"Nebulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... papers: the "Sphinx," a French paper published in Cairo, and London papers, the "Times," the "Morning Post." Isaacson bought two or three, vaguely. It was but rarely he felt vague, but now, as he sipped his tea, his excitement was linked with something else, that seemed misty and nebulous, yet not free from a sort of enchantment. By the railing, before and beneath him, a world of many of his dreams—his nargeeleh dreams—flowed by. The abruptness of his decision to come—that made half the enchantment of his ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses. Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to have grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the finishing mind of ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... admit that the substance of which the solar system consists once existed in a nebulous condition, and was in rotation, all the above peculiarities follow as necessary mechanical consequences. Nay, more, the formation of planets, the formation of satellites and of asteroids, is accounted for. We see why the outer planets and satellites are larger than the interior ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... that according to Kant's theory we are to suppose that millions of years ago there appeared a nebulous mass possessing a rotary motion, and unequally distributed through space. This is what science calls a beginning, and may assert that every physical event of a hundred million of ages existed potentially in ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... be farther advanced than if you were frightened by avowals which our fathers insisted should worry the women. Avowals absolutely useless in themselves, and which always incumber a passion with several nebulous days. They retard its progress. Bear this well in mind, Marquis: A woman is much better persuaded that she is loved by what she guesses than ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... chance in which Conniston had already lost his life, and in which he was now staking his own, was something which gave to Keith a new and entirely unlooked-for desire to see the end of the adventure. The mental vision of his own certain fate, should he lose, dissolved into a nebulous presence that no longer oppressed nor appalled him. Physical instinct to fight against odds, the inspiration that presages the uncertainty of battle, fired his blood with an exhilarating eagerness. He was ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... stucco existed not, and the "Jerry-builder" had no being. But where, among them all, might be found such another parlour as this at Dapplemere, with its low, raftered ceiling, its great, carved mantel, its panelled walls whence old portraits looked down at one like dream faces, from dim, and nebulous backgrounds. And where might be found two such bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, quick-footed, deft-handed Phyllises as the two buxom maids who flitted here and there, obedient to their mistress's word, or gesture. And, lastly, where, in all this wide world, could there ever be found just such another ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... windows, every story, Shine with far-off nebulous glory! Round her in that luminous cloud Stars obedient press and crowd, She the centre of all gazing, She the sun her planets dazing! In her eyes' victorious lightning Some are paling, some are brightening: Those on ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... among the foremost and withal the most mischievous of the old theories which will fall, will be that figment of the imagination—the Nebular Hypothesis.[14] How strangely, and how strongly, has that hypothesis maintained its ground, even after nebulous masses have been resolved into clusters of stars. If gravity be the result of retro-acting forces, there could be no element of attraction in the flimsy gaseous particles whereby they might be drawn together. If gravity be the result of retro-acting forces, then ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... secresy. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all." In fact, forgery, and nothing else than forgery, seems to be the easiest as well as the most feasible explanation of these remarks, which, were it not for this theory, would, instead of being very clear, be quite nebulous. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... nursing and full of grief for the passing of her old friend, Nance threw a coat about her and slipped out on the terrace. Above her, nebulous stars were already appearing, and their twinkling was answered by responsive gleams in the city below. Against the velvety dusk two tall objects towered in the distance, the beautiful Gothic spire of the cathedral, and the tall, unseemly ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... Faint nebulous spots in the air, little red disks in a halo of fog, acquaint us that there are gas-lights this night in the streets of Halifax. Something new, I take it, this illumination? Carbonated hydrogen is ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... In a nebulous way the theatre plays with certain aspects of the relations between the two sexes, but without seriously considering any question of feasible reform. Upon one aspect which seemed to promise matter for powerful ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... the word development to designate a definite sequence of ideas, i.e., in a logical order. "Metamorphosis, says Hegel, belongs to the Idea as such since its variation alone is development. Rational speculation must get rid of such nebulous concepts as the evolution of the more highly developed animal organisms from ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... the impact would thus appear where nothing had been seen previously. Again, a similar effect might be produced by a dark body, or a star too faint to be seen, being heated to incandescence by plunging in its course through a nebulous mass of matter, of which there are many examples lying about ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... heavily into the air, until at a certain height the smoke remains stationary, and hangs in clouds above the houses. Looking from some great elevation, such as the tower of Ivan Veliki in the Kremlin, you see these clouds beneath you, agitated like waves, and forming a kind of nebulous sea, which is, however, soon taken up ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... that nebulous and confused frame of mind to which all things, animate or inanimate, human, animal, vegetable, or inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and reason. The savage, at all events when myth-making, draws ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... thin crust formed? what should cause any solid envelope, however slight and filmy when compared to the whole bulk of the globe, to form upon the surface of such a molten mass? At this point of the investigation the geologist must appeal to the astronomer; for in this vague and nebulous border-land, where the very rocks lose their outlines and flow into each other, where matter exists only in its essential elements, not yet specialized into definite forms and substances,—there the two sciences ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... gaps there floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rain suggested—and from which broader ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... life; the backwoods era, the simple industries, the old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.E. Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the Premier of Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the minority ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... mind in regard to the issues of this war. We have confounded causes and occasions and purposes and incidents until it has become almost impossible for any considerable number of us to form a sound and correct judgment in regard to it. But we shall emerge from that nebulous condition. We are beginning to see more clearly now, and it would not surprise me greatly if the means used for producing our confusion would some day come back, if not to plague the consciences, at least to foil the purposes of ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... flame was made by a violent collision between two bodies coming together with great velocity so that both flared up, but this speculation has been shown by the spectroscope to be improbable, and now it is supposed by some people that two stars journeying through space may pass through a nebulous region, and thus may flare up, and such a theory is backed up by the fact that a very great number of such stars do seem to be mixed up in some strange way ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... the liquid vault of ether hung the starry gems of light, Blazing with unwonted splendor on the ebon brow of night; Far across the arching concave like a train of silver lay, Nebulous, and white, and ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... is evidence in favour of the hallucination theory that: "A flower or other small object is seen to move; one person present will see a luminous cloud hovering over it, another will detect a nebulous-looking hand, whilst others will see nothing ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... to note a score of societies which seemed quite independent of each other. The smartest was the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest was the sporting world, also unknown to him except through the talk of his acquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of nebulous societies. His lawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented legal circles where one still sat over the wine and told anecdotes of the bench and bar; but he himself never set eyes on a judge except when his father took him to ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... you would formulate it." She laughed again, and Staniford started as one does when a nebulous association crystallizes into a distinctly ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... good humour. She had none of his philosophy, and she mistook his even temper for indifference. "Irene is our only child, and before your very eyes you see her—you see her—" Mrs. Hardy's fears were too nebulous to enable her to ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... intellect, surely it is the one which should most vividly awaken the religious sentiment. Is it possible to look upon all those worlds within worlds, all those endless groups of mighty suns, all those strange and marvellous combinations of coloured stars, all those remote nebulous clusters,—to look upon them in their perfect order and government,—to consider their infinite number and astonishing dimensions,—without acknowledging the fulness of the power of an everlasting God, who created them, set them in their appointed places, and still controls them? Is it ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... means of his astral sight. The human aura, as all students of occultism know, is that peculiar emanation of astral vibrations that extends from each living human being, surrounding him in an egg-shaped form for a distance of two to three feet on all sides. This peculiar nebulous envelope is not visible to the physical sight, and may be discerned only by means of the astral senses. It, however, may be dimly "felt" by many persons coming into the presence of other persons, and constitutes a personal atmosphere which is sensed ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... benefits conferred by some of these specially prepared editions, there remains still more to be accomplished in this direction before the work is complete. A flood of light has been thrown on the dark and nebulous places of the instrumental classics by various distinguished and highly competent musicians. It is sincerely to be hoped, in the interests of this branch of the aesthetics of vocal art, that those competent to speak with authority will do so, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... thankful that she failed of striking resemblance to the portraits of these admirable ancestors, nevertheless it seemed to me that, had I not known definitely of their place in her family history, I might almost have sensed them hovering behind her: a background, nebulous and shadowy, out of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... this word in a kind of preter-perfect sense—in the very beginning of things, immense portions of infinite space were filled with finely diffused nebulous matter, heated to an intensity that is altogether inconceivable. The particles of this "fire mist," as it is appropriately called, were the true primordia rerum,—the elements of the universe,—the principles of all the forms of inorganic matter and all organic things. ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... which they gave to those who performed them. But these had no rational basis behind them on which they could lean for support. These were probably then just tending towards being affiliated to the nebulous Sa@mkhya doctrines which had grown up among certain sections. It was at this juncture that we find Buddha erecting a new superstructure of thought on altogether original lines which thenceforth opened up a new avenue of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... where the sheaves are already garnered. Thus disregarding the fruits of action, we could work like those who have made the Great Sacrifice, for whom even Nirvana is no resting place. Worlds may awaken in nebulous glory, pass through their phases of self-conscious existence and sink again to sleep, but these tireless workers continue their age-long task of help. Their motive we do not know, but in some secret depth ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... at least one hundred million stars, a number of which have over five hundred worlds revolving around them; others have only six or ten. The average, as above stated, is estimated at forty-nine. Then, also, far out in the depths of space, there are nebulous spots visible only through the most searching lenses. These are new systems of milky ways or new universes, so immensely distant that our most powerful telescopes cannot even resolve them ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... and that it was difficult for them to swear to the identity of the assailants; although they believed that the accused were among them. Cross examined by the clever attorney who had been engaged by McGinty, they were even more nebulous in their evidence. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... froth, mantle, sparkle, guggle[obs3], gurgle; effervesce, ferment, fizzle. Adj. bubbling &c. v.; frothy, nappy[obs3], effervescent, sparkling, mousseux[French: frothy], up. cloudy &c. n.; thunderheaded[obs3]; vaporous, nebulous, overcast. Phr. "the lowring element scowls o'er the darkened landscip" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that nobody left the ship. Once more he felt that vague suggestion of a cloaked trap in the second mate's smiling acceptance of the instructions, but now, strangely, the feeling did not bother him. The hint remained nebulous; he shook it off and went to sleep on the more ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... world, he had attained to a clear sanity, to a just sense of values; the romantic blur of his early poetic vision clarifying into the strong definiteness of the Real. Assuredly he could now no longer write those nebulous, elusive word-harmonies. Nor for him the mere aesthetic toying, the dainty piece of colour-work; but poetry that should throb with vitality and humanness. From dream poetry he had passed to dream life. Now that he had won his way to true life, was he ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... man of science, himself an eye-witness of the great meteoric shower on the American continent, after carefully collecting and comparing facts, proposed the following theory: The meteors of November 13th, 1833, emanated from a nebulous body which was then pursuing its way along with the earth around the sun; that this body continues to revolve around the sun in an elliptical orbit, but little inclined to the plane of the ecliptic, and having its aphelion near the orbit of the earth; and finally, that ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... at great, very great, trouble to trace the path of the fugitives in Lytton's immortal work. But I have an idea that at certain points Lytton was rather nebulous. I met your young friend and asked him what he thought. He only laughed, however. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... formation of planets and satellites, on the assumption of the existence of a central sun, and of certain other specified conditions; the second being that which undertakes to account for the formation of the sun itself, on the assumption of the existence of a diffused nebulous matter in space, or, as it has been ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... believe, to revenge on him all the irritation which she and I both felt at his attitude of unemotional superiority towards all the world. Some people may think it almost a pity that the lady cannot deal similarly with Mr. SHEPPARD himself in just reprisal for his long-winded and nebulous way of talking about Anti-Christ and Armageddon, and for his revolting incidents of murder and insanity introduced without any excuse of necessity. The book contains a considerable element of lively if undiscriminating ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... new stars appeared. The Milky Way, which had so puzzled the ancients, was found to be composed of stars. Stars that appeared single to the eye were some of them found to be double; and at intervals were found hazy nebulous wisps, some of which seemed to be star clusters, while others ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... prospect which is found, and the mine which is made and investment cannot properly begin until a body of ore has been blocked out in a proved prospect. Add to the glamor of risk the haze of fraud, and the foregoing will show the nebulous condition of mining investments in relation to mining ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... when its cloudy wings were folded over his cabin, he would sit alone with a sense of security he had never felt before. On such occasions he was apt to leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for what might not come to him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond? Perhaps even SHE,—for this strange solitary was not insane nor visionary. He was never in spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping or waking, pacing the beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a woman's face was always ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... now revolves. No planet was then in existence. The solar nebula was endowed with a general movement of rotation in the direction west to east. As it cooled it could not fail to experience a gradual condensation, and in consequence to rotate with greater and greater rapidity. If the nebulous matter extended originally in the plane of its equator, as far as the limit where the centrifugal force exactly counterbalanced the attraction of the nucleus, the molecules situate at this limit ought, during the process of condensation, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... afternoon. Am I sick? . . . Good Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when she finds that out, but—I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death! Some day but——Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy old men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to bear them——! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... fire was retreating before them and the following wind. In a few moments their haven of safety—the expanse already burnt over—came in sight. Here and there, seen dimly through the drifting smoke, the scattered embers that still strewed the forest floor glowed in weird nebulous spots like will-o'-the-wisps. For an instant the major hesitated; the sheriff cast ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... probably, a long "Entwickelungsgeschichte" out of a nebular blastema. Who knows how far that amount of likeness among sets of minerals, in virtue of which they are now grouped into families and orders, may not be the expression of the common conditions to which that particular patch of nebulous fog, which may have been constituted by their atoms, and of which they may be, in the strictest sense, the descendants, ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... among subjects of the dynastic States—as e.g., Japan or Germany—men are known to have resolutely risked, and lost, their life for the sake of the sovereign's renown, or even to save the sovereign's life; whereas, of course, even the slightest and most nebulous reflection would make it manifest that in point of net material utility the sovereign's decease is an idle matter as compared with the loss of an able-bodied workman. The sovereign may always be replaced, with some prospect of public advantage, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... circle grew nebulous, and Colwyn was fast falling asleep through sheer weariness, when a slight sharp sound, like that made by turning a key in a lock, brought him back to wide-eyed wakefulness. He sat up in bed, listening with strained ears, feeling for the box of matches at his bedside. He found ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... the outcome of an idle suggestion made one hot summer afternoon, and decided upon in the moment. Within the same half-hour a telegram was sent the Professor inviting him for a ride to Buffalo. Beyond that point there was no thought,—merely a nebulous notion that might take ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... in study, for he had partially grasped, in a hazy, nebulous way, the rudiments of a thought which was destined to prove the key and the solution to the puzzling problem of ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and cliffs. From every point we could see the Navajo Mountain and at least we knew what there was at the foot of its majestic northern slope. I climbed far above camp and crossing over a promontory looked down upon the nebulous region to the eastward that we were to fathom, and it seemed to me one of the most interesting sights I had ever beheld. The night was so cold that ice formed in our kettles, for our altitude in feet above sea was ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... be repeated again in a few hours and irregularly throughout the night, but with scenic changes behind the great sombre pall of the sky. North-west, northeast, and south-east it would elusively appear in nebulous blotches, flitting about to end finally in long bright strands in the zenith, crossing the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... the Desert even reached us; and the fine sand with which they were loaded, had completely obscured the clearness of the atmosphere. The sun presented a reddish disk; the whole surface of the ocean became nebulous, and the air which we breathed, depositing a fine sand, an impalpable powder, penetrated to our lungs, already parched with a burning thirst. In this state of torment we remained till four in the afternoon, when a breeze from the northwest ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... spades and rakes; Rust's on the garden-tools. Yet, where the moonlight makes Nebulous silver pools A ghostly shape is cast— Something unseen has stirred.... Was it a breeze that passed? ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... many a page what cordialities step forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon; what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer," to drink of the spiritual waters of "Sartor Resartus." Here was a new ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... pious souls crouched behind the pillars, or pouring forth their last fervent aspirations before some favorite altar or saintly shrine. Soon all have left, and the silence of the abandoned sanctuary shrouds the fabric in greater solemnity. The aromatic incense still floats in nebulous veils around ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... to the East, but he did not keep quite straight; he just half turned." This from a pastor's wife, about one whom she had been observing during an ordination ceremony in the English cathedral. "He just half turned." It describes the nebulous attitude of mind of many a one to-day. India has not our historical background. It has no Foxe's Book of Martyrs yet. Perhaps that is why its people are so indifferent upon points which seem of importance to us. They have not had to fight ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... hopes and all her ambitions, for even in the face of hopelessness, in the clutches of the dread authority from which there was no escape, little Meriem yet cherished hopes and ambitions. It is true that her ambitions were rather nebulous in form, consisting chiefly of a desire to