"Undefined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the country was very rough; and the mules that carried the guns met with such difficulties that the infantry had to turn to, and improve the paths—if paths they could be called, for they were often little better than undefined tracks. As the expedition moved up the valley, the tribesmen opened on them a distant fire; but scattered after a few shells from the mountain guns were thrown among them. The fortified houses, however, were stubbornly held; and indeed, were only carried ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... At some distance from where he was, Mrs. Goddard was talking to Mrs. Ambrose. He could see her graceful figure, but he could hardly distinguish her features in the gloom of the dimly-lighted church. He longed to leave Nellie and to go and speak to her, but an undefined feeling of hurt pride prevented him. He would not forgive her for having taken the vicar's arm in coming home through the park; so he stayed where he was, pricking his fingers with the holly and rather impatiently pulling the string off the ball which ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... off the weight that oppressed him. There was no shirking the truth. He was deadly afraid of Bub Quinn; the sight of that lowering face at the window had caused in him a horrible physical shrinking; the dread of an undefined mischief brewing weighed upon his spirit like ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... surroundings had in his time the outward look of a Virginia plantation. The President was required to pay the expenses of the house and grounds. In consequence, the grounds were uncared for, the palings broken or wanting, the paths undefined, and the place a waste, running imperceptibly into the barren fields about it. Within, the house was as simple as without, after the usual style of Virginia houses, where the scale was often extravagant but the details plain. Only in his table did Jefferson spend an unusual ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... story Mr. Hansson informs us that it dealt with "a man who commits a forgery and then tells about it, doing both in a sort of somnambulistic state whereby everything is left vague and undefined." At that moment "Raskolnikov" was in the air, so to speak. And without wanting in any way to suggest imitation, I feel sure that the groundnote of the story was distinctly Dostoievskian. Strindberg himself ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... ours—really more attached to their clergy than they were in the lost days, when the Mathers and Nortons were noblemen—should choose to neutralize so much of their ministers' lives, and destroy so much of their early training, by this undefined passion for seeing them in public. It springs from our balancing of sects. If a spirited Episcopalian takes an interest in the almshouse, and is put on the Poor Board, every other denomination must have a minister there, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... she was very small, when her father was dangerously sick, and the coming of the doctor had wakened her. She had always somehow associated the hour with mysterious flickering lights, and anxious whispers and softened steps, and a dread as terrible as it was undefined. Now, out here in this desolate place, where the birds were asleep in their nests, and the winds quiet among the mountain-tops, and the very frogs tired of their chanting,—herself the only waking thing,—these two far, deep-toned syllables seemed like a ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... great good-humor. Merriment lighted his eyes and the cut of his mouth was for laughter. But the smile seemed to be set and, furthermore, indicated that the fan-bearer found much mirth in the discomfiture of others. Aside from this undefined atmosphere of heartlessness, it can not be said that there was any craft or wickedness patent on his face, for his features were good and indicative of unusual intelligence. To the unobservant, he seemed to be a lovable, useful, able man. However, we have seen what ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... he felt suddenly and strangely at a loss. Something in her face struck him silent and perplexed. It seemed that without preparation he had stepped upon dangerous ground. With an undefined apprehension he waited, looking ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Curatorship of the Industrial Museum. The expenditure of thought, of ingenuity, of research, and management—the expenditure, in a word, of himself—involved in originating and giving form of purpose to a scheme so new and so undefined, and, in our view, so undefinable, must, we fear, have shortened his life, and withdrawn his precious and quite singular powers of illustrating and adorning, and, in the highest sense, sanctifying and blessing ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... possession of certain characteristic and relatively fixed behavior patterns which we call instincts. This is his racial inheritance which he shares with all members of the species. He comes into the world, also, endowed with certain undefined capacities for learning other forms of behavior, capacities which vary greatly in different individuals. These individual differences and the instincts are ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... extending from the time of the first coming of Negroes to the English colonies to that of the Revolutionary War. This divides into two parts, with a line coming at the year 1705. Before this date the exact status of the Negro was more or less undefined; the system of servitude was only gradually passing into the sterner one of slavery; and especially in the middle colonies there was considerable intermixture of the races. By the year 1705, however, it had become ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... a strange penetrating glance that in some undefined way increased his irritation. "It's quite possible," she said quietly. "But I don't think even you, Martin, can call her handsome. As to her intelligence, she never gave me ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... hundred thousand dollars, his breath came in shorter gasps of excitement. He began to realize the colossal wealth which lay guarded behind the great porphyritic granite pillars. He also began to realize some new and as yet undefined responsibility. The mere thought of the magnitude of the movement in which he was being made a deliberate and yet disinterested factor brought him once more to his feet, pacing his little den of a room with thoughtful ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... To such a name—deep, pure and beautiful, As its trout-peopled wave!—on Windermere Our skiff pursued its way amid the calm Which fill'd the heart with holiest communings. On Windermere—what scenes entranced the eye That wander'd o'er them! either undefined Or traced upon the outline of the sky. Afar the lovely panorama glow'd, Until the mountains, on whose purple brows The clouds were pillow' d, closed it from our view. The fields were fraught with bloom, on them ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... Diaconus (S. Greg. Vit. lib. i. cap. i.) employs these decisive terms, "quartus Felix, sedis Apostolicae Pontifex." It is of course possible to translate "atavus meus" merely "my ancestor;" and this will leave the relationship sufficiently undefined. ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... which they are said to illustrate, I do not find that I have. Three of them, the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth, would be more in place in the Classic of Filial Piety than here in the Chung Yung. The meaning of the sixteenth is shadowy and undefined. After all the study which I have directed to it, there are some points in reference to which I have still doubts and difficulties. The twentieth chapter, which concludes the third portion of the Work, contains a full exposition of Confucius's views on government, though professedly descriptive ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... but Mark had an undefined sensation that it was a satisfactory one in its way. Then Mary, with her veil lowered, passed him with a quick step, and beckoned him to follow. She stopped once more before they lost that corner; looked back; and waved her hand to Martin. He ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... had little special reason to love Mr Osborne, and knew him to be a tyrant, I knew also that my old Charley could not have thus coolly uttered a disrespectful word of him, and I had therefore a painful though at the same time an undefined conviction that some degree of moral degeneracy must have taken place before he could express himself as now. To many, such a remark will appear absurd, but I am confident that disrespect for the preceding generation, and especially for those in it nearest to ourselves, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... as she played. Later, when a couple of whist-tables had been established, and the brilliantly-lighted room had grown hot, these two sat together at one of the open windows, looking out at the moonlit lawn; one of them supremely happy, and yet with a kind of undefined sense that this supreme happiness was a dangerous thing—a thing that it would be wise to pluck out of his ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the estate are, as I have said, good ones, but there is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions. The ocean has marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined. There is no word of the 'Hinterland;' for neither the term nor the idea had then been thought of. Had Great Britain bought those vast regions which extended beyond the settlements? Or were the discontented Dutch at liberty to pass onwards and found fresh nations ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her close to him and bent to kiss her lips; but some undefined reluctance came over her, and she ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... Gabriel was sent to "give him skill and understanding," and to inform him, that their chastisement would not be terminated by the captivity of seventy years, but by one of "seventy times seven," i. e. a long and undefined period. The words "seven," and "seventy," were frequently used by the Hebrews to signify an indefinite number, and "seventy times seven" is a Hebreism used to signify a great and indefinite number. Thus one of the ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... most fearless seekers of motives; one of the ablest practisers of that transmutation of obscure emotion into the visible detail of dress, habit, expression, which is the real technique of the novelist. His fault is a defect in sympathy, a lack of spiritual appreciation, if I may use and leave undefined so old-fashioned a term. His virtue lies in the rich garment of experience which careful observation and skilful writing enable him to wrap about his imaginative conceptions. It is this which makes his novels so readable for the discriminating ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... seriously threaten the Eastern dominions; and no advantage was promised by following on the steps of Alexander and annexing countries too poor to bear the cost of their maintenance. To the west it was different. Beyond the Alps there was still a territory of unknown extent, stretching away to the undefined ocean, a territory peopled with warlike races, some of whom in ages long past had swept over Italy and taken Rome, and had left their descendants and their name in the northern province, which was now called Cisalpine Gaul. With these races the Romans had as yet no clear relations, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... after we enter upon that enchanted ground that the human mind begins to droop and flag as in a strange road, or in a thick mist, benighted and making little way with many attempts and many failures, and that the best of us only escape with half a triumph. The undefined and the imaginary are the regions that we must pass like Satan, difficult and doubtful, 'half flying, half on foot.' The object in sense is a positive thing, and execution comes ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... religion had exhibited on a large scale alike its powers and deficiencies. Thoughtful and religious men could scarcely do better than set themselves to restore the balance where it was unequal. They had to teach that faith must be based, not only upon feeling and undefined impulse, but on solid intellectual apprehension. They had to urge with no less earnestness that religious truth has to be not only outwardly apprehended, but inwardly appropriated before it can become possessed of true spiritual ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... Snodgrass. The offer relieved him from considerable embarrassment, for his previous notions of loading a pistol were rather vague and undefined. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... fever, and a mental disturbance described by the medical officer as exhaustion psychosis. He believed this condition to be the result of severe exhaustion, prolonged anxiety, worry, and extreme exposure. Extreme restlessness and irritability, confusion of thought and an undefined perplexity, all the prominent symptoms of exhaustion psychosis, making him hyperactive and inclined to acts of violence, were ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... with its mysterious Gulf of Carpentaria; a survey of which, it is supposed, would solve the great geographical question respecting the rivers of the mimic continent. Place your finger on Japan, with its exclusive and civilized people; it lies an unknown lump on our earth, and an undefined line on our charts! Think of the northern coast of China, willing, as is reported, to open an intercourse and trade with Europeans, spite of their arbitrary government. Stretch your pencil over the Pacific Ocean, which Cook himself declares ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of a certain smoker of that cigar, and the clasp of the strong, firm hand that has placed that delightful weed between those suggestive lips,—when on a winter evening she steals alone into the drawing room and lowers the vulgar glare of the gas until everything is misty and undefined as her own heart, and then throwing herself on the spacious fauteuil before the grate fire, soars into the world of her imagination, and is happy with her heart's idol for a few dreamy hours, or depositing herself carelessly on a ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... think, than I know. How are such things to be measured, put into words? You have effected some change in me which defies analysis, a change of attitude,—to attempt to dogmatize it would ruin it. I prefer to leave it undefined—not even to call it an acquisition of faith. I have faith," she said, simply, "in what you have become, and which has made you dare, superbly, to cast everything away. . . It is that, more than anything you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... evils of those times were owing to these perpetual changes, which all came from the undefined rights of succession to power, as left by Charlemagne; a striking proof that a monarch may be a man of genius, a great and acceptable ruler, and still fail to see the consequences to future times of the legacy he leaves them in ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of parts will be to study their early development. "For since each organ becomes what it is only through the manner of its development, its true value can be recognised only from its method of formation. At present, we form our judgments by an undefined intuition, instead of regarding each organ merely as an isolated product of its fundamental organ, and discerning from this standpoint the correspondences and dissimilarities in the different types" (p. 233). Parts, therefore, which ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... will refuse to be in your company!" said Helen. She was angry now at something undefined in Van Shaw's manner. "If you do not leave me at once, I will try to leave you." She actually made a movement to rise and put her foot on the ground at the edge of the kiva. Van Shaw instantly got up and said quickly, "Of course I'll go. But I ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... to be lit stood beside Anne's sofa. The effect of the illumination was to make the lady in the window turn on her settee. Across the space between, her eyes, obscure lights in a face still undefined, swept with the turning of her body, and fastened upon Anne's face, bared for the first time to their view. They remained fixed, as if Anne's face had a peculiar ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... sentence of this passage is of very undefined sense; we can guess at what is meant by the sneer upon the "vaunted Italian schools." There are not only immense gaps, but great gulfs, over which there is no legitimate passage. If these schools have "done so much honour to the art of painting," as M. de Burtin asserts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... a court usher and provincial secretary, suffers from the mania of persecution. He either lies curled up in bed, or walks from corner to corner as though for exercise; he very rarely sits down. He is always excited, agitated, and overwrought by a sort of vague, undefined expectation. The faintest rustle in the entry or shout in the yard is enough to make him raise his head and begin listening: whether they are coming for him, whether they are looking for him. And at such times his face expresses the utmost ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to see Chauvelin during this last hour; she knew that his keen, fox-like eyes would terrify her at once, and incline the balance of her decision towards Armand. Whilst she did not see him, there still lingered in her heart of hearts a vague, undefined hope that "something" would occur, something big, enormous, epoch-making, which would shift from her young, weak shoulders this terrible burden of responsibility, of having to choose between two ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... extends as far north as the Himalayas, it may contain monosyllabic languages, and tribes speaking them. It may present also instances of intermixture like those which we have already found in Behar—the line of demarcation being equally difficult and undefined. Difficult and undefined it really is—because, although it is an easy matter to take a portion of the Sirmor, Gurhwal, or Kumaon population, and say, "this is Hindu because both language and creed make it so," ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... a fact, but it had not long existed, nor had it ever received a formal baptism. So undefined was its constitution, and so conflicting were the various opinions in regard to it of eminent men, that it would be difficult to say how high-treason could be committed against it. Great lawyers of highest intellect and learning believed the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... buy the beginnings of a ready-made sea-going fleet when it had the offer of ten British East Indiamen specially built for rapid conversion into men-of-war. Forty thousand bales of cotton would have bought the lot. The Mississippi record was even worse. Five conflicting authorities divided the undefined and overlapping responsibilities between them: the Confederate Government, the State governments, the army, the navy, and the Mississippi skippers. A typical result may be seen in the fate of the fourteen "rams" which were absurdly mishandled by fourteen independent civilian skippers with ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... secret shame A form of beauty undefined, A loveliness with out a name, Not of degree, but more of kind; Nor bold nor shy, nor short nor tall, But a new mingling of them all. Yes, beautiful beyond belief, Transfigured and transfused, he sees The lady of the Pyrenees, The daughter of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... intense, but that did not altogether blind him to his faults. He listened attentively, sympathetically but gravely, and said little. He felt, somehow, that London was a dangerous place compared with the west of Ireland,—that his friend was in danger of something vague and undefined,—that he himself was in danger of—he knew not what. While the two were conversing they heard a step in the now quiet street. It advanced quickly, and stopped at the door. There was a rustling sound; something fell on the floor, and the step ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... not succeed in absorbing all my attention. That old document kept working in my brain. My head throbbed with excitement, and I felt an undefined uneasiness. I was possessed with a ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... which no reflection could enable Peveril to answer. His eyes glanced from Alice to the stranger; and new fears, and undefined suspicions, in which the safety of that beloved and lovely girl was implicated, mingled with the deep anxiety which already occupied his mind, on account of his father and his ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... had no mind to let the President out of his clutches so easily, and a long conversation followed, during which he forced his antagonist into the position of urging him to take the Treasury in order to prevent some undefined but portentous mischief in the Senate. All that could be agreed upon was that Ratcliffe should give a positive answer within two days, and on that agreement he ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... a sudden and deep groan; it seemed near me, and I sprung to my feet. Bells rang; there was a rush on the staircaise—a shriek—another rush—the opening of doors wildly; all this was in a moment—in the moment I ran out of my room toward Mary's where an undefined and terrible ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... the benediction of the new abbot. In abbeys exempt from episcopal jurisdiction, the confirmation and benediction had to be conferred by the pope in person, the house being taxed with the expenses of the new abbot's journey to Rome. By the rule of St Benedict, the consent of the laity was in some undefined way required; but this seems never to have been practically enforced. It was necessary that an abbot should be at least 25 years of age, of legitimate birth, a monk of the house, unless it furnished no suitable candidate, when a liberty was ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called "courage," began to come to life again, laughing, "Let the darned old business bust, if she's ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... for you. I will be near you always." Here was another inspiration. For three years or more he had been thinking of her as dead. Or rather he had thought of her in that nebulous, undefined fashion in which we consider the dead; the slumberous people who forget everything, who see nothing; who, if they exist at all, are like stones upon the beach rolled to and fro blind and senseless, not of their own desire, but by the waves of a fearful ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... He was a very different man from the one who had been seated on her hearth a short half-hour ago. He bade her leave him alone, and without a light, and she obeyed him, though reluctantly, and with an undefined fear of ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... confessed? Hope and joy spoke louder to him than fear. He fancied himself already relieved of the Colonel. But the spectacle presented to his eyes suddenly diverted the course of his ideas, and the inconsolable lover began laughing like a fool. A noise of kicks, blows, and slaps; an undefined group rolling on the floor in the convulsions of a desperate struggle—so much was all he could see and understand at the first glance. Soon Fougas, lit up by the ruddy glow of the candle, discovered that he was struggling with Gothon, like Jacob with the angel, and ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... from some undefined cause. Arthur glanced at her. He saw the trembling and knew she would have a fit of nerves in a moment if something did not come up ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... back into the room his face, wearing the look of one far gone in despair, was contorted with passion. Fear, confusion, and undefined soul-longing seemed to move rapidly across it, each leaving its momentary impression, and all mingling at times in a surging flood that swelled the veins of his temples to the point of rupture. Mechanically he paced his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... was no flame, and the room was lighted only by the glow of the burning embers. Mary Erskine was frightened to find herself alone. The tranquillity and happiness which she had experienced a few hours ago were all gone, and her mind was filled, instead, with an undefined and mysterious distress and terror. She went to the fire-place and built a new fire, for the sake of its company. She took the baby from the cradle and sat down in the rocking-chair, determining not to go to bed again till morning. She went to the window and looked out at the stars, to see if ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... to circulate about the town. The news was undefined, vague, told