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More "Obscurity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... saved if he shuns evils as sins and does not confirm heretical falsities in himself. For by shunning evils as sins the will is reformed and through it the understanding is, which emerges for the first time then out of obscurity into light. There are three essentials of the church: acknowledgment of the divine of the Lord, acknowledgment of the holiness of the Word, and the life which is called charity. Everyone's faith is according to the life which is charity; from the Word he has a rational ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... life of eating, drinking, and money getting. He gave great pains to the study of eloquence, as wings upon which he might aspire to public business; and it was very apparent that he did not intend to pass his days in obscurity. When Vettius, a friend of his, was on his trial, he defended his cause, and the people were in an ecstasy, and transported with joy, finding him master of such eloquence that the other orators seemed like children in comparison, and jealousies and fears on the other hand began to be felt by ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... cellar built beneath the level of the ground. An iron grating at the top of the wall admitted one blanched wink of light, but the place was bathed in obscurity. A wooden ladder led down to the cell from a hole in the ceiling, and this hole also gave a spark of brightness and some little air to the room. The walls were of stone covered with plaster, but the plaster had fallen away in many ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... moment on the threshold. The true artist is never in a hurry. The breadth of the great room immediately before her showed very bright with candle-light and lamplight. But that died away, through gradations of augmenting obscurity, until the extreme end, towards the western bay, melted out into complete darkness. This produced an effect of almost limitless length which moved her to a childish, and at first pleasing, fancy of vague danger—an effect heightened by the ranges of curious and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... occupied us a great part of the morning, then we prepared our cassava, and baked our cakes on iron plates. Though we had a glazed door to our hut, the gloominess of the weather, and the obscurity caused by the vast boughs of the tree, made night come on early. We then lighted a candle, fixed in a gourd on the table, round which we were all assembled. The good mother laboured with her needle, mending the ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... letrillas in racy Castilian; he was less successful in the graver forms. Nicasio ALVAREZ DE CIENFUEGOS (1764-1809) passes as a disciple of Melendez; he was a passionate, uneven writer whose undisciplined thought and habit of coining words lead to obscurity. Politically he opposed the French with unyielding vigor, barely escaped execution at their hands and died in exile. The verse of Cienfuegos prepared the way for Quintana. Differing from him in clarity and polish are Fr. Sanchez Barbero (1764-1819) and ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... modern lighthouse stands a tall, hexagonal tower, built of chalk in four stories, with a string course between each. The signs of age it bears and the remarkable obscurity surrounding its origin and purpose would suggest great antiquity, and yet there seems little doubt that the tower is at the very earliest Elizabethan. The chalk, being extremely soft, has weathered away to such an extent that the harder ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... was a humiliating fiasco, unless, as I have stated before, it was a preconceived decoy for some other purpose. But whether it were strategy or decoy, it taxes one's intelligence to conceive why the French fleet did not proceed to bombard the British possessions on arrival, then steal into safe obscurity and make their way back to European waters. The evasion of Nelson's scouts in any case was a matter of adroit cunning. Had a man of Nelson's nimble wits and audacious courage commanded the enemy's fleet, the islands would have been attacked and left in a dilapidated condition. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the latter are so flagrantly avowed and known, the poor creature, who suffers herself to be seduced, either by a single or married man, with promises, or without, has only to sequester herself from the world, and devote the rest of her days to penitence and obscurity. As to the gentleman," added I, "he must, I doubt, be left to his conscience, as you say, Lady Towers, which he will one day have enough to do ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... The obscurity was in his favour. Tom made his bow and accepted the chair offered him, less awkwardly than was to be ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... nation whose annals are tiresome.'"—Corwin, in Congress, 1847. This figure is much employed in poetry. A judicious use of it confers harmony, variety, strength, and vivacity upon composition. But care should be taken lest it produce ambiguity or obscurity, absurdity or solecism. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the day of Messianic dreams. In the century that was over, strange figures had appeared of prophets and martyrs and Hebrew visionaries. From obscurity and the far East came David Reubeni, journeying to Italy by way of Nubia to obtain firearms to rid Palestine of the Moslem—a dark-faced dwarf, made a skeleton by fasts, riding on his white horse up to the Vatican to demand an interview, and graciously received by ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... out of his little narrow town or village circle of acquaintances, has thirsted for something beyond what they could give him; everybody who, with nothing but a dull, daily round of mechanical routine before him, would welcome death, if it were martyrdom for a cause; every humblest creature, in the obscurity of great cities or remote hamlets, who silently does his or her duty without recognition—all these turn to Jesus, and find themselves in Him. He died, faithful to the end, with infinitely higher hopes, purposes, and capacity than mine, and with ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... disgrace; how they could face their fellow-creatures while their names were bandied about so injuriously and so publicly;—and now this lot was to be his,—he, that shy, retiring man, who had so comforted himself in the hidden obscurity of his lot, who had so enjoyed the unassuming warmth of his own little corner,—he was now dragged forth into the glaring day, and gibbeted before ferocious multitudes. He entered his own house a crestfallen, humiliated ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... progress," contain one of the most important lessons of all spiritual life. The Wise Man says of the knowledge of the works of God: "When a man hath done, then he shall begin," St. Augustine applies this sentence to the obscurity of the sacred writings, when he says that, the deeper they are searched, the more hidden mysteries are found in them; and it is equally applicable to Christian and religious perfection. It is an error condemned by the Church to believe that a man is capable ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... and a personal religion without conversion, no emphasis or reiteration can be extreme. Besides, the clearness as well as the definiteness of the Testimony of Nature to any Spiritual truth is of immense importance. Regeneration has not merely been an outstanding difficulty, but an overwhelming obscurity. Even to earnest minds the difficulty of grasping the truth at all has always proved extreme. Philosophically one scarcely sees either the necessity or the possibility of being born again. Why a virtuous man should not simply ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... childless. Yet, unmindful of the alleviation, a spirit of complaint, at what she impatiently called the bitterness of her lot and the hardness of the world, so preyed upon her, as ere long to hurry her from the obscurity of indigence to the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... been made in the arrangement of the principal cabin. The light was entirely excluded from the stern, and the crimson curtain had been lowered before the alcove. A small window whose effect was to throw a dim obscurity within, had been opened in the side. The objects on which its light fell strongest, received a soft coloring from the hues ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... refer to a philosopher of this earth as illustrating the work of a philosopher of another planet, the Editor cannot help quoting a passage from a man possessed of wondrous prescience, who, to use his own words, "held up a lamp in the obscurity of philosophy that would be seen ages after he was dead." It will also in a measure convey the difference between the process of grafting and the course pursued by the Tootmanyoso in the creation ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... thus eventually learn whether a blank space in the sky truly represents the end of the stellar universe in that direction, or whether farther and farther worlds roll and shine beyond, veiled in the obscurity of immeasurable distance. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... himself he would gladly go, for his friends' sake he is drawn to the opposite choice. He has 'fallen into a place where two seas meet,' and for a minute or two his will is buffeted from side to side by the 'violence of the waves.' The obscurity of his language, arising from its broken construction, corresponds to the struggle of his feelings. As the Revised Version has it, 'If to live in the flesh—if this is the fruit of my work, then what I shall choose, I wot not.' By which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... which have become classical abound. The "purple patch" sewn on to a sober narrative; the wine jar turning to a pitcher as the potter's wheel revolves; the injunction to keep a book ten years before you publish it; the near kinship of terseness to obscurity; the laughable outcome of a mountain's labour; the warning to be chary of bringing gods upon the stage; the occasional nod of Homer;—are commonplace citations so crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that even the unlettered ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... est mort; vive le roi!"—A Vipont dies; live the Vipont! Despite its high-sounding Norman name, the House of Vipont was no House at all for some generations after the Conquest. The first Vipont who emerged from the obscurity of time was a rude soldier of Gascon origin, in the reign of Henry II.,—one of the thousand fighting-men who sailed from Milford Haven with the stout Earl of Pembroke, on that strange expedition which ended in the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. There is no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-love in its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more love flows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny little pearly drop of the "wine ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... sole guidance; he wanders, wanders, as if that curse of the Prophet had fallen on him, and he were "made like unto a wheel." Doubtless, too, the chaotic nature of these Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. Quite without note of preparation, for example, we come upon the following slip: "A peculiar feeling it is that will rise in the Traveller, when turning some hill-range in his desert road, he descries lying far below, embosomed among its groves and green natural bulwarks, and ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... is ever veiled in obscurity; the more we believe that we know its meaning, the less do we understand it. Perhaps, after all, you must expect from it nothing but glory and happiness. Suffer us, dear sister, to behold this mortal dread deceived by a worthy issue; or at least let us die with you, if heaven does not show ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... been done, and to get an order from the governor for what was to be done in the future. The island is densely populated, as they will relate to your Majesty. It will be a pity for those peoples to remain in the obscurity of their blindness, without the light of our holy Catholic faith, for lack of ministers. Since the fathers of St Dominic have taken that conquest in charge, it will be very advisable for the present to settle it with religious ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... white stocking, wet. At the back was a cabinet de toilette, as dark as the other one, a vile malodorous mess of appliances whose familiar forms loomed vague and extraordinarily sinister in the dense obscurity. Sophia turned away with the righteous disgust of one whose preparations for the gaze of the world are as candid and simple as those of a child. Concealed dirt shocked her as much as it would have shocked her mother; ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... for you, my lord," said Varney—"that is, in the case supposed, if such be her disposition; since you think you cannot aspire to become her husband. Her favourite you are, and may remain, if the lady at Cumnor place continues in her present obscurity." ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... march, the construction of their camp, and the engagement, yet, as Metellus was longer in coming than they expected, advanced to meet him in regular and steady order. The subtlety of the Numidians, indeed, allowed them neither rest nor relaxation. But as the two parties drew together, in the obscurity of the night, each occasioned, by a noise like that of enemies approaching, alarm and trepidation in the other; and, had not parties of horse, sent forward from both sides, ascertained the truth, ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... left a distinct gap in the literary world. A life like his could not be extinguished without general sorrow. Although he was unduly modest, and never aspired to the role of a beacon-light in literature, always seeking to remain in obscurity, the works of Emile Souvestre must be placed in the first rank by their morality and by their instructive character. They will always command the entire respect and applause of mankind. And thus it happens that, like many others, he was only ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... their own act, everything is obscured to themselves and to their neighbors. But whilst the cuttle-fish swims out of the zone of opacity created by himself, the theologian remains in his, fighting the obscurity with logic—for that purpose the poorest of all devices. You cannot guide an emotional boat with an intellectual rudder. Something to me much more convincing than reason, tells me that our bodies will not be long in their graves before we shall again ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... of his efforts to please them; but when the day came would they not think (and would not their wives remind them) that Sir Winterton was a neighbour and a friend and that Lady Mildmay was kind and sweet? Then, having shouted for Quisante, would they not in the peaceful obscurity of the ballot put ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... each religious house did not have it formal regulations. The latter however seem to have depended largely upon the abbot's spirit, will or discretion. The existing "Rules" abound in allusions to forgotten practices and customs and, to add to their obscurity, their language is very difficult—sometimes, like the language of the Brehon Laws, unintelligible. The rule ascribed to Mochuda is certainly a document of great antiquity and may well have emanated from the seventh century and from the author whose name it bears. The tradition of Lismore ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... lonely rings the echo of my feet! Those windows, which I gaze at, frown, Silent and white, unopening down, Repellent as the world;—but see, A break between the housetops shows The moon! and, lost behind her, fading dim Into the dewy dark obscurity Down at the far horizon's rim, Doth a whole tract of ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... optical illusions were common, especially in the obscurity of night. One could look so long at a motionless object that it seemed to move. That was why the boat, tied securely to low boughs, did that curious trick of apparently gliding over the surface of the river. ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... than in the outer division of the building. At the moment when they entered it the place was very dark; the pile of idols intercepted even the little light that could have been admitted through its narrow entrance; but the dense obscurity was soon dissipated. Dragging Numerian after him to the left side of the recess, Ulpius drew back a sort of wooden shutter, and a vivid ray of sunlight immediately streamed in through a small circular opening pierced in this ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... fading light, fool and jestress drew rein, and, moved by the same purpose, looked about them. On the one hand was the deserted, desolate plain over which lay a sullen, gathering mist; on the other, the sombrous obscurity of the wood. Everywhere, an ominous silence, and overhead the crescent growing ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of bread is involved in the obscurity of distant ages. The Greeks attributed its invention to Pan; but before they, themselves, had an existence, it was, no doubt, in use among the primitive nations of mankind. The Chaldeans and the Egyptians were acquainted with it, and Sarah, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... they dropped down the river, and soon came into the thick mist that lay beyond the point. It was impossible to see more than a yard or two ahead, but the same dense obscurity would prevent any further range of vision from the other boat, and, if it was still at its work, the sound of its oars or of voices, Michael reflected, might guide him to it. From the lisp of little wavelets lapping on ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... what, boys," Jack said presently, growing weary of trying to discover features in the obscurity below that covered the landscape, "this makes me feel just like I imagine that old guy must have felt when he went out after the Golden Fleece or something ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... different impulse. M. de Soissons panted for power, and loathed every impediment to the gratification of his ambition; while the young Prince, less firm of purpose, and more greedy of pleasure and ostentation, was wearied by the obscurity of his existence, and the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... to me. I was anxious to have it all over with. We went out. Once in the street the passing from semi-obscurity to daylight dazed me and I staggered. I began to fear that it would no longer be possible for me to conceal the crime. I kept my eyes steadily fixed upon the ground and took my place in the procession. When all was over, I breathed once more. I was at peace with man. But I was ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Bourbon. The origin of this family fades away in the remoteness of antiquity. Some bold chieftain, far remote in barbarian ages, emerged from obscurity and laid the foundations of the illustrious house. Generation after generation passed away, as the son succeeded the father in baronial pomp, and pride, and power, till the light of history, with its steadily-increasing brilliancy, illumined Europe. The family had often ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... by no means encouraging. In 1893 Colonel French was actually retired on half-pay! It is an admirable system which allows the middle-aged officer to make way for youth in the British army; but the spectacle of a French despatched into civil obscurity at the ripe age of forty-one, has its tragic as well as its comic side. That it acutely depressed him we know. For a time he was almost in despair ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... thwarted his plans, and he resigned his post and returned to Austria, where his brother, the emperor, refused even to see him, probably fearing assassination. Matthias took up his residence at Lintz, where he lived for some time in obscurity and penury. His imperial brother would neither give him help nor employment. The restless prince fretted like ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... a little distance they came to a grove of ancient trees. Mightily tail and well grown these trees were, and the trunk of each could not have been spanned by ten broad men. As they went among these quiet giants into the dappled obscurity and silence, their thoughts became grave, and all the motions of their minds elevated as though they must equal in greatness and dignity those ancient and glorious trees. When they passed through the grove they saw a lovely house before them, built of mellow wood and with a roof ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... but she said no, and managed to mount the stairs, though it was evidently an exertion. Mrs. Carleton's dressing-room, as her son had called it, looked very pleasant when they got there. It was well lighted and warmed and something answering to curtains had been summoned from its obscurity in store-room or garret and hung up at the windows,—"them air fussy English folks had made such a pint of it," the landlord said. Truth was, that Mr. Carleton as well as his mother wanted this room as a retreat for the quiet and privacy which travelling ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... shade. The canal was not above thirty feet wide; the walls stretched upward on both sides for many hundred feet. It was as cool as an ice chamber. When Maskull attempted to plumb the chasm with his eyes, he saw nothing but black obscurity. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... sacred thing Is Beauty curtained from the sight Of the gross world, illumining One only mansion with her light! Unseen by man's disturbing eye,— The flower that blooms beneath the sea, Too deep for sunbeams, doth not lie Hid in more chaste obscurity. So, HINDA. have thy face and mind, Like holy mysteries, lain enshrined. And oh! what transport for a lover To lift the veil that shades them o'er!— Like those who all at once discover In the lone deep some fairy shore Where ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... imagination. In a secret report they pointed out very strongly the dangers likely to arise from this unhealthy stimulus to the imagination. Their verdict does honor to their learning and their common-sense. Mesmer left Paris, and he died in obscurity in 1815. ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... knowledge. The thing that struck the first observer is proved to be less important than he thought it. Scientific names, for all their air of learned universality, are merely fossilized impressions, stereotyped portraits of a single aspect. The decorous obscurity of the ancient languages is used to conceal an immense diversity of principle. Mammal, amphibian, coleoptera, dicotyledon, cryptogam,—all these terms, which, if they were translated into the language of a peasant, would be seen to record very simple observations, ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... retired to Monticello, humiliated and overwhelmed by unjust criticism and undeserved censure. His gloom and melancholy were made still more sad at this period, by the death of his wife, whom he had married in 1772. But the privilege of neither obscurity nor rest was reserved for him. The winter session of 1783 found him again in the General Congress abolishing the English system of coinage and providing for the government of the Northwestern territory, which had been ceded ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... open, simple, childlike. My interior resembles a drop of water, mingling and lost in the ocean, and no more discerning itself,—the sea not only surrounding, but absorbing it. In this divine immensity, the soul discerns and enjoys all objects in God. All is darkness and obscurity in respect to itself; all is light on the part of God. Thus, God is all to me. This has been my state more than thirty years, although in latter years I have realized greater depths in these experiences. ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... memorable night in question, there was a good deal of fog driving over the ocean to increase the obscurity. This rendered Daggett doubly cautious, and he actually hauled up close to the wind, heading off well to the westward, in order to avoid running in among the bergs, in greater uncertainty than the circumstances would seem to require. Of course Roswell ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... humble life was quite familiar once, and not only in Hillsborough. Often he was born out of time, loving ideals of history and too severe with realities around him. In Darrel it is sought to portray a force held in fetters and covered with obscurity, yet strong to make its way and widely felt. His troubles granted, one may easily concede his character, and his troubles are, mainly, no fanciful invention. There is good warrant for them in the court record of a certain ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... Peru yields to the judicious application of these principles of interpretation. Its peculiar obscurity arises from the policy of the Incas to blend the religions of conquered provinces with their own. Thus about 1350 the Inca Pachacutec subdued the country about Lima where the worship of Con and Pachacama prevailed.[176-2] ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... of having married without love," said Fanny, gently. "Oh, I should willingly give up wealth and splendor—I should be quite ready to live in poverty and obscurity with a man ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... around the mouth were branched, feathery arms. The creatures must have been exquisitely beautiful, but they have completely disappeared from the face of the earth, with the exception of a very few, found in the obscurity of the almost fathomless depths of the great ocean. Here they remain as peculiar relics, only preserved by the unvarying conditions in the deep sea from the extinction ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... has put upon the letters of my uncle and father, it is plain that I ought to have understood them as marshalling me to the course of my ancestors; and it has been my gross dullness, joined to the obscurity of expression which they adopted for the sake of security, that has confounded my judgement. Had I yielded to the first generous impulse of indignation when I learned that my honour was practised ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... used for storage, and from the open door there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... you." The Book of Leinster contains a poem attributed to Saint Ciaran relating to the shortness of his life: as it has apparently never been printed it is given here with a translation, so far as the obscurity of the language permits— ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... the eye got attempered; and then, like an autumnal haze clearing away from the face of the landscape, and revealing the glories of green meadow, golden field, and wooded mountain, the obscurity that wrapped pillar and aisle gradually brightened up, and the temple around me began to develope into the noblest proportions and the most impressive grandeur. Some hundred and fifty feet over head was ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... three or four dvorniks[3] belonging to the house, but the young man, to his great satisfaction, came across none of them, and, escaping notice as he entered, mounted at once the stairs on the right hand. He had already made acquaintance with this dark and narrow staircase, and its obscurity was grateful to him; it was gloomy enough to hide him from prying eyes. "If I feel so timid now, what will it be when I come to put my plan into execution?" thought he, as he reached the fourth floor. Here he found the passage ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... good fortune to obtain the additional comfort of a letter from Minnie, which, although it did not throw much light on the proceedings of Captain Ogilvy (for that sapient seaman's proceedings were usually involved in a species of obscurity which light could not penetrate), nevertheless assured him that something was being done in his behalf, and that, if he only kept quiet for a ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... in these days, is not to be put down, and doubtless he feels in his inner breast that wrong which has been done for years to his talents and his services; doubtless he remembers the silence and obscurity to which he has been condemned, while Mr. Balfour has been figuring largely before the general public, in the very situation which Jimmy held himself in days when Mr. Balfour stumbled and trembled from his place below the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... and which, from the heads of the animal being carved in relief around them, had become famous as the receptacles of secret accusations under the name of the Lion's Mouths. Something he dropped into the grinning aperture of the marble, though what, the distance and the obscurity of the gallery prevented Gino from perceiving; and then his form was seen gliding like a phantom down the flight of ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... commonalty, democracy; obscurity; low condition, low life, low society, low company; bourgeoisie; mass of the people, mass of society; Brown Jones and Robinson; lower classes, humbler classes, humbler orders; vulgar herd, common herd; rank and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... which form the ground-work of these volumes have long been kept in the obscurity of manuscript: my studies of South America, of Syria and Palestine, of Iceland, and of Istria, left me scant time for the labour of preparation. Leisure and opportunity have now offered themselves, and I avail myself of them in the hope ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... sir," returned Mrs Wyllys, with a cold salute. "I thank you for your good and kind intentions, but you cannot blame us for not consenting to follow advice which is buried in so much obscurity. Although in our own grounds, we shall be pardoned the rudeness of leaving you. The hour appointed for ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... compass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few words being also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way; allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary without obscurity; thus, 'his present, and your pains, we thank you for' is better than 'we thank you for his present and your pains,' because the Dauphin's gift is by courtesy put before the Ambassador's pains; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... toward the Carolinians. He rode quickly, past the dark shell of a house sunken among pines. There were with him seven or eight persons. The horses' hoofs made a trampling on the Plank road. The woods were deep, the obscurity great. Suddenly out of the brush rang a shot, an accidentally discharged rifle. Some grey soldier among Lane's tensely waiting ranks, dressed in the woods to the right of the road, spoke from the core of a fearful ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... her qualities had not been bought and paid for; they were like some brilliant birthday-present, left at the door by an unknown messenger, to be delightful for ever as an inexhaustible legacy, and amusing for ever from the obscurity of its source. They were superabundantly crude as yet—happily for Olive, who promised herself, as we know, to train and polish them—but they were as genuine as fruit and flowers, as the glow of the fire or the plash of water. For her scrutinising friend Verena had the disposition ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... our pastures. In the course of a month, nearly every acre of the surrounding country was taken, only one or two squaw-men holding out, and these claiming their ranges under Indian rights. The movement was made so aggressive that the usurpers were driven into obscurity, never showing their hand again until after the presidential election ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... commendable that the name of them in the river became as legion, and the original possessors of the waters were steadily extirpated or took despairingly to small rivulets, and led ever after a life of undeserved ignominy and obscurity. There were bass in the river from the Falls of the Potomac, near Georgetown, to a point as near its source as any self-respecting fish could approach without detriment to the buttons on his vest by reason of the shallowness of the water. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... could sweep the pavement, or lie in rich folds at the bottom of a carriage, unadorned by an imposing flounce that almost covered the robe; a little later, the one sober flounce was driven into obscurity by twenty coquettish small ones; and these were displaced by primly puffed bands; which gave way to fanciful "keys" running up the sides of the dress (where they seemed to have no possible right); and those vanished when double ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... had vanished, now that I found my line of conduct traced for me. The chief thing at present was to get something to eat. So we pushed ahead up the hill in the ever-deepening obscurity. We walked on in silence for what seemed an interminable distance. Once I fancied I had mistaken directions and was about to despair when the tramp of feet coming toward us revived hope. A second later a brawny arm turned a lantern into my face and a huge police dog growled close ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... time thereafter attempt or enterprise the destruction, invasion, detriment, or annoyance to the said plantation or inhabitants." Nothing was said of religious liberty. The government may have relied upon its power to restrain it, and the emigrants on their distance and obscurity ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... tocsin of insurrection tolls its dismal knell in the towers of Paris. Through scenes surpassing fable, the king and his family escape to the hospitable shores of England. Here, in obscurity and exile, he reaches the end of life's journey, and passes away to the unknown of the spirit-land. Such is the wonderful story which we have endeavored to compress within the limits of these brief pages. Every event here narrated is sustained by ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... the spring of 1916 that Kantara dropped its mantle of obscurity and began to take its place as our principal base of operations. From then onwards the place hummed with ever-increasing activity, for the danger of a further attempt on the Canal was now somewhat remote, and work could be carried on in ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... explanations of the Bible and the ritual laws for Sabbath and festivals; it provides a convenient summary of the six hundred and thirteen precepts into which the duties of the Law were arranged. But over and above all this the genius of Kalir soars to poetic heights. So much has been said of Kalir's obscurity that one quotation must, in fairness be given of Kalir at his simplest and best. The passage is taken from a hymn sung on the seventh day of Tabernacles, the day of the ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... so wise as to make their churches extremely dark. At first you can see nothing. Incense floats heavily about you, filling the air, and the coolness is like a draught of fresh, perfumed water. But gradually the church detaches itself from the obscurity and you see great columns, immensely lofty. The spaces are large and simple, giving an impression of vast room; and the choir, walled up on three sides, in the middle of the nave as in all Spanish cathedrals, by obstructing the view gives an appearance of ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... dashed past him on its way across the glade. No, so far as the ape was concerned, the signs indicated that it had waded into the water far enough to bend down and drink, and then had been suddenly and very badly frightened. Again Phil gazed about him, searching the obscurity on the far side of the cave, and now he noticed that there was another passage over there, a roughly circular hole about five feet in diameter, running still farther into the heart of the rock. He thought he would like to get across and explore that hole; but how was he ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... experience in managing public business, and from the great vicissitudes of fortune which I have encountered. And this divination I am the more inclined to trust, from the fact that it never once deceived me in the late troubles, in spite of their obscurity and confusion. I would have told you what events I foretold, were I not afraid to be thought to be making up a story after the event Yet, after all, I have numberless witnesses to the fact that I warned Pompey not to form a union with Caesar, and afterwards not to sever it. By this union ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... made himself master of the art of living was the Real man of the Taoist. At birth he enters the realm of dreams only to awaken to reality at death. He tempers his own brightness in order to merge himself into the obscurity of others. He is "reluctant, as one who crosses a stream in winter; hesitating as one who fears the neighbourhood; respectful, like a guest; trembling, like ice that is about to melt; unassuming, ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... to be paralleled with those which made Cyrus the son of a Persian of moderate rank, and the foster-child of a herdsman. There is always in the East a tendency towards romance and exaggeration; and when a great monarch emerges from a comparatively humble position, the humility and obscurity of his first condition are intensified, to make the contrast more striking between his original low estate and his ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... woman. Many are the references to the Creator's comforting presence and help. Note these lines from a letter written by Margaret Winthrop to her husband in 1637: "Sure I am, that all shall work to the best to them that love God, or rather are loved of him. I know he will bring light out of obscurity, and make his righteousness shine forth as clear as noonday. Yet I find in myself an adverse spirit, and a trembling heart, not so willing to submit to the will of God as I desire. There is a time to plant, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... those Jacobite chieftains whose history has sunk into obscurity, partly from the difficulty of obtaining information concerning their career, after the contest was at an end. Amongst those who met Lord Mar in the hunting-field, but who afterwards became neutral,[76] although most of his clan joined in the Rebellion, was ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... time the dishes question was disposed of and everything had been tidied up and the fire once more attended to, the darkness of an October night had fallen. Everything outside the circle of our firelight was veiled in obscurity. There was no moon and it was a little cloudy, at least, the stars did not seem to show much. Very soon as we sat on our benches in front of the girls' cabin, we began to hear various wild notes from the great somber ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... failings as plainly as any one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments—a moral and intellectual ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Purchase had strengthened the Administration with all classes of people; Jefferson and George Clinton had received 162 electoral votes to 14 for Pinckney and Rufus King; Burr had gone into retirement and was soon to go into obscurity; the Livingstons, filling high places, were distinguishing themselves at home and abroad as able judges and successful diplomatists; DeWitt Clinton, happy and eminently efficient as the mayor of New York, seemed to have before him a bright and prosperous career as a skilful ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... donkey not much bigger than a cat, and they drive in the Chiaja; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous carriages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, and so the furious procession goes. For two hours rank and wealth, and obscurity and poverty clatter along side by side in the wild procession, and then go home ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... black clouds gathered about the giant's middle, and burst into a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning, causing such a pother that Hercules found it impossible to distinguish a word. Only the giant's immeasurable legs were to be seen, standing up into the obscurity of the tempest; and, now and then, a momentary glimpse of his whole figure, mantled in a volume of mist. He seemed to be speaking, most of the time; but his big, deep, rough voice chimed in with the reverberations ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... brought relief. But, when she awoke from a prolonged period of unconsciousness, the brightness of her reason was gone. Since then, she has never been clearly conscious of what was passing around her, and well for her, I have sometimes thought it was, for even obscurity of intellect is a blessing in her case. Ah, me! I always get the heart-ache, ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... the Khedive to send for General Gordon cannot be mistaken; nor is there any obscurity as to those which led General Gordon to accept a task in which he was bound to run counter to the views of every other European authority, and still more to the fixed policy of his and other Governments. In the first place, Gordon being the servant ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... our philosophers; that is to say, a great many bad things to a very few good ones. I could prove, in short, that if we behold a handful of rich and powerful men seated on the pinnacle of fortune and greatness, while the crowd grovel in obscurity and want, it is merely because the first prize what they enjoy but in the same degree that others want it, and that, without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy the minute the people ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... hydrographical regions—the North Pacific, between Polynesia and the Asiatic and American shores; and doubtless the store of observations upon the currents of this region, which she will accumulate, when compared with what we know of the North Atlantic, will throw a powerful light upon the present obscurity ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... recognize Young's authority, and for this contumacy he was excommunicated and delivered to the Devil "to be buffeted in the flesh for a thousand years." Returning to Pittsburg, Rigdon led a life of utter obscurity, and finally died in Friendship, Allegany county, New York, July 14, 1876. Cowdery, Whitner and Harris either deserted or were cut off. The Legislature of Illinois repealed the charter of Nauvoo in 1845. Most of the Mormons gathered at Council Bluffs, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... conscience. It was her habitual practice to reprove sin, and to warn sinners wherever she found them. At the time of her death, she had under her care a number of pious young men, preparing for the ministry. These she had looked after, and brought out of obscurity. As soon as their piety had been sufficiently tested, she would bring them to the notice of her Christian friends. She persuaded pious teachers to give them gratuitous instruction, and pious booksellers to supply them with books. In the same way, she procured their board, in the families of ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... mentioned already the obscurity surrounding the history of the Mahayanist Canon in India and it may seem to throw doubt on the authenticity of these scriptures. Unauthentic they certainly are in the sense that European criticism is not likely to accept as historical ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... One thought one heard the terrible statue Legion marching onward. This tread drew near; it drew still nearer, and stopped. It seemed as though the breathing of many men could be heard at the end of the street. Nothing was to be seen, however, but at the bottom of that dense obscurity there could be distinguished a multitude of metallic threads, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about like those indescribable phosphoric networks which one sees beneath one's closed eyelids, in the first mists of slumber at the moment when one is dropping off ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to the Cimmerii, or their country; extremely and perpetually dark. The Cimmerii were an ancient people of the land now called the Crimea, and their country being subject to heavy fogs, was fabled to be involved in deep and continual obscurity. Ancient poets also mention a people of this name who dwelt in a valley near Lake Avernus, in Italy, which the sun was ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... twilight. Then, lights begin to shine in Genoa, and on the country road; and the revolving lanthorn out at sea there, flashing, for an instant, on this palace front and portico, illuminates it as if there were a bright moon bursting from behind a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity. And this, so far as I know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid it after ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Darkness came down on the face of the waters. Oh, the horrors of that night. The sea roared and hissed, and we knew that those mountain waves were following us as before, though the sight could scarcely distinguish the vast watery masses which, in the obscurity, seemed doubled in height. That a delicate girl should exist through the time appeared indeed surprising; yet, anxious as I was, I could discover no failing of strength or energy ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... great powers, our kings do not offer the example of a single individual redeeming by brilliant personal qualities the vice of subalternity, to which his position condemned him; not a single one who has ever evinced any grand national aspiration. Around them in the obscurity of their courts, gather idle or retrograde courtiers, men who call themselves noble, but who have never been able to constitute an aristocracy. An aristocracy is a compact independent body, representing in itself an idea, and from one extremity ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... and involved, the greater the pleasure they have. They will carry on a conversation for hours by hints, suggestions, ambiguous terms, allusions, phrases that may mean anything or nothing, and then leave at the end, in obscurity, the whole matter, which could have been explained and made perfectly clear and settled on a satisfactory basis in a few short sentences. It's a petty, abominable ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... were flying, and I had stood up a moment to let the blood down into half-frozen toes, when a shadow seemed to pass over my head. The next moment there was a splash, followed by loud quacks of alarm from the decoy. All I could make out, in the obscurity under the ridge, was a flutter of wings that rose heavily from the water, taking my duck with them. Only the anchor string prevented the marauder from getting away with his booty. Not wishing to shoot, for the decoy was a valuable one, I shouted vigorously, and sent out the ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... mother ever knew the amount of suffering which he endured thereby. He became plaintive and wrote poetry, and spent his pocket-money in publishing it, which again caused him sorrow, not for the loss of his money, but by the obscurity of his poetry. He had to confess to himself that God had not conferred upon him the gift of writing poetry; and having acknowledged so much, he never again put two lines together. Of all this he said nothing; but the sense of failure made ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... sepulchre, becomes jealous of Adeline, the girl they have befriended. It later transpires that La Motte has turned highwayman and stores his booty in this secluded spot. The visits are so closely shrouded in obscurity, and we have so exhausted our imagination in picturing dark possibilities, that the simple solution falls disappointingly short of our expectations. The next thrill is produced by the arrival of two strangers, the wicked marquis and the noble hero, without whom the tale ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... and science, with the solution of our enigma anything but complete, we resort last of all to the argument from analogy. If this can illumine the obscurity, it will all be on the positive side of the inquiry. At present the question resembles a half-moon: analogy may show that the affirmative is waxing towards a full-orbed conviction. We open with Huyghens, a Dutch astronomer of note, who, while he thinks it certain "that the moon has ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... on a scarf over her bare shoulders glittered iridescently in the light streaming from her room. Of Thor she could discern little more than the whiteness of his face and of his evening shirt-front from the obscurity in which he kept himself. A minute or more elapsed before ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Macnooder about faced and stared at Stover, who all the while had remained in quiet obscurity, dangling ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... blessed as to be counted worthy to be co-worker with God in the beginnin' of the world's redemption; since He called her from the quiet obscurity of womanly rest and peace into the blessed martyrdom of renunciation and toil and sufferin', all to help a world that cared nothin' for her, that cried out shame ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... take in, in a happy view, four men playing cards at a square table. One of these men was the boy's father, another was Mein Herr Joseph Haydn, and the other two players are lost in the fog of obscurity. Did they ever know what a wonderful game they played, as little Franz Liszt, sitting on a corner of the table, listened to their talk and admired the buttons on the coat of the Kappellmeister? After the card-game Haydn sat at the piano and played, and the boy, just three years old, thought ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... armchair, and the sallow little man would curl himself up, and, smoking his long clay, discuss the weights of the next big handicap. If Ginger contradicted him he would go to the press and extract from its obscurity a package of Bell's Life or a ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... verification of the meteorological theory of causation, more positive and rational ideas will prevail;—obscurity will, in a measure, give place to clearer and more exact perceptions of the character and relations of diseases, and a corresponding efficiency in treatment may ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... than the writers of the Augustan age; and the didactic strain, in which he mostly prosecutes his subjects, has a tendency to render him sententious; but the expression of his thoughts is neither enfeebled by decoration, nor involved in obscurity by conciseness. He is not more rich in artificial ornament than in moral admonition. Seneca has been charged with depreciating former writers, to render himself more conspicuous; a charge which, so far as appears from ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... foot by foot, seeking the friendly shelter and obscurity of a grove of firs just above him. Twice he sank to his knees, a numbing pain at the base of his brain, his breath roaring, his lips dry, but each time he rose and struggled on, eager to reach the green and grateful shelter of the forest, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... atmosphere and customs of an aristocratic past than any other single area in the city—should have been the home of the well-beloved William Dean Howells. One also likes to recall that Jenny Lind was married at number 20. Chestnut Street—which after a period of social obscurity is again coming into its own—possesses Julia Ward Howe's house at number 13, that of Motley the historian at 16, and of Parkman at 50. In this hasty map we have gone up and down the hill, but the cross-street, Charles, although not so attractive, is nevertheless as ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... difficult to understand, and his cryptic utterances earned for him the doubtful title of the Dark. But his champions have pointed out that his obscurity of diction was not the outcome of pride or intentional assumption of mystery, but of the genuine difficulty he found in giving expression to his novel thoughts. He waxes vehement in his struggles to subdue his language to his purposes, his vague intuitions, his movements in ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the rear found it impossible to see, and groped blindly, feeling their way after their leader. Had the course to be traversed been a straight line, the difficulty would have been much less; but to make so sharp a turn as awaited them at the bend was no easy feat under the prevailing obscurity. As the Hartford attempted it the downward current caught her on the port bow, swung her head round toward the batteries, and nearly threw her on shore, her stem touching for a moment. The combined powers of her own engine and that of the Albatross, her consort, were then brought ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... obscurity of Mrs. Inchbald's career has not, of course, been the only reason for the neglect of her work. The merits of A Simple Story are of a kind peculiarly calculated to escape the notice of a generation of readers brought up on the fiction of the nineteenth century. That fiction, infinitely ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... a retired spot, inoffensive from its obscurity, safe in its remoteness from the haunts of despots, where the little church of Leyden might enjoy freedom of conscience? Behold the mighty regions over which in peaceful conquest—victoria sine clade—they have borne the banners of ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... social institutions of the Hindus. The translation of the Rig-Veda-Sonhita is valuable for the scholar who wishes to study the most ancient belief, opinions, and modes of the Hindus, so far as they can be gathered from hymns addressed to the deities. At the same time, their mystery or obscurity, increased by remoteness of years, is perhaps so considerable, that it will require peculiar learning to profit by the materials this most ancient and important of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... my Charge, where, among other undiscover'd valuable Authors, I pitch'd upon Tom Thumb and Tom Hickathrift, Authors indeed more proper to adorn the Shelves of Bodley or the Vatican, than to be confin'd to the Retirement and Obscurity of a private Study. I have perus'd the first of these with an infinite Pleasure, and a more than ordinary Application, and have made some Observations on it, which may not, I hope, prove unacceptable to the Publick; and however it may have been ridicul'd, and look'd ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... ask for the reasons which call for this new theory of transmutation. The beginning of things must needs lie in obscurity, beyond the bounds of proof, though within those of conjecture or of analogical inference. Why not hold fast to the customary view, that all species were directly, instead of indirectly, created after their respective kinds, as we now behold them—and ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Pizarro and his enterprise, with his recommendation, to the Council of the Indies. Yet a year passed, and nothing was done. Pizarro was fast sinking into obscurity, and he would likewise have sunk into despair, if he had been less stout of heart. Then, as Queen Isabella had aided Columbus, so the queen of Charles V. came to the assistance of Pizarro, and caused ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... as to this latter point. Some years ago a distinguished scholar, when engaged in translating Goethe's Faust, came to a passage involved in considerable obscurity, and which he found was interpreted very differently by different admirers of the poem. Unable, under these circumstances, to procure any satisfactory solution of the poet's meaning, the translator applied to Goethe himself, and received from him the candid reply which we think it far from improbable ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... is coloured with rhetoric, and occasionally with poetic embellishment, but is otherwise terse and vigorous. The extreme curtness he cultivated often leads him into something bordering on obscurity. His habit of alluding to sources of information instead of being at the pains to describe them at length, while it adds to the neatness of his periods, detracts from its value to ourselves. He rises but rarely into eloquence, and still more rarely shows dramatic power. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... in a mysterious obscurity, from which she first emerged into the light as an actually existing being, at her present visit to London. Two years ago there appeared a romance, 'Jane Eyre,' by 'Currer Bell,' which threw all England into astonishment. Everybody was tormenting himself to discover ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... they had reached Rome, where the Duca di Crinola at present lived, and where he was at present a member of the Italian Cabinet, the mother had told her son all that she knew, having throughout the telling of the story unconsciously manifested to him her own desire to remain in obscurity, and to bear the name which had been hers for five-and-twenty years; but at the same time so to manage that he should return to England bearing the title to which by his birth she believed him ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... excluded. I could not but lament, that although the Coast of Africa has now been known and frequented by the Europeans for more than two hundred years, yet the Negroes still remain entire strangers to the doctrines of our holy religion. We are anxious to draw from obscurity the opinions and records of antiquity, the beauties of Arabian and Asiatic literature, &c.; but while our libraries are thus stored with the learning of various countries, we distribute with a parsimonious ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... Venetia; 'you have a duty to perform, and you must perform it. Besides, I do not wish the name of Cadurcis to sink again into obscurity. I shall look forward with interest to Lord Cadurcis taking the oaths and his seat. It will ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... enjoy the powers which were once given to the favorites of royalty; they rise and fall with majorities in legislative assemblies. In such a country as America the President is king, but only for a limited period. He descends from a position of transcendent dignity to the obscurity of private life. His ministers are his secretaries, without influence, comparatively, in the halls of Congress,—neither made nor unmade by the legislature, although dependent on the Senate for confirmation, but once appointed, independent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... Then some day I'll be a sergeant with three stripes upon my arm, Zig zag, like the old rail fences on Dad Posey's Country farm. Call me early, though I'm dreaming, wake me up that I may see How the sun that sinks in grandeur rises in obscurity. I've been a private, bunkie, such as privates seldom are, Borne my share of public censure, let it heal without a scar. Till upon the fair escutcheon of my name and humble rank Captain says he'll add the title and a stripe on ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... houses on either hand, and Sir Guy deemed it wiser to move at a reasonable pace, for fear of attracting suspicion in a neighborhood already aroused by rumors of the man-hunt which had begun. They could count upon the obscurity ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... at the door side of the room another photograph stood in a glass stand. His back had been to it, and the soft light of the lamp left a great part of the room in obscurity, but he saw it now, and something bitter that lay hidden at the bottom of his heart rose to his throat. It was a portrait of Drake, and at the sight of it he laughed ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... their good looks, instead of lecturing them on the sin of vanity; and promise that they should sing in the chorus, or dance in the ballet if their legs were good, when he should have been discoursing about the dangers of the vain world, and pointing the moral of happy humble obscurity. On these occasions, Lady Fulda, who was always beside him, suffered a good deal. She would pull him up in a whisper which he sometimes made her repeat, until everyone in the place had heard it but himself, and then, at last, when he did understand, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... when a man in a melancholy mood is left tete-a-tete with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy. And that, I suppose, is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with penknives. I remember as though ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... executing the ministers of his father,[18] he continued it by sending his own to the scaffold. The Tower of London was both palace and prison, and statesmen passed swiftly from one to the other; in silent obscurity alone lay salvation. Religion and politics, rank and profession made little difference; priest and layman, cardinal-archbishop and "hammer of the monks," men whom Henry had raised from the mire, and peers, over whose heads they were placed, were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More, Cromwell ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... was as if blocked up; the fog, sticking to the panes of glass, formed a perfect wall of gloom. Behind this wall stretched emptiness, the unknown. A great noise, a loud roar, alone arose in the silence and spread through the obscurity. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... luminous, and there were instants when it seemed to touch her eyes and her mouth with an edge of light. Beyond this her complexities remained for him as on the day when he first saw her—if she was obscure it was the obscurity of a star seen through a fog—and the desire to understand lost itself presently in the bewilderment of his misapprehension. At last, however, he had put her, as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce her to a formula with the despairing ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... simple talk brought me back to the level of common life. My own nervous weeping, which I could not control, served to soothe me. My casement, almost covered by broad, clustering vine-leaves, preserved a cool, dim obscurity in my room. The village children seemed all at once to have forgotten how to scream and shout, and no sound from the street disturbed me. Even the morning and evening bell rang with a deep, muffled tone, which scarcely stirred the silence. I heard afterward that Jean had swathed ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... esteem of his countrymen. I., with an intellect adapted to the exploration of the mysteries of science, of which he gave good evidence, but lacking in all the elements of strength of character lead a life of uniform failure, obscurity and poverty, and yet I felt assured that a different education in youth which would have developed his manhood and ambition and would have carried him to eminence. J. is a man of superior intellect, benevolence ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Wharf. It was expected the same would have been carried away by the tide, but the water being then ebbing, it was left behind. There were also some lighters lying over against the dock, and one of the lightermen walking then on board, saw them throw the pail into the dark; but by the obscurity of the night, the distance, and having no suspicion, they did not apprehend anything of the matter. Having thus done, they returned home again to Mrs. Hayes's where they arrived about twelve o'clock and being let in, found Mrs. Hayes had been very busily employed in washing ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... without some hesitation, with the noble earl and his adherents, in the conduct of public affairs. And how did he reward their confidence? He was careful to retain the question respecting his real sentiments upon the business of America, in as much obscurity as ever. He wrote officially a letter to sir Guy Carleton, which has never seen the light, by which that officer was induced to declare the American independency already irreversibly recognised ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... fiasco, unless, as I have stated before, it was a preconceived decoy for some other purpose. But whether it were strategy or decoy, it taxes one's intelligence to conceive why the French fleet did not proceed to bombard the British possessions on arrival, then steal into safe obscurity and make their way back to European waters. The evasion of Nelson's scouts in any case was a matter of adroit cunning. Had a man of Nelson's nimble wits and audacious courage commanded the enemy's fleet, the islands would ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... silk scarf around his neck, concealing the lower part of his face, and a silk hat pushed down almost over his eyes. I saw his little nervous glance up and down the street, I saw him push past the commissionnaire as though in a hurry to gain the semi-obscurity of the car. I stopped short upon the pavement, motionless for one brief and fatal moment. Then I turned back and hastened to the side of the car. I ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to others as any alien town would seem to me. There is something, though, you must grant us, a heritage peculiarly ours. Amid our packed tenements, into the dark mass where poorer London huddles as my shipping parish, are set our docks. Embayed in the obscurity are those areas of captured day, reservoirs of light brimmed daily by the tides of the sun, silver mirrors through which one may leave the dark floor of Poplar for radiant other worlds. We have our ships and docks, and the River at Blackwall when night and the flood come together, and walls and ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... remarked, a fine place to eat in, and a great place for kindness; but, Lord, what a silly thing is popularity! I envy the cool obscurity of Skerryvore. If it even paid, said Meanness! and was abashed at himself. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a special Providence for children and idiots," said Laura gently. We didn't ask her whether she meant us or Tony McGinnis or both. There are some things better left in obscurity. I'd have probably said something much sharper than that if anybody had made off with my Thanksgiving ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... came upon Fanny, in the hollow torn by the lamps out of an obscurity which whirled like a dense pillar above her, seated on her mudguard, blanched and still as an image, the iron bar for a weapon in her right hand, the torch ready as a ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... clear-cut, as no proper shadows should be. Everything that was handsome seemed ten times handsomer and less attractive in the glaring splendor; and everything that was ugly seemed ten times uglier, and everything was either handsome or ugly. There was no soft blending, or kind obscurity, or elusive mistiness in that searching glitter. The only things that held their own individuality were the firs—for the fir is the tree of mystery and shadow, and yields never to ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S. Treasury Comptroller's understanding. The very fires of the hereafter could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it. In the days I speak of he never could be made to comprehend why ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... prudent enough to promote him. It is a recognition of the merit that others have discovered, and a wise administration marches with the inventions of the age it lives in. Kostalergi's chief was consequently recalled, suffered to fall back upon his previous obscurity—he had been a commission-agent for a house in the Greek trade—and the Prince of Delos gazetted as Minister Plenipotentiary of Greece, with the first class of St. Salvador, in recognition of his services to the state; no one being indiscreet enough to add that the aforesaid services were comprised ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... can think of is to send to an old servant of her father's house—the same who, as Tutor, preserved the child Orestes on the fatal night—now an aged herdsman forced to hide himself in obscurity, and ask him to help them in this emergency. Exit Peasant to the fields to find the old Tutor; Electra into the ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... yes! If he had been in Lord Everscourt's position, how gladly she would have been his wife! but his picture of the life which the must share if she joined in her lot with him sent a chill of dismay through her veins. Ten years of poverty and obscurity, ten years' work and waiting, with no possibility of success until youth and beauty had fled, and she was an uninteresting, middle-aged woman! Rosalind shivered at the thought, and summoned up courage to protest ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... As medical men in this Country employ the word infection and contagion in various senses, I shall, generally substitute transmissible or communicable, to avoid obscurity.] ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... farther observation, being resolved, by private remonstrance to Achilles Tatius, to engage him to prevent a meeting which might be fatal to the one or the other of two brave men. The town now darkened before them, sparkling, at the same time, through its obscurity, by the many lights which illuminated the houses of the citizens. The royal cavalcade held their way to the Golden Gate, where the trusty centurion put his guard ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the night advanced, and the soft light of the moon was playing on the waters, adding a semi-mysterious obscurity to the excitement of the scene. The two-oared boat had evidently been overtaken by that carrying six oars, and, after a short conference, the first had returned reluctantly towards the land, while ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Emily. Wuthering Heights appeared also, and nothing happened. It was bound in the same volume with Anne's humble tale. Its lightning should have scorched and consumed Agnes Grey, but nothing happened. Ellis and Acton Bell remained equals in obscurity, recognized only by their association with the tremendous Currer. When it came to publishing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and association became confusion, Charlotte and Anne went up to London to prove their separate identity. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... answer and yet, stronger than before, was the certainty that someone was near at hand, that a pair of eyes were regarding him through the obscurity of the night. So strong was the emotion, and so strongly did it recall the emotion of a few nights ago when he had felt the influence of a strange woman's eyes, that he leaped to his feet. On the instant ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... the danger of pride, and necessity of perseverance and constant watchfulness. (T. 6, p. 94.) After several homilies on certain texts of Jeremy, Daniel, &c., we have his two elegant discourses On the Obscurity of the Prophets, in which he shows that the wisdom of Providence is displayed; for too great perspicuity would not have so well answered the various ends of the Old Law. The advantages of public prayer are here strongly set forth; and in the second the saint declaims against detraction, a ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... precipitate and rickety stairs led upward into an obscurity rendered deeper by a single gas jet burning low on the ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... from which both it and the religion which followed it are named, is variously rendered Reason, Nature, the Way; the last is the nearest, though by no means a full rendering of it. By the manifold operations attributed to it, it reminds us of the Indian Brahma, and the riddle of Lao's obscurity has been proposed to be solved by the supposition that he was dealing with a doctrine imported from India which Chinese forms of speech could but imperfectly express.[6] Tao is not personal, but something that precedes all persons, all particular beings. It was there ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... or withdraw into obscurity. In the following passage it is used in the collegiate ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the mild sun of prosperity: but it is the faithful page of biography that transmits to future generations the poverty, pain, wrong, hunger, wretchedness and torment, and every nameless misery that has been endured by those who have lived in obscurity, and groped their lonely way through a long series of unpropitious events, with but little help besides the light of nature. While the gilded monument displays in brightest colors the vanity of pomp, and the emptiness ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... hours had elapsed since the departure of the two spies. The little town of Saint Ame was plunged in profound obscurity. The wind raged down the narrow street, and the roar and rush of the torrent ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... burdened with the care of the lame girl, and laden with the fish. The purple shades of twilight soon clouded the scene, deepened by the heavy masses of foliage, which cast greater obscurity upon their narrow path; for they had now left the oak-flat and entered the gorge of the valley. The utter loneliness of the path, the grotesque shadows of the trees that stretched in long array across the steep banks on either side, taking now this, now that wild and fanciful ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... name of a nation, and he is entitled to remembrance, on the soil which was once the home of his fathers. And though linked with a melancholy association, as connected with the waning history of a people that once laid a claim to greatness, but are now fast passing into obscurity, it is not on this account the less attractive, but presents another ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... and back!" This only meant that nothing could surprise one who had such an experience. As to the effect on Granny Marrable, Mrs. Lamprey said no—quite the reverse. Once it was Providence, there you stuck, and there was no moving you! There was some obscurity about this saying; but no doubt its esoteric meaning was, that once you accounted for anything by direct Divine interposition, you stood committed to a controversial attitude which would render you an obstructive to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... counter-attack. I was watching the operations from Hlangwani Hill through a powerful telescope. As the light died my companions climbed down the rocks to the Cavalry camp and left me alone staring at the bright flashes of the guns which stabbed the obscurity on all sides. Suddenly, above the booming of the cannon, there arose the harsh rattling roar of a tremendous fusillade. Without a single intermission this continued for several hours. The Howitzer ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... suspicious, he sought to shackle public opinion—the fearful hydra to all ambitious aspirants—to know all secrets of the time and states, and render one half of the great nations he held in his grasp spies upon the other! The most profligate principles of Machiavel sink into obscurity when contrasted with the Imperial Espionage of Napoleon. When no longer moving squadrons in the tented field—whole armies, like so many pieces of chess in the hands of a dexterous player—he sat upon his throne, reclined upon his lounge or smoked in his bath, organized and moved the most difficult ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the ground-work of these volumes have long been kept in the obscurity of manuscript: my studies of South America, of Syria and Palestine, of Iceland, and of Istria, left me scant time for the labour of preparation. Leisure and opportunity have now offered themselves, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... was in this way transferred from the holding of the Church to that of nobles and gentry. Not only were the older houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was erected from among the dependants of the Court. The Russells and the Cavendishes are familiar instances of families which rose from obscurity through the enormous grants of Church-land made to Henry's courtiers. The old baronage was thus hardly crushed before a new aristocracy took its place. "Those families within or without the bounds of the peerage," observes ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... would reign once more in the land, and an age of penitence and Lenten self-abasement would succeed the orgies of the Restoration; while the light loves of Whitehall, the noble ladies, the impudent actresses, would vanish into obscurity. Angela's loyal young heart was full of faith in the King. She was ready to believe that his sins were the sins of a man whose head had been turned by the sudden change from exile to a throne, from poverty to wealth, from dependence upon his Bourbon cousin and his friends in Holland to the lavish ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... worthy to reign after me. What you call inability, I call rebellion, for you cannot excuse yourself on the ground of the weakness of your mind and the state of your health. We have struggled from obscurity through the toil of war, which has taught other nations to know and respect us, and yet you will not even hear of military exercises. If you do not alter your conduct, know that I shall deprive you of my succession. ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... shall answer before God, I will employ myself to the utmost of my power in their defence and for the extirpation of heresy, the planting of the Catholic religion, the delivery of our country of infinite murders, wicked and detestable policies by which this kingdom was hitherto governed, nourished in obscurity and ignorance, maintained in barbarity and incivility, and consequently of infinite evils which were too lamentable to be rehearsed. And seeing these are motives most laudable before any men of consideration, and before the Almighty most meritorious, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... Billingsfield. John, he thought, could take no possible interest in knowing about her, and moreover, Mrs. Goddard herself was most anxious never to be mentioned abroad. She had come to Billingsfield to live in complete obscurity, and the good vicar had promised that as far as he and his wife were concerned she should have her wish. To tell even John Short, his own beloved pupil, would be to some extent a breach of faith, and there was assuredly no earthly reason why John should ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... something written in a book. It was an old account book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of the candle to get a stronger light on it. The shadow of the book would then throw into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a number of faces and figures; for besides the reader, eight other men were present. Seven of them sat against the rough log walls, silent, motionless, and the room being small, not very far from the table. By extending an arm any one of them could have touched the ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... literary men, Milton died in obscurity, though not in debt. Lovelace died in a cellar. Butler, the author of "Hudibras," died of starvation in Rose Alley, the same place in which Dryden was beaten by hired ruffians. Otway was hunted by bailiffs to his last hiding-place on ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... for want of evidence to make good certain claims. It is not forth-coming, and he alleges that it was destroyed by the Spaniards when they captured Fort Caroline. Be that as it may, he who should be loaded with honors and riches now suffers obscurity and poverty, and perchance thou art the very one who ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... aristocratic brown-stone mansion, which was to have been a testimonial of esteem from admiring friends; though all these fade before me like the beautiful mirage that proves only an illusion of the senses, yet I am equal to this act of self-denial, and submit to pass my life in obscurity, unknown ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... destroyed. The large bay placed over the small front door gives a mysterious light in the nave of the church, and sends the rays directly upon the main altar or dagoba, leaving the lateral columns and porticoes in a semi-obscurity well calculated to inspire ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... of their teaching, as well as by an extensive experience in managing public business, and from the great vicissitudes of fortune which I have encountered. And this divination I am the more inclined to trust, from the fact that it never once deceived me in the late troubles, in spite of their obscurity and confusion. I would have told you what events I foretold, were I not afraid to be thought to be making up a story after the event Yet, after all, I have numberless witnesses to the fact that I ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... I think Theobalds' interpretation right, namely, that 'thirsty entrance' means the dry penetrability, or bibulous drought, of the soil. The obscurity of this passage is of the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... the scene of his escape came back to him so vividly that he wondered why it had ever been blurred to obscurity. ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... darkly green where it lay beneath spreading branches; everywhere limpid, showing the pebbles or the sand in its cool depths. Infinite were the varyings of light and shade, from a dazzling gleam on the middle water, to the dense obscurity of leafy nooks. On either hand was a wood, thick with undergrowth; great pines, spruces, and larches, red-berried rowans, crowding on the steep sides of the ravine; trees of noble stature, shadowing fern and flower, towering ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... heard of his name, and certainly no stationer would have been mad enough to stick B.-P.'s photograph in his window. Whether Baden-Powell, when he awakes to it, will prefer his present fame to the happy obscurity of those distant days, is a subject for speculation. I could say definitely, if I chose, which condition is preferred by the proud mother of as gallant a son as ever rode ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... bloody, desperate fight ensued. For, after the first onslaught, in which Dawson (dropping his axe, as being useless at such close quarters) and I grappled each our man, the rest, knowing not friend from foe in the obscurity, and urged on by fear, fell upon each other,—this one striking out at the first he met, and that giving as good as he had taken,—and so all fell a-mauling and belabouring with such lust of vengeance that presently the whole place was of an uproar with the ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... ideas. Persons who are obstinate till they can give up their notions with a safe conscience, are troublesome intimates. Often too the cold tardiness of decision is only the strict balancing of scepticism or candour, while obscurity as frequently may arise from the deficiency of previous knowledge in the listener. It was said that NEWTON in conversation did not seem to understand his own writings, and it was supposed that his memory ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... sky was covered with stormy clouds. The serenity we had admired a little while before, entirely disappeared, and gave place to the most gloomy obscurity. The surface of the ocean presented all the signs of a coming tempest. The horizon on the side of the Desert had the appearance of a long hideous chain of mountains piled on one another, the summits of which ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... Lieutenant, Bullock-Bashee or Captain, Tiah-Bashee or Colonel, and Aga or General. For among these strange people every valiant and aspiring Soldier,—I wish 'twas so in England,—though taken yesterday from the Plough, may be considered as Heir-Apparent to the Throne. Nor are they ashamed of the obscurity of their birth. This Mahomet Bassa, in a dispute he once had with the Spanish Consul, said: "My mother sold Sheep's Trotters, and my father Neat's Tongues; but they would have been ashamed to expose for sale on their stalls a Tongue so worthless as thine." Mahomet ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... made funnier still by Sarah's attitude, by the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else—the spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in the small salon de lecture that had, for the most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... long when a tapping was heard at the widow's door, and my grandfather, starting up, retired into a distant corner of the room, behind a big napery press, and sat down in the obscurity of its shadow. Elspa remained in her seat beside the table, on which a candle was burning, and, as it stood behind the door, she could not be seen by any coming in till they had passed into the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... however, that meaningless words have always been the favorite components of verbal charms, whose power, in the opinion of medieval conjurers, was in direct ratio to their obscurity;[38:3] and this fact is well shown in the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... farm with its hideous false facade. I could not resist glancing at her, though I said nothing. Her eyes were on her hands, held loosely in her lap. She did not look at me until, with another lurch, we had swung about again, and all but the road in front of us was drawn back swiftly into obscurity. I found that she had turned towards me then, and, as I laid one hand across her arm, I felt her relax to a relieved trembling. Before us the night crowded down over the countryside, masking its ugliness like a film, through which our lights cut ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his retribution. Hunted like a wild beast to his lair, he was surrounded by his pursuers, forsaken by his accomplice, the barn to which he had fled fired, then shot to death, lingering several hours in intense suffering and his remains consigned to impenetrable obscurity. Retribution came to him before his victim was buried. So be it ever! His accomplices are known and must ...
— Abraham Lincoln - A Memorial Discourse • Rev. T. M. Eddy
... Finally, in a spasm of heroic self-sacrifice, he takes poison with the alleged purpose of saving the heroine's life. We never quite gather how his suicide should serve this end, but then the whole atmosphere is charged with that obscurity which is the very breath ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... he could not tear her away from the heavy obscurity into which she was merged. He must not try to tear her into recognition of himself, and agreement with himself. It were disastrous, impious. So, let him rage as he might, he must withhold himself. But his wrists trembled and seemed mad, seemed as ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Psalms, made a prayer, and questioned from the catechism, at the conclusion of which they prayed and sang some verses from the Psalms again. It was all performed without respect or reverence, very literally, and mixed up with much obscurity and error. He played, however, the part of a learned and pious man, enfin le suffisant et le petit precheur. After their departure, I had an opportunity of speaking to him and telling him what I thought was good for him. He acknowledged ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... worn and trampled grass in fields half given over to the speculative builder: in place of this, to tread the immaculate shore over which breathed a wind not charged with soot; to replace the dull, shrouding obscurity of the smoke by a distance so distinct that the masts of the ships whose hulls were buried below the horizon were visible—all this was perfect bliss. It was not very poetic bliss, perhaps; but nevertheless it is a fact that ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... plant, in connection with that of the sweet potato, is involved in obscurity, as the accounts of their introduction into Europe are somewhat conflicting, and often they appear to be confounded with one another. The common kind was doubtless introduced into Spain in the early part of the sixteenth ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... lost his calmness and let escape certain rude phrases as if he were yet in the good old times when he could imprison and burn at his pleasure. Console yourselves, reverend lord priests, everything comes to an end, and the ancient period of darkness and obscurity exists no more ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... is easier to imagine the figure which William II of Germany would cut on the operatic stage than the "grand, gloomy, and peculiar" Corsican. The royal people with whom the operatic public is familiar as a rule are sufficiently surrounded by the mists of antiquity and obscurity that the contemplation of them arouse little thought of the incongruity which their appearance as operatic heroes ought to create. Henry the Fowler in "Lohengrin," Mark in "Tristan und Isolde," the unnumbered Pharaoh in "Aida," Herod in "Salome" and "Herodiade," and the few other kings, if there ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... read, several days before, about an Italian laborer who had been crushed by a falling column. To one unaccustomed to death in any form that object, head-on in the obscurity of the compartment, had been a trying sight. He began to wonder if it were really cold ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Sordello or rhyme "end-knot" to "offend not." Nevertheless he was no anarchist and no mystagogue; and even where he was defective, his defect has commonly been stated wrongly. The two chief charges against him were a contempt for form unworthy of an artist, and a poor pride in obscurity. The obscurity is true, though not, I think, the pride in it; but the truth about this charge rather rises out of the truth about the other. The other charge is not true. Browning cared very much for form; he cared very much for style. You may not happen to like his style; but he did. To say ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... and, passing along a narrow dark passage, its obscurity rather increased than diminished by the solitary illuminating power of a single "dip" in a ship's lantern hung up against the side, the lieutenant stopped the Captain from any further grumbling by introducing him into the ward-room, ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... from the walls of the same college, nay, sometimes from the bosom of the same family, two young men, of whom one will be admitted to be a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... down, till his mouth reached Glendower's ear, he commenced his recital. Artfully hiding his own agency, the master-spring of the gigantic machinery of fraud, which, too mighty for a single hand, required an assistant,—throwing into obscurity the sin, while, knowing the undaunted courage and desperate fortunes of the man, he did not affect to conceal the danger; expatiating upon the advantages, the immense and almost inexhaustible resources of wealth ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... degree,—the charm of stately beauty and the charm of human interest which belongs to the home of generations who have spent there the happiest years of life, preparing for themselves distinction and success, or obscurity and failure. As you stand in the well-known College garden, one side of which is bounded by the chapel and long line of wall and gables showing half-white half-grey against the sward from which they rise, you might fancy, if you were a Platonist, that here Plato might have realised ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... that when he was copying the Cartoon, which could hardly have happened before 1513, the Battle of Pisa was at the Palace of the Medici, and the Battle of Anghiari at the Sala del Papa. The way in which it finally disappeared is involved in some obscurity, owing to Vasari's spite and mendacity. In the first, or 1550, edition of the "Lives of the Painters," he wrote as follows: "Having become a regular object of study to artists, the Cartoon was carried to the house of the Medici, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... intrigue disappeared. Madame de Lamotte was apprehended at Bar-sur-Aube; her husband had already gone to England. From the beginning of this fatal affair all the proceedings of the Court appear to have been prompted by imprudence and want of foresight; the obscurity resulting left free scope for the fables of which the voluminous memorials written on one side and the other consisted. The Queen so little imagined what could have given rise to the intrigue, of which she was about to become the victim, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... themes connected with the public life of Caesar, we notice only in those circumstances which have been overlooked, or partially represented by historians. Let us now, in conclusion, bring forward, from the obscurity in which they have hitherto lurked, the anecdotes which describe the habits of his private life, his tastes, and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... it will give comfort to great numbers who are passing through the world in obscurity, when I inform them how easily distinction may be obtained. All the other powers of literature are coy and haughty, they must be long courted, and at last are not always gained; but Criticism is a goddess easy of access and forward ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... that 'what is new is not true, and what is true not new,' in pragmatism, is insincere. If we said nothing in any degree new, why was our meaning so desperately hard to catch? The blame cannot be laid wholly upon our obscurity of speech, for in other subjects we have attained to making ourselves understood. But recriminations are tasteless; and, as far as I personally am concerned, I am sure that some of the misconception I complain of is due ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... while, Because my homely phrase the truth would tell. You are the fools, not I—for I did dwell With a deep thought, and with a softened eye, 40 On that old Sexton's natural homily, In which there was Obscurity and Fame,— The Glory and the Nothing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... being a weird-like kind of wisdom, very like that of the aged; so the effect on a creature so constituted was just equal to the cause. Annie ran out of the room with her face concealed in her hands, and got into a small bedroom darkened by the window-blind, and there, in an obscurity and solitude suited to her mind and feelings, she resigned herself to the grief of the young heart. It was now clear to her that her dear Mary was to be taken from her; had not the doctor said as much? And then she had never seen death, of which she had read ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... the moral relations which the consumers of slave labor products sustain to slavery, is one of too important a nature to be passed over without a closer examination; and, beside, it is involved in less obscurity than the morality of the relation existing between the master and the slave. Its consideration, too, affords an opportunity of discriminating between the different opinions entertained on the broad question ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... essentially the story of the successive ascendancy of a series of dominant families, each of which attained its maximum, in organisation as well as in extent, and then sank into comparative obscurity, giving place to other families, which under new conditions were better able to take a leading place. As each family ran its downward course, either its members underwent an actual reduction in structure as they became relegated to herbaceous or perhaps aquatic ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... harm done, brother, I warrant you: since there is no harm done, anger costs a man nothing; and a tall man is never his own man till he be angry. To keep his valour in obscurity, is to keep himself as it were in a cloak bag. What's a musician, unless he play? What's a tall man unless he fight? For, indeed, all this my wise brother stands upon absolutely; and that made me fall in with him ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... discipline, have been spared by Richard Harrington to make her what she is, and while her imperious temper has bent to the one, her intellect and manners have expanded and improved beneath this influence of the other, and Richard has not only a plaything and pet in the little girl he took from obscurity, but also a companion and equal, capable of entering with him the mazy labyrinths of science, and astonishing him with the wealth of her richly stored mind. Still, in everything pertaining to her womanhood she is wholly feminine ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... for a hat check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest best with ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... was let down into the well; the crowd pressing around us, and breathlessly bending over the dark and fetid hole, the secrets of which seemed hidden in impenetrable obscurity. This was repeated several times without any result. At length, penetrating below the mud, the hooks caught an old chest, upon the top of which had been thrown a great many large stones; and after much effort and time, we succeeded in raising ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... later when the brethren of the little Community of San Ambrogio gathered in their chapel to sing the requiem over their founder and first General, Father Denfili, who died, old and blind, after twenty years of retirement into obscurity. But there were more than his brethren there. For all those years he had occupied, day after day, the solitude of a little confessional in the chapel. He had had his penitents there, and, in a general way, the brethren of San Ambrogio knew that there were among them many distinguished ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... dry when it dashed past him on its way across the glade. No, so far as the ape was concerned, the signs indicated that it had waded into the water far enough to bend down and drink, and then had been suddenly and very badly frightened. Again Phil gazed about him, searching the obscurity on the far side of the cave, and now he noticed that there was another passage over there, a roughly circular hole about five feet in diameter, running still farther into the heart of the rock. He thought ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... into the shoes and boots took to flight at the interruption; and as we were conscious that in the depth of our meditations we might have been rudely staring at the old lady for half an hour without knowing it, we took to flight too, and were soon immersed in the deepest obscurity ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... they not think (and would not their wives remind them) that Sir Winterton was a neighbour and a friend and that Lady Mildmay was kind and sweet? Then, having shouted for Quisante, would they not in the peaceful obscurity of the ballot put their cross opposite ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... the deliberate intention of betraying their country. Kosciuszko was ill-versed, either by nature, training, or inclination in the art of politics; but through this tangled web of perplexity and uncertainty, when present and future were equally enveloped in obscurity, his singleness of aim supplied him with the unerring instinct with which through the whole of his life he met and unmasked the pitfalls that were spread before the unhappiest and the most cruelly betrayed of nations. Under the dictates ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... once told her that obscurity was my object, and that it was enough that there was peace in the house, for I was engaged over a mighty project, which I could not perfect with so many striving to do me honor. If she was before pleased, she now became exultant, and nimbly ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... allude to is the future prospects of the Republic; a question which doubtless is veiled in much obscurity. The black cloud of the South hangs perpetually over their heads, ever from time to time threatening to burst upon them. In the Free States many feel strongly the degradation of being forced to aid in the capture of the fugitive slave; and the aversion to the repulsive task ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Second symbol: "notre vieux grimoire," grimoire is the parchment, parchment is used for writing, therefore, grimoire is the symbol for literature, "d'où s'exaltent les milliers," thousands of what? of letters of course. We have heard a great deal in England of Browning obscurity. The "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" is a child at play compared to a sonnet by such a determined symbolist as Mallarmé, or better still his disciple Ghil who has added to the infirmities of symbolism those of poetic instrumentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Shahweetah and off to the South Bend. The sun was bright on all the land now, though the cedars shielded the bit of hill-top well; and Wut- a-qut-o looked down upon them in all his gay Autumn attire. The sun was bright, but the air was clear and soft and free from mist and cloud and obscurity, as ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... case, it's celebrity against the respite, obscurity against Miss Goodwin. While the system is in operation you will be free but inglorious. You choose freedom? All right, then. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... filiation which they have followed, and the alterations which they have undergone in their transmissions and ramifications. If, then, there are any persons present who have made a study of these objects, let them come forward, and endeavor, in the face of nations, to dissipate the obscurity in which their opinions have so ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... also admirable in statement. Confusion, vacillation, obscurity, uncertainty, are as foreign to his style as to his mind. He is almost rigid in his precision. Every word has its meaning, and every idea its stern, sure, decisive statement. His masterly powers of analysis, of reasoning, of generalization, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... which he describes have been viewed with a poet's eye, and are portrayed with a poet's pencil; and the poems contain, many passages exquisitely beautiful; but they also contain many faults, the chief of which are obscurity and a too frequent use of some particular expressions and uncommon words; for instance, moveless, which he applies in a sense, if not new, at least different from, its ordinary one. By 'moveless,' when applied to the swan, he means ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... was immediately answered by another hoot at a small distance. At the same moment a vague shadowy figure emerged from the gap for which they had been making, and uttered the plaintive signal cry again, on which a second man appeared out of the obscurity. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... emanated in sidereal fireworks that illuminated the heavens, dazzled the earth, then melted into each other, faded away or, occasionally, flared afresh in a glare dispelling and persistent. Among these latter was Amon. Glimmering primarily in provincial obscurity at Thebes, the thin fire of his shrine mounted spirally to Ra, fused its flames with his, expanding and uniting so inseparably with them, that the two became one. Amon means hidden; Amon-Ra, the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... After dinner we went into M. d'O 's private closet, and thereupon he drew two long questions out of his pocket. In the first he desired to know how to obtain a favourable decision from the States-General in an important matter, the details of which he explained. I replied in terms, the obscurity of which would have done credit to a professed Pythoness, and I left Esther to translate the answer into common sense, and find a ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the continent—and as far as mental ability and legal knowledge went, there could be no question among the growlers as to his perfect qualifications for the position. Mr. Judah P. Benjamin was not only the successful politician, who had risen from obscurity to become the leader of his party in the Senate, and its exponent of the constitutional questions involved in its action; but he was, also, the first lawyer at the bar of the Supreme Court and was known as a ripe and ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... were examined closely, in order to discover any glimmering of light that might have been left in a camp; and the men strained their eyes, in the obscurity, to see if some thread of smoke was not still stealing along the mountainside, as it arose from the dying embers of a fire. Nothing unusual could be traced; and as the position was at some distance from the outlet, or the spot where the savages had been met, it was ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
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