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More "Blur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... carried the power supply on a strap over his shoulder while Rick carried the camera and its attachments. The thing was uncanny, even when its operation was understood. To the naked eye, Dismal was just a vague blur under the trees. But with the infrared searchlight on him, Rick could see him through the telescope as though it were white light. He shot a few feet of film, then took it to the photo lab. He could develop short lengths by dipping them into bottles of solution, although full lengths ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... won't come back ever again?" The meadows swam in a blur before her eyes, and she thought of the purple velvet slippers which ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... ordinary course through the post-office. Letters in the post-office are hurried quickly through the operation of stamping, so that one passing over the other while the stamping ink is still moist, will to some extent blot and blur that with which it has come in contact. He will produce some dozens taken at random, and will show that with them all such has been the case. This blotting, this smudging, is very slight, but it exists; it is always ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... up in ignorance of life, simply the exquisite prolongation of wooing. If she had looked beyond, to the vision of wider ties, it was as a traveller gazes over a land veiled in golden haze, and so far distant that the imagination delays to explore it. But now through the blur of sensations one image strangely persisted—the image of Denis's child. Had she ever before thought of their having a child? She could not remember. She was like one who wakens from a long fever: she recalled nothing of her former self or of her former feelings. She knew only that the vision ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... windy: presently it blew so strong, that he could hardly keep his legs. But, he got to an arched window in the tower, breast high, and holding tight, looked down upon the house-tops, on the smoking chimneys, on the blur and blotch of lights (towards the place where Meg was wondering where he was and calling to him perhaps), all kneaded up together in a ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... to see a great yellow garden-spider hanging head downward in the centre of his web, when we approach too closely, instead of deserting his snare, set it vibrating back and forth so rapidly that he becomes a mere blur; a more certain method of escaping the onslaught of a bird than if he ran to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... in it must go on obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us. The art of the theater ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... strength. Something in Joe's supreme effort and in the gloom of the Indian's eyes made Shefford curious about this stone. He bent over and grasped it as Joe had done. He braced himself and lifted with all his power, until a red blur obscured his sight and shooting stars seemed to explode in his head. But he could not even ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... another blow on the window, and something pounded and scratched against the glass. Both of them were looking this time, and again my father saw the hand without the little finger—but my mother could see only a blur ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... firelight glints in his golden hair, And his wondering eyes are fixed on my face, And he rests on the arm of my easy-chair, And the book's a blur and I lose my place: And I touch my lips to his shining head, And my voice breaks down and—the story's done. . . . Oh, children, kiss me and go to bed: Leave me to think of ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... multitudes of small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair, warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of brownish gold. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... blur the gracious moon, And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell, For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... his eyes with a dazed expression, at first a blur of consciousness. Then gradually the recognition of himself, of his surroundings, of his life, came into them, and that self-knowledge was unmistakable. There was no doubt about the man with his twisted limbs and his twisted soul. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... observed. Whether by this apparent apathy her people hoped to lull us into a condition of equal carelessness, it is of course impossible for me to say; but, if so, they signally failed, for immediately that the barque's outline faded into an indistinct blur in the growing darkness, we went to work and shook out a reef all round, never doubting but that they were at that moment doing precisely the same thing. And our supposition was most probably correct—Ryan, indeed, who had sent for his night-glass and brought it to bear upon her, declared ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... as accurately as I can, and with no theories to blur the history. Theories are poor things at the best, and the bulk of mine have perished long ago. I love better than any theory the sound of the Gate of Ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone who has passed the rose-strewn threshold ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... he looked long and steadily into the darkness around him. Suddenly he saw her—a pale blur ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... withstood the ravages of time wonderfully. It had encircled her like a friend, both when she was sad and when she was gay. It had been wrapped around the Baby, of whom she never thought without a pang and a blur before her eyes. It was the dearest article she had in her wardrobe, and because of that and because she had been so forgetful, she would send ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... composition and form, that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes— if ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... than ever at Sloane Square station. Through the still, thick blur, men groped in and out; women, very few, grasped their reticules to their bosoms and handkerchiefs to their mouths; crowned with the weird excrescence of the driver, haloed by a vague glow of lamp-light that seemed to drown in vapour ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... extreme leisure at the rails. He stuck his hands into his pockets and his head out at the very small train. His bleached blue eyes shut to slits as he watched the rear car in its smoke-blur ooze away westward among the mounded bluffs. "Lucky it's out of range," I thought. But now Scipio ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... marks blur badly and become illegible in a few months. Remember, you may be using the notebook twenty years hence, therefore make ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Dingley Dellers, and that at the Swan—otherwise the Blue Lion—the Pickwick fellowship shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to the town an ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... and bright greens, yellows and pinks, positive discords and absolute antagonisms of tint side by side, yet without jarring the eye. Green all round, the trees and hedges; blue overhead, the sky; purple and gold westward, where the sun sinks. No part of this grass can be represented by a blur or broad streak of colour, for it is not made up of broad streaks. It is composed of innumerable items of grass blade and flower, each in itself coloured and different from its neighbour. Not one of these must be slurred over if you wish to get ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Leighton, dully. Then he tossed back his head. He would not blur Lew's happy hour. He held out his hand. "I hear," he repeated, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... fields of waving wheat And leagues of golden corn The fragrance of the wild-rose bloom And elder-flower is borne; But earth's appealing loveliness We do but half surmise, For oh, the blur of battle-fields Is ever ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... his rope, clinging desperately, trying at every solid tree to stop the career of his runaway, but in every instance being forced by the danger of jamming his hands to let go. Again he lost his derby. The landscape was a blur. Dimly he made out the howls of laughter as the outfit passed a group of rivermen. Then abruptly a ravine yawned before him, and he let go just in time to save himself a fall. The wanigan, trailing her ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... to treat you with still greater frankness. I do not approve of your preface, and I will tell you why: if your work should deserve attention, it is a blur on the very face of it. Disadvantages of education, etc., ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded with the public in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties that lie in his way, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... I'll never see Those hills again, a blur of blue and rain Across the old Willamette. I'll not stir A pheasant as I walk, and hear it whirr Above my head, an indolent, trusting thing. When all this silly dream is finished here, The fellows will go home to where there fall Rose-petals over every street, and all The year is like a friendly ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... The frequent gloom that clouds thy noble spirit, Is born of humours natural to thy body; And, as foul vapours blur the honest sun, Hangs o'er the face of the high enterprize, That hath enrich'd thy ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... purest opposites, yet mutual, reciprocal, necessary to each other; and he is a narrow man who cannot stand in open relations with both terms, reconciling in the depths of his life, though he can never explain, the mystery of their friendship. He who will adhere only to the universal, and makes a blur of the special, is a rhapsodist; he who can apprehend only the special, being blind and callous to the universal, is a chatterer and magpie. From these opposites we never escape; Destiny and Freedom, Rest and Motion, Individual and Society, Origination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... or four specks silhouetted against the sky—not three or four, but five—no! six—no! seven! Seven black specks which detach themselves one by one, one from another and from the vagueness beyond—experienced eyes scan the horizon with enthusiasm and excitement which threaten to blur the clearness of their vision. Anyone with an eye for sea-going craft can distinguish that topsail-schooner there, well ahead of the rest of the tiny fleet, skimming the water with swift grace, and immediately behind her the three-masted polacca—hm! ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... lanes led down, Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown: The air above was wan with misty light, 5 The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... back into the shed, covering the child up so that the drifting wet should not beat upon it. He came after me and kissed it again, saying 'Good- night, poor little innocent, good-night!' three or four times. Then he went off quickly and sprang into his saddle and in the blur of rain I saw horse and man turn away. He waved his hand once and his handsome pale face gleamed upon me like that of a ghost in the storm. 'Till to-morrow!' he called, and was gone. I took the child into the house ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... golden dust in my eyes, and I am seeing things all wrong. We have anchored for the night.... I am watching the misty green blur, which is all that is left to me of India, grow more and more indistinct as darkness falls. Soon it will ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... offered the familiar pleasantries which are the portion of that strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In tens of thousands of London public-houses she stands with her hand on beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banalities with persons beyond the counter in whose dim regard she must show a mere blur of hardened loveliness against her background of bottles and decanters; but the waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior as fine as that of any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel; and I thought ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... slipped into a tangle of brush that marked the upper end of his patch of timber. The bare summit of the ridge stretched away in the half-light to merge in a mysterious blur with the indistinct valley of the Ten Bow. The wind was blowing gently from the ridge and the boy figured that if the wolf pack followed the summit as he hoped, they must pass within twenty yards of him. "If it don't go and cloud up before they get here I ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... foaming like a furious, rapid stream away from the stern. The houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. The water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. Nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had been out ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... was as formalized and stylistic as an Italian garden; the only contrasts were those of one elegance with another; horses were not to be seen, except occasionally in the distance when under their riders they shot past some dark background a flitting blur of primary colours with a rumble of muffled thunder; and ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the issues, then, before us, and I dare not blur the clear distinction which Jesus Christ draws. I listen to Him, and accept His word, and I press upon you, dear brethren, that the main thing about a road is, after all, where it leads us; and I ask you to remember that your life-path—as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... him. He heard, too, a high-pitched cry, half of warning, half of fright; the next instant there was a mighty upheaval of snow, an explosion of feathery white, as the human projectile landed, then a blur of blue-and-white stripes as it went rolling ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... It has turned away From the vast aweful silences of Heaven (Which answer but with silence when we pray) And sought for something to assuage its grief. Some surcease and relief From sorrow, in pursuit of mortal joys. It drowned God's stillness in a sea of noise; It lost God's presence in a blur of forms; Till, bruised and bleeding with life's brutal storms, Unto immutable and speechless space The World lifts up its face, Its haggard, tear-drenched face, And cries aloud for faith's supreme reward, The promised Second Coming of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dark they softly stir, Till arrowy dawn the shadow-blur Dispels—God's tingling kiss of morning On oak and ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... faces, names, came to me through a sort of hazy blur as Hoddy and I drank something he called superbourbon—a New Texan drink that Bourbon County, Kentucky, would never have recognized. They had no corn on New Texas. This stuff was made out of something ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... Captain Coffin was waiting in his shore-boat. I listened, minute after minute, on the chance of hearing his hail. A heavy bank of cloud had overcast the moon, and the packet melted from sight in a blur of darkness. Worst of all—worse even than the sting of self-reproach—was the prospect of returning to Stimcoe's and wearing through the night, while out there in the darkness the two men would meet, and all that followed their meeting must ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... de feast? me spurne a, me kick a de feast; be garr, me tell a me do de grand grace, de favor for suppa, for dina, for eata with dee; be garrs blur, we have at home de restorative, de quintessence, de pure destill goulde, de Nector, de Ambrosia. Zacharee, make ready de fine partricke, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... experiment. Several professional photographers, one of them a top Life photographer, said that if Hart was familiar with his camera and was familiar with panning action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours. I recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed sporting events for the Lubbock newspaper. This would have called for a ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... "there is no life in me. What I eat does not feed me; the air that enters my lungs does not refresh me; the sun feels cold; it seems to you to light that front of the house, and show you the old carvings bathed in its beams, but to me it is all a blur, a mist. If Beatrix were here, it would be dazzling. There is but one only thing left in this world that keeps its shape and color to my eyes,—this flower, this foliage," he added, drawing from his breast the withered bunch the marquise had ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and a blur in her eyes which the man could not ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... looks, with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... block on 'em!" cried Bill with enthusiasm. Jim could just make out a dark blur in the fog ahead where the pursued hack was galloping to some unknown destination. At the sight all the fierce excitement of the chase came over Jim. He must not let that Mexican escape this time. It meant everything ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... not sing that without breaking down. As we recall it, we draw an inward fluttering breath, something grips our throats and makes them ache, our eyes blur, and a tear slips down upon the cheek, not of sorrow—God knows not all of sorrow—but if we had it all to live over again, how differently we—oh, well, it's too late now, ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... face appeared in a blur before him. Bates said something, but it sounded far off, and he did not catch its import. There was a long silence, and then the ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... motive, too, was plain enough in the light of the overheard conversation at the National Hotel. The men who wanted Mr. Bell's mine had waited till he had located it before striking their first blow. What would their next be? Peggy's pulses throbbed and the grove seemed to blur for an instant. But the next moment she was mistress of herself again. Clearly there was only one thing to do. Lay the whole ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... the end of the track the operator moves the front rudder, and the machine lifts from the rail like a kite supported by the pressure of the air underneath it. The ground under you is at first a perfect blur, but as you rise the objects become clearer. At a height of 100 feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... scapegoats on the altar of the fatherland. He had turned off the expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to avoid every decisive conflict with the Executive, to weaken and to blur it over. Fearing to lose its conquests over the revolution, it let its rival gather the fruits thereof. "France demands, above all things, peace," with this language had the party of Order been apostrophizing the revolution, since February; with this language did Bonaparte's ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... obscure and damp, its only light filtering through the moving curtain of green water. Black and crawling things squirmed at our feet, and darkness filled the recesses of the cavern. Malicious Gossip's body was a blur in the dimness, and her low soft voice was like an overtone of the deep organ notes of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... years afterward that I found that out, and then—oh, then I only cried when that picture of young care-free mirth rose before me out of the blur and mists of that long-vanished time; for there had come a day between, when God's good gift of laughter had gone out from me to come again no more ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... day's thine own: Thou and thy Stars have cast me down: 870 My laurels are transplanted now, And flourish on thy conqu'ring brow: My loss of honour's great enough, Thou need'st not brand it with a scoff: Sarcasms may eclipse thine own, 875 But cannot blur my lost renown. I am not now in Fortune's power; He that is down can fall no lower. The ancient heroes were illustrious For being benign, and not blustrous, 880 Against a vanquish'd foe: their swords Were sharp and trenchant, not ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Macedonian court and public affairs, there are several stories that implicate him dishonorably with political intrigues, and though there is not one of these that is not denied, and not one which rests on competent historical authority, such traditions are not apt so to cluster as to blur the fair fame of a sturdily incorruptible man, but are much more likely to cling to the memory of ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... building, and his niece standing a moment on the veranda watched the long train roll away down the faint blur of track that ran west to the farthest verge of the great white wilderness. Then with a little impatient gesture she went ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... run up and down his back at the horror of it; he seemed paralyzed; he could not move. And then, from somewhere out in that blur of ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... ruins of his life! Behind him followed the same inexorable antagonist who so swiftly had brought everything crashing about his head. Possibly Sorenson once out of the town had failed to look back; possibly looking back he had been unable to distinguish against the blur of houses and trees the horseman galloping in the moonlight ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the first proofs, and, with them, some degree of disappointment. Those covering the first outward and return journey between Pozieres and Le Sars were good, as were the next three, at the beginning of the second journey. Then came a confused blur of superimposed ground-patterns, and at the last five results blank as the brain of a flapper. A jamb in the upper changing-box had led to five exposures on ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... postboy. And peering through the haze before us I saw the tollgate, sure enough, and I turned to stare