and explained in different ways; but, such as it was, it excited the greatest curiosity among the people. The everyday work seemed to go on as usual, but in the midst of the dashing and rattling of implements of handiwork ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... largely. By subtle and occult processes which defied his analysis, what he had seen and heard had proved mysteriously disturbing—all this outpouring of irrational sentiment in which he had no share. So had his conversation with the girl disturbed him. He was in a condition of mental unrest, undefined but acute; odds and ends of curious thought kicked about within him, challenging him to follow them down to unexplored depths. But he was paying no ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... fearful dangers. An atheist in their midst was like a scorpion in a flower-bed—no one could tell when and where he would sting. Rough misdemeanours among them had been many, there had once been a murder in the parish, but the undefined horrors of infidelity were more shameful than ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wrongs, remained moody and sulky. At any other time such rare amusement would have overjoyed me; but the wonders of the great theatre that from other boys I had heard so much of, that from gaudy-coloured posters I had built up for myself, were floating vague and undefined before me in the air; and neither the open-mouthed sleeper, swallowing his endless chain of rats; nor even the live rabbit found in the stout old gentleman's hat—the last sort of person in whose hat one would have expected to find such a thing—could draw away my mind from the joy I ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... knows what has happened; they both feel changed with an undefined sorrow, with a regret that pride will not enunciate. She is now again in India with her husband. There are duties, courtesies, nay, kindnesses which both will perform, but the ghost of love and sympathy will only rise in their hearts to jibber in mockery words and phrases that ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... was hemmed in by feelings which were blissful and undefined: she knew only that the world smelt sweeter than it had ever done, that the stars shone with amazing brightness. Through the darkness she could see the splendid curves of the moor and the shapes of thorn bushes thick with leaves. The familiar friends of other days seemed to wait upon her happiness, ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... unpremeditated reply relieved Zashue of an undefined feeling of suspicion that had arisen within him. During his moment of thoughtfulness he had been led from the accusations of Hayoue against Tyope unconsciously to the accusation which Tyope had launched before against Shotaye and his own wife. Quick as lightning it flashed upon his mind that that ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... quick snuffles. All in him was conquered save the enigmatical childish ideal of form, manner. This principle still held out, and it was the only thing between him and submission. When he surrendered, he must surrender in a way that deferred to the undefined code. He longed simply to go to the kitchen and stumble in, but his unfathomable ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... B. Grampus had engaged in no further communication with Simpson. He thought it best to avoid all relations with the young man who could jest on serious occasions; and yet underlying his upper strata of thought was a dim and undefined impression that he would hear from that young ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... him—but with this terrible irritation, his muscular power, before debilitated, seemed to revive, and his action, which was drooping and languid, became quick and angular. I began to be seized with an undefined sense of fear and alarm. In vain I combated it; it grew upon me; and I had almost risen from my seat to try to make myself heard, and obtain, if possible, assistance. The loneliness of the gaol, however, rendered ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... was so ineffably dear to him. He did not exactly fear that Komel's parents would sell her to go to Constantinople, though they were now, since war and pestilence had swept away lands, home and title, poor enough; and yet there was an undefined fear ever acting in his heart as to her he loved. Sometimes when he realized this most keenly, he could not help whispering ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... while it died away. There was nothing to talk about. The prisoners, without memory of the past, had nothing upon which to base a speculation of the future. Personalities could not be exchanged, for those personalities were newly emerged and still undefined. ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... then, that the "cosmical current" which bears the solar system towards its unknown goal carries also with it nebulous masses of undefined extent, and at an undefined remoteness, fragments detached from which, continually entering the sphere of the sun's attraction, flit across our skies under the form of comets. These are, however, almost certainly so far strangers to our system that they had no ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... sculptors, great actors and great singers without end, had sat at her table and she was always interested in their talk and often attracted by their personalities; yet in her heart she knew that she connected them all vaguely with undefined wickedness, just as she associated the idea of virtuous uprightness with all American and English business men. Next to a clergyman, she unconsciously looked upon an American banker as the most strictly moral type of man; and though her hair was grey and ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... in the open space, whence rose fitful clouds of smoke, the remnants of the fire, which had there done its worst; and beyond was a smoky undefined outline, with tongues of flame darting up, then volumes of dense white smoke, denoting a rush of water from the engines. Black beings flitted about like ants round a disturbed nest; Rosamond hoped she detected ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she had felt no fear of Lord Lufton, had always carried herself before him on equal terms, and had been signally capable of doing so when he made his declaration to her at the parsonage; but now she looked forward with an undefined dread to the first moment in which she should see him. And then she thought of a certain evening she had passed at Framley Court, and acknowledged to herself that there was some pleasure in looking back to that. Griselda Grantly had been there, and all the constitutional powers of the two families ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... Undefined and vague, all this was still somewhere in the background of her thoughts as she returned to Crownlands, and when she met Ward Carter, wrestling with the engine of his own rather disreputable racing car, out in ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... reached the marsh. But the sun did not delay. The moon, which had been bright when he went out, by now shone only like a crescent of quicksilver. The pink flush of dawn, which one could not help seeing before, now had to be sought to be discerned at all. What were before undefined, vague blurs in the distant countryside could now be distinctly seen. They were sheaves of rye. The dew, not visible till the sun was up, wetted Levin's legs and his blouse above his belt in the high growing, fragrant hemp patch, from which the pollen had already ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... night was the decision to carry the story to Torrance and leave the rest in his hands. That plan, too, fitted in with certain undefined ambitions of his own. He did not want the Police to know far enough ahead to nip the whole affair in the bud. Blue Pete loved a scrap; he had also certain definite debts to pay to Koppy, and the thought of a lot of bohunks within range of a licensed rifle made him smile happily. An inborn decency ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... boy, and it was an undefined horror, and he never breathed a word of it; but oh, there was a weight on that young brow, an anxious look about the face, and though now and then he would be all joy and fun, still there was the older, more sorrowful ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ghostly sediment of shine around them. The night was warm. Glow-worms lay here and there, brooding out green light in the bosom of the thick soft grass. There was no wind save what the swift wing of a bat, sweeping close to their heads, would now and then awake. The creature came and vanished like an undefined sense of evil at hand. But it was only Richard who thought that; nothing such crossed the starry clearness of Barbara's soul. Her skirt made a buttony noise with the heads of the rib-grass. Her red cloak was dark in the moonlight. She threw back the hood, and coming ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... undeniable relief and welcome in her eyes, and it gave him a peculiar thrill, a thrill at first of absolute and unthinking joy, followed at once by a little catch. Before him rose the square and massive vision of "King" Plummer, and he had an undefined sense ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... former secretary, a Roman Catholic, to join the new society, but he made it clear that Orange, a man of real distinction, was in no sense a prominent member. The precise dogmata of Mirafloreanism—a nickname given, I believe, in ironic sympathy by Mr. Disraeli—were undefined, but the term gradually became associated with those ideals of conduct, government, and Art which poets imagine, heroes realise, and the ignorant destroy. Men of all, sundry, and opposing beliefs presumed to its credentials. Some, because the club appeared to flourish, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the main-mast, he stood awhile thinking over the scene, and not without some undefined misgivings, when he heard a noise near the cuddy, and turning, saw the negro, his hand to his cheek. Advancing, Captain Delano perceived that the cheek was bleeding. He was about to ask the cause, when the negro's wailing soliloquy ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... keenly, forcing kind-hearted Mr. Edmonstone into a persecution so foreign to his nature. The agony of suffering such an accusation, and from such a quarter,—the violent storm of indignation and pride,—wild, undefined ideas of a heavy reckoning,—above all, the dreary thought of Amy denied to him for ever,—all these swept over him, and swayed him by turns, with the dreadful intensity belonging to a nature formed for violent passions, which had broken down, in the ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... easy, and very peaceful. He could hardly have thought of anything at all likely to happen which could darken the future, or even give him reasonable cause for anxiety. There was no imaginative sadness in his nature, no morbid dread of undefined evil, no melancholy to dye the days black; for melancholy is more often an affliction of the very strong in body or mind than of the weak, or of average men and women. Marcello was delicate, but not degenerate; he seemed gentle, cheerful, and ready to believe the world a very good place, ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... Hugo Canning, her own career of brilliant aspiration had reached its final goal. Even papa's future seemed to be affected to its roots. Already he spoke with satisfaction of taking a smaller house next year; ultimately of "retiring" to an undefined "little place in the country," toward which in recent years his ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to increase their fleets and to perfect their armaments at immense cost, the European powers are striving at aims undefined and unattainable. But the financial and social difficulties which yearly increase may result in such dangers that governments must be compelled after immense sacrifices to do what it would be wiser to do to-day—namely, to abandon a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... about it. But Gorman's bribes were offered in vain. A curious fear possessed the islanders; the same fear which laid hold of the souls of simple people all over Europe at that time. They were afraid of some vast evil, undefined, unrealized, and their terror kept them close to the shadows of their homes. The most that Gorman could persuade them to do was to take him a few miles out to sea in one of their boats. There he used to stay for an hour or so, for so long as the men ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... is something implied or understood when we look upon a beautiful object, that has quite as much to do with the impression made upon the mind as anything in the object itself; perhaps more. There is somehow an immense and undefined background of vast and unconscionable energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean storms, and cleft mountains, across which things of beauty play, and to which they constantly defer; and when this background is wanting, as it is in much current poetry, beauty sickens and dies, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... have!" cried Jane; and both ladies rushed into the kitchen, gave simultaneous and hurried orders to the servant-girl, and sent her out of the house impressed with an undefined feeling that life or death depended on the instant procuring of ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... had felt himself to be provoked. When next he went to Bolton Street he found that Lady Ongar had left London. She had gone down to Ongar Park, and, as far as the woman at the house knew, intended to remain there till after Easter. Harry had some undefined idea that she should not have taken such a step without telling him. Had she not declared to him that he was her only friend? When a friend is going out of town, leaving an only friend behind, that friend ought to tell her only friend what she is going to do, otherwise such a declaration ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... not appear to be any good and valid reason why a Constitution should not be as clearly defined as an Act of Parliament. Undefined Constitutions have worked well at certain periods when there was a tacit general consent as to their meaning, but they have not always been able to withstand the strain of fierce controversy and the coming ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... hiding the real impulse of flight. So with the strong-flowing current in the streets of a great city; for how else shall we interpret this intricate net-work of human feature and movement,—this flux of life toward some troubled centre, and then its reflux toward some uncertain and undefined circumference? ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Captain Twinely, Lord Dun-severic's grave face, and his summons to Neal had filled Una's mind with an undefined dread of some threatening evil. She was nearly as anxious as her aunt to know what was to happen. The prospect of a scamper across country through the rain daunted her very little. She had no doubt of her ability to keep in touch with the horsemen without being discovered. They would keep to the ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... seemed to be the matter with Fitz Burnett, for how long he could not tell. But a change came at last, with the gnawing, grinding pain becoming dull. Later on it did not seem that his head was detached from his body, and he had some undefined idea that his hands were where he could move them, and at last, later on still, he found himself lying in comparative calmness and in no pain, but in a state something between sleeping ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... pattern, who find the ultimate significance in life in individuality, novelty and the undefined, would not only regard the poietic element as the most important in human society, but would perceive quite clearly the impossibility of its organisation. This, indeed, is simply the application to the moral and intellectual fabric of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... not to have met with a very favorable reception. Yet, in 1712, the King of France granted to Anthony Crozat the exclusive privilege for fifteen years of trading in all that immense territory which, with its undefined limits, France claimed as Louisiana. Among other privileges granted Crozat were those of sending, once a year, a ship to Africa for Negroes.[6] When the first came, is not known, but in 1713 twenty of these Negro slaves from Africa are recorded ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... not only professors and pupils, scholars grown old in meditation and young folks eager for truth, liberty, action, and renown, who welcomed passionately those boundless and undefined hopes, those yearnings towards a brilliant and at the same time a vague future, at which they looked forward, according to the expression used by Lefevre of Etaples to Farel, to a "renewal of the world." Men holding a social position very different from that of the philosophers, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a vague movement but an impetuous one. If the girl had realized the fact of his love for her, she might have been touched and influenced by it, but as it is she feels only a sense of anger towards him. Anger unplaced, undefined, yet ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Sea of the South. There is little doubt that both Portuguese and Spanish had touched on the western coast early in the sixteenth century, but gave no information about it beyond sketching certain rough and undefined patches of land and calling it Terra Australis in their early maps; no one seems to have thought this mysterious land of much importance. The maritime nations of that period carefully concealed their knowledge from one another. The proud Spaniard hated his Portuguese ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... so many times at the portrait which was in the panel that at length he felt an undefined sensation of terror creep over him whenever he took his ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... includes the drainage of the Rio Pecos on the east and that of the Colorado on the west, and extends from central Utah on the north beyond the limits of the United States southward, in which direction its boundaries are still undefined. ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... fire-rimmed by the flickering torchlight. A sound came from afar—a sound not unmelodious but singular beyond power of language to express—a whisper of sinister significance to him who knew its meaning, of sheer mystery to all others. A murmur filled the air, a murmur of undefined noises still far distant. They might have been human, they might have arisen from the flight and terror of beasts, from the movement of vast bodies, from the reverberations of remote music; Earth ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... with perfect faith in the speaker and his statements, with a little undefined sort of regretfulness. So, then, Pitt need not have been lost to them, if only they could have been found! Just what that thought meant she had no time then to inquire. She hardly interrupted ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... we invariably find three principles: 1, rhythm; 2, the howl or descending scale of undefined intervals; and 3, the emotional raising of the voice. The rhythm, which characterizes the most primitive form of song or chant, consists of the incessant repetition of a very small group of rhythmic ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... grew denser and the path more obscure. All at once, rounding a sharp turn, the path ended in a valley carpeted with fern. This was the place that always filled Emmeline with an undefined dread. One side of it was all built up in terraces with huge blocks of stone—blocks of stone so enormous, that the wonder was how the ancient builders had put them in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... did so there was carried to her memory, and imprinted on it, the picture of a wistful and lonely man, his countenance touched, for all its open Irish smile, with some wordless sorrow, some pensive isolation of soul, lean and gaunt with some undefined hunger, a little furtive and covert ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... lo! — Infinity Came down and settled over me; And, pressing of the Undefined The definition on my mind, Held up before my eyes a glass Through which my shrinking sight did pass Until it seemed I must behold Immensity made manifold; Whispered to me a word whose sound Deafened the air for worlds around, And brought unmuffled to my ears The gossiping of friendly spheres, ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... our Lord Jesus Christ as the true God and the only Mediator between God and man; which teach doctrines or have usages or forms of worship condemned in God's Word and in the Confessions of His Church; which assume to themselves what God has given to His Church and its ministers; which require undefined obligations to be assumed by oath, are unchristian, and we solemnly warn our members and ministers against all fellowship with, or connivance at, associations which have this character. 3. All connection with infidel and immoral associations we consider as requiring the exercise of prompt and ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... the name passed his lips than the stranger drew back suddenly, with a hasty exclamation. Some suspicion seemed to engender a mixture of terror and defiance which placed him on his guard against undue intimacy, even when some undefined fear was knocking at his heart. "Who are you?" he demanded in a steadier tone. "How ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... and his own position, while Jaspar lit another cigar. Each was striving to penetrate the thoughts of the other, but neither had the boldness to enter upon the subject which occupied his mind. The lawyer wanted the lady and the fortune, and he had an undefined purpose of obtaining them through the agency of Jaspar, who wanted only the fortune, and had a decided anticipation of being able to retain the attorney in his service. Neither knew the purposes of the other; but each wanted the assistance ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... outlined in the transparent darkness with myriads of little colored lights, and the extravagantly dented profile of the mountains is delineated on the starlit sky, blue upon blue, transparency upon transparency. A corner of the harbor also is visible, far up, undefined, like a lake lost in clouds the water, faintly illumined by a ray of moonlight, making it shine like ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... connected with Camilla, soft and gentle-thrilled through his heart. Occupied as her own thoughts and feelings necessarily were with Sidney, there was something in Vaudemont's appearance—his manner, his voice— which forced upon Camilla a strange and undefined interest; and even Mrs. Beaufort was roused from her customary apathy, as she glanced at that dark and commanding face with something between admiration and fear. Vaudemont had scarcely, however, spoken ten words, when some other guests were announced, and Lord Lilburne ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... should all like to have a day fixed,' said Lady Pomona. Then there was a pause. Even Georgiana, in her present state of mind, would have accepted some distant, even some undefined time, as a compromise. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Mariana had pictured Solomin to herself as quite different. At first sight he had struck her as undefined, characterless. She had seen many such fair, lean, sinewy men in her day, but the more she watched him, the longer she listened to him, the stronger grew her feeling of confidence in him—for it was confidence he inspired her with. This calm, not exactly ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... who make it necessary. Had the victors at Copenhagen fought a desperate fight, and were they neglected? If so, and the outside world looked indifferently on, who from among them should first come forth to defend their glory from implication of some undefined stain, if not their Commander-in-Chief, one whose great renown could well spare the additional ray of lustre which he demanded for them. Whether underneath lay some spot of self-seeking, of the secondary motive from which so few of us are free, matters little or nothing. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... accused the revenge of Severus, for depriving the Roman people of the strongest bulwark against the barbarians of Pontus and Asia [55] The truth of this observation was but too well justified in the succeeding age, when the Gothic fleets covered the Euxine, and passed through the undefined Bosphorus into the centre of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... gate with him when he took his departure, having refused tea from a certain undefined feeling that he could not even sit in the same room as the man whom he intended to do out of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... I drew near, and put the lamp through the opening, showing a few stone steps; perhaps there were a dozen of them; at least, they went down into undefined darkness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... scarcely recognizable as the high-colored, powerful woman for whom he had helped build the shanty in March. There were times now when it seemed as if she were appealing to him, and his heart ached with undefined sorrow as he looked about ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... of his experience, and true moreover to the laws of mind, he refers them, collectively, to a mental source, to a vague individuality. This loose, undefined conception of an unknown volition or power forms the earliest notion of Deity. It is hardly associated with personality, yet it is broadly separated from the human and the known. In the languages of savage tribes, as I have elsewhere remarked, "a word ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... afternoon the boatbuilder's heart was, somehow, heavy with undefined dread as to what he ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... he is so handsome." "Oh Jeanette what's to hinder you from being so happy?" "But where is Mr. Romaine? we have missed him for some time." "I don't know, let me seek my husband." "Isn't that a mouthful?" said Jeanette laughingly disengaging herself from the merry group, as an undefined sense of apprehension swept over her. Was it a presentiment of coming danger? An unspoken prophecy to be verified by bitter tears, and lonely fear that seemed for a moment to turn life's sweetness into bitterness and gall. In the midst of a noisy group, in the ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... yet with undefined misgivings. He had an arm about her firmly in an instant, and when they had caught step with the music he held her close to him. He was an excellent dancer. Sylvia was instantly transported away from the world of petty discretions into ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... were very tame, those hours. The widow still felt an undefined fear that she was wrong, and though her heart yearned to know that her daughter was happy in the sweet happiness of accepted love, yet she dreaded to be too confident. Not a word had been said about money matters; not a word of Aaron Dunn's relatives. So she did not leave ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... suppose I slept profoundly for about half an hour, when I was suddenly awakened by a jerk: the cars had stopped. I was not aware I had been sleeping, but I had an undefined sense that something was wrong. I hastily opened the window and heard the name Liancourt shouted. There was no such stopping-place between Paris and Creil, for I had studied up my route before starting. The truth flashed upon me, and impulsively I left my car, rushed to the conductor, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... saw a shape, ghostly and undefined, flit swiftly from the gloom of the boat-house, and next moment a convict was standing beside the Imp, gaunt and tall and wild-looking in the moonlight. His hideous clothes, stained with mud and the green slime of his hiding-places, hung upon him in tatters, ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... relations as to our human experience. But this species of assumption, on the largest scale, is more within the limits of credibility and plausible verisimilitude when applied to modes of existence, which, after all, are in such total darkness to us, (the limits of the possible being so undefined and shadowy as to what can or cannot exist,) than the very slightest liberties taken with human character, or with those principles of action, motives, and feelings, upon which men would move under given circumstances, or with the modes of action which in common prudence ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... looking down upon the pavement, in the purlieus of the courts at Westminster, and swear to himself that he would win the game, let the cost to his heart be what it might. What must a man be who would allow some undefined feeling,—some inward ache which he calls a passion and cannot analyse, some desire which has come of instinct and not of judgment,—to interfere with all the projects of his intellect, with all the work which he has laid out for his accomplishment? Circumstances ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... who had put him there. His state of mind was that of the stable-puppy who knows he MUST not be found in the parlour. Not thrice in his life had Verman been within the doors of White-Folks' House, and, above all things, he felt that it was in some undefined way vital to him to get out of White-Folks' House unobserved and unknown. It was in his very blood to be ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... comely features, and of adroitness of intellect, and endowed with all that the schools can do for one, and of high social position, yet moving in society with superciliousness and hauteur, as though she would have people know their place, and with an undefined combination of giggle and strut and rhodomontade, endowed with allopathic quantities of talk, but only homeopathic infinitesimals of sense, the terror of dry-goods clerks and railroad conductors, discoverers of significant meanings in plain conversation, prodigies of badinage and innuendo—I ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Assembly or Assemblee Nationale (expanded from 121 to approximately 140 seats under the transitional government inaugurated 1 November 2001; members are elected by popular vote to serve five-year terms) and a Senate (54 seats; term length is undefined, the current senators will likely serve out the three-year transition period) elections: last held 29 June 1993 (next was scheduled to be held in 1998, but was suspended by presidential decree in 1996; elections are planned to follow the completion of the three-year transitional government) ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... picnic, and now she seemed to be quite neglected, while every one else was gay and happy. She had not the courage to make her way through the visitors to reach Julia at the other end of the boat, for she had an undefined feeling that if she went she would not be welcomed there. Her thoughts flew back to the one spot of earth where she was always wanted and ever welcomed, and she heaved ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... inclined at that moment to ask Kate Vavasor to dance with him. He was possessed by an undefined idea that Kate had snubbed him, and as Kate's fortune was, as he said, literally nothing, he was not at all disposed to court her favour at the expense ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... great comfort up to now, but we both have an undefined idea that one of his periods of "rest" is approaching. He works with feverish haste, alternating with times of sitting and looking at the ground, that I fear bodes no good. He also seems to take a diabolic pleasure in tormenting Amos ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... considerations—the great inferiority of physical strength, a very much less and undefined degree of inferiority in intellect, and the salutary teachings of the Christian faith—it follows that, to a limited degree, varying with circumstances, and always to be marked out by sound reason and good feeling, the subordination of woman, as ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... sad pageantry of death, the weeping of friends, the dark rooms, the ghostly stillness, the exhortation to the living to prepare for death, the solemn prayer, the mournful chant, the funeral cortege, the solemn, tolling bell, the burial. How I suffered during those sad days! What strange undefined fears of the unknown took possession of me! For months afterward, at the twilight hour, I went with my father to the new-made grave. Near it stood two tall poplar trees, against one of which I leaned, while my father threw himself on the grave, with outstretched ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... do, still the promise ought not to be given, nor ought it to have been asked. The moment a man promises to do a thing he ceases to be as free as he was before he made the promise. It is essential principle that in the British Constitution that the Crown should be free—should be undefined in its prerogative. The exercise in that prerogative may be checked in various ways; but to bind it by promises is to infringe its constitutional liberty. If the Queen were to bind herself by promise, or declaration, that she would not appoint any person contrary to Sir Robert ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... blinding mists of his fog-breeding wrath he began to be aware of the shining of two heavenly lights, the eyes, namely, of the dumb boy fixed upon him. They jarred him a little in his onward course; they shook him as if with a doubt; the feeling undefined slowly grew to a notion, first obscure, then plain: they were eyes of reproof that were fastened upon his! At the first suspicion, his anger flared up more fierce than ever; but it was a flare of a doomed flame; slowly the rebuke told, was telling; the self-satisfied ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... vaguely. He could not tell the other what he felt; he could not have spoken, just then, to any mortal. Besides, Pendennis did not quite know what he felt yet; it was something overwhelming, maddening, delicious; a fever of wild joy and undefined longing. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Soeur Lucie went away, leaving Madelon, not to sleep, but to lie broad awake, framing the most dismal little pictures of the future. And was this to be the end of it all, then?—the end of her vague dreams, her undefined hopes, which, leaping over a dim space of intervening years, had rested on a future of indefinite brightness lying somewhere outside these convent walls? Ah, was all indeed at an end? Never to pass these dull walls again, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... word or two to the exultant, radiant child at the close. Something about her putting away some of the childish things, and taking up the gentler and nobler ways of first young girlhood now. She thought in an almost undefined way of mother's words as she held the fluttering thrushes to her lips and kissed their downy breasts. Then had come the unlooked-for interruption. Polly's life seemed cloudless, and all of a sudden there appeared a speck in the firmament—a little cloud which grew ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... clay, bound down by the immutable law which bids them wait their time, their great deep is but troubled, and while, from their swaying and surging, a delicious emotion spreads over the soul, filling the whole being with indescribable joy, it is an emotion which we cannot fathom, vague and undefined, at which we wonder even while we enjoy. To each and all of us the doors of heaven are closed for the present; we never have heard the songs of the celestial spheres, and how should we recognize their echo here on earth, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... seriousness; we see upon his face that dawning gravity in which the blossom of feeling already exists, but its plenitude and maturity are still to come. And in attentively examining our personage we are struck with his reflective and searching glance. We seem to have a glimpse in him of an undefined melancholy. This expression surprises us in this man, who ought to be happy at living and who lacks no ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Guinea.—On the Gold Coast, or Coast of Guinea, the Danes had long held certain positions or forts, named Christiansbergh, Augustabergh, Kongensteen, and Prindsensteen; connected with these was an undefined amount of territory. The Danish merchants, who at first derived some profit from these establishments, soon found that they could obtain from Great Britain more cheaply the various articles of that commerce, than by direct communication with the country itself. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... desire to satisfy the need I first indicated to you as the prime exciting cause of this passion. I tell you this is a hard and humiliating truth, but it is none the less certain. We women enter the world with this necessity of loving undefined, and if we take one man in preference to another, let us say so honestly, we yield less to the knowledge of merit than to a mechanical instinct which ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... for no pipe contend - This time a sheep I win, a pipe the next.' Now came she forward eager to engage, But first her dress, her bosom then surveyed, And heaved it, doubting if she could deceive. Her bosom seemed, enclosed in haze like heaven, To baffle touch, and rose forth undefined: Above her knees she drew the robe succinct, Above her breast, and just below her arms. 'This will preserve my breath when tightly bound, If struggle and equal strength should so constrain.' Thus, pulling hard to fasten it, she spake, And, rushing at me, closed: I thrilled throughout And seemed ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... beginning to rumble in the street, Vassilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into space. He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of missionary work. His whole attention was turned upon the spiritual agony which was torturing him. It was a dull, vague, undefined anguish akin to misery, to an extreme form of terror and to despair. He could point to the place where the pain was, in his breast under his heart; but he could not compare it with anything. In the past he had had acute toothache, he had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but all that was insignificant ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... energetic message from the President was read. On the one hand he denounced a vast and perilous combination of all the most dangerous elements of society which threatened to overwhelm France in the following year; on the other hand he demanded, with certain undefined safeguards, the re-establishment of universal suffrage. The middle classes were scared with the prospect of a Socialist revolution; the Assembly was divided against itself, and the democracy of Paris flattered ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the tram-men nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. After this the letters ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a reflection cast by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this monster face, far away in the rear, on the top of those undefined and gently undulating sandhills, three apocalyptic signs rise up against the sky, those rose-coloured triangles, regular as the figures of geometry, but so vast in the distance that they inspire you with fear. They seem to be luminous of themselves, so vividly do they stand out in their clear ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... existence, in addition to the Cosmos with which natural knowledge is conversant, of a world of spirits; that is to say, of intelligent agents, not subject to the physical or mental limitations of humanity, but nevertheless competent to interfere, to an undefined extent, with the ordinary course of both physical ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... begin the dissociation of pastoral from the conditions of actual life, and just as his shepherds cease to present the features and characters of the homely keepers of the flock, so his landscape becomes imaginary and undefined. This peculiarity has been noticed by Professor Herford in some very suggestive remarks prefixed to his edition of the Shepherd's Calender. 'The profiles of the Sicilian uplands,' he writes, 'waver uncertainly amid traits drawn from the Mantuan plain. In this confusion lay, perhaps, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... name, were a poor and hardy race of mountaineers. So were the men of Macedon; and neither one tribe nor the other found any adequate resistance in the luxurious occupants of Babylonia. We may add, with respect to these two earliest monarchies, that the Assyrian was undefined with regard to space, and the Persian fugitive with regard to time. But for the third—the Grecian or Macedonian—we know that the arts of civility, and of civil organization, had made great progress before the Roman strength was measured ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Committee express their unanimous opinion that the one important physical fact thus proved to exist, that motion may be produced in solid bodies without material contact, by some hitherto unrecognised force operating within an undefined distance from the human organism, and beyond the range of muscular action, should be subjected to further scientific examination, with a view to ascertaining its true ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett |
