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More "Undefined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idea of winter half the charm of Christmas would be gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western Christendom from an undefined season in the hot East to Europe at midwinter, the Nativity scenes have taken on a new pathos with the thought of the bitter cold to which the great Little One lay exposed in the rough stable, with the contrast between the cold and darkness of the night ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... grown softer than a child's. The same look of unutterable tenderness brooded on the mournful face of the phantom by his side; but its thin, shining hand was laid upon his head, and its countenance had undergone a change. The form was still undefined; but the features had become distinct. They were those of a young man, beautiful and wan, and marked with ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... it plain that, with Cally's establishment as Mrs. 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
... vol. i, 70]. March 4, Toombs urged that a special agent be sent and offered a resolution to that effect [Ibid., 105]. The day following, Congress passed the resolution [Ibid., 107]: but left the powers and duties of the special agent, or commissioner, undefined. Davis appointed Pike to the position and, after Congress had expressed its wishes regarding the mission in the act of May 21, 1861, had a copy of the act transmitted to him as his ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... thoroughly; yet something of the drift and air of them she did feel, and felt as unnecessary. There had been already in Faith's mind a doubtful look towards the last evening she had spent in Pattaquasset; a certain undefined consciousness that her action that night might have said or seemed to say—she knew not what. She could find no fault with it, to herself; there had been nothing that she could help; but yet this consciousness made her ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... encourages to the practice of virtue; it supports the unfortunate under the stroke of affliction; and consoles the believer in the hour of adversity. But what encouragement, what support, what consolation can be imparted to the mind from these undefined and undefinable shadows? No one, indeed, will deny that hope is sufficiently useful to the priests, who never fail to call in its assistance for the vindication of Providence, whenever any of the elect have occasion to complain of the unmerited hardship or the transient injustice of his ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... not be his place to go. Somewhere in the priory ruins was Percival Thorne, hiding his sorrow and himself: should he find him and persuade him to make the attempt? But Harry had an undefined feeling that Mrs. Middleton did not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... mother was the home; and Averil, though Leonard showed both love for and pride in her, had hitherto been a poor substitute, while as to Henry, there was something in each mention of him which gave Ethel an undefined dread of the future of the young household, and a doubt of the result of her father's kind ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... yet unutterable awe crept over him—a fearful but undefined sensation—a presentiment that something terrible was about to happen. He strove to shake it off, but could not—like an icy thrill it ran, slow and curdling, through his veins. A low rustling, as of silken drapery, struck upon his ear. He turned to know the cause, and leaned eagerly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... her as she left the shop. She had an instant of hesitation, of an almost panicky desire to go back and repair her folly, ere it was too late. Why had she taken her money with her that evening, if not with some deliberate though undefined purpose? But she was ashamed to face the saleswoman again, and her elation was not to be repressed—an elation optically presented by a huge electric sign on the farther side of the street that flashed through all the colours ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... practically, it was a kind of club. The guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly punished. A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired; but to a touch of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... while a strong personal sense of shame heightened his causticity, and he delighted to contemn that urbanity in which he had never shared, and which he knew not how to practise. His miserable subservience to these people was the real cause of his oppressed spirit calling out for some undefined freedom in society; and thus the real Rousseau, with all his disordered feelings, only appeared in his writings. The secrets of his heart were confided to ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... toward the bog, as far as she could see; but they did not appear. Again she listened—but in vain. At first she had felt angry, but now a different feeling overcame her, and she grew pale. With an undefined boding she looked toward the heathy boss of Lisnavoura, now darkening into the deepest purple against ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... 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 ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... without discovering an apparently arbitrary use of the termination. The usage as recorded by Webster has held its ground, and there is no variation between the first and latest editions, except that the alternative form Saviour is given in the latest as a concession to an undefined sense of sanctity which would lead to a separation of the word from its class. There is a foot-note in the edition of 1828, in which Washington's omission of u is cited as an argument in favor of ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... and credit in the utterances of latter-day journalism, coloring their opinions to suit the one, or to escape the criticism of the other. Under the pernicious doctrine of public policy and in fortifying that undefined and indefinable legal notion of police power, courts have wiped aside Constitutional limitations, and disregarded what the profession at least had learned to consider as almost fixed precedents of the law, but even with all these defects admitted, there remains the startling ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... suffered from a process resembling a sort of mystical parricide, such as is told of so many gods, and is true of so many great ideas. Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom. But the important point to seize about this reactionary scepticism is that as it ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... The right shoulder is slightly elevated, while the left hip is depressed and projects upward. If not corrected while in its earlier stages, it progresses very rapidly, and a second curvature is developed. The symptoms vary in different cases, and in the early stages are somewhat obscure and undefined, but generally the patient feels a sense of uneasiness, languor, stupor, and nervousness, loss of energy and ambition, general debility, poor appetite, gradually declining health, loss of strength and flesh, and, as the disease progresses, a slight ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... of it. And the trick of it is in the accent and intonation, and not so much in any peculiar form of words. They have a peculiar way of dropping their voices, too, which is sometimes disconcerting. But it is a clean wholesome language, undefined by the disgusting and childish obscenity which is too often a disgrace to other districts in England. It reminds me a little of the Scottish tongue, but rather more of the country speech in the northern parts of Yorkshire, but in some ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... considered as to plan, to understand what it was that not alone had given him his fame so early, but that in itself held the germ of the future that awaited him. Every point was a telling one, and the truthfulness of the whole unerring. The dreadful restlessness of the place, undefined yet unceasing, unsatisfying and terrible, was pictured throughout with De Foe's minute reality; while points of character were handled in that greater style which connects with the richest oddities of humor an insight into ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and then through a curtained door down some steps into a great studio-laboratory, provided (behind screens) with washing places, and full of mysteries, with cupboards and shelves and further rooms beyond and a smell of chloride of lime combined with alcoholic preservatives and undefined chemicals. After a tour round this domain in which David was only slightly interested—for lack of the right education and imagination—so far he—or—she had only the mind of a mathematician—Rossiter led him back into the library, drew out chairs, indicated ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... nothing more than a trifling quantity. But it must also be considered that the exact time, and even the exact personality,[36] of Sardanapalus in all his relations are not known. All are vast phantoms in the Assyrian empire; I do not say fictions, but undefined, unmeasured, immeasurable realities; far gone down into the mighty gulf of shadows, and for us irrecoverable. All that is known about the Assyrian empire is its termination under Sardanapalus. It was ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Any one who called himself a reformer was regarded with distrust and suspicion, as a concealed republican or rebel. It must not, however, be supposed that these loyalists were really tories in their political principles. Their notions on such subjects were generally crude and undefined, and living in a country where the whole construction of society and habits of feeling were decidedly republican, the term tory, when adopted by them, was certainly a misnomer. However, hated by, and hating ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... upon the white folks 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 sure ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... but on the opening morning, on the few first opening mornings, there is a promise about the thing which invigorates and encourages the early riser. He means to like it this year if he can. He has still some undefined notion that his period of pleasure will now come. He has not, as yet, accepted the adverse verdict which his own nature has given against him in this matter of hunting, and he gets into his early tub with acme glow of satisfaction. And afterwards it is nice ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... hour of her bare, wretched life,—a faith, faith in God, faith in her fellow-man, faith in herself. No human soul refused to answer its summons. Down in the dark alleys, in the very vilest of the black and white wretches that crowded sometimes about her cart, there was an undefined sense of pride in protecting this wretch whose portion of life was more meagre and low than theirs. Something in