escape with Geeka to some remote and unknown spot where there were no Sheiks, no Mabunus—where El Adrea could find no entrance, and where she might play all day surrounded only by flowers and birds and the harmless ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... up from the valley that stormy afternoon, Sawyer's Ledge was at first quite blotted out by wind and rain, but presently reappeared in little nebulous star-like points along the mountain side, as the straggling cabins of the settlement were one by one lit up by the miners returning from tunnel and claim. These stars were of varying brilliancy that evening, two notably so—one that eventually resolved itself into a ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... spiritual reading, she gladly permitted Lady Sara's influence, realising—with the priceless knowledge of a spirit made reasonable through pain—that the girl was romantic and the Prince incurably old. His flaxen wig heightened the tone of a complexion much ravaged by gout and its antidotes. His nebulous eyes with twitching lids were not improved by the gold-rimmed glasses which magnified their insignificance. He possessed a striking nose and chin, but, as these features were more characteristic than delightful, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... heard to the reader would be impossible; so chaotic was most of it that it left no impression on my own memory. All I can do is to tell him what fragments stuck, and what nebulous classification I involved. The letters ran from A to G, and my best continuous chance came when Bhme, reading rapidly from a paper, I think, went through the letters, backwards, from G, adding remarks to each; thus: ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... terror. Surrounded by her whirling cloud of hair, the maiden sprang, untiring, across the wild white world. His strength failing, the youth pantingly followed. Thousands of years passed; the breathless pursuit continued; the maiden's nebulous hair became shot with streaks of golden fire, from her eyes beams of light streamed across the expanses over which she exultantly, fearfully bounded; the tremulous faltering youth's face paled until it shone silvery in the darkness, and the beads of perspiration on his forehead glowed with a strange ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... air Nebulous floating of tone-sacrifices, Twilight in churches now broadens and rises, Incense and word fill the evening with prayer. Over the Sabines the flame-belt is knotted, Shepherds' lights through the Campagna are dotted, Rome with her lamps dimly breaks on the sight,— Shadowy legend from history's ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... have tried to visualise old New York as hard as I have tried. But I will wager that, like myself, you have been unable to conjure up more than a nebulous and tenuous vision,—a modern New York's shadow, the ghostly skeleton of our city as it appears today. For instance, when you have thought of old Washington Square, you have probably thought of it pretty much as it is now, only of course with an old-time atmosphere. The ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... “Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistently emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himself through the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in the freedom ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... southward, low down and glittering swiftly nearer, were two little patches of nebulous light. And then two more, and then a glow of swiftly driving shapes. Presently he could count them. There were four and twenty. The first fleet of aeroplanes had come! Beyond appeared a yet ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... yet she neither gave her consent nor yet withheld it, and he knew there was no immediate hope in her words. Graceful as were his bows as he withdrew, he left with scarcely another word to say. All day his castle hung over him like a cloud, not nebulous and evanescent only, but brooding darkly, boding storms, such as the orange ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... all these crosses Mrs. Grubb was moderately cheerful, for her troubles were as nebulous as everything else to her mind. She intended to invent some feasible plan for her deliverance sooner or later, but she was much more intent upon development than deliverance, and she never seemed to have the leisure to break her shackles. ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... concealed in the niche, and Cudjo's was nowhere visible; yet the whole interior was luminous with a dim and silvery halo. A narrow corridor ran round the sides, and resembled a dark ring swimming in nebulous light, midway between the upper and nether hemispheres of the wondrous hollow globe. Within this horizontal rim, floor there was none; and they stood upon its brink; and, looking up, they saw the marvellous vault all sparkling with stars and beaming with pale, pendent, ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... somewhat nebulous subleaders in the rebellion was Van Rensburg, sometimes called "Prophet" Lichtenberg, from the place where he lived. During the Boer War he had predicted a remarkable victory for the Boers, which had resulted in the capture of Lord Methuen, and ever since the burghers of the Union ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... significance of the ka I realize that, in striving after brevity and conciseness—to keep the size of my statement within the limits of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, generously elastic though it is—I have left the argument in a rather nebulous form. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... constitution of specific objects and live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to thought no less than nature is, and even what we call invention or fancy is generated not by thought itself but by the chance fertility of nebulous objects, floating and breeding in the primeval chaos. Where the natural order lapses, if it ever does, not mind or will or reason can possibly intervene to fill the chasm—for these are parcels and expressions of the natural order—but only ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... not pulled, rabbit-like, out of a hat. When you build a house, the architect makes it yours by getting a word picture of your ideas and pulling them down to earth in a series of business-like blueprints. If your ideas regarding decoration are nebulous, a good interior decorator can help to make them concrete. Do not depend on her completely, however, because you are anxious that this country home should be just right and you are afraid of making mistakes. There is nothing final about them and it is better to make a few and have a ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... Unknown; and when I farther gaze upon Those clustered stars, at distance infinite, That seem to us like mist, to whom Not only man and earth, but all our stars At once, so vast in numbers and in bulk, The golden sun himself included, are Unknown, or else appear, as they to earth, A point of nebulous light, what, then, Dost thou unto my thought appear, O race of men? Remembering thy wretched state below, Of which the soil I tread, the token bears; And, on the other hand, That thou thyself hast deemed The Lord and end of all the ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... his bullet-head that the idea of a plot that could not be discovered came into its first nebulous being. Absalom found out that Mhtoon Pah was looking for a gold lacquer bowl, and through the agency of Leh Shin the bowl was eventually marked down as the property of a seaman who was lodging temporarily near the opium den by the river, one of Leh Shin's clients. The assistant had the good ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... thought of that, also? Dared she tread on this nebulous fairy-ground? Dared she lead Corrie to set foot ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... one of the many places where the frontier had to be settled. The empire was a nebulous affair; you could not say where it began and ended; and to bring all out of this nebulosity was one of the labors that awaited Augustus. Even a Messenger of the Gods is limited by the conditions he finds in the world; and is as great as his age will allow ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... surface this objection seems final—but it is only on the surface. It arises from taking a too narrow view of what Evolution is. It takes evolution in zoology for Evolution as a whole. Evolution began, let us say, with some primeval nebulous mass in which lay potentially all future worlds. Under the evolutionary hand, the amorphous cloud broke up, condensed, took definite shape, and in the line of true development assumed a gradually increasing complexity. Finally there ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... have several times remarked within the tropics, in the space of a few minutes. Mairan asserts, that in France it is common enough to see the zodiacal light, in the months of February and March, mingling with a kind of Aurora Borealis, which he calls 'undecided,' and the nebulous matter of which spreads itself all around the horizon, or appears toward the west. I very much doubt, whether, in the observations I have been describing, there was any mixture of these two species of light. The variations in intensity took place at considerable ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... century in the past. Knowledge is enthroned as a king, and grand truths and new ideas are his ministers. Science takes the diameter of the earth's orbit as a base line and unit of measurement, and with it spans infinity, and triangulates the nebulous systems amid the shadowy verges of receding space. Its researches are cosmical upon the earth and the heavens, and all the elements minister to its progress. Sink to the lowest mine, or fathom the ocean's depth, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Toro, you found that old mortgage carried in its list of assets. You also discovered that it had been renewed several times, each time for a larger sum, from which you deduced that the prospects for the ultimate payment of the mortgage were nebulous and distant. Your hypothesis was correct. The Farrels never did to-day a task that could be deferred until to-morrow. Well, you went out and looked over the security for that mortgage. You found it to be ample—about three to ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... art. He was one of those who contributed most to bring all created work, pictures, statues, books, building under the single standard of Art. He had begun his career by committing a volume of verse, which won him a place in the pleiades of living poets; among these verses was a nebulous poem that was greatly admired. Forced by want of means to keep on producing, he went from the theatre to the press, and from the press to the theatre, dissipating and scattering his talent, but believing always in his vein. His fame was therefore not unpublished like that of so many great minds ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... terrible idea which had been growing in my brain, shaping itself out of a nebulous mass of reminiscences of what had just occurred at the studio, was now stinging me to madness. Wilderspin's extreme dejection, the strange way in which he had seemed inclined to evade answering my question ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... number of people in the coffee-room, and these, with tankards and glasses before them, were listening to the conversation of Jentham. Tobacco smoke filled the apartment with a thick atmosphere of fog, through which the gas-lights flared in a nebulous fashion, and rendered the air so hot that it was difficult to breathe in spite of the windows being open. At the head of the long table sat Jentham, drinking brandy-and-soda, and speaking in his cracked, refined voice with considerable spirit, his rat-like, quick eyes glittering ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... a riband around the flowing hair of the sea, Where gleam the foam-flowers garlanded in multitudinous nebulous rings: Here, on the frontier of many worlds and the billow-rocked cradle of eternal sleep, No sound, no music, no silence that a ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... that is an indefinite phrase. What do you mean by it?' I will tell you what the Bible means by it. It means Jesus Christ. All the nebulous splendours of that firmament are gathered together into one blazing sun. It is a vague direction to tell a man to shoot up, into an empty heaven. It is not a vague direction to tell him to seek the 'things above'; for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... ever be taken for a fool, but who showed by the very actions of his body as well as by the play of his face, that he lacked firmness of purpose. He certainly was no fool. He had read much, and, though he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his readings certain nebulous lights, begotten by other men's thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects. It cannot be said of him that he did much thinking for himself;—but he thought that he thought. He believed of himself that he had gone rather deep into politics, and that he was entitled to call many ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... horizon with a considerable breadth, and as luminous as a moderate aurora, and extended upward in the direction of the star Aldebaran, thus forming a triangle. Mr Vernon explained to me the supposed cause of this phenomena. It is that the sun is surrounded by a mass of nebulous matter, of which this light is but a manifestation. Some philosophers have an idea that the matter has solid particles in it, which, when they pass through the earth's atmosphere, produce shooting stars, or are drawn towards it in the shape of meteoric ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... no dweller in that darkness, the terrible voice of God drove it far away from the eyes of men—Heaven was thundering as if it would have smashed this nebulous star of ours here below into fragments. Who could sleep at such ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... heart warm toward the grizzled old warrior as he, dropping the nebulous matter of Kumari, said: "And to think, Captain Sahib, that but for the Gulab we would have slain you as the murderer of Amir Khan. As a Patan, even if I had wished it, I could not have fended the tulwars from your body. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of Urdoz and Oleron, and at last rising over their unequal ridges, turns their nebulous peak into a new country which has also its mountains and its depths, and, quitting France, descends into Spain. Never has the hoof of the mule left its trace in these windings; man himself can with difficulty stand upright there, even with the hempen ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... mild interest in the daily reports of so many German aeroplanes destroyed, so many driven down, so many of ours missing, and enraged interest in the reports of bomb raids on British towns; but of aerial observation, the main raison d'etre of flying at the front, they own to nebulous ideas. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... the criminal on the scaffold, general forgiveness of sinners and the abolition of hell, was rejected by Schiller, who later characterized the song as a 'bad poem'. The 'Song to Joy' sprang from noble sentiment and has the genuine lyric afflatus; but its author had not yet emerged from that nebulous youthful sentimentalism according to which joy, sympathy, love, friendship, virtue, happiness, God, were all very much the same thing. And the thought is a trifle incoherent. If the good Spirit above the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... where I shall go, Mr. Daney," Nan informed him truthfully, "except that I shall betake myself some distance from the Pacific Coast—some place where the opportunities for meeting people who know me are nebulous, to say the least. And I shall leave no forwarding address. When I leave Port Agnew"—she looked Mr. Daney squarely in the eyes as she said this—"I shall see to it that no man, woman, or child in Port Agnew—not even Don McKaye ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... which still kept keen watch ahead. He was glad when it came time for Steve's watch on deck, and he could lie down and let sleep drive it out of his mind. He did not live solely to revenge himself upon Horace Gower. He had his own way to make and his own plans—even if they were still a bit nebulous—to fulfill. It was only now and then that the past saddened him and ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... there lies their scorpion power. De Quincey's vigor is evenly and equally diffused through his whole being. It is not a partial palpitation, but a deep, steady glow. His insight hangs over us and the world like a nebulous star, seeing us, but, in part, remaining unseen. In fact, his deepest thoughts have never been disclosed. Like Burke, he has not "hung his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at." He has profound reticence as well as power, and he has modesty as well as reticence. On subjects ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... expansion. Hence the shock of sun and planet would at once result in the vaporization of both bodies; and there can be no doubt that by the time the sun has absorbed the outermost of his attendant planets, he will have resumed something like his original nebulous condition. He will have been dilated into a huge mass of vapour, and will have become fit for a new process of contraction and for a new production of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... mud, where the whitened dome of the modest house of prayer is surmounted by a cross and not a crescent. They are the villages of those Copts, those Egyptians, who have preserved the Christian faith from father to son since the nebulous times of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... is very simple, David. The earth was once a nebulous mass. It cooled, and as it cooled it shrank. At length a thin crust of solid matter formed upon its outer surface—a sort of shell; but within it was partially molten matter and highly expanded gases. As it continued to ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to my conversation with Simpson, had been of the most vague and nebulous character, had now taken shape and wore so promising an appearance that I felt sanguine of its ultimate success; so without further ado I retired right aft to the wheel grating—that part of the brigantine being now quite deserted, and ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine, These that we feel in the blood of our blushes ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... than the accumulation of vegetable matter in a peat bog and its transformation into coal? No scientific person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast extent, from which the specific existing worlds have been developed one by one What theist doubts that the actual results of the development in the inorganic worlds are not merely compatible with design but are in the truest ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... thinking only of her gain, of being clothed upon with a garment showing ever some new fold of surprising beauty and wonder. If she had remained in the Father's house—like the elder brother in the Parable—then would all that He had have been hers, in nebulous simplicity. But now, holding her revels apart, she seems to sing her own song, and to dream her own beautiful dream, wandering, with a motion wholly her own, among the gardens of cosmic order and loveliness. She glories in her many veils, which, though they hide from her both her source ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Seizing us by the crown-tuft of hair upon our shaven head, he plants the foamy bunch of fibres full in our face. The world vanishes; sight, hearing, smell, taste (unless we open our mouth), and breathing, are cut off; we have become nebulous. Although our eyes are shut, we seem to see a blank whiteness; and, feeling nothing but a soft fleeciness, we doubt whether we be not the Olympian cloud which visited lo. But the cloud clears away before strangulation begins, and the velvety ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... he came into the house, still nebulous, and as he passed the open door of the library he heard a ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... Mr. Foley admitted, "which I have always considered a little nebulous. However, we shall see. We have a few hours' respite, at ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... one place was like another to him, who had lost his hold on everything worth while. He had a vague notion to invoke the aid of the law to hold Bland and the plane, wherever he might be located, but he was not feeling particularly friendly toward the law just now, and the idea remained nebulous and remote. He went on because there was really ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... of thought and sentiment and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for talking's sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of richness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and Shakespearean—for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human and interesting in themselves, the ideas ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that no one of them was infallibly in the right, and that the truth probably lay in certain wide religious ideas which underlay all forms of Christian faith. Maitland rejected this with scorn as a dangerous and nebulous kind of religion—"nerveless and flabby, without bone or sinew." They then diverged on to a wider ground, and Hugh tried to defend his theory that God called souls to Himself by an infinite variety of appeal, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Gerzson, however, the romantic spectacle of sunrise on the puszta produced no romantic impression whatsoever. He neither observed the golden clouds in the sky, nor the dappled shadows flitting across the dewy fields, nor the lilac-coloured nebulous horizon. He saw none of these things, I say, but he saw something else which did not ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... respiration." Lectures and demonstrations went on all through the evening, all over the magnificent room engaged for the occasion. In one corner, a fair philosopher in blue velvet and point lace, took the Sun in hand facetiously. "The sun's life, my friends, begins with a nebulous infancy and a gaseous childhood." In another corner, a gentleman of shy and retiring manners converted "radiant energy into sonorous vibrations"—themselves converted into sonorous poppings by waiters and champagne bottles at the supper ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... balmy air, tinged with a whiff of salt, and gazed pensively at the white town rambling down towards the shining river. Had God indeed revealed Himself on Mount Sinai? But this fresh doubt was banished by the renewed suspicion which, after having disturbed his dreams in nebulous distortions, sprang up in daylight clearness. It was his babbling about Dom Diego that had ruined the genial old physician. After days of gathering uneasiness, being unable to gain any satisfaction from the friar, he sought the secretary of the Inquisition ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... needed for affixing thereto a praem. Some friends of mine have been plaguing me beyond the restrictive line of Patience for the true cause of conceiving the accompanying collection of words, balderdash or what you will, some even asseverating with the eruditeness of an Aristole that it was a nebulous idea, an embryonic form of thought hibernating within the cavities of my sinciput's inner apex, the remnants of that wild phantasmagoric dream of "vicious, vulpine labyrinths of hell," partly expounded in my "The Flight ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... trait in his character, and through the absence of which in most other explorers, Australian nomenclature lacks distinction and often euphony — enquired of the name from the natives, and found it to be called the Karaula. Was this, or was this not the nebulous Kindur? The answer could be supplied only by tracing its course; but its general direction and the discovery and recognition of its junction with the Gwydir showed that the Karaula was but the upper flow of Sturt's ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... the daughter of the chief, at Natzie, whose hand was now level with the surface of the rock. The next instant, far to the northwest flashed a slender beam of dazzling light, another—another. An interval of a second or two, and still another flash. Angela could see the tiny, nebulous dot, like will-'o-the-wisp, dancing far over among the rocks across a gloomy gorge. She had never seen it before, but knew it at a glance. The Indian girl was signaling to some of her father's people far over toward the great reservation, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... good qualities. Thoroughly acquainted as she believed herself with "the plan of salvation," Jesus of Nazareth was to her but the vague shadow of something that was more than a man, yet no man at all. I had nearly said that what He came to reveal had become to her yet more vague from her nebulous notion of Him who was its revelation. Her religion was, as a matter of course, as dusky and uncertain, as the object-center of it was obscure and unrealized. Since her father's death and her comparative isolation, she had read and thought a good deal; ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... force, and the law of gravitation,—what must happen? We have the strongest scientific reason to believe that the matter of the solar system primordially existed in a highly diffused or nebulous form. By mutual gravitation, therefore, all the substance of the nebula must have begun to concentrate upon itself, or to condense. Now, from this point onwards, I wish it to be clearly understood that ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to pack ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... life, filling my own home—our home—with laughter and with the music of her voice! Again and again she rose to my enthralled vision, and ever she was Youth and Love, the vision crowned with the wonder of her nebulous, brown-gold hair as she gazed at me out of her sweet, clear eyes in which I seemed still to read unfathomable ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... State under the League of Nations. An arrangement was also proposed by which the city was to be administered by Italy, while the Yugoslavs should have a guarantee of access to the sea. These negotiations were still in a nebulous state, but certain proposals were going to be put into force which were suggested by the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry. With French, American, Italian and British representatives this commission had visited Rieka. One of the recommendations ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... see it," she cried. He looked at her incredulously. There was nothing but a nebulous mass of blue. "Well, I have seen it," she protested, "two or three times. To-day it is ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... fluctuating fortunes and perils, to his final fall on the field of battle. Such a tragic exhibition resembles a comet's course, which, hardly visible at first, and revealing itself only to the astronomic eye, appears at a nebulous distance in the heavens, but soon soars with unheard-of and accelerating rapidity towards the central point of our system, scattering dismay among the nations of the earth, till, in a moment, when least expected, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... She pointed with her arm in a certain direction, but as the points of the compass had no existence for Mrs. Rexford's newly immigrated intelligence, and as all parts of Canada, near and remote, seemed very much in the same place in her nebulous vision of geography, the little information the girl had given was of no interest to her and she ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... he is perturbed. I spare you the details, but from the nature of his questions you might have thought he was examining you through me for a licence to preach. I did not try to deceive him in regard to your views, but my own impression of them is so nebulous that the very vagueness of my replies increased his alarm. Nor did I protest at the abuse he heaped upon your absent head. For I know how wickedly and unscrupulously you acted in the felony of my love, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... topsy-turvy world it was, to be sure! What alternations between despair and hope! What rebound from the gates of Death to the threshold of Eden! How untrue, after all, was the nebulous philosophy of Omar, the Tentmaker. Surely in the happenings of the bygone day there ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... trifling with, that brought him now this cold, dead fear before which he quailed! What was this something that in his temerity he had dared invoke—that rose now engulfing him, a puny maggot—that snatched him up and flung him headlong, shackled, before this nebulous, terrifying tribunal, where out of nothingness, out of a void, the calm, majestic features of the Patriarch took form and changed, and changed, and kept changing, and grew implacable, set with the stamp of doom. ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... filling about the hall in a quaint serpentine manner like a man trying to invent a new variety of the tango, the Efficient Baxter had found himself in some way—why, he did not know—of what, he could not say—but in some nebulous ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... they cause him to die to every other thing, except the absorbing affection; at the same time, they, being closed and concealed, render him unquiet, and being open, they will tranquillize him, because at this time, when the eyes of the human mind in this body are covered with a nebulous veil, the soul, through such studies, becomes troubled and harassed, and he being thus torn and goaded, will attain only that amount of quiet as will satisfy the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... refulgent, effulgent, brilliant, vivid, glossy, fulgent, naif, lucent, glaring, garish, crystalline; intelligent, precocious, apt, acute, discerning, clever, smart, knowing; auspicious, propitious; illustrious, glorious. Antonyms: dull, lackluster, obscure, dim, opaque, murky, nebulous, dingy, tarnished, sullied. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... More nebulous were the memories of those early mornings when she had paused in the midst of getting breakfast to sniff in the clover-laden air and think how wonderful it would be if only she needn't stay in the hot, stuffy kitchen but could be free ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... remain blind to the trend of events. After the fall of Tsingtao and the subsequent complications with Japan, which so greatly served to increase the complexities of a nebulous situation, certain lines of thought insensibly developed. That the influential classes in China should have desired that Germany should by some means rehabilitate herself in Europe and so be placed in a position to chastise a nation that for twenty years had brought nothing but sorrow to them ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... while it is invisible to Lassell's mirror—a proof, if one were needed, of the enormous superiority possessed by refractors in such inquiries. Then we approach 1861, when the ring plane again passes through the earth, and Struve and Wray observe curious nebulous appearances."[*] ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... cloudily,—curling like smoke of phosphorus. Great sharp lights burst up momentarily through it like meteors. Weirder than this strange wake are the long slow fires that keep burning at a distance, out in the dark. Nebulous incandescences mount up from the depths, change form, and pass;—serpentine flames wriggle by;—there are long billowing crests of fire. These seem to be formed of millions of tiny sparks, that light up all at the same time, glow ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... story of domestic and stage life." To which my comment must be, that the domesticity supplied by the hero's family and their quite uninteresting hesitations between town and suburban residence are entirely nebulous and illusive, that the stage as background has no significance one way or other, but that the impropriety upon which (I must say frankly) the appeal of the book seems to depend is given without stint, in a measure that certainly may, for some readers, justify the publishers' epithet. You ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... was quite useless; indeed, as time went on she seemed to become more nebulous on the point as though a picture were fading from her mind. But as to one thing she was always quite clear, that she had seen them dead and had seen their new-made grave. This she swore "by God in Heaven," completing the oath with an outburst of tears in a way that would ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... part, whose intellectual attitude towards the Christian faith was one of detachment, indifference, or conventional acquiescence. That could not be his attitude. He was the last man in the world to be content with anything nebulous. The active exercise of thinking {138} was to him a pleasure in all matters, and in things important a duty as well. He was certain not to avoid it in the most important question of all. He might have been either Hume or Butler, either Wesley or Gibbon, but he was certain not to be, what the average ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... the senses, what few ideas she had, even her religion. A good skill to do it, too. The recess out of the kitchen was only a small closet, but, with the aid of a softly tinted curtain or two, and the nebulous light of a concealed lamp, she had contrived to give it an air of distance and reserve. Within were green wreaths hung over the whitewashed walls, and an altar-shaped little white table, covered with heaps of crimson leaves and bright berries, such as grow in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... a time when the earth was only a nebulous mass whose particles were scattered far apart through the expanding force of heat; when she had not yet attained her definiteness of form and had neither beauty nor purpose, but only heat and motion. Gradually, when ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... 'light' surrounds you—it is exhaled and produced by your physical and moral being,— and those among us who have cultivated their inner organs of vision see IT before they see YOU. It can be of the purest radiance,— equally it can be a mere nebulous film,—but whatever the moral and physical condition of the man or woman concerned it is always shown in the aura which each separate individual expresses for himself or herself. In this way Dr. Brayle reveals his nature to me as well as the chief tendency of his thoughts,—in ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... critics take a higher kind of ground, and say that I want to minimise and melt down the old stern beliefs and principles of morality into a kind of nebulous emotion. They remind me a little of an old country squire of whom I have heard, of the John Bull type, whose younger son, a melancholy and sentimental youth, joined the Church of Rome. His father was ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dreams, on the mutual consent and bond of souls which can never become general; he pairs with a vehemence of which the bonds are constantly riveted by the hammer of necessity. Modern innovators write unctuous theories, long drawn, and nebulous or philanthropical romances; but the thief acts. He is as clear as a fact, as logical as a blow; and then ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... passed through rock cuttings where their voices and the sound of their feet flung back hollowly from the walls. They rounded curves, looking eagerly for some sign of habitation, only to be met by the same stretch of deserted track leading off into nebulous gloom. Or perhaps they would see a dim white speck ahead or the black outlines of a rocky spur where the track disappeared and they would comfort themselves with the thought that around that particular curve or beyond that mile-post they would ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... though a power of veto was retained. But the most important thing of all, and the fruitful cause of future trouble, lay in an omission. A suzerainty is a vague term, but in politics, as in theology, the more nebulous a thing is the more does it excite the imagination and the passions of men. This suzerainty was declared in the preamble of the first treaty, and no mention of it was made in the second. Was it thereby abrogated or was it not? The British contention is that only ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... responses in the order in which they were published. The learned gentlemen ought to feel grateful for the increased candor, brevity and explicitness of their replies, when boiled down into the rhyming form, bringing out new beauties which were not apparent in the original nebulous condition of vagueness in which some of them disclaim opposition to immortality, while their only immortality is that ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... void. That nebulous light had been extinguished. That feeble thrill had vibrated itself into quiescence. Many lustra had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The worm had food no more. The sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its stead—instead of all things—dominant ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... white blot in the middle distance; a nebulous blur in the painting, as if there had been some chemical impurity in the pigment causing it to fade, or rather as if a long drop of some acid, or perhaps a splash of salt water, had fallen upon the canvas while it was wet, and bleached it. I knew little of the possible causes of ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... infinite God could have calculated the enormous potential energy of the nebulous gases, required by contraction to cause the prodigious heat of ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... turmoil tore the thought of Graham and his intention of going to the Cedars. With shaking fingers he dragged out his watch. He couldn't read the dial. He braced his hands against the table, thrust back his chair, and arose. The room tumbled about him. Before his eyes the dancers made long nebulous bands of colour in which nothing had form or coherence. Instinctively he felt he hadn't dined recklessly enough to account for these amazing symptoms. He ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... boat, but I sat watching. Finally, as if in response to some secret signal, the darkness began its inevitable retreat and, as the night horizon receded, out of the gray of the morning, growing more and more distinct as the shadows fell away, appeared a dark object less than two miles distant, nebulous at first, then unmistakable in its character. It was a solitary fishing vessel lying at anchor, toward which we had been rowing and drifting unerringly all through the ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... heavens are empty. He will presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only through his own brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, formally the most nebulous person in the Trinity, and now become its sole survivor as it has always been its real Unity, can help him in any way. And so, if the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man's intentional and well-considered contrivance. Conviction of this will smash everything that opposes ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... had wrecked his youth—had the woman who had figured in it some material hold upon him? Could she—was it possible she could still come between them in some way? Ann had heard of such things. It seemed to her as though, betwixt herself and Eliot, there hovered a dim, formless shadow, vague and nebulous—a shadow which had crept silently out from some memory-haunted ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... huge trees standing close together, like columns; and the roof of the pavilion was formed by their massive foliage, through which not a ray of outer light penetrated. Such light as there was seemed nebulous, and appeared to rise out of the ground. In the centre of this pavilion I stood alone, happy to have got clear away from those terrible beasts and the gaze of their steadfast eyes. As I stood there, I became conscious of the fact that the nebulous light of the place was concentrating ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... was a flash, so brilliant it nearly blinded them, and the Scavenger burst apart in space. The second shell struck a fragment; there was another flash. Then there was nothing but a nebulous powdering of ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... style of conversation was effluent, gallant, pretentious, and smiling, with the smile he formerly wore when he received beautiful great ladies at the door of his shop. Powder, well raked off, defined upon his cranium a nebulous half-circle, flanked by two pigeon-wings, divided by a little queue tied with a ribbon. He wore a bottle-blue coat, a white waistcoat, small-clothes and silk stockings, shoes with gold buckles, and black silk gloves. The most marked feature of his behavior was his ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac |
