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More "Vacillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possible also to effect a junction by rail with General French. Thirdly, a victory gained in the centre of the disaffected districts would have been a feather in the cap of the General, for it must have drawn to him such waverers whose vacillating loyalty was daily growing dangerous. The melancholy reverse was, therefore, from many points of view to be regretted. Perhaps, however, it achieved one object. It forced those at home to realise the necessity for ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... samovar and the hostess the conversation had been meanwhile vacillating in just the same way between three inevitable topics: the latest piece of public news, the theater, and scandal. It, too, came finally to rest on the last topic, that ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... steady his nerves a little. And when the moon went down and the day was slowly breaking, he took his way, with a vacillating intention and many a chilling doubt, along the winding road to the ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... furrowed with wrinkles. Lines appeared in his forehead, his jaws grew gaunt and sharp; and at the end of the fourth year he bore no longer the likeness of his former self. He was now a wan, worn-out septuagenarian—stupid, vacillating. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... Threatened with excommunication and the scalping knife if they should return to their allegiance, and with starvation if they obeyed the commands of their heartless superiors at Quebec, they were girt about on all sides with pain and peril. Vacillating, unable to think boldly for themselves, they were doubtless much to blame, but their miseries were infinitely more than they deserved. The punishments that fell upon them fell upon the wrong shoulders. The ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... have to deal with Cicero in no vacillating spirit, but loudly exultant and loudly censorious. Within the two years following his return he made a series of speeches, in all of which we find the altered tone of his mind. There is no longer that belief in the ultimate success of justice, and ultimate ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... generous, and yet no more than honest, Aram had no sooner arrived at, than he dismissed, at once, by one of those efforts which powerful minds can command, all the weak and vacillating thoughts that might interfere with the sternness of his determination. He seemed to breathe more freely, and the haggard wanness of his brow, relaxed at least from the workings that, but the moment before, distorted its wonted serenity, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... This vacillating Thing, you see, Could not decide which he would be, Fish, Flesh or Fowl, and chose all three. The scientists were sorely vexed To classify him; so perplexed Their brains, that they, with Rage at bay, Call him a horrid ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... de Roannez was not a happy one. After vacillating for some time between the cloister and the world—obeying the guidance of Pascal, either directly or through Madame Périer, and even passing through her novitiate at Port Royal with “extraordinary fervour”—she was persuaded to marry and become the Duchesse ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... greater vivacity of expression; but although each well-strung muscle indicated physical prowess, there was an uncertain expression in his glance and in the play of his features, which suggested a yielding and somewhat vacillating character; while the younger, lacking the full physical development, and somewhat of the engaging expression of his brother, had that calm and steady bearing which indicated present and future government of ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... splendid opportunity for Louis to complete the conquest of his vacillating cousin whose allegiance was so vital to his plans of aggrandisement. Louise should go to Whitehall to play the part of beautiful spy on Charles, and, by her favours, to make him a pliant tool in the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... the cowardly fellow came out, laughing at the others, and protesting that he was under no promise and was free to act as he pleased! Yet in the hour of danger he generally proved to be our friend; such was his vacillating character. Nor was Miaki very seriously impressed. Mr. Mathieson shortly thereafter sent his boat round to me, being again short of European food. On his crew leaving her to deliver their message to me, some of Miaki's men at once jumped into the boat and started off round the ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... ago, when the first freshness of his boyish delusions faded away before the penetrating clear daylight of reality, he had known long ago that his friend was not faultless; that except in that one faithful alliance with himself, John Saltram had been fickle, wayward, vacillating, unstable, and inconstant, true to no dream of his youth, no ambition of his early manhood content to drop one purpose after another, until his life was left without any exalted aim. But Gilbert had fancied his friend's nature was still a noble one in spite of the comparative ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the movements of a group of people to direct her steps, and went eastward along New Kent Road. But when the shops were past, and only a dreary prospect of featureless dwellings lay before her, she felt her heart sink, and paused in vacillating wretchedness. ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... with which Italy had until then been on friendly terms. Thenceforward Russia united her influence with that of France in creating difficulties for Italy in Abyssinia as the punishment of Crispi, and at the same time the means of paralyzing one of the members of the Triple Alliance. Lord Salisbury, vacillating, as is his way, and under persuasion of the powers opposed to his action, consented to delay and negotiate, thus giving the Sultan time to prepare the defenses of the Dardanelles, making the coup de main, possible at first, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... though his own brain tricked him. Of Anna's sudden passion for him he had no doubt whatever. She was ready and willing to yield her whole self to him and would, it might be, make him a devoted wife. None the less, the temptation found him vacillating and incapable even of a clear decision. Some voice of the past called to him and would not be silenced. Maladroitly, he gave no direct reply, but answered the question ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... our ideals change that the very graces of face and form that a while ago had pleased her in Kenneth, seemed now effeminate attributes, well-attuned to a vacillating, purposeless mind. Far greater beauty did her eyes behold in this grimfaced soldier of fortune; the man as firm of purpose as he was upright of carriage; gloomy, proud, and reckless; still young, yet past the callow age of adolescence. Since the day of his coming to Castle ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... idea, the body of doctrines, the members of a philosophic system; we infuse new blood into thought. Truth becomes palpable, a theme is eviscerated, thought is lame, science is childish. History speaks clearly; there is an embryo of knowledge, a vacillating science; the infancy, youth, maturity, and death of a theory; morality is crass, the spirit meagre or acute; the mind adapts itself, logic is maimed; there is a conflict of ideas, the inspiration of science, truncated thoughts. Again we talk of the head of ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... writes of her delicate health,[229] and as the poor lady had at various times a great deal of trouble to go through, it is quite possible that as she grew older she became short in her temper, or trying in other ways to a husband so excitable and vacillating. We find stories of her in Plutarch and elsewhere which represent her as shrewish, too careful of her own money, and so on;[230] but facts are of more account than the gossip of the day, and there is not a sign in the letters that Cicero disliked or mistrusted her ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... sources of internal strength, while at the same time philandering with ideas and projects of human amelioration. Bismarck and Cavour seized the opportunity of making extremely useful for Germany and Italy the irrelevant and vacillating idealism and the timid absolutism of the third Napoleon. Great Britain has occupied in this respect a better situation than has the Continental Powers. Her insular security made her more independent of the menaces and complications of foreign politics, and left her free to be measurably ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... grief had given softness and a winning mildness to her manners, which had before been remarkable for vivacity. Nor was her residence at her mother's house of a nature to restore her gaiety. The poor woman was very vacillating in her repentance. She sometimes begged Justine to forgive her unkindness, but much oftener accused her of having caused the deaths of her brothers and sister. Perpetual fretting at length threw Madame Moritz into a decline, which at first increased her irritability, but she is ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... proper and fatherly advice did not have an immediate effect upon the shy and vacillating young girl, for not until a year later did she become the wife of ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... most astounding and benumbing fact to her mind. What she had loved with all that tenacity of devotion which every Northern heart has for the flag and the country, was covered with ignominy by these late events. She blushed with shame as she thought of the weak, vacillating nation which had given the promise of freedom to the ears of four millions of weak but trustful allies, and broken it to their hearts. She knew that the country had appealed to them in its hour of mortal agony, and they had answered ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... "While Otis was fitful, vacillating and morbid, Samuel Adams was persistent, undeviating, and sanity itself. While Samuel Adams never abated by a hair his opposition to the British policy, James Otis, who at the outset had given the watch-word to ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... correspondent shows her in a new aspect. Terrible is the scorn of the gentle. "He who wrote it does not seem to me to understand his trade very well; he ought to put himself to school," writes she, and proceeds with analysis so convincing and exhortation so invigorating that even the vacillating Gregory must have been magnetized afresh with power to resolve. One feels in the letter that Catherine is as near impatience with him and with the situation as is permitted to a saint. Gregory must have felt the sting in her words when she tells him plainly that his correspondent treats him like ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... interest the small intelligent class acquiesce in the autocracy. The autocracy imposes force on the people to crush out their inherited mores, and to force on them western institutions. The policy is, moreover, vacillating. At one time the party which favored westernizing has prevailed at court; at another time the old Russian or pan-Slavic party. There is internal discord and repression. The ultimate result of such an attempt to control mores ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Fleetwood. Lieutenant-General Charles Fleetwood was son-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, and for a time Lord-Deputy of Ireland. He was mainly instrumental in the resignation of Richard Cromwell, but so weak and vacillating that he lost favour with all parties. His name was excepted from the general amnesty, and it was only with great difficulty that, owing to the influence of Lord Litchfield, he escaped with his life. He died in obscurity at ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... that all that admits of precision shall not be smothered by that which is confused; so that what is exact shall not be obscured by what is vague, and so that its firm resolves shall not be shaken by vacillating and incoherent caprice. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... reached home, flakes of snow, the first of the season, were whirling through the gray dusk noiselessly, ceaselessly, always falling, yet never seeming to fall, rather to restlessly pervade the air with a vacillating alienation from all the laws of gravitation. Elusive fascinations of thought were liberated with the shining crystalline aerial pulsation; some mysterious attraction dwelt down long vistas amongst the bare trees; their fine ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... O vacillating Prussia! Had she moved, Had she but planted one foot firmly down, All this had been averted.—I must go. 'Tis sure, 'tis sure, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... dear, that you won't have a row with Owen's dear little vacillating, weak-minded ma," ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... Catholic Church. Charles, in terror of the Puritans, declared that it was a purely malicious invention, but none the less he continued to temporise, and the court to regulate its conscience according to his vacillating example. Some of the nobility were received into the Church, and among them Lord Boteler and Lady Newport. Mass was again said in the houses of the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... the man's mind was a turbid chaos of reflections upon the past and the future, in which selfishness, disappointed vengeance, terror, hypocritical policy, and every feeling that could fill the imagination of a man possessed of a vacillating, cowardly, and cruel heart, with the exception only of any thing that could border upon penitence or remorse. That Miss Folliard was not indifferent to him is true; but the feeling which he experienced towards her contained only two ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... agreeable person of the Marquis, she almost disdains herself for hesitating to prefer him to Clermont. Her life is the tragedy of a soul too indolent to swim against the current of events. Mrs. Haywood managed to give extraordinary vividness and consistency to the character of the vacillating Henrietta by making the plot depend almost entirely upon the indecision of the heroine. Consequently none of the author's women are as sharply defined as this weak, pleasure-loving French girl. The character drawing, though too much subordinated to the sensational elements ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... neither rendered the present intelligible nor satisfactory, and left the future uncertain,—could not be that of noble souls and lofty intellects; and that he could not be the God of truth who had dictated, in the midst of thunder, his vacillating will, and had called to the performance of his narrow wishes the slaves of a vulgar terror. Always conversant with himself, Samuel, who had spoken what he thought, now performed what he had spoken; and, a year after his arrival in Germany, solemnly abjured Judaism, and entered into the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reason for haste, which was not yet known to the French leaders. Maximilian had long been uncertain and vacillating in his alliances, but had now definitely decided to join the side of Pope Julius and the King of Spain. As usual there were companies of German and Swiss mercenaries both in the Italian army and also ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare
... exist. Mr. Norbury might frequently avoid misunderstandings if an acute sense of duty and an almost startling integrity of motive were the only things wanted to procure peace with honour in a disturbed household. But that was where it was. You must have Authority, and a vacillating disposition did not contribute to its exercise. In Mr. Norbury a fatal indecision in action and a too great sensitiveness of moral fibre paralysed latent energies of a high order which might otherwise ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... I should despise a feeble, vacillating Hercules most of all— a burly, assuming sort of person, who could be made a tool of, and led to do what he knew to be mean ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Davenant spoke, and spoke in his favour, the boy's countenance cleared up; that vacillating expression of fear, and consciousness of having something within him unwhipt of justice, completely disappeared, and his whole air was now bold and open—towards Helen, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... apologies and pretexts, but to no purpose. For two days I remained in vacillating indecision; I neither saw nor heard of her ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... carelessness which proved ruinous in the long run. It was fortunate for Elizabeth that of the two necessary figure-heads for any conspiracy, Mary and Norfolk, one was more than half-believed even by her own party to be stained by the grossest crimes, while the other was nerveless and vacillating. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... terror-stricken, gasping, all but insane with hysteria. Then the never-to-be-forgotten night that ensued, when he descended into the pit, horrified at what he supposed he had done, at one moment ridden with remorse, at another raging against his own feebleness, his lack of courage, his wretched, vacillating spirit. But morning had come, and with it the knowledge that he had failed, and the baser assurance that he was not even remotely suspected. His own escape had been no less miraculous than that of his enemy, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... saw that Lucien was deep in thought, and made a pretty good guess at the matter of his meditations. He himself had opened out wide horizons of public life before an ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world of letters ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... every feeling, every institution—behind everything, no matter what it be, Plato perceived an idea, immortal, eternal, indestructible, and incorruptible, which existed in the bosom of the Eternal, and of which all that comes under our observation is only the vacillating and troubled reflection, and which supports, animates, and for a time preserves everything that we can perceive. Hence, all philosophy consists in having some knowledge of these Ideas. How is it possible to attain such knowledge? By raising the mind from the particular to ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... country was in the condition of France in the year of Arthur Young's journey. The poverty was abject, the relief futile and the hatred of the poor for the rich was inflammatory. George III, slipping into feebleness and insanity, yet jealous of his unconstitutional power, was a vacillating despot, quarrelling with his Commons and his Ministers. Lord Eldon as Chancellor, but with as nearly the control of a Premier as the King would allow, was the staunch upholder of all things that have since been disproved and discarded. Bagehot said of him that "he ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... charge of Mohammed Ahmed all the blood that was spilled. To my mind it seems that he may divide the responsibility with the unjust rulers who oppressed the land, with the incapable commanders who muddled away the lives of their men, with the vacillating Ministers who aggravated the misfortunes. But, whatever is set to the Mahdi's account, it should not be forgotten that he put life and soul into the hearts of his countrymen, and freed his native land of foreigners. The poor miserable natives, eating only a handful of grain, toiling half-naked and ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... in their turn, But we were to begin with the general view. Half-measures, then, are no measures; they imply a vacillating judgment; they are a vain attempt to make a pound of rashness and a pound of timidity into two pounds of prudence. You permit me that figure, sir; it comes from the summing-book. The able man of business fidgets. He keeps ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... were popular just before and during the war attest the vacillating temper of the people. Joyous airs were at first heard, these growing contemptuous and defiant as the struggle approached, then stirring war songs and hymns of encouragement. But as sorrow followed sorrow until all were stricken; as wounds, sickness, imprisonment, and death of friends ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... smile at Patty, entirely unmoved by this criticism; for she knew that she was vacillating and sometimes undecided, as compared to Patty's quick-witted grasp of a subject ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... have the head of the catfish for the snuff, and the whole catfish for the box," said La Certe, with the firmness of a man who has irrevocably made up his mind—for there are none so firm of purpose as the weak and vacillating when they know they have got the whip-hand of any one! "And, behold! I will be liberal," he added. "You shall have another goldeye into the bargain—six goldeyes for the five shillings and a whole catfish for the box and snuff—voila!" The ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... forfeited her confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home. Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... hour it falls asleep, or wanders, through want of having all its principles present. Feeling does not act thus; it acts in a moment, and is always ready to act. We must then put our faith in feeling; otherwise it will be always vacillating. ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... at this time was vacillating with more of weakness than would have been expected from a man who had generally been so firm in the affairs of his life. He had been quite clear about George Hotspur, when those inquiries of his were first made, and when ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... manufacturing establishments, or in any other leading pursuit of life, if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal to-morrow what it has enacted to-day. Fitful profits, however high, if threatened with a ruinous reduction by a vacillating policy on the part of Government, will scarcely tempt him to trust the money which he has acquired by a life of labor upon the uncertain adventure. I therefore, in the spirit of conciliation, and influenced ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... Eve there was a club ball, which I, being the oldest child, was allowed to witness. I took my position in one corner of the hall and looked on with vacillating feelings. When the dancing couples whirled past me I was happy, on the one hand, because I was permitted to stand there as a sort of guest and share in the pleasure with my eyes, and yet, on the other hand, I was unhappy, because I was merely an onlooker instead of a participator in the dance. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... at Baiae. It is there that I keep my grandfather's collection of majolica. The sun shines there always. A long olive-grove secretes the garden from the sea. When you walk in the garden, you know the sea only in blue glimpses through the vacillating leaves. White-gleaming from the bosky shade of this grove are several goddesses. Do you care for Canova? I don't myself. If you do, these figures will appeal to you: they are in his best manner. Do you love the sea? This is not the only house of mine that looks out on it. On the coast of County ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... to the editors, that if they continue in their present tone I will pay them off; tell them that I do not judge them hardly for the bad things they have said, but for the little good they have said. When they represent France vacillating on the point of being attacked, I judge that they are neither Frenchmen nor worthy to write under my reign. It is all very well to say that they only give their bulletins; they have been told what these bulletins are; and since they ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... was hampered by vacillating instructions, reflections of the unstable impulses which swayed the Ministry. Whatever his personal wishes, he felt that he was expected to avoid action, unless under very favourable circumstances. At the moment of sailing he wrote: "Since you leave me free to continue my cruise, ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... candle after all?" she thought. "Ah me! what a miserable, vacillating creature I am. Whatever comes—the worst or the best—there is nothing for it now but to ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Prussian armies to the frontier; a majority of the clergy had identified themselves with the reaction, were breaking down the revolution among the people, and were producing a reversionary tendency to absolutism. The king was vacillating and timid, but the queen had all the spirit and courage of her mother, Maria Theresa. It is very evident from Madame Roland's memoirs and letters, that these two women felt that they were in actual collision. It is a strange contrast; the sceptered wife, looking from ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... dexterous in being always strong upon the strongest, and safe upon the safest side. There was a tolerably numerous party ready, in times so dangerous, to attach themselves to Barrere, as a leader who professed to guide them to safety if not to honour; and it was the existence of this vacillating and uncertain body, whose ultimate motions could never be calculated upon, which rendered it impossible to presage with assurance the event of any debate in the convention during this ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... question, Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there came to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had a good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness since the choice had been made had done much to render the first year in Chicago agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... of dark, sweating skins. For four years Peter Siner had not known that odor. Now it came to him not so much offensively as with a queer quality of intimacy and reminiscence. The tall, carefully tailored negro spread his wide nostrils, vacillating whether to sniff it out with disfavor or to admit it for the sudden mental ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the Eskimos it is necessary to make a psychological study of them, and to consider their peculiar temperament. They are keenly appreciative of kindness, but, like children, they will impose upon a weak or vacillating person. A blending of gentleness and firmness is the only effective method. The fundamental point in all my dealings with them has been always to mean just what I say and to have things done exactly as ordered. For instance, if I tell an Eskimo that if he does a ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... up and eyed me for a moment as steadily as his vacillating glance would permit him, then he held ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... personal character. It had at first been liberal and just; it became arbitrary and even treacherous. His personal timidity made him at once harsh and vacillating. The heads of the great families, whom he had invited to a banquet, were seized and condemned to death on a charge of conspiracy. But a sudden terror of the possible consequences of his action caused him to relent, and he released his victims ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... hearts, commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to do to others as we wish to be done by, to render each his due, not to keep back anything from the laborer's hire, and not to lend at usury; he knows, moreover, that in us charity is lukewarm and conscience vacillating, and that the slightest pretext always seems to us a sufficient reason for exemption from the law: and yet he involves us, with such dispositions, in the contradictions of commerce and property, in which, by the necessity of the theory, charity and justice are bound to perish! Instead of enlightening ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... together more closely the king and his parliament. He believed that the royal difficulties would be removed if a policy were adopted with which the people could heartily sympathize, and if the king placed himself at the head of his parliament and led them on. But his advice was neglected by the vacillating and peace-loving monarch, his proffered proclamation was put aside, and a weak, featureless production substituted in its place. Nevertheless the new parliament seemed at first more responsive than might ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... under the same religion, nor the father who had led his child into distress by holding before her her sinful condition, could offer any genuine comfort. Miss Earle has summarized with briefness and force the results of such training: "A frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... unbounded. The frontiersman was always ready for a fight, and just now he especially wanted a fight with England. He resented the insults that his country had suffered at the hands of the English authorities and had little patience with the vacillating policy so long pursued by Congress and the Madison Administration. Other grievances came closer home. For two years the West had been disturbed by Indian wars and intrigues for which the English officers and agents ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... guarantee of happiness, of something more than happiness, for, with all his brightness of manner, there was an underlying nobility in Arthur Saville's character which Rosalind recognised and longed after in the depths of her vacillating heart. She could be a better woman as his wife than in any other sphere in life; if she rejected him, she would reject also her own best chance of becoming a good woman. She knew it, and a little chill, as of fear, ran ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... element in the Austrian councils of war which we don't understand, but which gives to their operations in this present phase of the campaign just as uncertain and as vacillating a character as it possessed during the campaign of 1859. On Friday they are still beyond the Mincio, and on Saturday their small fleet on the Lake of Garda steams up to Desenzano, and opens fire against this defenceless city and her railway station, whilst two battalions of Tyrolese sharp-shooters ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... most dangerous men that we have here to the peace and quiet of the city. The leading men of the convention—King, Cutler, Hahn, and others —have been political agitators, and are bad men. I regret to say that the course of Governor Wells has been vacillating, and that during the late trouble he has shown very ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... the proper time. More is lost by doing work out of season, and doing it better or worse than is requisite, than can readily be supposed. Negroes are harassed by it, too, instead of being indulged; so are mules, and everything else. A halting, vacillating, undecided course, now idle, now overstrained, is more fatal on a plantation than in any other kind of business—ruinous as ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... function of the poet to set our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... is perfectly indescribable. I saw him lie on the sofa nearly a whole day, the table before him covered with maps and papers at which he did not even glance, and with no other occupation for hours than slowly tracing large letters on sheets of white paper. This was while he was vacillating between his own will and the entreaties of his generals. At the end of two days of most painful suspense he yielded; and from that time all was lost. How much better it would have been had he not listened to their complaints, but had again allowed himself to be guided ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the midst of which and in the silence of whose cloisters, he loved to share the peace and even the austerities of a monkish life; his transition from the Western countries, where reason is placed above imagination, to the East, where the opposite is aimed at—all contributed to prevent what was vacillating in his mind from becoming settled. Meanwhile endless disappointments, bitter sorrows, and broken illusions contributed their share to the pain which his mind experienced at every stage of its philosophical ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... 1813. Its success was complete; two editions were speedily circulated, and the fame of the author was established. With the exception of the Eclectic Review, every periodical accorded its warmest approbation to the performance; and vacillating friends, who began to doubt the Shepherd's power of sustaining the character he had assumed as a poet and a man of letters, ceased to entertain their misgivings, and accorded the warmest tributes to his genius. A commendatory article in the Edinburgh ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Stafford? should he also have sacrificed wife, faith, and crown? If yes, then was he wholly in the wrong; if no, he was partly—for once at least—in the right. Vices, other than duplicity, he had none, as we use the word. He was vague, vacillating, obstinate, unable to lead or to be led; superstitious, heedful of omens; unsympathetic and reserved where he did not love; intolerant of opposition to his will. But he was a good husband, a good father, a good churchman—no man so good was ever so bad ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... carry the same steady hand in diffusing good. The ardor of his love may never cool; his hand of charity never weary. He must be god-like. With permanency and uniformity of conduct, imitative of his own, our Holy Sovereign will be well pleased. But with him who is wavering in his principles; vacillating and impulsive in his purposes of good; at one time toiling for others with the utmost earnestness, and then, forgetful of their wants and woes for months together, he must be displeased. How unlike ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... him bitter and despairing to think that women should be helpless—that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and reasonable prudence, a people with a low, vacillating, and uncertain moral ideal may, for a time, be able to stem the tide of outraged virtue, but this is merely transitory. Ultimate destruction and ruin follow absolutely in the wake of moral degeneracy; this, all history shows;—this, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... inspiration of woman, man becomes a cold, dry petrifaction, constantly obeying the centripetal force of his being, and adoring self. Without his basal firmness and strength, woman, in whom the centrifugal force is stronger, remains a weak, vacillating, impulsive creature, feebly swayed by the tides of emotion, lacking ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... himself, she found, was ignorant. The ill-temper had lost its picturesqueness, and become worse than grotesque. And the selfishness seemed to be displayed on an object not so high as to render it justifiable. Then came a fortnight of vacillating misery, in which she did not dare to tell her discomfort to either of her friends. Her mother, who, though she could not read Schiller, was as anxious for her daughter's happiness as any mother could be, saw something of this and at last ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... of the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers of the Irish army. Avaux and De Rosen were both sent back to France by James; and thus, with but few officers, badly-equipped troops, and his own miserable and vacillating counsel, he commenced the war which ended so gloriously or so disastrously, according to the different opinions of the actors in the fatal drama. In July, 1690, some of James' party were defeated by the Williamites at Cavan, and several of his ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... And in her dreams braved by a murderous child, She went to sacrifice the high-priest Joad Unto her wrath, and in the end to place Within that temple Baal and you. You had To me already testified your joy; I hoped, on my part, for so rich a prey. What changes thus her vacillating vows? ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... cannot understand the policy that actuated this weak, vacillating conduct on the part of our chief. But some idea may be given of his fighting notions by the following occurrence, of which ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... vacillating between two impulses, take yourself at once in hand, decide upon the preferable course, and go ahead. Dominate your astrological tendencies, do not be dominated by them. Dominate your weaknesses as exhibited by your phrenological chart, and build up ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... saying of it? I think not. I could be a professor if I would and show you slips enough—certain ponderous nothings in the Ibsen essays, already mentioned; a too easy bemusement at the hands of Shaw; a vacillating over Wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus-pocus of the mystics, particularly Maeterlinck. On the side of painting, I am told, there are even worse aberrations; I know too little about painting to judge for myself. But the list, made complete, would still not be ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... several days thereafter he was held in prison by order of Colonel de Peyster. The commander seemed to be in a vacillating mood. Now he was despondent, and then he had spells of courage and energy. Henry heard through Holderness that the negotiations with Timmendiquas were not yet concluded, but that they were growing more favorable. A fresh supply of presents, numerous and ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... between his teeth, and glancing again at the bed, though the epithet was meant to apply to Jackson and not to Arthur. "What can I do to circumvent him? Write to Horace, of course, and warn him of Elsie's danger." And though usually vacillating and infirm of purpose, on this occasion Walter showed himself both prompt and decided. The next mail carried the news of his discovery to Elsie's natural protector,—her father, who with Rose, the Allison family, and little Horace, was still ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... Such shortsighted, vacillating, and futile methods are accompanied by decreasing water-borne commerce and increasing traffic congestion on land, by increasing floods, and by the waste of public money. The remedy lies in abandoning the methods which have so signally ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Bearing all down in thy precipitancy— And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows And mine is living blood: thou dost His will, The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know, Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall Linger with vacillating obedience, Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to— Since the good mother holds me still a child! Good mother is bad mother unto me! A worse were better; yet no worse would I. Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force To weary her ears with one continuous prayer, Until ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... combat his first virtuous impulse. He considered that his own inferiority must by comparison appear more striking to his mistress; and he sophistically persuaded himself that it would be for her happiness to conceal the merits of a rival, to whom she could never be united. In this vacillating state of mind he continued during the greatest part of the evening. About half an hour before he took his leave, Lady Delacour was called out of the room by Mrs. Marriott. Left alone with Belinda, his embarrassment increased, and the unsuspecting kindness of her manner was to him the most bitter ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... son's return home, and has even peremptorily required it of him. It is a plot of all the Swedish wellwishers, all the anti-imperialists of this court, believe me. They wish to place the Electoral Prince at their head, and hope by this means to bring it about that the weak and vacillating Elector shall secede from the Emperor and ally himself with the Swedes. They teased and goaded the Elector, until he even sent his Chamberlain von Schlieben to The Hague in order to fetch the Prince, and the latter has but to-day returned from ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... between the writing of the two poems "Wanderung im Gebirge" (1830), in which the most orthodox faith in a personal God is expressed, and "Die Zweifler" (1831). The only consistent feature of his poems is their profound melancholy. But Lenau's inner struggle of soul did not consist merely in his vacillating between religious faith and doubt; it was the conflict of instinct with reason. This is evident in his relations with Sophie Loewenthal. He knows that their love is an unequal one[124] and chides her for her ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... A vacillating gleam, thrown from the shop-window of a shoemaker, suddenly illuminated from the waist down the figure of the woman who was before the young man. Ah! surely, she alone had that swaying figure; she alone knew the secret of that chaste gait which innocently set into relief the many beauties ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... ideas of Hetty, in the best manner she could, to the attentive Indians, who heard her words with some such surprise as an American of our own times would be apt to betray at a suggestion that the great modern but vacillating ruler of things human, public opinion, might be wrong. One or two of their number, however, having met with missionaries, said a few words in explanation, and then the group gave all its attention ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... not keep them secret—he did not care for unpopularity in the least. His great aim was to fight—at whatever odds— for whatever he felt by dogged conviction. He was often wrong; but never cowardly, never philandering, never vacillating. "I am anti-everything," as he said humorously of himself. And so he was. He was, in a sense, "anti-everything," and though, sometimes through the training of previous environments, sometimes through other reasons, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... has reached the shady side of threescore years and ten must remember many Lord-Lieutenants—the pompously visible symbols of much vacillating misdirection. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... reputation for courage and resource may, thereby, sustain some damage, I am constrained to state that while in the sick-room Miss Felicia shone, Damaris gave off but a vacillating ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... taking shelter afterward for the night—they two alone, and without the possibility of avoiding it—in a cavern or grotto. Or, finally, perhaps the author would have arranged the matter in such a way as that Pepita and her vacillating admirer would have been obliged to make a journey by sea, and, although at the present day there are neither pirates nor Algerine corsairs, it is not difficult to invent a good shipwreck, during ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... around him, and by the vacillating light of the torch, he recognized the funereal ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... hospital." Mr Harding still made no reply, but looked meekly into his son-in-law's face. The archdeacon thought he knew his father-in-law, but he was mistaken; he thought that he had already talked over a vacillating man to resign his promise. "Come," said he, "promise Susan to give up this ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... in these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon, being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for the first time, he could ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... other side of the stream." He peered into the vacillating shadows, but saw nothing but the darker shadows of one of the innumerable man-made caves. The sound he had heard had brought to mind the dull clang that metal makes when it collides with stone, and it ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... that general informed him that, having passed the Rhine on the 20th with brilliant success, and taken four thousand prisoners, it would not be long before he joined him. Who, in fact, can say what would have happened but for the vacillating and distrustful policy of the Directory, which always encouraged low intrigues, and participated in the jealousy excited by the renown of the young conqueror? Because the Directory dreaded his ambition they sacrificed ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... never committed himself to a position of the security of which he was not sure; and he carried this spirit of caution to such an extremity that many of the early years of his reign present a succession of timid and vacillating movements, that more nearly resemble the subterfuges of a coward than the crafty artifices of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... now gathered round one man, who, having just come out of the tavern, appeared to be communicating to the crowd something that obviously produced considerable sensation. This person was a man of the ordinary size, of fair complexion, light eyes, and an unsettled and vacillating countenance, rendered the more strikingly so, perhaps, by the quick, eager, and restless motions and manner by which his whole appearance was characterized. Bart soon contrived to work his way into this circle, till he gained a position ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... frankness in the mouth and chin; a face, withal, that would bear constant watching, and that contained scarce a trace of virility—only a keen selfishness and a crafty faithlessness. And of a verity, if ever a human visage revealed truly the soul within, this one did; for a more scheming sycophant, vacillating knave and despicable traitor than Thomas, Lord Stanley, England had not seen since the villain John ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... by a power professing the closest amity. Yet Huguenot influence, had prompted and Huguenot hands executed it. That influence had now ebbed low; Coligny's power had waned; and the Spanish party was ascendant. Charles IX., long vacillating, was fast subsiding into the deathly embrace of Spain, for whom, at last, on the bloody eve of St. Bartholomew, he was destined to become the assassin of his own ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... most valuable is that they were not (like the letters of Pliny, and Seneca, and Madame de Svign) written to be published. We see in them Cicero as he was. We behold him in his strength and in his weakness—the bold advocate, and yet timid and vacillating statesman, the fond husband, the affectionate father, the kind master, the ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... me, I have ever been at the mercy of my moods, easily elated, quickly cast down. I have always been abnormally sensitive, affected by sunshine and by shadows, vacillating, intense in my feelings. I was truly happy in those days, finding time in the long evenings to think of the scenes of stress and sorrow I had witnessed, reconstructing the past, and having importune me again and again the many ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... personality, whose estates joined his own. This appeared more plausible than the suit of Cantemir, and his Lordship watched Katherine when she was with these two and soon found, so he thought, it was for the latter she cared; indeed 'twas hard for him to follow the trend of her vacillating mind. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... James most resembled was, we think, Claudius Caesar. Both had the same feeble vacillating temper, the same childishness, the same coarseness, the same poltroonery. Both were men of learning; bath wrote and spoke, not, indeed, well, but still in a manner in which it seems almost incredible that men so foolish ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I hope you feel the content you express: at any rate, your good sense will tell you that it is too soon yet to yield to the vacillating fears of Lot's wife. What you had left before I saw you, of course I do not know; but I counsel you to resist firmly every temptation which would incline you to look back: pursue your present career steadily, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... back upon Armagh. This feat established him as the hero of the North. No army which Sussex could again gather together could be induced to risk the fate of its predecessor. The deputy was a poor soldier, feeble and vacillating in the field. He was no match for his fiery assailant; and after an attempt to get over the difficulty by suborning one Neil Grey to make away with the too successful Shane, he was reduced to the necessity of coming to terms. An agreement was entered ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... and provisions comes from Trieste, across the Adriatic to the Po, and when this is cut off [as by our uncovering the sea it must be], they must retire." Above all he grieves for Naples. If a weak and vacillating ally, there was no doubt her heart was with them. "I feel more than all for Naples. The King of Naples is a greater sacrifice than Corsica. If he has been induced to keep off the peace, and perhaps engaged in the war again by the expectation of the continuance of the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... suppose that, could it be enjoyed in that perfection with which the imaginations of men love to cheat their judgments, it is the great good of life! One hour spent in humble veneration for the Being that gave it, in common with all of earth, its vacillating and uncertain existence, is of more account than ages passed in its service; and he who fancies that in worshipping liberty, he answers the great end of his existence, hugs a delusion quite as weak, and infinitely more dangerous, than ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... compulsion, and to get rid of the piece-meal treatment of recruiting to which the House had objected. Members were, I think, hardly prepared for the vigour with which the PRIME MINISTER turned upon his critics, reminding them that just the same denunciation of "vacillating statesmen" was current in the days of PITT. No doubt there had been blunders both in policy and strategy, but nevertheless the contribution of this Kingdom and this Empire to the common cause was growing steadily, and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... Frenchmen and their critical sense must be unbridled. They love their ideas and their systems. They would doubtless not hesitate to advise Foch. Personally, if I were Foch, I should turn a deaf ear. But if I were a timid, vacillating, pessimistic spirit, still in doubt as to the final outcome, I should most certainly seat myself at a neighbouring table and listen to their conversation that I might come away imbued with a little of their ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... perhaps threescore years, benign of aspect save for the eyes, which were neither clear nor steady, but had the trick of looking past one. Glenister thought the mouth, too, rather weak and vacillating; but the clean-shaven face was dignified by learning a acumen and was wrinkled in ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... any hazard it must be tried. Were she to fail him, he would be like a compass with no magnetic pole—spinning, vacillating. Suppose he should go spinning off from his now safe orbit? And then suppose he should come rushing back to her for help?—could she ever again enter those former halls of confidence with this new, strange man, as he had grown ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... stains or defects wherefrom the priests had to be immune, signify the various vices and sins from which they should be free. Thus it is forbidden that he should be blind, i.e. he ought not to be ignorant: he must not be lame, i.e. vacillating and uncertain of purpose: that he must have "a little, or a great, or a crooked nose," i.e. that he should not, from lack of discretion, exceed in one direction or in another, or even exercise some base occupation: for the nose signifies discretion, because it discerns odors. It is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... themselves: they only wish to know so much of an artist as is compatible with the service of their rooms; they know only the extremes— censing or burning. To all this they are heartily welcome; the one surprising feature of the whole case is that public opinion, in matters artistic, should be so feeble, vacillating, and corruptible as contentedly to allow these exhibitions of indigent Philistinism to go by without raising an objection; yea, that it does not even possess sufficient sense of humour to feel tickled at the sight of an unaesthetic little master's sitting in judgment ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the presentation of the doctrine will be faulty and cold and lifeless, or weak and vacillating, or harsh and sharp and severe. With the experience, the preaching of the doctrine will be with great joy and assurance, and will be strong and searching, but at the same time ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... my fallen brother, as I cannot speak to the foolish people who grope in this miasma of delusion. Silly women, yielding to the natural vanity of their sex, may mistake hysterics for inspiration. Vacillating and vacant men may seek a new sensation by encouraging a revival of the demoniacal epidemics of heathendom. But you, who have been a preacher of the gospel, though, as I must now more than ever believe, after a devitalized and perverted method,—you, to leave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the banks of the Danube, the country people, still feeling the influence of Roman civilization, celebrated feasts of flowers in spring and summer, under the name of rousalia. In the sixth century, when the Slavs were vacillating between the influence of the past and the present, the celebration of the Pentecost was mixed up with that of the half-pagan, half-barbarous rousalia. Southern Russians believe in supernatural female beings, called Rusalky, who ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... range of vision which, in his capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists mar the effect of their work—and among these Thackeray is notable—by adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating. Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through everything. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Robert Louis in a degree he had never before known. He also had dignity and a precision such as his parents and kinsmen had despaired of seeing in one so physically and mentally vacillating. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... secretly advocated. He reminded him that it was no mean honor to have been among the first fruits of the revival of truth in France. He urged him to put an end to his inordinate hesitation, by the consideration of the number of those who were still vacillating, but who would forthwith imitate his example if he forsook the enemy's camp for the fold of Christ. Letter of Calvin to Salignac, Nov. 19, 1561, Calvini Opera, ix. 163; Calvin's Letters (Bonnet), iv. 239-241. Salignac's reply, from which the extract given above is taken, is characteristic ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... dignity. The concessions wrung from the sultan by the French furnished the Russian government with the occasion it had long sought. An especial envoy was sent to demand the restitution of all the privileges of which the Greeks had been deprived. The vacillating sultan yielded to his new tormentor. Negotiations were set on foot by the ministers who represented the great powers; and France was induced by the influence of England to adopt a concessive tone, and to withdraw from the insolent and hostile position ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... have its part in those later chapters of the life of the vacillating king which led up to the tragic finish at Whitehall. On 10 January, 1642, King Charles journeyed from London to Hampton and arrived here for the last time as a free king. The inevitable breaking-point had come, and hence he set forth to the early scenes of civil war. ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... command. This man had rendered good service to Chili when, in conjunction with O'Higgins, he had led the movement of independence; but his success had turned his head. He was vain and arrogant, and at the same time dilatory and vacillating. He, like the dictators, was jealous of the success and popularity of Lord Cochrane, and was bent upon thwarting him to the utmost. His army, four thousand two hundred strong, was embarked at Valparaiso in the ships of the squadron. ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental dignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in the measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... first begun to think seriously of the risk I was running. But this thought only served to prepare me for a new condition of things; for now to go back and appear before Rima, and thus prove myself to be a person not only capable of forgetting a promise occasionally, but also of a weak, vacillating mind, was not to be thought of ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Herald of July 11th, 1833, correctly characterized it as "the oddest mixture of slander and truth, of knowledge and ignorance, of bold assertion and vacillating opinion." ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... should be done to-day he leaves to be shirked to-morrow; he is easily discouraged, timid, and vacillating. Extremely self-conscious, he thinks himself the observed of all observers. If others are indifferent toward him, he is depressed; if interested, they have some deep motive; if grave, he has annoyed them; if gay, they are laughing at him; ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... contracted in irresolute perplexity: "What do you say?" urged Laramie. Vacillating, Stone let down the hammer to talk it over. It went up again almost instantly. There may in that last brief instant have flashed across his muddled consciousness a realization of his fatal mistake; perhaps he saw in the wicked flash of Laramie's ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a "damned vacillating state." The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far from that happy cock-certainty, and consequently ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the coward brave. It was no small piece of courage for Joseph to go to Pilate and avow his sympathy with a condemned criminal. The love must have been very true which was forced to speak by disaster and death. And to us the strongest motive for stiffening our vacillating timidity into an iron fortitude, and fortifying us strongly against the fear of what man can do to us, is to be found in gazing upon His dying love who met and conquered all evils and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... of opportunity is ever the excuse of a weak, vacillating mind. Opportunities! Every life is full of them. Every lesson in school or college is an opportunity. Every examination is a chance in life. Every patient is an opportunity. Every newspaper article is an opportunity. Every client is an opportunity. Every sermon is an opportunity. Every business ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... masculine and practical display of the energetic hate of its object, while on the contrary she, whose beauty of person was now to him a thing without price, acknowledged no other feeling than contempt for the vacillating character of her associate. In this only did they agree that each looked upon each in the light of a being sunk in crime—steeped in dishonor—and while the love of the one was turned to almost loathing at the thought, the other ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... hands, and immense joints. There was a good deal of strength about him, but it wanted concentration and arrangement. His features were rather exaggerated and coarse in outline, with the high cheek-bones common on the north side of the Tweed; his hair of an unhappy vacillating color that could not make its mind up to be red; and his eyes, that rarely met you fairly, of a light cold gray. About the mouth, in particular, there was a very unpleasant ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Phineas Finn, and therefore hardly capable of understanding the exaggerated feelings of the man who had recently been tried for his life. Lord Chiltern was affectionate, tender-hearted, and true;—but there were no vacillating fibres in his composition. The balance which regulated his conduct was firmly set, and went well. The clock never stopped, and wanted but little looking after. But the works were somewhat rough, and the seconds were ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... of which we are now writing Filippo Strozzi was a victim to the policy of the Medici, so vacillating in its means, so fixed and inflexible in its object. After sharing the misfortunes and the captivity of Clement VII. when the latter, surprised by the Colonna, took refuge in the Castle of Saint-Angelo, Strozzi ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... blasphemous, ribald fool!" The words leaped from the lips of Ralph Bastin, in a tone of command that literally awed the interrupter. The effect, too, upon the hesitating, vacillating mass of people was, for the moment at least, to arouse their sympathy with Ralph, and a ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... touched by some sense of that great and gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye; that the man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himself up for an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out a hand, and then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysed will recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power to say, 'Thou oughtest,' but no power to enforce the execution of its decrees, and the heart turning away from the salvation that it would have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... long there, undecided, vacillating. Then he shuddered, wheeled his horse, and sent him scampering ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Vacant neokupata. Vacate forlasi. Vacation libertempo. Vaccinate inokuli. Vacillate sxanceligxi. Vacillating sxanceligxa. Vacuous malplena. Vacuum malplenajxo. Vagabond sentauxgulo, vagisto. Vagary kaprico. Vagrant vagisto. Vague malpreciza. Vain (fruitless) vana. Vain (conceited) vanta. Vain, in vane. Vainly vane. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... they ushered him into the blue drawing-room. He remembered the room well. It was here that Blanche had been wont to receive him in days gone by, when his fancy was vacillating between her ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... we have here to the peace and quiet of the city. The leading men of the convention—King, Cutler, Hahn, and others —have been political agitators, and are bad men. I regret to say that the course of Governor Wells has been vacillating, and that during the late trouble he has shown very little ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... compulsory loans. For these reasons, Bridgenorth became a decided Roundhead, and all friendly communication betwixt his neighbour and him was abruptly broken asunder. This was done with the less acrimony, that, during the Civil War, Sir Geoffrey was almost constantly in the field, following the vacillating and unhappy fortunes of his master; while Major Bridgenorth, who soon renounced active military service, resided chiefly in London, and ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... other side, is to make the poem appeal to our emotions with an intensity which the beautiful lines alone could not effect. Ichabod we read once, but when we know the meaning of its spiritual name and remember that it is Whittier's indignant rebuke of Webster for his vacillating policy in the slavery agitation, we read it again with a renewed and more vivid interest. Many things, however, are so universal that one cares not whether they were written by a Hindoo or an American, whether they are full of personal experience or drawn ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... a sad, vacillating condition, between the two great attractions to which he was exposed. Myrtle looked so immensely handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to meeting, for she world not go, except when ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... chair aside so as to face the lawn, and with his left leg over another chair, and his right elbow on the table, was smoking a large cigar, while his companion was still eating. The dogs—half-a-dozen of various kinds were moving lazily in and out, taking attitudes of brief attention—gave a vacillating preference first to one gentleman, then to the other; being dogs in such good circumstances that they could play at hunger, and liked to be served with delicacies which they declined to put in their mouths; all except Fetch, the beautiful liver-colored water-spaniel, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... this time was vacillating with more of weakness than would have been expected from a man who had generally been so firm in the affairs of his life. He had been quite clear about George Hotspur, when those inquiries of his were first made, and when his mind had first accepted the notion of Lord Alfred as his chosen ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... The vacillating court of Berlin heard with much apprehension of the formation of the Rhenish confederacy;[53] and with deep resentment of its immediate consequence, the dissolution of the Germanic Empire. The house of Brandenburg had consented to the humiliation ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... line of action which was far from according with his weak and vacillating nature, Mulraj raised the standard of revolt, and sending the fiery cross through the country, called on all to join in expelling the hated foreigner, and common enemy, from the Land of the Five Rivers. The prospects ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... critical sense must be unbridled. They love their ideas and their systems. They would doubtless not hesitate to advise Foch. Personally, if I were Foch, I should turn a deaf ear. But if I were a timid, vacillating, pessimistic spirit, still in doubt as to the final outcome, I should most certainly seat myself at a neighbouring table and listen to their conversation that I might come away imbued with a little of their ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... many ways the leading spirit of the Girondists, who were also known as Brissotins. Vergniaud certainly was far superior to him in oratory, but Brissot was quick, eager, impetuous, and a man of wide knowledge. But he was at the same time vacillating, and not qualified to struggle against the fierce energies roused by the events of the Revolution. His party fell before the Mountain; sentence of arrest was passed against the leading members of it on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... opportunity for disunion among his enemies, by which he was certain to gain in the end. He never committed himself to a position of the security of which he was not sure; and he carried this spirit of caution to such an extremity that many of the early years of his reign present a succession of timid and vacillating movements, that more nearly resemble the subterfuges of a coward than the crafty artifices of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... curious indecision mingled with his other emotions at this thought. His face grew serious. Lately he was developing a vacillating will; whenever he meditated any action with regard to Betty he had an inclination to defer it. He postponed a decision now; he would think it over again. Before he made up his mind on that question he wanted to enjoy her discomfiture and ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... benumbing fact to her mind. What she had loved with all that tenacity of devotion which every Northern heart has for the flag and the country, was covered with ignominy by these late events. She blushed with shame as she thought of the weak, vacillating nation which had given the promise of freedom to the ears of four millions of weak but trustful allies, and broken it to their hearts. She knew that the country had appealed to them in its hour of mortal agony, and they ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... consistency it would be adopted in all cases. This reasonable expectation, however, is far from being realized. We have already seen that in numberless cases, such as that of the fore-limbs of serpents, no vestige of a rudiment is present. But the vacillating policy in the matter of rudiments does not end here; for it is shown in a still more aggravated form where within the limits of the same natural group of organisms a rudiment is sometimes present and sometimes absent. For instance, although ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Marigny. I took the central alley, walking parallel with them, and then crossed over for the purpose of getting nearer to them. The night was dark, and the grass deadened the sound of my steps. They had stopped under the vacillating light of a gas jet and appeared to be both bending over a paper held by Mademoiselle Stangerson, reading something which deeply interested them. I stopped in the ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... was then sent out to collect the Indians, and when the council opened (March 14, 1775) had twelve hundred assembled at the Sycamore Shoals—half of them warriors. The council proceeded slowly, with much characteristic vacillating on the part of the Indians; but on the third day (March 17) the deed of sale was signed to what came to be known as "the great grant:" The tract from the mouth of the Kentucky (or Louisa) River to the head spring of its most northerly fork; thence northeasterly ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... pursuit of life, if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal to-morrow what it has enacted to-day. Fitful profits, however high, if threatened with a ruinous reduction by a vacillating policy on the part of Government, will scarcely tempt him to trust the money which he has acquired by a life of labor upon the uncertain adventure. I therefore, in the spirit of conciliation, and influenced by no other desire than to rescue the great interests of the country ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... rule of conduct,—which neither rendered the present intelligible nor satisfactory, and left the future uncertain,—could not be that of noble souls and lofty intellects; and that he could not be the God of truth who had dictated, in the midst of thunder, his vacillating will, and had called to the performance of his narrow wishes the slaves of a vulgar terror. Always conversant with himself, Samuel, who had spoken what he thought, now performed what he had spoken; and, a year after his arrival in Germany, solemnly abjured Judaism, and entered into ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with his mind still vacillating, for he could see no way out of his difficulty, and, to render his position more difficult, the colonel came to his tent and sat till long after dark chatting about the likelihood of the war coming to an end, and their prospects of once ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... placed in command. This man had rendered good service to Chili when, in conjunction with O'Higgins, he had led the movement of independence; but his success had turned his head. He was vain and arrogant, and at the same time dilatory and vacillating. He, like the dictators, was jealous of the success and popularity of Lord Cochrane, and was bent upon thwarting him to the utmost. His army, four thousand two hundred strong, was embarked at Valparaiso in ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... man's mind was a turbid chaos of reflections upon the past and the future, in which selfishness, disappointed vengeance, terror, hypocritical policy, and every feeling that could fill the imagination of a man possessed of a vacillating, cowardly, and cruel heart, with the exception only of any thing that could border upon penitence or remorse. That Miss Folliard was not indifferent to him is true; but the feeling which he experienced towards her contained only two elements—sensuality and avarice. Of love, in its purest, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Lotbiniere and Le Mercier were, as before, zealous for battle at Ticonderoga, and their opinion counted for much with Montcalm. De Levis, held back by the vacillating Vaudreuil, had not yet come from Montreal, and the swiftest of the Canadian paddlers was sent down Lake Ticonderoga in a canoe to hurry him on. Then the entire battalion of Berry went to work at once with spade and pick and ax ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... for Miss Siddal was sincere in its insincerity. The art impulse was supreme in him and love was secondary. The nine years' engagement, with the uncertain, vacillating, forgetful, absent-minded habits of erratic genius to deal with, wore out the life of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a "damned vacillating state." The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far from that ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... in the wrong with regard to Beauclerk," she continued quietly. "That is merely fair to him. Every one shall know that I have been weak and vacillating. May God forgive me and humble me—for I shall not be understood, even by many good people. But the next worst thing to making an error is to abide by it. Dear David, try to follow my feeling. It has ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... influence was at work to prevent my escape, as though fate was against me! Yet, after all, it was not fate that was to blame, but my own dullness in not perceiving my chance and availing myself of it the moment that it presented itself. If instead of vacillating, as I had done, I had promptly taken the plunge, I should have accomplished my short swim before the sharks had made their appearance and cut off my retreat. When I first sighted the detached fragments of wreckage the distance which separated them from me was trifling; now it was at least double ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... one's existence (No. 33). The short lines at Nos. 28, 29, 30, and 31, indicating departure from the path of propriety, terminate in rounded spots and signify, literally, "lecture places," because when a Mid[-e] feels himself failing in duty or vacillating in faith he must renew professions by giving a feast and lecturing to his confreres, thus regaining his strength to resist evil doing—such as making use of his powers in harming his kinsmen, teaching that which was not given ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... and those who desired to oppose the Bill to the last and force the creation of Peers. The view of the latter section, led by Lord Halsbury, was an expression of the wide-spread impatience and annoyance with Mr. Balfour's weak and vacillating leadership. All the counting of heads and the guesses as to how each Peer would behave afforded much material for sensational press paragraphs and rather frivolous speculation and intrigue. The action of any Peer in any circumstance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... late, whether for recovery or revenge. Out of some forty fighting men now mustered in the stolen ship, eight had been to sea, and could play the part of mariners. With the aid of these, a slice of sail was got upon her. The cable was cut. Lawless, vacillating on his feet, and still shouting the chorus of sea-ballads, took the long tiller in his hands: and the Good Hope began to flit forward into the darkness of the night, and to face the great waves beyond ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and carry the same steady hand in diffusing good. The ardor of his love may never cool; his hand of charity never weary. He must be god-like. With permanency and uniformity of conduct, imitative of his own, our Holy Sovereign will be well pleased. But with him who is wavering in his principles; vacillating and impulsive in his purposes of good; at one time toiling for others with the utmost earnestness, and then, forgetful of their wants and woes for months together, he must be displeased. How unlike our ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... play the piano, knew something of accounts, a little designing, even a little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad work of nature, mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleams of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smouldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes, and we ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... quite prepared for Cressy's absence from school that morning—indeed in his present vacillating mood he had felt that her presence would have been irksome and embarrassing; but it struck him suddenly and unpleasantly that her easy desertion of him at that critical moment in the barn had not since been followed by the least sign of anxiety ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... should spend our honeymoon at Baiae. I have a villa at Baiae. It is there that I keep my grandfather's collection of majolica. The sun shines there always. A long olive-grove secretes the garden from the sea. When you walk in the garden, you know the sea only in blue glimpses through the vacillating leaves. White-gleaming from the bosky shade of this grove are several goddesses. Do you care for Canova? I don't myself. If you do, these figures will appeal to you: they are in his best manner. Do you love the sea? This is not the only house of mine that looks out on it. On the coast of County ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... four thousand regulars and a thousand volunteers, while the sections' force comprised about twenty-eight thousand National Guards. But the former were disciplined, they had cannon, and they were desperately able; and there was no distracted, vacillating leadership. What the legend attributes to Napoleon Buonaparte as his commentary on the conduct of King Louis at the Tuileries was to be the Convention's ideal now. The "man on horseback" and the hot fire of cannon were to carry the day. Both sides seemed loath to begin. But at half-past four in ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... sense? What decision has he reached, if any, before he returns to his wife? In his soliloquy in Act I, scene 7, what two considerations are keeping him from the murder? What argument of Lady Macbeth was effective in bringing him to a decision? How do you account for the fact that he is extremely vacillating in Act I and fearful in the first part of Act II, while in the battle with the rebels he was the personification of bravery and decision? What is his state of mind as soon as the act is committed? What change takes place as soon as it is ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... men had not a word to say. Mr. Batchgrew grunted, vacillating. It seemed as if the majestic apparition of Mrs. Maldon had rebuked everything that was derogatory and undignified in her trustee, and that both he and Louis were apologizing to the empty hall for being common, base creatures. Each of them—and especially Louis—had the sense of being ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... meanwhile saw that Lucien was deep in thought, and made a pretty good guess at the matter of his meditations. He himself had opened out wide horizons of public life before an ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... a vacillating, staggering, decrepit creature with wildish white beard and eyes, who had been arrested—incredibly enough—for "rape." With him his son, a pleasant youth quiet of demeanour, inquisitive of nature, with whom ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... comes out the better the more fully it is known. Though often feeble and vacillating, it finally attained to firmness and dignity; and Ministers closed the cycle of war with acts of magnanimity towards the French people which are studiously ignored by those who bid us shed tears over the martyrdom ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... well in the flame of oxidation as in that of reduction. There is formed a clear bead which, with a certain degree of saturation, is clear when cold, but appears milk-white when overcharged, and of an opal, enamel appearance, when heated intermittingly, or with a vacillating flame, that changes frequently from the oxidating to the reducing flame. Baryta and its compounds produce the ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... to take a friendly glass, the toast was, "Success to grey hairs, but bad luck to White-locks!" On the whole, the Rev. E. Neale's account seems to be quite impartial; and most persons, after reading the evidence of the general's extremely vacillating conduct, will be inclined to agree with him in awarding this unfortunate officer the title of the "Flincher-General at ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... backwoodsman, fought, whether wisely or not, for a cause as untainted as ever animated a nation in arms. But it seems a paradox even now, and there is no reproach in the fact, that our fathers, who had not followed the vacillating course of Northern politics hitherto, did not generally take it in. We shall see in a later chapter how Northern statesmanship added to their perplexity. But it is impossible not to be ashamed of some of the forms in which English feeling showed itself and was well ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... and taking pay rested upon all labor. The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. A curse rested upon all labor; and even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... what you are," said Mr. Bright. "You have grown out of all semblance to the true type of a man. You are wicked, deceitful, weak, vacillating, and untruthful. So long as you retain these qualities there is no hope for you. Perhaps a punishment of a term in jail may serve to bring you to a sense of your condition. If it will, it is the best thing that can happen to you. Anyhow, I am ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... excited by a letter from Mr. Bartholomew Szemere, one of Kossuth's former friends, and even a minister in the Hungarian revolutionary cabinet, charging him with cowardice, weakness, and a fatally irresolute and vacillating policy in the administration of affairs. Szemere also denies that Kossuth has any just right to call himself the Governor of Hungary, or even the leader of the Hungarian people. On the other hand, Mr. Vukovitch, who was also a minister in the same cabinet, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... addressed at the same time one lady who was rich and plain, and one who was poor and very beautiful; and they, by chance becoming acquainted, exhibited to each other their correspondence with the vacillating lover, and one of them invited him to a meeting, in which after joining in reproaches, they dexterously each deprived him of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... cauldron was at its boiling point, its editor, the elder James Gordon Bennett, dubbed its three journalistic contemporaries in New York, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil—the World, representing human life with all its pomps and vanities; the Times, as a sheet as vacillating as the flesh; and the Tribune, as the virulent champion of abolition, the ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Young's journey. The poverty was abject, the relief futile and the hatred of the poor for the rich was inflammatory. George III, slipping into feebleness and insanity, yet jealous of his unconstitutional power, was a vacillating despot, quarrelling with his Commons and his Ministers. Lord Eldon as Chancellor, but with as nearly the control of a Premier as the King would allow, was the staunch upholder of all things that have since been disproved and discarded. Bagehot said ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... occasion offered, spoke of me in the highest terms as a gentleman and lawyer. My resentment accordingly died out, but I never could feel any great regard for him. He possessed a fair mind and a kindly disposition, but he was vacillating and indolent. Moreover, he loved drink and low company. He served out his second term and afterwards went to Nevada, where his habits became worse, and he sunk so low as to borrow of his acquaintances from day to day small ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... that, having passed the Rhine on the 20th with brilliant success, and taken four thousand prisoners, it would not be long before he joined him. Who, in fact, can say what would have happened but for the vacillating and distrustful policy of the Directory, which always encouraged low intrigues, and participated in the jealousy excited by the renown of the young conqueror? Because the Directory dreaded his ambition they sacrificed the glory of our arms and the honour of the nation; for it cannot be doubted that, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... was the only one in which a line actually waited for the shock of another line charging with the bayonets. Even then the Russians gave way before the moral and not before the physical impulse. They were already disconcerted, wavering, worried, hesitant, vacillating, when the blow fell. They waited long enough to receive bayonet thrusts, even blows with the rifle (in the back, ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... one who understands her deeds, and in her place would do the like. The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy; and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... choice necessarily resolved itself into one or the other of these two principles—strict obedience, rigidly enforced by punishment; or a vacillating policy of petting and scolding, leading to moral confusion—there could be little hesitation in deciding which would be apt to give better results in the formation of character. The old way, if somewhat crude and summary, has proved itself ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Spirit as his text, and he made it quite evident what his campaign is going to be; that it is going to be a charge, veiled and very poorly supported by facts, that we have not known where we were going, that we were vacillating, that we did not have any enthusiasm, that we did not arouse the people and make them feel proud that they were Americans. How in the mischief he is going to get away with this, I do not understand. Whom were we to be mad at—England, or Germany, or everybody ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... publish in his student paper a defense of Menzel against his critics. This led Menzel to invite Gutzkow to Stuttgart and to propose a cooeperation which could be but short-lived; for Menzel was timid and vacillating, whereas Gutzkow was sincere, courageous, and consistent. This steadfastness and singleness of purpose, combined with a remarkable power to appreciate, adopt, and express the leading thoughts and aspirations of his own time, make Gutzkow the most efficient leader of the whole group. Heine ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... who confirmed the divine appointment. Saul, who appeared reluctant to accept the high dignity, was fair and tall, and noble in appearance, patriotic, warlike, generous, affectionate—the type of an ancient hero, but vacillating, jealous, moody, and passionate. He was a man to make conquests, but not to elevate the dignity of the nation. Samuel retired into private life, and Saul reigned ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Mr. Count mustered all hands on the quarter-deck, and addressed us thus: "Men, Captain Slocum is dead, and, as a consequence, I command the ship. Behave yourself like men, not presuming upon kindness or imagining that I am a weak, vacillating old man with whom you can do as you like, and you will find in me a skipper who will do his duty by you as far as lies in his power, nor expect more from you than you ought to render. If, however, you DO try any tricks, remember that I am an old hand, equal to most ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... the beaming roundness of a well-to-do middle-class gentleman, became furrowed with wrinkles. Lines appeared in his forehead, his jaws grew gaunt and sharp; and at the end of the fourth year he bore no longer the likeness of his former self. He was now a wan, worn-out septuagenarian—stupid, vacillating. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... closely the king and his parliament. He believed that the royal difficulties would be removed if a policy were adopted with which the people could heartily sympathize, and if the king placed himself at the head of his parliament and led them on. But his advice was neglected by the vacillating and peace-loving monarch, his proffered proclamation was put aside, and a weak, featureless production substituted in its place. Nevertheless the new parliament seemed at first more responsive than might have been ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Hayne" took a solemn vow that nothing should separate him from the object of his affections. Believing that all was safe, Miss Foote now threw up her engagement and disposed of her theatrical wardrobe, but the weak-minded, vacillating creature, who could not summon up resolution either to have or to leave her, let matters go on to the very day, and again failed to put in an appearance. Some preliminary letters having passed between the parties, Maria ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... scoundrel!" muttered Walter between his teeth, and glancing again at the bed, though the epithet was meant to apply to Jackson and not to Arthur. "What can I do to circumvent him? Write to Horace, of course, and warn him of Elsie's danger." And though usually vacillating and infirm of purpose, on this occasion Walter showed himself both prompt and decided. The next mail carried the news of his discovery to Elsie's natural protector,—her father, who with Rose, the Allison family, and little Horace, was still ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... he was "noan Lancashire" worked against him too, though even if he had been a Lancashire man, he would not have been likely to find over-much favor. It was enough that he was "one o' th' mesters." To have been weak of will, or vacillating of purpose, would have been death to every vestige of the authority vested in him; but he was as strong mentally as physically—strong-willed to the verge of stubbornness. But if they could not frighten or subdue him, they could still oppose and ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Year's Eve there was a club ball, which I, being the oldest child, was allowed to witness. I took my position in one corner of the hall and looked on with vacillating feelings. When the dancing couples whirled past me I was happy, on the one hand, because I was permitted to stand there as a sort of guest and share in the pleasure with my eyes, and yet, on the other hand, I was unhappy, because I was merely an onlooker instead of ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... news reached the teacher, and he, poor, weak, and vacillating man, had not manhood enough to defend her, but acted according to the prejudices of society, and wrote Thomas a note telling him that circumstances made it desirable that she should ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... of her trial he basely deserted her. No, there is no excuse except that at the King's side there were many men jealous of the success and military glory of Jeanne, to whisper tales in his ear. He was a weak and vacillating creature, at the best, ready to follow the last person who talked to him, and he probably believed some of the stories told him about ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... these questions lie difficulties, which Smith, though not blind to their existence, treated in a vacillating and inconsistent fashion. Variations of supply and demand cause fluctuations in the price; but what finally determines the point to which the fluctuating prices must gravitate? We follow the process by which one wave propagates ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Marduk-belusate, "a vacillating king, incapable of directing his own affairs," came out to meet him, but although repulsed and driven within the town, he defended his position with such spirit that Shalmaneser was at length obliged to draw off his ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the happy future promised to Jane seemed ever to recede; and slowly the conviction forced itself on her mind that he whom she had trusted so implicitly was selfish and vacillating, generous from impulse, selfish from calculation; but he still seemed to love her, and she clung to him because having been so long accustomed to his devotedness, she shrunk from being again alone. In the mean season Mrs. Lynn's health became impaired, and Jane's ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... Patty, entirely unmoved by this criticism; for she knew that she was vacillating and sometimes undecided, as compared to Patty's quick-witted grasp of a subject and ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... Were mine to use—O senseless cataract, Bearing all down in thy precipitancy— And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows And mine is living blood: thou dost His will, The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know, Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall Linger with vacillating obedience, Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to— Since the good mother holds me still a child! Good mother is bad mother unto me! A worse were better; yet no worse would I. Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force To weary ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... allied to them were, some from sincere conviction and some from policy, adherents of Calvinism. Thus the Protestants in France became a political party, as well as a religious body, and a party with anti-monarchical tendencies. Anthony of Bourbon, a weak and vacillating person, had married Jeanne d'Albret, the heiress of Bearn and Navarre, a heroic woman and an earnest Protestant, the mother of Henry IV. His brother Louis, Prince of Conde, a brave, impetuous soldier, whose wife, the niece of the Grand ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... help to determine; it makes the highest human excellence consist in acquiescence in the supposed will of a being that is defined as not human, a being that is above the driving force of impulse, that does not experience vacillating moods or conflicting desires, that is never harassed by doubts or misled by ignorance.... Theism is in essence repressive, prohibitory, ascetic. The outcome of its influence is that expertness in practical living and expertness in ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Poland was an outrage upon the Polish people, but it was largely dictated by an entirely honest desire to settle a dangerous possibility. It seemed less injurious than the possibility of a vacillating, independent Poland playing off one neighbour against another. That possibility will still be present in the minds of the diplomatists who will determine the settlement after the war. Until the Poles make up their ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... be brought into its new life, no one knew. Russia was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in the class of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second rank. Its monarch, Alexander II., humane and well-meaning, was irresolute and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid of all administrative and organising faculty himself, but so infirm of purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pass out of their sight, lest in the course ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... constant watching, and that contained scarce a trace of virility—only a keen selfishness and a crafty faithlessness. And of a verity, if ever a human visage revealed truly the soul within, this one did; for a more scheming sycophant, vacillating knave and despicable traitor than Thomas, Lord Stanley, England had not seen since the villain John ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... are practically lost to us. The crest of the noble Mexican Gulf has separated from us. Let us exert every power we possess to bring them all back to the fold. Why should we not? Every motive of interest or patriotism should induce us to do so. Suppose the States were vacillating and in doubt where to go. Suppose they were set up for sale in market overt, and the States of Europe were to bid for them—for this, not only the richest portion of our own country, but of the world—because this portion of our land has an element of ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... time. It had been so with his wife. It was obviously so with his eldest daughter. Many men as superficially affectionate as Colonel Bellairs, and at heart as callous, as exacting and as inconsiderate, have made endurable husbands. But Colonel Bellairs was not only irresolute and vacillating and incapable of even the most necessary decisions, but he was an inveterate enemy of all decision on the part of others, inimical to all suggested arrangements or plans for household convenience. The words "spring ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... in the easiest way possible to Justina, "I shall ask our new clergyman to take Emily in to luncheon, and Mr. Mortimer to take you." Justina knew now that the game was up; she was not quick of perception, but neither was she vacillating. When once she had decided on any course, she never had the discomfort of wishing afterwards that she had done otherwise. There was undoubtedly a rumour going about to the effect that John Mortimer liked her, and was "coming ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... but the majority of the readers living in the country just continued to pin their faith to the printed declarations of their oracles, while Grimes kept up the delusion of sincerity by every now and then fulminating a tremendous denunciation against his trimming, vacillating, inconsistent opponent on the Tuesday, and then retaliating with equal vigour upon himself on the Saturday. He wrote his own 'leaders,' both Whig and Tory, the arguments of one side pointing out answers for the other. Sometimes he led the way for a triumphant ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... disposition and the rectitude of his character, rather than for the strength or activity of his intellect. In his seventy-fourth year he came over to London to resign the Seals to His Majesty, laden with the burden of years and hypochondriacal infirmities; yet, up to the last, vacillating in his resolution. Lord Mornington, who met him at dinner at Pitt's during this visit, says: "I met old Lifford at dinner at Pitt's, and never saw him look in better health or spirits; he is, as you may well believe, most generally quizzed in London." The letter in which he announces to ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... at Stretton House, Mr. Caryll had left a scene of strife between Lady Ostermore and her son on one side and Lord Ostermore on the other. Weak and vacillating as he was in most things, it seemed that the earl could be strong in his dislike of his son, and firm in his determination not to condone the infamy of his behavior ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... statesmen, and it gives a confidence and energy to the public service which in times of difficulty and danger are of supreme importance. In such times a mistaken decision is usually a less evil than timid, vacillating, or procrastinated action, and a wise Minister will go far to defend his subordinates if they have acted promptly and with substantial justice in the way they believed to be best, even though they may have made considerable mistakes, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... looked at them searchingly, though it was too dark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he told himself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head and heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy was quicker, but vacillating. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... drama of Canossa, was a man of feebler mould. Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental dignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in the measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the worst description. He received in exchange a reinforcement of the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers of the Irish army. Avaux and De Rosen were both sent back to France by James; and thus, with but few officers, badly-equipped troops, and his own miserable and vacillating counsel, he commenced the war which ended so gloriously or so disastrously, according to the different opinions of the actors in the fatal drama. In July, 1690, some of James' party were defeated by the Williamites ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... articles, we especially notice Cranmer, remarkable for the candor and the coolness of perception with which the character of its benevolent and gifted, but inconsistent and vacillating subject, is discussed:—Cromwell, which gives a completer, more authentic, and less prejudiced account of the eventful life of the great Puritan leader than is to be found in any other publication known ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... truth and honour, and as the struggle deepened in his soul and the possibility of his refusing the demand presented itself to his mind, there flashed in upon him the picture of a man standing in the midst of enemies, the flickering firelight showing his face vacillating, terror-stricken, hunted. From the trembling lips of the man he heard the words of base denial, "I know not the man," and in his heart there rose a cry, "O Christ! shall I do this?" "No," came the answer, strong and clear, from his lips, ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... enable it naturally to maintain; if its records show that it has decided-as it may be compelled to decide if the construction referred to, advocated on the part of the defendant, is established-the same identical question, arising on a bill of exchange, first one way, and then the other, with vacillating inconsistency?" ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his feelings vacillating ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... with his masters. Over Percy Neville this boy had acquired a most undesirable influence, and led him into many pranks and violations of rules which were little suspected by the authorities. Poor Percy, weak, vacillating, and utterly without resolution or firmness of character, was easily led astray, although his conscience, his judgment, and his sense of truth were often offended by the wrong-doing into which he suffered himself to ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... which we are now writing Filippo Strozzi was a victim to the policy of the Medici, so vacillating in its means, so fixed and inflexible in its object. After sharing the misfortunes and the captivity of Clement VII. when the latter, surprised by the Colonna, took refuge in the Castle of Saint-Angelo, Strozzi was delivered ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... to be ruled for a century by Christianity or Infidelity. The irresolution of Robespierre lost to us the victory of the first passage of arms, equally as decisive as Lafayette in 1830, and Lamartine in 1848, being Liberals, lost in each case the social Republic by their vacillating policy. The true Freethinkers of that age were the Girondists. With their heroic death, the last barrier to despotism disappeared; the Consulate became the only logical path for gilded chains and empire. With the ostracism of the Republicans by Napoleon the Little, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Government, they were absolutely terrified by this act of 'boycotting' (the slang word then current for such acts of abstention). Their counsels became wild and vacillating to the last degree: one hour they were for giving way for the present till they could hatch another plot; the next they all but sent an order for the arrest in the lump of all the workmen's committees; ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... woman would ever exist for him; and surely, in the case of an all-absorbing passion such as this, the overstepping of conventional boundaries would not be counted too heavily against them: laws and conventions existed only for the weak and vacillating loves of the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... incident of those tumultuous hours surprised her more than the way in which Lady Hermione received her unbidden and unwelcome visitors. The instant before their arrival she was an irresponsible and doubting and vacillating girl, torn by emotion, and swayed hither and thither by gusts of perplexity which ranged from half-formed hope to blank despair, but now she came from her bedroom without a second's hesitancy, and faced her father and the lawyer with a proud ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... was the permanent settlement of the investiture controversy for England, and under it developed the practice on ecclesiastical vacancies which we may say has continued to the present time, interrupted under some sovereigns by vacillating practice or by a more or less theoretical concession of freedom of election to the Church. Henry's grandson, Henry II, describes this practice as it existed in his day, in one of the clauses of the Constitutions of Clarendon. The clause shows that some at least of the inventions of Ranulf Flambard ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... unprogressive on that account, should the young student, in particular, regard some degree of uncertainty about his facts as the ideal state of mind for him to reach? Or would such uncertainty too easily undermine his self-confidence and render him vacillating in action? And should firmly fixed ideas, rather than those that are somewhat uncertain, be regarded as his goal, so that the extent to which he feels sure of his knowledge may be taken as one measure of his progress? Or can it be that there are two kinds of knowledge? That some facts ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... communicate themselves gradually from mind to mind, descending lower as they extend wider, until they leaven the whole lump, and rule by absolute authority, even where the grounds and reasons for them cannot be understood. On this gradual victory of what is consistent over what is vacillating, depends the reputation of all that is highest in art and literature. For It is an insult to what is really great in either, to suppose that it in any way addresses itself to mean or uncultivated faculties. It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... his own decision. Having heard from the cautious who counselled neutrality, he was now seeking the arguments of the impetuous who demanded action and wanted it "hot off the bat." But at that time, not knowing him as I now know him, he seemed, in this interview, to be vacillating between two opinions, for he did what I have often known him to do subsequently: stated with lucidity the arguments of the other side, and with the air of one quite open-minded, without opinions of his own, seemed to seek my arguments in rebuttal. I was sorely ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... has been more refined by observation, both at home and abroad, than is usual in this busy country; and, though not himself a thinker, he follows with care and delight the flights of a rapid and inventive mind. He is one of those rare persons who, without being servile or vacillating, present on no side any barrier to the free action of another mind. Yes, he is really an agreeable companion. I do not remember ever to have been wearied or chilled ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... conscious of an addition to the landscape in the shape of a man who was passing down the road with a pack on his back like the tramping "prospectors" she had often seen at Heavy Tree Hill. That memory apparently settled her vacillating mind; she determined she would NOT go to the dance. But as she was turning away from the window a second figure, a horseman, appeared in another direction by a cross-road, a shorter cut through her domain. This she had no difficulty in recognizing as one of the strangers ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... 1814, which brought about the downfall of Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only begins to shape ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... a Frenchman, was elected Pope at Avignon, a man who, according to the chronicler, contrasted favourably by his wisdom, breadth of view, and liberality, with a weak and vacillating predecessor. Seeing that they had to do with a man at last, the Romans sent an embassy to him to urge his return to Rome. The hope had long been at the root of Rienzi's life, and he must have already attained to a considerable reputation of learning and eloquence, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... her conduct in its worst light: vacillating, feeble, deserting the man she loved at the moment she had led him to expect triumph; dismissing her faithful servant without his reward. Then, in a flash, came the other side of the picture—the mother of a ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... its dukes, one was a prisoner in the hands of the English; the other was connected with the French party through his brother-in-law, King Charles, and with the Burgundian party through his father-in-law, the Duke of Lorraine. No wonder the fealty of the townsfolk was somewhat vacillating; downtrodden by men-at-arms, forever taken and retaken, red caps and white caps alternately ran the danger of being cast into the river. The Burgundians set fire to the houses, pillaged the churches, chastised the most notable ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the last shred of my happiness when I did so. I made weak health my excuse, and indeed I was far from well; but I had the anguish of seeing the unspoken reproach in Mr. Cunliffe's eyes: he thought me cowardly, vacillating; ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the spring of 1813. Its success was complete; two editions were speedily circulated, and the fame of the author was established. With the exception of the Eclectic Review, every periodical accorded its warmest approbation to the performance; and vacillating friends, who began to doubt the Shepherd's power of sustaining the character he had assumed as a poet and a man of letters, ceased to entertain their misgivings, and accorded the warmest tributes to his genius. A commendatory article in the Edinburgh Review, in November 1814, hailed ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... conflict. I have sought to guide and control public opinion into the ways on which depended our life. This rational flexibility of policy you and your fellow radicals have been pleased to call my vacillating imbecility." ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... man of perhaps threescore years, benign of aspect save for the eyes, which were neither clear nor steady, but had the trick of looking past one. Glenister thought the mouth, too, rather weak and vacillating; but the clean-shaven face was dignified by learning a acumen and was wrinkled in ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... "This vacillating policy," he swept on, "annoys me. For my part, I should like to see so firm a stand taken on all questions that in any part of the world, whenever a man, and wherever a man, said 'I am an Englishman? everybody else ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... to Liszt's description of the rubato "a wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same—that is the Chopin rubato." Elsewhere, "a tempo agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing, and vacillating as the fluctuating breath by which it is agitated." Chopin was more commonplace in his definition: "Supposing," he explained, "that a piece lasts a given number of minutes; it may take just so long to perform the whole, but in detail ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... beg, Mother dear, that you won't have a row with Owen's dear little vacillating, weak-minded ma," said ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... that had been placed upon his military ability; but after studying the orders and dispatches of Johnston I am compelled to materially modify my views of that officer's qualifications as a soldier. My judgment now is that he was vacillating and undecided ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... brow contracted in irresolute perplexity: "What do you say?" urged Laramie. Vacillating, Stone let down the hammer to talk it over. It went up again almost instantly. There may in that last brief instant have flashed across his muddled consciousness a realization of his fatal mistake; perhaps he saw in ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... the capacity to understand it. But all speculations as to what Eve thought in that eventful hour are vain. Clarke asserts that Cain and Abel were twins. Eve must have been too much occupied with her vacillating joys and sorrows to have indulged in any connected train of thought. Her grief in the fratricidal tragedy that followed can be more easily understood. The dreary environments of the mother, and the hopeless prophesies of her future struggling life, banished to a dreary, desolate region, ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... obtaining the Protectorate, and thus defeat his own insidious design to dethrone the legitimate Ts'i house. The wily Marquess of Ts'i thereupon—of course at the instigation of the intriguing "great families"—tried another tack, and succeeded at last in corrupting the vacillating Lu prince with presents of horses, racing chariots, and dancing women. Then it was (497) that Confucius set out disheartened on his travels. Recalled thirteen years later, he soon afterwards began to devote ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... most skilful of the three, was soon deposed from his command by a factious and fanatic vote of his fellow-countrymen, and the other competent one, Lamachus, fell early in a skirmish: while, more fortunately still for her, the feeble and vacillating Nicias remained unrecalled and unhurt, to assume the undivided leadership of the Athenian army and fleet, and to mar, by alternate over-caution and over-carelessness, every chance of success which the early part of the operations offered. Still, even under him, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... the guardianship of the Post Office, and she went to the Postmaster assuring him that there had been a mistake in the family, that a wrong letter had been put into a wrong envelope, and begging that the letter addressed to Mr. Twentyman might be given back to her. The Postmaster, half vacillating in his desire to oblige a neighbour, produced the letter and Mrs. Masters put out her hand to grasp it; but the servant of the public,—who had been thoroughly grounded in his duties by one of those trusty guardians of our correspondence who inspect and survey our provincial ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... agents, La Ronde Denys and Pensens, proceeded to the settlements about Chignecto and the Basin of Mines,—the most populous and prosperous parts of Acadia. Here they were less successful than before. The people were doubtful and vacillating,—ready enough to promise, but slow to perform. While declaring with perfect sincerity their devotion to "our invincible monarch," as they called King Louis, who had just been compelled to surrender their country, they clung tenaciously to the abodes of their fathers. If they had ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... of those of their own co-religionists. These form, in a certain sense, the clerical wing of Protestantism. Hence in the Netherlands there are Catholics and Calvinists on one side, and on the other a liberal party, while between the two there hovers a vacillating legion that does not allow either side to gain an absolute supremacy. The chief point of contention between the extreme sections is the question of primary instruction, and this reduces itself, on the part of the Catholics and Calvinists, to insistence that so-called mixed schools, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... with Honor," but, as one of their cardinal principles was the abandonment of abolitionism, he worked in vain. He bitterly denounced the Emancipation Proclamation, and President Lincoln came in for many hard words from his pen, being considered by him weak and vacillating. Mistaken though I think his attitude was in this, his opinions were shared by many prominent men of the day, and we must admit that for those who believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible there was much excuse. For instance, in a letter ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad sketch made by nature and mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleam of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smoldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... a brutal utterance, it is at any rate more frank, and therefore more manly, than the vacillating policy of the 'Cape Times', the Ministerial organ of the Cape Colony. It is said that "politics make strange bed-fellows", but not even the shrewdest of our political seers could have predicted that in 1913 the 'Cape Times' would be found in the same camp as its Republican contemporaries ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... with a vacillating gait," continued Fakrash, as though he had not been interrupted, "the willow branch ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... Charles came back to London from France on October 20th, the Cabinet was still vacillating as to its ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... emperor, after a pause, "these are idle musings, Lacy. Your picture of the great Frederick has made me melancholy; I cannot but hope that it is overdrawn. It cannot be that such a warrior has grown vacillating; he will surely awake, and then the old lion will shake his mane, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... wrong, it was at least a decision, and therefore welcome. It may not be best—it was something. No honest friend to Samoa can pretend anything but relief that the three Powers should at last break their vacillating silence. It is of a piece with their whole policy in the islands that they should have hung in stays for upwards of two years—of a piece with their almost uniform ill-fortune that, eight days before their purpose was declared, war should have marked the country ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the loftiness of their highnesses nor to prejudice, but to the depth of their ignorance, and of course I forgive and forget. Others again are so "reckless," so "don't care" disposed, that they treat me as fancy dictates, now friendly, now vacillating, and now inimical. With these I simply do as the Romans do. If they are friendly, so am I; if they scorn me, I do not obtrude myself upon them; if they are indifferent, ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice, the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a prison ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... for hesitating to prefer him to Clermont. Her life is the tragedy of a soul too indolent to swim against the current of events. Mrs. Haywood managed to give extraordinary vividness and consistency to the character of the vacillating Henrietta by making the plot depend almost entirely upon the indecision of the heroine. Consequently none of the author's women are as sharply defined as this weak, pleasure-loving French girl. The character drawing, though too much subordinated to the sensational elements in the story, is nevertheless ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... me. I am at any rate too well known to be suspected. I don't know what came over me today, but had the Republic depended on it, I could not have done it," and he flung himself down on one of Agatha's sofas, and slept not the less soundly for having began his career of extermination in so vacillating a manner. ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... and in the government of a nation so that all that admits of precision shall not be smothered by that which is confused; so that what is exact shall not be obscured by what is vague, and so that its firm resolves shall not be shaken by vacillating and incoherent caprice. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Pilate, the Roman governor, that he might confirm their sentence and execute the cruel penalty of crucifixion. The trial before Pilate developed into a disgraceful contest between the murderous and determined Jewish rulers and the weak and vacillating Roman governor, who was at last compelled to act contrary to his conscience and his desire and to submit his will to that of the ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... a kind of pusillanimity. But because consternation springs from a double fear, it may be more aptly defined as that dread which holds a man stupefied or vacillating, so that he cannot remove an evil. I say stupefied, in so far as we understand his desire of removing the evil to be restrained by his astonishment. I say also vacillating, in so far as we conceive the same desire to be restrained by the fear of another evil which equally tortures ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... remained silent, looking fixedly at each other. Now that they had said the things of greatest urgency, present interests became more absorbing. More immediate things, unspoken, seemed to well up in their timid and vacillating eyes, before escaping in the form of words. They did not dare to talk like lovers here. Every minute the cloud of witnesses seemed increasing around them. The woman with the dogs and the red wig was passing with greater frequency, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... father. In conjunction with the King he originally espoused the cause of Burgundy, and was afterwards averse from deserting their ally. He was anxious also to dissuade his father from adopting that vacillating policy on which he saw him bent. But within two days after the King had irrevocably taken his final resolve, and had joined himself to the Duke of Orleans, and the other confederated princes by a league, offensive and defensive, against ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Yakov went up to the altar and began mass. Being still young and having come straight from the seminary bench to the priesthood, Father Yakov had not yet formed a set manner of celebrating the service. As he read he seemed to be vacillating between a high tenor and a thin bass; he bowed clumsily, walked quickly, and opened and shut the gates abruptly. . . . The old sacristan, evidently deaf and ailing, did not hear the prayers very distinctly, and this very often led to slight misunderstandings. Before Father Yakov had time ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... guardian in his place would hardly have consulted the girl at all. Between his desire to have his own way and reduce her to obedience, and the temptation to put his arm round her waist and kiss away her tears, he was uneasy and vacillating. She gently put her hand within his arm, ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... loved to share the peace and even the austerities of a monkish life; his transition from the Western countries, where reason is placed above imagination, to the East, where the opposite is aimed at—all contributed to prevent what was vacillating in his mind from becoming settled. Meanwhile endless disappointments, bitter sorrows, and broken illusions contributed their share to the pain which his mind experienced at every stage of its philosophical inquiry, and contributed to give him, in the loneliness of his life, a tinge of misanthropy ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... with hides to make their lodges for the next season. This done, they were to send out a small independent war party against the enemy. Their final determination left us in some embarrassment. Should we go to La Bonte's Camp, it was not impossible that the other villages would prove as vacillating and indecisive as The Whirlwinds, and that no assembly whatever would take place. Our old companion Reynal had conceived a liking for us, or rather for our biscuit and coffee, and for the occasional small presents which we made him. He was very anxious that we should go with the village ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... ice-water as he studied the menu card, and motioned for more. Two other glassfuls went the way of the first, and the negro refilled the carafe. The man pulled angrily at his limp collar and discussed his order. Vacillating for a time between broiled lobster and porterhouse steak with mushrooms, he cut the matter short by taking both, and buttressed the main structure of the meal with side dishes of banana fritters and ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... inclination Well might find its precipices, He might possibly escape them: For the fate the most fastidious, For the impulse the most powerful. Even the planets most malicious Only make free will incline, But can force not human wishes. And thus 'twist these different causes Vacillating and unfixed, I a remedy have thought of Which will with new wonder fill you. I to-morrow morning purpose, Without letting it be hinted That he is my son, and therefore Your true King, at once to fix him As King ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... should despise a feeble, vacillating Hercules most of all— a burly, assuming sort of person, who could be made a tool of, and led to do what he knew to be mean ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... in sight of them on the grass. They think I'm an earless freak, maybe. She told him that dear Peggy was growing into such a strong, splendid woman; that she'd been talking to her, and she thought the child would be able to give up her weak, vacillating lover with hardly a pang, because she realized that he was unworthy of her; that Peg had said she couldn't marry a man she didn't admire—and wasn't that noble of her? Noble, your grandmother—to give up a perfect lady like Harry Goward, when she's got a ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... was in these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon, being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for the first time, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Peter's mind was continually vacillating between Alabama, with his wife and children, and his new-found relatives in the North. Said a brother, "If you cannot get your family, what will you do? Will you come North and live with your relatives?" "I would as ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... are steed-like in other respects: any timid and vacillating course with them is sure to get you into trouble. One must strike out boldly, and not be disturbed by the curveting and shying; the valley you want lies squarely behind them, but farther off than you think, and if you do not go for it resolutely, ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... elderly man, dressed like a farmer, with an exaggerated straw hat shading a face that gripped my attention at once, was looking down at me. It was the face of a born commander; it struck me that I should like to have it cast in bronze to look at whenever a vacillating mood ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Thus she was not only made acquainted with all the important occurrences of the times, but she formed an intimate personal acquaintance with the leading actors in these eventful movements. Louis, adopting a vacillating policy, in his endeavors to conciliate each party was losing the confidence and the support of all. The Girondists, foreseeing the danger which threatened the king and all the institutions of government, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... and with a wild look, rose to his feet laboriously, made a sign with his hand and left the sala with vacillating steps. In the street, he saw a girl, leaning her back against the wall, rigid, immovable, listening attentively, looking into space, her marble-like hands extended along the old wall. The sun was shining ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... wanted to hear. Vacillating as he was, he hoped that perhaps this time Jeremiah would bring him a message of assurance. So, ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... up my wild life, and return with my wife and child to my old home. My character, however—which is extremely resolute and decided when following the bent of my inclinations, and exceedingly weak and vacillating when running counter to the same—interfered with my good intentions. The removal of the tribe to a more distant part of the land also tended to delay me, and a still more potent hindrance lay in the objection of my wife—who has been faithful and true to me throughout; God ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... cries: 'Tell it in the dark, then!' and plunges the room in darkness. The natural impulse of that defaulter under those circumstances would be to blurt out with it; at least so I believe. Such was his vacillating, impulsive nature. And for the same reason the attempt to escape in the dark, which was silly, futile! It was another sudden impulse; had it been otherwise, he was far too sensible to have tried it. I developed that scene by ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... undertake by his misdemeanour. She might in truth have safely trusted him now; but he had forfeited her confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home. Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her family ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... which it is in the power of others either to deny or inflict: otherwise, he is a slave.' And of all such gifts as are dependent on the caprice of fortune or of men, I have long ago learned to say, with Horace—who, however, is too wavering in his philosophy, vacillating between the precepts of Zeno and the less worthy maxims of Epicurus, and attempting, as we say, 'duabus sellis sedere'—concerning such accidents, I say, with the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
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