them struggled up to meet the trust in the pitiful eyes,—something which scorned to betray the trust,—some Christ-like power, smothered, dying, under the filth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... vague desire to render my position more comfortable, ending in a forlorn hope that intense and continued sitting might, by some undefined process of evaporation, cure the evil. This suggested a speculation, half pleasing and half painful, as to what would be my mother's feelings could she be aware of the state of things; the pleasure being the result ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... that he had gone, yet a feeling of undefined fear of what he might do in his present angry mood stole over her. She was well aware of his fierce and daring character, and she had heard from her granny of desperate deeds done by men whose addresses had been rejected by girls whom they ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... and the amount of work done, the length of time he spent upon the project, cannot be determined from his correspondence and must, as Behmer implies, be left in doubt. But several facts, which Behmer does not note, remarks of his own and of his contemporaries, point to more than an undefined general purpose on his part; it is not improbable that considerable work was done. Wieland says incidentally in his Teutscher Merkur,[56] in a review of the new edition of Zckert's translation: "Vor drei ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... the aggression of foreign states, except for the purposes of preserving the sanctity of the temple. The functions of the league were limited to the Amphictyonic tribes and whether or not its early, and undefined, and obscure purpose, was to check wars among the confederate tribes, it could not attain even that object. Its offices were almost wholly confined to religion. The league never interfered when one Amphictyonic state exercised the worst severities against the other, curbing neither ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mountains, swelling out into vast proportions, over which man had no dominion? At the dawn of day he sees, perhaps, the mist ascending slowly up the dusky river, taking its departure to some distant undefined region; below the mountain range his sight rests upon a deep and narrow glen, gloomy with woods, shelving down to its centre. What is hid in that mysterious mass the eye may not visit; but a sound comes down from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of Brooklyn, which had long drawn its members from the genteel quarters of the Heights, the Hill, and the remoter South Brooklyn, and, in later days, also from Prospect Park Slope. But at the houses of the officers of the bank she had caught somewhat bewildering vistas of those involved and undefined circles of people that make up in one way and another metropolitan society on the New York side of East River. Three years before Hilbrough entered the bank his family had removed into a new house in South Oxford street, and lately they ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... quite sure of his people. They came eagerly to hear him, they reflected his enthusiasm at his behest, they wept and praised God. Yet, underneath all his hopes and all his pride in what he had done ran a cold current of doubt, an undefined and indefinable fear of something devilish and malign that might thwart him in the end. He thrust it resolutely out ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... we 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 ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... all citizens are sovereigns, each citizen bearing a portion of the supreme sovereignty, and therefore it must necessarily be that the right to a voice in the Government is the right and privilege of a citizen as such, and that which is undefined in the Constitution is undefined because it ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Durward of the cars—grown handsomer and taller since then, she thought. With a nimble bound he leaped from his saddle, kissing his hand to Carrie, who with her sunniest smile ran past him to welcome Nellie. A pang, not of jealousy, but of an undefined something, shot through 'Lena's heart, and dropping the heavy curtain, she turned away, while the tears gathered thickly in ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... very bright, offered to show me where the beacons had been placed years before by a Boer Commission. I accepted, as the night was lovely for a stroll after the hot day. Also I was half conscious of another undefined purpose in my mind, which perhaps may have spread to that of Marnham. Those two young people looked very happy together there on the stoep, and as they must part so soon it would, I thought, be kind to give them the opportunity of ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... bliss, long past. He could not conceive that a stupid chance, letting the seven be dealt to the right rather than to the left, might deprive him of all this happiness, newly appreciated and newly illumined, and plunge him into the depths of unknown and undefined misery. That could not be, yet he awaited with a sinking heart the movement of Dolokhov's hands. Those broad, reddish hands, with hairy wrists visible from under the shirt cuffs, laid down the pack and took up a glass and a pipe that were ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... working-women felt possessed Jasmine, but it was an impulse born of the moment, a flood of feeling begotten by the tragedy. It had in it more of remorse than aught else; it was, in part, the agitation of a soul surprised into revelation. Yet there was, too, a strange, deep, undefined pity welling up in her heart,—pity for Rudyard, and because of what she did not say directly even to her own soul. But pity was there, with also a sense of inevitableness, of the continuance of things which she was too weak ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is in a distant and obscure part of the city, surrounded by narrow streets and lanes, imperfectly laid out and undefined. In leaving the walls of the prison, he mistook his direction, and the night being very dark, with a light, drizzling rain, which commenced while he was in the prison, the whole aspect of things seemed reversed. After travelling ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... know that girl who went to New York with all the dreams of all her years calling upon her for fulfillment. She knew what that girl had dreamed when she dreamed she knew not what; knew what she thought when she thought the undefined. She smiled understandingly, tenderly, at thought of it all—the bounding joy and the stubborn determination, the fearing and the demanding and the resolving with which she began her work. She was a great deal like a child on the long-promised holiday, and much like the pilgrim ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... to the Physical Sciences only. In addition to this circumscribed application, it is moreover indistinct by reason of the use of the word Ideas, a word to which so many different significations have been attached by different writers that its meaning is vague and undefined—to convey the impression of Laws or Principles. The same defect exists in the detailed exposition is perhaps the most ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of himself dropped and was broken to bits. There he sat now maskless and invisible. That was how he strictly felt: invisible and undefined, rather like Wells' Invisible Man. He had no longer a mask to present to people: he was present and invisible: they could not really think anything about him, because they could not really see him. What did they see when they looked at him? Lady Franks, for example. He neither knew nor cared. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... to have felt several times in my life undefined foreshadowings of some future which was to befall me; and just previous to my departure from earth, as has been generally stated in the journals of the day, I experienced a similar sensation. An awful blank seemed before me—a great chasm into which I would soon ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... The fire had nearly gone out. There 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 ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... 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; ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... the black man we say, this cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when and where and how. If this course, discouraging and paralyzing to both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, they recognize ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... so much to draw the outlines of the Renaissance in the North as to present sketches of the world through which Erasmus passed, and to view it as it appeared to him and to some of his contemporaries, famous or obscure. And firstly of the generation that preceded him in the wide but undefined region known ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... my chief difficulties. As I had treated my men with the greatest kindness, and had given them almost everything they had asked for, I can impute their running away only to their being totally unaccustomed to the restraint of a European master, and to some undefined dread of my ultimate intentions regarding them. The oldest man was an opium smoker, and a reputed thief, but I had been obliged to take him at the last moment as a substitute for another. I feel sure it was he who induced the others to run away, and as they knew the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... premature speech. She had heard that he was prone to take a glass too much, but she saw nothing in that. A handsome fellow, a man such as one seldom sees, a little weather-beaten perhaps, but most sailors are the same. Something undefined in his eyes frightened her, as did his greediness at table. Sometimes she was startled at the vehemence of his opinions. If only she had been at home, and could have made inquiries beforehand! But he was to leave very soon, and had said jestingly that the next time ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... position which seemed naturally to belong to them. After all they had lost, and in spite of all they ought to have learned at the Revolution, they found themselves in 1815, when power reverted to their hands, in the same undefined and shifting position. In its relations with the great powers of the State, in public discussion, in the exercise of its peculiar rights, the Chamber of 1815 had the merit of carrying into vigorous practice the constitutional system, which, in ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... despotism of Cromwell—how again that produced a restoration which settled none of the great moral or political questions which had generated all those agitations, and which, in return, those agitations had complicated and inflamed—and how, at last, the undefined, discordant, and antagonistic pretensions of the royal and democratical elements were reconciled by the Revolution and the Bill of Rights—and finally, whether with too much or too little violence to the principles of the ancient constitution—all ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... center of the settlement, facing on to the market-place—the latter a vague, undefined space of waste ground on which vendors of produce are wont to draw up their wagons. The store is a massive building of great extent. Its proportions rise superior to its surroundings, as if to indicate in a measure its owner's worldly status ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... say that that emotion is but another name for aesthetic pleasure. Objectively, we have formal beauty; subjectively, on the physiological side, a harmonious action of the organism, and on the mental side the undefined exaltation which ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... that remained to be explored, but the torch of investigation that guided us through it now flares out upon new regions we did not see before. Like one who goes with a candle into some immense cavern, presently a little circle becomes clear, the shadows vanish before him, and undefined forms grow distinct, he thinks he is near the end, when lo! what seemed a solid boundary of rock dissolves and floats away into a depth of darkness, the path opens into an immense void, new shapes of mystery start out, and he learns this much that he did not know before, that instead of ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... to him and bent to kiss her lips; but some undefined reluctance came over her, and she moved ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... while the outward man appeared engrossed in everyday matters, the inward man had been seeking religion. His failure to accept the forms of his mother's creed did not rest on any lack of the spiritual need. Though undefined, his religion glimmers at intervals through the Speed letters. When Speed's fiancee fell ill and her tortured lover was in a paroxysm of remorse and grief, Lincoln wrote: "I hope and believe that your present anxiety and ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... now even at his feet there slid along the ground the shadow of a monstrous bird, pale and undefined, as between the wan sun and himself moved out the vast shape that a moment ago hung above the Hill.... Then again it ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... 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 do you ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... efforts will avail if they are not to be partakers of these, to them, forbidden streams of the river of the water of life. Or, perhaps, this gloomy doctrine produces a sullen suspicion, vague and undefined, of the rectitude of God, and thus alienates still more those hearts which are already adverse to ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... been guilty; and it has sometimes occurred to me that the occult cause of his lady's separation from him, round which herself and her legal adviser have thrown such formidable mystery, may have been nothing more, after all, than some imposture of this kind, some dimly hinted confession of undefined horrors, which, though intended by the relater but to mystify and surprise, the hearer so little understood him as to take ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... For some undefined reason Rachael rarely thought of the past. She did not care to bring its certainties, its panorama of blinded eyes and closed doors before her mental vision. But to-night she found herself walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts went back to the ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... 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, ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... falling braids,—for I kept apart,—he breathed the penetrating incense of each separate amulet, and I saw that from that hour, when every atom of his sensation was tense and vibrating, she would be associated with the loathed amber in his undefined consciousness, would be surrounded with an atmosphere of its perfume, that Lu was truly sealed from him in it, sealed into herself. Then again, saying no word, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... utterly beyond the power of man to form anything approaching to a correct conception of the amount of life that is thus shown to exist in the ocean. Although it has pleased the Creator to limit our powers, yet it has also pleased him to leave the limit of those powers undefined. We may not, indeed, ever hope in this life to attain to perfect knowledge, nevertheless, by "searching" we may "find out wisdom;" and certain it is, that, although there undoubtedly must be a point of knowledge on any given subject which man cannot reach, there is in ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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
... of the hour stole into his heart, and his brain calmed down. The mountain suggested to him the past, and the pure, white mist shrouding it seemed like vapour risen from the merciful waters of Lethe. The Moon suggested hope, vague and undefined, lint still hope. With the swing as of a pendulum his consciousness swept back from the dark night of despondency and bathed its wings in light. Then his soothed spirit felt the need of sleep, so he entered the house and began ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... thought, maybe, you could help me get started—or something." She gazed at him with open-eyed trust, as if she expected him with a word to solve her undefined problem. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... 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
... growing, from thee going, Seems every hope more vague and undefined— Oh! as the fiend might suffer when bestowing A last look on the heaven he left behind: Or as earth's first-born children when they parted Slowly, despairingly, from Eden's bowers, Looked back with many a sigh—though broken-hearted, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... Pope, who, as the Head of Christendom, was regarded as having supremacy over all Religious Orders. But the Pope himself often encroached upon the rights of the Order, not only by sending nuncios to Malta with large and undefined powers, but by arrogating to himself the patronage of the langue of Italy when he wished to bestow gifts upon his relatives and friends. This led to bitter resentment among the Italian Knights, who saw all the lucrative posts of ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... of wickedness known and occupied by this band of villains? With such and a hundred similar suggestions her mind was occupied, and she began to feel unpleasant. Perhaps she was venturing into the presence of those who would have even less regard for her than Duffel. An undefined terror for a moment seized upon her, and she was about to yield to the dictates of fear, and return to her room, when a kind of murmuring sound, as if of voices in the distance, met her ear. Listening a moment she felt quite sure ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... 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 look ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... perfections. She, poor child, herself has seen it and felt it, but never, in her blameless innocence and purity, suspecting the cause, 'There is,' she said to me last night, confidentially, 'something strangely antagonistic and repellent in our natures, some undefined and nameless barrier between our ever understanding each other.' You comprehend, Mr. Hathaway, she does full justice to your intentions and your unquestioned abilities. 'I am not blind,' she said, 'to Mr. Hathaway's ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... the Coalition as an "invertebrate and undefined body." Meaning that they have rather more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... can be found in his plays any deep search into nature, any accurate discriminations of kindred qualities, or nice display of passion in its progress; all is general and undefined. Nor does he much interest or affect the auditor, except in Jane Shore, who is always seen and heard with pity. Alicia is a character of empty noise, with no resemblance to real ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... The poet's ideal was sufficiently despoiled by the unconscionable French librettist without this further desecration which effectually dispelled the last glimmer of the poetical light that ought always to shine about this strange child of the South. Too much of tropical passion, too much of undefined longing, too much of tenderness the part could hardly be invested with, but it is easily made silly by over-acting in the very place where the tendency to do so is strongest. The whole opera is one that must either ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the shore with boats. The Cossacks arranged the horses' trappings. Taras assumed a stately air, pulled his belt tighter, and proudly stroked his moustache. His sons also inspected themselves from head to foot, with some apprehension and an undefined feeling of satisfaction; and all set out together for the suburb, which was half a verst from the Setch. On their arrival, they were deafened by the clang of fifty blacksmiths' hammers beating upon twenty-five anvils sunk in the earth. Stout tanners seated beneath awnings ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... little gate he smiled broadly. His smile was not a pleasant one, because it was undefined. "Good-evening, Adele," he said when he came near to her. "How ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... Psychically they were affected as by ecclesiasticism. The perfume of the cologne and the throb of the engines swept them with a sense of esthetic reverie, the thrill of travel, and the atmosphere of elegance. Moreover, the story of the Hutch money and the Hutch hairs had in some undefined way affiliated the two. At last by tacit consent they rose, went out on deck and, holding their reticules tight, walked majestically up and down. When they passed Mrs. Turtle's blue feathers and the gold parrot-cage they smiled meaningly ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... at first: being (as I have said) much of the temper and habits, for good and evil, of English navvies. But they grow more and more uneasy, full of childish curiosity, and undefined dread. So into the town they go, on promise (which they will honourably keep, being German men) of doing no harm to the plebs, the half Roman artisans and burghers who are keeping themselves alive here—the last dying remnants of the civilization, and luxury, and cruelty, and wickedness, of a great ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... asked Thomas Wingfold to meet him, partly with the design that he should act as a foil to her nephew, partly in order to do her duty by the church, to which she felt herself belong not as a lay member, but in some undefined professional capacity, in virtue of her departed dean. Wingfold had but lately come to the parish, and, as he was merely curate, she had not been in haste to invite him. On the other hand, he was the only clergyman officiating ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... still ringing Pollyanna's story of that same girl who had found a crowd in a big city the loneliest place in the world, yet who had refused to go with the handsome man that had "noticed too much." Perhaps in Mrs. Carew's heart was the undefined hope that somewhere in it all lay the peace she had so longed for. Perhaps it was a little of all three combined with utter helplessness in the face of Pollyanna's amazing twisting of her irritated sarcasm into the wide-sweeping ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... there 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 ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... sleep that night but she did sleep and heavily. When she awoke it was to blankness, a cold throbbing blankness of undefined ill being. Then her Ego, with a sigh, came back from far places; the busy brain shot into focus; all the memories, fears, humiliation of the night before stood forth clear and poignant. She buried her ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... face, he saw a something reigning there: a lofty something, undefined and indistinct, which made it hardly more than a remembrance of that child—as yonder figure might be— yet it was the same: the same: and ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... telling him to nestle close, close, for the time was coming when those two hearts would throb no more beside each other, and that the waves of life's ocean would some day cast one upon the shore, and bear the other far out to sea? Even so! It was dim, ghost-like, and undefined; but still ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... him. It was because—how clearly he saw it now!—he had never been complete by himself alone. He had been satisfying only half of himself. The other half he had tried to quiet with man-made things, with the artificial products of civilization. He had thought to allay that deep, undefined hunger in him with travel and sports and the attentions of hirelings. It had been easy at first; but, keen as nimble wits had been to keep pace with his desires with an ever-increasing variety of luxuries, he had exhausted them all within a ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... arguments. It is, according to them, unsafe to live in Ireland. (Let us leave this insurrection of a week out of the question.) Life is not safe in Ireland. Property shivers in terror of daily or nightly appropriation. Other, undefined, but even more woeful glooms and creeps, wriggle ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... so hopelessly entangled in the meshes of subtle philosophical speculation, derived from the most complex sources. To deal with the facts of classic art, which is concerned with seeking a clearly-defined perfection, is a simple matter compared with the unbounded and undefined concepts of a school which waged war upon "the deadliness of ascertained facts" and immersed itself in vague intimations of glories that were to be. Its most authorized exponent declared it to be "the delineation of sentimental matter in fantastic form." A ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... emotions; she is overflowing with emotion; she becomes sensitive; in her relations with boys and men she becomes self-conscious. Distinct sexual desire fortunately does not make its appearance in the girl at this period, as it does in the boy, but she becomes filled with vague undefined and undefinable longings. It is the period of "crushes" when the girl is apt to bestow her overflowing emotion on a girl friend. There is nothing reprehensible in these crushes—they act as a safety valve—and only in rare cases are they apt to lead to abnormal ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... fierce suddenness had it come upon her! She looked back over the day with bewilderment. She could see dimly that the Catherine who had started on that Shanmoor walk had been full of vague misgivings other than those concerned with a few neglected duties. There had been an undefined sense of unrest, of difference, of broken equilibrium. She had shown it in the way in which at first she had tried to keep herself and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... in the Forest that the woodland child, as they still called her, was again about to leave them for some undefined time, ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... in and embrace the balmy atmosphere. [Footnote: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book vii] The song of the birds melted me to tenderness. I would lie by the side of some rivulet for hours, and form garlands of the flowers on its banks, and muse on ideal beauties, and sigh from the crowd of undefined emotions ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... afternoon the boatbuilder's heart was, somehow, heavy with undefined dread as to what he was to learn ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... Genevieve as doing such things. But she had done them—he felt that somehow she was a different Genevieve: he didn't know what the difference was—he was in too much of a whirl for analysis—but he had an undefined sense of aliveness, of a spirited, joyous ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... forest—with not a friend nigh that could render her assistance—with no hope of escape from the awful doom to which she was hastening? Or was she thinking of him, for whom her heart yearned with all the thousand, undefined, indescribable sympathies of affection?—of him who so lately had been her companion?—for the heart of love measures duration, not by the cold mathematical calculation of minutes and hours, and days and weeks, ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... the features appeared to be stamped with melancholy, and the eyes to be fixed with pitying tenderness upon her descendants. Both gazed at each other and at the picture, struck with the same sentiment of undefined awe. Beside them stood the dark figure of the gipsy girl, watching, with ill-concealed satisfaction, the effect of her handiwork. Ranulph was aroused from his abstraction by hearing a loud outcry in Mrs. Mowbray's ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of his childhood had grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength; his temper seemed more hasty and impetuous than ever, and there was a dashing recklessness about him which gave his sister many a heart-ache; and she had painful, though undefined fears for the future, for ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... and shapeless were the characters, that it was not easy to resolve them into letters, or to believe that they were anything but arbitrary and dismal blots and scrawls upon the yellow paper; without meaning, vague, like the misty and undefined germs of thought as they exist in our minds before clothing themselves in words. These, however, as he concentrated his mind upon them, took distincter shape, like cloudy stars at the power of the ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he left Mrs. Belding's. But still he began to be sure that there was one groping for recognition which as yet he had not recognized. The more ho dwelt upon it, the more it seemed to attach itself to the song Alice had sung, but he could not give it any definiteness. After he had gone to bed, this undefined impression of something significant attaching itself to the song besieged him, and worried him with tantalizing glimpses, until he ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... chamber. The door stood half open. I entered, and was bewildered by the dim, mysterious, dreamy loveliness upon which I gazed. The moon shone full upon the windows, and a thousand coloured lights and shadows crossed and intertwined upon the walls and floor, all so soft, and mingling, and undefined, that the brain was filled as with a flickering dance of ghostly rainbows. But I had little time to think of these; for out of the only dark corner in the room came a white figure, flitting across the chaos of lights, bedewed, besprinkled, bespattered, as she ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... Edward Coke declared that the king's royal prerogative being unlimited and undefined, "was a great overgrown monster;" and, on one occasion, when Coke said before the king, that "his Majesty was defended by the laws,"—James, in anger, told him he spoke foolishly, and he said he was not defended by ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... feverish, and shrank from her mother's rejoicing, declaring that she was mistaken, and that nothing more must be said. She had never consented, and he must not make such a sacrifice; he would not when he knew better. Nay, in some moods, Rachel seemed to think even the undefined result of the interview an additional humiliation, and to feel herself falling, if not fallen, from her supreme contempt of love and marriage. The hurry, and the consent taken for granted, had certainly been no small elements in her present disturbed and overwhelmed ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his throat. He stood there looking toward the outside door, drawing his breath like a man suffocating. Stealthily his hand moved toward his revolver, while his wife and daughter, even Frances, struck by a thrill of some undefined terror, leaned and looked as Chadron was looking, toward ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... dark, broken clouds, which whirled about and floated, and reminded the passenger of some terrible Medusa's head. The gloomy plains of Capsir, which were traversed by torrents, extensive meadows in which undefined forms were moving about, fields of rye, like huge golden table-covers, and here and there wretched villagers, and broad sheets of water, into which the stars seemed to look in a melancholy manner, opened out to the view. Damp gusts of winds swept along ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... partly with this thought that the Patriarch had striven to interest Caterina in these incidents of early Christianity; and partly from his undefined dread as to what the future might hold for her, with the wish to keep the Church and its teachings uppermost in her mind, that she might lean upon them in need. She had been deeply interested and again and again ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... large yet undefined extension may safely be given to the direct and indirect results of natural selection; but I now admit, after reading the essay by Nageli on plants, and the remarks by various authors with respect to animals, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... said, had as yet shaped itself into formulas. We have not to trace any slow growing elaboration of opinion. Protestantism, before it became an establishment, was a refusal to live any longer in a lie. It was a falling back upon the undefined untheoretic rules of truth and piety which lay upon the surface of the Bible, and a determination rather to die than to mock with unreality any longer the Almighty Maker of the world. We do not look in the dawning ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... little-known 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 ...
— 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
... distemper, tempera and oil, led to an exact study of form, the colors employed by the Orientals—at times brilliant, at times subdued with an almost studied restraint—preserved a singular fluidity and lent themselves to undefined evanescences which ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... again when Natalya came into the garden. It was full of sweetness and peace—that soothing, blissful peace in which the heart of man is stirred by a sweet languor of undefined ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... an almost immediate day; but now he was debarred from this by his determination to see Marion yet once again before he took himself altogether beyond the reach of Holloway. The plan, therefore, though it was fixed as far as his own intention went and the assent of Lady Frances, was left undefined as to time. The more he thought of Holloway, and the difficulties of approaching Paradise Row, the more convinced he became that his only mode of approaching Marion must be through Mrs. Roden. He had taken two or three days to consider what would be the ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... I do recall to mind All that is past:—the yearning undefined,— The baulk'd confession that was like a sob— The sound of singing and the gurgling throb Of lute and viol,—meant for many things But most for misery; and a something clings Close to my heart that is not wantonness, Though, ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... in other words. All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... non-differenced intelligence. 'He does not again go to death;' 'He sees this as one;' 'He who sees this does not see death' (Ch. Up. VI, 27); 'When he finds freedom from fear and rest in that which is invisible, incorporeal, undefined, unsupported, then he has obtained the fearless' (Taitt. Up. II, 7); 'The fetter of the heart is broken, all doubts are solved and all his works perish when he has been beheld who is high and low' (Mu. Up. II, 2, 8); 'He knows Brahman, he becomes Brahman only' ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... starred with cyclamens and wavering anemones. At last we reached the chestnut woods, and so by winding paths descended on the village. Giuseppe told me, as we walked, that in a short time he would be obliged to join the army. He contemplated this duty with a dim and undefined dislike. Nor could I, too, help dreading and misliking it for him. The untamed, gentle creature, who knew so little but his goats as yet, whose nights had been passed from childhood a la belle etoile, whose limbs had never been cumbered ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... prisoner would tell strongly in his favour. The woman and child would bear witness to his tenderness and skill, and plead for him. As he had said, the convict deserved a pardon. The mean, bad man, burning with wounded vanity and undefined jealousy, waited for some method to suggest itself, by which he might claim the credit of the escape, and snatch from the prisoner, who had dared to rival him, the last hope ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... And the trick of it is in the accent and intonation, and not so much in any peculiar form of words. They have a peculiar way of dropping their voices, too, which is sometimes disconcerting. But it is a clean wholesome language, undefined by the disgusting and childish obscenity which is too often a disgrace to other districts in England. It reminds me a little of the Scottish tongue, but rather more of the country speech in the northern parts of Yorkshire, but in some ways it is all ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... endures the unpleasant interval, steeled against definite pleasures and evident life of today, and worried into an intoxicated colored belief in the expected happiness of the undefined future. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... would then, Hand locked in hand, forsake the haunts of men; Communing with the silver queen of night, Which, as a spirit, shone upon their sight, Full orbed in maiden glory; and her beams Fell on their hearts, like distant shadowed gleams Of future joy and undefined bliss— Half of another world and half of this. Then, rapt in dreams, oft would he gazing stand, Grasping in his her fair and trembling hand, And thus exclaim, "Helen, when I am gone, When that bright moon shall shine on you alone, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... and whatever he had been dreaming faded into vagueness. He couldn't have said what he had been dreaming about. He was neither asleep nor awake, but in the shadowland somewhere between. Something as yet undefined had brought him halfway toward awakening, but the influence was not powerful enough ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... 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 ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... physiognomy not sufficiently intellectual for the Greatest of Teachers. These "images" in fact inspire little reverence except with blind worshippers; they are mostly wrought up and renovated, so as to fulfil the preconceived conditions of sanctity: undefined generality, weakness, smoothness, and blackness, are the common characteristics of these supposititious heads of the Saviour. It will thus again be easily understood how opposite has been the practice of the Eastern and Western Churches; it is a striking ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... in some of these old Dissenting congregations that, either the prevalent understanding or a hope for speedy inclusion in the national Church, or a prevision on the part of liberal-minded men here and there, left so largely undefined the basis of religious ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... been untrue to his mother's brother, William Mildmay, the great Whig Minister of the day, for any earthly consideration. He was ready to work with wages or without wages. He was really zealous in the cause, not asking very much for himself. He had some undefined belief that it was much better for the country that Mr. Mildmay should be in power than that Lord de Terrier should be there. He was convinced that Liberal politics were good for Englishmen, and that Liberal politics and the Mildmay party were one and the same thing. It would be unfair to ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... a daughter—a guardian angel—to my father, in the days of his heavy sorrow—sorrow which my ungoverned passions had brought upon his grey head—all these things endeared you to me still more. Next followed a period of estrangement and separation, during which, as I now see, an undefined craving for your society preyed upon my spirits, and, as I verily believe, retarded my recovery. Hence, the moment I felt the slightest symptoms of returning health, my determination to revisit Heathfield. When we again met, I fancied you were ill ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... to look over the dress she was to wear in the evening; as the ruffles in neck and wrists were fresh, she found there was nothing for her to do but brush it and lay it out on the bed. Still she lingered with an undefined feeling that it was Christmas-day everywhere else, and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... very 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 ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... here keeping to simple words in everyday use, we may employ and combine them to analyse out our Town into its elements and their inter-relations with all due exactitude, instead of either leaving our common terms undefined, or arbitrarily defining them anew, as economists have alternately done—too literally losing or shirking essentials of Work in the above formula, and with these missing essentials of ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... who plays in this fashion entirely alone, the pleasure consists in the production of familiar ideas together with agreeable feelings, which are, as it were, crystallized with comparative clearness out of the dull mass of undefined perceptions. These memory-images become real existences, like the hallucinations of the insane, because the sensuous impressions probably impress themselves directly—without reflection—upon the growing brain, and hence the memory-images of them, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... frame of mind was so painful to her? During the last two or three months 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 ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... 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. This arose ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and which had induced their recent return to Court, had merely been intended to lure them thither at a period when their presence was more than ever essential to the interests of the Regency; and while M. de Conde found his position in the Government as undefined and unsatisfactory as ever, and that his vanity had been flattered at the expense of his interests, the Count on his side saw the possession of Quilleboeuf more remote than ever, and openly declared that ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... present from all immediate contact with home interests, it is difficult to realise her removal and its consequences to the full. It is a stunning blow from which one recovers gradually to a consciousness of a great and undefined loss. God bless you!... and grant that you may share ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... and Mr. Vivian, for securing for him such a treasure as Mr. Russell, he introduced Lord Lidhurst, a sickly, bashful boy of fourteen, to his new governor, with polite expressions of unbounded confidence, and a rapid enunciation of undefined and contradictory expectations. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... which was in them as to the reality of conscience and the mysterious distinction between right and wrong. And it entered into a close alliance with science, which was beginning to assert its claims, since then risen so high, to a new and undefined supremacy, not only in the general concerns of the world, but specially in education. It was the day of Holland House. It was the time when a Society of which Lord Brougham was the soul, and which comprised a great number of important political and important ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... spreads from leaf to hill, from hill to horizon, till the whole is bathed in sunlight. Is not this fact also recognized in other arts? In painting, the great picture is without marked outline; in music, the truest and deepest is undefined. Beethoven is greater than Haydn. The precision which offends in manner is as disagreeable everywhere else. Is it not because when named as Precision, the depth which necessarily means a graceful form is ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... to all our dwellings come the spectres of the mind, Doubts and fears and dread forebodings, in the darkness undefined; Round us throng the grim projections of the heart and of the brain, And our pride of strength is weakness, and the cunning hand ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that he should give up the hereditary vocation and read for the bar: literature, on which his heart was set, and in which his early attempts had been encouraged, being held to be by itself no profession, or at least one altogether too irregular and undefined. For the next several years, therefore, he attended law classes instead of engineering and science classes in the University, giving to the subject a certain amount of serious, although fitful, attention until he was called ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... valley—Tim—even Tim—all of them were forgotten. I had found the woman of my firelight, the woman of my cloudland, the woman of my sunset country down in the mountains to the west. She, had always been a vague, undefined creature to me—just a woman, and so elusive as never to get within the grasp of my mind's eye; just a woman whom I had endowed with every grace; whose kindly spirit shone through eyes, now brown, now blue, now black, according to my latest whim; who ofttimes worn, ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... to be sure that there was one groping for recognition which as yet he had not recognized. The more ho dwelt upon it, the more it seemed to attach itself to the song Alice had sung, but he could not give it any definiteness. After he had gone to bed, this undefined impression of something significant attaching itself to the song besieged him, and worried him with tantalizing glimpses, until he ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... it back, they bite you, like dogs. No—let's sit here and starve first, child. We can shut the door and nobody 'll know we're hungry." She straightened up and threw the shawl from her shoulders. Terror had taken the place of an undefined dread. ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... there was also a contest respecting boundaries. The treaty of peace had extended the limits of the United States to the thirty-first degree of north latitude, but the pretensions of the Catholic King were carried north of that line, to an undefined extent. He claimed as far as he had conquered from Britain, but the precise limits of his ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... eyes on the unmoved and manly countenance of his companion. There was a vague and undefined suspicion in the look; but it vanished, as the practised organs drank in the assurance, which so much physical promise afforded, of the aid of a bold and active mariner. Rather amused than offended ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... voice, in answer to her inquiries, bade her go on to the kitchen, and she hastened off. There she found a single candle burning dimly; by its light she picked up her bundle, and, leaving the door open to see her way, returned to the front of the house. Though not a nervous woman, she felt an undefined fear at the mysterious darkness and silence; and as she passed the brothers standing in the doorway, she was struck with fresh terror at the livid pallor of those two stern faces that looked out from the black shadow. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... 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 pleasures that ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... representation of Shakespeare, with whose creations no actor can ever hope to identify himself, however he may modify our former impressions. Let it be remembered, too, that an actor's conception of a character must never be vague, undefined or shadowy, as that of a mere reader may well be, and probably will be in the exact degree in which he is a keen and appreciative student. The actor must not strive to suggest all possible solutions, but must hold firmly to one, and that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... you'll never know! Pray don't try!' cried Lucy; but if she had had any knowledge of character, she would have seen that she had only provoked the little Berserkar's curiosity, and had made him determined on proving the undefined threat. So the unfortunate Algernon seldom descended the stairs without two childish faces being protruded from the balusters of the nursery-flight over-head, pursuing him with hissing whispers of 'Polysyllable' ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... warning. He has done more than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great thinkers and actors—Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Koerner, Stein, Goethe,—who taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his historical sketch of the Early Kings of Norway, showing no diminution of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... uneasiness always leapt up within his heart when her name was mentioned, and that was very rarely, for his father never spoke of her, and old Betto, the head servant, but seldom, and then with such evident sadness and reticence, that an undefined, though none the less crushing fear, had haunted him from childhood upwards. As he stepped out so bravely this soft spring evening, the look of disquietude did not remain long on his face. At twenty-four life has not lost its rosy tints; heart, ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... the Colossal period. They are selections with an easily distinguishable theme. Throughout these chapters the mind of the student should be engaged with the motif of the selection as it first catches the mind. Nothing in later study can make up for the loss of the first glow, the undefined answering response to the animating spirit of a writer's message. His differentiated meanings, his elaborations of theme for the purpose of increased force, intensity or suggestion are but useless lumber to a mind that has not throbbed in sympathy, scarce knowing why. It is ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... bears this test better than the other, and this, too, in face of the fact that it has cost much less labor to produce. Remember we are only now considering the question of visibility in the design. You may like the undefined and suggestive masses into which the leaves and shadows of the Southwell one group themselves better than the unbending severity of the lines in the other, but that is not the point at present. You can not see the actual work which produces that mystery, and I may point out to you, that what ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Instead of hurrying to the schoolroom she stood still and looked out of one of the windows. The words Miss Mills had uttered as they walked across the fields to the wood kept returning to her memory. In some curious, undefined, uncomfortable way she connected them with her sister Hilda. What did they mean? Why was it dreadful to be engaged to be married? Why were some people so fickle, and why were promises broken? Judy had never seen Miss ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... walls, the very walls are woven of dreams, All undefined by blasphemies of art! Here, pure from finite hues the very night Conceives the mystic harmonies of light, Delicious glooms and gleams; And sorrow falls in rose-leaves on the heart, And pain that yearns upon the passing hour Is but a ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... and, what Guy felt scarcely less 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, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would not feel his heart expand at the first sight of the heathy mountains, swelling out into vast proportions, over which man had no dominion? At the dawn of day he sees, perhaps, the mist ascending slowly up the dusky river, taking its departure to some distant undefined region; below the mountain range his sight rests upon a deep and narrow glen, gloomy with woods, shelving down to its centre. What is hid in that mysterious mass the eye may not visit; but a sound comes down from afar, as of the rushing and din of waters. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... weight must be accorded to the desire to reduce the amount of available labor, and to protect adults who tend machines from the competition of children who could do it as well or better. There is, however, an undefined feeling in the laborers' minds that when children all work from an early age the wages of the whole family somehow become low, and that it takes all of them to do for the family what the parents might do under a different condition. The Malthusian law shows how, in the long run, this ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... She had an undefined feeling that she would not come into any relation with Stephen White, if it could be avoided. She was heartily glad that she had not been in the house when he called. And yet, had she been in the habit of ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... yet to come, is planned, executed according to its own power, for the course of time is marked as clearly as the tides: by its own coming and going it is revealed. Revealed, however, only in an abstract and undefined manner, so that while its marks are clearly seen, it is only by special revelations that it is shown in a comprehensive and detailed light. And that is why I have summoned you here, my dear Jehu, for you are the chosen ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... chief justice and three inferior judges, should be established at Calcutta. This court was made independent of the Governor-General and Council, and was entrusted with a civil and criminal jurisdiction of immense and, at the same time, of undefined extent. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... impulse of an undefined curiosity drove me on through this succession of darksome chambers, till, like the jeweller of Delhi in the house of the magician Bennaskar, I at length reached a vaulted room, dedicated to secrecy and silence, and beheld, seated by a lamp, and employed in reading a. blotted ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... from life in China. There is no special class to take care of it; every one has to attend himself to those sacrifices which are incumbent on him; this is a natural, matter-of-course part of a man's duty. As there is no Bible, there is no religious instruction, and the doctrine is quite vague and undefined. The ritual, however, is fixed by tradition in every detail, and if a man attends to it he does his duty; religion is a set of acts properly and exactly done, the proper person sacrificing always to the proper object in ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... their probable tenants. Town-planning has taken rank as an art; it is sometimes styled a science and University professorships are named after it; in the London Conference of 1910 it got its deductio in forum or at least its first dance. But it is still young and its possibilities undefined. Its name is apt to be applied to all sorts of building-schemes, and little attempt is made to assign it any specific sense. It is only slowly making its way towards the recognized method and the recognized principles which even an art requires. Here, it seemed, a student of ancient history might ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... "the Isles of Chittim." Sometimes the whole idea of Gentiles and Gentile nations is represented by the isles of the sea. The Hebrew bards, standing on the heights of Lebanon, and looking westwards, saw nothing but innumerable clusters of islets in the dim and undefined distance of the waters ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... 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
... our present point of view. But we cannot leave them without noticing also how Indian they are in their unwillingness to define their thought, and in their readiness to enthrone a holy man and his relics. Undefined thought we see expressed in symbol. There are four doors to the sanctuary at Buchhoke,—the fakiri [Chet Rami ascetics'] door, the Hindu, Christian, and Mahomedan doors—expressing the openness of the Chet Rami sanctuary to all sects. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... 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
... an excess in the practice of certain actions beyond what is proper (e.g., Prodigalitas est excessus in consumendis opibus); or, as a less exercise of them than is fitting (Avaritia est defectus, etc.). For since in this way the degree is left quite undefined, and the question whether conduct accords with duty or not, turns wholly on this, such an account is of no use ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... men who, as I have said, admired her, some felt a peculiar enchantment in what they called her ugliness; others declared her devilish handsome; and some shrank from her as if with an undefined dread of perilous entanglement, if she should but catch them looking her in the face. Among some of them she was known as Lucifer, in antithesis to Hesper: they meant the Lucifer of darkness, not the light-bringer of ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... but what different sensations did I carry into it from those with which I had left it a few hours before! I stretched myself on the mattress and put out the light; but the swarm of new images that rushed on my mind set me again instantly in motion. All was rapid, vague, and undefined, wearying and distracting my attention. I was roused as by a divine voice, that said, "Sleep no more! Mervyn shall ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... they ask these questions they care nothing and remember naught of the answers. What is deepest in them is growing in silence; it is not yet formed into conceptions, and has no language. The difference between the spoken questions of children and their impressions, as yet so undefined, is like that between pictures of the snapshot camera and the astronomer's plates which, for hours, gather and develop the figure of ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... their religious teaching, as a home of mysterious giant fairies who made gurgling noises in the rocks along the beach or floated vast and cloud-like through high pine forests. The evergreens on Michilimackinac showed as if newborn through the haze of undefined deciduous trees, for it was May weather, which means that the northern world had not yet leaped into sudden and glorious summer. Though the straits glittered under a cloudless sky, a chill lingered in the wind, and only the basking stone ledges reflected warmth. The clear elastic ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... return home, he immediately repaired to his neighbor Elwood's, and, unperceived, slipped into the hands of Mrs. Elwood a letter, which the wondering matron soon took to a private room, curiously opened, and, with a deep, undefined interest and varying emotions, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... 