back down the road towards the second hard-riding horseman, and presently beheld a vague blur that resolved itself into a rapidly oncoming shape that swept down upon us through the swirling mist; the flutter of a long cloak, a spurred boot, a shadowy form bowed low in the saddle—all this I saw in one brief moment; then rose a hoarse shout from ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... nearer reach where there was a mass of rough water, and a certain tongue of shingle thrust out from the further bank. For days and weeks these river marks had warned the anxious inquirers that they might not expect sport. The diminution of the tongue of land on the one side, and a blur in the pure white of the foam on the other, told ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... all those years of loving thrift, Nor blame nor discord marred their lot; Each to the lover-life was gift; And each was free from blur or blot That called for silence ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... remained silent, or made little signs to one another as they watched the fire. Meanwhile the mother considered the papers, now with a gleam of anger in her eyes, as she read, and now with a momentary blur of tear-dimmed vision. Most of the letters she threw at once on the fire. They writhed a moment like living creatures, and of a sudden blazed out as if tormented into sudden confession of the passions of ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... certainly nervous, which was a queer thing; for ordinarily the swamp boy seemed to be as cool and self-possessed as an Indian brave, who thought it a blur on his manhood to display emotion in the face ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... I knew nothing; with the coming of help, the sense that I was no longer struggling unaided for life in those treacherous waters, all strength and consciousness left me. When I again awoke, dazed, trembling, a strange blur before my eyes, I was lying upon a sandy beach, with a cliff towering above me, its crest tree-lined, and I could hear the dash of waves breaking not far distant. I endeavored to raise myself to look about, but sank back helpless, fairly struggling for breath. An arm lifted ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... a little. MacRae was not even looking at her now. His eyes were turned to the sea, to hide the blur that crept into them ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... setting. The mountains floated in mid-sky, pearly pale, and magical under the rising moon. The little circle of light from our pink-shaded candles on the table (I say our, because Boy and I dined together) gave to the picture a bizarre effect, which French artists love to put on canvas; a blur of gold-and-rose artificial light, blending with the silver-green radiance of ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the bells and the continued low blur of auto horns from Fifth Avenue, but his own street was silent and he was safe in here from all the threat of life, for there was his door and the long hall and his guardian bedroom—safe, safe! The arc-light shining into his ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... animal arose in an attitude of defense. Nodding to Joel that the moment had come, as the horse advanced and the enemy came within reach, the singing noose shot out, the wolf arose as if to spring, and the next instant Dog-toe whirled under spur and quirt, leaving only a blur behind as he shot across the corral. Only his rider had seen the noose fall true, the taut rope bespoke its own burden, and there was no time to shout. For an instant, Joel held his breath, only catching a swerve in the oncoming horse, whose rider bore down on the centre post ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... both in seeing and stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or political prescience, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness with which the individual habitually applies the animistic or anthropomorphic formula in dealing with the facts of his environment. The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes of the individual in a more pervasive way ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... dim blur upon the frosty night. It was near time for him to close his store, and when she entered he was turning out the loafers who had been cuddling close to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... signs. Slight changes in orthoepy we cannot account for, except by pleading the general issue of custom. Why should foot and boot be sounded differently? Why food and good? Why should the Yankee mark the distinction between the two former words, and blur it in the case of the latter, thereby incurring the awful displeasure of the "Autocrat," who trusses him, falcon-like, before his million readers and adorers? Why should the Frenchman call his wooden shoe a sabot and his old shoe a savate, both from the same root? Alas, we must too often ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... tribe, and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was not openly insulting, but ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... be avoided. Let not the possibility of general annihilation blur our perception of the task before us; above all, let us not count on the miraculous aid of chance. Hitherto, the promises of our imagination notwithstanding, we have always been left to ourselves, to our own resources. It is to our humblest efforts that every useful, enduring achievement of this ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... understand, for they were new dead. Had the Turks attacked and been driven back? When he had gone about thirty yards he stopped to take his bearings. On the right were the ruins of a large building set on fire by the guns. There was a blur of woods and the debris of walls round it. Away to the left another hill ran out farther to the east, and the place he was in seemed to be a kind of cup between the spurs. Just before him was a little ruined ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... an unaccountable blur in his sight. He could not see perfectly, and that was why, when Mrs. Belding entered the sitting-room, he was not certain that her face was as sad and ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and shutting of a door. So with Joseph, in the brief space of the lady's approach. And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been—in fact it was, in his recollections, later—a blur of emotion. ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... not be that in the development needed to fit the individual for the full and glad enjoyment of the sunshine to come, a ray of light would blur the film, and spoil the picture instead of producing one that is strong, clear ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... various complications which blur the sharpness of this distinction in practice. To begin with, many instincts mature gradually, and while they are immature an animal may act in a fumbling manner which is very difficult to distinguish from learning. James ("Psychology," ii, 407) maintains that ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... have not defined the outlines; I have suffused them with a haze of half-tints warm or golden, in such a sort that you can not lay your finger on the exact spot where background and contours meet. Seen from near, the picture looks a blur; it seems to lack definition; but step back two paces, and the whole thing becomes clear, distinct, and solid; the body stands out; the rounded form comes into relief; you feel that the air plays round it. And yet—I am not satisfied; I have misgivings. ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... be call'd, and to offset it, or finish it out, as if in Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not really or exactly to be described at all, (for on the many hundreds who were there it seems to this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a blotch)—and yet partially to be described as I now proceed to give it. There is a scene in the play representing a modern parlor in which two unprecedented English ladies are inform'd by the impossible Yankee that he is not a man of fortune, and therefore undesirable for marriage-catching ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... invalid chair, with her face set toward the noble river sweeping into view around the base of a wooded bluff, and toward the line of its course beyond, where its hidden waters furrowed the forests to the northward and divided hill from hill. Yet to her eyes the landscape was but a blur, and she ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... held hers, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions. She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying to maintain, she burst out, in ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Now I am perfectly willing to travel as fast as any one, if necessity demands it, but to tear through a region as beautiful as Venetia at sixty miles an hour, with the incomparable landscape whirling past in a confused blur, like a motion-picture film which is being run too fast because the operator is in a hurry to get home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is unnecessary. Like all Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted on keeping his cut-out wide open, thereby producing ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... are indignant that the satirist should have made this the climax to his praise of a woman. And yet, we fear, he saw only too truly. What unexpected failures have we seen, literally, in this respect! How often did the Martha blur the Mary out of the face of a lovely woman at the sound of a crash amid glass and porcelain! What sad littleness in all the department thus represented! Obtrusion of the mop and duster on the tranquil meditation of a husband and brother. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... combination of forms of no great refinement in themselves, but which give a varied skyline and a pretty play of light and shade. It amuses at the first glance, and as it rarely demands a second, it is well suited to turbid atmospheres, which blur outlines, and a chilly climate in which people cannot loiter out of doors. Moreover, the old-world memories it evokes, although in a minor degree than was the case with the Gothic, contribute to its facile popularity. But the classical ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... fire on shore, by which the defeated pirates lay carousing in the swamp. The other, a mere blur of light upon the darkness, indicated the position of the anchored ship. She had swung round to the ebb—her bow was now towards me—the only lights on board were in the cabin, and what I saw was merely a reflection ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... throwing herself face downwards on the ground, crawled to the edge. For an instant she closed her eyes, shrinking with a sick dread from what they might show her—Tony's young, lithe body lying broken on the rocks below, or, perhaps, only the dark blur of some awful and unmeasured depth which would never ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform on which ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... paddles because a wind would do the work, you know not the ways of the great explorer. He bade us ply the faster, till the canoe sped between earth and sky like an arrow shot on the level. The shore-line became a blur. Clumps of juniper and pine marched abreast, halted the length of time an eye could rest, and wheeled away. The swift current raced to meet us. The canoe jumped to mount the glossy waves raised by the beam wind. An upward tilt of her prow, ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... was made by Wilson in an extraordinary joint session of Congress, held on the 2d of April. In this, possibly his greatest speech, he was careful not to blur the idealistic principles which, since the spring of 1916, he had been formulating. War existed because Germany by its actions had thrust upon the United States the status of belligerent. But the American people must meet the challenge with their purpose clearly ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... the sea. As Ross headed toward the wave-washed coast he began to hear shouting and other sounds which made him believe that the besiegers were in the midst of an all-out assault. Yet those distant fires and rocketlike blasts into the sky had a wavery blur. And Ross, making his way with the effortless water cleaving of the diver, surfaced now and then to spot film curling up from the surface of the sea between the two standing rock pillars which marked the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... weeks of our waiting draw to a close.... There is scarcely a leaf astir In the garden beyond my windows, where the twilight shadows blur The blaze of some woman's ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... her down the street until her blue dress, with its white trimming became a blur in the shadows. Then he struck out once ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... stopped and looked landwards, where the indistinct grey blur was beginning to take the pattern of fields and ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... Columbia. Then, before they realize it, comes the danger of going with the current on a river with rapids. The stream sweeps to a torrent, mad and unbridled. The canoe is as a chip in a maelstrom, the precipices racing past in a blur, the Indians hanging frantically to the gunnels, bawling aloud in fear, the terrified voyageurs reaching, . . . grasping, . . . snatching at trees overhanging from the banks. The next instant a rock has banged through bottom, tearing away ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... low forehead, and noticed that his eyes were small. He had a good, swaggering military figure to which uniform was becoming, and a kind of animal good looks which would deteriorate early. His colour would fix and deepen with the aid of steady daily drinking, and his features would coarsen and blur, until by the time he was forty the young jowl would have grown heavy and would end by being his ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... visions became more frequent than the idealistic. Gradually, coarse and uninteresting erotic dreams of women began to haunt his mind in sleep. A curious particular regarding the new type of vision was that he never dreamed of whole females, only of their sexual parts, seen in a blur; and the seminal emissions which attended the mental pictures left a feeling of fatigue and disgust. In course of time, his wife and he agreed to live separately so far as sexual relations are concerned. He then indulged his passion for males, and wholly lost those rudimentary female dreams which ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... rudder-lines, with the result that as the cutter glided once more rapidly over the little waves she made a sharp curve to starboard, and then as the line was once more loosened, glided on straight ahead for something dim and strange that stood out before them like a blur. ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... is not with me. I kiss her empty dress. Here I kneel beside it, not ashamed to bless Each dear bosom-fold of it that bears a breath of her, Makes my heart a house of pain, and my eyes a blur. ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... with a protest of rusty hinges, and Ruan saw the Parson standing on the threshold. A woman's face, pale and strained, swam out of the darkness behind, and to Ruan, materialist though he was, came the thought that the pale blur looked like the face of someone drowning in a black flood. He put the idea aside and nodded slightly at the woman. She gave a gasp of relief, and, pushing by the priest, walked over ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. Nay he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes, that full of that taste you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but hee commeth to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-inchaunting skill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you: with a tale which holdeth ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were obliged to lock him in," cried the "good woman," following to the door, to clear every blur from her virtues; "for his own sake I done it, for I felt my cry a-coming, and to see me cry—Lord bless you, the effect upon him is to call out for a walking-stick and ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... journey is seven miles, ten if pasture fails, in a windless blur of dust, feeding as it goes, and resting at noons. Such hours Pete weaves a little screen of twigs between his head and the sun—the rest of him is as impervious as one of his own sheep—and sleeps while ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... in the temperament and in the transmuting and modifying medium. More or less of filtration does it all. Nature makes the poet, not by adding to, but by taking from; she takes all blur and opacity out of him; condenses, intensifies; lifts his nerves nearer the surface, sharpens his senses, and brings his whole organization to an edge. Sufficient filtration would convert charcoal into diamonds; and we shall everywhere find that the purest, most ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... fall asleep at all? If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home, usually worked with some precision; but this,—there seems to be, you might say, a blur, a—film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, foggy terms of man's conceit to explain what he ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... behind their blur, didn't answer. Indeed, she could not have defined that sweetly sad glow, now so cruelly crushed, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... a young tree on the edge of a wood When the mist is weaving and drifting. Slowly the boughs disappear and the leaves reach out Like the drowning hands of children, Till a grey blur quivers cold Where the green grace drank of the sun. So now, as I gaze, the morrows Creep weaving and winding their mist Round the beauty of her who sings. They hide the soft rings of her hair, Dear as a child's curling fingers; They shut out the trembling sun ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... inn and waited there in a long, narrow room, lit by a few small oil-lamps and crammed with soldiers. They were eating and drinking in vehement haste. Wherever the light from the lamps fell on them, you saw faces flushed and scarred under a blur of smoke and grime. Here and there a bandage showed up, violently white. On the tables enormous quantities of ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... into Lanyard's eyes, dazzling them, as he peered through a narrow opening in the portieres; and though the light was instantly shifted, for several moments a blur of peacock colour, blending, ebbing, hung like a curtain in the darkness, and he could see nothing distinctly—only the trail traced by that dancing spot-light ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... her view through the glasses was beginning to blur when the gates of the stockade swung back and five horses dashed out, running at top speed under the urge of the spurs. A rider leaned low upon the neck of each horse and they scattered wide as they fanned out across the basin, a ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... and quite futile effort to assure him that she was nothing of the sort. But she knew that no more than a blur of sound came from her lips, and even while she strove to make herself intelligible the floating world became a dream, and darkness fell ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the tragedies and comedies might be simmered down to one thing. Were there biscuits in the basket? But Betty Dalrymple did not laugh; her eyes were like stars on a wintry night; her face was white as paper. It was turned now from the steersman—ahead. She saw the blur before them become a definite line of green; later she made out details, the large heads of small trees. The former looked like big overflowing cabbages; the trunks, beneath, sprawled this way and that, as the vagaries ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... noticed that his eyes were small. He had a good, swaggering military figure to which uniform was becoming, and a kind of animal good looks which would deteriorate early. His colour would fix and deepen with the aid of steady daily drinking, and his features would coarsen and blur, until by the time he was forty the young jowl would have grown heavy and would end by being his most ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... their firelocks under their great-coats, and their collars turned up against the rain, lounged by the embrasures of the shore-wall, and gossiped dejectedly, or eyed in silence the blurred boat bobbing up and down in the grey blur ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... parks of New York to find the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares reward the seeing eye with ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... have been acquired only by uninterrupted application; she spoke French, German, and Italian with unusual purity. That intellect, as strong and clear as crystal, could never have suffered even a temporary blur. He was beginning to be amazed at the blunder he had committed, when suddenly, one evening, a peculiar note in her voice, accompanied by a certain lifting of the eyelashes—a movement he had noticed for the first time, but which was familiar to him—threw Lynde into great ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... him, all painted with eyes. All the real, as he rode, was the horse at his thighs, And the thought "They'll come back, if I've luck, if I'm wise." Some banners uncrumpled on the blue of the skies, The cheers became frantic, the blur of men shook, As Thankful and Kubbadar went at ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... come, as the horse advanced and the enemy came within reach, the singing noose shot out, the wolf arose as if to spring, and the next instant Dog-toe whirled under spur and quirt, leaving only a blur behind as he shot across the corral. Only his rider had seen the noose fall true, the taut rope bespoke its own burden, and there was no time to shout. For an instant, Joel held his breath, only catching a swerve in the oncoming ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... that to-day is the full moon—the first full moon of this year's springtime. In years to come I may perchance be reminded of this night, with the tee-tee of the bird on the bank, the glimmer of the distant light on the boat off the other shore, the shining expanse of river, the blur of shade thrown by the dark fringe of trees along its edge, and the white sky gleaming overhead in ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... see the glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together. He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun. The first Terry knew of it he was standing in a warm ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... meeting with Maurice, she ate her lunch with a glance every few minutes at her great-uncle Allan on the opposite wall. A very black portrait, it seemed only a meaningless blur till in a certain light the strong face and stern eyes shone out of the surrounding gloom with startling effect. She sometimes wondered rather anxiously if the uncle to whose home-coming she looked forward, could by any ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... our street it has acquired an alien grace and beauty. Perhaps a scrawny neighbor by the name of Falstaff might remain inconsequent, but I am sure that if a lady called Messilina moved in next door and were of charming manner, a month would blur the bad suggestion of her name; which presently—if our gardens ran together—would come to sound sweetly ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... tops of the slender saplings, stopping every few yards to half- stretch himself out in the soft mass through which he was struggling, panting with exhaustion. He shouted when he gained the top of the ridge. Up through the white blur of snow on the other side there came to him faintly a shout; yet, in spite of its faintness, Jan knew that ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked up a slipper—a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... this adventure. He became uneasy and thoughtful. He imagined that he was beginning to see things through Digrung's eyes, and that there were strange troubles immediately ahead. The next time his eyes started to blur, he fought it down with his ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... his kind don't stop to look at the brand on a steer if they happen to feel hungry," explained Bud. "They'll cut one out of the herd, or appropriate a maverick, or an unbranded calf, and feast up on it. They'll skin it, salt down the hide after they blur the brand, and get ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... Rallywood himself, well as he knew the country, became bewildered; but luckily the horse he rode was a charger he had had with him on the Frontier. He left it to choose its own direction, yet it was long before a blur of light which he knew to be the open doorway of the block-house grew out ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... An expression of stupid amazement came over Friday's face. The design of asteroid and planets wavered into a blur as the Hawk fought unconsciousness; a short, harsh sound came from his lips; he lurched uncertainly. The negro crumpled up and stretched out on the deck. Carse's desire to sleep grew overpowering. Once more, as from a distance, he glimpsed Ku Sui's smile. He tried to back to the ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... hollow, and over the field went the 65th in a wild charge. The noise of a thousand seas was in the air, and the smoke of the bottomless pit. The yellow flashes of the guns came through it, and a blur of colour—the flag on the bank. On went their own great battle-flag, slanting forward as Billy Maydew ran. The bank flamed and roared. A bullet passed through the fleshy part of the boy's arm. He looked sideways at the blood. "Those durned bees sure do sting! ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... was in the middle of a line of eight destroyers. Two hundred yards ahead of him he could just discern the dim black blur of the next ahead and the occasional splutter of whity-grey foam in her wake as her stern lifted to the seas. At times, when a driving rain squall came down from windward, he seemed to lose sight of her altogether, and, through inexperience and in his anxiety to catch up, increased the revolutions ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... they register on our navigating charts, sir," said Hendricks slowly. Hendricks, my youthful third officer, had an inquiring, almost scientific mind. I have often said he was the closest approach to a scientist I have ever seen in the person of an action-loving man. "They're a blur of light on the charts—all out of proportion to their actual size. They must be something more than material bodies, ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... it, but the flame of my wax match showed her fingers, clasping the wires of the lantern. The cloak slipped away, showing her arm’s soft curve, the blue and white of her bodice, the purple blur of violets; and for a second I saw her face, with a smile quivering about her lips. My grandfather was beating impatiently with his stick, urging us to leave the ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... human endeavor; it sanctifies defeat and denial; it polishes manners; it gives to morals a tincture of devotion; and, as with the spell of magic, such as Milton describes in "Comus," it dissipates with a glance the wild rout of low desires and insane follies which so much blur and blot up the otherwise fair face of human society. It permits of no meanness in its train; it expels vulgarity, and, with a high stretch toward perfected humanity, it unearths the grovelling nature, and gives it aspirations of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... banisters, a handrail: all indistinguishable. One step farther down or up, and why? But up is harder. Down! Down to this white blur; ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... he staggered into the Preparation room and sat at his desk with his brows on his hand and his eyes on his book. The print danced before his gaze: letter rushed into letter, word merged mistily into word, line into line, till all was a grey blur. A blink of the eyes—an effort of the will—a sort of "squad, shun!" to the type before him—and the words jumped back into their places, letters separated from their entanglement and stood like soldiers at spruce attention. A relaxing of the effort—and dismiss! helter-skelter, pell-mell went ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... a rich contralto voice, that of a boy rather than a man, the slight blur of the South distinguishable even ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... fraction of a second a furry catapult launched itself across the wide road at a speed that made it look like tawny blur. ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them veer and shift Around his blustering path. In clouds blindly whirling, In rings madly swirling, Full of crazy wrath, So furious and fast they fly They blur the earth and blot the sky In wild, white mirk. They fill the air with frozen wings And tiny, angry, icy stings; They blind the eyes, and choke the breath, They dance a maddening dance of death Around their work, Sweeping the cover from the hill, ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... which seemed to trouble him slightly enough. He thought with a faint, wistful interest of the various ports of call, of the days which might pass, each one bringing him nearer the end. He suffered himself, even, to think of that faint blur upon the horizon, the breath of the spicy winds, the strange home perfumes of the bay, as he drew nearer and nearer to the outstretched arms of his country. Well, if not he, another! It was something to have ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a mile distant. Somewhat nearer, a blur of white radiance amid the dashing rain, was the headlight of No. 38 showing that she was coming at momentarily increasing speed. Ralph aimed to run nearer to the air line stretch to plant the signal. ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now it was her mood to try and make ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... response to an exceptionally strident outburst of sound, they beheld the line of lights suddenly incline from the horizontal, saw the slope grow steadily steeper, and then, as the great mass of the vessel's stern hove up, an indistinct blur of deeper blackness on the darkness of the night, the line of lights slid forward and vanished one after another until all had disappeared, while at the same moment a heartrending wail from hundreds of throats pealed out across the water, punctuated ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of history, and explode many bubble-reputations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... searching it as his were searching hers, luminously and with a swiftly kindling fire. Her lips parted a little, trembling. There was a sort of bloom on her skin that became more visible as the blood, wave on wave, came flushing in behind it. His vision of her swam suddenly away in a blur as his own ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... come down to his place in a hurry.'—'An' who the devil is your masther?' says I; 'an' didn't think ye had one, only yourself, an' you so fine.'—'Oh,' says he, 'my masther is the Prence Ragin.'—'Blur an' ouns,' says I; 'tell his honour I'll be wid him in the twinklin' ov a bedpost, the minit I take my face from behind my beard, an' get on my clane flax; but stop a bit,' says I; 'where does the masther live?'—'Down at Carltown Palace,' says he; 'so make yourself dacent, an' ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... the schooner, which had apparently followed them, a blur of dusky canvas against a bank of haze, and then as the boat slid down into a hollow there was nothing but the low-hung, lowering sky. It was evident to him that if they were to make a landing ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... defacement, disgrace, injury, spot, blur, defect, dishonor, reproach, stain, brand, deformity, fault, smirch, stigma, crack, dent, flaw, soil, taint, daub, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... back to the fire, and he saw again the red bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a magnificent fight. And she had won. And it suddenly occurred to him that what she had said in the note was true, and that Scottie Deane could easily have killed him. ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror. But has any one who saw it forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil. And at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... be too late. The news would have been passed on. The victory of the Allies and the lives of thousands of our soldiers were at stake. Next instant I had pulled out the loaded revolver and fired two shots after the vanishing figure, already only a dark blur in the dusk. I heard a scream, the crashing of the breaking cycle, and ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... slowly, a shapeless, round blur in the pale light. Inch by inch it drifted toward them, until Chet moved one hand abruptly and found he had created a ripple of light by which he could see more clearly. And he saw before him ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... was a blur and a haze, of which Joe was the centre—Joe half crazed and impatient, making ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... They were poor, else Amity might never have been. They lived in a house which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the Saunders mansion. At the time of Maria's first visit to Amity it had been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with its roof and walls of rain and sun stained shingles and clapboards, its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda. When Maria went to Amity ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was like a map unrolled at their feet. Still as a vision it stretched to where sky and earth fused in a golden haze. No sound or motion broke its dreaming quiet, vast, brooding, self-absorbed, a land of abundance and accomplishment, its serenity flowing to the faint horizon blur. Lines of trees, showing like veins, followed the wandering of streams, or gathered in clusters to suck the moisture of springs. Nearby a pool gleamed, a skin of gold linked by the thread of a rivulet to other pools. They shone, a line of glistening ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... appeared in a blur before him. Bates said something, but it sounded far off, and he did not catch its import. There was a long silence, and then the lawyer ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... I stole to the parlor door. At my old seat by the window was Emily Warren, writing on a portfolio in her lap. For a second a blur came over my vision, and then I devoured her with my eyes as the famishing would look ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing ...
— The Jupiter Weapon • Charles Louis Fontenay
... faint blur on the surface of the mirror in Mr Carker's chamber, and its reflection was, perhaps, a false one. But it showed, that night, the image of a man, who saw, in his fancy, a crowd of people slumbering on the ground at his feet, like ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the hills, I forgive, I forget Life's hoard of regret— All the terror and pain of a chafing chain. Grind on, O cities, grind! I leave you a blur behind. I am lifted elate—the skies expand; Here the world's heaped gold is a pile of sand. Let them weary and work in their narrow walls; I ride with the voices of waterfalls. I swing on as one in a dream—I swing. ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... exact reproductions. A real person ordinarily has too much of the commonplace and conventional about him to serve in fiction, where—despite the apparent paradox—a character must be exaggerated to appear natural. A person in fiction is at the best but a blur of hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, and can be comprehended only through the mentality of the author; therefore his description, his actions, his words, his very thoughts must be made so unnaturally striking that through the sense of sight alone they will stimulate the imagination ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... blankness came upon him, and he could only move feebly on, seeing everything in a blur and mist. After these long days and nights of sleeplessness, semi-starvation, and terrible excitement, every nerve was sick, every organ out of gear. The lights of the Tuileries, the stately pile of the Louvre, under a gray driving sky.—There ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... relief. Take away the human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. Where God planned a unique though intelligible psychic harmony, we ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... tympan of the duplicating machine is sometimes made uneven so that the impression of a typewriter is still further carried out. Some duplicating machines advertise that their type print "loose" for this very purpose. A favorite scheme with firms where letter presses are used is to blur the letter slightly after it has been filled in and signed. A word "XXX'd" out as by a typewriter lends an impression of the personal message, as does also the wrong spelling of a word, corrected by pen ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... her pain; and with knotted brows rapidly considering, and rejecting, one after another, the desperate expedients that suggested themselves. Suddenly looking up he perceived among the trees, at the distance of a few paces, Rina standing. Hot anger instantly welled up in his breast, and made a red blur before his eyes. Rina's sex was no protection to her then. He picked up ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the doctor away from the piano, and thus there was no one near to see how at last the bright color began to fade from her cheeks as the notes before her ran together, and the keys assumed the form of one huge key which Maddy could not manage. There was a blur before her eyes, a buzzing in her ears, and just as the dancers were entering heart and soul into the merits of a popular polka, there was a sudden pause in the music, a crash among the keys, and a faint cry, which to those nearest to her sounded ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... Deacon demanded truculently, and then went on to deny the half-caste's knowledge. "You chaps put on a lot of side over a new chum. I've done some sailing myself, and this naming a craft when its sail is only a blur, or naming a man by the sound ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... they yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... vapor arising from the stack which instantly disappeared. In the opposite direction there was a wide expanse of water, quiet as a mill-pond in spite of a fresh breeze, revealing in the distance the faint blue blur of a far-off coast line. Nothing broke the vista except the white sails of two sloops, evidently fishing boats, far off on the horizon. It was an ideal spot in which to lie—to quietly hide in during the hours of daylight, probably never approached but by stray fishermen. Ashore everything ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... common-room. The summer heat surging up from the burning pavements stagnated between the faded walls. He could not touch the food that he had brought with him. He was faint and sick, and the long table at which he sat, with its white blur of newspapers, rose and fell as though it were floating on an oily sea. But he held out. At five o'clock he was to meet Francey at the gates, and, as though she had some magic gift of relief, he strained towards that time, his head between his hands, his ears counting ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... you are as obtuse as the critics who may one day hover hungrily over it. Try the aid of one more clew, and if you fail to catch my purpose, I will dash my brush all loaded with ochre, right into those mystic, prescient eyes, and blur them forever. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... fiddles are drowned, and guitars smothered, and one sort of drum mistaken for another sort; but whensoever the brazen note of the McClintockian trombone breaks through that fog of music, that note is recognizable, and about it there can be no blur of doubt. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Glory—no tyrant-dealt scars, No blur on her brightness, no stain on her stars! The brave blood of heroes hath crimsoned her bars. She's the flag of our ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... Henry Overton, U. S. A.,'" replied Hal, turning the envelope so that his mother might read. But a sudden rush of mist to her eyes made the letters blur. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... Margaret, for there was a long pause—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... quite dark when he returned to his window, but the far shore was only an indistinct blur of gloom. The fires were brighter. One of them, built solely because of the rivermen's inherent love of light and cheer, threw the blaze of its flaming logs twenty ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... words were hardly out of his mouth before Gussie was out of the cupboard. I have commented on the speed with which he had gone in. It was as nothing to the speed with which he emerged. There was a sort of whir and blur, and he ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... scheme of things is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons whose countenances ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... efforts of its straining oarsman. The passengers had taken refuge under the felze, or gondola hood. Impatient of the slow progress of the boat, the Colonel looked down into the hotel-garden directly beneath his windows, which was drowned in a moist blur, that only seemed intensified where it focused about the electric lights. Over there again, across the Canal, stood the great Salute, showing ghostly and unreal in its massive whiteness, half obliterated ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... than to see a great yellow garden-spider hanging head downward in the centre of his web, when we approach too closely, instead of deserting his snare, set it vibrating back and forth so rapidly that he becomes a mere blur; a more certain method of escaping the onslaught of a bird than if he ran to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... and the others had anticipated, there were plenty of signs showing where the cattle had been driven off. A large herd was missing, and it must have taken a number of rustlers to have rounded them up and started them toward Double Z, or whatever place was to be used to change, or blur the brands, so the cattle could be sold to some innocent purchaser, perhaps. Though there were not wanting, in that ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... appearance by which we know it. So I have not defined the outlines; I have suffused them with a haze of half-tints warm or golden, in such a sort that you can not lay your finger on the exact spot where background and contours meet. Seen from near, the picture looks a blur; it seems to lack definition; but step back two paces, and the whole thing becomes clear, distinct, and solid; the body stands out; the rounded form comes into relief; you feel that the air plays round it. And yet—I am not satisfied; I have ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... as swift, Attusah is on his feet. At the back of the great niche, so high that none could conceive that it might afford an exit, a fissure lets in a vague dreary blur of light from spaces beyond. Leaping high into the air, the lithe young warrior fixes his fingers on the ledge, crumbling at first, but holding firm under a closer grasp. The elder man, understanding the ruse as if by instinct, lays hold of the knees of the other, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was not openly insulting, but rather that of banter, misplaced ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... cut through the river-water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of the pace at which she was going. We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her finger, and strained my eyes to see. All I could make out was a dim greyish mist, with something like a little spot or blur on it, at the place which the maid's finger indicated as the position occupied by the ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... strange impulse, the girlish figure turned and made straight for the wildly yelling men, who stood in the form of a great circle in the center of which two men weaved and milled about each other in a blur of motion. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... is no life in me. What I eat does not feed me; the air that enters my lungs does not refresh me; the sun feels cold; it seems to you to light that front of the house, and show you the old carvings bathed in its beams, but to me it is all a blur, a mist. If Beatrix were here, it would be dazzling. There is but one only thing left in this world that keeps its shape and color to my eyes,—this flower, this foliage," he added, drawing from his breast the withered bunch the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... a fair illustration of the matchless agility of the crotalus when he cares to be quick. The cage was just twelve inches high in the clear; but before the falling mouse was halfway to the bottom, there was an indescribable gray blur, and I knew that the larger snake had hit him. I have improved numerous chances to study the stroke of rattlesnake, which is the swiftest motion made by any living creature; but that particular case, better than any other, gave me ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... Canterbury, without making any stay at Dover. The shouting and joy expressed by all is past imagination. Seeing that my Lord did not stir out of his barge, I got into a boat and so into his barge. My Lord almost transported with joy that he had done all this without any the least blur or obstruction in the world, that could give offence to any, and with the great honor he thought it would be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... on the couch, and she raised her head. In the half darkness he could not have seen how she was suffering. Her face was only a warm blur to him, vague and sweet and beautiful, with tender eyes. He said: "I think—I'm falling asleep. My head is so very, very queer! What is the matter with my head? Coira, do you think I might be kissed before I go ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... somebody called, for convenience, Sandy—the "Biggest of Them All." But Cynthia's ideal bore little likeness to the actual Sandy, and her letters had become but the outpourings of a heart that must create its own Paradise or perish. Sandy Morley had faded into an indistinct blur, but the romance he had awakened bore the girl far and away from the ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... all, the running walk, and began to enjoy the vista; the wide-sweeping, southern reaches dotted with buttes, the line of the far hills crowded against the sky, and the intense light in which there was no faintest trace of blur or moisture. Everything within normal range of vision stood out ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the weariness he lunged forward again, swinging the now deadened right arm at the blur Corrigan made in front of him. Something collided with him—a human form—and thinking it was Corrigan, clinching with him, he grasped it. The momentum of the object, and his own weakness, carried ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... right. He's what you could call a runnin' fool!" We shot past somethin' that was just a black blur for a minute and then disappeared back in the dust. "What was that?" ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... audacity. Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long hill, for it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... head, and grunted at a red blur very low in the mist. A fire was burning on the low point of land where Nichols—the Nova Scotian—had planted the battery which had worked such havoc with Admiral Rowley's boats. It was a mere earthwork and some of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and French terms, not correctly used and not even rightly spelt, his endless iterations, lists, catalogues, categories, things not clearly visualised or even remotely perceived, but swept relentlessly in, like the debris of some store-room, all these are ugly mannerisms which simply blur and encumber the pages. The question is not whether they offend a critical and cultured mind, but whether they produce an inspiring effect upon any ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... down to the Village was long enough to induce that odd motion-hypnosis so common in night flight over a metropolitan area. The dizzy blur of red and green running lights from air-borne traffic at levels above and below us, the shapes of 'copters silhouetted beneath us against the lambent glow of the city's well-lit streets, all ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... groves and the orange gardens were so entirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the ordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligences would have rendered, but by mud and blur, those "golden lamps hung in a green night" that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite detail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us for the absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... employed, the object being to blur the lower portion of the plate, leaving the head of the subject in relief. Every Daguerreotypist is familiar with the fact that a motion of any body between the camera and the sitter will cause a "blur." Cut a piece of thin ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... her face was gravely thoughtful as she looked across the shining water towards the faint blur of a pine forest on a distant point, and Thirlwell felt as if they had been suddenly united ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... he saw a space between her two front teeth, as with children whose second teeth have just come. While they pushed along in the crowd she looked up intently at the man beside her, or off into the blur of light, where she evidently saw nothing. Her face, young and soft, seemed new to emotion, and her bewildered look made one feel that she did ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... very late interlopers, down to the sixth century, introduce modern details into the picture of life? did they blur the unus color? We hope to prove that, if they did so at all, it was but slightly. That the poems, however, with a Mycenaean or sub-Mycenaean basis of actual custom and usage, contain numerous contaminations from the usage of centuries as late as the seventh, is the view of Mr. Leaf, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... on a valve so that with a hissing sound additional gas rushed into the bag. Jack pulled a lever. The big motors roared and a queer, sickly smell of burned gas filled the air. The propellers began to revolve slowly and then increased their speed till they became a mere blur. ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... in seeing and stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or political prescience, that no man of experience ventures to prophesy, is enough ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Anderson, the good old grandfather revived in his unfortunate, perhaps graceless grandson, reseated himself on the door-step and watched the bulky, receding figure of his visitor through a pleasant blur of tears, which made the broad, rounded shoulders and the halting columns of legs dance. This David Anderson had almost forgotten that there was unpaid kindness in the whole world, and it seemed to him as if he had seen angels walking up and down. He sat for a while doing nothing except ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... now going to treat you with still greater frankness. I do not approve of your preface, and I will tell you why: if your work should deserve attention, it is a blur on the very face of it. Disadvantages of education, etc., ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded with the public in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties that lie in his way, nature seems to command him, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the blur of a dream to him, a dream which ended when he had found his head upon a cool, white pillow, and had felt glad, glad—dear God, how glad!—to know that Angy was still within reach of his outstretched hand; and so he had fallen asleep. But when he awoke in the morning, there stood Angeline ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... back. Every rod or so she stopped to rest and to look back and to call to the Kid who seemed such a tiny mite of humanity among these huge peaks and fearsome gorges. He seemed to be watching her very closely always when she looked she could see the pink blur of his little upturned face. She must hurry. Oh, if she could only send a wireless to his mother! Human inventions fell far short of the big needs, after all, she thought as ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... Cash and the immensely interested Cousin Gussie, gazed dully about the circle. He saw little except a blur of faces; his thoughts were elsewhere, busy in dreadful anticipation of the scene he knew he must endure when he and his cousin and Miss Phipps returned to the house of the latter. He did not dare look in her direction, fearing to see once more upon her face the expression of suspicion ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... he was for the most part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with him a few of those affecting words which ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... a tumult in the summer skies, A blur of sunshine, and the rush of rain, The tempest dying in the twilight's hush, And I forget, forget the ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... last foot in a rush of speed which reduced it to a blur, coming to a halt before the Hoobat. Its front legs whipped out to strike at its enemy. But Queex was no longer dreaming. This was the moment the Hoobat had been awaiting. One of the sawing claws opened and closed, separating the head of the lurker from its body. And before either ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... was open. The thick, wet fog came pouring in like smoke. I moved up boldly through the heavy smother and looked down into the field. There was the blur of the small coop, but where was ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... for the bank, he noticed a thin stream of smoke trembling above Bongao. He paused and trained his eye on the blur. Suddenly he dug ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... poet and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... too many of Ma Graham's pancakes this morning, and had a blur over your eyes," commented one, slyly. "Prairie fires don't stop that sudden when the grass is ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... interesting than to see a great yellow garden-spider hanging head downward in the centre of his web, when we approach too closely, instead of deserting his snare, set it vibrating back and forth so rapidly that he becomes a mere blur; a more certain method of escaping the onslaught of a bird than if he ran to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... overtake her," thought Everychild. He could just see her now: a mere blur in the shadows far ahead of him. He could no longer hear the sound of her feet. Then quite suddenly ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... it out, as if in Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not really or exactly to be described at all, (for on the many hundreds who were there it seems to this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a blotch)—and yet partially to be described as I now proceed to give it. There is a scene in the play representing a modern parlor in which two unprecedented English ladies are inform'd by the impossible Yankee that he is not a man of fortune, and therefore undesirable for marriage-catching ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... father. "Time is a mere blur in these old stories. A hundred, two hundred, five hundred years, all are one to a people who keep no written records. Well, a great king ruled here over a busy and wealthy people. He built this pagoda and was immensely ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... the outlines; I have suffused them with a haze of half-tints warm or golden, in such a sort that you can not lay your finger on the exact spot where background and contours meet. Seen from near, the picture looks a blur; it seems to lack definition; but step back two paces, and the whole thing becomes clear, distinct, and solid; the body stands out; the rounded form comes into relief; you feel that the air plays round it. And yet—I am not satisfied; I have misgivings. Perhaps one ought not to ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... dizzy to look down upon it from so great a height, so he closed his eyes tight and held his breath. Higher and higher climbed the huge bird. Tarzan opened his eyes. The jungle was so far away that he could see only a dim, green blur below him, but just above and quite close was the sun. Tarzan reached out his hands and warmed them, for they were very cold. Then a sudden madness seized him. Where was the bird taking him? Was he to submit thus passively to a feathered creature however enormous? ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions were awaiting them at the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry-boat, and New York immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevateds, shop windows that seemed dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of people ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... "Blur an' agers!" exclaimed Neal one day, when half tipsy in the fair, "am I never to get a bit o' figtin'? Is there no cowardly spalpeen to stand afore Neal Malone? Be this an' be that, I'm blue-mowlded for want of a batin'! I'm disgracin' ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... drowning the flower-beds and for the moment making a pool of the court- yard. Priscilla hurried to see that all the windows were shut and the doors well barred, and when evening closed in the picturesque gables of the roof were but a black blur in the almost incessant whirl ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... waving wheat And leagues of golden corn The fragrance of the wild-rose bloom And elder-flower is borne; But earth's appealing loveliness We do but half surmise, For oh, the blur of battle-fields Is ever in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... There was a blur before the lady's eyes—a buzzing in her ears—and the footfall she had listened for so long was now unheard as it came slowly to her side. But the light touch upon her arm—the well-remembered voice within her ear, calling her "Madam Conway," sent through her an electric thrill, and starting up ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... worse than ever at Sloane Square station. Through the still, thick blur, men groped in and out; women, very few, grasped their reticules to their bosoms and handkerchiefs to their mouths; crowned with the weird excrescence of the driver, haloed by a vague glow of lamp-light that seemed to drown in vapour before it reached the pavement, cabs loomed dim-shaped ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... she had passed into a stage of existence which was like a dream, more poignant and real than life. There was the old gray house with its sloping eaves. Amid the blur of green, and dimly, she saw familiar faces and heard voices as if they came from far across the fields, and Edmond was holding her. Her dead Edmond; her living Edmond, and she felt the beating of his heart against her ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... with his mother's handkerchief now fading into the whitish blur of other handkerchiefs, drifted behind; Charley took a long breath, straightened his shoulders, stole a glance at his father, who was winking violently in queer fashion, and began to take stock of the other passengers. Some were leaving the rail; a number of others already ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... before us, we can make some headway. I believe the V-shape is the lower end of the mountain, probably a headland, and the arrow points to a place 30 leagues to the,—see here, in the last line is a W. and there is a blur before it and after it. That may be SWE, EWS, SWW, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... really prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a most outrageous picture which adorned a song-book used in Sunday School, portraying the Lord upon his throne, surrounded by tiers and tiers of saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am ashamed to tell how old I was when that picture ceased to appear before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to ask protection ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... U. S. A.,'" replied Hal, turning the envelope so that his mother might read. But a sudden rush of mist to her eyes made the letters blur. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... gilt figure of the Virgin hanging at right angles from the top like the arm of a bracket. On the hills beyond can just be made out the woods of Fricourt behind the German line. They are in the background behind Albert church tower. The white ruins of Fricourt may be the blur in the background south of them. We ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... an' down, up an' down, an' roun' an' roun' that perpendicular race track, until we made such a blur in the scen'ry that any fool with half an eye an' standin' half a mile away could 'a' seen a great big figger eight layin' on its side in the middle o' the landscape. We took turns at carryin' the packet, but sometimes ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... her strength quite gone when suddenly, close to her, she heard Jimmy's cheery call again. The next minute she felt herself snatched off her feet and held close to a great throbbing something that dimly she realized was Jimmy's heart. It was all a horrid blur then of cries, hot, panting breaths, and pounding hoofs thundering nearer, ever nearer. Then, just as she knew those hoofs to be almost upon her, she felt herself flung, still in Jimmy's arms, sharply to one side, and yet ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... saw him carefully remove my revolver, and place it beyond my reach. But all was uncertain; a blur appeared to be before my eyes which ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... higher, the heat waves began to shimmer and the landscape to blur before his eyes; and then an automobile came thundering up behind him ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... past in a blur of leaping hostile beams. Silent battle of lights! Darkness bombs down at the ship struggling to bar our camp searchray. The Benson radiance rays from our passing platforms, curving down to mingle with the confusion. The electronic rays sending ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... what? And a jealous, slandering, spiteful quean she is, One that would blur my reputation With her opprobrious malice, if she could; She wrongs her husband, to abuse my fame: 'Tis known that I have lived in honest name All my lifetime, and been your right ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... roar the engine awoke to life and the propeller spun around, a blur of indistinctness. The motor was working sweetly. Toni throttled down, assured himself that everything was working well, and then, with a wave of his hand toward Jack, began to taxi across the field, to head up into the wind. All aeroplanes are started this way—directly ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... to take up the old life again and to look back from it at the months of life with Gregory—that mirage of happiness receding as if to a blur of light seen over a stretch of desert. Still with her quiet and unrevealing young face turned towards the evening landscape, Karen felt as if she had grown very old and were looking back, after a life-time without Gregory, at ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... easy task to purvey luxuries to the imperious Briton, to hold the extravagant underlings in his usurious clutches, to be at peace with Hindu, Moslem, Sikh, Pathan, Ghoorka, Persian, and Armenian, and to blur his easy-going Mohammedanism in a generous participation in all sins of omission and ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... outcries meant nothing to Bull Hunter. They faded to a blur. All he saw was the head of the stallion. Had he known and remembered that fall and the hand that forced him to it? He could not tell. There might be any murderous intent in ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... McElroy in the bottom, a bright blanket beneath him and his fair head pillowed on a roll of leaves. A shelter of boughs hid his face, and for one moment her heart stopped while the river and the woods, the people and the boats whirled together in a senseless blur. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... biting cold till dawn. Douglas was too weary, too much menaced by the cold, to think coherently; for now, conscious of the depletion of his strength, even his new-found happiness could not blur the fact that he and Judith were playing with death on Black Devil Peak. He kept the fire going and fought the desire to sleep until, far below and to the east, the Indian Range turned black against a crimson sky. Then he awakened Judith. They made a hasty breakfast, then started ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... he said. He picked the second headband from the desk and put it on. Abruptly, both he and his wife were aware of a fuzziness in their thoughts and senses. The walls, the floor, and the furniture seemed to blur and waver, like the fantasy world of delirium. He put his hand up and adjusted the controls. The room returned to normal, and their senses were abruptly sharp and clear again. He ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... Lord Nick turned, a blur coming before his eyes, and made blindly for the door. A body collided with him; without a word he drew back his massive right fist and knocked the man down. The stunned body struck against the wall and collapsed along the floor. ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... lowly fallen! till shame my virtues blur, Till such an ending seem not loss, but gain! Yet o'er my heart there creeps a saddening pain, To hear them cry abroad "You murdered ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... rushing in my ears and beating against my face awoke me all at once. The trees ran madly past, and the water at my right was a silver blur. The beast beneath me snorted as he rose and fell. Fainter and fainter dropped the clamour behind me, which had risen as I started, and the leaps grew longer and longer. Then my head was cleared like a steamed window-pane in a cold blast. I saw the road curve in front of me, I put all my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... from the front entryway. He wrenched viciously at the fastenings. They gave now. The windows flew open. He glanced over his shoulder. A man, Mittel presumably, since he was the only one not in uniform, was springing into the room. There was a blur of forms and brass buttons behind Mittel—and Jimmie Dale leaped to the lawn, speeding across it ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... choice for Michael in accepting that appeal. He knew with the inmost fibre of his being that, Sylvia being Sylvia, nothing that she could say or do or feel could possibly part him from her. When he looked at it directly and simply like that, there was nothing that could blur the verity of it. But the truth of what she said, the reality of that call of the blood, seemed to cast a shadow over it. He knew beyond all other knowledge that it was there: only it looked out at him with a shadow, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the mental constitution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... that constitutes her appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes— if the great Claude, say, had ever used that ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... sour'd a milky queen— (For "bloody" all enlighten'd men confess An antiquated error of the press:) Who, rapt by zeal beyond her sex's bounds, With actual cautery staunch'd the Church's wounds! And tho' he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre, Yet blames them both—and thinks the Pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield Against such gentle foes to take the field Whose beckoning hands the ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... hand was n't inured to hard labor, and that it was a rather long and slender one, it closed so powerfully upon the drippings that the pattern of little lines—the vermiculations which differentiate one man's hand from everybody else's—is merely a blur. As a wax impression of the murderer's hand it ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... roundabout of the baker's offspring; I still heard all their different voices; I saw where each one sat in school; I recalled their words, their attitudes, their gestures. Gradually all the faces melted into a rosy blur, the jackets into a uniform neutral tint; the gestures were blent in a vague ripple of movement, and at last a thick mist enveloped all and ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... rate of $500 or $1,000 every month, until they were perfectly sickened. One by one they shut up shop. One went to his farm, another to his merchandise, another to emigrant running, another (known by the elegant surname of Blur-eye Thompson) to raising recruits, several into the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... view as he stood before the basin at the rear of the car, for even now they were passing over Turin. It was a blur of light, vivid and beautiful, that shone beneath him in the midst of this gulf of darkness, sweeping away southwards into the gloom as the car sped on towards the Alps. How little, he thought, seemed this great city seen from above; and yet, how mighty it was! It was from ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... finally found the car, it was mainly by the sense of hearing; the motor was drumming softly under the hood, and there was a blur in the mechanician's seat which answered for the crouching figure of the ward-worker. By a supreme effort of will Blount swung himself up behind the steering-wheel and let the clutch in. Luckily, the street was clear of vehicles and he made the turn ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... like myself, were in England during these fateful days of August, 1914, when the destiny of Europe hung in the balance, know perfectly well the decisive influence which the invasion of Belgium had on English public opinion at that time. Nothing can ever blur the clear outlines of the events as they passed before us under the implacable rays ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... of the hollow, and over the field went the 65th in a wild charge. The noise of a thousand seas was in the air, and the smoke of the bottomless pit. The yellow flashes of the guns came through it, and a blur of colour—the flag on the bank. On went their own great battle-flag, slanting forward as Billy Maydew ran. The bank flamed and roared. A bullet passed through the fleshy part of the boy's arm. He looked sideways at the blood. "Those durned bees sure do sting! I air a-goin' to plant this ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... me, cutting through Brenton Road a while ago, at a perfectly insane pace. Some one—how do you do, Sara, I 'm delighted to have you with us—was in the tonneau, whom I took to be Koltsoff, although there was such a blur I was n't ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... was a queer thing; for ordinarily the swamp boy seemed to be as cool and self-possessed as an Indian brave, who thought it a blur on his manhood to display emotion in the face of ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... other relics of ancient literature. Ideas grow and change, yet each generation tries to find its own ideas reflected in the sacred pages of their early prophets, and, in addition to the ordinary influences which blur and obscure the sharp features of old words, artificial influences are here at work distorting the natural expression of words which have been invested with a sacred authority. Passages in the Veda or Zend-Avesta ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... hips, and heads on high, as suits women who carry heavy weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a hundred sons and no daughters, as the saying ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... o'clock we were out under the fading stars. As we had seen the day pass into night, surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw the night pass into day, and the elemental grandeur on every hand reborn before us. There was not a wisp of cloud or fog below us or about us to blur the great picture. The sun came up from behind the vast, long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the eastern horizon, and the shadows fled from the huge pile of mountain in the west. We hung about the rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... to wear; yet that, for the sake of its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain by a certain amount of vagueness, ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... you have gone 50 feet the speed is too great for him, and he lets go. Before reaching the end of the track the operator moves the front rudder, and the machine lifts from the rail like a kite supported by the pressure of the air underneath it. The ground under you is at first a perfect blur, but as you rise the objects become clearer. At a height of 100 feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably lost it by this time. ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... when the lad had a good view of one of the ladies and a gentleman, he could not repress a cry of astonishment. Then he rubbed his eyes to make sure it was not some blur or defect of vision. No, his first impression had ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... from school, grow bold And quarrel with the wind, whose angry gust Plucks off the summer hat, and flaps the fold Of many a crimson cloak, and twirls the dust In spiral shapes grotesque, and dims the gold Of gleaming tresses with the blur of rust. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... the general rule, though it is by no means wholly the sex line that divides the old-fashioned houseworker from the specialized professional, though this habitual difference in standing between groups of different sex does tend to blur fundamental issues. The economic struggle in its bare elements would be easy to follow compared with the complex and perpetually changing forms in which ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... seen ships pass in the darkness at home, out on the horizon, a glimmering blur of light. She had pictured them by daylight, shining in the sunlight with snowy decks and glittering engines; she had no idea that this spirit of desolation would rise out of the waves and possess her. For an hour she sat, dreaming of grey things, for her dreams could admit of no colour. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... man on the couch, and she raised her head. In the half darkness he could not have seen how she was suffering. Her face was only a warm blur to him, vague and sweet and beautiful, with tender eyes. He said: "I think—I'm falling asleep. My head is so very, very queer! What is the matter with my head? Coira, do you think I might be kissed before ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Shown by Breathing. If you wanted to find out whether a little black bunch up in the branches of a tree were a bird or a cluster of leaves, or a brown blur in the stubble were a rabbit or a clod, the first thing you would probably look for would be to see whether it moved, and secondly, if you could get close enough without its moving away, whether it were breathing. You would know perfectly well if you saw it breathing that it ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... been if he had only waited a minute before speaking, because the words were hardly out of his mouth before Gussie was out of the cupboard. I have commented on the speed with which he had gone in. It was as nothing to the speed with which he emerged. There was a sort of whir and blur, and he was ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... Coffin was waiting in his shore-boat. I listened, minute after minute, on the chance of hearing his hail. A heavy bank of cloud had overcast the moon, and the packet melted from sight in a blur of darkness. Worst of all—worse even than the sting of self-reproach—was the prospect of returning to Stimcoe's and wearing through the night, while out there in the darkness the two men would meet, and all that followed their meeting must happen ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... all his tribe, and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was not openly insulting, but rather that of banter, misplaced perhaps, and in poor taste at such a time, yet ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the snow. Instead of that, after a few days of sunny weather, the wind dropped in a clear sky; it began to freeze, and then came the white blanket to cling about sheets and spars, and hold them close, a blur drifting upon a sea like oil. Gudrid sat like a ghost in the after deckhouse, nursing her baby and trying to keep it warm. It did not thrive and could not be expected to thrive. She was sure it would die. And so it did—died in its sleep while she was suckling ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... happening to the crippled liner, but no message came back. The last word from the Titanic was that she was sinking. Then the sparking became fainter. The call was dying to nothing. The Virginian's operator labored over a blur of signals. It was hopeless. So the Allan ship strove on, fearing ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... with the loaded coach and the cab going through the central arch, and the blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bostonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Boston Library was said still to linger out its existence late into the present century. But where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... seemed trying to follow the Dewey into the depths. Against the eye of the periscope streamed a faint flicker of greenish particles in the water that reminded the boy of myriad shooting stars. And then—-nothing but a blur of black! ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... side as though he had been turned to stone, rigidly upright, his hand hanging lifeless at his side, his face expressionless. She felt that she had struck right at his life's vitality—that she had killed him. Yet it was not remorse that blinded her till the white road became a shimmering blur—it was a frightful personal pain which was hers and hers alone. Neither spoke. They passed a crowd of natives returning to the Bazaar. They salaamed, but Nehal Singh made no response, as was his wont. He did not seem to see them. Mechanically he guided his horse through the bowing ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... Speech forsook her tongue. The trees vanished and the air was a blur, through which she saw a moving shape that looked the shadow of a human figure. All this in an instant. The swoon passed, the trees reappeared, the shadow took the form of Aaron Burr, tugging at a chain which fastened a skiff to a ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... Side; the foliage of only the foremost trees emerged from its blur, and these were dimmed and flatted as though a soft white veil were tangled among their leaves. Into this white mystery of dawn the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... speculations may well be avoided. Let not the possibility of general annihilation blur our perception of the task before us; above all, let us not count on the miraculous aid of chance. Hitherto, the promises of our imagination notwithstanding, we have always been left to ourselves, to our own resources. It is to our humblest efforts that every useful, enduring ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Flanagan presented his respects. The admiral was fond of the old fellow, a friendship formed in the blur of battle-smoke. He had often been criticized for officering his yacht with such a gruff, rather illiterate man, when gentlemen were to be had for the asking. But Flanagan was a splendid seaman, and the admiral ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... he felt a severe pain in his head, a shock through his entire nervous system, a red-fire-like blur before his eyes—and he was blind forever. The eyes that, for the last time, had looked upon the writhing bodies of his headless children had been pierced out by the ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... as a shadow, as swift, Attusah is on his feet. At the back of the great niche, so high that none could conceive that it might afford an exit, a fissure lets in a vague dreary blur of light from spaces beyond. Leaping high into the air, the lithe young warrior fixes his fingers on the ledge, crumbling at first, but holding firm under a closer grasp. The elder man, understanding the ruse as if by instinct, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... outline, because, first, they could not comprehend it perfectly, and, second, because their power of expression was limited. The lenses by which they apprehended their facts were not adjusted properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines, cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice measurement of relations, were matters outside of their observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling; and their language was no ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... away, not to see anything, with the mind's eye or any other, for a blur came over both. She was no fainter; she was strong of mind and body; but the one and the other were shaken; and for that bit of time, and it was several minutes, her senses performed no office at all. And when consciousness ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... desperate and quite futile effort to assure him that she was nothing of the sort. But she knew that no more than a blur of sound came from her lips, and even while she strove to make herself intelligible the floating world became a dream, and darkness fell ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... glorious Youth Is the true age of prophecy, when Truth Stands bared in beauty, and the young blood boils To hurl us in her arms, before the blur Of time makes dim her rounded form, Or the cold blood recoils From the polluted swarm Of armed Chimeras that environ her. But worthy Age to ripened fruit shall bring The glorious blooming of its hopeful spring, And pile the garners of immortal Truth With sheaves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... back, pleadingly. "Please don't be angry with me, I'm doing the best I can, Henry—the very best I can." There was a sweet foreign blur in her speech, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... ceased to beat and his breath had the rustling sound we hear when a strong man dies of a sudden wound. Somehow the defacement of the portrait was taken by his soul as the final touch of fate, signifying that Alice was forever and completely obliterated from his life. He felt a blur pass over his mind. He tried in vain to recall the face and form so dear to him; he tried to imagine her voice; but the whole universe was a vast hollow silence. For a long while he was cold, staring, rigid; then the inevitable collapse came, and ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... he swallowed some eagerly; but it had little effect on his chilly apathy. The dinner-bell clanged below. Flint heard it, but he paid no heed to the summons. He had forgotten what it was to desire food. A blur before his eyes, and an iron band about his head, occupied his attention to the exclusion ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... move Gubin that he rose and transferred his position to the door of the hut, where, a dark blur against the square of blue, he lit a gurgling pipe, and puffed thereat until his long, conical nose glowed. Presently the surging stream ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... to draw to herself, as she danced, among the soberer colours of her elders and the white frocks of the country cousins, all the light in the room. "I would look at something else if I could," thought Richard to himself, "but it would be only a blur to ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... Wes Craig, a blur in the wavering shadows, darted to her side. His dagger sped through the cords that bound her, and he lifted her slight form down. For a moment she ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... home for ever. And she could do nothing but wait. Her nerves were alive to every stir; every touch of the bell made her tremble; it was impossible to read, to lie down, to be quiet or still anywhere. She had set the glass of expectancy, for one thing, in the distance: and all things else were a blur ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... equivocal though it was on Martin's part, resulted gradually in a more friendly period. Rose always liked to remember that winter, with its peace that quenched her thirsty heart and helped to blur the recollection of old unkindnesses long since forgiven, but still too vividly recalled. When, a year later, Billy was born, she was swept up to that dizzy crest of rapture which, to finely attuned souls, is the recompense and justification ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... transformation,—all these characteristics have their analogies in Browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology, and dynamics of what he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, intense, immaculate spiritual ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song was repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the Old Mother—that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was gone—a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this sentence in ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... of blessed relief; and he looked out over the broad rosy blur of faces in the street, where no one wondered more than he how the water was to reach the roof. Suddenly he started, wiped his eyes with his wet sleeve, and peered intently down from under the shading arm. His roving glance crossed the smoke and ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... that was like a map unrolled at their feet. Still as a vision it stretched to where sky and earth fused in a golden haze. No sound or motion broke its dreaming quiet, vast, brooding, self-absorbed, a land of abundance and accomplishment, its serenity flowing to the faint horizon blur. Lines of trees, showing like veins, followed the wandering of streams, or gathered in clusters to suck the moisture of springs. Nearby a pool gleamed, a skin of gold linked by the thread of a rivulet to other pools. They shone, a line of glistening disks, imbedded in the green. Space that seemed ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... pronounced him not vitally damaged. After he had finished with them he insisted upon Rainey's lying, face down, on the table, stripped to the waist, while he rubbed him with oil and then kneaded him. Once he gave a sudden, twisting wrench, and Rainey saw a blur of stars as something snapped into place ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... a faint blur on the surface of the mirror in Mr Carker's chamber, and its reflection was, perhaps, a false one. But it showed, that night, the image of a man, who saw, in his fancy, a crowd of people slumbering on the ground ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... back. The little brown horse and the little brown girl were one with the little brown station so far away, and presently the saloon and men were blotted out in one blur of green ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... visage moved for the first time from its immobility with a sort of awe, a dread. And when my gaze came back to her, I noticed that, with the dropping of her hands to join the finger-tips, she had left, where that little, pressing fist had been, a blur of red on the white sweater. Over me it rushed with the force of calamity, she had been wounded when she sank down back there in the crowd. It was a shot—not a ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... might have been as small as a rat, or it might have been a part of something as large as a man. At any rate, it proclaimed that something in that spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly and at other times it vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last, however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously dishevelled and wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the prisoner and then upon the sentry. The wandering rays caused the eyes to glitter like silver. The ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... slipped off in the darkness, making for the belt of forest where the gloomy leafage made only a slight blur against ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... make out the schooner, which had apparently followed them, a blur of dusky canvas against a bank of haze, and then as the boat slid down into a hollow there was nothing but the low-hung, lowering sky. It was evident to him that if they were to make a landing it must ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... warm, heavy with a human scent, with the scent of the night, honest, sensuous, and long—long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I half closed my eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling, and all was a delicious blur.... ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... hoarsely. Then the nurse, and the little white table by the bedside with the bottles on it, and the white uniformed man standing outside the doorway, swung up to the ceiling and became an indistinct blur. He recovered almost immediately. The nurse slipped a little thermometer under his tongue, and put a cool ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... cries, I cry, too; and when she dies—oh, Harold! but you saw me play it once, and wondered where I got the idea. I saw it. I know I did; I was there, a part of the play. I was the little child. Then, there is a blur, a darkness, with many people and a crying—two voices—the dark woman's and mine; then, a river, or the sea, or both, and noisy streets, and a storm, and cold; and you ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... sunshine falls Eery, distorted, as it long had shone On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone. The whir of motors, stricken through with calls Of playing boys, floats up at intervals; But all these noises blur to one long moan. What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange That other men still go accustomed ways! I hate their interest in the things they do. A spectre-horde repeating without change An old routine. Alone I know ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... but surely he drew down on the reins. The girl felt the effort and tried to frustrate it. In backing her pull with her right hand, the end of her crop flashed down the side of Pirate's head—the finishing touch. There was a wild leap, a blur of dust, and Mr. Pirate, well named after his freebooting sires, his head down where he wanted it, his feet rolling like a snare-drum, Mr. Pirate ran away, headed for heaven only ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... glistening scales were entangled. The women appeared to have cause of dispute between themselves—to be rating one another about something. In the background, and to one side of the house, showed a faint, dusky blur of pinewood, and even the weather was in keeping with the surroundings, since the day was neither clear nor dull, but of the grey tint which may be noted in uniforms of garrison soldiers which have seen long service. To complete the picture, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... painfully in her side, Ann reached the ravine and, throwing herself face downwards on the ground, crawled to the edge. For an instant she closed her eyes, shrinking with a sick dread from what they might show her—Tony's young, lithe body lying broken on the rocks below, or, perhaps, only the dark blur of some awful and unmeasured depth which would ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the fifth page of the Kullak edition, after the trills. A measure is missing in Kullak, who, like Klindworth, gives it in a footnote. To my mind this repetition adds emphasis, although it is a formal blur. And what an irresistible moment it is, this delightful territory, before the darker mood of the C sharp minor part is reached! Niecks becomes enthusiastic over the insinuation and persuasion of this composition: ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... men like you!" he exclaimed, standing before a small, exquisitely finished Madonna. "What do these Milanese know of art? Or the Florentines, for that matter? Your 'Last Supper'—I saw it last week. It is a blur. Would that the sainted Louis might have taken it bodily, stone by stone, to our France, as he longed to do. You will see; the mere copy has more honor with us than the original here. Come with us," he added persuasively, ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... Whowever the Dutch concluded that they would have no mo Admirals that ware gentlemen (for Obdam was so) because they never fought fortunatly with their ennemies when they had such. But certainly this is nought but a fiction made by a commonwealth to cast a blur upon nobility, seing thir same very states have fought most couragiously and advantagiously under the conduct ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... end indicates that the staff is made of oak. It had been painted blue originally. The freshness of the paint has been marred. On one side, a huge slice has been cut out of it as if by a mighty sword stroke. The tough wood is gashed and scarred in various places, and there is a long, dark blur just above the broken part, which looks as if it ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... for convenience, Sandy—the "Biggest of Them All." But Cynthia's ideal bore little likeness to the actual Sandy, and her letters had become but the outpourings of a heart that must create its own Paradise or perish. Sandy Morley had faded into an indistinct blur, but the romance he had awakened bore the girl far and away from the common life of ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... the gate when a voice speaking suddenly at his side caused him to start and stop short in his walk. A moment before he had fancied himself alone; he had heard no footsteps; and the place from where the words came was a mere vague blur in the shadows. There was something uncanny in the muffled approach, and the sensation it produced on his nerves was like the shock he used to feel as a child when his hand was unexpectedly touched ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... down again and called once more into the stallion's ear and once more the note rose a notch. She felt that great pulsing seeming of reserve. Always when she called there was the answer. The plain swam beneath her like a blur. The thunder of the king's hoofs was a ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... loomed up in my mind and would not leave it. Just her black, serious eyes and those shy looks of theirs gleaming out of a white, strikingly interesting complexion. Her face in general was a mere blur in ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... companion, who at once suggested the effects of liver after a sea voyage so tempestuous as ours had been. For the first few moments I was inclined to agree with her, and said so; but very shortly my opinion was altered by the fact that what I saw first as an indistinct blur gradually assumed a definite shape, and I then found there were six little swallows in front of me, apparently connected with each other by a waving ribbon, or so ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... ascent, dragging himself up by the tops of the slender saplings, stopping every few yards to half- stretch himself out in the soft mass through which he was struggling, panting with exhaustion. He shouted when he gained the top of the ridge. Up through the white blur of snow on the other side there came to him faintly a shout; yet, in spite of its faintness, Jan knew ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... in tow. We got Bogan aboard and got some clothes on him, and took him ashore at Bourke to the new hospital. The doctors did all they knew, but Bogan was blind for life. He never saw anything again—except 'a sort of dull white blur,' as he called it—or his past life sometimes, I suppose. Perhaps he saw that for the first time. ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... to a window and listened, then peered in. She could see nothing, for the moon had slid over toward the west, and the room was a blur of shade. But it was also silent, depressingly silent. She crept around to the door, and found that it was fastened on ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... spoken came whining and moaning across the surface of the ocean from the south-west, filling our scanty spread of canvas with a resounding clap and then passing away toward the north-east, its track across the glistening surface of the ocean being marked by a dimming blur like a catspaw, which swept down toward us, touched us for an instant, and was gone again. This occurred some seven or eight times at decreasing intervals, each succeeding rush of air being of a few seconds' longer duration than the ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... swamp to higher ground where an open space, or maidan, corresponding to a drive in an English preserve, but on the grand scale, divided it from the jungle—all our thoughts being set upon lunch—when suddenly across this open space passed a blur of yellow and black only a few yards from the nearest elephant. It was so unexpected and so quick that even the trained eyes of my companion were uncertain. "Did you see?" he asked me in a voice of hushed and wondering awe. "Could that have been a tiger?" I could not say, ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... book obstinately, but could get little good of it; then went to ask comfort of the descending sun in the woods and fields. What a comment it was on the disparity between my pursuits and my situation to receive such a letter while reading that book! However, I will not let life's mean perplexities blur from my eye the page of Plato; nor, if natural tears must be dropt, murmur at a lot, which, with all its bitterness, has given time and opportunity to cherish an even passionate love for Truth ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of War, d'Hautpoul, Bonaparte had, with his own hands, sacrificed the scapegoats on the altar of the fatherland. He had turned off the expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to avoid every decisive conflict with the Executive, to weaken and to blur it over. Fearing to lose its conquests over the revolution, it let its rival gather the fruits thereof. "France demands, above all things, peace," with this language had the party of Order been apostrophizing the revolution, since February; with this language did Bonaparte's message now apostrophize ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... there was no light at all except for dim moonlight. Scotty carried the power supply on a strap over his shoulder while Rick carried the camera and its attachments. The thing was uncanny, even when its operation was understood. To the naked eye, Dismal was just a vague blur under the trees. But with the infrared searchlight on him, Rick could see him through the telescope as though it were white light. He shot a few feet of film, then took it to the photo lab. He could develop ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... spirit sunk softly into the warm and satisfied flesh. She bade Sarah bring her dinner into the parlor; after she had eaten it she slept. When she awoke in the late afternoon, she wished she could sleep again. All her thoughts ran together in a lazy blur. Somewhere, back of the blur, she knew there was unhappiness, so this was best—to lie warm and quiet by the fire, eating candy ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... or interpret anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes at the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... dress! it makes my poor eyes blur; It seems, when I look at that, as if 'twas holdin' her. And here are her week-day shoes, and there is her week-day hat, And yonder's her weddin' gown: I wonder ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... the wooden building, and his niece standing a moment on the veranda watched the long train roll away down the faint blur of track that ran west to the farthest verge of the great white wilderness. Then with a little impatient gesture she went into ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... in consequence, somewhat difficult, in telling this narrative, to arrange the minor incidents of my story in their proper sequence. I am writing by the light of an imperfect memory; and the work is complicated by the fact that the early days of my sojourn at Sanstead House are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which emerge haphazard the figures of boys—boys working, boys eating, boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs and along passages, the whole picture ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... seconds if we could get two in four seconds in our experiment. Several professional photographers, one of them a top Life photographer, said that if Hart was familiar with his camera and was familiar with panning action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours. I recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed sporting events for the Lubbock newspaper. This would have called for ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... think, that thence, and out of themselves I might well draw a long declamation: they that understand him, will agnise this; they that doe not, let them learne: let both conceive, how they conforme, and both reforme their deformities; or if they will not, at least let them forbeare to blur others because they are blacke themselves, least it be saide to them, as Seneca saide to one not unfitely, Te fera scabies depascitur, tu nacuos rides pulchriorum? this let them construe, and take to them the ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... order to the officers, she started up, and stood erect, face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace and joy and light and life"—for he was standing against the window a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame from hell, since he was in it—and she cried to him to stand away, she chose hell ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... mesas the steel trail of the railroad runs east and west, diminishing at either end to a shimmering blur of silver. South of the railroad these level immensities, rich in their season with ripe bunch-grass and grama-grass roll up to the barrier of the far blue hills of spruce and pine. The red, ragged shoulders of buttes blot the sky-line here and there; wind-worn ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... he gathered her in his arms, and for a while I saw only his head and not her face at all, except just a blur that looked pale, and then I heard ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... a norther during the day, and at sunset the valley, seen from Dysart's cabin on the mesa, was a soft blur of golden haze. The wind had hurled the yellow leaves from the vineyard, exposing the gnarled deformity of the vines, and the trailing branches of the pepper-trees had swept their fallen berries into coral reefs on the ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... the town. The cessation of the snow and the brilliant moonlight enabled them to see far into the plain below, where the hospital camp lay. John, looking in the same direction, saw little wisps of smoke rising above the blur of the camp, but the distance was too great for ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... he had finished with them he insisted upon Rainey's lying, face down, on the table, stripped to the waist, while he rubbed him with oil and then kneaded him. Once he gave a sudden, twisting wrench, and Rainey saw a blur of stars as something snapped into place with ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... am now going to treat you with still greater frankness. I do not approve of your preface, and I will tell you why: if your work should deserve attention, it is a blur on the very face of it. Disadvantages of education, etc., ought, in my opinion, never to be pleaded with the public in excuse for defects of any importance, because if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties that lie in his way, nature seems to command him, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... things is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... material, too, includes much that is of the nature of self-revelation, to be gleaned from familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his time. Yet, after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to many observers a mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an enigma—a blur, bright or black, ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... must be up and at work betimes. Then Harry, Tom, and Nellie must be roused, dressed, fed, and made ready for the half-mile walk to the red schoolhouse at the cross-roads. After that the day was one blur of steam, dust, heat, and stifling fumes from the oven and the fat-kettle, broken always at regular ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... child learns to see the mother. At first he sees her face as a blur, and though he knows her, knows her by a direct glow of communication, as if her face were a warm glowing life-lamp which rejoiced him. But gradually, as the circuit of touch, taste, and smell become powerfully established; ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... a thick mist before my eyes, the fire seemed an infinitely distant red blur, and Postie, several continents away, was burbling about possible promotions, good voyage, fine weather, tobacco, and the like. Forgive me, old man, but your letter lay unopened for a while. I poured tobacco and cigars into Postie's pockets, and sat down to think things out. Was it foolish of me ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... glittering mass of shining horses and bright colours. One dropped at the jump near the judge's box, and as the other horses raced away round the turn the riderless horse followed, while his jockey lay still for a moment, a little scarlet blur upon the turf. Eager helpers ran forward to pick him up, but he was on his feet before they could reach him, and came limping up the hill, a little ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... beauty and splendour. Here were velvet lawns and gardens of rare flowers, and dancing and feasting and merriment. It seemed very far from the sordid strife of commerce, from poverty and toil and death. But Montague carried with him the sight that he had seen in the plate-mill, the misty blur about the whirling shaft, and the shrouded form ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... divinely caught up, and absurd as it is to write, he seemed to carry me with him. We drank each a glass of vermouth before dinner sitting over a scented fire of deodar branches, while outside the little window in front of me the lifted lines of the great empty Himalayan landscape faded and fell into a blur. I remembered the solitary scarlet dahlia that stood between us and the vast cold hills and held its colour when all was grey but that. The hill world waited for the winter; down a far valley we could hear a barking deer. Armour talked slowly, ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... furiously, straight up the St Lawrence, making Quebec a partly seen blur to the nearest American patrols and the Heights of Abraham a wild sea of whirling drifts to the nearest British sentries. One o'clock passed, and nothing stirred. But when two o'clock struck at Holland House Montgomery rose and began to put the council's plan in ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... Sally gave up trying to determine precisely which window it had been, and turned her gaze seaward again, the boat had vanished. Its lights, at least, were no longer visible, and it was many minutes before the girl succeeded in locating the blur it made on the face of the waters. It seemed to be moving, but the distance was so great that she could not be ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... where the only memory that remains is that of a confused blur of preparations for leaving—packing, ticket-buying, and melancholy farewells—for the time had come to return to old Scotland to introduce a newly acquired American wife to ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... a shapeless, round blur in the pale light. Inch by inch it drifted toward them, until Chet moved one hand abruptly and found he had created a ripple of light by which he could see more clearly. And he saw before ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... the brute whinny. He was uneasy; he was trying to shy; he was twisting away, trying to avoid the strange thing which lay there. I hid my head no longer. I saw the horse above me. I saw the rider glaring down. He was going to ride over me. I saw his face, a grey blur under his hat. The horse seemed to be right on top of me. I started up to my feet with a cry. The horse shied into the road, with a violence which made the rider rock. Then, throwing up his head, ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... later the boy slipped into a tangle of brush that marked the upper end of his patch of timber. The bare summit of the ridge stretched away in the half-light to merge in a mysterious blur with the indistinct valley of the Ten Bow. The wind was blowing gently from the ridge and the boy figured that if the wolf pack followed the summit as he hoped, they must pass within twenty yards of him. "If it don't go and cloud up before they get here I can see 'em plain as day," ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... grease-pots, stained ropes, and unpainted pulleys,—and, to tell the truth, we want to see these blemishes. They are encouraging. They lessen the distance between us and it by teaching us that even fairy-land knows no exemption from those imperfections which blur our purest natures. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... last survey from his bank steps at three o'clock, some one yelled, "Hello, Amzi!" A piece of brick flung with an aim worthy of a nobler cause whizzed past his head and struck the door-frame with a sharp thwack and blur of dust. Amzi looked down at the missile with pained surprise and kicked it aside. His clerks besought him to come in out of harm's way; and yet no man in Montgomery had established a better right than he to stand ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... herself, as she danced, among the soberer colours of her elders and the white frocks of the country cousins, all the light in the room. "I would look at something else if I could," thought Richard to himself, "but it would be only a blur to ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... looking its very best on this particular morning. A green-grey fog enshrouded shops and houses, the Park was an invisible blur and the atmosphere smarted in people's eyes and irritated their throats. Despite the contrariness of the weather, Joan clambered on to the top of the bus, she felt she could not face the inside stuffiness. She was tired and, had she but owned to it, hungry. It was already late ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... headed for the bank, he noticed a thin stream of smoke trembling above Bongao. He paused and trained his eye on the blur. Suddenly he dug ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... and be able to estimate the causes and effects of his discourse. I have sometimes suspected, indeed, that better saints occupy this Amen Corner for a less excusable curiosity about the doings in the congregation. William closed the hymn-book, looked out over the blur of faces ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... general glance gives you picturesque stretches of gleaming water, on your left, with a sail here and there and a lunatic asylum on shore; over beyond the water, on a distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which made it blest and beautiful. Still in the distance, but on this side of the water and close to ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... day. We had not camped on the open coast as had been our custom, but in a sun-warmed meadow a few paces inland, where there were birds, and tasseling grasses, and all kinds of glancing lights and odors to steal into a man's blood. I parted the trees. The blur of gray ashes from our fire was undisturbed; our canoes lay, bottom upwards, waiting to have the seams newly pitched, and the cargo was piled, untouched, against a tree. All was as we left it. And there, in the shade of a maple, lay ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... of laugh and jest, They plied their subtle alchemy with zest— Till, sudden, high above their tumult, welled Out of the sitting-room a song which held Them stilled in some strange rapture, listening To the sweet blur of voices chorusing:— ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... subject, and impressionism could be fully justified of its follower in Pymantoning as well as in Paris. That golden dust along the track; the level tops of the buggies drawn up within its ellipse, and the groups scattered about in gypsy gayety on the grass there; the dark blur of men behind the barrier; the women, with their bright hats and parasols, massed flower-like,—all made him long to express them in lines and dots and breadths of pure color. He had caught the vital effect of the whole, and he meant to interpret it so that its truth ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... growing into a wild dash of wind-driven rain. It was dark and Rupert himself was but a blur ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... signs of day appeared over the hills and the morning star commenced to fade. As the light strengthened, the wide panorama of the plains and the far off mountains unfolded and the individual patches of scrub and single trees began to stand out distinctly from the general blur of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... discovered an unaccountable blur in his sight. He could not see perfectly, and that was why, when Mrs. Belding entered the sitting-room, he was not certain that her face was as sad and white ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; the conspectus is always good, and the blur that remains on the mind is probably just enough. I have been enchanted with the unveiling of Revelations. And how picturesque that return of the false Nero! The Apostle John is rather discredited. And to think how one had read the thing so often, and ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... swaggering military figure to which uniform was becoming, and a kind of animal good looks which would deteriorate early. His colour would fix and deepen with the aid of steady daily drinking, and his features would coarsen and blur, until by the time he was forty the young jowl would have grown heavy and would end by being his most ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rural charmers. They think New York is folded up and put away in camphor when they leave, and only taken out again when they pay their next visit. The notion that anything could possibly have happened since he was last in our midst to blur the memory of that happy evening had not occurred to Mr Ferris. I suppose he was so accustomed to dating things from 'when I was in New York' that he thought everybody else must ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... steamers lies moored by the bank. Another, worked by the crew that manned it in Egyptian days, is threshing up the Blue Nile, sent by the Khalifa to Sennar on some errand of State. Far away to the southward the dust of a Darfur caravan breaks the clear-cut skyline with a misty blur. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... on the hand, very melancholy, and very dangerous. Perhaps her very card is stuck proudly into a corner of the mirror in the college-chamber. After this may come moonlight meetings at the gate, or long listenings to the plaintive lyrics that steal out of the parlor-windows, and that blur wofully the text of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... asts the crowd. "Is your tongue coated after meals? Do your eyes leak when your nose is stopped up? Do you perspire under your arm pits? Do you ever have a ringing in your ears? Does your stomach hurt you after meals? Does your back ever ache? Do you ever have pains in your legs? Do your eyes blur when you look at the sun? Are your teeth coated? Does your hair come out when you comb it? Is your breath short when you walk up stairs? Do your feet swell in warm weather? Are there white spots on your finger nails? Do you draw your breath part ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... had it passed in ordinary course through the post-office. Letters in the post-office are hurried quickly through the operation of stamping, so that one passing over the other while the stamping ink is still moist, will to some extent blot and blur that with which it has come in contact. He will produce some dozens taken at random, and will show that with them all such has been the case. This blotting, this smudging, is very slight, but it exists; it is always there. He will tell you ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... wheat And leagues of golden corn The fragrance of the wild-rose bloom And elder-flower is borne; But earth's appealing loveliness We do but half surmise, For oh, the blur of battle-fields ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... until six-and-thirty years afterward that I found that out, and then—oh, then I only cried when that picture of young care-free mirth rose before me out of the blur and mists of that long-vanished time; for there had come a day between, when God's good gift of laughter had gone out from me to come again no more ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... the sky was fast fading. The gold was dying away from the edges of the clouds. The long lines of surf mingled together in a blur of tangled whiteness. She looked for a moment into the gathering dimness, and she felt a menace in it; she heard a menace in the cry of the tides. And within herself she seemed to be aware of ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... slip off and spin, or spiral down, and a few have even landed themselves. Also, if the plane started down from twenty thousand, the pilot wouldn't be too far blacked out. The odds are he'd come to when he got into thicker air—admitting he did blur out, which is only an Air Force guess. I don't see why they're so positive Mantell died before he hit the ground—unless they know something ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... been a part of something as large as a man. At any rate, it proclaimed that something in that spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly and at other times it vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last, however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously dishevelled and wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the prisoner and then upon the sentry. The wandering rays caused the eyes to glitter like ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... content to remain where we were. The night had fallen; the streets, as they lost themselves in dim turnings, in mysterious alleyways, and arches that seemed grotesquely high in the vague blur of things, were filled for us with the charm of a new and lovely beauty. At one end the street ended in a towering mass of stone; that doubtless was the cathedral. At the right, the narrow houses dipped suddenly; their roof-lines were lost in vagueness. Between ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... haste to board it and to lose myself quickly in the crowded smoking-car. Later, when the conductor made his round, I paid a cash fare to the end of the division, forbearing to draw a full breath of relief until the cesspool city had faded to a smoky blur on ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... that has more power to make a man's path plain before his feet than that he should concentrate his better self on the manful and complete discharge of the present moment's service. And, on the other hand, there is nothing that will so fill our sky with mists, and blur the marks of the faint track through the moor, as present negligence, or still more, present sin. Iron in a ship's hull makes the magnet tremble, and point away from its true source. He that has complied with evil to-day is the less capable ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain by a certain amount ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... curse. What he had loved about this world was its leisure. What he had hated about his own world above was its constantly increasing speed. Like a squirrel caught in a cage, his world had gone faster and faster until reality had vanished into a mad blur of turning wheels and running feet. Oh, well, he thought, a man is like a pup. Contented enough until life takes him by the scruff of the neck and shakes him up and proves to him that things change and a pup's world changes and he had better accustom himself to new standards or be ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... saw the stone terrace dimly lit by the stars far below him. The gardens were a blur of darkness out of which he vaguely discerned the glimmer of the lake among ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... and without the least shadow of surprise, and once I remarked that she had caught sight in the twilight of a cup raised without hands; yet no hint fell from her lips to make me feel she was intruding on my affairs. The old blur was in her eyes; the only change in manner was her treatment of me: she regarded me with a kind of awe. And after it had proved abortive to tell her something and not all, because the pleasure of unbosoming myself of so much love was too great to restrain, I ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... their gallant stand for All Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers, and that at the Swan—otherwise the Blue Lion—the Pickwick fellowship shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to the town an attraction of a ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... Cryptic's port side, as she lay half a mile away across the glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in the centre. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... since I have discovered what some of them believe to be the ordinary waking experience of one who is both deaf and blind. They think that I can know very little about objects even a few feet beyond the reach of my arms. Everything outside of myself, according to them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, cities, the ocean, even the house I live in are but fairy fabrications, misty unrealities. Therefore it is assumed that my dreams should have peculiar interest for the man of science. In some undefined way it is expected that they should ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... with alkaline dust, crossed the ranch at right angles. Far away, to the left, was a faint blur upon the pink hills. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... horses, the clank of harness, and splash of water, the whirl of ducks did not blur out of Jones's keen ear a sound that made him jump. It was the thump of hoofs, in a familiar beat, beat, beat. He saw a shadow moving up a ridge. Soon, outlined black against the yet light sky, a lone buffalo cow stood like a statue. A moment ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... the mind first sees a blur of events— formless, seething, inextricably tangled. Deep in this boiling chaos is one fact struggling more powerfully than the rest to cool and so to shape itself. It kicks a leg free here, there an arm, then another leg. Its exertions cause the whole more furiously ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... exceed for egotism the temper of a new man in the cab of a train like this one. This valkyric journey on the back of the vermilion engine, with the shouting of the wind, the deep, mighty panting of the steed, the gray blur at the track-side, the flowing quicksilver ribbon of the other rails, the sudden clash as a switch intersects, all the din and fury of this ride, was of a splendor that caused one to look abroad at the quiet, green landscape ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... chauffeur drives too fast. The car passed me, cutting through Brenton Road a while ago, at a perfectly insane pace. Some one—how do you do, Sara, I 'm delighted to have you with us—was in the tonneau, whom I took to be Koltsoff, although there was such a blur I was ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... city's humanitarian pang, of the suburb's esthetic pleasure, the White Linen Nurse found herself precipitated suddenly into a mere blur of sight, a mere chaos of sound. In whizzing speed and crashing breeze,—houses—fences—meadows—people—slapped across her eyeballs like pictures on a fan. On and on and on through kaleidoscopic yellows and rushing grays the great car sped, a purely mechanical ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... children's awe and fools' amazement, a worm in conscience and a curse to wickedness. In brief, it makes the coward stagger, the liar stammer, the thief stumble, and the traitor start. It is a blot in arms, a blur in honour, the shame of a soldier, and the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... from the baskets of fruit and flowers, messengers with late orders from the stores, repeated farewells, to the squalling babies in the steerage. Even in the impudent shrieking tugboats he found a measure of delight; and the blur ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Mrs. Severance finally, with a blur of delicate scorn, "I suppose our friend Mr. Billett—got ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... out, as if in Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not really or exactly to be described at all, (for on the many hundreds who were there it seems to this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a blotch)—and yet partially to be described as I now proceed to give it. There is a scene in the play representing a modern parlor in which two unprecedented English ladies are inform'd by the impossible Yankee that he is not a man of fortune, and therefore ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Jean ascended, the top of her hat first—a blur of gray, then the red of the rose that he had sent her, a wave of her gray muff as she saw him. He went down to meet her, and stood with her on the landing. Beneath the painting, on one side, ran ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... faintly tinted blue, and put on instead, not the rose-colored specs of Dr. Pangloss, but a glass that blurs somewhat the outlines of men and things; and these he may wear until midnight. The only objects which this glass does not blur are children. Seen through blue, or rose, or white, children are always the same. They ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... never have any bright glow, such as stars have, but they are so vast, their dimensions so great, that even across millions of light years of space they appear as tiny glowing discs with faint, indistinct edges. As the men looked out of the clear lux metal windows, they saw the tiny blur of light on the soft black ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... Through the blur of tears in his own eyes, the man saw the drawn face opposite, twisted with emotion. Involuntarily his thoughts went back to what Pollyanna had said when he had made his final plea for her presence: "Oh, ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... the unicorn's throat, swerving its charge, and the unicorn plunged past him. The unicorn swung back, all the triumph gone from its squeal, and the prowler struck again. They became a swirling blur, the horn of the unicorn swinging and stabbing and the attacks of the prowler like the swift, relentless ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... definitions, which must blur the margins with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well-enchanting skill of music and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you—with a tale which holdeth children from ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... from its catching qualities, as the Wait-a-bit-thorn, and as rapidly as they could go Dickenson led his men to that, finding, as he expected, just enough cover in the midst of a perfectly bare plain, if not to shelter lying-down men, at least to blur and confuse the enemy's marksmen. Here he gave the order, "Dismount!" Lennox was laid flat upon his back, to lie without motion, and each man took the best shelter he could; while the ponies, not being trained like the modern trooper to lie down, were left to graze and take care ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... to-days. Except, daily, she visited the Public Library, reading over St. Louis newspapers of last week's vintage, and never failing to glance at the death notices. For one week an advertisement under PERSONAL appeared, which every time she encountered it was sure to blur over her vision ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... for many months. It changed her feeling toward the town, for now she had a foothold here. It changed her feeling toward Amy, whose picture had begun to blur. But that queer sensation of intimacy, of being in her sister's place, was even deeper than before. For now she was mothering Amy's child—her child ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... saw its great bulk that many men had worked to ease down to the sand. It was outlined clearly now until its edge became a blur, until the sand rolled in upon it, and its black mass became a circle that shrank and shrank and vanished utterly at ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... little to the left, used the same long, sweeping strokes as with Agatha. At each of them a warm current of air seemed to strike me, and to suffuse a thrill and glow all through me from head to foot. My eyes were fixed upon Miss Penclosa's face, but as I gazed the features seemed to blur and to fade away. I was conscious only of her own eyes looking down at me, gray, deep, inscrutable. Larger they grew and larger, until they changed suddenly into two mountain lakes toward which I seemed to be falling with horrible rapidity. I shuddered, and as I did so some deeper stratum ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... over its massive crossbeams, its leaning gables, its rows of gleaming lattices, and so up to the great sign swinging above the door—an ancient sign whereon a weather-beaten hound, dim-legged and faded of tail, pursued a misty blur that, by common report, was held to be a hare. But it was to a certain casement that his gaze oftenest reverted, behind whose open lattice he knew his father lay asleep, and his eyes, all at once, grew suffused with a glittering brightness that was not of the morning, and he took ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... Joe suddenly, when the Major was a blur in a cloud of dust and the horsemen were specks in the distance, "this looks like home to me somehow. There ought to be great sheep feed over there in the foothills and summer range in the mountains. What do you think ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Burne sings. These voices, faces, landscapes mingle with the music and blur the pictures of the poet who enchanted for us certain hours passed in the paradise of youth. A reviewer who finds himself in this case may as well frankly confess that he can no more criticise Mr. Morris dispassionately than ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... waiting in the Lake Shore station when the train pulled in on Tuesday. His legs were trembling like two reeds in the wind and his teeth chattered with the chill of a great excitement. Out of the blur that obscured his vision bounded a small figure, almost toppling him over as it clutched his not too stable legs and shrieked something that must have pleased him vastly, for he giggled and chortled like ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... clinging desperately, trying at every solid tree to stop the career of his runaway, but in every instance being forced by the danger of jamming his hands to let go. Again he lost his derby. The landscape was a blur. Dimly he made out the howls of laughter as the outfit passed a group of rivermen. Then abruptly a ravine yawned before him, and he let go just in time to save himself a fall. The wanigan, trailing her rope, ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... of what appeared a narrow island. The Sea Gull's fires were banked, only a thin vapor arising from the stack which instantly disappeared. In the opposite direction there was a wide expanse of water, quiet as a mill-pond in spite of a fresh breeze, revealing in the distance the faint blue blur of a far-off coast line. Nothing broke the vista except the white sails of two sloops, evidently fishing boats, far off on the horizon. It was an ideal spot in which to lie—to quietly hide in during the hours of daylight, probably never approached but by stray fishermen. Ashore everything ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... Why couldn't he hear Cadman? Cadman had the gun. But if he himself could only reach her before the snake—if he could only— And a soft blur of sun-melted red loomed ahead ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... a hundred men crushed in to slap his back. He had never known a higher moment. He drove away in a blur of wonder. He lunged into his office, chuckling to Miss McGoun, "Well, I guess you better congratulate your boss! Been elected vice-president of ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... white blot in the middle distance; a nebulous blur in the painting, as if there had been some chemical impurity in the pigment causing it to fade, or rather as if a long drop of some acid, or perhaps a splash of salt water, had fallen upon the canvas while it was wet, and bleached it. I knew little ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... until she found herself Queen by coronation and inheritance, consecrated in her right by the awful seal of the great High-Priest Death—before whose inviolable silence questions cease, and the scroll of the closed life is no longer searched, save with eyes that blur ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... was, it had come to nothing. Down in the purple forest, disconnected now from the ship, the last of our friends stood marooned. I could distinguish them through the blur of the closed dome—only a swaying, huddled group was visible. But my fancy pictured this last sight of them, Dr. Frank, Venza, ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... fly from it: the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting and your character—all that is done for you: you have just got to select the characteristic things, and not to blur the things that you would have wished otherwise. For God's sake, let us get at the truth in books, and not use them as screens to keep the fire off, or as things to distract one from the depressing facts in one's bank-book. I welcome ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... moment, staring at the closed door, and then turned back to the writing-table and took the letter to Sheila from beneath the blotting-paper. He read it through and sat staring at it until the writing became a dancing blur.... He got up, carrying the letter in his hand, and went to the door and opened it. He tried to call "Gilbert!" but the name came out in a whisper, and before he could call again, he heard the noise of laughter and then the sound of a young ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... well out to sea now. The shore line was sinking gradually into the sea. The land had become a faint, purplish blur in the distance, a strong, salty breeze was blowing across the sloop and the Atlantic rollers were becoming longer. The "Sue" was beginning to roll heavily, rising and falling to the accompaniment of creaking boom, rattling mast rings and flapping jibs. Keeping on one's feet was becoming ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... years of blur and blot Have slid since I beheld that spot, And saw in curious converse there Moving slowly, moving sadly, That mysterious tragic pair, Its olden look may linger on— All but the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... half-past nine I threw a warm wrap over my shoulders, stepped quietly out of the lodge, and made my way successfully over the crackling snow to the billiard-room. The moon, wrapped in vapour, stood a dim blur just over the ridge of the roof, and the wind whistled shrilly round the corner of the wall. A shiver passed over me, but I put the key into the lock, went into the room, closed the door behind me, turned round... A dark figure ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... woods. That marble face was too much in earnest for the vainest of men to suppose its indifference assumed; and no matter how fair the eyes, no man likes to be looked at, by eyes that do not see him, or see him only as a blur on the landscape. Still that marble face stood for much that is dear to the roughest of hearts and about which men do not talk. So I went on packing damp moss into the bottom of the bark horn, arranging frail ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... must have failed long ago," I observed, my eyes turned to where the horizon closed the long perspective of the sky. Away there was the sweetest light. Elsewhere colour marred the simplicity of light; but there colour was effaced, not as men efface it, by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. And against it rose, high and faintly outlined, the defences of the great unknown city standing on the summit of what appeared to be a gigantic rock. "Magnificent!" I exclaimed, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... were to Michael one long blur of trouble. He haunted Mr. Endicott's office in hopes of getting some news of his return but they told him the last letters had been very uncertain. He might come quickly, and he might be delayed a month yet, or even longer; and a cablegram might not reach him much sooner ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... productively on this, held hers, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions. She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying to maintain, she burst out, in the ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... found the vision of his dream home floating in his mind as he steered the Skylark in her meteoric flight or as he strapped himself into his narrow bed. Now, however, the central figure of the vision, instead of being an indistinct blur, was clear and sharply defined. And for her part, more and more was Margaret drawn to the quiet and unassuming, but utterly dependable and steadfast young inventor, with his wide knowledge and his ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... bars they blur the gracious moon, And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell, For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... going through the drifts and keeping the right way over a plain that had the similarity of the sea, but the men did not falter. Jimmy Grayson was always looking into the darkness, striving to see the darker line or blur that would mark the hills, but he asked no questions. The snow ceased, and after a while low, black slopes ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... strength quite gone when suddenly, close to her, she heard Jimmy's cheery call again. The next minute she felt herself snatched off her feet and held close to a great throbbing something that dimly she realized was Jimmy's heart. It was all a horrid blur then of cries, hot, panting breaths, and pounding hoofs thundering nearer, ever nearer. Then, just as she knew those hoofs to be almost upon her, she felt herself flung, still in Jimmy's arms, sharply to one side, and yet not so far but that she still could feel ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... of that first horrible interview in the inn parlour; I thought of my heroic ancestors. It was no use; every moment I drew, nearer and nearer to the breaking-point. I still stared, but the Squire's face was growing misty, growing into a big, red-brown blur. Then suddenly a hand gripped my arm, and ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... drifting wet should not beat upon it. He came after me and kissed it again, saying 'Good- night, poor little innocent, good-night!' three or four times. Then he went off quickly and sprang into his saddle and in the blur of rain I saw horse and man turn away. He waved his hand once and his handsome pale face gleamed upon me like that of a ghost in the storm. 'Till to-morrow!' he called, and was gone. I took the child into the house and called Priscilla. She was always a rough ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... turned away from the window of the hotel, out of which they had been gazing for the last quarter of an hour. Stretched out before them were the lights of the Exposition, a blur of twinkling diamonds against the black garb of night. Beyond, the flashing of a light-house and a faint background of ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... conversation at the National Hotel. The men who wanted Mr. Bell's mine had waited till he had located it before striking their first blow. What would their next be? Peggy's pulses throbbed and the grove seemed to blur for an instant. But the next moment she was mistress of herself again. Clearly there was only one thing to do. Lay the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... a desperate and quite futile effort to assure him that she was nothing of the sort. But she knew that no more than a blur of sound came from her lips, and even while she strove to make herself intelligible the floating world became a dream, ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... of vapor. Loops of hanging moisture marked the hollows of the land-front, or the alleys of the waning light; and then the mass abandoned outline, fused its shades to pulp, and melted into one great blur of rain. Janetta thought of her Sunday frock, forgot the boat, and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... where gaunt walls Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls Eery, distorted, as it long had shone On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone. The whir of motors, stricken through with calls Of playing boys, floats up at intervals; But all these noises blur to one long moan. What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange That other men still go accustomed ways! I hate their interest in the things they do. A spectre-horde repeating without change An old routine. Alone I know the days Are still-born, and the world ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... toward the noble river sweeping into view around the base of a wooded bluff, and toward the line of its course beyond, where its hidden waters furrowed the forests to the northward and divided hill from hill. Yet to her eyes the landscape was but a blur, and she saw it only ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... convictions, the intuitions of our souls, that lie upon their surface like direct reflections from heaven, distinct and beautiful enough for reverent contemplation, but a curious search into whose nature would, at any rate temporarily, blur and dissipate ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... one of these automobeels went past. It was the first Tusky and me had seen in them parts, so we run out to view her. Owin' to the high spots on the road, she looked like one of these movin' picters, as to blur and wobble; sounded like a cyclone mingled with cuss-words, and smelt like hell on ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... the fire, and he saw again the red bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a magnificent fight. And she had won. And it suddenly occurred to him that what she had said in the note was true, and that Scottie Deane could easily have killed him. The next moment he wondered why he had not done that. Deane ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... dusty, inky office of the New York Evening Sentinel he had been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes remembered that black day when from his high window he had ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... tiny slippers and such dainty bootlets as show forth and enhance the separate beauty of each inch of outline of rounded ankle, arched instep, and slender length of foot, shall lend their help. And if envious Time have something done to blur the bloom upon the cheek, or blot the clear transparent purity of skin,—sunt certa piacula,—there are not wanting means for helping a mortal Diva to some of the prerogatives ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... misunderstood, misrepresented, during his life. Nor, I think, since that, have many men fared worse, by the Limner or Biographic class, the favorable to him and the unfavorable; or been so smeared of and blotched of, and reduced to a mere blur and dazzlement of cross-lights, incoherences, incredibilities, in which nothing, not so much as a human nose, is clearly discernible by way of feature!"—Courage, reader, nevertheless; on the above terms let us ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mother have long been dead, And the bride sleeps under a churchyard stone, And a bent old man with a grizzled head Walks up the long dim aisle alone. Years blur to a mist; and Dorothy Sits doubting betwixt the ghost she seems, And the phantom of youth, more real than she, That meets her there in that ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... but the water still held a pale light; in the east the sky was filled with an increasing, cold radiance. It was the moon, rising swiftly above the flat land. The moonlight grew in intensity, casting inky shadows of the spars and cordage across the deck, making the light in the cabin a reddish blur by contrast. The icy flood swept over the land, bringing out with a new emphasis the close, glossy foliage and broken facade—it appeared unreal, portentous. The odors of the flowers, of the orange blossoms, uncoiled in heavy, ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... man experiences in admitting that he is something more than an educated stone prevented me from confusing you by demonstrations of a kind I had never accustomed you to. Besides, I wish this assurance of my love—my last word—to reach you when no further commonplaces to blur the impressiveness of its ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Goat-foot piping low: . . . But these are things I do not know. I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . . Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx. Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill. ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... and constrained attitudes, of course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and there an elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of the younger children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... see what happened. He saw the pennies taken from what seemed to be seven or eight in the boy's palm. When the two were taken away there seemed to be a slight blur—and there was only a ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... grey eyes. Even through the drizzling rain he could see the gleam of her rich hair, the marking of her lovely face, and the carmine of her lips. She motioned to him to go on. He went, and when he had traversed a hundred paces looked round once more. She was still there, but now her face was a blur, and again the great white gull ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... they had been given into my hands. There was a bit of a haze, and you could not see more than a few hundred yards. I hired a boat for myself, and I pulled after them. I could see the blur of their craft, but they were going nearly as fast as I, and they must have been a long mile from the shore before I caught them up. The haze was like a curtain all round us, and there were we three in the middle of it. My God, shall I ever forget ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... accurately as I can, and with no theories to blur the history. Theories are poor things at the best, and the bulk of mine have perished long ago. I love better than any theory the sound of the Gate of Ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone who has passed the rose-strewn threshold can catch the far ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... sundering in a titanic convulsion . . . then he lost hearing . . . In that same sick bewildering moment of preternatural consciousness he thought wildly of Annadoah . . . he saw her appealing wan face amid the blur of white moonlight . . . he knew she needed food . . . and he felt an ache at his heart . . . he called upon the spirits of his ancestors. Then the silvery swimming world of white dust-driven fire became suddenly black—and the earth seemed ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... cooking utensils he began to prepare breakfast. She watched him for an instant, and then went to the north window, rubbed a hole through the frost and tried to look out. She could not see more than a few inches into the white blur that roared against the glass, and so she turned, sought a chair near the table, and resumed watching Lawler. And her eyes filled with a warm light as they followed his movements—noting that he seemed handsomer now ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... up Charley's face and seemed to blur his sight. His monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and slowly adjusted it again as he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lines against the perfect blue-and-white heavens. He looked at the chimney of the little wooden cottage, and there, too, was smoke coming forth; but it was a thin and feeble stream, scarcely making even a pale blur against the transparent skies. The house itself appeared to be as cold and chilly ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... and while he could conform to the conventionalities of society, he was never more pleased than when mixing with the variegated mass of mankind, where vice and virtue predominated without the guilt of hypocrisy to blur and blast ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... sun-swept mesas the steel trail of the railroad runs east and west, diminishing at either end to a shimmering blur of silver. South of the railroad these level immensities, rich in their season with ripe bunch-grass and grama-grass roll up to the barrier of the far blue hills of spruce and pine. The red, ragged shoulders of buttes blot the sky-line here and there; wind-worn and grotesque silhouettes of gigantic ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... a moment of blessed relief; and he looked out over the broad rosy blur of faces in the street, where no one wondered more than he how the water was to reach the roof. Suddenly he started, wiped his eyes with his wet sleeve, and peered intently down from under the shading arm. His roving glance crossed the smoke and flame to rest upon a ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... too well because the lights were off inside the trailer. But I could tell from the way she filled up the doorway that she was big. I could make out the white blur of a cigarette in her mouth, and when she struck a match to light it—on her thumb-nail, like a man—I saw that she was fairly young and not bad-looking in a tough, sullen sort of way. The wind was blowing in my direction ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... understanding in pointing out the loftier biblical peaks which give the direction of the whole range than in tracing out pathways through detailed passages. Moreover, we have been afraid to employ many theoretical terms lest we blur the quick moral impressions made by the Scripture phrasings. For example, it may be objected that our treatment of the character of God is altogether inadequate. We have not thus far said a word about the Trinity, for example, or about atonement. The reason is that ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... 50 feet the speed is too great for him, and he lets go. Before reaching the end of the track the operator moves the front rudder, and the machine lifts from the rail like a kite supported by the pressure of the air underneath it. The ground under you is at first a perfect blur, but as you rise the objects become clearer. At a height of 100 feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably lost it by this time. The operator moves a lever: ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... christening were— For your name—just to hear it, Repeat it, and cheer it, 's a tang to the spirit As salt as a tear;— And seeing you fly, and the boys marching by, There's a shout in the throat and a blur in the eye And an aching to live for you always—or die, If, dying, we still keep you waving on high. And so, by our love For you, floating above, And the scars of all wars and the sorrows thereof, Who gave you the name of Old Glory, and why Are we thrilled at the name of Old Glory? Then the old ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... when Wade tried to recall that mad ride, he found it only a vague blur upon his memory. He was conscious only of the fact that he had traveled at a speed which, in saner moments, he would have considered suicidal. Urging the big black over the rougher ground of the higher levels, he rode like a maniac, without ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... I buy—I bid," Jean Jacques said in a voice that rang. It had no blur of emotion. It had resonance. The hammer that struck the bell of his voice was the hammer of memory, and if it was plaintive it also was clear, and it was also vibrant with the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of human passion, Blur not the image true; This was not folly's fashion, This was the man ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... street until her blue dress, with its white trimming became a blur in the shadows. Then he struck out once more for the ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... man opened his eyes with a dazed expression, at first a blur of consciousness. Then gradually the recognition of himself, of his surroundings, of his life, came into them, and that self-knowledge was unmistakable. There was no doubt about the man with his twisted limbs and his twisted soul. He lay quite still a while longer, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... chemical combustion, but to vital replenishment. No energy is created within the body; it is merely transmitted. The body, in fact, acts as a means of transmission—as a sort of "organic burning glass" which transmits and focuses the sun's rays on one focal point. And just as any crack, or blur, or clouding, or other accident to the burning glass would interfere with its power and capacity from transmitting the rays, so, any accident or disease or pathological state of the organism would interfere with or altogether prevent ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... whirled past him, all painted with eyes. All the real, as he rode, was the horse at his thighs, And the thought "They'll come back, if I've luck, if I'm wise." Some banners uncrumpled on the blue of the skies, The cheers became frantic, the blur of men shook, As Thankful and Kubbadar went at ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
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