"Unintelligible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them. It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena. It is apt to create a substance where at first there was a mere shadow. . . . If at any time there should seem to be an expression unintelligible from one soul to another, it is best not to strive to interpret it in earthly language, but wait for the soul to make itself understood; and, were we to wait a thousand years, we need deem it no more time than we can spare. . . . It is not that ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and trembling, stammered a few unintelligible words and intended to withdraw, withered and crushed by the emperor's anger. But the searching eyes of Napoleon were firmly and steadfastly fixed on him, and, as if guessing his innermost thoughts, he said, in a cold, disdainful voice, "Remain and do your duty!" The ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... can furnish an example of more unintelligible jargon; yet these attributes are believed to be indisputably true by the Malays and others residing at a distance from his immediate dominions, who possess a greater degree of faith than wit; and with this addition, that he ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... rather rambling and unintelligible, but he plainly pronounced the words 'Miss Nell,' three or four times—shaking his head while he did so, as if he would add that there was no ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... intelligible to people who, in spoken language, represent the idea by very different words. For example, there are several cases where a common set of ideograms appears to have been used as a means of communication between people whose spoken language was mutually unintelligible. The Chinese sign for "words" made thus ] is a typical ideogram. It represents a mouth ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... could understand Arabic, the order of the Emir would have been unintelligible to them had it not been for the conduct of Mansoor. The unfortunate dragoman, after all his treachery and all his subservience and apostasy, found his worst fears realised when the Dervish leader gave his curt ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... person whom they think perceptive and sympathetic; in some cases it proceeds, I think, from a hysterical desire to be thought interesting, with a faint hope, I fear, of being possibly put into a book. Some of the letters have been simply unintelligible and inconceivable on any hypothesis, except for the human instinct to confess, to bare the heart, to display the secret sorrow. Many of these letters are intensely pathetic, affecting, heart-rending; an invalid lady writes to say that she would like to know me, and will I come to ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... contumely have now taken the place of that. The plain fact is that no man sees the greatness of the present, unless he regards it as being the vestibule of the future, and that this present life is unintelligible and insignificant unless beyond it, and led up to by it, and shaped through it, there lies the eternal life beyond. The low flat plain is dreary and desolate, featureless and melancholy, when the sky above it is filled with clouds. But sweep away the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... cried the Steel King. "Here, Jack,"—this to the aged garcon, "smoke up! and ask the ladies what they'll have"—all of which was unintelligible to the two little Parisiennes and the garcon, but quite clear in meaning to ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... Carlyle's labours which will not meet so unanimous an approbation. As editor, Mr Carlyle has given us a valuable work; as commentator, the view which he would teach us to take of English Puritanism is, to our thinking, simply the most paradoxical, absurd, unintelligible, mad business we ever encountered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... system of the mental fabric is exceedingly obscure, and without more attention than will be willingly bestowed, is unintelligible. The Ideas of Beauty will be more easily understood, and are often charming. I was delighted with the different beauty of ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... different materials or variations to work on, in order to arrive at the same functional result; and the structures thus acquired would almost necessarily have differed. On the hypothesis of separate acts of creation the whole case remains unintelligible. This line of argument seems to have had great weight in leading Fritz Muller to accept the views maintained by me in ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... handwriting. Part was in Ashton's handwriting but this the counsel for the prosecution had not the means of proving. They therefore rested the case against Ashton on the indisputable facts that the treasonable packet had been found in his bosom, and that he had used language which was quite unintelligible except on the supposition that he had a guilty knowledge of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Lewis sat for a long time listening to chatter that was quite unintelligible. But he scarcely listened, for his eyes had robbed his brain of action. They roamed and feasted upon one bit of sculpture after another. Casts, discarded in corners, gleamed through layers of dust that could not hide their wondrous contour. Others hung upon the wall. Some were fragments. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... thought on awakening was for his chum. Charley was tossing restlessly on his blanket, his face and hands flushed and hot with fever. All of Walter's attempts to rouse him met only with unintelligible words and phrases. The exertion of the previous day in his weak state, the opening of his wound afresh, and the unhealthy river water he had drank, had all combined to bring him ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... part of her career that, since it had proved a failure, seemed least like herself and most difficult to justify. She had gone away with him, and had lived with him for two months: she, Undine Marvell, to whom respectability was the breath of life, to whom such follies had always been unintelligible and therefore inexcusable.—She had done this incredible thing, and she had done it from a motive that seemed, at the time, as clear, as logical, as free from the distorting mists of sentimentality, as any of her father's financial enterprises. It had been a bold move, but it ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... instead. That much is saved. Now we need not read them. If we feel ourselves weakening towards such idleness, let us spin tops. If we had to choose between Garvice and say Hegel or Locke for a niche in the Temple of Letters, we should make an unintelligible blunder if we did not elect Mr. Garvice without discussion. He is human, he is ingenuous and funny, and the philosophers are only loosening with the insinuations of moth and rust. The philosophers are like the great statesmen and the great soldiers—we should be happier without them. If we ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... threatened the short upper lip with obliteration. Straight from ear to ear, deep under his chin, was a zigzag scar made by a razor in his boyhood days, and under emotion the injured throat became convulsed at times, causing his words to be unintelligible. The red flannel shirt, patched with colors of lighter shades, lay open to the shoulders, ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... Fenwick rose. The day had grown cool. A fresh breeze was blowing from the north down the fell-side. He put his arm round Carrie as she stood beside him, kissed her, and in a gruff, unintelligible voice, murmured something that brought the tears again to her eyes. Then he announced that he was going for a short walk. Neither Phoebe nor Miss Anna were to be seen. Carrie protested on ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as from a trap-door opening in the roof, and a voice was heard to utter these words in Anglo-Saxon, "Leap, sirrah; come, no delay; leap, my good Sylvan, show your honour's activity." A strange chuckling hoarse voice, in a language totally unintelligible to Count Robert, was heard to respond, as if disputing the orders which ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Presently, from the direction of the lines of light in the shutters, came the sound of voices, Lem's deep and insistent, and another, pitched in a high nasal key, deprecatory and protesting. There was still another, a harsh one that growled something unintelligible, and Wetherell guessed, from the fragments which he heard, that the judge before sitting down to his duty was trying to dissuade the stage driver from a step that was foolhardy. He guessed likewise that Lem was not to be dissuaded. At length a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the polished floor, she took her place by her hostess's side. She had already been presented to the fashionable guests who sat around the ample table, and a good deal of the awe which she had felt in anticipation, had begun to ooze away. Although much was said that was unintelligible to her, she could see that this was not the result of intellectual deficiency on her part, but merely of an ignorance of the ground on which the conversation was founded. As Cornelia stole glances at the faces, pretty or pretentious, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... to be mutually unintelligible languages, but which have an undoubted relationship to each other, and to the numerous Mandingo dialects as well. It is this which induces me to place them in the same section with the more civilized Africans of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... should efface the remembrance of his defeat, and still prove to the world his military superiority. Nevertheless, he continued inactive in Bohemia, while the Emperor's losses in Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and the Rhine, pressingly called for his presence—a conduct equally unintelligible to friend and foe—the terror, and, at the same time, the last hope of the Emperor. After the defeat of Lutzen he had hastened into Bohemia, where he instituted the strictest inquiry into the conduct of his officers in that battle. Those ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... comer, after a few shuffles on the threshold, and an unintelligible murmur of words, walked in with painful awkwardness, and took a seat upon a corner of the chair which Pet offered him, as if the whole chair were more of a favor than he could conscientiously accept; ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... explain the tactical device it indicated robbed his country of a victory at an hour of the direst need. There had been no previous theoretical training to supply the omission, and Rodney's fine conception was unintelligible to ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... structure of the part should be retained, which is manifestly possible if not probable, then we should have the organs, on which morphology is founded and which instead of being metaphorical becomes plain and <and instead of being> utterly unintelligible becomes simple matter ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... made a low-voiced, unintelligible reply, and then they ran on for some distance in silence. Suddenly Ashton-Kirk signaled the driver and the car came to a stand; the investigator pointed to some buildings at no great distance; a locomotive with a few cars trailing behind it was panting laboriously away from these, its headlight ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at this point is unintelligible, if you suppose that the country enjoyed a regular government, and that the men had deliberately adopted a plan. In order to account for the circumstances, you must suppose that the central government was paralyzed, and that these men were as stupid as they ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... objects only to which they have been familiarized, find in learning this branch of science. There is scarcely any way of conveying the meaning of it to them. All the usual terms and definitions, and the means which are commonly employed in schools, are utterly unintelligible here. But the curious and novel devices which must be employed, have this advantage,—that they exercise their understanding, and help to form their judgment. Dictation was one of the methods to which I had recourse: without it they would have made ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... a start, and a low growling voice asked what was apparently a question as to what was the matter. The response came from the man who had struck the blow; but what he said was unintelligible to the listeners, who had immediately shrunk flat upon the deck, conscious as they were that two of the crew had been sleeping within touch, while for aught they knew ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... lately, I fear I have missed a letter or two of yours: I hope this will have better fortune; for, almost unintelligible, as it is, you will want even so awkward ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... lay a few miles further southward, and where not only fresh water was abundant, but also fish and wild ducks. These men were natives of Botany Bay, whence it was that we understood a little of their language, whilst that of some others was altogether unintelligible. Their river proved to be nothing more than a small stream, which descended from a lagoon under Hat Hill, and forced a passage for itself through the beach; so that we entered it with difficulty even in Tom Thumb. Our two conductors then quitted the boat to walk ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... procession, and heard, with unspeakable terror, that it was the solemnization of the funeral rites of a Venetian nobleman, who had been beheaded for high treason. "His name?" cried the breathless girl, in almost unintelligible accents: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various
... sleeping waiter. But to his great astonishment, two gigantic fellows were posted outside the door; who, upon his affirming that he must be allowed to enter his own room, seemed in some foreign and unintelligible language to support the negative of that proposition. Without further scruple or regard to their menacing gestures, he pressed forwards to the chamber door; but immediately after felt himself laid hold of by the two fellows—one at his legs, the other at ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the monster and the legends are compounded have been preserved in Egypt, and in perhaps a more primitive and less altered form than elsewhere. Hence, if Egypt does not provide dragons for us to dissect, it does supply us with the evidence without which the dragon's evolution would be quite unintelligible. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... islands of Goram, Matabello, Ke, and Aru, of several distinct species of Euploea and Diadema, having broad bands or patches of white, which do not exist in any of the allied species from the larger islands. These facts seem to indicate some local influence in modifying colour, as unintelligible and almost as remarkable as that which has resulted in the modifications ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... place a dead adult. I hope to make a picture of the whole quaint incident, for it was a corner crammed full of Imperial history in the light of what we already knew, and it would otherwise have been about as unintelligible as any group of animate or inanimate nature could possibly have been. As it is, it throws more light on the life history of this ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... talk well. Annie listened with polite attention for a short time—indeed Gregory was exerting himself more for her sake than for Mr. Walton's—and she was satisfied from her father's face that his guest was interesting him; but as the subject was mainly unintelligible to her she soon turned with real zest to Miss Eulie's fancy-work, and there was an earnest whispered discussion in regard to the right number of stitches. Walter noted this and sneeringly thought, with a masculine ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... to journey; and if dumb there would be an end to my calling." After simpering in a small way, like one whose modesty prohibited a more open expression of his admiration of a witticism that was perfectly unintelligible to his hearers, he continued, "It is not prudent for any one of my profession to be too familiar with those he has to instruct; for which reason I follow not the line of the army; besides which, I conclude that a gentleman of your character has the best judgment in matters of wayfaring; ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... prospects around me, still struck with new sense of pleasure; when I found by the voice of my friend, who walked by me, that we had insensibly strolled into the grove sacred to the widow. "This woman," says he, "is of all others the most unintelligible; she either designs to marry, or she does not. What is the most perplexing of all, is, that she doth not either say to her lovers she has any resolution against that condition of life in general, or that she banishes them; but, conscious of her own merit, she permits their addresses, without ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... far they found carvings and inscriptions, the latter of which were unintelligible to them, but they were very curious, judging from the few sketches which were made. But like many men of their class they began to quarrel over the treasure, and fought each other to ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... Grandcourt had returned to Diplow; knowing no more than she did that Leubronn had been the goal of her admirer's journeying, and feeling that it would be unkind uselessly to revive the memory of a brilliant prospect under the present reverses. In his secret soul he thought of his niece's unintelligible caprice with regret, but he vindicated her to himself by considering that Grandcourt had been the first to behave oddly, in suddenly walking away when there had the best opportunity for crowning his marked attentions. The rector's ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... you mean about your father: he is no martinet in society, even with his son. He assumes to himself no mysterious unintelligible dignity. He has none of the military Grimgruffenuff about him. He takes things easily, and allows other people ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... audaciously attired young girl; and near the lamp sat an old crone spinning and singing in a quavering voice. As the young man did not laugh constantly, fragments of the old woman's ditty reached the priest; it was something unintelligible yet frightful,— ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... it out in this form, and took it section by section. 'Pepys,' that was unintelligible. 'Buttered toast,' no sense in that. 'Suede gloves,' yes, she had told Frank that when she came to town, she would buy some suede gloves at a certain shop in the City, where she could get for three and threepence a pair which would cost her three and ninepence in Woking. Maude was so conscientiously ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... admit," said Lenorme when he had ended, "that you are no longer unintelligible, not to say incredible. You have had a splendid education, in which I hope you give the herring and Kelpie their ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... de force. You took it as you took a leap. It was spiritually acrobatic. You didn't understand but you believed. The less you understood the more credit your belief became to you. The more hidden and difficult and mysterious and unintelligible God made Himself the greater your merit in having faith in spite of everything. I am far from saying that this is the common understanding of Christians, or from holding others responsible for my misconceptions. I speak of these misconceptions only because ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... losing my consciousness, either of the uproar out of doors, or of the place in which I was. Both became overshadowed by a new and indefinable horror; and when I awoke—or rather when I shook off the lethargy that bound me in my chair—my whole frame thrilled with objectless and unintelligible fear. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... in which Herbert Spencer reasoned these things out, and his high literary style, which made him unintelligible to all those whose minds were not of scientific bent, and his emphatic statement that what is, is right, and all the steps in man's development mean a mounting to better things, saved him from the severe treatment that greeted, say, Charles ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... all right. Don't you want Mrs. Snow to fix your piller? P'raps you'd lay a little easier, then. Now, Mrs. Snow, if you'll jest turn it while I lift him. So; that's better now, ain't it, shipmate, hey?" But the sick man muttered an unintelligible something, and relapsed once more into the half-doze, half-stupor that ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to me to be on the eve of a collapse. His lips moved, and he mumbled something, but the words were wholly unintelligible. ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... him stay and talk to me. I sat on the stairs and he folded himself up on the mat—I can't describe it any other way—and told me all about Japan, and California and Algeria and all the other queer places he has been to with Mr. Craven. He has such a quaint dramatic way of speaking and lapses into unintelligible Japanese just at the exciting moments—so tantalising! They seem to have been in some very—what do you say?—tight corners. We got quite sociable. I was so interested in listening to his description of the wonderful gardens they make in Japan that I never heard Mr. Craven come ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... at last deputed the whole matter to the de Courcy faction. And for this there was another reason, not hitherto mentioned. Mr Mortimer Gazebee was finding the money with which all the furniture was being bought. He, with an honest but almost unintelligible zeal for the de Courcy family, had tied up every shilling on which he could lay his hand as belonging to Crosbie, in the interest of Lady Alexandrina. He had gone to work for her, scraping here and arranging there, strapping the new husband down upon the grindstone of his matrimonial ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... first masters, when other rulers and another tongue were thrust upon him,—and this may have occurred three or four times! The result is a totally incoherent agglomeration of speech-forms—a baragouin fantastic and unintelligible beyond the power of anyone to imagine ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... eyebrows, looking at his young friend, who capered and danced round the fire in a manner that threw the cook's performances in that line quite into the shade, while he continued all the time to shout fragments of sentences that were quite unintelligible to anyone. It was evident that Harry was in a state of immense delight at something unknown save to himself, but which, in the course of a few minutes, was ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... rough-and-tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the mine! roared stout Rising—Tantarar-ra-ra! twanged the trumpet of Antony Van Corlear;—until all voice and sound became unintelligible,—grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of triumph mingling in one hideous clamor. The earth shook as if struck with a paralytic stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered at the sight; rocks burrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... the usual patter about spiritual and physical freedom, about faith and perfection, "the Deific principle as a rule of health," a jumble of things medical and things physical, things profane and things holy mingled in a strange and unintelligible jargon. By the time that the eager-eyed speaker had talked for an hour Ashe felt his mind to be in confusion, and he could not but feel that not a few of the hearers must be in a state of utter mental bewilderment if the address ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... is sometimes called the Mimamsa ( philosophical reflections). The aphorisms of which the Vedanta Sutras consist are in themselves almost as unintelligible as the Confucian "Book of Changes," the compiler having been only too successful in aiding the memory of the Hindu student by a system of multum ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... evidently taken leave of his senses. Would he bite her next? No: he only looked confused, and said (how very extraordinary!) that he would never do it again. Susan gave her message gravely. Here was an unintelligible man; she felt the necessity of being careful in her ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... a relief to come up into the sunshine where people of our own kind had walked, the Kings of Tara and their harpers, and St. Patrick and St. Malachy and Oliver Cromwell and William III. After the unintelligible symbols on the rocks, how familiar and homelike seemed the sculptures on the Celtic crosses. They were mostly about people, and people whom we had known from earliest childhood. There were Adam and Eve, and Cain slaying Abel, and the Magi. They were ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... had given him a taste of her tongue, nor would he have looked so upset about it. But you know the fellow's way; whenever it's important for him to make himself clear he loses what little power of speech he has, becomes worse than dumb-unintelligible. He sputtered inconsequent ejaculations ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... further informed that the Sibyl generally wrote her oracles on separate oak leaves, which were set in due order in her cave, but which the wind, as soon as the doors opened, scattered or jumbled together, so that most of her predictions proved unintelligible to those who visited her shrine. After a solemn invocation, Aeneas besought her not to baffle him by writing on oak leaves, and was favored by her apparition and the announcement that, after escaping sundry perils by land and sea and reddening the Tiber with ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... and amused myself in the best way I could. I helped Mademoiselle Madeleine in her poultry-yard and dairy, looked in on the old lady employed in her culinary affairs, walked over the farm with the old man, and chatted in my somewhat unintelligible French, with every one I met. Happening to go into my own room in the evening, I found the window open, and looking out, I saw that the height from the sill to the ground was not more than from twelve to ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... magical work and muttered some unintelligible words in a sepulchral voice, looked at the remaining millet-seeds, and watched the way in which the toad retired. Then after seven or eight minutes, she turned her white eyes on the cards and ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... are going to stay,' said the Judge, after we had waited some fifteen minutes. The conversation behind the arras, at first low and murmuring, was becoming animated. I distinctly heard the Parsee say, 'Who are the blaggards ye've brought here wid ye?' followed by an unintelligible reply. ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... ago, when it was being given in the Dresden theatre, I saw it performed four or five times and I remember noticing the wonderful attraction that it had for minds of a certain class (and no very limited class), while for others it was just such an unintelligible farrago of wearisome 'Zeug' as Dante's Paradiso and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... distinctness to the opposite roof. At this moment some words fell on my ear. The door of the dining hall had just been opened to let in the fresh air, and I heard the following conversation: "Do you recall having taken part in the murder of Ulmet Elias on the twentieth of this month?" Some unintelligible words followed. "Close the door, Madoc!" said the bailiff; "the woman is ill." I heard no more. As I stood with my head resting against the balusters, a sudden resolution seized me. "I can save my comrades!" I exclaimed; "God has pointed out ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... was to quit the field she had so rashly ventured upon. Her answer to Mr. Stoutenburgh, if made, was too unintelligible to be understood or remembered; and meanwhile she was as the Squire had hinted, looking very well, and a picture of dainty confusion. It might not help the confusion, though it did put her face more out of sight, to ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... thought into "blind furies slinging flame." Unless immortality be true, man appears a dark riddle, not made for that of which he is made capable and desirous: every thing is begun, nothing ended; the facts of the present scene are unintelligible; the plainest analogies are violated; the delicately rising scale of existence is broken off abrupt; our best reasonings concerning the character and designs of God, also concerning the implications of our own being and experience, are futile; and the soul's proud faculties tell glorious ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... men are generally so easily impressed by external objects, but I must confess that when I trudged along the streets with my knapsack on my back, looking around in every direction for a gasthaus; when I spoke to people in my peculiar style of French and German, and received unintelligible answers in Russian; when I got lost among palaces and grand military establishments, instead of finding the gasthaus, and finally attracted the attention of the surly-looking guards, who were stationed about every where, by the anxious pertinacity with ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... few—five or six, perhaps, of the twenty—would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing the poet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by, the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grossly unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... was rather proud of this instance of juvenile indiscretion. When therefore he entered the room, and perceived, instead of the lady. Mr Sullivan raised up to his utmost height, and looking any thing but good humoured, he naturally started back, and stammered out something which was unintelligible. His behaviour did not allay the suspicions of Mr Sullivan, who requested, in a haughty tone, to be informed of the reason why he had been honoured with a visit. The colonel became more confused, and totally losing his ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Probably owing to careless abridgement by Purchas, this passage is quite unintelligible. The meaning seems to be, That the ship in which was the English messenger, having a cargo worth 100,000l. sterling, and 700 persons aboard, bound on the pilgrimage to Mecca, was taken and carried ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... related all that she knew regarding the fugitives, stammering very much from sheer anxiety to get it all out as fast as she could, and delaying her communication very much in consequence,—besides rendering her meaning rather obscure—sometimes unintelligible. Indeed, the worthy seaman could scarcely understand a word she said. He sat staring at the whites of her eyes, which, with her teeth, were the only visible parts of her countenance at that moment, and swayed his body to and fro, ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... attention and interest excited by the attractive powers of others is so much homage subtracted from her own. That beautiful aphorism, "The human heart is like heaven—the more angels the more room for them," is to such persons as unintelligible in its loving spirit as in its wonderful philosophic truth. Their craving is insatiable, once it has become habitual, and their appetite is increased and stimulated, instead of being appeased, by the ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... Preserved, but his Obsolete Language and Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered in Heroic Numbers by a Person of Quality." The preface praises Spenser, but declares that "his style seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obsoletest of our English or Saxon dialect." One instance of this deliverance into heroic numbers ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... He gave a sudden cry. Yes, there it was—a hasty memorandum; part of the writing was unintelligible to him, but the main word stood ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly recognized his pupil. Whether or not she ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... old, the baby swam like a frog in the clear water of the river, gurgling at intervals scraps of what must have been Marquesan baby-talk, unintelligible to me, but showing plainly her enjoyment. Something of European caution, however, still remained with me and, perhaps unnecessarily, I picked up the dripping little body and carried her up the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... soul of man is an independent substance, and entirely unintelligible as a mere higher stage of development ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... of the tunnel the plate-layer, the foreman and the navvies all followed with their eyes the unintelligible conversation passing between the gendarme and the tramp a hundred yards away. Suddenly they saw the man try to get off and the sergeant seize him almost simultaneously. A few minutes later the individual, with his hands linked together in front of him, was obediently descending the steep ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... blue-tinted envelopes, held together by two rubber bands, and written on, here and there, in a language which the intruder assumed to be Russian. Next came a japanned-tin box, which proved to hold nothing but a file of quite unintelligible, Seidlitz-powder-colored papers, and then what seemed, to Durkin's exploring fingers, to be a few small morocco cases. The question flashed through his mind: What if, after all, the money he was looking for was not to be found! He ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... taken from vegetables, and others from minerals. Three kinds of talismans were usually distinguished 1st. the astronomical known by the signs or constellations of the heavens engraven upon them, with other figures, and some unintelligible characters; 2nd. the magical, bearing very extraordinary figures, with superstitious words and names of angels unheard of; 3rd. the mixt talismans, which consist of signs and barbarous words; but without any superstitious ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... when someone grasped her from behind. She felt the hands as the coils of a snake. Then she was ready to faint, but she must not faint. She struggled away, stood free. It was the man Bill who had caught her. He said something that was unintelligible. She reached for the snag of a dead cedar and, leaning there, fought her weakness, that cold black horror which seemed a physical thing in her mind, her ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... and marriage, she was too apt to bring in her husband. I received him cordially enough two or three times, particularly when he came with 'the good news from Ghent.' But on other occasions his conversation was so far from agreeable, so unintelligible, or, 'not to put too fine a point upon it,' unedifying, that at last my porter was obliged to hand him out for immediate chastisement.[5] He never came again. I do not quite see why not; for, if others are willing to take pains for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... came answering shouts, but with an interrogatory note in them. The assistants were willing, but puzzled. They did not like to leave their posts without specific instructions, and Buck, shouting as he clattered over the bare boards, was unintelligible. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... Marion murmurs some unintelligible excuse and follows her sister—leaving the unfortunate Tommy a prey to his grandmother's tender mercies. So brilliant an opportunity is not, of course, to be thrown away. Tommy's fingers, having incontinently strayed in the direction of the sugar-basin, are summarily ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... components and the properties of the resultant, but neither was there in the case of the water. It is also true that what I have spoken of as the influence of pre-existing living matter is something quite unintelligible; but does anybody quite comprehend the modus operandi [106] of an electric spark, which traverses a mixture of ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of these." All things seem to acquire fresh sweetness, and to be clothed with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss. "In them the burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened." They stood awhile perfect, but they afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight—their ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... laws of nature. At the utmost they do but exemplify the aphorism, "Knowledge is power."[343] Such as are within the range of human knowledge are no miracles. Those of them, on the contrary, which are beyond it, will be found on inspection to be unintelligible, and to convey no evidence. The prediction of an earthquake (for instance) is not necessarily superhuman. An interpretation of the discourse of birds can never be verified. In understanding languages, knowing future events, discovering the purposes of others, recognising ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... catacombs of Rome, are very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations, and as illustrations of faith; but they present no intrinsic beauty or worth. They are not only clumsy and childish designs ill executed, but they are rendered unintelligible to all save the initiated in such hieroglyphics, by offering an elaborate ground-work of type, antitype, and symbol, on which the artist probably spent a large part of his strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents, vines, fishes, dolphins, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... unnaturally angry, and an angry man in his passion is apt to lose both his head and his memory. Forgetting the manner in which he had shortly before acknowledged the services and talent of the artist, he now attacked him and his abilities with a malice which would be unintelligible if we had not seen something of his nature and disposition. In his favourite "Notices to Correspondents" in the number of 13th September, 1834, he professes to account for the employment of Isaac Robert Cruikshank after the following disingenuous fashion: "Mr. Seymour, our ex-artist, is much ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... by all but Mrs. Hunter. And Aurelia could not like her, for her gossip had been far broader and coarser than that of the Mistresses Treforth, who, though more bitter were more of gentlewomen. Happily much of what passed was perfectly unintelligible to Betty's carefully shielded pupil, who sat all the time with the cat on her lap, listening to its purring music, but feeling much more inclined to believe nothing against my Lady, after her father's example, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... answered the man in an almost unintelligible jargon, a horrible medley of French, Spanish, and English. "I heard you tell the little ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... to the organism which presents it. On the contrary, it is a general rule that "the less any part of the organization is concerned with special habits, the more important it becomes for classification." Now, from the point of view of special creation it is unintelligible why unity of ideal should be most manifested by least important structures, whereas from the point of view of evolution it is to be expected that these life-serving structures should have been most liable to divergent modification in divergent lines of descent, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... engaged his fancy that he entered and began a sentence in excellent English. The shopman replied by shaking his head and uttering a few unintelligible words. ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... refused to believe that, and said that with a stupid woman Charles would just rot away in a studio and grow more and more unintelligible. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... upon Milburgh's willingness to confess his guilt. If the manager agreed to stand sponsor to this lie, he admitted his own peculations, and Tarling, to whom the turn of the conversation had at first been unintelligible, began dimly to see ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... my belief never will. I wish you had been more critical, and had pointed out the faults and defects of the book, of which there are no doubt some, if not many, to be found. I flatter myself that I have made more clear some passages utterly unintelligible in our A.V., such as, "He shall deliver the island of the innocent, yea," etc., chap. xxii. 30, and chap, xxxvi. 33, and the whole of chap. xxiv. and chap. xx. What a fierce, cruel, hot-headed Arab Zophar is! How the wretch gloats over Job's miseries. Yet one admires his word-painting ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... often highly important to understand the fundamental beliefs of a writer. His works may be in a measure unintelligible till his standpoint is fully understood. Sometimes his various writings are only an expansion and application of one or two great fundamental principles. The works of Herbert Spencer, for example, are in the main an elaboration of the theory of evolution. Byron represented ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... slang had ever before passed the lips of the judge: for slang might indeed be unintelligible to a judge who knew not what a race-course was, and would ask in court, "What is the 'Stock ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Many Passages in the Scriptures Would Be Unintelligible Except on the Ground of a Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ from ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... faculties to comprehend this, the greatest of them all. Had not science gradually discovered the chemical processes by which gases could be concentrated and disengaged, the formation of one of those glittering orbs above his head would have been quite as unintelligible a mystery to him, as the incarnation of the Saviour. The fact was, that phenomena that were just as mysterious to the human mind as any that the dogmas of Christianity required to be believed, exist hourly before our eyes without awakening skepticism, or exciting discussion; ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... absorbed in the information he had received—and so confident that the English, in which it had been told, would be unintelligible to anyone who might overhear it—that he paid no attention to the boys who—one of them limping badly—went slowly down the street; stopping, occasionally, to look in at the shop windows. It was not until they were fairly outside the town, and ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... reasoning or other, she had cajoled herself into the notion, that whoever steered the brigantine, for that period was captain. Wherefore, she gave herself mighty airs at the tiller; with extravagant gestures issuing unintelligible orders about trimming the sails, or pitching overboard something to see how fast we were going. All this much diverted my Viking, who several times was delivered of a laugh; a loud and healthy one to boot: a phenomenon worthy ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... and slipped it into her pocket. There were just a few words in the telegram that would have been unintelligible to the ordinary understanding. The girl did not even comprehend, but Littimer's eyes were upon her, and the cipher had to keep for a time. Littimer walked away at an intimation that his steward desired to ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... bad mind-reader you are!" fairly shouted the outraged wife. Sadie added something unintelligible, it was so rapidly uttered and so venomously hissed. Even Mrs. Schmidt displayed every ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... sane men take care to exchange a certain consideration and courtesy. But even as late as the time of Dickens's first visit to the United States, we English still felt America as a colony; an insolent, offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony; a part of our civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I have said, under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as a mother country. This being the case it was possible for us to quarrel, like kinsmen. Now ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... herself that she was anxious, but for us; for when she observed that she had attracted our attention she smiled and turned to go back the way she had come, beckoning us with hand and eye to follow her, and still singing her sweet but unintelligible words. Perhaps I flattered myself, but I thought she was looking at me more than at my companion, and I began with great eagerness to unfasten the door of ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... deserves more attention than it appears to have received. Not only will the faithful reader find in it the necessary corrections of the version of 1611, but clear guidance as to the meaning of the sometimes utterly unintelligible renderings of the version of the Great Bible which still holds its place in our Prayer Books. To take two examples: let the reader look at the Authorised Version and Prayer Book Version of Psalm lxviii. 16, and of lxxxiv. 5, 6, and contrast ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... Menko, is it not?" demanded Andras; while the terrified General gasped out something unintelligible, his intoxication increasing every yard the carriage advanced ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... her picture. The guide, of course, followed her, and I could see by the vehemence of his shrugs and gesticulations that his temper had given way. I guessed that his English must have been almost unintelligible. The scene interested me and I stood still to see how it would end. The girl in the blue dress changed her intention and tried to photograph the excited interpreter while he gesticulated. I sympathized with ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men, like G. W. Curtis, and T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking into an odd volume of the Harbinger, will find in it some stimulating writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible talk about "Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now fallen silent. The most important literary result of this experiment at "plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and agriculture, was Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, which has for its background ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... usual, unintelligible to the humble unit, but the force is advancing slowly, the Yorkshire Light Infantry and Munster Fusiliers on either hand of us. Our section is in action now. We have just taken our waggon to the firing line and brought back the team. The corporal's horse stepped in a hole just ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... into the Loggie, which consist of a long gallery, or arcade or colonnade, the whole extent of which was once beautifully adorned by Raphael. These pictures are almost worn away, and so defaced as to be untraceable and unintelligible, along the side wall of the gallery; although traceries of Arabesque, and compartments where there seem to have been rich paintings, but now only an indistinguishable waste of dull color, are still to be seen. In the coved ceiling, however, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... often since given me of our early intercourse, one of his great diversions was to make me fold my little fat arms—not an easy performance for small muscles—and with a portentous frown, which puckered up my mouth even more than my eyebrows, receive from him certain awfully unintelligible passages from "Macbeth;" replying to them, with a lisp that must have greatly heightened the tragic effect of this terrible dialogue, "My handth are of oo tolor" (My hands are of your color). Years—how many!—after this first lesson in declamation, dear Charles Young was acting Macbeth ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... in quoting our Lord's saying respecting "anger," he quoted it very shortly, because to have quoted at length the gradations of punishment for being "angry without a cause," for "calling a brother Raca" and "fool," would have been almost unintelligible to those unacquainted ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... which, as much as Mr. Darwin, he recognises the base and foundation."—"Pall Mall Gazette," April 12th, 1871.) How the mistake which I have made in speaking of greatest happiness as the foundation of morals arose, is utterly unintelligible to me: any time during the last several years I should have laughed such an idea to scorn. Mr. Lecky never made a greater blunder, and your kindness has made you let me off too easily. (242/2. In the first edition of the "Descent of Man," I., ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Reserve is in northwestern Rhodesia, bordering the Congo Free State. The description of its local boundaries is quite unintelligible outside of Rhodesia. ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... tuyo that he had met a woman from the Rito de los Frijoles and had taken her to his home, or rather to that of his wife; that the woman was gesticulating in an unintelligible manner; and that all he could surmise was that there might be Queres approaching the Puye with hostile intentions. He said nothing about Cayamo and his relations toward Shotaye, for Cayamo had enjoined ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... even thought whether she was a Christian or not. She had not even once put her finger on her spiritual pulse, to gauge the evidences of her faith. A system of theology would have been unintelligible to her. She could not have defined one doctrine so as to have satisfied a sound divine. She had not even read the greater part of the Bible, but, in her bitter extremity, the Spirit of God, employing the inspired guide, had brought ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... ignorance of the mischief she was doing, and the other half from the mere desire of selfish gratification. The times and ways in which Lot and Abraham were walked into the conversation were incalculable,—and unintelligible except to the person who understood it only too well. On one occasion Mrs. Evelyn went on with a long rigmarole to Mr. Thorn about sea-breezes, with a face of most exquisite delight at his mystification and her own hidden fun; till Fleda was absolutely trembling. Fleda ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... collect himself to speak, some one shouted from outside, and one of his captors replied, but the Gaelic words were quite unintelligible to the prisoner, as was also the conversation which ensued between the two men before him, though it was apparent that one was urging the other to do something ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... logical notion, nor a collective unity, which is nothing but a company who are naturally many: but a true subsisting numerical unity of nature; and if the difficulty of explaining this, and his zeal to defend it, forced him upon some unintelligible niceties, to prove that the same numerical human nature too is but one in all men, it is hard to charge him with teaching, that there are three independent and co-ordinate Gods, because we think he has not proved that Peter, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... attempt to deduce a settled scheme of philosophy from these discourses among the mountains. I would urge only that as a guide to conduct Wordsworth's precepts are not in themselves either unintelligible or visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in the second. Asceticism, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... avoid the Texas treasury—and triumphant Populism take it for granted that 'twas on these curious disks that our "infant industry" cut its teeth. The "In God We Trust" inscription may be regarded as a barbaric hoodoo to prevent infantile bellyache or the evil eye, but the dollar mark will be entirely unintelligible to a people so many thousand years removed from the savage superstition of metallic money. Of course woman will have ruled the world so long that "tyrant man" will be regarded as a sun myth, and the Goddess of Liberty on our coins be mistaken for portraits of our female monarchs. Thus will ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... again after dinner, and with his finger between the leaves, at the last-read, unintelligible page, he went out to the bow, and crouched down there to renew the conflict of the morning. It was not long before Dunham followed. He stooped over to lay a hand ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... itself becomes defective, though the gap thus left open can hardly extend beyond a very few words. Without this supplement, incomplete as it is, it would have been impossible to give the full drift of one of the Romancer's best stories, which is equally unintelligible in both the French and Welsh texts in their ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... translate them. He says: "In the preceding chapters I have sketched the daily life of the Kai people. But I have not attempted to set forth the reasons for their conduct, which is often very peculiar and unintelligible. The explanation of that conduct lies in the animistic view which the Papuan takes of the world. It must be most emphatically affirmed that nobody can judge the native aright who has not gained an insight into what we may call his religious opinions. The native must be ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... muttering something unintelligible to Sara, and looked altogether quite queer and cross enough to be a denizen of this ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... know," he said doggedly. "She won't come back,—anyhow not till—" his utterance trailed off into an unintelligible murmur in his throat and he ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... great as is my horror of this parody of a government to which we have had to submit for nearly two months, I could not forbear a feeling of repulsion on reading the letter of Citizen Rossel. It is a capitally written letter, firm, concise, conclusive, differing entirely from the bombastic, unintelligible documents to which the Commune has accustomed us; and besides, it brings to light several details at which I rejoice, because it permits me to hope that the reign of our tyrants is nearly at an end. I am glad to hear that the Commune, if it possesses artillery, is short of artillerymen. It delights ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... comforted her who was weeping not with remorse for what had been, but that it had gone. No word consciousness stirred her grief. An unintelligible sorrow, it swelled in her heart and filled her with helplessness. Life had gone from her. She was mourning for it. Mourning for a murderess and a sinner who had gone, abandoned her and left her a naked, uninteresting Pauline Pollard again—a nobody surrounded by nobodies. And once it had been ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... oddly companioned, and my exit thence was equally so, though greatly in contrast. For a day or two I was storm-bound, and felt the depression natural in a remote solitude, wrapped in by rain and fog, with no society but an unintelligible mountaineer or two. At last it cleared and the revulsion was inspiring. I found myself in a little green vale hemmed in by magnificent heights whose rocky summits were covered with freshly-fallen snow. Close at hand ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... was quite unintelligible to the two men, who could scarcely have been more bewildered and alarmed if they had found themselves confronted by one of those "white things" that Bud had described to his wife; and when they heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the road, without being able to see who or ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... thought something, I understood, but the thoughts themselves were hopelessly unintelligible to me. You know the explanation?" asked Zezdon ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... assumes a written form, and it is the most marked of professional distortions, the most unintelligible to the illiterate, who think waveringly and who do not, happily for them, suffer the continual servitude to precision of word and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Spirits. They are intended to be taken by the reader for what they may be worth as contrivances of the fancy merely. Their doctrines are but tentative, and are advanced with little eye to a systematized philosophy warranted to lift "the burthen of the mystery" of this unintelligible world. The chief thing hoped for them is that they and their utterances may have dramatic plausibility enough to procure for them, in the words of Coleridge, "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... count, in so pathetic a tone that his companions both laughed. "As often as I look at my gray hair I would think of her." And the young count gazed into the distance, like one entranced, and his smiling lips whispered low, unintelligible words. ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... place. At Delphi there was a temple to Apollo built over a chasm in the mountain side from which came sulphurous fumes. A priestess took her seat on a tripod over this chasm, and the answers she gave to inquiries were supposed to be dictated by the god. These answers were almost always unintelligible, and even when interpreted by the priests were ambiguous and of little use. Nevertheless, the Greeks believed in oracles firmly, and never undertook any important work without first consulting one or more of them.] of Apollo whether he or his family had ignorantly offended any of the gods. Eagerly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... thou'll never need to know about it, only to spend money,' said the millionaire, purposely, as his son believed, talking in such broad Yorkshire as is not often heard nowadays, and so broad as to be unintelligible to the reader of this tale, for which reason it must be taken for granted, as perhaps his wife's cockney ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... our hero grew in the good graces of his school-fellows, he fell out of those of his masters, for lessons were brought only half-learned, and exercises only half-written, or blotted and scrawled so as to be nearly unintelligible; and after he had been a fortnight at school, he seemed much more likely to descend to a lower class than to mount a step in his own. Day after day saw Louis kept in the school-room during play-hours, to learn lessons which ought ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... the least matter how they had made up their minds, yet she felt obliged to behave in the way that was expected of her. She did not want to talk to this unpleasant-looking man, and what he told her about the crops and their marvellousness was half unintelligible to her and wholly a bore. Yet she did talk to him, and looked friendly, and affected to understand and be deeply interested in ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... same Magazine, there may be papers of practical and directly useful character, and of ready application to the arts and interests of life and society. A person wishing to possess these popular papers must therefore purchase with them a quantity of matter which to him would be unintelligible, and the value of which could only be appreciated by direct study, a task of no small import in these days of cheap literature. That the plan has succeeded, and that its intention has been fully recognised, is borne out by the testimony ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... muttered something unintelligible, and backed away. The others likewise seemed discouraged by the mischance to their leader, for they turned and followed his retreating ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman |