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 source, ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... argument are two glaringly false assumptions, and on these the whole fabric rests. The first is that a certain undefined but presumably multitudinous body, which he designates as "Socialist," "Democratic," and "Social Democratic," is better qualified to determine the policy and conduct the correspondence of the Foreign Office than ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... questions involving purely civil rights, and the constitutional exercise of the prerogative on the part of the Executive. This was the more necessary, as civil and religious freedom were largely identical in those days of undefined prerogative, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... Apart from his undefined share in A Looking-Glass for London and England, all that we have of Thomas Lodge's dramatic work is The Wounds of Civil War, or, as its other title ran, The Most Lamentable and True Tragedies of Marius and Sylla (about 1588). The author went to Plutarch ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... too great in handling this matter, no scrutiny too exact. It was evidently the interest, and as evidently at least in the power, of the creditors, by admitting secret participation in this dark and undefined concern, to spread corruption to the greatest and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... up in him an inchoate longing, a desire for something far and undefined. He thought of great audiences, roses, the accompaniment of violins. Subconsciously he began to sing in a whisper that yet reached beyond the huts. He forgot his surroundings, the past without light, the future seemingly ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... upon a tried name. They knew what he had done in the now distant past, and they had heard lately that he had been to the West Indies, and had returned, having saved the chief jewel among the colonies of the empire. They knew, also, that their rulers were fearful about invasion, and that in some undefined way Nelson had stood, and would yet stand, between them and harm. The rapidity of his movements left little interval between the news of his being back at Gibraltar and the announcement of his arrival at ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in its plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... had determined to be content with a half brick of gold without retribution or restitution in place of the whole fraught with penalties of exposure and reprobation. At that period his cupidity had not flared into the towers of fire it afterward became, in the smoke and flame of which all undefined ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... turned 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 narrow cell, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... more gently sloping descent reached the floor of a second cave, as level and nearly as smooth as a table. On her left hand, what light managed to creep through the tortuous entrance was caught and reflected in a dull glimmer from the undefined surface of a well of fresh water which lay in a sort of basin in the rock: on a bedded stone beside it sat the laird, with his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, and his hump upheaved above his head, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... of natural theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence: If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: If it affords no inference that affects human life or can be the source of any ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... candles, wreaths, and crosses, and to recite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, in still another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the pretty playthings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, this same sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelled the Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter his brave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw to hang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that the "Macmillan" writer, with all his delicacy of thought and command of expression, could not say exactly what he means when he speaks of this Nature which is so worthy of reverence and of love. For this reason, and for no other, we may be sure, he has left the word undefined. This is important; for, as Mr. Savage says in his eleventh chapter, when he proposes the question whether evolution and Christianity are antagonistic, so that one necessarily excludes the other—"that depends ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... to scold or slap him. The housemaid's closet on the stairs was to him an abode of wolves. Mrs. Gatty's tale of The Tiger in the Coal-box is a transcript of his feelings, except that no one took the trouble to reassure him; something undefined and horrible was thought to wag in the case of the eight-day clock; and he could not bear to open the play cupboard lest 'something' should jump out on him. The first time he was taken to the Zoological Gardens, the monkeys so terrified him that ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a little better, but he was still shaken, and his head ached violently. Little snatches of undefined memory tried to creep into his consciousness, but he couldn't quite bring them into focus. He turned toward the rail, and saw ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... softer than a child's. The same look of unutterable tenderness brooded on the mournful face of the phantom by his side; but its thin, shining hand was laid upon his head, and its countenance had undergone a change. The form was still undefined; but the features had become distinct. They were those of a young man, beautiful and wan, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... the condition of this class. At the same time, it is impossible not to observe that, quite irrespective of political opinions, there is a wide gulf between the great mass of the employers and the employed. There is dislike—there is undefined distrust. Those who doubt this will do well to investigate working-class opinions for themselves, not at election time, and in such a familiar manner as to get at the truth without compliments. Probably in times of prosperity this feeling is not increasing—we are strongly inclined to think it ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... which pervades this remarkable fragment was strangely recalled by the following passage in a recent book that has interested many:—"Masses of strange, nameless masonry, of an antiquity dateless and undefined, bedded themselves in the rocks, or overhung the clefts of the hills; and out of a great tomb by the wayside, near the arch, a forest of laurel forced its way, amid delicate and graceful frieze-work, moss-covered and stained with age. In this strangely desolate and ruinous ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... calmly, but with a low vibration of tone; and as he came to his feet he looked very tall and terrible. Ray's blood began to rise, and as he looked about for something undefined he felt the heat and smelled the smoke of the grass fire of ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' Then the powers delegated to the United States were not reserved to the States or to the people. What is the meaning of the clause 'or to the people,' as contradistinguished from 'the States'? Does it mean that any of this mass of undefined powers, but embracing all not granted to the General Government, was reserved to the people of the United States in the aggregate? Then there would exist, and does now exist, a consolidated despotism. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... lay ahead, its outline vague and undefined like that of the landscape around, but the sun was shining. It shone full on their young faces, as they went forward, ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the scene, turned as Evans and Dane arrived carrying undefined plastic. They snapped the cylinders and chairs appeared; chairs—and a table upon which Carter and Lewis, bringing up the rear, placed a pitcher of beer, glasses and a box ...
— The Terrible Answer • Arthur G. Hill
... 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 what is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... There is an undefined, half-recognized force in nature which leads many to seek to balance themselves by marrying their opposites in temperament. While the general working of this tendency is, no doubt, beneficent, it not unfrequently brings together those who are ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... history of the world, the individuals we have to do with are peoples, totalities that are States. We cannot, therefore, be satisfied with what we may call this "peddling" view of Providence, to which the belief alluded to limits itself. Equally unsatisfactory is the merely abstract, undefined belief in a Providence, when that belief is not brought to bear upon the details of the process which it conducts. On the contrary our earnest endeavor must be directed to the recognition of the ways of Providence, the means it uses, and the historical phenomena in which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of Maltravers, to trace, herself, to any causes connected with her younger lover the listless melancholy that crept over her. In very young women—new alike to the world and the knowledge of themselves—many vague and undefined feelings herald the dawn of Love; shade after shade and light upon light succeeds before the sun breaks forth, and the earth ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... now riding at the full through a wild flecked sky, and Pete could clearly see, as he returned towards the bay, a crowd of human figures on the cliffs above Port Lewaige. Quaking with undefined fears, he pushed on until he had joined them. The schooner, abandoned by her crew, had parted her cable, and was rolling like a blinded porpoise towards the rocks. She fell on them with the groan of a living creature, and, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... to him; he started nervously at an undefined object in a dim corner, and went nearer to examine it; he was irritable, vaguely discontented, and had even a moment of nausea, perhaps the result of tobacco stronger than he was accustomed to smoke. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of Valois. More than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, we get dim glimpses of France, or, as it was then called, Gaul. It was peopled by a barbarian race, divided into petty tribes or clans, each with its chieftain, and each possessing undefined and sometimes almost unlimited power. Age after age rolled on, during which generations came and went like ocean billows, and all Gaul was but a continued battle-field. The history of each individual of its countless millions seems to have been, that he was ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... and I 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 can't ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... had started out. She shuddered as she remembered how wickedly rebellious had been her mood that morning. Never before had such hot and dreadful feelings and thoughts burned in her heart and brain. In an undefined way, the growing girl realized that such a state of mind and heart was unworthy her sacred ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... 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
... is of two kinds: one kind which has its length defined, and two kinds which are undefined; and the defined shadow is pyramidal. Of the two undefined, one is a column and the other spreads out; and all three have rectilinear outlines. But the converging, that is the pyramidal, shadow proceeds from a body that is smaller than the light, and the columnar from ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... 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 ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... discipline themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is the only content, is to be attained not by grovelling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continually striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good—"a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night."' And these words are an excellent specimen of the general moral ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... true the danger was only hypothetical and undefined; but it was just this supposititious indefiniteness that caused the difficulty in providing against it. Had it assumed a tangible shape, I might more easily have adopted some means of avoiding it: but no—it remained a shadow, and against a shadow I knew not what precautions to ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... great events and exciting scenes creates a feeling of delight, and sets life in motion, so as to give a pleasure which any one not in the same state would be unable to explain. In fact, a more jovial night we had not passed in the forecastle for months. All seemed in unaccountably high spirits. An undefined anticipation of radical changes, of new scenes and great doings, seemed to have possessed every one, and the common drudgery of the vessel appeared contemptible. Here was a new vein opened,— a grand theme of conversation and a topic for all sorts of discussions. National feeling was wrought up. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... find not, yet I find The ancient joy of cell and church, The glimpse, the surety undefined, The unquenched ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... significance. The work of men like Cantor, Dedekind, Frege, Whitehead, Russell, is providing us with an almost unexceptional theory of the first principles required for pure mathematics. We are already in a position to say with almost complete freedom from uncertainty what undefined simple notions and undemonstrated postulates we have to employ in the science and to express these ultimates without ambiguity. 'Evolutionary science,' rich as is its information about the details of the processes going on in the organic world, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... had ever been, and she spoke no word of her double sorrow and her irreparable loss. Her love for her remaining child never showed itself in caresses, and was not even discernible in her speech; but in spite of her reserve there was an undefined feeling in most people's minds that Mrs. Ogilvie idolized her son. Of the two who were dead no one ever heard her speak. Whatever she thought of them seemed to be buried in her heart as deeply as though that heart had been their ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... poor thing! and for the child too." But perhaps this very child was the only flower of a life else wholly barren and desolate. There is often, even in the humblest and most uncultured nature, an undefined longing and pining for the beautiful. It expresses itself sometimes in the love of birds and of flowers, and one sees the rosebush or the canary bird in a dwelling from which is banished every trace of ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... influence from early babyhood can do. Sally seldom spoke of this mysterious father of hers in any other terms than those she had just used. She had never had an opportunity of making his acquaintance—that was all. In some way, undefined, he had not behaved well to her mother; and naturally she sided with the latter. Once, and once only, her mother had said to her, "Sally darling, I don't wish to talk about your father, but to forget him. I have forgiven him, because of you. Because—how could I have done without ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... as the carriage wheeled into another street, its occupants exchanged easier smiles, and they must have confessed in some subtle way of glances that now at last they were upon their own mission, a mission undefined but earnest to them all. Coleman had a glad feeling of being let into the family, or becoming ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... room for some time, I stopped at last before a looking-glass, pulled a comb out of my pocket, gave a picturesque carelessness to my hair, and, as sometimes happens, became suddenly absorbed in the contemplation of my own face. I remember my attention centred anxiously about my nose; the soft and undefined outlines of that feature afforded me no great satisfaction, when suddenly in the dark depths of the sloping mirror, which reflected almost the whole room, the door opened, and the slender figure of Liza appeared. I don't know why I did not stir, and kept the same ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Through an undefined sense of the duties of hospitality, Elmore was surprised by this impudence into sending out to the next caffe for a pitcher of beer. Rose-Black poured himself out one glass and another till he had emptied the pitcher, conversing affably meanwhile ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... from finding his way by a thick mist which rose as the night fell; one of those mists which come on autumn evenings when the whiteness of the moonlight renders them more undefined and more treacherous. The great pools of water scattered through the glades gave forth a vapor so dense that when the gray crossed them, their presence was known only by a splashing noise, and the difficulty with which she drew her feet from ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... senses. Then, still lying on his stomach, almost holding his breath, he saw the thin line of light from an electric torch steal out along the surface of the sea, obviously from the hand of his fellow watcher. Almost at that same moment the undefined agitation which had assailed him passed. He set his teeth and watched that line of light. It moved slowly sideways along the surface of the sea, as though searching for something. Julian drew himself ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... as usual with all his balloon topsails set, his sea-room limited only by the skein, while his aunt wound her yarn silently, and listened with a face expressive at once of deep interest and hope, mingled with a certain undefined doubt. ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... world—with a period of refined and exquisite [192] tectonics (as the Greeks called all crafts strictly subordinate to architecture), that Greek art actually begins, in what is called the Heroic Age, that earliest, undefined period of Greek civilisation, the beginning of which cannot be dated, and which reaches down to the first Olympiad, about the year 776 B.C. Of this period we possess, indeed, no direct history, and but few actual monuments, great or small; but as to its whole character ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... gained for Big Bill the admiration of the extremely limited number of people who would be called "the public" in the outlying portions of Wyoming; but although contented with himself, Big Bill was always suspicious of a solitary stranger, as he had an undefined idea that some relative of the defunct horse-dealer might draw a trigger upon him unawares. It was this redoubtable Big Bill who now confided to me that he had been running away from some monster grizzly bear only on the preceding ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... 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
... what is it?" said Raeburn, still watching half dreamily the exceeding beauty of the face before him. Yet an undefined sense of dread chilled his heart. Was anything too hard or high for her to propose? He listened without a word to her account of M. Noirol's Parisian scheme, to her voluntary suggestion that she should go into exile for two years. At the end he merely put a brief question. "Are ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... possibilities, the ordinate shows the choice that has been made. Now it is clear at once that this choice has not been made suddenly but gradually. Halfway of the development, the choice is halfway determined, but the other half is still undefined. The first half is the same for all the organs of the plant, and is therefore termed individual; the second differs in the separate members, and consequently is known as partial. Which of the two halves ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... phase in Mr. Wells' history, an unhappy phase for him, presumably, but inevitable. In the uneasy period of irritation and defiance he lost none of his skill in self-portraiture, in projecting himself upon the canvas of modern life. It was that vein of undefined Romanticism in him, according so ill with the life of "public affairs," that put him out of harmony with himself. Such an ideal as he had formed for himself could never by its nature completely satisfy any but the solitary recluse, and had little to give to man in his social capacity, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... reach, she tapped upon the wood-work with the handle of her sunshade. This summons eliciting no response, she repeated it; but by-and-by the opening of a door within the house let out upon her the sound of Sennacherib's voice, hitherto audible only as an undefined and surly buzz. ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... 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 ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Clinch supported himself against the open window, leaning his throbbing head on the cold glass. Shame, mortification, an hysterical half-consciousness of his utter ridiculousness, and yet an odd, undefined terror of something, by turns possessed him. Was he ever before guilty of such perfect folly? Had he ever before made such a spectacle of himself? Was it possible that he, Mr. James Clinch, the coolest head at a late supper,—he, the American, who ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... not one of them would do. No, he wanted a friend, the friend he had often dreamed of, whose thoughts would be his thoughts, with whom there would be no need of speech. Then his longing swelled, grew fiercer and more undefined, and a sudden burst of energy convulsed him and struggled to find vent. His breath came hard, and he stretched his arms out into the night, uncertainly, as if to grasp something he did not see; but they fell to his side again. He would have liked ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... strange perhaps that she should be counting on Sorell's neighbourhood. If she had often petulantly felt at Oxford that he was too good, too high above her to be of much use to her, she might perhaps have felt it doubly now. For although in some undefined way, ever since the night of the Vice-Chancellor's party, she had realised in him a deep interest in her, even a sense of responsibility for her happiness, which made him more truly her guardian than poor harassed Uncle Ewen, she knew very well that she had disappointed him, and ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the steamer was still quite half a mile away, a peculiar change came over the sea. The sun was still shining brightly, but the other boat grew dim and enlarged-looking, as if it were magnified and set in a bluish opal. There was the long range of ice cliff, but it was curiously blue and undefined. ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... wincing, "I never met him there." He recollected that Lucia had expressed more pleasure at Major Campbell's coming than even, at that of her brother; and a dark, undefined phantom entered his heart, which, though he would have been too proud to confess it to himself, was ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... her instructress; and she sought also to teach her the value of useful books; and while one read aloud to the other of deeds historic and names renowned, Frado expe- rienced a new impulse. She felt herself capable of elevation; she felt that this book information supplied an undefined dissatisfaction she had long felt, but could not express. Every leisure moment was carefully applied to self-improve- ment, and a devout and Christian exterior in- vited confidence from the villagers. Thus she passed months of quiet, ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... either of all the things that the subject denotes, or only of some. When the predicate is affirmed or denied of all and each of the things denoted by the subject, the proposition is universal; when of some undefined portion of them only, it is particular. Thus, All men are mortal; Every man is mortal; are universal propositions. No man is immortal, is also a universal proposition, since the predicate, immortal, is denied of each and every individual denoted by the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... a head on 3 August, when the British Minister at Sofia made to the Bulgarian Government a formal offer of Cavalla and an undefined portion of its hinterland, as well as of Servian territory in Macedonia, stating that Great Britain would bring pressure to bear on those countries, and make the cession to them of any compensations elsewhere conditional on their consent ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... have been, whether under ordinary circumstances his natural benevolence and even his patriotism would have continued to war with an undefined feeling of distrust, this letter relieved his doubts, if only because it showed that Jugurtha could never fill a private station. The act of adoption was immediately accomplished, and a testament was drawn up by which Jugurtha was named ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
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