"Vague" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scheme, of which Lydia had given them a hint at the inn, was under frequent discussion between her parents. Elizabeth saw directly that her father had not the smallest intention of yielding; but his answers were at the same time so vague and equivocal, that her mother, though often disheartened, had never yet ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... vague reports which chief constables are in the habit of furnishing," he said, drily. "Apparently the owner is an American, an invalid, and is eccentric. More than this—and this will surprise you—he has been certified by competent medical authorities ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... do—the fathers and mothers of our faith in the tenement-houses," he explained, wistfully, to the young man. He pointed to other graves in the vicinity, short and narrow graves. Toys were spread on them, too. They were the poor treasures of dead children. The toys had been left there in the vague, helpless yearning of parents who strove to reach their human ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... eagle, of whom you have said, or thought, or heard others say, "It is scarcely possible to believe that such a man was once a squalling baby." If you had seen our hero in all the strength and majesty of full-grown doghood, you would have experienced a vague sort of surprise had we told you—as we now repeat— that the dog Crusoe was once a pup—a soft, round, sprawling, squeaking pup, as fat as a tallow candle, and as blind as ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... a cab, and drove off at once. George remained in the street; he paced up and down, and took no rest—he was far too excited and nervous for that. He had got a dangerous game to play, and his plans were vague and shadowy. He had promised Mr. Sanders he would make inquiries about the person he suspected had forged the cheque, and let him know in the morning. His plan was to try and raise the money, pay it to Mr. Sanders on account of the transgressor, and induce him to take no further steps until ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown; scurrying, moving, changing—each half recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind. ...
— Viewpoint • Gordon Randall Garrett
... admiration for the scene, till suddenly your path leads you out on to the dizzy brink of an awful precipice—a sheer fall, so exaggerated in horror that your most stirring memories of Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, and the hideous arete of the Pitz Bernina, sink into vague insignificance. The gulf that divides you from the distant mountain seems like a huge bite taken bodily out of the world by some voracious god; far away rise snow peaks such as were not dreamt of in your Swiss tour; the bottomless valley at your feet is misty and gloomy with blackness, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... are, perhaps, the most puzzling. These are the true Sylvia, the real wood-birds. They are small, very active, but feeble songsters, and, to be seen, must be sought for. In passing through the woods, most persons have a vague consciousness of slight chirping, semi-musical sounds in the trees overhead. In most cases these sounds proceed from the warblers. Throughout the Middle and Eastern States, half a dozen species ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... a Persian rug, and, beside the various objects scattered upon it, you notice a bunch of carnations in an artistically wrought Venetian glass. These carnations, like the motto, awake in us an image, a poetical reminiscence. Sentiment, Germanic in its essence, mingled with dreams and vague ideals, is introduced into this ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... near, the field of Cressy. By the aid of the books, we fancied we could trace the positions of the two armies; but it was little more than very vague conjecture. There was a mead, a breadth of field well adapted to cavalry, and a wood. The river is a mere brook, and could have offered but little protection, or resistance, to the passage of any species of troops. I saw no village, and we may not have been within a mile of the real field, after ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the sword of Damocles. Nelson himself seems to have been possessed already by vague premonitions of the coming end, which deepened and darkened around him as he went forward to his fate. The story told of his saying to the upholsterer, who had in charge the coffin made from the mast of the "Orient," ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... present day have had a profound influence upon my views of economic subjects. The conception which the masses of the present time have of how their ancestors lived in the early years of the century are so vague and shadowy as not to influence their conduct at the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... she had her small fixed allowance from home; for credentials she was furnished with an introduction or two to literary men from her friends in the country who had some appreciation, more or less vague, of her intellectual powers. Though courageous and determined, she was far from self-confident; she asked herself if she might not be mistaking a mere fancy for a faculty, and her first step was to seek the opinion of ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... new grandeur was born when these tattered crags appeared above storm-clouds. Fleeting glimpses of the crests through a surging storm arouse strange feelings, and one is at bay, as though having just awakened amid the vast and vague on another planet. But when the long, white evening light streams from the west between the minarets, and the black buttressed crags wear the alpine glow, one's feelings are too ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... managed to reply. He glared at me for having interrupted. And stopped to pick his words before he spoke; Like one who turns all personal remarks Into a general survey of the world. Choosing his phrases with a finicky care So they might fit some vague opinions, Taken, third-hand, from last year's New York Times And jumbled all together into a thing He thought was his philosophy. "Never mind; There's more in Foster than you'd understand. But," he continued, darkly ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... remembered that just as the beaver, when pursued, jettisons some one of its organs—I forget which—and thus evades capture, so the careful mechanic removes some vital portion of his engine to thwart the unauthorised. I had a vague idea that the part in question was of, with, or from the magneto. I had not even a vague idea that the latter was protected by a network of live wires, and that one had only to stretch out one's finger to induce a spark about a foot long and a shock from which one will never wholly recover.... ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... reforming government the people would remain orderly, as they had generally remained in America during the transition from British rule to selfgovernment. Burke maintained that if the existing political order were broken up there would be no longer a people, but "a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more." "Alas!" he exclaims, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass, which has a true personality." For the sake of peace Paine wished the revolution ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... on the firing line express the utmost confidence that what was done yesterday and this morning they can keep on doing until the war has been won. They never hear the vague, unverified reports circulated in Paris, sometimes of tremendous and impossible victories, sometimes sinister hints of disaster. They know what they have done since March 9, when they were ordered to act on this part of the Aisne. They talk as a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... with them working desperately above him, it was almost possible to see the strength ebbing back into his veins. They dashed water upon his head, inverted bottles of it into his face, and emptied it from his eyes, but during that long half minute the vague smile never left his lips—nor his eyes the face ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... of the earliest human genera have been little or not at all investigated. And also the hypothesis of Haeckel, that the cradle of mankind was a land between Africa and Asia, now sunk in the sea, and called Lemuria, can be neither proved nor denied. Such vague possibilities have indeed not the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... McGuire had only a vague impression of a great building beyond, of lower stories decorated in barbaric colors, of towers above in strange forms of the crystal, colorful beauty they had seen. He walked toward it unseeing; his thoughts were only of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... age with his, recalling the fact, to be precise, of his forty-seven years, created a vague questioning dissatisfaction. Suddenly he saw himself—a comfortable body in a comfortable existence, a happy existence, he added sharply— objectively; and the stout figure in knickerbockers, rough stockings, a yellow buckskin jacket and checked cap pulled over a face which, he felt, was brightly ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of those who use that very vague, grandiloquent word 'Ambrosial' know that it has reference to the 'ambrosia' ([Greek: ambrotos], immortal), the food of the gods! It has, however, a secondary signification, namely, that of an unguent, or perfume, hence fragrant; and this is probably the prevailing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... soul? Do departed spirits in verity retain any knowledge of what transpires in this world, and take any part in its scenes? All that revelation says of a spiritual state is more intimation than assertion; it has no distinct treatise, and teaches nothing apparently of set purpose; but gives vague, glorious images, while now and then some accidental ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... for the first time HOUSEHOLDERS in Germany - real Teutons, with no deception, spring, or false bottom. About half-past one there began such a trumpeting, shouting, pealing of bells, and scurrying hither and thither of feet as woke every person in Frankfurt out of their first sleep with a vague sort of apprehension that the last day was at hand. The whole street was alive, and we could hear people talking in their rooms, or crying to passers-by from their windows, all around us. At last I made out what a man was saying in the next room. It was a fire in Sachsenhausen, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day of the adjourned inquest drew near Brent became aware that there were rumours in the air—rumours of some sensational development, the particulars of which were either non-obtainable or utterly vague. He heard of them from Peppermore, whose journalistic itching for news had so far gone unrelieved; Peppermore himself knew no more than that rumour was busy, ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... (evidently drunk for some time in the royal honour) are slowly removing them, and on the whole it is more like the clearing away of "The Frozen Deep" at Tavistock House than anything within your knowledge—with the exception that we are not in the least sorry, as we were then. Vague ideas are in Arthur's head that when we come back to Hull, we are to come here, and are to have the Town Hall (a beautiful building), and read to the million. I can't say yet. That depends. I remember that when I was here before (I came from Rockingham to make a speech), I thought them a dull ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... you never seen them march across the grass-lands in the daytime, cohort after cohort, hurrying to the call of the unseen trumpets? In the woods, have you never heard strange sounds, when you put your ear to the ground—sounds untraceable to any animate life? Have you never heard vague voices in the trees? Have you not heard distant, mysterious noises in the forest, whose cause you could never learn, seek no matter how you might? These were the voices of the shadows, the people who live there. Who else should it be to whisper and sing to you and make you happy when ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... monuments. Dim but seemingly unmistakable traces are now discovered of enterprises, not only of exploration and trade, but also of evangelization, reaching along the mainland southward to the shores of New England. There are vague indications that these beginnings of Christian civilization were extinguished, as in so many later instances, by savage massacre. With impressive coincidence, the latest vestige of this primeval American Christianity fades out in the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... whippersnapper, God knows why. This whippersnapper has a father, a parson, who can write the most offensive letters imaginable. I received one of them this morning, accusing the whippersnapper of all sorts of vague things, and me and my fellow trustee, who is at present enjoying himself travelling, of abetting him. I repeat, damn Ranson, Richards and Son; damn the parson, damn Helen—no, I won't say that, for she is dead—and especially damn the whippersnapper. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Mediterranean, the same expanse of eternal sapphire that he had watched from the same Riviera window, day in and day out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the same forlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week by week seemed to grow too strong for him. He turned away from the soft, exotic loveliness of the sea and sky before him, with ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... have kept up his vague complaints, but right in the midst of them Daddy Jack stuck his head in at ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... in the water on the wreck, of seeing some one approaching me, of being held down first by a drowning man and then by a rope, of trying to free myself, and then I must have swooned, for I remember nothing more. I have now a vague remembrance of some one talking to me about a dream I ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... come to Pao-yue. After he had heard these ballads, so diffuse and vague, he failed to see any point of beauty in them; but the plaintive melody of the sound was nevertheless sufficient to drive away his spirit and exhilarate his soul. Hence it was that he did not make any inquiries about the arguments, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... enjoyed her outing, else it would not seem consistent for her to wish to come again to-morrow; and she must, she must come again! Her poor contradictory little heart found itself clinging to the one vague, ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... and took to his heels until he was out of shot from stone or word. It seemed to him that in this country of England there was no protection for a man save that which lay in the strength of his own arm and the speed of his own foot. In the cloisters he had heard vague talk of the law—the mighty law which was higher than prelate or baron, yet no sign could he see of it. What was the benefit of a law written fair upon parchment, he wondered, if there were no officers to enforce ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would not die. No, she would not die! She would see her beloved, her child once more! With a sudden jerk she freed her arm from the hand that held her prisoner. She knew not what to do, whither she could flee. She had only a vague consciousness that to be alone with him meant death—that she would he safe only outside the castle. Without, on the street, Schwarzenberg would not venture to seize her, for he knew that she possessed his secret and that she would accuse him. She flew across the vestibule, tore open the ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... That, by the vague and indefinite term of evasion, the said Warren Hastings did introduce a loose and arbitrary principle of interpreting formal engagements, which ought to be regarded, more especially by guaranties, ill a sense the most literally ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... very well, Lawrence," said Lewis, with a touch of sarcasm, "to talk in a vague way about the sun's action, but it's quite plain, even to an unphilosophical mind like mine, that the sun can't lift a block of stone some tons in weight and clap it on the top of a pillar of ice ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... standpoint. In this very prosaic and materialistic age, when very few persons have profound beliefs on any subject, the spectacle of one of the sovereigns of the earth still claiming a divine origin is one that appeals to the ludicrous susceptibilities of that vague entity "the man in the street." It is not well, however, that people should criticise statements in royal proclamations or in royal assertions too seriously. Even in this country there are documents issued from time to time bearing ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... heard men's voices raised in anger. She recognized one. Bower was speaking German, Stampa a mixture of German and Italian. Millicent had a vague acquaintance with both languages; but it was of the Ollendorf order, and did not avail her in understanding their rapid, excited words. Soon there were other sounds, the animal cries, the sobs, the labored ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... It is possible that there is a vague and obscure reference here to the doctrine that the fruits of our deeds are reaped in ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... I remember very well!" I said as we shook hands. I could not but note that the acquaintanceship seemed a relief to Miss Trelawny. There was a certain vague uneasiness in her manner which took my attention; instinctively I felt that it would be less embarrassing for her to speak with me alone. So I said ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... remarks, and once, after reading one of Cooper's novels, as an Indian Maiden. This was, I believe, the only instance when she had borrowed from another's fiction. Most of the characters that she assumed for days and sometimes weeks at a time were purely original in conception; some so much so as to be vague to the general understanding. I remember that her personation of a certain Mrs. Smith, whose individuality was supposed to be sufficiently represented by a sun-bonnet worn wrong side before and a weekly addition to her family, ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte
... think it a vision of his own brain, when suddenly a vague suspicion of the truth flashed upon his mind. He barred the door, and hastened wildly back. Yes, there she was, - there, in the chamber he had quitted, - there in her old innocent, happy home, so changed that none but he could trace one gleam of what she had been, - there upon her knees, - with ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... all, is not this a somewhat vague and nebulous conception of "The Church". If it is to go into all the world, how, from a business point of view, is this world-wide mission, in all its grandeur, to be accomplished? The answer is seen in our ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... move. Nor did Deveny change his position. A queer, cold chill had come over Deveny—a vague dread, a dragging reluctance—an indecision that startled him and made of his thoughts an odd jumble of half-formed impulses that seemed to die before they could ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... regulated her pace and her husband's as to keep just in the rear of the other three, which it was easy to do without notice in such a stream of pedestrians. Her answers to Cartlett's remarks were vague and slight, for the group in front interested her more than all the rest of ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... her kitchen window, was conscious of a vague sense of worry as to her friend over the fence. It appeared to her that Susan was looking more thin and peaked than nature had intended. It is true that Miss Clegg was always of a bony and nervous outline, but it seemed slowly but surely borne in upon her older friend ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... the angels on the chalices, he did not hate them; on the contrary, he saw in them the reflection of those vague images of loveliness and innocence which haunt every artist's soul at times, and the mere manual skill necessary to produce expression in things so minute, fascinated a mind accustomed to cope with difficulties, and so inured to them ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Rome by 200 B.C. and that of Isis and Serapis in the time of Sulla. In the early centuries of the Christian era the cultus of Mithra prevailed not only in Rome but in most parts of Europe where there were Roman legions, even in Britain. These religions may be appropriately labelled with the vague word oriental, for they are not so much the special creeds of Egypt and Persia transplanted into Roman soil as fragments, combinations and adaptations of the most various eastern beliefs. They differed from the forms of worship indigenous to Greece and Italy in being personal, not national: ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... swear at once 800 That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce— Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown— O I do think that I have been alone In chastity: yes, Pallas has been sighing, While every eye saw me my hair uptying With fingers cool as aspen leaves. Sweet love, I was as vague as solitary dove, Nor knew that nests were built. Now a soft kiss— Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss, An immortality of passion's thine: 810 Ere long I will exalt thee to the shine Of heaven ambrosial; and we will shade Ourselves whole ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... again, And beat the cross to earth, and break the King And all his Table.' Then they reached a glade, Where under one long lane of cloudless air Before another wood, the royal crown Sparkled, and swaying upon a restless elm Drew the vague glance of Vivien, and her Squire; Amazed were these; 'Lo there' she cried—'a crown— Borne by some high lord-prince of Arthur's hall, And there a horse! the rider? where is he? See, yonder lies one ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... the door. No one spoke a word. The silence as he crossed the room seemed a little ominous. He looked over his shoulder. They were all three standing in their places, looking at him. A vague sense ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... book itself which can make clear that by "mystical" its author does not imply a conception which relies more on vague feelings than on "strictly scientific statements." It is true that "mysticism" is at present widely understood in the former sense, and hence it is declared by many to be a sphere of the human soul-life with which "true science" ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... politely, with the usual vague American notion of the Balkan states. The Bulgarian's ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a lot better and more clear-headed than he'd been feeling. Maybe the sleep had done ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... restlessly, and her heart throbbed anxiously, as she told herself that she had done little to smooth his rugged pathway. The vague feeling, that he had not been entirely to blame, if she had not found perfect happiness by his side, alarmed her. Did not her former conduct justify him in expecting hindrance rather than support and help in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... me; but which I should use in London in redeeming bonds and coupons, and should leave in the bank on deposit unless by the peculiarity of their rules, I should be obliged to withdraw it. They objected to taking the money as a Government deposit, or as an official deposit in my name, having some vague idea that if they took it and opened an official Government account they should be liable for the appropriation of the money unless documents from the United States were filed with them taking away that liability, but they could not tell ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... the "great store of firre" found lying "at their whole lengths" in the "fens and marises" of Lancashire and other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure what species of evergreen Caesar intended by abies. The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. PINUS, PINE, has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and KIEFER, FICHTE, and TANNE are often confounded in German.—Rossmassler, Der Wald, pp. 256, 289, 324. A similar confusion in the names of this family ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... there. In Paris he once more visited Turgenev, and then crossed over to London, where he saw the great Russian critic Herzen almost every day. Herzen was not at all impressed by Tolstoi's philosophical views, finding them both weak and vague. The little daughter of Herzen begged her father for the privilege of meeting the young and famous author. She expected to see a philosopher, who would speak of weighty matters: what was her disappointment when ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... evidence, that I was nightly removed from the mess-room to my bed in the mode I mention, it would have puzzled me sorely to prove the fact in any direct way; inasmuch as by half-past nine, as the clock chimed, and Tim entered to take me, I was very innocent of all that was going on, and except a certain vague sense of regret at leaving the decanter, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... had conceived a great passion for Tabea, and now that his apprenticeship was about to expire he amused her with surreptitious notes. To-day, for the first time, Tabea began to think of the possibility of marrying Scheible, chiefly, perhaps, from a vague desire to escape from the convent, which could not but be irksome to one of her spirit. Scheible was ambitious, and it was his plan, as she knew, to go to Philadelphia to make his fortune; and she and he together, what ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... He could not analyse his unutterable sense of shame. He had been afraid to fight. He knew he was a coward, but there was a deeper shame in which his mother was involved. She was a Quaker, he knew, and he had a more or less vague idea that Quakers would not fight. Was she then a coward? That any reflection should be made upon his mother stabbed him to the heart. Again and again Mop's sneering, grinning face appeared before his eyes. He felt that he could ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... gave, as is well known, an impulse to the investigation of the use of organs—and thus created the great school of what is known in Germany as Biology—a department of science for which no English word exists except the rather vague term Natural History. This was especially the case in floral biology, and it is interesting to see with what hesitation he at first expressed the value of his book on Orchids ("Life and Letters", III. page 254.), "It will perhaps serve to illustrate how Natural History may be worked ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... an assault did not greatly move him now. He was too tired and sleepy to have more than a vague impression of anything. He saw the coals glowing before him, and then he did not see them. He had gone sound asleep in ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Pulteney inveighed against such a vague and general way of accounting for the public money, as tending to render parliaments altogether insignificant, to cover embezzlements, and to screen corrupt and rapacious ministers. The commons having taken into ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... childish days I remember to have had a vague but profound admiration for a certain legendary person called the Lord Mayor's fool. I had the highest opinion of the intellectual capacity of that suppositious retainer of the Mansion House, and I really regarded ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... young gentleman be a Conservative, he has usually some vague ideas about Ireland and the Pope which he cannot very clearly explain, but which he knows are the right sort of thing, and not to be very easily got over by the other side. He has also some choice sentences regarding ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the keen speculator on theological problems and for the mystic who, because he feels God, declines to reason about Him—for a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn, but also for a Nachmanides, a Vital, and a Luria' (M. Joseph, op. cit., p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism stands for spiritual inwardness. Religion without mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume. This saying is no more precise and no more informing than Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as morality touched with emotion. Neither mysticism nor ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... Katherine's marriage, there was a long era noticeable only for such vicissitudes as were incident to their fortune and position. But in May, A.D. 1774, the first murmur of the returning tide of destiny was heard. Not but what there had been for long some vague and general expectation of momentous events which would touch many individual lives; but this May night, a singular prescience of change ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... rainwater and indicated that here they would camp for the night, Margaret was too weary to question the decision. It had not occurred to her that she would be on the way overnight before she met her friends. Her knowledge of the way, and of distances, was but vague. It is doubtful if she would have ventured had she known that she must pass the night thus in the company of two strange savage creatures. Yet, now that she was here and it was inevitable, she would not shrink, but ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... deep, fiery eyes of the gunfighter, stepped into the room to minister to his patient. He had a vague feeling that, if Bull Hunter died, Pete Reeve would blame him for lack of care. In truth, Pete seemed ready to blame everyone. He threatened to destroy the whole village if a dog was allowed to howl ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... said the voice, which was to me as the fiat of life and of death, so utterly did it fill my existence: "why should we thus yield to a vague terror? Listen, my beloved! I know where the waters of the fountains of life roll their eternal waves—I know I can bear you thither and bid you drink from their source, and over lips so hallowed death hath ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... recognised" Jewish teaching on this subject. The belief that God would deliver his people, and that his sovereignty would be recognised throughout the world, was no doubt part of the belief of every pious Jew, but the details were vague and there was no systematic teaching ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... baby for the last time, blessed it for the vague sweet hope it had infused into her heart, and then laid it in its nurse's arms and left ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... woman made a gesture as wide and vague as Rita's own of a few minutes before. "Our home, noble lady? the wilderness is our home to-day. Our little farm, our cottage, our patch of cane, all gone, all destroyed. Only the graves of ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... away from him, turning her profile. Her expression was inscrutable. After a silence he dropped her wrists with a vague laugh. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... universities provide so liberally, except dabbling in literature. Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction—which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond. In his own eyes he did well enough, and a good deal better. Gifted not ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... description be worth? It would be, at the best, vague and indefinite. Besides, they've not even found the boy. Now, to return ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... the United States to entrust him with a negotiation with England relative to the Commerce of the two countries. M. Gouv. Morris acquitted himself in this as an adroit man, and with his customary zeal, but despite his address (insinuation) obtained only the vague hope of an advantageous commercial treaty on condition of an Alliance resembling that between France and the United States.... [Mr. Robert Morris] is himself English, and interested in all the large speculations founded in this country for Great ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of Rome with the somewhat more distant Caere were on the whole far more peaceful and friendly than those which we usually find subsisting between neighbours in early times. There are doubtless vague legends, reaching back to times of distant antiquity, about conflicts between Latium and Caere; Mezentius the king of Caere, for instance, is asserted to have obtained great victories over the Latins, and to have imposed upon ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that this was the charge selected first for proof; for so effectual had been the precautions which he had taken to conceal his crime in this case, that he was confident that, instead of any substantial evidence against him, there could be, at worst, only vague grounds of suspicion, and these he was confident he could easily show were insufficient to establish so serious ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... her face toward the fire as a flower seeks the sun, but her deep eyes looked beyond it, into the fires of Life itself. A haunting sense of unfulfilment stirred her to vague resentment, and she sighed as she rose and moved restlessly about the room. She lighted the tall candles that stood upon the mantel-shelf, straightened a rug, moved a chair, and gathered up a handful of fallen rose-petals on her way to the window. She was about to draw down ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... The idea of Ukridge married was something too overpowering to be assimilated on the instant. If ever there was a man designed by nature to be a bachelor, Stanley Ukridge was that man. Garnet could feel that he himself was not looking his best. He knew in a vague, impersonal way that his eyebrows were still somewhere in the middle of his forehead, whither they had sprung in the first moment of surprise, and that his jaw, which had dropped, had not yet resumed its normal posture. Before committing ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... in a proud, self-satisfied, almost triumphant manner, and I felt profound pity, mingled with a feeling of vague contempt, for this vainglorious and simple reproducer ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Eric's, although it was coming to weigh heavily on his buoyant spirit, was not the worst of his troubles. The girl from Orange—there lay the sting. He had sent her a note as well, but there was little he was free to say without betraying Billy, the note was mostly vague expressions of regret, and Rex knew her clearheaded directness too well to hope that it would count for much. No answer had come, and, day by day, he had grown more dejected, ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... rose suddenly to her feet and expression came to her face—a very wonderful expression wherein were blended fear, awe, and something of vague but violent joy—as though one suddenly beheld a loved ghost from ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... ten minutes later Jimmy's saddle horse clattered off at a gallop. The visitors were gone silence was left behind them. But Conscience did not at once turn into the house and close the door behind her. She stood by one of the tall pillars and the boy strained his gaze to make out more than the vague outline of a shadow-shape. Then slowly she came down the stairs and out onto the moonlit lawn, walking meditatively in the direction of Stuart Farquaharson's hiding place. The boy's heart leaped into a heightened tattoo and he bent eagerly forward ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... that she had taken to sit in the old study of Stephen Verner; a room which she had rarely entered during his lifetime. Perhaps some vague impression that she was now a woman of business, or ought to be one, that she herself was in sole charge for the absent heir, had induced her to take up her daily sitting amidst the drawers, bureaux, and other places which had contained Mr. Verner's papers—which contained them still. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... incongruity of human nature, the mingling of the beast and the divine, which cannot find satisfaction in the same woman; whatever the fire in her, she cannot gratify the instincts which rage below passion in man, without losing the purity of mind which he adores in her. She, too, feels a vague regret that some portion of his nature is a sealed book to her, forever beyond her ken. But her regret is nothing to his: he knows, and she ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to a stranger, that there was some subject of care not vague nor undefined pressing upon Mr. Ringgan's mind as ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... little at home those days, for the house in Brooklyn disturbed me now. Poor old Dad. Since I had secured my contract he had tried so hard to help me, to be eager, interested, alive, to talk it all over with me at night. And this I did not like to do. A vague feeling of guilt and disloyalty would creep into my now boundless zest for the harbor that had crowded him out. And I think that he suspected this. One night, when with this feeling I stupidly tried to talk as though I still hated all its ugliness, its clamor, smoke and grime, I ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... and more observers and thinkers have enlarged the boundaries and developed the territory of the known. The history of human thought itself demonstrates an evolution which began with the savages' vague interpretation of the "what" and the "why" of the universe, and culminates ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... understood and to become amenable to further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines, distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be called ...
— Progress and History • Various
... it, his eye was caught by an indistinguishable object moving across the plain from the direction of Cameron City. He regarded it as he might have regarded the progress of a coyote or prairie-dog, till it stopped at his own gate, half a mile to the northward. A vague feeling of dissatisfaction came over him at the sight, but he did not disturb himself, nor make any remarks to the dogs on the subject. They however soon pricked up their ears, and sprang to their ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... France did not look far forward into the future or attempt to trace the definite lines on which the human race might be expected to develop. They contented themselves with principles and vague generalities, and they had no illusions as to the slowness of the process of social amelioration; a rational morality, the condition of improvement, was only in its infancy. A passage in a work of the Abbe Morellet probably reflects faithfully enough the comfortable though not ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... romancer was the son of the Widow Hathorne. Now it so chanced that her family had long ago occupied a house on Union Street, looking off into the garden of the old Manning family mansion; and she remembered no son, though a vague image came back to her of a strong and graceful boy's form dancing across the garden, at play, years before. Her mind therefore fastened upon one of the sisters, who, she knew, had shown great facility in writing: indeed, Hawthorne used at one time to say that it was she who should have been the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... different from those adopted in a school meant for the special instruction of the artisan in his own business. I do not think this distinction is yet firmly enough fixed in our minds, or calculated upon in our plans of operation. We have hitherto acted, it seems to me, under a vague impression that the arts of drawing and painting might be, up to a certain point, taught in a general way to everyone, and would do everyone equal good; and that each class of operatives might afterwards bring this general ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a smile, "do you think I am to be turned from my quest after this great truth by the stringing together of words without meaning—at least words vague and incomprehensible?" ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... who seized and subdued this island in the year 1066 and following years. The fourth contribution came to us by the aid of the Revival of Learning— rather a process than an event, the dates of which are vague, but which may be said to have taken place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Latin left for us by the Romans is called Latin of the First Period; that brought over by the missionaries from Rome, Latin of the Second Period; that given us by the Norman-French, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... clothes, snowy from collar to shoe tips, like the trappings of the White Knight, and started to walk down into the Settlement to find Martha. I intended to stop at Mother Spurlock's "Little House Beside the Road," and some vague idea was in my mind of having her dispatch a messenger to summons Martha to the interview I was about to bestow upon her. That is not the way it all happened and I was hot and dusty and sweat-drenched before I had been on my quest more than ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... The irrelevant ideas might consist of thoughts about a German lesson which you are going to study, visions of a face, or thoughts about some social engagement. These marginal objects are in the mind even when you conscientiously focus your mind upon the history lesson, and, though vague, they try to force their way into the focus and become clear. The task of paying attention, then, consists in maintaining the desired object at the centre of the mental field and keeping the distractions away. With this definition of attention, we see that ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... previous century, by the nations of the Tigris and Euphrates, but all Asia, from the Indus to the Hellespont, was about to fall on her to crush her. She was destitute of all human help and allies, and the gods themselves appeared to have forsaken her. The fellahin, inspired with vague alarm, recognised evil omens in all around them. Rain is rare in the Thebaid, and storms occur there only twice or three times in a century: but a few days after the accession of Psammetichus, a shower of fine rain fell at ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... in fog, now drenched in rain, were overpowering and terrifying to me. Beyond that general seeming of terror there is little I remember of the early city, except the glimmer of white tent tops against gray fog or blue water, the loud voices in the streets, and a vague, general impression of rapid and violent changes of place and circumstance. Through their confusion three figures only, move with any clearness,—my tall, teasing, father, my grim nurse Abby, and my pale-haired mother. Indeed, the first distinct incident that stands forth from ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... running through a part of the State, the letters "r" and "c" hard, which spell 47. A more exact Exclusion might be found in the word "{r}i{ng}," which spells 47. For if we consider the shape of the boundary of New York we would see that in no vague sense a ring, as a circle, is the ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... stand separation. The memory of Jahel, smarting at first, was smoothed down little by little, and nothing remained but a vague irritation, of which she was no ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... care much whether we did or didn't," retorted Vixen, shrouding her personality in a vague plural. "If you had cared you would have been with us. Sultan," meaning the chestnut "must have felt cruelly humiliated by being ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... by means of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... at the little pearl brooch, a hundred vague doubts and dreads which had previously been resolutely thrust aside, darting back into her mind with a new and terrible significance. She felt stunned and bewildered, but the predominant sensation was the necessity for caution. ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... earliest remembered observation, when I first began to "take notice," as nurses say of vague babies, with pinafore comparison and judgment, Aunt Judy was an old woman; I knew that, because she had explained to me why I had not wrinkles like hers, and why she could not read her precious Bible without spectacles, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... this world ignorant, yet full of presentiments and questions. I learn my first vague lesson about myself and God. I naturally ask: For what purpose has God put me here? What does He wish me to do? The Catechism answers: To do His will, to keep His commandments. Here they are, and this is what they mean. I study them, and the more I study them, ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... limits of common observation. You are now demanding that a circumstance, which, even if it were proved up to the hilt, would not prejudice me in the eyes of a good judge, should be fatal to me when, as it is, it rests on vague suspicion, uncertainty, and ignorance. You will perhaps, as is your wont, say, 'What, then, was it that you wrapped in a linen cloth and were so careful to deposit with the household gods?' Really, Aemilianus! is this the way you accuse your victims? You produce no definite evidence ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... scholars, too, echoed the voices of their hearts, some of them sonorous with religious bliss, others sad, still others happy-go-lucky. Although absorbed in my book, I would have a vague consciousness of the connection between the various singsongs and their respective performers. I would be aware that the bass voice with the flourishes in front of me belonged to the stuttering widower from Vitebsk, that the squeaky, jerky intonation ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate programs, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a man," or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan." It is no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso" or "Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading strings, of the resonant, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... this feeling of urgency that stimulated her, and the vague ideas which had been floating in her brain suddenly crystallised, and a plan took shape which she promptly communicated to Alice. The latter, she proposed, should go to Paris, to the pastor's family at Neuilly, Barbara lending her the necessary money, for the girl was only given a ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... not, as I cannot, describe our meeting. It was the meeting of brothers—yet of strangers—and a confusion of wonder, curiosity, vague expectation, and doubt, possessed the soul of each. I trust and believe, that notwithstanding the different political bias which sways each, the ancient ties which bound us together as brothers will again unite us. The countenance of Calpurnius, though dark and almost ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Francis, he was beginning to be piqued by Elsie's gentle indifference, and he had a vague suspicion that Wayne was carrying on a flirtation with her instead of attending to Mrs. Verdon. Lily's light-grey eyes were not as beautiful as Elsie's brown orbs, but they were pretty enough when they glanced at him in mute reproach. He felt he ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... These three references are considered spurious by many scholars, and even if they were all to be accepted it would mean that the total pagan testimony as to the historicity of Jesus is confined to three very vague and brief references written a century after the reputed time of Jesus. The longest reference to Jesus is in the writings of the Jewish historian, Josephus. The passage referring to Jesus in his "Jewish Antiquities" has been considered as spurious even by conservative scholars. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... striking episodes, they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside, and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience. Immediate experience is the intermittent ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... resignation similar to the lime-stone formation deposited on objects by certain springs. And a kind of interest for the thousand-and-one little insignificant things of daily life, a care for the simple, ordinary everyday occupations, awakened in her heart. A sort of pensive melancholy, a vague disenchantment with life was growing up in her mind. What did she lack? What did she want? She did not know. She had no worldly desires, no thirst for amusement, no longing for permissible pleasures. What then? ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of religion Bonaparte's ideas were very vague. "My reason," said he, "makes me incredulous respecting many things; but the impressions of my childhood and early youth throw me into uncertainty." He was very fond of talking of religion. In Italy, in Egypt, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and gazing in vague trouble after her rapidly disappearing visitor, murmured to herself, "Who ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... measure, but they were quite sensible that everything had changed in their little world, and that they were out of tune with it. Some few of their number had made their way to India or Canada, and there was a vague dissatisfaction which only required a prospect of change to develop. As time went on, and the laird's plan for opening the coal beds on his estate got known, the men ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... preserve the obscurer materials of history. The Collection Du Puy, which has now became national property, comprised more than 800 volumes of fugitive pieces, memoirs, instructions, pedigrees, letters, and all the other miscellaneous documents that were classed by D'Israeli 'under the vague title of State Papers.' It has been said that the object of their 'Titanic labour' was to ease the way for the historian De Thou; but it is more likely that the brothers obeyed an instinct for the acquisition of secret history; 'life would have been too short to have ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... picket fence and holding desultory converse with Mabel Rorebeck, an attractive member of the Friday Afternoon Dancing Class, that hated organization of which Sam and Penrod were both members. Mabel was a shy little girl; but Penrod had a vague understanding that Sam considered ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... a woman grown, yet of a strangely vague and childlike look. The figure, never very large, was thin and shrunken unbelievably. The features, waxy-white, were mercifully spared by the flames which had licked at the shielding hands and arms that had borne her hither. ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... hour on the day he is to leave. Thus gives the guest clearly, and without discourtesy, the precise time he is expected to remain at the home of the hostess, and he may remain the full time without any vague pre monitions of undesired presence. If the hostess did not state the time of arrival and departure the guest should in her acceptance give suggestive dates leaving them subject to change at the discretion of the hostess. Any other plan is embarrassing ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... student finds himself already possessed of a vague, general knowledge of literature, but nothing definite or satisfying, nothing that inspires interest. He it is who may profitably take up the first attractive unread book at hand; but he should endeavor to read it, not as an isolated fragment of literature, but ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... you will be reading a Letter I hurried off for you by Dr. Russell in the last steamer; and your friendly anxieties will partly be set at rest. Had I kept silence so very long? I knew it was a long while; but my vague remorse had kept no date! It behoves me now to write again without delay; to certify with all distinctness that I have safely received your Letter of the 30th October, safely the Bill for L25 it contained;—that you are a brave, friendly man, of most ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... detective is a mysterious way. Far be it from us to presume to point it out, or elucidate or expound it in any degree. We can only give a vague, incomplete, it may be even incorrect, view of what the man in grey did and achieved, nevertheless we are bound to record what we know as to this officer's proceedings, inasmuch as they have to do with the thread ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... Mona, "and I seemed to smell them quite strong," and she told them her dream—at least a part of it. She left out about the forget-me-nots that she rowed and rowed to try and get. She could not have told why she left out that part, but already a vague thought had come to her—one that she was ashamed of, even though it was so vague, and it ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... consciousness. Her first sensation was one of drowsy well-being. For some minutes she lay while her brain groped in a vague, listless way to find itself. She and Win were going West—there was a ranch for sale—and ... she suddenly realized that she was uncomfortable. Her shoulders and hips ached. Where was she? She felt cold. She tried to move and the effort caused her pain. She heard a sound nearby and opened ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... was reckoned a little adventure to accomplish it. Besides, the Highlands, though now as peaceable as any part of King George's dominions, was a sound which still carried terror, while so many survived who had witnessed the insurrection of 1745; and a vague idea of fear was impressed on many as they looked from the towers of Stirling northward to the huge chain of mountains, which rises like a dusky rampart to conceal in its recesses a people whose dress, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... Rachael Gregory admitted to herself months later, there had been a cloud in the sky—a cloud so tiny and so vague that for many days she had been able to banish it in the flooding sunshine all about her whenever it crossed ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... associations with the newly born moon than that poetic sentiment which delights in the vision of the faint sickle silver through the twilight; if they possess any further association with the planet, it is likely to be no more than a vague dread of the effect of its radiance falling on a sleeper. Women, on the contrary, will remember that the moon should be first seen not "full face," but "over the the[TN-1] right shoulder;" they will ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... gilt should be wholly dimmed. The country, in short, so far as bustle and movement went, was more quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its restless elements had been drawn towards the seat of the conflict. But the air was full of a vague disturbance. To me, at least, it seemed so, emerging from such a solitude as has been hinted at, and the more impressible by rumors and indefinable presentiments, since I had not lived, like other ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... realised, in the first place, how undefined is the Hindu's religious position. From the rudest polytheism up to pantheism, and even to an atheistic philosophy, all is within the Hindu pale, like fantastic cloud shapes and vague mist and empty ether, all within the same sky. To the student of Hinduism, then, the first fact that emerges is that there are no distinctive Hindu doctrines. No one doctrine is distinctive of Hinduism. There is no canonical book, nowhere any stated body of doctrine that might be called the Hindu ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... all this vague unrest and incipient division came a Presidential election, the most strangely unreal in the whole history of the United States. The issue about which alone all men, North and South, were thinking was carefully excluded ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... disposed in a circle, and that a magic ring, being suspended over the centre, was conceived to point to the initial letters of the name of him who should be the future emperor. Theodorus, a man of most eminent qualifications, and high popularity, was put to death by the jealousy of Valens, on the vague evidence that this kind of trial had indicated the early letters of his name. [141] It may easily be imagined, that, where so restless and secret an investigation was employed as to the successor that fate ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... those who think the spirits are always trivial or foolish, I wish to say that "Mitchell's" remarks were dignified and very suggestive. He produced in my mind the distinct impression of a serious man of seventy, ornate of rhetoric, but never vague or wandering in his thought, and he never went outside the circle of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... ceased, the wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a faint ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of mine who wanted a wife, and said there were only two things he would stipulate for—1,500 a year, and an angel. But it brings us to another definition, you see. We shall agree as to the brains, but how about goodness! What is your definition of that very wide, not to say vague, term?" ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrested from the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination is concerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasy that peoples with images the interlunar vague. Still, one of these lyrics, in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the sublimer works of a supernatural cast,—Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" of Goethe, "Manfred," or even those ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... constant want of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but I had no pattern, and consequently never ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... indicated an ivy-grown tower, to which the knight made his way. The whole place struck him as strangely sombre and weird, a castle of shadows and vague horror. He was shown into a gloomy chamber by an aged attendant, and there awaited the coming of the lord. Opposite him was hung a veiled picture, and half hoping that he might solve the mystery which pervaded the place, he drew aside the curtain. From the canvas there looked out at ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... and grew more friendly. "Frankly," said he, "I experience difficulty. My remark was vague. I meant it ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... man which shrank from plain courses. And, with all his cleverness, he missed the occasion of fame. Rowley and I were suffered to walk out of his door, with all our baggage, on foot, with no destination named, except in the vague statement that we were come 'to view the lakes'; and my friend only watched our departure with his chin in his hand, still ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... new decree. The agents of the Committee of General Security, of whom Heron is the chief, have from to-day powers of domiciliary search; they have full powers to proceed against all enemies of public welfare. Isn't that beautifully vague? And they have absolute discretion; every one may become an enemy of public welfare, either by spending too much money or by spending too little, by laughing to-day or crying to-morrow, by mourning for one dead relative or rejoicing over the execution of another. He may be a ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Randolph, the whole of Fauchet's letter, and Randolph's remarks. "From the nature of the circumstances," says Sparks, "Mr. Randolph had a difficult task to perform, as he was obliged to prove a negative, and to explain vague expressions and insinuations connected with his name in Fauchet's letter." The statements which he made in proof of his innocence were not such as to produce entire conviction. "He moreover," continues Sparks, "allowed ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Ingram. He believed the man to be sincere with him and he trusted him. And yet, as he looked up now and saw Ingram, relapsed into his luxurious arm chair, blowing rings of smoke, he seemed to detect something in his expression that filled him with a vague distrust about the genuineness of his professed interest in him. There was a sort of swagger in his whole posture, a slickness about his well-dressed, well-fed body, and a self-satisfaction in his somewhat burly face, nay, even in the ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... out?" Joy broke into a laugh, and Gypsy, now quite awake, joined in it merrily. For the first time a vague notion came to her that she was rather glad Joy came. It might be some fun, after all, to have somebody round all the time to—in that ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps |
