"Incoherency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Stuart Wortley, the Parliamentary representative for Bute, who tells his constituents at Bute, that the true secret of the apparent incoherency in the conduct of Government, of that subsultory movement from almost passive surveillance to the most intense development of power, is to be found in some error, some lapse as yet unknown, on the part of the conspirators. Hitherto Mr Wortley, as lawyer, had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... leader of the tory party, the chief of the people and the champion of the throne, should have commenced his career as minister under Victoria by an unseemly contrariety to the personal wishes of the Queen. The reaction of public opinion, disgusted with years of parliamentary tumult and the incoherence of party legislation, the balanced state in the kingdom of political parties themselves, the personal character of the sovereign—these were all causes which intimated that a movement in favour of prerogative ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... the air was impregnated to choking point with smoke and evil exhalations. The noisy times on Saturdays come at 2 p.m., and from ten till closing time. In the afternoon a few labourers fuddle themselves before they go home to dinner, and there is a good deal of slavering incoherence to be heard. From seven to eight in the evening the men drop in, and a vague murmur begins; the murmur grows louder and more confused as time passes, and by ten o'clock our company are in full cry, and ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... circumstance passed across his mind; there was, between his forehead and eyes and those of Helene, one of those vague and distant likenesses which seem almost like the incoherence of a dream. Gaston, without knowing why, associated these two faces in his memory, and could not separate them. As he was about to lie down, worn out with fatigue, a horse's feet sounded in the street, the hotel ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... all on the outward spectacle of the blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and its saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the fierce incoherence of the Empire's decay, the struggle of Roman order and of German freedom, of Roman luxury and of German hardness; above all, the war of orthodoxy and heresy, with its strange political complications. And then, discontented still, as though the heart of the matter ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it, the clock by which he had started was fast, and he was home in good time. The circumstance tended to render his story more worthy of credence than it might otherwise have proved. But his evident terror, and the very incoherence of his narrative, told ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... possible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selected Coryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hoping he might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit into which we had slipped. He responded from the darkness, with the hesitation and incoherence which, in him, I have always found ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... He murmured an incoherence or two, and there was then a long silence. Presently his head knocked sharply against the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... and urged him forward to new fields of action and new fields of thought. The temper of his soul assumed almost a revolutionary cast. 'I am a Mosaic Radical,' he exclaimed; and, indeed, in the exaltation of his energies, the incoherence of his conceptions, the democratic urgency of his desires, combined with his awe-inspiring aspect and his venerable age, it was easy enough to trace the mingled qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the demagogue. ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... occasionally in his punctuation, which will explain any apparent incoherence in the above and ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... itself was not real because, in it, Eben's usually calm face was distorted into a demoniac frenzy and his voice quavered and ranted into a high-pitched incoherence. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... and after a questioning glance they knew that she meant it. With some grumbled incoherence, they went on. They even went at a gallop, and Alexander saw them no more. But perhaps even after that ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... God, had she lost the power of thought? Imagine telling Erik, "A crowd of people I saw to-day reminded me of a swarm of humanity." There was no sanity in her demanding words. Because there was no incoherence outside. Things weren't incoherent but non-existent. The city was no mystery. There was nothing to translate. It was an alien, superfluous world. That was the difference between them. To Erik it was not alien or superfluous. Even in their ecstasies there was still a ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... perceiving pitfalls alike in statement and in suppression of fact, hesitated and gobbled to the near neighbourhood of positive incoherence, while admitting, and trying to avoid admitting, how inconveniently ignorant of precise details she ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Analytical Review also saw German extravagances in The Ancient Mariner; the Monthly borrowed Southey's figure of the Italian and Flemish painters, and called The Ancient Mariner "the strangest story of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper ... a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence." The belated review in the British Critic was probably written by Coleridge's friend, Rev. Francis Wrangham, and was somewhat more appreciative than the rest. For further details, consult Mr. Thomas Hutchinson's reprint (1898) of the Lyrical Ballads, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... truth dogmatically; consequently insight is needed to understand him? On the contrary, however, it seemed