"Nebulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to describe these nefarious if nebulous designs and appeals to Mr. WINSTON CHURCHILL in particular, "if he has no such intentions, to disclaim them publicly and in a way which will leave no breeding-ground for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... shining rivers, Past golded-sanded bars, And nebulous isles of amethyst, They dropt like falling stars: Till on a scarped and wrinkled coast, Washed by dark waves below, They came upon the glittering tents— ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... recognized and is not made the basis of the distinction between the two classes. The world is seen to be full of Powers that make for weal or for woe—a conception that contains the germ of all the later development but is at first nebulous. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... also? Dared she tread on this nebulous fairy-ground? Dared she lead Corrie to set foot ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... 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 ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... With a nebulous kind of apprehension that I might be recognized as the mute inglorious hero of an adventure which had in my consciousness and conscience something of the character of eavesdropping, I allowed myself only a hasty cup of the lukewarm ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... of rotation. As the action continued, paroxysms of motion were manifested; the various parts of the cloud would rush through each other with sudden violence. During these motions beautiful and grotesque cloud-forms were developed. At some places the nebulous mass would become ribbed so as to resemble the graining of wood; a longitudinal motion would at times generate in it a series of curved, transverse bands, the retarding influence of the sides the tube causing an appearance ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... uncanny and incomprehensible. Lamb's modest works breathe the two essential qualities of sympathy and humor; the greater number of De Quincey's essays, while possessing more or less of both these qualities, are characterized chiefly by their brilliant style. Life, as seen through De Quincey's eyes, is nebulous and chaotic, and there is a suspicion of the fabulous in all that he wrote. Even in The Revolt of the Tartars the romantic element is uppermost, and in much of De Quincey's prose the element of unreality is more noticeable ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... deny Marlowe's 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 into verse, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... just this afternoon. It isn't often that I ask anything of you...." He did not believe that she had ever really finished "The Stone House." She pretended that she had—"the end was simply perfect," but she was vague, nebulous. He found the marker in her copy, some ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... 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. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... could have created the world in a perfected form for the use of man, but instead of so doing, Infinite Wisdom allowed slow-acting causes, working through infinite years, to develop the globe from a nebulous mass. Man could, indeed, have been created a civilized being, but instead of this, his starting-point was certainly very low. He was granted capacities in virtue of which he has risen. We are not to say what the end shall be, but we think it yet ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... England, Europe, and America, and consider the condition of the entire Protestant world. Religion, it is true, we shall still find in it; but it is religion from which not only the supernatural element is disappearing, but in which the natural element is fast becoming nebulous. It is indeed growing, as Mr. Leslie Stephen says it is, into a religion of dreams. All its doctrines are growing vague as dreams, and like dreams their outlines are for ever changing. Mr. Stephen has pitched on a very happy ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... that is the St. Louis clubwomen's "holy of holies." They have a club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in self-culture. As a group their consciousness of the city's industrial problems is still nebulous. The high light in which Mrs. Knefler's work must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of self-culture women, with a few—only a few—rash daughters shivering around preparatory to taking their first cold ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... speculations which forcibly remind us how empirical was the notion of the earth's rotundity before the inauguration of physical astronomy by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. We now know that our planet has the only shape possible for such a rotating mass that once was fluid or nebulous, the shape of a spheroid slightly protuberant at the equator and flattened at the poles; but this knowledge is the outcome of mechanical principles utterly unknown and unsuspected in the days of Columbus. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... dawned through a grey October haze. The French, with their backs to the nebulous light, loom out and show themselves to be already under arms; LANNES holding the centre, NEY the right, SOULT the extreme right, and AUGEREAU the left. The Imperial Guard and MURAT'S cavalry are drawn up ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... superior's conversation. Being an American sailor, I had little use for r's in every word which held an a but I had no objection to any one else talking the way they wished. I was somewhat doubtful just how to sit upon this nebulous third mate, so ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... For I fear that she is nervously sensitive both to praise and blame, a woman to be hurt inevitably in this battle of life, and a complex character which I own I do not perfectly comprehend myself yet, perhaps because parts of it are still nebulous. But doubtless your keener insight will detect what is obscure to me, and I rely upon you to befriend her until my return to England, when I hope to be able to relieve you of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 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 gas pipe of Clarke's Bottle Factory. Between ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... sitting indoors at home; as something which lasts us our lifetime, and about the confines of which no doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable people. But in truth this "we," which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and indefinable aggregation of many component parts which war not a little among themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps due to this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... God but this, and in one moment the interior consciousness becomes at-one-with-self, God, and from that inconceivable height of profound vision we again look upon Nature. Behold Sun, Moon and planets in all the original magnificence of their nebulous luminosity; from nebulous rings we proceed, stage after stage, each producing its own degrees of life. On, on we pass the ages, the geological cycles of inconceivable duration in time, but only a mere instant in eternity; and on and on, as the changes roll, until we see Earth as she is now; still ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... sea of molten air that stretched before him, that nebulous chaos of quivering bars and belts of heated atmosphere which remains above the desert as a memorial of the first stage of the entire planet's existence, the imagination of the prospector created a paradise of his own. There took shape before his eyes a Mexican ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... satisfactory. They had size and sparkle and luster, all the diamond brilliance that rings need to have; and for none of them had he paid much over five dollars. He was amply supplied with jewelry in which he felt perfect satisfaction. His present want was positive, if nebulous; he desired a fortune in his pocket, bulky, tangible evidence of his miraculous success. Ever since Stuhk had found him, life had had an unreal quality for him. His Monte Cristo wealth was too much like a fabulous, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... and plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself to be the product of a slow process of natural change operating upon more and more widely different antecedent conditions of the mineral framework of the earth; until, at length, in place of that framework, he would behold only a vast nebulous mass, representing the constituents of the sun and of the planetary bodies. Preceding the forms of life which now exist, our observer would see animals and plants not identical with them, but like them; increasing their differences with their antiquity ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... name was brought up she remembered reading a newspaper paragraph about the last voyage of that great ship from New York to Liverpool. Fortunately or unfortunately, her recollection of the paragraph was nebulous, for when she read news aloud to her mistress she permitted her mind to wander, unless the subject happened to be interesting. She tried to keep up a vaguely intelligent knowledge of world politics, but small events and ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the 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 Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his publisher's salon. How much older he was now than then—and yet how much younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut out a clear line for his future through the confusion ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... 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. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen, the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin, and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer—don't you know?—and a lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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
... country appeared, at that moment, 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 ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... 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 ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... to 1820 port, a wine which I remember to have had a rich colour and a full refined flavour, and once I tasted the famous comet wine, 1811, which, however, had lost something of its nucleus, and only retained a certain tawny, nebulous tone. On one occasion I remember my host said he had some seventeen-ninety something wine in his cellar, which he proposed we should taste, but for some reason, now forgotten, it was not produced, and I sometimes rather regret ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... 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 ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... 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 ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... me, at least, now I am here. The gulf between a historical figure and a man or woman who could bleed and cry out in human words was broad when one was at school. Lady Jane Grey, for instance, how nebulous she was and how little one cared. She seemed invented merely to add a detail to one's lesson in English history. But, as we drove across Waterloo Bridge, I caught a glimpse of the Tower, and what do you suppose ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of her united life. Educational facilities, inclusive of schools, libraries, and museums; railroads, telegraph and telephone service, electric lighting and electric trams,—all the ways and means of the modern mechanism of life are, inevitably, in a nebulous state in Italy. The political situation is extremely interesting at the present time. That the "Blacks" and the "Whites" are diametrically opposed to each other is in the nature of history rather than that of contemporary record or of prophecy; and that ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... 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 ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... attempted in the present volume is mainly of a tentative and preliminary character. There is here little scope yet for the presentation of definite scientific results. However it may be in the physical universe, in the cosmos of science our knowledge must be nebulous before it constellates into definitely measurable shapes, and nothing is gained by attempting to anticipate the evolutionary process. Thus it is that here, for the most part, we have to content ourselves at present with the task of mapping out the field in broad and general outlines, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... cut in the dried-up bed of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates among rocks, 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 ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... 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 which ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... single hard throb and stood still. She looked at Ina wordlessly. The shop in which they stood suddenly lost all form and sound. It seemed to float round her in nebulous billows. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... out, even her feigning ignorance of the existence of the charm and the leaving of it to Hans to suggest its production, which perhaps she did by influencing his mind subconsciously. No doubt more or less it fitted in with one of those nebulous traditions which are so common amongst ancient savage races, and therefore once shown to her confederate, or confederates, would be accepted by the common people as a holy sign, after which ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... comprehensive scheme not only for the League of Nations, but for the embodiment of the Fourteen Points in an actual Treaty of Peace. But in fact the President had thought out nothing; when it came to practice his ideas were nebulous and incomplete. He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House. He could have preached a sermon on any ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... volumes with generous pulses, with delicate sympathies. From 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 spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... 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
... unequal, and often somewhat nebulous Essay on Method, is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of method. Method is the road by which you reach, or hope to reach, a certain end; it is a process. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... 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! . . . I must shut up. I'm ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare's fashions. For him the essentials are dignity 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 apparelled ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... that leaped away from his ship and toward the target. The missile reached the target, and there was a small flare of light. His radiation counter burped briefly. The target vanished from the radar, but the infrared detector insisted there was a nebulous fog of hot gas, shot through with a rain of molten droplets, where the target had been. That was all. He had destroyed the enemy warhead without setting it off. He stabbed the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED button, and flicked the red-handled ...
— Pushbutton War • Joseph P. Martino
... 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 coming, made a wonder of his ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... him that a man must worship a God, love a woman, or find a real friendship, to make life endurable. God was too dim, too nebulous, for Hollister's need. Friendship was almost unattainable. How could a man with a face so mutilated that it was grotesque, repellent, cultivate the delicate flower of friendship? Doris loved him because she could not see him. When she could ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 eyes into the gathering evening. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... has discovered stars hitherto unknown and inaccessible to all our means of mensuration; it has penetrated distances so great, that luminous and necessarily immense bodies present themselves to us only like nebulous ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... am floating with wild caprice in the midst of this nebulous mass of fourteen hundred thousand times the volume of the earth into which it will one day be condensed, and carried forward amongst the planetary bodies. My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised. Sublimed into imponderable ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... 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 meet. Astronomy shows us our planet thrown off from the central mass of which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... soul and body, penetrates to the depths of thought, and paralyzes mind as well as blood! Cold—the sinister demon who grazes the universe with his damp wing, and breathes pestilence on bewildered nations! Cold, tarnishing everything, unrolling its gray and nebulous veil over the sky's rich tints, the waters' reflections, the hearts of flowers, and the cheeks of maidens! Cold, that casts its white winding-sheet over fields and woods and lakes, even over the fur ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... 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 ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... 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 dreamy, heaven's ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... resorted daily to the busy offices in the Athenian Building. A brief vacation had served to convince him of the folly that lay in indulging a parcel of incoherent prejudices at the expense of even that somewhat nebulous thing popularly called a "career." Dr. Lindsay made flattering offers; the work promised to be light, with sufficient opportunity for whatever hospital practice he cared to take; and the new aspect of his profession—commercial medicine he dubbed it—was at least entertaining. If one wished to see ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Dick's looked dim and nebulous. Other things could be set right; there was always a fighting chance. It was only death that ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... been 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
... once with the rise of the science of thermodynamics. In 1854, Helmholtz showed that the supposition of an original fiery condition of the nebulous stuff was unnecessary, since in the mutual gravitation of widely separated matter we had a store of potential energy sufficient to generate the high temperature of the sun and stars. We could scarcely go wrong in attributing the light of the nebulae to the conversion of the gravitational ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... on home at the side of Miss Westlake, after leaving Miss Stevens at Hollis Creek, in a strange and nebulous state of elation, which continued until bedtime. As he was about to retire he was handed a wire ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... for, a prayer is offered for the will of God! It is somewhat vaguely held to be the appropriate expression for the last emergency, and that it implies resigning one's self to the most serious and irreferable calamity. There is also a nebulous feeling that while the will of God may be entirely appropriate to the conditions and circumstances of the aged, the poor, the unfortunate, and the defective classes, it is the last thing in the world to be invoked for the young, the gifted, the strong, and the ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... those we might learn in regions superior to chance. If we let our gaze travel beyond the creatures that are possessed of a glimmer of intellect and consciousness, beyond the protozoa even, which are the first nebulous representatives of the dawning animal kingdom, we find, as has been abundantly proved by the experiments of Mr. H. J. Carter, the celebrated microscopist, that the very lowest embryos, such as the myxomycetes, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... is brightest;—towards either edge it pales off 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 for a while, disappear, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 corner of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... 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, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... chin. Having no teeth he swallowed half his words, though his 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 ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... my window at night, And the welkin above is all white, All throbbing and panting with stars, Among them majestic is standing Sandalphon the angel, expanding His pinions in nebulous bars. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... was senescent 30 And star-dials pointed to morn, As the star-dials hinted of morn, At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent 35 Arose with a duplicate horn, Astarte's bediamonded crescent ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. But it's true what I was saying. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... turned his telescope 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 seemed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... world. I can best describe the passage of day and night, at this period, as a sort of gigantic, ponderous flicker. Moment by moment, the acceleration of time continued; so that, at nights now, I saw the moon, only as a swaying trail of palish fire, that varied from a mere line of light to a nebulous path, and then dwindled ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... in the old orbit, more or less divorced, bankrupt, or otherwise unsound, though still smart, the kind of women who are asked to fill a table on such occasions 'because they won't mind'—that is to say, they will not object to dining with a primadonna or an actress whose husband has become nebulous and whose reputation is mottled. The men, of whom there might be several, would be either very clever or overpoweringly noble, because all geniuses and all peers are supposed to like their birds ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... so many of us have, are contented with superficial remedies for it. But let a man get a glimpse of his own real self, and I think that he will wish for something a great deal more solid to grip hold of, than nebulous talk of the kind that I have been describing. If once we feel ourselves to be struggling in the black flood of that awful river, we shall want a firmer hold upon the bank than is given to us by some rootless tree or other. We must clutch something that will stand a pull, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 conceptions proceeded ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... about nothing," Jason said emphatically. "He plays word games. He takes a word, gives it an abstract and unreal value, then proves this value by relating it to other words with the same sort of nebulous antecedents. His facts aren't facts—just meaningless sounds. This is the key point, where your universe and mine differ. You live in this world of meaningless facts that have no existence. My world contains facts that can be weighed, tested, proven related ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... elaboration of the views expressed in the personal letter to King would have been favoured with the imprint "de l'Imprimerie Imperiale." Peron's anthropological studies among Australian aboriginals led him to conclusions totally at variance with the nebulous "state of nature" theories of the time, which pictured the civilised being as a degenerate from man unspoiled by law, government, and convention. The tests and measurements of blacks which he made, and compared with those of French and English people, showed him that ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... contentedly upon the scattered difference of things, and expect not equality in lustre, dignity, or perfection, in regions or persons below; where numerous numbers must be content to stand like lacteous or nebulous stars, little taken notice of, or dim in their generations. All which may be contentedly allowable in the affairs and ends of this world, and in suspension unto what will be in the order of things hereafter, and the new system of mankind which will be in the world to come; when the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... pleasant addition. It is now gliding along with wonderful celerity, and the nucleus is very bright. It is accompanied with a great luminosity, and the nucleus has changed its position therein; that is, on the 29th August, the nucleus was like a minute star near the centre of the nebulous envelope; on the 2nd September it appeared in the n. f. quarter, and latterly it has been in the ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief in the miraculous aside, on the ground that it had no evidence of a scientific kind to support it, was proclaiming with confidence some vague creed as unassailable, the evidence in support of which was very much more nebulous, or what many would describe as nil. A story used to be told about him by which his position in this respect is aptly and amusingly illustrated. He was taking a walk with an undergraduate, who confessed ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Christmas party is something, but it is not everything. The disengaging of the erotic motive is everything, is the only touchstone. If while that is being done we are soothed into a trance, a nebulous delirium of the nerves, then we know the novelist to be a supreme novelist. If we retain consciousness, he is not supreme, and to be less than supreme in art is to not exist.... Dickens disengages the erotic motive through two figures, ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... 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 ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... through half a world of black, fury-space. His toes and finger-tips were infinite miles behind. A sound of rushing waters filled his ears, like deathly waterfalls stamping the life from his bursting head. Black blurred figures, nebulous and meaningless, loomed ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... after dressing with a great running commentary of grunts and groans, he sat down to drink a mouthful of the reviving decoction. But his brain was still in a whirl, and the scenes of a few hours ago passed rapidly, but in nebulous form, before his ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... had an idea; it was as yet nebulous; still, it was a shrewd idea, and needed only a small space to stand. The moment he saw the letter the nebulous idea became opaque. The page was neatly typewritten in Italian, and only the signature was in ink. It was a small, slanting, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... 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, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... said you love, you will 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.
... something to art, came spontaneously to his lips, and were not less lofty than his thoughts. As a statesman he had serious defects; he was haughty, vain, and overbearing, his opinions were unsettled, his far-reaching views often nebulous; his passion was stronger than his judgment, and he was immoderately given to bombast. In spite of his true greatness he lacked simplicity, and he imported the arts of a charlatan into political life. Yet Englishmen must ever reverence his memory, for he ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... that he would never get away from The Job. But he thought of Nelly a hundred times a day and hoped that sometime, some spring night of a burning moon, he might dare the great adventure and kiss her. Istra— Theoretically, he remembered her as a great experience. But what nebulous bodies these ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... miles in diameter, and of that class termed nebulous, having no tail, and probably no solid nucleus. The point where the comet's centre crosses the plane of the ecliptic is within and very near the curve which the earth describes,—so very near, that the outskirts of the nebulous matter of the comet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... perhaps twenty in perpendicular diameter. Carl's torch was 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 ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... student of physical geology, who fully believes in the uniformity of the general condition of the earth through geologic time, may feel compelled by what he knows of causation, and by the general analogy of nature, to suppose that our solar system was once a nebulous mass; that it gradually condensed, that it broke up into that wonderful group of harmoniously rolling balls we call planets and satellites, and that then each of these underwent its appointed metamorphosis, until at last our ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... be as delightful and artistic as are the walls of our hoardings and Railway-stations. The anthem of "The Heavens are Telling" will have to be adapted for large towns. Perhaps pictures may be projected on the nebulous back-ground. If so, some of our best Artists may not object to taking a good sum, and then having ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... for that matter," he added. "Anyhow," he went on to explain, "the power's all on your side now; and I'll show you how little the doing will hurt you as soon as I can have a quiet chat with your husband." He branched off again into technicalities, nebulous projections of capital and interest, taxes and rents, from which she finally extracted, and clung to, the central fact that if the "deal went through" it would mean a commission of forty thousand dollars to Marvell's firm, of which ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... till they ultimately halted by one of the unwieldy trees spoken of. A process somewhat analogous to that of alleged formations of the universe, time and times ago, was observable. The bustling swarm had swept the sky in a scattered and uniform haze, which now thickened to a nebulous centre: this glided on to a bough and grew still denser, till it formed a solid black spot upon ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... this 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
... had no use for odd fish—queer folk and the like—and kept a sharp look-out for erratic strangers. Of these there was a constant succession coming to the Farm; reformers of everything under the sun; fanatics demanding the instant adoption of—their nebulous theories; mental aliens not quite crazy but pretty near it; egotists, wild to be noticed, freaks and fakirs and humbugs of every description, and, worst of all, wrecks of humanity seeking refuge from the slings and arrows ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... him say: "My love, my love," very softly, as he rose to go; and she smiled sadly to herself. She folded her hands in her lap, and thought, not bitterly, not listlessly, but deeply. She wanted to consider all cheerfully now; she tried to do so. She was musing among those flying perceptions, those nebulous facts of a new life, experienced for the first time; she was now not herself as she had been; another woman was born; and she was feeling carefully along the unfamiliar paths which she must tread. She was not glad that these words ran through her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... talent of standing aside and reading faces and dissecting emotions. Three faces interested him curiously. The Chevalier hid none of his thoughts; they lay in his eyes, in the wrinkles on his brow, in the immobility of his pose. How easy it was to read that the Chevalier saw nothing, save in a nebulous way, of the wonderful panorama surrounding. He was with the folly of the night gone, with Paris, with to-day's regrets for vanished yesterday. The vicomte could see perfectly well that Victor's gaiety was natural and unassumed; that the past held him but loosely, since ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... roseate 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, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... back-door into immortality for sagacious and affectionate dogs and horses, they leave it ajar for the admission of animals of less intelligence—even for all the kinds that Noah took into the ark, perhaps, although the theory is still nebulous and undefined. Now, I would beg the kind-hearted adherents to this theory not to think I am seeking to play off a satirical pleasantry upon it, if I express a hope, which is earnest and true, that, if there be an immortality for any class of dumb animals, the donkey shall go into it first, and have ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... far horizon a range of chalk-topped hills gleams white, even in dull weather, as though it were lightened with perpetual sunshine; and here and there on the dazzling whiteness of its lower slopes some plaster-like, nebulous patches represent far-off villages which lie too remote for the eye to discern their details. Indeed, only when the sunlight touches a steeple to gold does one realise that each such patch is a human settlement. Finally, all is wrapped in an immensity of silence which even ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and one by one, Out of the ether, were worlds created; Star and planet and sea and sun, All in the nebulous Nothing waited Till the Nameless One Who has many a name Called them to being ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... assumption is going the way of the others, the only difference being that it is passing through more phases than some. But the decay is plain to all save those who refuse to see. The process of refinement cannot go on for ever. In other matters knowledge passes from a nebulous and indefinite stage to a precise and definite one. In the case of theism it pursues an opposite course. From the very definite god, or gods, of primitive mankind we advance to the vague and indefinite god of the modern theist—a God who, apparently, ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... neither imaginative in any true sense, nor actual in any sense, that up to the present hour there was nothing in the bank, and only the money for impending needs in the house. He could not be called a man of learning; he was only a great bookworm; for his reading lay all in the nebulous regions of history. Old family records, wherever he could lay hold upon them, were his favourite dishes; old, musty books, that looked as if they knew something everybody else had forgotten, made his eyes gleam, and ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... had made him slow to accept marvellous stories and many forms of superstition. Yet, as a man of science, he well knew that just on the verge of the demonstrable facts of physics and physiology there is a nebulous border-land which what is called "common sense" perhaps does wisely not to enter, but which uncommon sense, or the fine apprehension of privileged intelligences, may cautiously explore, and in so doing find itself ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... this necessary warning; namely, that the public should safeguard itself against the absurd, but possible mistakes of confusing the Legitimate Scientific School of the Hygienic Dietetic Method of Biological Healing with the nebulous cults aforesaid. There is no vestige of resemblance between them, either in thought or principle, and nothing could be more fatal and ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... 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 ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... care-free. A career seemed a far-off, nebulous thing that one need not fret over. It was very pleasant to be walking up over the hills in the moonlight and sunset with Gavin at her side carrying flowers for her. She felt it would be beautiful to be able to always stroll around this way with the scent ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... stupefied. For a while he seemed to himself to be turning over in his mind something he had heard read from a book, with a nebulous notion of being somehow concerned in it. The thought of his father cleared his brain. He ran to the dead body, kissed its lips as he had once kissed the forehead of another, and falling on his knees wept, he knew not for what. Presently, however, he recovered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... marshalled races. He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede, to recede, and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Via Dolorosa toiled a Sunday mob from many nations. The long, nebulous avenue, framed on either side by dull trees, was dusty with the heels of the faithful ones; and the murmur of voices in divers tongues recalled the cluttering sea on a misty beach. Never swerving, without haste or rest, went ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... mentioned Merrimac Avenue (they had come all the way from there) my imagination had associated her with that indefinite social limbo known to the properly-constituted Boston mind as the South End—a nebulous region which condenses here and there into a pretty face, in which the daughters are an "improvement" on the mothers and are sometimes acquainted with gentlemen more gloriously domiciled, gentlemen whose wives and sisters are in ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... created the heavens and the earth." There is in this sentence no limitation of time, so there is room here for astronomical ages, cycle upon cycle. There was time enough in that beginning for the present system of planets to be arranged from a single nebulous mass. In it we have a picture of matter in a crude condition, without fixedness of form, surrounded with darkness. Then comes the commencement of the great work of preparing our planet for the home of man, by the spirit of God moving ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... will-power which enables us to take a firm hold of ourselves and to get a grip upon our impressions, they will remain vague and nebulous without presenting to us characters of sufficient definiteness to enable us to direct them readily into the ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... the frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did it lie? Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous records of the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make small specific impingement on our consciousness today, so also even now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than folklore. Now the ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... considered the matter closed, the Colonel drew his chair toward the fire, picked up a magazine, and commenced idly to slit the pages. Shirley studied the back of his head for some time, then got out some fancy work and commenced plying her needle. And as she plied it, a thought, nebulous at first, gradually took form in her head until eventually she murmured loud enough for the ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... be regarded as a fanciful figure: it is not a nebulous hope which is to be realised at some indefinitely remote period, thousands of years hence; nor is it a new species (in the Darwinian sense) of which we can know nothing, and which it would therefore be somewhat ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... exasperated by her husband's 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 ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... that no matter how rapidly the head shall be moving in its orbit, the end of the tail—in order to keep its position—must move with a rapidity impossible to conceive. If this tail were composed of nebulous mist, or anything of that sort, it could not keep its position. There is only one theory which could account for this position, and that is that the head of a comet is a lens and the tail is light. The light of the sun passes through the lens and streams out ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... 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
... power of suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has been or might be unrolled in a human being.[9] The ideas with which Locke operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can discriminate and rest upon; but the unity of these units is specious, not existential. If ideas were not logical or ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... crimes to secure its fruits with 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, with its portentous ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... before them seemed to thicken in a curious fashion. Lura gave a cry of alarm and pressed close to Damis. The sun's rays penetrated with difficulty through a patch of air directly before them. Gradually the mistiness began to assume a nebulous uncertain outline and separated itself into four distinct patches. The thickening air took on a silvery metallic gleam and four metallic cylinders made their appearance. Two of them were about eight feet in height and three feet in diameter. The other ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... the boundless vision burst Through yawning gulfs of gloom; To human hunger, human thirst Infinite hell did loom; Infinite bale to vision burst In tracts of nebulous bloom; And life through peril, lorn, accurst, Passed on ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... 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 the tabernacle. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... First National Bank of El 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 ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... chance introduction. It had in reality been carefully designed by the French manipulator of underground wires. Louis Delgado he already knew, and held in contempt, yet Louis was the only possible instrument for use in converting certain vague possibilities into definite realities. Changing the nebulous into the concrete; shifting the dotted line of a frontier from here to there on a map; changing the likeness that adorned a coin or postage-stamp: these were things to which Monsieur Jusseret lent himself with the same zest that actuates the hunting ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... Rodriguez, 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 ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... the child to get selected portions of it by heart on Sundays. But you are yet to imagine that the authors themselves have taken a hand in the game: that the later ones suppose all the earlier ones to have been predicting all the time in a nebulous fashion what they themselves have to tell, and indeed to have written mainly with that object: so that Macaulay and Adam Smith, for example, constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to affirm that what they tell us must be right because Walter Map or the author ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... picture is crossed with nebulous black streaks. These were originally present in all the pictures. I have omitted them in all but this, lest they might obscure the details of the reduced copies. It has been explained to me (although in the myth it is expressly stated only ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... a weeping mist shrouding the long, straight street, and clinging to one's face in clammy caresses. I felt how much better it was down at Ham, as I turned into our side street, and saw the flats looming like mountains, the chimney-pots hidden in the mist. At our entrance stood a nebulous conveyance, that I took at first for a tradesman's van; to my horror it proved to be a hearse; and all at once the white ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... talk with you. The Sophomores may sneer at faculties and kings, but they wouldn't think of sassing you. The papers publish your picture in your football clothes. You dine with the professors, and prominent alumni come back and shake you by the hand. Of course, you know that somewhere in the dim nebulous outside there is a President of the United States who is quite a party in his way, but none of the girls mention it when they tell you how grand you looked after they had hauled the other team off of you and sewed ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... numerous. All times and tribes are searched for memorials; the remote corners of modern, medieval and ancient periods are brought under scrutiny; and going beyond these again, the semi-historic eras of tradition and the nebulous gleams from pre-historic milleniums[TN-1] are diligently scanned, that their uncertain story may be prefaced to that registered in "the syllables ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... a pale edge of light stole along the east, throwing out the high, crumpled line of the Sierra. The landscape developed from nebulous shadows and enfoldings to hill slopes, tree domes, the clustered groupings of barns. A stir passed, frail and delicate, over the earth's face, a light tentative trembling in the leaves, a quiver through the grain. Birds made sleepy twitterings; the chink of running water ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a cluster of stars looking like a cloudy spot till separated by telescopic power; but the term is also now correctly applied to masses of nebulous ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... name whispered in another direction, in connection with the cashiership of the new bank which was to be built. The cashiership and the mayoralty might be nebulous honors, but it was sweet, for once, to be recognized for what he was—man of might; a man of talent, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... displayed a marvellous generosity. Yes, everything was Julio's handiwork . . . and the father went from canvas to canvas, halting admiringly before the vaguest daubs as though he could almost detect signs of genius in their nebulous confusion. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not good. I know what is the matter with them. I have found out that I have no more idea of making pie crust than I have about the nebulous part of astronomy, and that I never could comprehend. I wanted to make the lightest, puffiest pastry that was possible, and I used some self-raising flour, the kind that has the yeast ground up with it, and ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... an occasional policeman the streets were deserted. It was a little cold and raw for the time of year, and a fog like a pink blanket was creeping in from the sea. Down in the Steine the big arc-lights gleamed here and there like nebulous blue globes; it was hardly possible to see across the road. In the half-shadow behind Steel the statue of the First Gentleman in Europe glowed gigantic, ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White |
