the arbiter that "the nature of the difference and the vague and not sufficiently determinate stipulations of the treaty of 1783 do not permit the adjudication of either of the two lines respectively claimed by the interested parties to one of the said parties without wounding the principles of law and equity with regard to the other," can ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... Duchesse, and quite another to call her back. For a time she refused point-blank to look again on the King who had spurned her from fear of hell; and when at last she consented to receive the penitent at Versailles she let him know, in no vague terms, that "it would cost France too many heads if she were to return ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... "dies festus" in the strict sense; festal seasons rather than festal days are what we have. Easter is celebrated in the month Abib, when the corn is in the ear (Exodus ix. 31, 32), Pentecost when the wheat is cut, the autumn festival when the vintage has been completed,—rather vague and shifting determinations. Deuteronomy advances a step towards fixing the terms and intervals more accurately, a circumstance very intimately connected with the centralisation of the worship in Jerusalem. Even here, however, we do not meet with one general festive offering on the part of the community, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... to run such a risk with the vague uncertainty of winning my daughter? Did you stop to count ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... going on in that closed-up head? When she had been thus two or three hours sitting opposite him, she felt herself getting daft, and longed to rush away and to escape into the open country in order to avoid that mute, eternal companionship and also some vague danger, which she could not define, but of which ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... June day, fair and fresh and tender with dreams and longing and vague desire. The morn lingers and passes, but the noon has not reached its height before the clouds begin to rise, the sunshine dies, the air grows thick and heavy, the lightnings flash, the thunder breaks among the hills, rolls ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... savagely. There was a draft from the open window; my ankle became suddenly weary and painful, and I went to bed. Can you believe that I didn't guess, immediately, what it all meant? In a vague way, I fancied that I had been premature in my attempt to drop our mutual incognito, and that Fisher, a rival lover, was jealous of me. This was rather flattering than otherwise; but when I limped down to the ladies' parlor, the next day, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... mysteries. A more careful inquiry soon demonstrated, that the offenders did not exceed seven thousand; a number indeed sufficiently alarming, when considered as the object of public justice. [168] It is with the same candid allowance that we should interpret the vague expressions of Tacitus, and in a former instance of Pliny, when they exaggerate the crowds of deluded fanatics who had forsaken the established worship of the gods. The church of Rome was undoubtedly the first and most populous ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... told that this tenant would pay; but that he would first produce a doctor's certificate that his old mother could not be moved. He did give the Sheriff a carefully worded document to show this, but it was so vague that I objected to its being received by the Sheriff. Upon this (not before! mark the craft of even a well-disposed Irish tenant in those evil days), I was asked to go into the house. I went in ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... that I craved from the fount of knowledge was enlightenment concerning the character known as A Man About Town. He was more vague in my mind than a type should be. We must have a concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we can comprehend it. Now, I have a mental picture of John Doe that is as clear as a steel engraving. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... is, that, as it was customary to apply the same honorific titles to both a god and the king, it is often uncertain to which the original meant to apply them. This may have been left intentionally vague. Some translators have taken on themselves to settle to which they will refer the epithet, to the god or to the king. Such translations are only interesting as a record of private opinions. They settle nothing, do not even give a presumption in favor of anything. It is more honest ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... the information given by the traitor was vague and general. Nor was the city able to elicit from the informant of this man, who had been promptly arrested and subjected to examination, any disclosures of a more specific or satisfactory character. He was, in truth, in possession of but few particulars of the plot, and was therefore ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... thanks and blessings when she came away. Not pride, surely—the great dark fathomless eyes were wondrously sweet and soft; the lips, that might once have been haughty and hard, tender and gentle now, and yet there was a vague, intangible something about her, that held all at arm's length, that let no one come one inch nearer than it was her will they should come. Lady Catheron had been their interest from the first—she was their mystery to ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... wraps, besides those which she had with her. What more could a man do? If she had been young he would have bought her sugar-plums. All that they meant were the dumb anxieties of his own breast, and the vague longing to do something, anything that would be a help to her on her ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... seating himself and setting both elbows on the table, "I allow it's vague, but it won't ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... from under the train and shrank perpetually into the west. The coach was nearly empty. No one was near him save the brakeman, and by and by he took his attention from the track and let it rest on this person. There he found a singular attraction. Had he seen that face before, or why did it provoke vague reminiscences of great cypresses overhead, and deep-shaded leafy distances with bayous winding out of sight through them, and cane-brakes impenetrable to the eye, and axe-strokes—heard but unseen—slashing through them only a few feet ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... fully established that Sound and Heat, Light, Magnetism, and Electricity are Forces, and therefore capable of doing work, as will be shown later on. Newton's use of the term Force is therefore somewhat vague; he does not definitely say what the Force is which causes the change of position, of the body, or of the rate of motion of that body. That it is something to do with Gravitation is obvious, but its exact nature ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... smoke, and I shall not allow any formalities to stand in the way, but to abandon the definite proposals of Middelburg (March 7th) for a thing like this, and to begin a fresh discussion on the basis of something which is so very vague will surely land us in trouble. I believe we are quite entitled to keep you to the Middelburg proposal, which we might modify ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... Mr. Stevens' betraying glass, picked it up, and sat staring at it in vague and dreamy fashion until, rousing at his master's second bidding, he proceeded to mix brandy and soda, his gaze still profoundly abstracted and his whiskers drooping ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... "some day when there's something doing." Young girls who only know that bulls hate anything red and that bears hug people to death—they are there, thrilled by the prospect of what they are about to witness with but a very vague idea of what it will be. A dear old lady from the quiet eddies of some sheltered spot has been brought in by the rest of her party to see "goin's on" of which she does not approve because gambling is a well-known sin. She is somewhat reassured by ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... side of the Pyrenees, which are laved by the waters of the Cantabrian Gulf or Bay of Biscay. This language is commonly known as the Basque or Biscayan, which words are mere modifications of the word Euscarra, the consonant B having been prefixed for the sake of euphony. Much that is vague, erroneous, and hypothetical, has been said and written concerning this tongue. The Basques assert that it was not only the original language of Spain, but also of the world, and that from it all other languages are derived; but the Basques are a very ignorant people, and know nothing of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... information respecting the habits and nature of the Tagbanuas, a half-caste Malay-Aeta tribe, disseminated over a little more than the southern half of the island. [69] It was only on my arrival at Puerta Princesa that I was able to procure a vague insight into the peculiarities of the people whom I intended to visit. The Governor, Don Felipe Canga-Argueelles, was highly pleased to find a traveller who could sympathize with his efforts, and help to make known, if only to the rest of the Archipelago, this island almost unexplored in the interior. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... that their altered relations and closer association in work would draw Alphonse out of the circles which Charles could not now endure, and unite them more closely. For he had conceived a vague dread of losing ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... beauty is no more Than a vague prelude to the thought of you— You are the rarest soul I ever knew, Lover of beauty, knightliest and best; My thoughts seek you as waves that seek the shore, And when I think of ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... What did he mean?" she thought, while for the first time, with a vague sense of his meaning, tears welled hot and bitter into her sunny eyes, while the pained color burned in her face. Those tears were the first that she had ever known, and they were cruel ones, though they lasted but a little time; there was too much fire in the young Bohemian ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Me. {16} It often recurred to me in after years when studying Schelling and Fichte, or reading works by Mystics, Quietists, and the like. At a very early age I was indeed very much given to indulging in states of mind resembling metaphysical abstraction—a kind of vague marvelling what I was and what others were; whether they and everything were not spirits playing me tricks, or a delusion—a kind of psychology without material or thought, like a workman ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... who immigrate with their families and sustain an affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from chaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughters work, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town." They themselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would gladly give the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is so unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by their inability to judge ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... "coign of vantage" in the reading-desk the next morning, Mr. Fullarton surveyed a crowded congregation, serenely complacent and hopeful, as a farmer in August looking down from the hill-side on golden billows of waving grain. Visitors had been pouring in rather fast during the week; and there was a vague, general impression, which no individual would have owned, that they were to hear something unusually good. For once expectation was not to be disappointed—a remarkable fact, when one considers ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... thinks it is a duty incumbent on him, which I do not see, and it appears to me to be an act of great folly. He stands much too high, has performed too great actions, and the attacks on him were too vulgar and vague to be under the necessity of any such retaliatory measure as this, and he lowers his dignity by entering into a conflict with such an infamous paper, and appearing to care about its abuse. I think the Chancellor ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... down into his plate. It seemed to Harry that there was some sort of play between them, or rather a thread of suspicion, a fine thread in truth, but strong enough to sustain something. He could see, too, that Colonel Talbot was giving Shepard a warning, a warning, veiled and vague, but nevertheless a warning. But the boy liked Shepard. His face seemed to him frank and honest, and he would ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... seized and clung to the branches of a small tree with the tenacity of a drowning man—unable to open my eyes while sticks and leaves, huge limbs of trees and deluges of water flew madly past, filling my mind with a vague impression that the besom of destruction had become a veritable reality, and that we were all about to be swept off the face of ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... not been a fortnight lost. Experience had already satisfied her on one important point—experience had shown that she could set the rooted distrust of the other servants safely at defiance. Time had accustomed the women to her presence in the house, without shaking the vague conviction which possessed them all alike, that the newcomer was not one of themselves. All that Magdalen could do in her own defense was to keep the instinctive female suspicion of her confined within those ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... his conduct. And so in truth she was. Why his conduct was more awful in her estimation since she had heard Lady Mason's name mentioned, than when her mind had been simply filled with general ideas of vague conjugal infidelity, I cannot say; but such was the case. "I call it awful," were the first words she again spoke when she found herself once more alone with Mrs. Furnival in the drawing-room. And then ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... Alexander the Great," he told us, "Aristotles the famous had produced an animal which he had placed in a fort" (which fort Mahommed Azin seemed rather vague about). "Whoever gazed upon the animal was seized with such convulsions of laughter that he could not stop ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... plant could have been made thus to keep its own diary, then the whole of its history might have been recovered!" But words like these are born of day dreams merely. Vague imaginings of this kind may furnish much gratification to an idle life. When, awaking from these pleasant dreams of science, we seek to actualise the conditions imposed by them, we find ourselves face ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... solely because she was one of a family of singers, dared to insult and dishonor her. A strange spite against Fate, against her uncle and aunt, against herself even, surged up in her, and with it a vague longing for another and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... on to the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre. There is another side to the shield-faith fawning on political expediency and egoism, and turning brigand. Without doubt many Christians went on the Crusades impelled by religious conviction. But how many nourished less vague ideas in their hearts? Not to mention those whose only aim was to escape from the consequences of their misdeeds and obtain absolution and indulgences, not to mention those who were animated by a foolish sense of chivalry, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... Dr. Lee would turn his back upon him now when they met in consultation; and Mr. Chubb, the county apothecary, would he laugh and ask him if he could read his own prescriptions? Then he recurred to a dream—for it was so vague at that time as to be little more—whether it would not be better to abandon altogether country practice, and establish himself in the metropolis—London. A thousand pounds, advantageously spent, with a few introductions, ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... not far off, this was the darkest hour of the night, so that even the sounds of dockland were muted and the riverside slept as deeply as the great port of London ever sleeps. Vague murmurings there were and distant clankings, with the hum of machinery which is ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... being served, and it seemed as though the splendid wolfhound, with a pedigree unrivalled in the world, stood as the very incarnation of outraged dignity, and a protest against insult. Perhaps some vague sense of having overstepped the bounds of good judgment, if not good breeding, was beginning to impress itself upon Mrs. Peyton Stewart. Certainly she had not so thoroughly ingratiated herself in the favor of her niece, or ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... and predictions. If they were not dictated by a divinity, they were framed at least by a profound knowledge of mankind; they applied themselves exactly to the circumstances of individuals, and made a notable contrast to the vague and loose generalities of their rival temples. As Arbaces now arrived at the rails which separated the profane from the sacred place, a crowd, composed of all classes, but especially of the commercial, collected, breathless and reverential, before the many altars which rose ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... which belongs to anonymous writing. Had he disposed of my apparent rival, and exalted me to the level of a princely family, in open speech, he would have conveyed no balm to me—I should have classed it as one confident man's opinion. Disguised and vague, but emphatic, and interpreted by the fine beam of his eye, it was intoxicating; and when he said subsequently, 'Our majority Burgundy was good emperor wine, Richie. You approved it? I laid that vintage down to give you a lesson to show you that my plans come safe to maturity,'—I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... often strikingly incorrect) who leads a dreary life with his head buried in a book or his eye glued to telescope or microscope, or perfumed with those disagreeable odors which, as everybody knows, are inseparably associated with chemicals. The purpose of this life is not very clear, but doubtless a vague feeling exists in the minds of most of us that people who are willing to pursue such an unattractive career must be worthy of admiration, for despite all the triumphs of commercialism, humanity ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... extended our real boundaries to the west. But none of these events was of so striking a character as to fix the popular imagination. The old thirteen colonies had always claimed that their rights stretched westward to the Mississippi, and vague and unreal though these claims were until made good by conquest, settlement, and diplomacy, they still served to give the impression that the earliest westward movements of our people were little more than the filling in of already ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... gave answer, insisting that the King of Portugal had moved first in this matter, and therefore should be the plaintiff. As to the rest he said that the suit was obscure, vague, and general, insufficient to form a case on possession, and to pass a sure sentence upon it, let them specify wherein they thought the treaty was not observed, and let them attempt the fitting remedy and interdict, and he will ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... let him have what he wished, adds the pious historian, according to the idea of good which he had formed. And yet, if he had been allowed time for a death-bed repentance at the end of his life, he would have yielded undoubtedly to the same vague terrors, and have made a hasty bid for safety with gifts and promises. At any rate now, when the nobles and bishops who came to visit him suggested that it was time for him to make atonement for his evil deeds, ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... view: every thing finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation of infinity; life has become shadow and darkness, and the first day of our real existence dawns in the world beyond the grave. Such a religion must waken the vague foreboding, which slumbers in every feeling heart, into a distinct consciousness that the happiness after which we are here striving is unattainable; that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls; and that all earthly enjoyment is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... The sun was shining on the limes, and the fresh green leaves seemed to thrill and shiver with life: a lazy breeze kept up a faint soughing, a white butterfly was hovering over the pink may, the girls' shrill voices sounded everywhere; a thousand undeveloped thoughts, vague and unsubstantial as the sunshine above us, seemed to blend ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... to Paris on the 2d of December. Our arrival had been preceded by vague rumors of an official mission more or less hostile to the interests of France, which caused great excitement among the French people and the American residents in Paris, and serious depression of United States, Mexican, and French securities ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... that Dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the wit of the street boy. It is racy, it is understood, and the illustrations are always concrete and massive, never vague or unsubstantial. Apt Shakespearian quotations, familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. Personality, vital personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. The speaker must be alive to ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... in the window seat, looking soberly out across the lawn to the village street, with its double rows of tall, old trees. So her flag had served little purpose after all! That change for Hilary was still as uncertain, as much a vague part of the future, as it had ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs
... in criticism is probably partially accountable for the slowness with which translators attained the power to put into words, clearly and unmistakably, their aims and methods. Even if one were to leave aside the childishly vague comment of medieval writers and the awkward attempts of Elizabethan translators to describe their processes, there would still remain in the modern period much that is careless or misleading. The very term "translation" is long in defining itself; more difficult terms, like "faithfulness" ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... advancing and laying a determined hand upon her arm. "You have made a mock of us with your pretended deafness. What does it mean—Stop! no more play-acting," he fiercely admonished her, as her eyes assumed a look of startled inquiry and wandered away in vague curiosity to the papers scattered over the floor—"we have had enough of that; you cannot deceive us—you cannot deceive me twice. You played at deafness—why? Because Anitra must have some disability to distinguish ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... world our spirits still enshrouds? The chord they strike!—oh, tell me not that it can be of earth— The golden heart-string that they touch is not of mortal birth: The very buds and blossoms, and the balmy summer air, Awake within us shadows vague of things more bright and fair; 'Tis almost like remembrance—oh! would that I could tell The meaning of that hidden charm my spirit knows ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... remember now, an ace of hearts off the table and threw it into the air. All held their breath. With eyes full of terror and a certain vague curiosity they glanced rapidly from the pistol to the fateful ace, which slowly descended, quivering in the air. At the moment it touched the table Vulich pulled the trigger... ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... days of faint trails and poor accommodations; as yet the road to the Arctic was little traveled and imperfectly known, so Harkness acted as guide. He had bragged that he knew every inch of the country, but he soon proved that his ideas of distance were vague and faulty—a serious shortcoming in a land with no food, no shelter, and no firewood except green willows in the gulch-bottoms. Folsom began to fear that the fellow's sense of direction was equally bad, and taxed him with it, but Harkness scoffed ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Mississippi are not clearly known. They may have been Pierre Radisson and his brother-in-law, Menard des Grosseilliers, who are alleged to have covered the long portage from Lake Superior to the Mississippi in or about 1665; but the matter rests entirely on how one interprets Radisson's vague account of their western perambulations. At all events, in 1680—seven years after the descent of the river from the Wisconsin to the Arkansas by Marquette and Joliet—Louis Hennepin, under instructions from La Salle, explored the stream from the mouth ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... stranded on the rocks, coal barges alongside, donkey engines chattering on deck, and a swarm of bum-boats round our sides, filled with tempting heaps of fruit, cigars, and tobacco. Baskets were slung up on deck, and they drove a roaring trade. A little vague news filtered down to the troop-deck; Ladysmith unrelieved, but Buller across the Tugela, and some foggy rumour about 120,000 more men being wanted. The Battery also received a four-footed recruit in the shape of a little grey monkey, the gift of the ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... on a ground of night Inlaid with sallow stars that dimly stare Down in the lonesome eyes, uplifted there As in vague hope some alien lance of light Might pierce their woe. The tears that blind her sight— The salt and bitter blood of her despair— Her hands toss back through torrents of her hair And grip toward God with anguish infinite. And O the carven mouth, with all its great Intensity ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... beat of hoofs upon the good road-bed, sounded smartly on the ear. The houses became larger, newer, more flamboyant; richly dressed, handsome women were coming and going between them and their broughams. When Sommers turned to look back, the boulevard disappeared in the vague, murky region of mephitic cloud, beneath which the husbands of those women were toiling, striving, creating. He walked on and on, enjoying his leisure, speculating idly about the people and the houses. At last, as he neared Fortieth Street, the carriages passed ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... was being carried down I experienced a sensation similar to that of pitching as when one is on board a ship in a rough sea. However, from that moment my impressions became more and more vague. I remember that the only distinct thought that still possessed me was an imbecile, impulsive curiosity as to the road by which I should be taken to the cemetery. I was not acquainted with a single street of Paris, and I was ignorant of the position of the large burial grounds (though ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... trust me. He does not think me fit to take charge of his affairs," said Harry to himself, with his vague remembrance of Allan's share in the events of that miserable night, he could hardly wonder that it should be so, and in his shame and impatience he was twenty times on the point of breaking his connection with his employers, and ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Vague suggestions had reached me from across the road shortly before—I do not recollect exactly how they came to hand—to the effect that one ought to examine into the possibilities offered by military operations ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... household, it was inevitable that knowledge of it should come to the ears of the sick man, since it was the chief interest of the many neighbors who called to see him. Yet all he could gain from his callers was the vague suspicion each entertained. He meant now to get at the facts of the case. Montgomery had spread the tale, but had strangely kept silence with him, his old chum. Montgomery should speak now, or Moses would know ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... appearance of the whole place that invited to contemplation and repose,—something almost monastic. The gayety of the teeming spring-time could not divest the spot of a certain sadness, not displeasing, however, whether to the young, to whom there is a luxury in the vague sentiment of melancholy, or to those who, having known real griefs, seek for an anodyne in meditation and memory. The low lead-coloured door, set deep in the turret, was locked, and the bell beside it broken. Caroline ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... nothing to my perfect wonder, though he bring Egypt, Assyria, and Greece. I find myself where I was, in Egypt, Assyria, and Greece: I find the old earth, the old sky, the old astonishment of man. Caesar and the grasshopper, both are alike within my knowledge and beyond. There is some vague report of a remote divine, at which he will smile who finds no least escape from the divine. Two points are given in every regard, man and the world, subject, we say, and object, a creature seen and a creature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me. The huge-grown ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... not a speck of distant sail, appeared within the range of his vision; and, as if to escape from this solitude, he absorbed himself in his melancholy. The vague consciousness of a misdirected life given up to impulses whose memory left a bitter taste in his mouth was the first moral sentiment of his manhood. But at the same time he felt no remorse. What should he regret? He had recognized no other virtue than intelligence, and had erected passions ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... absolutism; before them the aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between these two worlds—something like the Ocean which separates the old world from Young America, something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage, traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship breathing out a heavy vapor; the present, in a word, which separates the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resemble both, and ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... downright grin with which he would laugh at his own jokes, or welcome an acquaintance. Hints were thrown out of an exciting nature; stories were told of perilous bargains made in a hurry and repented of at leisure; and instances were adduced of unaccountable capacities, vague longings, and unnatural inclinations implanted by the author of all evil for wise purposes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... theory,—rightly enough upon the atheistic alternative,—the theistic view rids him at once of this "scum of creation." For, as species do not now vary at all times and places and in all directions, nor produce crude, vague, imperfect, and useless forms, there is no reason for supposing that they ever did. Good-for-nothing monstrosities, failures of purpose rather than purposeless, indeed sometimes occur; but these are just as anomalous and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that ancient cycle. Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean age of greatness. What form it took, the details of it, were probably as much lost to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... electrified atmosphere generated by the three conspirators began to reach his non-sensitive brain. A quick glance at Mr. Batholommey and a second at the rector's wife confirmed his vague feeling that something was wrong. He turned back to Willem, in time to intercept a blighting scowl of warning the doctor was trying to flash to ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the town. Brightenings from the West were still upon the upper foliage of the trees, but vague dusk had fallen between their faces. His features were white and haggard.... She was afraid to ask him now. She would wait for the darkness. Had he heard a tremble in her voice, Bedient would have caught her bridle-rein and ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... for Overholt was tormented by the vague consciousness of a coming idea, so that he had headaches and could not sleep at night. It flashed upon him at last one evening when Newton was in bed and he was sitting before his motor, wishing he had the thousand dollars which ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... to me vague and unsatisfactory. They will tell you that Christ died for men, and that He is the Saviour of the World, but they do not seem to comprehend the spiritual character of Christianity, nor the full extent of the requirements and application of the law of Christian love. These imperfect ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... enter the quaint old church that his fancy has thus restored—moving softly, for truly he is on holy ground and every step is over unknown dead—he may see in vague vision a very little of the ancient interior: the nave lighted by diamond-paned windows, not stained; the aisles between the rows of pews paved with brick; the chancel paved with tile; a gallery at the end next the tower; and, over all, the heavy timbers of ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... overpowering to the man who now certainly loved her as deeply as it is possible for man to love woman. Many a difficulty and doubt had been removed from his mind by the words which Lord Sherbrooke had spoken while affecting to seek for the warrant; and there were vague hopes of high destinies in his heart. But it must be acknowledged, that if there had been none, he would have given way, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... did not see her, his face contracted into a ghastly grin of pain. The attendant who came to them deftly aided Geoffrey to force a little cordial between the sufferer's teeth. Savine made no sign. Forgetting her indignation in her terror Helen glanced at Geoffrey in vague question, but he merely raised his hand with a ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... just left school, was going through the awkward phase of discovering her individuality. At the College, with a full program of lessons and games, she had followed the general lead of the form. Now, cast upon her own resources, she was quite vague as to any special bent or taste. The war-time occupations which had tempted her imagination were no longer available, and Careers for Women did not attract her, even if family funds had run to the necessary training. So, for the present, she stayed at home, going once a week to ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... was dazed. She knelt down upon the floor and gathered the feathers into her hand with a vague thought that merely to touch them would help her to comprehension. They lay upon the palm of her white glove, and she blew gently upon them, and they swam up into the air and hung fluttering and rocking. As they floated downward she caught them ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... account, that Dr. Leslie suddenly announced that he meant to go to Boston for a few days and should take Nan with him. This event had long been promised, but had seemed at length like the promise of happiness in a future world, reasonably certain, but a little vague and distant. It was a more important thing than anybody understood, for a dear and familiar chapter of life was ended when the expectant pair drove out of the village on their way to the far-off railway station, as another had been closed when the door of the Thacher farm-house had been shut and ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... exact information and a theory based on good grounds, seeing that nine-tenths of Russia uses water out of wells, and has done so since time immemorial; but whenever he questioned the well-sinkers who came to him, he received the same vague answer: "Who can tell? It's in God's hands. Can you find out beforehand what the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... as incident to their legislative duties and being necessary to enable them to discover and to provide the appropriate legislative remedies for any abuses which may be ascertained. Although the terms of the latter portion of the resolution are extremely vague and general, yet my sole purpose in adverting to them at present is to mark the broad line of distinction between the accusatory and the remedial clauses of this resolution. The House of Representatives possess no power under ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... house, she zealously served them refreshments, taking no interest whatever in what was said, and showing preference toward none. Only Mayakin, a witty, droll man, at times called forth on her face a smile, as vague as a shadow. He ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... various preparations thus went forward we had no direct news from the stronghold of the enemy; yet many vague rumors reached us of the army that was being set in order there to take the field against us. On the other hand, the constant departure from among us of those who were loyal to the ancient government kept the Priest Captain well informed of all that was in progress ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... myself as a sample of the whole: thus giving assistance in every case either by work or by counsel. For if it were for the sake of my reputation only and other men's interests were not concerned in it, I would not have any man think that in such cases merely some light and vague notion has crossed my mind, and that the things which I desire and offer at are no better than wishes; when they are in fact things which men may certainly command if they will, and of which I have formed in my own mind a clear and detailed conception. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... some anxiety, having not the faintest idea what a toque was. He was not without other anxieties. What if the sight of Tillie's baby did not do all that he expected? Good women could be most cruel. And Schwitter had been very vague. But here K. was more sure of himself: the little man's voice had expressed as exactly as words the sense of a bereavement that was not ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... material world. He ascribes every work, every external act of man, to the innate force or soul of the physical universe. He observes that spiritual agents are so mysterious and unintelligible, so uncertain in their laws, so vague in their operation, so sheltered from experience, that a wise man will have nothing to say to them. They belong to a different order of causes, which he leaves to those whose profession it is to investigate ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... alternative route to Kerman are very vague, but it may probably have been that through Finn, Tarum, and the Sirjan district, passing out of the plain of Hormuz by the eastern flank of the Ginao mountain. This road would pass near the hot springs at the base of the said mountain, Sarga, Khurkhu, and Ginao, which ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... first day, M. Griffon entirely lost his senses. He threw himself into the sea, but M. Savigny saved him with his own hands. His words were vague and unconnected. A second time he threw himself in, but, by a sort of instinct, kept hold of the cross pieces of the raft, and ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... mentioned, a vein of simplicity which was not its least charm. It resulted, no doubt, in a great degree from the earnestness of his nature. There never was a boy so totally devoid of affectation, which was remarkable, for he had a brilliant imagination, a quality that, from its fantasies, and the vague and indefinite desires it engenders, generally makes those whose characters are not formed, affected. The Duchess, who was a fine judge of character, and who greatly regarded Coningsby, often mentioned this trait as one which, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... light, Bonaparte's proclamations of the same period seem stilted, jerky, and theatrical. In them, however, there may still be found a sort of interstitial sentimentality, and in an age of romantic devotion to ideals the quality of vague suggestiveness passed for genuine coin. Whatever else was lacking in those compositions, they had the one supreme merit of accomplishing their end, for they roused the French ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... fruit country," another "the place where canoes are drawn out." Cusick, the historian, translates it "a mountain rising from the water." Mr. Morgan was told that it meant "the mucky land." We can only infer that the interpreters were seeking, by vague resemblances, to ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... some slight exception might be made in his favour if he took on himself the responsibility of accepting a most favourable opportunity of doing most valuable work at the expense of infringing certain rules about crossing the border. These rules were, to say the least, vague and indefinite, and had never been officially promulgated. Reward or recognition of service he rightly never expected. It must fairly be conceded that the conditions under which such a spirit of enterprise ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... either. The fact of their joint desertion of the office was made known to all comers by a scrap of paper in the hand-writing of Mr Swiveller, which was attached to the bell-handle, and which, giving the reader no clue to the time of day when it was first posted, furnished him with the rather vague and unsatisfactory information that that gentleman ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... seriously he contemplated the matter, dwelling now upon the rough good nature of the sheepmen and this almost miraculous demonstration of their good will; then remembered with vague misgivings their protestations against the unlawful violence which presumed to deny them what was their legal right—free grazing on all government lands. And in the end he wrote a brief note to Judge Ware, telling him that while the sheepmen had accepted his hospitality in a most ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... impossible to miss it. It was not his father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any sign elsewhere that it greatly ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... he speaks no English, and appears to take for granted that no one speaks French. Mamma would be delighted to assure him of the contrary; she has never conversed with an Academician. She always makes a little vague inclination, with a smile, when he passes her, and he answers with a most respectful bow; but it goes no farther, to mamma's disappointment. He is always with the beau-frere, a rather untidy, fat, bearded man, decorated, too, always smoking and looking at the feet of the ladies, whom mamma ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... de Bossuet, who had been charged to preach the sermon of investiture, showed a good deal of wit by exhibiting none at all. The King must have felt indebted to him for such reserve. Into his discourse he had put mere vague commonplaces, which neither touch nor wound any one; honeyed anathemas such as these may even ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... wild dream-poem Kubla Khan, it is hardly more than a psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years." The rays of infinite Truth, when gathered into 504:24 the focus of ideas, bring light instantaneously, whereas a thousand years of human doctrines, hypotheses, and vague ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night, There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white, There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near, I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... elevation; and to see, between yourself and them, many farm-houses and many little cottages dotted here and there. There, under your eye, how much of life, and of the interests of life, is going on! Looking at such things, you muse, in a vague, desultory way. I wonder whether when ordinary folk profess to be thinking, musing, or meditating, they are really thinking connectedly or to any purpose. I daresay the truth is they have (so to speak) given the mind its head; laid the reins of the will on the mind's ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... somehow. I wish you'd talk with her and try to have her let up on Viola. I don't think they're doin' right by her. If she was my own girl I'd stop it—I would so." Then he added, in a curious tone, this vague defence: "As for Viola, she would be all right if they would leave her alone. She's gifted in a way I don't understand; but if she isn't twisted by Clarke's foolishness she's going to make some man a good wife. She's a good girl, and, as I say, if she was my own child I'd serve notice that ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... eternal Fitness of Things;" Partridge—the unapproachable Partridge,— with his superstition, his vanity, and his perpetual Infandum regina, but who, notwithstanding all his cheap Latinity, cannot construe an unexpected phrase of Horace; Ensign Northerton, with his vague and disrespectful recollections of "Homo;" young Nightingale and Parson Supple:—each is a definite character bearing upon his forehead the mark of his absolute fidelity to human nature. Nor are the female actors less accurately conceived. Starched Miss Bridget Allworthy, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... herself. With a pleasant word she put the well-filled bags into Tom's hands, and received the silver he offered in payment—three bright new dimes. At that moment she caught a glimpse of Ed Brown lurking in the area way of a house at the other end of the block. The sight filled her with a vague misgiving which she could not have explained. She glanced again at Tom; he was ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... striving with all his might to get a perfect collection of animal and human skulls. All this, however, was rather an accidental outbreak of exuberant intellectual activity than serious and well-directed study. He was full of the vague ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... against the stronger! This latter consummation especially, [84] Mr. Froude tells us, has been happily secured "under the beneficent despotism" of the Crown Colony system. However, let the above vague hyperboles be submitted to the test of practical experience, and the abstract government analysed in its concrete relations with ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... angels on the chalices, he did not hate them; on the contrary, he saw in them the reflection of those vague images of loveliness and innocence which haunt every artist's soul at times, and the mere manual skill necessary to produce expression in things so minute, fascinated a mind accustomed to cope with difficulties, and so inured to them as ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... twined with jewels of pearl and jade; with hand in mine she wandered o'er her garden, bending over goldfish ponds, or clipping fading flowers from off their stems. There reigned a heavy silence in her palace, with its memories, that seemed full of sadness and a vague regret, reminding me of an old blue China bowl which a hand of other days had filled with roses. The flowers trying to struggle from beneath the thorns and brambles that always come where troops are quartered, seemed to say, "Behold, they are not here who once have cared for us ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... became stronger at 22, the images of the two sexes then mingling in his thoughts of flagellation. Latterly the mental accompaniments of masturbation have been less personal, lapsing into the mental picture of being whipped by an unknown and vague somebody. When definite it has always been a man, and preferably of the type of a schoolmaster. His desire has been for punishment by whips, canes, or birches, especially upon the buttocks. He has always shrunk from the thought of the production of blood or ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a mirror which clearly reflects the truth, but "a glass fantastically cut into a thousand spangles;" that side by side with great moral truths we sometimes find his worst errors, contradictions, and paradoxes; that his eloquent utterances about God often degenerate into a vague Pantheism; and that even on the doctrine of immortality his hold is too slight to save him from waverings and contradictions;[51] yet as a moral teacher he is full of real greatness, and was often far in advance ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... from Denison that he should be at home before the end of a week. The letter had hardly been mailed when he received one from his wife evincing a depression she had never permitted herself to acknowledge before. She wrote briefly, and, with vague allusions to her health and an avowal of what she called her "lack of firmness," besought him ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... the old simile of the needle in the haystack would be mild indeed compared with his brother's chance of finding him. He did not run long. Jibing the fore- and main-sails and setting the topsails again, we headed back into the bank. As we entered I could have sworn I saw a vague bulk emerging to windward. I looked quickly at Wolf Larsen. Already we were ourselves buried in the fog, but he nodded his head. He, too, had seen it—the Macedonia, guessing his manoeuvre and failing by ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... calculations as to the probabilities of human life, on which the practice of life assurance and the valuation of reversionary interests, deferred annuities, &c., are based. The first mention of the word in law is in the Friendly Societies Act of 1819, where it is used in the vague sense, "actuaries, or persons skilled in calculation,'' but it has received still further recognition in the Friendly Societies Act of 1875 and the Life Assurance Companies Act of 1870. The word has been used with precision since the establishment of the "Institute of Actuaries ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... themselves off the woodpile and flung themselves upon her. They wound their arms chokingly about her neck; they petted and caressed, and besought her not to cry; they bewailed their own shortcomings, and made unconditional promises of perfection in the future. And even Tim sidled up, and volunteered a vague hint concerning ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... the story in review, and beheld all those pictures which the poor fellow's artless words had so vividly conjured up: he saw him leaping ashore in the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled into the dock, and making his way, with his vague sea-legs unaccustomed to the pavements, up through the silent and empty city streets; he imagined the tumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man's home must have caused in him, and the benumbing shock of finding it blind and deaf to all his appeals; he ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... confess, fidgety and queer—I searched the corners and recesses of the oddly-shaped and roomy old apartment—I turned the face of the looking-glass to the wall—I poked the fire into a roaring blaze—I looked behind the window-curtains, with a vague anxiety, to assure myself that nothing could be lurking there. The shutter was a little open, and the ivied tower of the little church, and the tufted tops of the trees that surrounded it, were visible over the slope of the intervening hill. I hastily ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... embroider, dream, and smile in the quiet of the room. A child lies asleep with his head under the mother's left arm. Whenever one of them rises, walks, or makes a gesture, his movements seem to be grave, slow, rare, and, as it were, spiritualized by the distance, the light, and the vague veil of the windows. The old man and the stranger enter ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... experiences of the day had so shaken the nerves of the black sergeant that he was ready to treat with these people rather than take their village by force of arms, as would ordinarily have been his preference; but now a vague conviction influenced him that there watched over this part of the jungle a powerful demon who wielded miraculous power for evil against those who offended him. First Usanga would learn how these villagers stood with this savage god and if ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he traveled with Ba'tiste to his cabin, only to fret nervously about the place and at last to strike out once more, on foot, for the lumber camp. He was worried, nervous; in a vague way he realized that he had been curt, almost brusque, with a woman for whom he felt every possible gratitude and consideration. Nor had he inquired about her when work had ended for the day. Had the excuse of a headache been made only to ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... warders of the growing hour, But vague in vapour, hard to mark; And round them sea and air are dark With great contrivances ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... yellow-bearded man, but he was never accused of anything worse than a tendency to corpulence. He emerged from childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a less roundabout course might have been taken to make him happy, but with a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human freedom, and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was about fifteen, he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... takes away sorrow: but cherishing in my hope some knowledge, I am utterly deficient, when I look on the fortunes and on the deeds of men, for they are changed in different manners, and the life of man varies, ever exceeding vague. Would that in answer to my petitions fate from the Gods would give me this, prosperity with riches, and a mind unsullied by griefs. And be my character neither too high, nor on the other hand infamous. But ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... general propositions—'whatsoever is, is'; and 'it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be'—that this sort of self-evidence belongs by any peculiar right. The perception of being, or not being, belongs no more to these vague ideas, signified by the terms WHATSOEVER, and THING, than it does to any other ideas. [These two general maxims, amounting to no more, in short, but this, that THE SAME IS THE SAME, and THE SAME IS NOT DIFFERENT, are truths known ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Chyne was waiting for him with that mixture of maidenly feelings of which the discreet novelist only details a selection. It is not customary to dwell upon thoughts of vague regret at the approaching withdrawal of a universal admiration—at the future necessity for discreet and humdrum behaviour quite devoid of the excitement that lurks in a double meaning. Let it, therefore, be ours to note the outward signs of a very natural emotion. Miss Chyne noted them ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... all! If Sheridan were defeated and driven from the valley, and Lee's flank left protected, Grant might sit forever before him at Petersburg and not be able to force his trenches. All these thoughts and fears swept before him, vague, disconnected, and swift. ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... now struck at Montenegro. The Venetians in 1797 ceded the Bocche di Cattaro to Austria. Till then the frontier had been vague. The Vladika was spiritual head of the Bocchese and the Montenegrins considered them as part of themselves. The new frontier caused much wrath. Russia hurried to support the Vladika. Austria strove in vain for influence. Her Envoy wrote in 1798, "The Gubernator ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... immure their lights under superincumbent bushels. Whatever was hers was everybody's, for she dispensed her favours with a liberal hand. She would never have permitted a child to suffer for lack of food or bed, for she was not at heart an unkind woman. You could see that by looking at her vague, soft brown eyes,—eyes that never saw practical duties straight in front of them,—liquid, star-gazing, vision-seeing eyes, that could never be focussed on any near object, such as a twin or a cooking-stove. Individuals never interested her; she cared for nothing but humanity, ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... perusal of the book. No great while, however, elapsed, when, rising also from his seat with a hasty exclamation of surprise, he threw down the volume and followed her into the room where she sat pensively meditating over thoughts and feelings as vague and inscrutable to her mind, as they were clear and familiar to her heart. With a degree of warm impetuosity, even exaggerated beyond his usual manner, which bore at all times this characteristic, he ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... superiority of numbers the French emperor had cherished a vague hope that, in a war against Prussia, he might possibly count upon the ancient friendship for France of Bavaria and Saxony, and to a still greater extent upon Austria and Italy. With regard to Bavaria and Saxony he was speedily undeceived. Moreover, contrary to expectation, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... not remember how, only somehow or other he walked alone on the moor, and all the ling was in flower. There was nothing in sight but ling and heather and bracken, except, far off near the sunset, on indistinct hills, there were little vague patches that looked like the fields of men. With evening a mist crept up and hid the hills, and still he went walking on over the moor. And then he came to the valley, a tiny valley in the midst of the moor, whose sides were incredibly steep. He lay down and looked ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... heard the sound of footsteps in the hall. Lady Jane, disturbed by the ominous note in Tallente's voice, rose also to her feet, glancing from him towards the door, filled with some vague, inexplicable apprehension. Tallente showed no fear, but it was plain that he had nerved himself to face evil things. There was something almost ludicrous in this denouement to a situation which to both had seemed filled with almost dramatic possibilities. ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inquired what sort of fellow Cresswell was, but he was too anxious not to let the affair of the whipper-in leak out, and refrained. He asked a few vague questions about the Sixth generally, and gathered from his companion that, with a very few exceptions, they were all "beasts" in school, that one or two of them were rather good at cricket, and swimming, and football, and that the monitorial system ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... however, be somewhat too long, than in any respect too short. No incitement to the attention of the sovereign can ever counterbalance the smallest discouragement to that of the landlord. The attention of the sovereign can be, at best, but a very general and vague consideration of what is likely to contribute to the better cultivation of the greater part of his dominions. The attention of the landlord is a particular and minute consideration of what is likely to be the most advantageous application of every inch of ground upon his ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... that sail the deep, When winds have sunk to sleep, The dreamy murmurs of the night steal on; Say, does their mystic hum, So vague and varied, come From distant shores unseen, and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... o'er Time And Space and Thought an empire claimed, Second alone to Him whose light Was even to theirs as day to night; 'Twixt whom and them was distance far And wide as would the journey be To reach from any island star To vague shores ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and fell heavily. At the shock, the blood gushed from his nose, and, mixing with the water on his face, ran down in vague red streams, dripping off his chin; while Red Wull, jerked from his grasp, was ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... been writing in a vain endeavor to put my vague and shadowy ideas of Maurice Mapleson's magnetic power into words, Jennie has come in and ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... to admire not less the manner in which he performs it in practice than the distinctness with which he conceives it in theory. We infer from his language that speculation in his day was active respecting the causes of this plague, according to the vague and fanciful physics, and scanty stock of ascertained facts, which was all that could then be consulted. By resisting the itch of theorizing from one of those loose hypotheses which then appeared plausibly to explain everything, he probably renounced the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... of appearing suddenly, as if he were seeking you, when by his trail you thought him miles ahead. And the way he disappears—just melts into the thick driving flakes and the shrouded trees—is most uncanny. Six or seven caribou once played hide-and-seek with me that way, giving me vague glimpses here and there, drawing near to get my scent, yet keeping me looking up wind into the driving snow where I could see nothing distinctly. And all the while they drifted about like so many huge flakes of the storm, watching my every movement, ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... abandoning my studies, wandered about for six years in different places, according as my curiosity led me. However, after the expiration of that time, a secret impulse drove me to revisit my kindred and my native country; but in Naples, alas! I could no longer find you, and could only hear vague reports concerning you; so that having in vain tried to meet with you, I ceased to roam about idly, and stopped for a while in Venice. From that time to this I have lived without receiving any other information ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... In a vague and detached sort of way he was surprised at the calmness of his own voice. Captain Rifle saw the veins standing out on his clenched hands and in his forehead. Through many years he had witnessed tragedy ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... long visit to Paris, and a rapid tour through Germany and Southern Europe. Most of the countries, that he had been compelled to hurry over, I had loitered through in days past, and I ought to have been shamed by the contrast in our recollections—his, so clear and systematical—mine, so vague and dim. An intellectual American travelling through strange lands does certainly look at nature, animate and inanimate, after a practical business-like fashion peculiar to his race; but it would be unfair to infer that such minds are, necessarily, unappreciative. At all events, that concentrative, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... opinions of himself. In the end both prince and princess learn love and wisdom and find happiness in spite of the revolution that drives them from their tiny kingdom. It is a fanciful tale, the charm of which lies less in the rather vague characters, who have the haziness of motive and of personality of the figures in some old play, than in the absolute perfection of style and of description that make it a book to read and re-read with ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... nowhere doth benignity, which comes In human form from heaven, so quickly gain An empire o'er the heart, as where a race, Gloomy and savage, full of life and power, Without external guidance, and oppress'd With vague forebodings, ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... autumnal twilight spread over the earth and peeped in through the windows. A purple mist filled the room with vague, spectral shadows. Outside was a white frost. A silvery moon triumphantly rode the ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... buy a great many things, but, according to my custom, not a photograph was among them; therefore, when I go back, I shall receive perfectly new and fresh impressions of the place, and can cherish no vague memories, encouraged by an album at home, in which the nameless cathedrals of many countries confuse themselves, and only the Coliseum at Rome stands forth, not ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the evening of Sunday, one district of the city, the Cordeliers, who were governed by Danton, were ready to march. The men of other districts were not so ready for action, or so zealous to avenge the new cockade. To carry the entire population more was required than the vague rumour of Metz, or even than the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the boundaries of objects and limit space by means of lines, and the use of lines constitutes drawing in pictures. These lines so used may be narrow or broad, straight or curved, perfect or broken, and definite or vague and undetermined. Upon their proper use, however, depends the beauty of proportion, the strength of personality and the impressions of truthfulness and reality. There are few rigid lines in nature. What we see is an impression of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... his last clean collar and put it on, with the vague idea of going somewhere and doing something—what, he could not have told. His eyes fell on a framed document hanging near his mirror, a small but ornate instrument, setting forth that the Faculty and Trustees of the Leland Stanford ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... debauch had entailed on him. For, in spite of the oft-repeated assurance that there is not a headache in a hogshead of it, whiskey punch will sicken one, as well as more expensive and more fashionable potent drinks. Barry was very sick when he first awoke; and very miserable, too; for vague recollections of what he had done, and doubtful fears of what he might have done, crowded on him. A drunken man always feels more anxiety about what he has not done in his drunkenness, than about what he has; and so it was with Barry. He remembered having used rough language with ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... Sansevero collection at that moment was being carefully examined, by experts, as to its preservation. Nevertheless, there was a look in his face that caused Nina to turn to her aunt with an apprehension, that gave rise to a vague suspicion that the princess, who was walking slowly, her head very high and her beautiful shoulders well back, was struggling to hide some strong emotion. She thought later that she might have been mistaken, for a moment later her aunt asked with her usual composure, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... Red Dog itse'f is about as low- flung a bunch of crim'nals as ever gets rounded up an' called a camp—but, as I'm sayin', this totterin' wreck I mentions comes stragglin' up, more or less permiscus an' vague, an', without sayin' a word or makin' a sign, or even shakin' a bush, stands about lariat distance away an' star's at Toothpick, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... myself laughing, singing, praying, apostrophising the sun, the clouds, the distant land, and even the spirits of my drowned companions, whom I imagined to be crowding round me and trying to drag me off the floating hatch. I was aware, in a vague, impersonal fashion, of the gradual decline of the sun toward the west, of his disappearance beneath the horizon, and of the fact that just as the outlines of the land ahead were fading into the gathering darkness ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... whittling ceased, his hands fell slack and he began to stare out through the snow-walled window. His anxiety for Hugh slipped imperceptibly into a vague pondering over his own youthfulness. That's what those two were always telling him, sometimes savagely, sometimes tenderly! "You're too young." What did it mean to him, anyhow, that he was "too young"? A desolation from which at times he suffered ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... hands and laughed and did everything to show their delight short of hugging each other, and then ran towards the vessel, suddenly possessed of a vague fear that it might sail away before they were seen. Bob fired several shots out of his rifle as he ran, to attract the attention of the crew, but as they approached they could see no sign of life, and ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... she ain't about here anywhere?" he said, with a vague gesture. "She don't belong ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the Kaiser himself always felt in some vague way that his luck lay with America, and I imagine that he himself was against anything that might lead to a break with this country. What, then, was the mysterious power which changed, for instance, the policy ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... vagabondage. He had none of the tidiness of the calculating and shrewd professional tramp. His wardrobe represented the cast-off specimens of half a dozen fashions and eras. Two factories had combined their efforts in providing shoes for his feet. As you gazed at him there passed through your mind vague impressions of mummies, wax figures, Russian exiles, and men lost on desert islands. His face was covered almost to his eyes with a curly brown beard that he kept trimmed short with a pocket-knife, and that ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... apoplexy. The attack was known to Penautier sooner than to his own family: then the papers about the conditions of partnership disappeared, no one knew how, and d'Alibert's wife and child were ruined. D'Alibert's brother-in-law, who was Sieur de la Magdelaine, felt certain vague suspicions concerning this death, and wished to get to the bottom of it; he accordingly began investigations, which were suddenly brought to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... statement is peculiarly significant. If it had been possible, we may be quite sure that such a statement would have been made. Suppose, for example, that in place of vague ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... gastritis are various and sometimes vague. Among those which are prominent we may mention an irregular appetite. At times it is voracious and the patient will consume every available article of diet, while at others he will experience nausea and disgust at the sight of food. Even when very hungry, one ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... teachings of the Christ from a Christian Science standpoint, and they no longer appear vague and mystical, but become luminous and powerful,—and, let ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... pain—only a sense of numbness and a vague feeling of torn muscles, as if they were extraneous matter. He dropped the revolver on the bed and pressed both hands against his wound. Then the door opened, and there appeared, not Riley Sinclair, ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... form a correct judgment on the question whether this bill were constitutional or unconstitutional, it must, I think, be admitted that, as has been remarked before, the terms "constitutional" and "unconstitutional" are somewhat vague and elastic. There is no one document—not Magna Charta, nor the Petition of Eight, nor the Bill of Rights—which can be said to contain the whole of the British constitution. Its spirit and principles ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... are ashamed as soon as we strip them of their long words. Tell me, my friend, when they talk to you of a blind force diffused throughout nature, do they present any real idea to your mind? They think they are saying something by these vague expressions—universal force, essential motion—but they are saying nothing at all. The idea of motion is nothing more than the idea of transference from place to place; there is no motion without direction; for no individual can move all ways at once. In what direction then does ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... countenance told of a troubled heart. She loved her guardian above everything else; knew that, separated from him, life would be a dreary blank to her; yet, much as she loved him, she could not divest herself of a species of fear, of dread. The thought of being his wife filled her with vague apprehension. He had hastened the marriage; the old place had been thoroughly repaired and refurnished, and this morning she would go home a wife. She clasped her hands over her eyes; the future looked fearful. She knew the passionate, exacting nature of the man with whose ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... had already formulated their doctrine that the national government was a thing of extremely limited powers, the "glorified policeman" of a certain school of publicists reduced almost to a minus quantity. The Whigs, though amiably vague on most things except money-making by state aid, were supposed to stand for a "strong central government". Abolitionism had forced on both parties a troublesome question, "What about slavery in the District of Columbia, where the national government was supreme?" The Democrats were prompt in their ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... published by Mr. Stephens in the appendix to his "Travels in Yucatan," and have appeared repeatedly since in English, Spanish and French.[10-*] They have, up to the present, constituted almost our sole sources of information on these interesting points. Don Pio Perez was rather vague as to whence he derived his knowledge. He refers to "ancient manuscripts," "old authorities," and the like; but, as the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg justly complains, he rarely quotes their words, ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton
... had ascribed his behaviour of the previous day, his first, false version, his reticence and his confusion to scruples of conscience and vague apprehensions. Anxious about the consequences of the business and dreading lest his testimony might complicate it, he had tried to avoid the ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... seen that the characters given tell nothing about a servant's qualities and knowledge; while the vague complaint that Anna Schmidt's behaviour no longer suited her mistress might mean anything or nothing. In this case it meant that a son of the house had annoyed the girl with his attentions, and she had in consequence treated ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... by measurers left immense, Through sound and shape and colour, comes the unsure Vague ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... feeling as that of which you speak, vague, but very strong, impels me to say what I am about to ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... was passing beneath Nina's tower he looked up at her casement under the vague impression that he should there find her whom he was so eager to meet; but no light was visible, either there or in any part of the building; and he had little time for observation, for his guide led him on with a step so light and rapid that he had to do his best to keep ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Furthermore, though twenty thousand minutemen and volunteers were gathered before Boston, though the thirteen colonies were aflame with war preparations, and though the Continental Congress was voting a declaration on taking up arms and appointing a general, nothing but vague report of all ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... appearance of luminous objects in the dark is the only relic with most of us of the gift of seeing visions with which, at least in some degree, we were endowed in our early years. The child who dreads to be alone, and asserts that he hears sounds, or perceives objects, is not expressing merely a vague apprehension of some unknown danger, but often asserts a literal truth. The sounds have been heard; in the stillness of its nursery the little one has listened to what seemed a voice calling it; or, in the dark, phantasms have risen before ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... through the reading and the singing and the talk, a vague fear kept crossing the little girl's mind. What if the things so confidently expected from the village should not come? Their little store of food was diminishing rapidly. What if their father had forgotten them? What if there was nothing awaiting them in the village? Oh, that was too dreadful ...
— Stephen Grattan's Faith - A Canadian Story • Margaret M. Robertson
... to the sounds produced during laughter. We can see in a vague manner how the utterance of sounds of some kind would naturally become associated with a pleasurable state of mind; for throughout a large part of the animal kingdom vocal or instrumental sounds are employed either as a call or as a charm by one sex for the other. They ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... attempt, it was pretty well done, and his companions watched the result with feelings of excited earnestness, that they felt half-ashamed to admit even to themselves. There was mingled with this feeling a sort of vague incredulity, and a disposition to ridicule the idea that they were actually endeavouring to wash gold out of the ground; but when Larry's panful began to diminish, and the black sand appeared, sparkling with unmistakeably-brilliant ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... have been held as to whether we have any trace of a religious belief. Theoretically speaking, they had some sort of a religion, though doubtless very vague and indistinct; for we know of no nation as far advanced as they were destitute of it. It has been pointed out, that the bones of some animals, as the horse, were very rare, and their absence explained as the result of superstitious reasons. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... was the Principia put than Hooke put in his claims for priority. And indeed his claims were not altogether negligible; for vague ideas of the same sort had been floating in his comprehensive mind, and he doubtless felt indistinctly conscious of a great deal more than he could ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the ill-fated Denton Grange lying stranded on the rocks, coal barges alongside, donkey engines chattering on deck, and a swarm of bum-boats round our sides, filled with tempting heaps of fruit, cigars, and tobacco. Baskets were slung up on deck, and they drove a roaring trade. A little vague news filtered down to the troop-deck; Ladysmith unrelieved, but Buller across the Tugela, and some foggy rumour about 120,000 more men being wanted. The Battery also received a four-footed recruit in the shape of ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... same letter to Zacharias he says, "When I was on board the Beagle I believed in the permanence of species, but as far as I can remember vague doubts occasionally flitted across my mind." Unless Prof. Judd and I are altogether wrong in believing that late or early in the voyage (it matters little which) a definite approach was made to ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... the danger is at least as great, on the other, that if subjected to fundamental changes, it might lose that advantage of permanency which whatever is established possesses in virtue of its being such; and which has its foundation in habit, and in that vague sense of responsibility which leads men to give, year after year, what they had been accustomed to give in the previous years, just because they had given it. Let it not be forgotten, that though much still remains to be done in connection with this Fund, much ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... of as "news"—such as this morning's happenings in the stock markets or the courts, or the fire in Main Street. The news interest in this restricted sense may dangle from a frayed thread. The timeliness of the contribution may be vague and general. We may not be able to do more than sense it. This is one reason why men of academic minds, who love exact definitions, never feel quite at ease when they attempt to deal with the principles ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... creature of society was Belle Wellington. Few of her sort are, public belief to the contrary notwithstanding. Her famous fight for social primacy, now lying far behind in the vague past, had been a struggle worthy of an epic, however meticulous the object of her ambition may have appeared in the eyes of many good people. At all events she had striven for a ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... and a mist passed before his eyes. He came to himself at the sound of a door opening, and impelled with a vague idea of defending his property, snatched up his candle and looked out on to ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... force, by which the existing order is maintained, and by relying on the vague and impalpable influence of public opinion expose Christians to the risk of being pillaged, murdered, and outraged in every way by the savages inside and outside ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... For the last hour he had had two voices in his conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his father's testament, the other crying to him to rescue the prisoner. These two voices continued uninterruptedly that struggle which tormented him to agony. Up to that moment he had cherished a vague hope that he should find some means of reconciling these two duties, but nothing within the limits of possibility had ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... could not do, remained an impenetrable mystery to Sylvia, for at that moment she turned away quickly, and went back up the driveway, her face in her hands. Sylvia hesitated, penetrated, in spite of her absorption in her own affairs, by a vague pity, but hearing in the distance the clang of the trolley-car's bell, she herself turned and ran desperately down the driveway. She reached the public road just in time to stop the heavy car, and to swing herself lightly on, to all appearances merely a rather unusually well-set-up, fashionably ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... positive high picture. He had been to the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary: one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself WHY there hadn't. There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed state of his companion, whose dress was "cut down," ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... maid-of-all-work to the housekeeper of a retired humourist turned painter (Mr. O. B. CLARENCE), a vague peppery sentimental old bachelor with an ideal of which a full-sized cast of the "Venus di Milo" stands for symbol in his studio. Cinderella is dumpy and plain (that is the idea which Miss HILDA TREVELYAN tries loyally but without much success to suggest to us), but she has the tiniest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... went, till the city seemed a blur of mingled white and gray, and then the color below changed to a vague blue as they flew over the fields ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... small iron-grey horses of the Camargue. All this crowd pushed and jostled before Tartarin's gate, the gate of this fine M. Tartarin who was going to kill lions in the country of the "Teurs". (In Tarascon: Africa, Greece, Turkey and Mesopotamia formed a vast, vague almost mythical country which was called the Teurs... that is the Turks). Throughout this mob the hat shooters came and went, proud of the triumph of their leader, and leaving in their wake, as it ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... with the general hopefulness of the place. Every one has the look of one making ready. You hear, all day long, when far enough from the waves, a vague, joyous hum of bustle pervading the town. The enterprising click of hammer or trowel falls constantly on the ear. The masons are at work upon the new villas, and our hotel is completing a fine addition for a cafe; the stores along the busy little main ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... like many others, an uncertain sound. In his account of Pity, he recognizes three things, (1) a painful feeling, (2) a selfish desire to remove the cause of the uneasiness, (3) a disposition grounded on benevolent concern about the sufferer. This is at best vague. Equally so is what he states respecting the pleasures of sympathy and benevolence (Book II., Chapter VII.). There is, he says, a pleasure attached to fellow-feeling, a disposition to accommodate our minds ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... should be what the tribune had been of old, the servant of the many not the creature of the few. To Gracchus's mother his plans could hardly have been veiled. She is even said to have stimulated a vague craving for action by the playful remark that she was still known as the mother-in-law of Scipio, not as the mother of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... spied my people's ways; Yea, heard the churl against the baron—yea, And did him justice; sat in mine own courts Judging my judges, that had found a King Who ranged confusions, made the twilight day, And struck a shape from out the vague, and law From madness. And the event—our fallows till'd, Much corn, repeopled towns, a realm again. So far my course, albeit not glassy-smooth, Had prosper'd in the main, but suddenly Jarr'd on this rock. ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Paris whom the pretended friend of the people persecuted; it was also the Academician Bailly. But the illustrious philosopher, the virtuous magistrate, gave no hold for positive and decided criminations. The hideous pamphleteer understood this well; and therefore he adopted vague insinuations, that allowed of no possible refutation, a method which, we may remark by the way, has not been without imitators. Marat exclaimed every day: "Let Bailly send in his accounts!" and the most powerful figure of rhetoric, as Napoleon said, repetition, finally ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... he has been of no use, that one can see at all. Still, for that great act we speak of Isaacs gratefully and remember him kindly; and he forges on, hoping to meet the football somewhere again. In that vague hope, he had arranged a "movement" for a general organization of the human family into Debating-Clubs, County Societies, State Unions, etc., etc., with a view of inducing all children to take hold of the handles of their knives and forks, instead of the metal. Children ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... be qualified an additional note to the effect that both may be occasionally heard at distances vastly greater. But perhaps the most curious observation of M. Flammarion respecting sounds aloft relates to that of echo. To his fancy, this had a vague depth, appearing also to rise from the horizon with a curious tone, as if it came from another world. To the writer, on the contrary, and to many fellow observers who have specially experimented with ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... hours to gain its object. The Mahdist attack took place at 3.30 A.M. on Monday, January 26th, and was only too successful. With regard to the report that the fall of Khartoum was due to foul play on the part of Farag Pasha, Colonel Kitchener says: "The accusations of treachery have all been vague, and are, to my mind, the outcome of mere supposition. In my opinion Khartoum fell from sudden assault, when the garrison was too exhausted by privation to make proper resistance!" Whether Farag Pasha was guilty ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... nearly twelve years ago, now, but no one ever dared to speak to David Linton of his wife. Sometimes Norah used to ask Jim about mother—for Jim was fifteen, and could remember just a little; but his memories were so vague and misty that his information was unsatisfactory. And, after all, Norah did not trouble much. She had always been so happy that she could not imagine that to have had a mother would have made any particular difference to her happiness. You ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... bag as she spoke and hurried to the door, prepared to jump on to the platform at the first possible moment, while her companions impatiently followed in her wake. Rhoda had a vague recollection of promising to write regularly to half a dozen girls, and then she was shaking hands with Harold, and laughing in pure joy at ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... time confined myself to this vague plan, because it was sufficient to fill my imagination with agreeable objects, and my heart with sentiments in which it delighted. These fictions, by frequently presenting themselves, at length gained a consistence, and took in ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... is possible that there is a vague and obscure reference here to the doctrine that the fruits of our deeds are reaped in ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Fergus went to the forest, not too sad, because there was a vague hope in his heart that had never been there before. He lay down under the branches, with his feet towards the rustling waters, and the smiles of the princess gilded his slumbers, as the rays of the rising sun gild the glades of the forest; and when the morning came he was scarcely surprised ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... day in March the far-flung arrows of the geese went over. Honk! honk! A vague, prophetic sense crept into the world out of nowhere—part sound, part scent, and yet too vague for either. Sap seeped from the maples. Weird mist-things went moaning through the night. And then, for the first time, I saw my big ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... great family: a feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism. As a religious emotion the feeling is infinitely extended to all the past; the blended sense of love, of loyalty, and of gratitude is not less real, though necessarily more vague, than ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... make him tolerably independent, he was wont to ignore all such considerations in his grand youthful way, and to look upon his profession from a purely abstract scientific point of view. And yet he was not without large hopes, grand vague ambitions concerning his future career; for he was at an age when it seems so much easier to become one of the few enumerated great ones of the world than to remain amongst the nameless forgotten multitudes; and life lay before him rather as something definite, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... signature is typewritten. Look at the neat little 'Hosmer Angel' at the bottom. There is a date, you see, but no superscription except Leadenhall Street, which is rather vague. The point about the signature is very suggestive—in fact, we ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... de Belliere, who had a vague hope that Marguerite would cease to overwhelm a vanquished enemy, "why do you not go and see ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Big things took the place of trifling ones,—sacred sorrows of wives and mothers, pangs of fathers and husbands, self-denials, sympathies, new desire to bear one another's burdens. Men and women grew fast in those days of the nation's trouble and danger, and Jane awoke from the vague dull dream she had hitherto called life to new hopes, new fears, new purposes. Then after a year's anxiety, a year when one never looked in the newspaper without dread and sickness of suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without so much as asking Miranda's ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cottage; and especially enjoined him, if any movements of a particularly suspicious nature were seen in the neighborhood, to break up from his present quarters, and to move down with his party, and take possession of the domains of Mr. Wharton. A vague suspicion of danger to the family had been awakened in the breast of the major, by the language of the peddler, although he was unable to refer it to any particular source, or to understand why ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... is Understanding, and Kshetrajna is the Soul. What, however, is Chitta is difficult to ascertain, unless it means vague or indefinite perception. In some systems of philosophy the Chitta is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... boys was freed at the age of twenty-eight, and lived in Wilmington, Delaware. It was owing to the fact that their mother had been freed that they entertained the vague notion that they too might be freed; but it was a well established fact that thousands lived and died in such a hope without ever realizing their expectations. The boys, more shrewd and wide awake than many others, did not hearken ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... She decided to go. Already down the straight road as far as the river white vapors were rising, floating lightly around the great trees. Here and there little lights from behind the windows of the houses pierced the gathering darkness, and vague sounds broke the silence of the ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... are now fairly complete for understanding the rise and development of animism. The untrained primitive intellect was stirred by vague intuitions—stimulated by contact with an external world constituted of essentially the same "stuff" as itself—and struggled to find concrete expression for its experiences. The root idea round which all else grouped ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... at seeing it again. In a few moments more the glorious god of day had sunk behind the western horizon, and the chateau seemed to retreat, until it became scarcely perceptible as the light faded, forming only a vague, gray blot in the distance as the gloaming succeeded to the glow. But de Sigognac knew every step of the way perfectly, and soon turned from the highway into the neglected, grass-grown road that led to the chateau. In the profound stillness, which seemed wonderfully peaceful and ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... therefore received a confirmation of which Aristotle did not dream, and its explanation has at the same time received an illumination which his vague if profound adumbration could never afford. With this added support the true conception of human knowledge has received new strength. The theory is still, nevertheless, not to be grasped without a resolute effort of reflection. It involves an inversion of ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Fulk, and straightway the pounding hoofs were still, the jingle of bridle and stirrup hushed, and in its place a vague stir of bustle and excitement; of pikemen wheeling right and left to vanish southwards into the green, and of archers stringing bows and unbuckling quiver-caps ere they too wheeled and vanished; yet now Sir Pertolepe stayed four lusty fellows, and beckoning ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... Diotti arose at daylight, and after a simple repast, betook himself to practise. Hour after hour he would let his muse run riot with his fingers. Lovingly he wooed the strings with plaintive song, then conquering and triumphant would be his theme. But neither satisfied him. The vague dream of a melody more beautiful than ever man had heard dwelt hauntingly on the borders of his imagination, but was no nearer realization than when he began. As the day's work closed, he wearily placed the violin within its case, murmuring, "Not yet, not yet; ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... "Bessy's as hopelessly vague about business as I am, Tredegar. Why the deuce Westmore left her everything outright—but he was only ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... believed likewise in a place of punishment for the wicked, is more doubtful, though vague allusions to it occur in the Rig-veda, and more distinct descriptions are found in the Atharva-veda. In one verse it is said that the dead is rewarded for his good deeds, that he leaves or casts off all evil, and glorified takes his body (Rv. X. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... more than once, was bewildered and uneasy. He lacked the experience in supreme command in which his great antagonist, Lee, was so rich. The field telegraph had broken down just before sunset, and his subordinates, Sedgwick and Reynolds, brave men too, who had divisions elsewhere, were vague and uncertain in their movements. Hooker did not know what ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... by Paley is vague and incomplete; but it does not omit the positive conditions. After health, Paley enumerates the exercise of the affections and some engaging occupation or pursuit; both which are highly relevant to the attainment of happiness. Indeed with an ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... hereafter for her sufferings The poor must pay for all their enjoyments The groom isn't handsome, but the bride's as pretty as a picture Void in her heart, a place made ready for disasters to come Wiping his forehead ostentatiously Word "sacrifice," so vague on careless lips Would have liked him to be blind only so ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... affording assistance, had recourse to prayers and entreaties, and going about to all the temples, wearied the gods with vows and supplications. While the city was in this state of solicitude and suspense, a vague report first arrived that two Narnian horsemen had come from the field of battle into the camp which stood as a defence in the entrance to Umbria, with intelligence that the enemy were cut to pieces. At first they rather heard than credited this news, as being ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... his long survey, the Editor trusts he may add without egotism, that he has found the vague general verdict of popular Fame more just than those have thought, who, with too severe a criticism, would confine judgments on Poetry to "the selected few of many generations." Not many appear to have gained reputation without some gift or performance that, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... said, as they came up the avenue, and, under pretext of something being wrong with his horse's bridle, had stopped, and let Arthur go on to the house alone. He had long waited for this opportunity of speaking to me alone, he said, as I must have known. Then, amid the basest of vague insinuations against Arthur, he dared to proffer me his odious love. Oh, Madame, I was angry! A woman cannot bear feigned love,—it stings like hatred; still less can she bear to hear one she loves spoken of as I had heard him speak of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... longer the vague thing driving here and there with pleasant torture. It had found freedom and light; what the Romany folk call its own 'tan', its home, though it be but home of each day's trek. That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... line of thought. And an unprejudiced observer will scarcely fail in this case to admit that what attracts many adherents of occult science—or occultism—is nothing but the fatal craving for what is unknown and mysterious, or even vague. And he will also be ready to own that there is much cogency in the reasons put forward against what is fantastic and visionary by serious opponents of the cause in question. In fact, one who studies occult science will do well not to lose sight ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... rumors, vague rumors, about these proceedings, and remained quietly in session. It met every day ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... train would have covered sounds ten times as loud as those of his snaky approach, yet he glided forward with as much care as though he were stepping on old stairs in a silent house. He could see a vague shadow—Donnegan; but chiefly he worked by that peculiar sense of direction which some people possess in a dim light. The blind, of course, have that sense in a high degree of sensitiveness, but even those who are not blind may learn to trust ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... reads a few of Shakespeare's great plays and then the meager story of his life is generally filled with a vague wonder. Here is an unknown country boy, poor and poorly educated according to the standards of his age, who arrives at the great city of London and goes to work at odd jobs in a theater. In a year or two he is associated with scholars and dramatists, the masters ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... optimistic, or idealistic, or pessimistic. And there is in the realm of truth that which justifies or refutes these definite practical ways of construing the universe. But no historical religion is ever so vague even as this in its philosophical implications. Indeed, we shall always be brought eventually to the inner meaning of some individual religious experience, where no general criticism ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... sharpening and making definite of the truth in its personal application, and the other side is, 'Thou art the man.' All preaching and religious teaching is toothless generality, utterly useless, unless we can manage somehow or other to force it through the wall of indifference and vague assent to a general proposition, with which 'Gospel-hardened hearers' surround themselves, and make them feel that the thing has got a point, and that the point is touching their own consciousness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... first time—and in Mesmerism every thing is new. An objection may be made that the article has rather a Magazinish air; Mr. Poe having evidently written with a view to effect, and so as to excite rather than to subdue the vague appetite for the mysterious and the horrible which such a case, under any circumstances, is sure to awaken—but apart from this there is nothing to deter a philosophic mind from further inquiries regarding it. It is a matter entirely for testimony. [So it is.] Under ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... those who have once seen a similar one are never really satisfied in any other place. The water looked flat like a mirror, and one or two cattle stood knee-deep in the edges of it. All around, just a vague black mass from which a warm mist of breath and hot bodies was rising, were the cattle, mostly lying down and contentedly chewing the cud, while a few wandered slowly about looking for one another and quietly ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
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