to me, that the doctrinal difficulties of the gospels depend chiefly either on obscure metaphor or on apparent incoherence: and I timidly asked a friend, whether the dislocation of the discourses of Christ by the narrators may not be one reason why they are often obscure: for on comparing Luke with Matthew, it appears that we cannot deny occasional dislocation. If at this period a German divinity professor ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy—an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... but it is long enough; the whole history of two lives, so far as their spiritual aspect is concerned, is fully given in these few pages. The besetting sin of Dostoevski is endless garrulity with its accompanying demon of incoherence: in later years he yielded to that, as he did to other temptations, and it finally mastered him. He was never to write again a work of art ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... terror till then. Never before or since have I seen horror so intensely depicted. It seemed actually as if O'Connor's mind had been unsettled by the shock; the few words he uttered were marked with all the incoherence of distraction; but it was not words that marked his despair most strongly, the appalling and heart-sickening groans that came from the terror-stricken and dying man must haunt me while I live; the expression, too, of hopeless, imploring agony with which he ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... had first met Mr. Armstrong. She paced about for a little while, and then sat down and once more watched the dawn. It was not a clear sky, but barred towards the east with cloud, the rain-cloud of the night. She watched and watched, and thought after her fashion, mostly with incoherence, but with rapidity and intensity. At last came the first flash of scarlet upon the bars, and the dead storm contributed its own share to the growing beauty. The rooks were now astir, and flew, one after the other, in an irregular line eastwards black against the sky. Still ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... becoming sufficiently stirred by his fervor to lapse into sober incoherence. "Invade them before they invade us. Aircraft out ... gentlemen's agreement ... quite understand ... well ... landingbarges ... Bering Sea ... strike south ... shuttle transports ... drive left wing TransSiberian ... holding operation by right ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... might be. Far from pacifying the Court of Spain, the departure of the Princess des Ursins had been the signal for an outburst of the most complete anarchy. To the rule exercised by the Queen had succeeded an entire absence of direction, and matters were conducted with an incoherence so shocking, that M. de Torcy having exhausted both his advice and his patience, opened with perfect terror the despatches drawn from that Pandora's box. The accord—at least apparent, which the preponderance ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... imagining, to an unpremeditated outpouring by telephone, in which her chief fear was only of making a perfect little silly of herself. And lastly, Mr. Heth, called summarily from a directors' meeting at the Fourth National Bank, was overflowed with such a wave of feminine incoherence and emotionalism as he found great difficulty in associating with his usually self-contained ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... made what speed he could to the house of a family whom he admired for their intelligence, their high culture, and in one member of which his whole thoughts of domestic happiness in this world were centered, and he found nothing but confusion, incoherence, mystery, and ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... which seemed to him to be no less moral than social, the young man took his way back to the village, laboring with all the incoherence of unaccustomed thought, to strike out some process by which to find a solution for those mysteries which were supposed to characterize the conduct of the stranger. He had just turned out of the gorge leading from Calvert's house into the settlement, when he encountered the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... spite of many obstacles, he was taking the first steps in that direction. An initial difficulty lay in the mental aberrations of the King, whose conduct still caused intense anxiety or annoyance.[682] Scarcely a day passed without a lapse into incoherence or violence. Moreover, his conversation often showed a lack of discrimination, being the same to the Queen, the physicians, or the servants. He made the most capricious changes, turning off the Queen's ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the war began dates also, for New Orleans, the advent of two better things: street-cars and the fire-alarm telegraph. The frantic incoherence of the old alarum gave way to the few solemn, numbered strokes that called to duty in the face of hot danger, like the electric voice of a calm commander. The same new system also silenced, once for all, the old nine-o'clock ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... gravel with the points of her shoes, was—er—yes! quite inclined, if Mr Elgood was sure she would not interrupt his sport Mr Elgood, with equal eagerness and incoherence, assured Miss Vane that she would do nothing of the kind, and hurried back to the inn, murmuring ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... short sententious phrases uttered in a soft voice. After the Revolution, the epoch at which he first came into notice, the good man stuttered in a wearisome way as soon as he was required to speak at length or to maintain an argument. This stammering, the incoherence of his language, the flux of words in which he drowned his thought, his apparent lack of logic, attributed to defects of education, were in reality assumed, and will be sufficiently explained by certain events in the following history. ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... every important incident through the eyes of each of the characters in turn. Furthermore, it is comparatively easy to characterize in the first person when the thing that is written is so intimate and personal as a letter. But the disadvantage of the device lies in the fact that it tends toward incoherence in the structure of the narrative. It is hard for the author to stick to the point at every moment without violating the casual and discursive tone that the epistolary ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... of firm yet painful resolution dyed her cheek as she spoke, and checked her tears. Alarmed as she was by the incoherence yet connection of her words when attached to Lord Alphingham's hints, which still lingered on her mind, yet the high-minded Lady Gertrude felt as if Caroline's honourable determination had struck a new chord of sympathy within her heart. Integrity itself was hers, and truth in others was ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... vacancy, triviality, and incoherence of mind painful to think of as the state of the departed, and coupled with a pretension to impress one, a disposition to 'fish' and face around and disguise the essential hollowness which is, if anything, ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... apologetic in the manner, if not in the language, of the speaker; and his words seemed to indicate, if possible, an excuse for the incoherence of his address, in the physical fatigue which he had undergone—in this way to divert suspicion from those mental causes of excitement, of which, in the present situation, he felt somewhat ashamed. Pouring out a glass of liquor, and quaffing it without pause, he motioned ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... replied that all the horses were engaged, and begged him to compose himself. But Kant went on, with great effort to himself, and added—'Many posts, heavy posts—then much goodness—then much gratitude.' All this he said with apparent incoherence, but with great warmth, and increasing self-possession. I meantime perfectly divined what it was that Kant, under his cloud of imbecility, wished to say, and I interpreted accordingly. 'What the Professor wishes to say, Dr. A——, is this, that, considering the many and weighty offices ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... stepped close to him now, as if to catch the scent of some disturbing influence which might account for such incoherence; but Amidon's ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... opposed the alteration, as leaving still an incoherence. If negroes were to be viewed as inhabitants, and the revision was to proceed on the principle of numbers of inhabitants, they ought to be added in their entire number, and not in the proportion of three-fifths. If as property, the word wealth ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... over-statements, yet they are the logical outcome of much of the talk that one hears. It is the visible sign of our incoherence and error, and in the measure of these follies we are sent back to seek the truth. Women need a robuster courage in the face of love, a greater faith in their womanhood, and in the scheme of Life. Nothing can be gained from the child's folly in breaking the toys that have momentarily ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... balance the simple construction against the Midrashic interpretation of the text, we are annoyed to feel how he is drawn in opposite directions by two tendencies. We realize that in consequence his works suffer from a certain incoherence, or lack of equilibrium, that they are uneven and mixed in character. To recognize that he paid tribute to the taste of the age, or yielded to the attraction the Midrash exercised upon a soul of naive faith, is not sufficient, for in point of fact he pursued the two methods ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... a certain something which, for want of a more precise name, we term quality, is not to be denied. But the incoherence and shapelessness of the greater part of her verse are fatal. On nearly every page one lights upon an unsupported exquisite line or a lonely happy epithet; but a single happy epithet or an isolated exquisite line does not constitute a poem. What Lowell ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... abated the ardent pursuit of an art dear as life itself. Overbeck had suffered from an affection of the eyes, and his later drawings, notwithstanding partial panegyrists, betray a faltering hand, together with some incoherence in thought, or, at least, in the relation of the parts to the whole. For some time, in fact, vitality had been ebbing from his work. The summer of 1869 found him in his favourite retreat of Rocca ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... children lived. A surgeon was sent for: he bled her, she gave signs of returning life, and before the dawn gave birth to a female infant. After this event she lay for some hours in a kind of stupor; and if at any time she spoke, it was with a quickness and incoherence that plainly evinced the total ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... welcomed generalizations about what Sir Robert Peel called "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion." Others have concluded that since out of drift and incoherence, settled aims do appear, there must be a mysterious contrivance at work somewhere over and above the inhabitants of a nation. They invoke a collective soul, a national mind, a spirit of the age which imposes order upon random ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... with a narrower inquiry. You tell me that you love your country, and desire its peace. How comes it, then, that you are numbered with the violent, the lawless, with those who renounce their citizenship and dishonour the State? Could not all your worldly meditations preserve you from so gross an incoherence of ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... Alice!" half rising. But he tumbled back upon the pillow with a swift collapse of weakness and his words waned into mumbled incoherence. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... a shame which kept his face on fire. There was something boyish in the simplicity of his phrases; he seemed to be making a confession that was compelled by fear, and at length his speech lost itself in incoherence. He stood with his eyes fixed on the ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... dear?" she said, with great ceremony, and went on with her playing, which was abominable that morning; her fingers stepped on each other, and, whatever the tune might have been in reality, it certainly had a most remarkable incoherence as I heard it then. I took up the new Littell and made believe read it, and finally threw it at Kate; you would have ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... be drawn a great many others. We can come to understand the chief characteristics of the dream. But I can only outline the scheme of this study. It depends especially upon three points, which are: the incoherence of dreams, the abolition of the sense of duration that often appears to be manifested in dreams, and, finally, the order in which the memories present themselves to the dreamer, contending for the sensations present where they ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... no power belongs To pitchfork me to Heaven upon the prongs Of a bad pen, whose disobedient sputter, With less of ink than incoherence fraught Befits the folly that it tries to utter. Brains, I observe, as well as tongues, can stutter: You suffer from ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... would be obliged to pay the debts contracted by them prior to the war. These remarkable utterances, which he repudiated in less than a year afterward, were emphatically endorsed by the President, who entered upon the same theme at a dismal length, freely indulging in his habit of bad English and incoherence of thought. I was disgusted, and sorry that the confidence of so many of my radical friends had ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... equilibrium the prak@rti. Then later on disturbance arose in the prak@rti, and as a result of that a process of unequal aggregation of the gu@nas in varying proportions took place, which brought forth the creation of the manifold. Prak@rti, the state of perfect homogeneity and incoherence of the gu@nas, thus gradually evolved and became more and more determinate, differentiated, heterogeneous, and coherent. The gu@nas are always uniting, separating, and uniting again [Footnote ref 2]. Varying qualities of essence, energy, and mass in varied groupings act on one ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... my book to the public at all if I knew of another work in English studying even with my incoherence the Italian poetry of the time mentioned, or giving a due impression of its extraordinary solidarity. It forms part of the great intellectual movement of which the most unmistakable signs were the French ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... dine? And your glorious Revolution has done it, cries one. And our glorious Revolution is subtilety, by black traitors worthy of the Lamp-iron, perverted to do it, cries another! Who will paint the huge whirlpool wherein France, all shivered into wild incoherence, whirls? The jarring that went on under every French roof, in every French heart; the diseased things that were spoken, done, the sum-total whereof is the French Revolution, tongue of man cannot tell. Nor the laws of action that work unseen in the depths of that huge ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... What does it all mean?" was the torrent of incoherence which next burst from Leslie, not affording Harding a very close solution of the mystery, but ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... had begun his tale, speaking under intense excitement which he vainly tried to control. He delivered his message. Such was the rapidity and incoherence of his speech, however, that Cameron could make nothing of it. The effect upon the crowd was immediate and astounding. On every side rose wild cries of fierce exultation, while at Cameron angry looks flashed from every eye. Old Crowfoot alone ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... somebody. "Why should I love you? Why should I?" she would ask amazed sometimes when somebody was trying—somebody was always trying—to propose to her. But she never got a real answer, only further incoherence. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Spennie explained with some incoherence that his name was Pitt. His uncle had shaken him; the arrival of his aunt seemed to unnerve ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... flashing, eternal second he looked upon her face. It was not for nothing, the saying which had arisen in the country, that Freda played with men as a child with bubbles. Not a word was spoken. Prince stepped aside, and a few moments later might have been seen resigning, with warm incoherence, the post to ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... egotistical and concerned solely about themselves, kings lovable and beloved, kings sombre and dreaded or detested. As we go forward and encounter them on our way, all these kingly characters will be seen appearing and acting in all their diversity and all their incoherence. Absolute monarchical power in France was, almost in every successive reign, singularly modified, being at one time aggravated and at another alleviated according to the ideas, sentiments, morals, and spontaneous instincts of the monarchs. Nowhere else, throughout the great European monarchies, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... random account is given by Foxe of his having joined a party in an expedition to Rome to obtain a renewal from the pope of certain immunities and indulgences for the town of Boston; a story which derives some kind of credibility from its connexion with Lincolnshire, but is full of incoherence and unlikelihood. Following still the popular legend, we find him in the autumn of 1515 a ragged stripling at the door of Frescobaldi's banking-house in Florence, begging for help. Frescobaldi had an establishment in London,[135] ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... glance that this was a gem of rare size and purity. I looked at Simon with wonder, and—must I confess it?—with envy. How could he have obtained this treasure? In reply to my questions, I could just gather from his drunken statements (of which, I fancy, half the incoherence was affected) that he had been superintending a gang of slaves engaged in diamond-washing in Brazil; that he had seen one of them secrete a diamond, but, instead of informing his employers, had quietly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... connection of premises and conclusion, that cannot be detected by reducing the arguments to syllogistic form, must depend upon some juggling with language to disguise their incoherence. They may be generally described as Fallacies of Ambiguity, whether they turn upon the use of the same word in different senses, or upon ellipsis. Thus it may be argued that all works written in a classical language are classical, and that, therefore, the history ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... vanished. I was sensible of still wearing the fetters of the flesh, yet they galled no longer; the burden was lifted from my heart, it beat happily and calmly, as in childhood. As the stronger influences of my opiate (for I had really swallowed nothing more, as the druggist, suspecting from the incoherence of my language, that I was meditating some fearful purpose, furnished me with a harmless, though not ineffective draught) passed off, the events of the past came back to me. It was like the slow lifting of a curtain from a picture of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to the conditions and to the functions of human life, although, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas, this dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience, preferred incoherence to partiality. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous causerie called Old Pictures in Florence. There is passion in its grotesqueness and method in its incoherence; for the old painters, whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the invisible to come into play, and ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... or not much less. Many of the inhabitants of the town and district were soon in his debt, and, of course, had given good security. Of late, too, he looked somehow bloated and seemed more irresponsible, more uneven, had sunk into a sort of incoherence, used to begin one thing and go on with another, as though he were letting himself go altogether. He was more and more frequently drunk. And, if it had not been for the same servant Grigory, who by that time had aged considerably ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... coherence, or hardness; the element of EARTH in the nomenclature of observation and the CARBONIC principle in that of experiment; while the southern pole, as its antithesis, represents mobility, repulsion, incoherence, and fusibility; the element of air in the nomenclature of observation (that is, of Nature as it appears to us when unquestioned by art), and azote or nitrogen in the nomenclature of experiment (that is, of ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him. This contingency was ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... overtake the invisible, was almost too holy to gaze upon. Riches, station, honors, kindred, he had resigned them all, more than half a century since, in his love for the poor and his longing after truth. Here was none of the wavering or vagueness or incoherence of a wandering, delirious death. He was going to his clear, eternal calm. With a smile of perfect peace he said: "To your Majesty I commend the poor; and this that remains of me I give to be burned." And that, his last ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... sharply and with prodigious scorn. The answer which it brought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that I could make out only a frequent repetition of "custom house," and that somebody was going to ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... sand and the consequent pressure in every direction, similar to that exercised by fluids, have a certain bearing on the difficulties of the exhumation. Two more tubes are prepared, but this time supplied with fresh mould, lightly heaped up, which has not the incoherence of sand, with the attendant drawback of pressure. Six centimeters of mould give me eight flies for fifteen pupae buried; twenty centimeters give me only one. There is less success than with the sandy column. My device ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... ingenuities that protested, in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and thought. It had indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check, should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a house, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where we enjoyed a ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... man to the colours and arrest all the activities of a nation's normal life, and demand a dreadful sacrifice in blood and tears. There was only a sense of stupefaction which seemed to numb the intelligence of men so that they could not reason with any show of logic, or speak of this menace without incoherence, but thrust back the awful possibility with one word, uttered passionately and repeated a thousand times ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... the rectory and then vaulted the railings by the paddock and struck across beyond the mere. I could not go home with the immense burthen of thought and new ideas and emotions that had come upon me. I felt confused and shattered to incoherence by the new quality of Mary's atmosphere. I turned my steps towards the wilder, lonelier part of the park beyond the Killing Wood, and lay down in a wide space of grass between two divergent thickets of bracken, and remained there ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... behind, and the peaceful dwelling of the Reverend Frank Milvey was gained. The Reverend Frank Milvey's abode was a very modest abode, because his income was a very modest income. He was officially accessible to every blundering old woman who had incoherence to bestow upon him, and readily received the Boffins. He was quite a young man, expensively educated and wretchedly paid, with quite a young wife and half a dozen quite young children. He was under the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... nerves. What had happened to him, then, to reduce him to the pitiable condition in which he had come back to us over the wall, and in which he was still plunged? The discovery of the murder and of Miss Vaughan's senseless body might have accounted for it, but his incoherence had antedated that—unless, indeed, he knew of the murder before he left the grounds. That thought gave me a sudden shock, and I put it away from me, not ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare's philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.... The preface to my "Three Plays for Puritans" contains a section headed "Better than Shakespeare?" which is, I ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... junction, conjunction, affiliation, association, filiation; implication, relative, relation, kinsman; bond, tie, link, coupling vinculum. Antonyms: disconnection, detachment, isolation, incoherence. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and went on: "I—you have always seemed to me the very nicest of Jerry's friends—and I shall never forget your mother's kindness. I hope—I hope so much I shall see more of her. The Colonel thinks so too—we've liked so much having him like you." The incoherence of this did not prevent Sylvia's having a chillingly accurate grasp on its meaning. "It is the Colonel's hope," she went on painfully, "to have Jerry marry as soon as he graduates from the Law School. The Colonel thinks that ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... gives us a specimen of this logical incoherence affecting if possible still more deeply the foundations of philosophic faith.[16] He heads his paragraph Matter is Force, and goes on to argue that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Mab, was published in 1813; Alastor in 1816, and the Revolt of Islam—his longest—in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody his social creed of Perfectionism, as well as a certain vague Pantheistic system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... it had come back to me from my typewriter I read it, and was filled with consternation to discover that it was nothing more nor less than a mass of jumbled sentences, conveying no idea to the mind—a story which had seemed to me in the writing to be coherent had returned to me as a mere bit of incoherence— formless, without ideas—a bit of raving. It was then that I went to you and told you, as you remember, that I was worn out, and needed a month of absolute rest, which you granted. I left my work wholly, and went into the wilderness, where I could be entirely free from everything ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... laughing, and he looked at her with astonishment, asking himself whether he could believe what she was saying, when he could recollect what seemed to him so many proofs to the contrary. Yet in what she said there was no hesitation, no incoherence, no false note. Pride, noble pride, upheld her to the end. The first falsehood of her life was ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal. What, then, must have been my amazement when I heard the Frenchman speak what he had just spoken, and when I could not help acknowledging that he had spoken the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of time and the conditions of experience, before seeking to ascertain how things OUGHT TO TAKE PLACE in society, had to tell us how things DO TAKE PLACE; and all these processes which the authors speak of so pompously in their books as LAWS, PRINCIPLES, and THEORIES, in spite of their incoherence and inconsistency, had to be gathered up with scrupulous diligence, and described with strict impartiality. The fulfilment of this task called for more genius perhaps, certainly for more self-sacrifice, than will be demanded by the future ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... long while my thoughts were as aimless as my progress, but gradually out of the incoherence one idea crystallized. It was not an idea to be proud of. My bitterness of heart produced the natural result, that was all—a burning desire to be revenged upon somebody. I contemplated revenging myself upon everybody who had anything to do with my discomfiture, upon Mannering, ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... of the book of Numbers is enough to reveal the essential incoherence of its plan, and the great divergence of the elements out of which it is composed. No book in the Pentateuch makes so little the impression of a unity. The phenomena of Exodus are here repeated and intensified; a narrative of the intensest moral and ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Why, Browning's poem was contained in my tone-poem; blame Browning for the incoherence, for I but followed his verse. One day many months afterward I happened to pick up Hanslick, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... leave. It remains To state that my present appearance Is something too awful, my brains Are tending to wild incoherence; My mental condition's absurd; My thoughts are at sixes and sevens, Inextrica—lord! what a word! ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... sabbath, and consequently would take opportunity at their sabbaths to afflict them so much the more. Wherefore, I would that they who plead for a continuation of the seventh day sabbath from this text, would both better consider it, and the incoherence that seems to be betwixt such a sabbath and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... shown itself in a few short novels by GEORGE SAND—the first of the long and admirable series of her mature works—where, especially in such delicate masterpieces as La Mare au Diable, La Petite Fadette, and Francois le Champi, her earlier lyricism and incoherence were replaced by an idyllic sentiment strengthened and purified by an exquisite sense of truth. Flaubert's genius moved in a very different and a far wider orbit: but it was no less guided by the dictates of deliberate art. In his realism, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... in the world is fair-mindedness, method, the critical view, the sense of proportion, the capacity for distinguishing. The common state of human thought is one of confusion, incoherence, and presumption, and the common state of human hearts is a state of passion, in which equity, impartiality, and openness to impressions are unattainable. Men's wills are always in advance of their intelligence, their desires ahead of their will, and accident the source of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... l'auteur examine si la religion est reellement necessaire ou seulement utile au maintien ou a la police des empires, et s'il convient de la respecter sous ce point de vue. Comme il etablit la negative, il entreprend en consequence de prouver, par son ouvrage, l'absurdite et l'incoherence du dogme Chretien et de la mythologie qui en resulte, et l'influence de cette absurdite sur les tetes et sur les ames. Dans la seconde partie, il examine la morale chretienne, et il pretend prouver que dans ses principes ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... looking more beautiful than any one would have dreamed she could look, came forward, hanging tightly to Sandy's arm. She forgot all about the crowd for just a moment, when she took his one hand in both hers, and whispered, "Oh, Gavin!" And he looked at her with his eyes shining and said with equal incoherence, ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... on the Sports and Pastimes of the People of England had rendered him familiar with all the antiquarian lore necessary for the purpose of composing the projected romance; and although the manuscript bore the marks of hurry and incoherence natural to the first rough draught of the author, it evinced (in my opinion) ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... be read with the same delight with which it was heard; but he cannot print his tone, nor his air and manner, nor the contagion of his hardihood. All the while we were not sensible of the flutter of his ideas, the incoherence of his transitions, his vague notions, his doubtful assertions, and his meagre knowledge. A pen is ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... signal to slow down. A squeal of the speaking-tube whistle followed instantly; and Lanyard set foot upon the bridge in time to hear Mr. Collison demanding to know what the sanguinary hades had happened down there. Whatever reply he got seemed to exasperate him into incoherence. He stuttered with rage, gasped, and addressed the ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... been perfect, but it and many more of these lyrics have the uncertainty of close that usually marks early work. Often incoherent, too, the pictures of a dream rapidly succeeding each other without logical connection; yet scarcely marred by the incoherence, since the effect they seek to produce is not an emotion, not a conviction, but an impression of beauty, or horror, or ecstasy. The uncertain outlines are bathed in a vague golden air of imagination, and are shown to us with ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the details of this iniquitous tariff would only enrage us to a point of incoherence. Perhaps a short list of some of the things you will have to do without under the new arrangement will serve ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... she said nothing; and, begging her pardon for my incoherence, I tried to express in serious words the future that awaited her. But all those glad impressions had dazzled me; I was like some one who comes suddenly from the bright sunshine into a room. Shadows fell and rose before my brain as before eyes that have looked too long at the light; ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... this has given rise to the contemptuous attitude towards dreams and the medical theory of their limited psychical activity. It is especially in the longer and more complicated dream-plots that signs of incoherence are ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... will some day understand, and then you will know what seems wild in my speech is but the incoherence of a poor creature who has been beaten to the ground by the whirlwind, and only saved ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... copies have been taken, which are scattered throughout Europe. It is in consequence somewhat effaced, but it still shows the characteristic features of the poet—the purity of the profile, the fineness of the mouth, and the spiritual beauty and fascinating expression of the whole face. But the incoherence of the adaptation makes it painful to think that this is the best representation of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... old diplomatic idiot inspires me in piling up his stupidity on the dung- hill of bourgeoisie! Is it possible to treat philosophy, religion, peoples, liberty, the past and future, history, and natural history, everything and more yet, with an incoherence more inept and more childish! He seems to me as everlasting ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... or feeling. And all this, cries Diderot, for not knowing what was concealed from him, and what was unknown and unsuspected even by those who were daily about her? What presumption, what bad logic, what incoherence, what unjustified veering and vacillation in all these public verdicts ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... ever!" declared he, with emphatic incoherence. And without more words he hurried down the steps, and in another minute was rattling rapidly homeward, astonishing Dolly herself by the speed which he encouraged her ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne |
