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More "Unintelligible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there was harm in reading the Scriptures without notes: he replied that there was certainly no harm in it, but that simple people, without the help of notes, could derive but little benefit from Scripture, as the greatest part would be unintelligible to them; whereupon I shook hands with him, and on departing said that there was no part of Scripture so difficult to understand as those very notes which were intended to elucidate it, and that it would never have been written if not ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the Christ and the Christianity in which they are called upon to believe, into which they are invited to enter, really is. The lecturer goes up and down the land and in the face of mighty audiences he denounces Christianity. He declares it to be unintelligible and absurd, to be monstrous and brutal. And when you ask what it is that he is thus denouncing, what it is that he is thus convicting over and over again, you find that it is something not simply which makes no part of Christianity, but which is absolutely ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... shifted his head wearily on the pillow. Johnston Smyth murmured something muffled and unintelligible in his sleep. Selwyn placed some new lumps of coal on the fire, the flames licking them eagerly as the sharp crackle of escaping gases punctured the ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the fulfillment of the divine ends, and that reply, would have been clear and complete. One might believe or disbelieve in the divine significance of Napoleon, but for anyone believing in it there would have been nothing unintelligible in the history of that period, nor would there have ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... there are a number of terms which we are in the habit of using in a vague though not unintelligible way, and which it is as well now to define. These terms are the tools with which we are to work, and the first thing is to sharpen them. It is nothing to us that they have been sharpened a thousand times before; they always get dull in the using, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... invented with the view that we should not be able to understand a word about it. In former times, when all law, except club law, was in its infancy, and practitioners not so erudite, or so thriving as at present, it was thought advisable to render it unintelligible by inventing a sort of lingo, compounded of bad French, grafted upon worse Latin, forming a mongrel and incomprehensible race of words, with French heads and Latin tails, which answered the purpose intended—that of mystification.—Flotsam and jetsam are of this breed. Flot, derived from the French ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... about them, being unknown to the common people, and only to be deciphered by the priests. Obelisks and pyramids were the great national records; and on these the hieroglyphics were constantly used, because unintelligible to the people, until expounded by those who had the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... precaution in connection with the purchase of transformers. They should do the same thing for all the important frequencies which they are to transmit. If they do not, the speech or signals will be distorted and may be unintelligible. ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... cafes, and rude musical instruments are brought forth, each nationality amusing itself after its own fashion. Strange and not inharmonious airs fall upon the ear, supplemented by songs, the words of which are utterly unintelligible, except to the circle of participants. The whole scene forms a strange picture, as parti-colored as Harlequin's costume, while the whole is watched by the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... surrender the position that if they became predominant they would be entitled to enforce their own views no less rigidly. No one thought of protesting against the burning of one Joan Bocher, in 1550, for affirming a peculiarly unintelligible heresy concerning the mode ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Crise on a stretch of five miles east of Buzancy. It was a mistake of nord-uest for nord-est which was never corrected, and has got into most of the summaries and histories of the war, although it makes the subsequent French fighting in that area unintelligible. The history of the German evacuation of the salient would have been very different had the French got east of Buzancy on the 18th. As a matter of fact, it took them eleven days to secure the territory credited to them by this error on the 18th.] Mangin reached the Montagne de ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... before eleven that morning she waked suddenly out of slumber with lips muttering rapidly. They, bending close, caught the words "Saviour—dear Saviour—help—at the last." By the time they had summoned John, though the muttering continued, the words were unintelligible: yet they knew she ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... into a narrow fissure. I fully expected, from the analogy of B. capreolata and B. littoralis, that the tips would have been developed into adhesive discs; but I could never detect even a trace of this process. There is therefore at present something unintelligible about the ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... clearly what happened then. I have a vague memory of the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some unintelligible account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted the ambiguous telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was dead. That was all I could think of. The only coherent remark I heard the man make was that it was a dreadful thing to happen at Christmas. Barbara gripped ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... thought on awakening was for his chum. Charley was tossing restlessly on his blanket, his face and hands flushed and hot with fever. All of Walter's attempts to rouse him met only with unintelligible words and phrases. The exertion of the previous day in his weak state, the opening of his wound afresh, and the unhealthy river water he had drank, had all combined to bring him to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the grass." And then in some incoherent and quick manner she had to explain what she knew of the accident before she could get a carriage-cloak out of the carriage. This, however, she did succeed in doing, and in some manner, very unintelligible to herself afterwards, she did gallop back with her burden. She passed the cloak over to Peregrine, who clambered up the bank to get it, while the judge remained on the ground, supporting the young barrister. Felix Graham, though he was weak, was not stunned or ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... lines. The resulting effect would not be serious enough to in any way hinder our operations, but photographically it was disastrous, and even if photographed the effect would not be impressive in the slightest degree, merely a wall of smoke which to the public would appear unintelligible. But in that seemingly useless cloud were falling thousands of shells of all calibres, tearing the earth into dust, the German line into fragments, forming a living and death-dealing curtain of blazing steel behind ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... to earth and flowers; and through the haze, (Save where some slender patches of grey maize Are to be over-leaped) that boy has crossed The whole hill-side of dew and powder-frost Matting the balm and mountain camomile. Up and up goes he, singing all the while Some unintelligible words to beat The lark, God's ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... they went to the parlor. Black coffee and cognac were served. Orlowski quickly gulped down his coffee and left the room, kissing Janina on the forehead and growling some unintelligible remark as he departed. ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... This was rather unintelligible to Ruth, who was nevertheless somewhat amused by the study of a type of character she had seen before. At length she ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... violently against our shelter, as if it claimed all those homeless people for its lawful prey, while we, caring little for the displeasure of the elements, sat comfortably talking. There was now an attempt to open the door, succeeded by a voice uttering some strange, unintelligible gibberish which my companions mistook for Greek and I suspected to be thieves' Latin. However, the showman stepped forward and gave admittance to a figure which made me imagine either that our wagon had rolled back two ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spotted here and there with little lights. Behind us a cock crowed. The shingle crashed at intervals beneath the feet of a large body of men. I remembered the smugglers; but it was as if I had remembered them only to forget them forever. Old Rangsley, who steered with the sheet in his hand, kept up an unintelligible babble. Carlos and Castro talked under their breaths. Along the gunwale there was a constant ripple and gurgle. Suddenly old Rangsley began to sing; his ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but, of late, even every word I use, being alike inconceivable to the insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr. Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist—as far as it had any—was that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I found the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... that flowed above and around and about him always seemed to shut out an intangible world beyond, and to be the only real presence. The booming of breakers scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a vague and unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past forever. Every morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he awoke, dazed and bewildered, as upon a new world. The first sense of oppression over, he came to love at last this subtle spirit of ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... of the world is achieved. The seamen listened with admiration, for they understood no part of the appeal; and, next to a statement which shall be so lucid as to induce every hearer to believe it is no more than a happy explanation of his own ideas, that which is unintelligible is apt to unite most suffrages ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... a perfect art in being unintelligible in discourse and uncomeatable in business. But he, having no understanding in his polite way, brought in upon us, to get in his money, ladder-dancers, rope-dancers, jugglers, and mountebanks, to strut in the place of Shakespeare's ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... ridiculous composition of arrogance, disputation, and contradictions; that some of them acted against all ideas of decency; that others affected to doubt of their own senses; that some, for venting unintelligible nonsense, pretended to think themselves superior to kings; that they gave themselves airs of accounting for all that we do and do not see-and yet, that no two of them agreed in a single hypothesis; that one thought fire, another water, the origin ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... way in which Herbert Spencer reasoned these things out, and his high literary style, which made him unintelligible to all those whose minds were not of scientific bent, and his emphatic statement that what is, is right, and all the steps in man's development mean a mounting to better things, saved him from the severe treatment that greeted, say, Charles Bradlaugh, who translated the higher ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... of half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly unintelligible articles—a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the word "left" and the characters ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... work is done," concluded Miss Caroline, as she turned to rustle silkily out. Whereat Chester Pierce, charter member and President of our Sons of Temperance, a man primed with all statistics of the woe resulting traditionally from that first careless glass, murmured words unintelligible but of gratified import, and bowed low after the retreating vision. A moment later he was staring with mystified absorption at the hat in his hands, quite as if the hat were a stranger's—and then he brushed it around and around with the cuff of his coat ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... opened his faded eyes, and fixed them upon his nephew's face. He tried to speak, but his voice was thick and his words were unintelligible. ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... establishment, almost divide the village into two equal parts; yet this close proximity does not appear to encourage any friendly intercourse between the two tribes. They in fact seldom pass their respective limits, and, with few exceptions, cannot converse together, the language of the one being unintelligible to the other. ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... are after now," you say; "they'll upset the coach before they've done with it. You won't be able to do your share in the business, and we——" "Not do our share in the business? Why not? Of course we——" "Yes, yes, I know that; but you really must help us. One of those unintelligible masterpieces of yours all about prostitution of sea-power, and periscopes and that sort of poppy-cock with which you always know how to bluff the lubbers." "Well, we'll see what we can do"—and the extinguisher is dexterously and effectually applied. Co-operation ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... speak later and more confusedly; the extreme attention paid to everything they say makes it unnecessary for them to speak distinctly, and as they will scarcely open their mouths, many of them contract a vicious pronunciation and a confused speech, which last all their life and make them almost unintelligible. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Brothers, not quite easy in his chair, "from my birthday. I am, to myself, an unintelligible book with the earlier chapters all torn out, and thrown away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?" His eyes meeting hers as they were addressed intently to him, something seemed to stir within his ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... is so infinitely abstracted and replete with high enthusiasm, that it will find few readers capable of entering into the spirit of it, or of relishing its beauties. There is a style of sentiment as utterly unintelligible to common capacities, as if the subject were treated in an unknown language; and it is on the same account that abstracted poetry will ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... when Horace made that answer, the safety of Rome was concerned; but, as for us, it is only to gratify a whim, and it would be ridiculous to risk our lives for so foolish a motive." Albert poured himself out a glass of lacryma Christi, which he sipped at intervals, muttering some unintelligible words. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... reference, which may or may not be accurate, or somebody's private secretary telephones somebody else's private secretary, asks for a memorandum, and in the course of time a darkey messenger arrives with an armful of unintelligible reports. The Department should be able to call on its own intelligence bureau to assemble the facts in a way suited to the diplomatic problem up for decision. And these facts the diplomatic intelligence bureau would obtain from the central clearing house. [Footnote: There has been a vast development ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... promise, or fails, through neglect, to furnish food to those who depend on him. Death, Ellen knew, is the penalty for both crimes in the remote places of Alaska. As she went forward she heard the White Chief's name and some words that were unintelligible to her. Then Shane came to his feet. He was speaking in a voice toneless, dispassionate, but weighted ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... of the stage, who picks up pocket-books and never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... you must be," said Florence, kissing her. To this Fanny made some unintelligible demur. It was undoubtedly possible that, under the altered circumstances of the case, so strange a being as Mr. Saul might have ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... unintelligible stuff. Finally Lord Mountfalcon said: "I went out of my way, sir, in speaking to you. I saw you from the window. Your friend is mad. Deuced methodical, I admit, but mad. I have particular reasons to wish not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not read a word, and to the best of my belief never will. I wish you had been more critical, and had pointed out the faults and defects of the book, of which there are no doubt some, if not many, to be found. I flatter myself that I have made more clear some passages utterly unintelligible in our A.V., such as, "He shall deliver the island of the innocent, yea," etc., chap. xxii. 30, and chap, xxxvi. 33, and the whole of chap. xxiv. and chap. xx. What a fierce, cruel, hot-headed Arab Zophar is! How the wretch gloats over Job's miseries. Yet one admires ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... this feeling,—"the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world into the unchangeable and endless next,—I have heard him, with deep feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel's ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... and so made the pathway wider than his single footsteps could have made it. But all this was idle, and was, indeed, only the foolish babble that hovers like a mist about men who withdraw themselves from the throng, and involve themselves in unintelligible pursuits and interests of their own. For the present, the small world, which alone knew of him, considered Septimius as a studious young man, who was fitting for the ministry, and was likely enough to do credit to the ministerial blood that he drew from his ancestors, in spite of the wild stream ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... alone into a retired cabinet, and said to him, "Explain yourself; what does Monseigneur le Prince de Conde wish to communicate to me?" Fauche was embarrassed, and stammered out something unintelligible. "Compose yourself." said Pichegru; "my sentiments are the same, as the Prince de Conde's. What does he desire of me?" Fauche, encouraged by these words, replied, "The Prince wishes to join you. He counts on you, and wishes ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... conducted in the native tongue it was unintelligible to Nigel, but after the interview with the chief the hermit explained matters to him, and bade Moses get ready for a start several ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... phrases, whether he was addressing Turk, Jew, or Christian. Lingua Franca—a compound of nearly all the languages spoken on the shores of the Mediterranean—was the tongue most in use at the Marina of Algiers at that time, but as this would be unintelligible to our reader, we will give Blindi's conversations in his favourite language. What his real name was we have failed to discover. The loss of his eye had obtained for him in the navy the name of Blind Bob. In his native city this was Italianised into Blindi Bobi. But Bobi was ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... fact, entire repose is strictly enforced in every well-regulated household and school. A German girl would consider the idea of going to a party at such times as simply preposterous; and the difference that exists in this respect in America is wholly unintelligible to them. ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... Having been guilty)—Ver. 5. Chambry, one of the French Editors, omits this, as unworthy of Phaedrus, and Adry pronounces it unintelligible. The meaning of this, which is Jannelli's version, seems to be: "When you ought not to please yourself, you do please yourself, in committing the crime; but the consequence is that, afterwards, when you ought ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... feud. A Beckett was not unnaturally angry, and an angry man in his passion is apt to lose both his head and his memory. Forgetting the manner in which he had shortly before acknowledged the services and talent of the artist, he now attacked him and his abilities with a malice which would be unintelligible if we had not seen something of his nature and disposition. In his favourite "Notices to Correspondents" in the number of 13th September, 1834, he professes to account for the employment of Isaac Robert Cruikshank ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... subject. He never heard Grisi, never saw Rachel; they were triflers, 'life was too grave, too short;' but he escorted me occasionally to lectures and orations. I remember two or three of these. A lecture on the 'Fossils of Humanity and Primeval Formations,' which was unintelligible, consequently to him 'sublime;' one on 'the Exalted,' that soared out of sight and beyond the empire of gravity, and one on 'Architecture,' by Dr. Vinton, a splendid production, the fruit and evidence of years of study and rare talent, that sent me home with longings and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the meaning was again, though he read the lines over, quite unintelligible. He was, about to make inquiries, but he felt convinced that the Fairy would be both to divulge the decrees of Heaven; and though intent upon discarding the book, he could not however tear himself away from it. Forthwith, therefore, he prosecuted a further perusal of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... allegories. The Alexandrian form of Judaism might satisfy the intellect, but it could not appeal to the feelings. It may have made Judaism accessible to the cultivated minority, to the upper ten thousand with philosophic training; for the masses of the heathen people Judaism continued unintelligible. Yet it was pre-eminently the masses that were strongly possessed by religious craving. Disappointed in their old beliefs, they panted after a new belief, after spiritual enlightenment. In the decaying classical world, which had so long filled out ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... got into Papa, and are doing the mischief. Trusting to memory alone, she misdates, mistakes, misplaces; jumbles all things topsy-turvy;—giving, on the whole, an image of affairs which is altogether oblique, dislocated, exaggerative; and which, in fine, proves unintelligible, if you try to construe it into a fact or thing DONE. Yet her Human Narrative, in that wide waste of merely Pedant Maunderings, is of great worth to us. A green tree, a leafy grove, better or worse, in the wilderness of dead bones and sand,—how welcome! Many other Books have been ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... I come, with some hesitation, to the trial. Hesitation, because I relied on McWhirter to keep a record. And McWhirter, from his notes, appears to have been carried away at times by excitement, and either jotted down rows of unintelligible words, or waited until evening and made up his notes, like a woman's expense account, from a memory never ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... heard them express it in speech, for in this way they cannot communicate with one another; but certain looks and gestures exchanged, unintelligible to others, have been easily interpreted by the Indian as the signs of a secret and ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... individual member of each class, as distinguished from the time when that class occupied the foremost place in the ranks of creation, would have been inconsistent with the simplicity and brevity of the narrative, while it would have been unintelligible to those for whom the narrative was intended, since these primeval types had passed out of existence ages before the creation of man. It is, however, noteworthy, that the first appearances of the several orders follow precisely the same arrangement ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... down," cried the Steel King. "Here, Jack,"—this to the aged garcon, "smoke up! and ask the ladies what they'll have"—all of which was unintelligible to the two little Parisiennes and the garcon, but quite clear in ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... a little and two figures, apparently male and female, came to Zaidie and held out their right hands and began addressing her in perfectly harmonised song, which, though utterly unintelligible to her in the sense of speech, expressed sentiments which could not possibly be mistaken, as there was a faint suggestion of the old English song running through the little song-speech that they made, and both Zaidie and her husband rightly concluded that it was intended ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... it was perceived by sight or touch. This is all that I can understand by these and the like expressions. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things, without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi; nor is it possible that they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking thing which ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... canvas, and they scudded off up the river like mad. The great difficulty was the steering; but it was rip-roaring fun, the Boy said, and very soon there were natives running down to the river, to stare open-mouthed at the astounding apparition, to point and shout something unintelligible that sounded like "Muchtaravik!" ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... this latter nation, a certain learned character, which was used by the priests for their mystic records, and also for certain sacred books which constituted the only national archives. It was, however, only slowly and with difficulty that this character could be penned, and, when penned, it was unintelligible to the great mass of the population. For this reason, among others, the Greeks wrote narratives of the great events which occurred in their day, which narratives they so embellished and adorned by the picturesque lights and shades in which their genius ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Sully growled an unintelligible reply, but that he recognized the truth of the lad's words was evident when he slowly dropped his clenched fist to ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... moving swiftly up the slow current of the stream. The sunlight flashed on their wet sides. The gleam of dripping paddles was like the flutter of silvery birds' wings, and across the water came an unintelligible shout in response to the rifle shot. It occurred to David that he might make a trumpet of his hands and shout back, but the distance was too great for his voice to carry its message for help. Besides, now that he had the ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... a taste of her tongue, nor would he have looked so upset about it. But you know the fellow's way; whenever it's important for him to make himself clear he loses what little power of speech he has, becomes worse than dumb-unintelligible. He sputtered inconsequent ejaculations at me in ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... interrogatory note in them. The assistants were willing, but puzzled. They did not like to leave their posts without specific instructions, and Buck, shouting as he clattered over the bare boards, was unintelligible. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... pickle-jar and wide-mouthed bottle, unless he is with them and barking tremendously. There is a dog residing in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind man. He may be seen most days, in Oxford Street, haling the blind man away on expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the man; wholly of the dog's conception and execution. Contrariwise, when the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the money-tray like an easy collar, instead of offering it to the public, taking the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... oracles; which, from the Deity by whom they were supposed to be uttered, were called Omphi and Amphi, as I have shewn: also, Alphi, Elphi, Orphi, Urphi, from El, and Orus. The Greeks adhered religiously to antient terms, however obsolete and unintelligible. They retained the name of Amphi, though they knew not the meaning: for it was antiquated before they had letters. That it originally related to oracular revelation is plain from its being always found annexed to the names of places famous on that account; and from ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... course was a mistake, and "that the work to be exhaustive should comprise every message of the Presidents transmitting reports of heads of Departments and other communications, no matter how brief or unintelligible the papers were in themselves, and that to make them intelligible I should insert editorial footnotes explaining them. Having acted upon the other idea in making up Volume I and a portion of Volume II, quite a number of such brief papers were intentionally omitted. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 10. • James D. Richardson
... the work are in the handwriting of Montaigne, and the rest is written by a servant, who always speaks of his master in the third person. But he must have written what Montaigne dictated, as the expressions and the egotisms are all Montaigne's. The bad writing and orthography made it almost unintelligible. They confirmed Montaigne's own observation, that he was very negligent in the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... narrow limits prescribed by his friends. In more respects that one, was this a good resolve; for so completely had he identified himself with college habits, things, and phrases, that whenever he conversed, he became little short of unintelligible to the vulgar—a difficulty not decreased by ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... a torrent of almost unintelligible words, he poured forth the tale of his discovery: what had come to him in the study at Crumford Hall, the locket he had found, the letters he had read, the episode of his past he had lived over, the poem which had swept him up among the gods in its reading—all the sequence of facts ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... going on; they called to those in the village, and on being answered we again went on for about half a mile, when every bundle was put down and a halt called, and again we had to listen to the unintelligible story of the wild animal or animals that would destroy us. We sat down and tried to get them to see as we did, that a house was necessary for our comfort. A thunderstorm was working up, and soon the rain would be down on us—let ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... figure of the enraged Chief, whose every feature was distorted by excited passions. He stood with his tomahawk uplifted, and his tall and muscular figure in an attitude of command and defiance; while, in a loud and distinct voice, he uttered a vow of vengeance, the words of which were unintelligible to the settlers, though the meaning could easily be guessed from his looks and gestures. Then he hung his battle-axe to his gaudy belt, and pointing his hand at Rodolph, he retired slowly and majestically like a lion discomfited but not subdued, to seek his people and to upbraid them ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... (308, 8) [ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me] Though this be perhaps not unintelligible, yet it is an odd way of confessing his dejection. I should wish ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... It was a theme that did not fit into his programme. He was casting about for an evasive reply when an unintelligible wheezing exclamation drew all eyes to the corner in which the landsturm officer and his wife were sitting. The others had almost forgotten them in the darkness and exchanged frightened glances when they heard a voice that scarcely one of ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... character, have suffered severely at the hands of his abbreviators, who omitted the majority of the names which seemed to them very barbarous in form, while those who copied these abbreviated lists have made such further havoc with them that they are now for the most part unintelligible. Modern criticism has frequently attempted to restore them, with varying results; the reconstruction here given, which passes for the most probable, is not equally certain in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to read scarcely represents the facts of the case; to say that we had taken it without leave, read bits here and read bits there, been carried away by an undreamed-of and hitherto unimagined whirlwind into things, times, places, all utterly absorbing, and at the same time absolutely unintelligible to us, would more accurately describe our state of mind on that summer's evening as we look at Jane Eyre—the great Jane Eyre—the tiny little lady. The moment is so breathless that dinner comes as a relief to the solemnity of the occasion, and we all smile as my father ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... extent of his technical library, which Wiggleswick had overlooked in his statement of the salvage from the burned-down house at Shepherd's Bush. Now and then he would creep from the shyness which enveloped the inventive side of his nature, and would talk with her with unintelligible earnestness of these dreadful engines; of radial and initial hoop pressures, of drift angles, of ballistics, of longitudinal tensions, and would jot down trigonometrical formulae illustrated by diagrams ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... at him with a puzzled but gently reproachful eye, for the tone was rude, and the words unintelligible. Good-natured, though crusty, Jorian had not thrown up three spadefuls ere he became ashamed of it himself. "Why, what a base churl am I to speak thus to thee, holy father; and thou a standing there, looking ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... thoughts; can fulfill but cannot intelligently sympathize with God's purposes. Man, alone among God's works, can enter into and approve of God's purpose in the world and can intelligently fulfill it. Without man the whole material universe would have been dark and unintelligible, mechanical and apparently without any sufficient purpose. Matter, however fearfully and wonderfully wrought, is but the platform and material in which spirit, intelligence and will, may fulfill themselves and ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... garden! In my presence!" cried the stranger, stamping up and down the gravel and choking with laughter, "whether there is a God!" And he went stamping up and down the garden, making it echo with his unintelligible laughter. Then he came back to them more composed and ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... and made it subservient to his exaltation of honor; this epaulet of the officer, and blood of the gentleman, this simple possession of knighthood not laid on by perfunctory steel, but springing from within—all this, I grieve to say, was partly unintelligible to Maruja, and not entirely satisfactory. Since he had entered the room they seemed to have changed their situations; he was no longer the pleading lover that trembled at her feet. For one base moment she thought it was the result of his knowledge of her mother's weakness; ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... one outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of Fuji-yama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practiced them, the law tottered—the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... still remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness for life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning, and the more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is his position, as when one looks into it, it is evident that he is working for the amusement of a rapacious and unclean animal, and is supporting the existing order. And I don't care to work and I won't work. . . . Nothing is ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... granddaughter. Valentine, by means of her love, her patience, and her devotion, had learned to read in Noirtier's look all the varied feelings which were passing in his mind. To this dumb language, which was so unintelligible to others, she answered by throwing her whole soul into the expression of her countenance, and in this manner were the conversations sustained between the blooming girl and the helpless invalid, whose body could scarcely be called a living one, but who, nevertheless, possessed ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... volubility is rather a contradiction to the yea and nay appellation of the country. A respectable Frenchman informed us, that the peasants of Languedoc were considered to possess much wit and ingenuity by those who could understand their patois, which he frankly owned was unintelligible to himself. Their liveliness and animal exuberance are as strong a contrast to the immoveable form into which they are swathed when infants, as the flutter of a butterfly is to its torpidity as a chrysalis; indeed a fanciful person might be apt to suppose, that on emerging from their bandages, they ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... forward and communicated with our party. They carried spears with them, and each of our gentlemen had their fowling-pieces: the appearance of Bundell, who on these occasions always took his clothes off, perhaps gave them greater confidence. After some vociferous and unintelligible parley, one of our gentlemen, in order to give them further cause for the surprise which they had already manifested to a great extent, unadvisedly fired his fowling-piece; upon which, as might be expected, they became distrustful and frightened, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... halted in a gasp and an unintelligible muttering in the throat. Of a sudden, darkening, ominous, fateful, the shadow within the entrance had silently advanced until it stood beside them, paused so with folded arms. Simultaneously the wife and the invader saw, realised. Instantly, instinctively, like similar repellent poles, they sprang ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... this much is certain, that lucidity is one of the chief characteristics of sanity. A sane man ought not to be unintelligible. Lucidity is good everywhere, for all time and in all things, in a letter, in a speech, in a book, in a poem. Lucidity is not simplicity. A lucid poem is not necessarily an easy one. A great poet may tax our brains, but he ought not to puzzle our wits. We may often ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... people sleep lightly on that frontier. Word came of native riots in the south, at Lahore and Amritsar, and the line of towns which mark the way to Delhi. In some places extraordinary accidents were reported. Certain officers had gone off on holiday and had not returned; odd and unintelligible commands had come to perplex the minds of others; whole camps were reported sick where sickness was least expected. A little rising of certain obscure rivers had broken up an important highway by destroying all the bridges ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... the hopeless task of making him hear, and listened intently. She could make no sense of what he said. The few words she could catch were repeated a hundred times amid an unintelligible murmur. The boat, and Loftus, and her own name—and Crack. Who was Crack? She remembered the little dog which had been drowned. And the lips which were so soon to be silent talked on incoherently while Rachel's ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... at first in a world of total mystery. Sights, sounds, sensations from contact come to him and all are unintelligible. As they are carried to his brain, somewhere, somehow, they awaken a desire to know their meaning, and as the tiny fingers are extended toward objects the soul is reaching also. This soul reaching is curiosity, one of God's most gracious and ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... water, and cubes, and sybils, and Mother Church, &c. &c. Poor fellow. I have been introduced to a man, not unlike him in his ideas,—Taylor the Pagan, a most devout Heathen! who seems to have some hopes of me. He is equally unintelligible, but his eye has not that inexpressible wildness, which sometimes half-terrified us ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... talk to you. Tell the hairy doctor that I am now strong enough to be allowed to go to the communicator screen. That is all." The Vorkul's mind again became an oblivious maze of unintelligible thoughts. Not deliberately were Kromodeor's thoughts hidden; he was constitutionally unable to interest himself in the thoughts or ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all—for though, certainly, he sat talking to Bonamy, half of what he said was too dull to repeat; much unintelligible (about unknown people and Parliament); what remains is mostly a matter of guess work. Yet over him ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Persian proverb and is absolutely unintelligible, unless one happens to know that the Persian word for "ostrich" is [Arabic], ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... under his left ear, and jerking his head over on the right shoulder; a piece of dumb show which the Jew appeared to understand perfectly. He then, in cant terms, with which his whole conversation was plentifully besprinkled, but which would be quite unintelligible if they were recorded here, demanded a ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... proceedings in parliament are unintelligible, without a knowledge of the facts to which they relate, and of the state of the nations to which they extend their influence, we shall exhibit monthly a view, though contracted, yet distinct, of foreign affairs, and lay open the designs and interests of those nations which are considered by the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... Minstrel's Song, on the Restoration of Lord Clifford the Shepherd, which is in a very different strain of poetry; and then the volume is wound up with an 'Ode,' with no other title but the motto, Paulo majora canamus. This is, beyond all doubt, the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication. We can pretend to give no analysis or explanation of it;—our readers must make what they can of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... could there be between these various requisites? And then there was the disheartening fact that the situation was not a permanent one, but terminable from day to day, according to the terms of the advertisement. The more I pondered over it the more unintelligible did it become; but at the end of my meditations I always came back to the ground fact that, come what might, I had nothing to lose, that I was completely at the end of my resources, and that I was ready for any adventure, however desperate, which would put a few honest sovereigns ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inseparable companions of faith. I do not say that I would imitate all the unmeaning and irreverent practices of the Romish church; and least of all could one wish to see the devout and solemn manner of the Protestant ministering at the altar supplanted by the unintelligible mumblings of the Latin breviaries: but why have we denounced the holy symbol of the cross, the ornaments of the temple, the graceful attire, and the aid of music? It is impossible, I think, for the American, who has visited Europe, not to feel the want of edifices reared in ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... merchant went with us, and I took several pieces of gold with me, which I offered to the honest fellows who had so generously and voluntarily rendered us such efficient service; when, to my still greater surprise, they, to a man, making a low bow, and muttering something, which to me was unintelligible, put their hands on their hearts, and refused to accept it. The merchant, who understood a word or two only of their language, said that he could make out that what they had said was, that we were brothers, and in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... vision could not penetrate. He put into this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible. But I have only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the bill, and knocked at the door. A servant appeared, of whom Alonzo enquired for the lodger. The servant answered him in French, which Alonzo did not understand: he replied in his own language, but found it was unintelligible to the servant. A grave middle aged gentleman then came to the door from within the room and ended their jabbering at each other: he, in the English language, desired Alonzo to walk in. It was an apartment, ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... men and women, drawn across the pavement and road alike, so that it seemed impossible to pass by them. I inquired of my driver what this assembling of the people meant. "Oh," says he, "Barrymore has made another hit." This answer being perfectly unintelligible to me, I requested some further explanation, and discovered that "Barrymore" was the name of a stage-player favored by the populace; that the building was a theater, and that all these creatures with immortal souls were waiting, before the doors opened, to get ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... faith on the part of the recipient was necessary for the efficacy of the sacrament. With respect to the second point, the religious principles upon which Luther based his doctrine were altogether strange and unintelligible to the scholastic standpoint of Cajetan; mere tittering and laughter followed Luther's observations, and he was required to retract this thesis unconditionally. The first point settled the question of papal authority. The Cardinal-legate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... galskaber, an expression which carries with it, in this sense, a confession of wilful paradox. In something of the same spirit, Robert Browning, in the old days before he was comprehended, used to speak of "the entirely unintelligible Sordello," as if, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... 1: This phrase is a conjectural emendation of the unintelligible expression, "as the Devil said to the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... bonnet trembled aguishly on her head, the good woman advanced, shaking every moveable object in the room, straight to the tea-table, and enfolded Madonna in her capacious arms. The girl's light figure seemed to disappear in a smothering circumambient mass of bonnet ribbons and unintelligible drapery, as Mrs. Peckover saluted her with a rattling fire of kisses, the report of which was audible above the voluble talking of Mr. Blyth and the boisterous laughter ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... of woods. I followed, rationally, and had come to a blacksmith's shop, at the corner of a diverging road, when I was made aware of some startling occurrence in my rear. A mounted officer dashed past me, shouting some unintelligible tidings, and he was followed in quick succession by a dozen cavalry-men, who rode as if the foul fiend was at their heels. Then came a teamster, bare-backed, whose rent harness trailed in the road, and directly some wagons that ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... so the frightful dream faces blended in terrible, spectral changes, one horrible visage drove out another, till Panna, with a low cry of fear, suddenly started from her troubled sleep. A heavy hand had grasped her by the shoulder, and a harsh voice shouted unintelligible words ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... about joint stock companies, trust fund companies, municipal bonds and debentures," said the magnate, unrolling a bundle of unintelligible papyrus showing assets which did not exist, and spreading them out on the bed in front of his victim. The whole system had been premeditated and had been systematically worked out. "Now," said the shark, pointing at long and encouraging figures, "those are ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... a few specimens of the almost unintelligible answers dragged from her, as it were, after much ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... magical work and muttered some unintelligible words in a sepulchral voice, looked at the remaining millet-seeds, and watched the way in which the toad retired. Then after seven or eight minutes, she turned her white eyes on the cards ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... words I have quoted unintelligible, like the parrot's prating? Perhaps the language may be reconstructed; perhaps it may be found to embody something worth a hearing. Success is most likely to come by considering the growth of alchemy; by trying to find the ideas which were expressed in the strange tongue; ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... without prejudice and respect of persons. Indeed, we know that the ancient philosophers were a ridiculous composition of arrogance, disputation, and contradictions; that some of them acted against all ideas of decency; that others affected to doubt of their own senses; that some, for venting unintelligible nonsense, pretended to think themselves superior to kings; that they gave themselves airs of accounting for all that we do and do not see-and yet, that no two of them agreed in a single hypothesis; that one thought fire, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... think of that growing proportion of readers who belong entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... though with a severe chill. Marks was the victim of something ghastly. He seemed to be trying to make sense, as though there was still a glimmer of intelligence behind the blank stare. But his words were disconnected, completely unintelligible. ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... Orange till half past five, but were fortunate in finding a civil reception at the Palais Royal, the first inn on entering the town. We met with no adventures to-day of any kind. The language of the people has now become completely unintelligible; it is a Patois of the most horrible nature. Many of the better sort of people among the peasants, are able to speak French with you, but where they have only their own dialect, you are completely at a loss. I had conceived, that there would be no more difference between ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... not see the boy in the branches of the tree; but from their elevated position the white and red flag was in plain view. Up and down, and crosswise, it continued to write its message, that was doubtless like printed letters to Paul and Jack, while unintelligible to those who had never taken lessons ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... gracious at first, looks over a picture-book with Miss Helena, and makes eager but unintelligible remarks respecting the "bow-wows" and "moos," to which Miss Helena answers, "Um, dear," as being the safest thing to say. But now he is silent, and has been so for at ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... heredity in all its manifestations as a mode of memory. I submit that this conception is not derivable from Mr. Spencer's writings, and that even the passages in which he approaches it most closely are unintelligible till read by the light of Professor Hering's address and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... traveller does not know the fixed prices, he is certain to be dreadfully imposed upon. At every station a book lies, containing the legal prices; but it is written in the language of the district, and utterly unintelligible to the stranger. Into this book, which is examined by the judge of the district every month, one may enter complaints against the peasant or publican; but they do not seem to fear it, for the guide who accompanied me to the fall of Rykanfoss endeavoured to cheat me twice in the most ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... of this long-deferred spectacle, assuring, as it seemed to do, their safety and their return home. To Xenophon and to the rear-guard—engaged in repelling the attack of natives who had come forward to revenge the plunder of their territory—the shout was unintelligible. They at first imagined that the natives had commenced attack in front as well as in the rear, and that the van-guard was engaged in battle. But every moment the shout became louder, as fresh men came to the summit and gave vent to their feelings; so that Xenophon ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... will have some idea of it. And above all, his Italian! I gathered that he was a Neapolitan, and we all know what Neapolitan dialect is like. Tuscans and Romans, who between them I believe—Lingua Toscano in Bocca Romana, you remember—know how to speak their own tongue, find Neapolitans totally unintelligible. For myself, and I speak for mio sposo as well, I do not want to understand what Romans do not understand. La bella lingua ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... day what he had seen a couple of Chinamen do in a Californian garden. They had a flower-bed to plant, about forty feet long; and each a basket of seedlings to plant it with, and a slip of wood for a model, with mystic unintelligible signs inscribed thereon: WELCOME HOME in English capitals. One went to one end of the bed and the other to the other, and they began their planting. They made no measurements or calculations; used no rod or ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... express invitation). He behaved like an angel, everybody said, and looked very pretty, I said myself; only he disgraced us all at last by refusing to kiss the baby, on the ground of his being 'troppo grande.' He has learnt quantities of English words, and is in consequence more unintelligible than ever. Poor darling! I am in pain about him to-day. Wilson goes to spend a fortnight with her mother, and I don't know how I shall be comforter enough. There will be great wailing and gnashing of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... was in the days of the Mysteries, and so it will be until whatever is to be the end of mortal things. Fitness for the finer truths cannot be conferred; it must be developed. Without it the teachings of the sages are enigmas that seem unintelligible, if not contradictory. In so far, then, as the discipline of initiation, and its use of art in drama and symbol, help toward purity of soul and spiritual awakening, by so much do they prepare men for the truth; ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... still hardly penetrated. The inhabitants, of whom there are only one and a half to the square mile, live here and there among the fens and eke out a miserable existence by frog-fishing and catching flies. They speak a dialect so broken as to be practically unintelligible, while the perpetual rain which falls upon them renders speech ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... but continued to glare wildly at the faces bent over him. He occasionally groaned and muttered a few unintelligible words. ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... glanced over the cabalistic cipher there traced. "Lyons—Marseilles—Rome—Algeria," he murmured. "All goes well." And while the wonderful register, like a thing of life, still whizzed, clicked and delivered its magic scroll, covered with characters unintelligible to all but him for whose eye they were designed, he touched a spring, and a row of ivory keys resembling those of a piano-forte was revealed. Then rapidly touching them with the fingers of one hand, while he ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... thrillingly that it was no wonder they came from her lips with a very peculiar and moving utterance; that is the way with words that are spoken from the heart; and although indeed the lovely sentences might have passed by her hearers, as trite or unintelligible or obsolete, the inflexions of Dolly's voice caught the hearts of both parents and stirred them involuntarily with an answering thrill. She did not know it; she did know that they were very still and listening; and after the reading was done, though she trembled a little, her own feelings ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... turned towards the Cross, reading the name, and they made a sign with the hands in unison, a rapid crisscross motion over the breast, the forehead, the eyes, ending in the low murmur of a word, unintelligible, like a pledge. Then the first mask to the left rose ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... we have another language which is largely spoken in the centre and north of Fuh-kien. This has many points of resemblance to the Amoy, but is quite unintelligible to the Amoy people, with the exception of an ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... a white-smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles and close-cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professional assurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell's stare and spoke; his words were utterly unintelligible, ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... something perfunctory in his attitude: his eyes were continually straying to the window, whence the illuminated Falloner festivities could be seen between the trees, and his ears were more intent on the songs and laughter that came faintly from the distance than on the feverish breathing and unintelligible ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... out of his way merely to inform me that his wife had given him a taste of her tongue, nor would he have looked so upset about it. But you know the fellow's way; whenever it's important for him to make himself clear he loses what little power of speech he has, becomes worse than dumb-unintelligible. He sputtered inconsequent ejaculations at ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... and Aru, of several distinct species of Euploea and Diadema, having broad bands or patches of white, which do not exist in any of the allied species from the larger islands. These facts seem to indicate some local influence in modifying colour, as unintelligible and almost as remarkable as that which has resulted in the modifications of ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... transforms himself into a tree to escape notice, a superstition which under a variety of forms still lingers here and there.[2] It would seem, too, that in some of our old legends and superstitions the terms Puck and Devil are synonymous, a circumstance which explains the meaning, otherwise unintelligible, of many items of plant-lore in our own and other countries. Thus the word "Puck" has been identified with Pogge—toad, under which form the devil was supposed to be personified; and hence probably originated such ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... was complete. The damp gray sea that flowed above and around and about him always seemed to shut out an intangible world beyond, and to be the only real presence. The booming of breakers scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a vague and unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past forever. Every morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he awoke, dazed and bewildered, as upon a new world. The first sense of oppression over, he came to love at last this subtle spirit of oblivion; and at ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... possibilities. We may observe in general that it is one of the peculiarities of the wit of Aristophanes to take a metaphor literally, and to exhibit it in this light before the eyes of the spectators. Of a man addicted to unintelligible reveries, it is a common way of speaking to say that he is up in the clouds, and accordingly Socrates makes his first appearance actually descending from the air in a basket. Whether this applies exactly to him is another question; but we have ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Brazilians. As they passed, Martin hailed them in an unsteady voice. They pulled up suddenly and drew pistols from their holsters; but on seeing only a fair youth armed with a bow, they replaced their weapons, and with a look of surprise rode up and assailed him with a volley of unintelligible Portuguese. ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Fauche alone into a retired cabinet, and said to him, "Explain yourself; what does Monseigneur le Prince de Conde wish to communicate to me?" Fauche was embarrassed, and stammered out something unintelligible. "Compose yourself." said Pichegru; "my sentiments are the same, as the Prince de Conde's. What does he desire of me?" Fauche, encouraged by these words, replied, "The Prince wishes to join you. He counts on you, and wishes to connect himself ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... all that is required, which must therefore be chosen—but by what rules? To the scholar, it usually happens that the most ancient and least handled text is the most interesting; but these are too frequently incomplete and unintelligible. The literary dilettante may prefer tasteful decorations by a Percy or a Scott; doubtless Buchan has some admirers: but the student abhors this ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... one by indomitable will had shaken off his own shackles and was making slavery odius by his matchless and eloquent arraignment; the other, "a leader of men," had now written his protest with the blood of his captors. Cinguez, with unintelligible utterance in African dialect with emphatic gesture, his liberty loving soul on fire, while burning words strove for expression, described his action on the memorable night of his emancipation, with such vividness, power, and pathos ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... Madonna heads, single flowers upside down next to flayed arms, calculations, monsters, sonnets, a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes, in which the plan of the artist is inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing, but out of whose unintelligible network of lines and curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the would-be philosophical would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite illustration out of a Bible or ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... call loudly, when the latter entered, "His honor the Court, hats off. Everybody please rise," while a second bailiff, standing at the left of his honor when he was seated, and between the jury-box and the witness-chair, recited in an absolutely unintelligible way that beautiful and dignified statement of collective society's obligation to the constituent units, which begins, "Hear ye! hear ye! hear ye!" and ends, "All those of you having just cause for complaint draw near and ye shall be heard." However, you would have thought ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... spans high [seven feet six inches], clad in skins of wild beasts, darker-complexioned than would have been expected in that part of the world; and when some of our men went on shore and showed them bells and pictures, they began to dance round our men with a hoarse noise and unintelligible chant, and to excite our admiration they took arrows a cubit and a half long, and put them down their own throats to the bottom of their stomachs without seeming any the worse for it. Then they drew them up again, and seemed much pleased at having shown their bravery. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... to charge his memory, or perhaps more properly, to discharge it. Dave had said first thing when he opened his eyes:—"The worty will be all over the hedge. Let me go to stop the worty." Of course, this had been quite unintelligible to his hearers. However, Mr. Alibone and Uncle Mo were au fait enough of the engineering scheme that had led to the accident, to supply the explanation. Dave's responsibility as head engineer had been on his conscience all ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Yet to have engaged him in the conversation would have been still more distressing; for his hearing was now very imperfect; the effort to hear was itself painful to him; and his expressions, even when his thoughts were accurate enough, became nearly unintelligible. It is remarkable, however, that at the very lowest point of his depression, when he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... burning questions which we must do our best to ignore, to forget their existence; and it is not more strange, after all, than many other facts in this wonderfully mysterious and defective existence of ours. One fourth of life is intelligible, the other three-fourths is unintelligible darkness; and our earliest duty is to cultivate the habit of not looking ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... Maco's account; of which I merely give a brief translation, for, of course, the language he used would be quite unintelligible to my readers. ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... before him, addressed me in words that sounded violent; but, as he spoke classical Tibetan, and I only the colloquial language, I could not understand a word of what he said, and I meekly asked him not to use such fine words, as they were unintelligible to me. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... written in very good English, containing such particulars respecting the vessel as he judged it for his interest to communicate; the other, designed to convey such information as he was possessed of respecting European politics, being written in Dutch, unfortunately proved unintelligible; and we could only gather from Mr. Ormsby and the master, who spoke bad English, that a misunderstanding subsisted between Great Britain and Spain; but on what account could not ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... presented to him by his friend Le Gentil, the French resident in Faizabad at the court of Shuja-uddaulah. Anquetil translated it into Latin which was published in 1801-1802. This translation though largely unintelligible was read by Schopenhauer with great enthusiasm. It had, as Schopenhauer himself admits, profoundly influenced ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... nations. Ethnological and philological researches—I do not forget the distinction between the two, but for the present I must group them together—have opened the way for new national sympathies, new national antipathies, such as would have been unintelligible a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago a man's political likes and dislikes seldom went beyond the range which was suggested by the place of his birth or immediate descent. Such birth or descent ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... blind, and spavined horses that can be raked up by hook or crook in the neighborhood. Such a medley was never seen in any other country. Barnum's woolly horse was nothing to these shaggy, stunted, raw-backed, bow-legged, knock-kneed little monsters, offered to the astonished traveler with unintelligible pedigrees in the Icelandic, which, if literally translated, must surely mean that they are a mixed product of codfish and brushwood. The size has but little to do with the age, and all rules applicable ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Riddlesworth, Rendlesham, Whersted, besides going to town several times and to Brighton. Since I left London for the Doncaster races I have travelled near 1,200 miles. At Riddlesworth the Duke of York told me a great deal about the Queen and Brougham, but he was so unintelligible that part I could not make out and part I do not remember. What I can recollect amounts to this, that the Emperor of Austria was the first person who informed the King of the Queen's conduct in Italy, that after the enquiry was set on foot a negotiation was entered into with ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Either a clerk in the State Department looks up Mexican oil in a book of reference, which may or may not be accurate, or somebody's private secretary telephones somebody else's private secretary, asks for a memorandum, and in the course of time a darkey messenger arrives with an armful of unintelligible reports. The Department should be able to call on its own intelligence bureau to assemble the facts in a way suited to the diplomatic problem up for decision. And these facts the diplomatic intelligence bureau would obtain from ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... seemed to him odder and more inexplicable than ever. The whole chamber was full of mystery. So it generally was, but now it was more mysterious than ever. After all that he had seen in the Shadow-church, his own room and its Shadows were yet more wonderful and unintelligible ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... related to Lord Snigsworth, must be let off. Veneering supposes a state of public affairs that probably never could by any possibility exist (though this is not quite certain, in consequence of his picture being unintelligible to himself and everybody else), and thus proceeds. 'Why, gentlemen, if I were to indicate such a programme to any class of society, I say it would be received with derision, would be pointed at by the finger of scorn. If I indicated such a programme to any worthy and intelligent tradesman ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... belief never will. I wish you had been more critical, and had pointed out the faults and defects of the book, of which there are no doubt some, if not many, to be found. I flatter myself that I have made more clear some passages utterly unintelligible in our A.V., such as, "He shall deliver the island of the innocent, yea," etc., chap. xxii. 30, and chap, xxxvi. 33, and the whole of chap. xxiv. and chap. xx. What a fierce, cruel, hot-headed Arab Zophar is! How the wretch gloats over Job's miseries. Yet one admires his word-painting ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... over the guard rail and stooped down, he would come close up to the wire, stand in one spot, and in a quiet, confidential tone talk to me earnestly and gesticulate with his head for five minutes straight. I have heard senile old men run on in low-voiced, unintelligible clack in precisely the same way. The modulations of that bird's voice, its inflections and its vocabulary were wonderful. From his manner a messenger from Mars might easily have inferred that the bird believed that every word of the discourse was ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... beat on Gerty's brain like the sound of a language which has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily—that was all! There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he was saying, to cling ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... was a start, and a low growling voice asked what was apparently a question as to what was the matter. The response came from the man who had struck the blow; but what he said was unintelligible to the listeners, who had immediately shrunk flat upon the deck, conscious as they were that two of the crew had been sleeping within touch, while for aught they knew others might ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... weather-beaten look, and hinders any great exuberance of architectural ornament. Not that we think this any loss; the simple buttresses and flying buttresses at Dol are really a relief after the elaborate and unintelligible forests of pinnacles which surround so many French churches, even of very moderate size. It is only in the huge porch attached to the south transept that an approach to anything of this kind is found. But very beautiful ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... Volume II, I became convinced that I had made a mistake and that the work to be exhaustive should comprise every message of the Presidents transmitting reports of heads of Departments and other communications, no matter how brief or unintelligible the papers were in themselves, and that to make them intelligible I should insert editorial footnotes explaining them. Having acted upon the other idea in making up Volume I and a portion of Volume II, quite a number of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... hand, and laying it upon the girl's cloak spake but one word, upon which the negro once more prostrated himself before Jill's camel, covering his already sandy hair with yet more glistening particles, murmuring something unintelligible, until a sharp word brought him to his feet, whereupon he backed towards the gates, flinging them wide apart, falling upon his knees as the camels ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... great diversions was to make me fold my little fat arms—not an easy performance for small muscles—and with a portentous frown, which puckered up my mouth even more than my eyebrows, receive from him certain awfully unintelligible passages from "Macbeth;" replying to them, with a lisp that must have greatly heightened the tragic effect of this terrible dialogue, "My handth are of oo tolor" (My hands are of your color). Years—how many!—after this first lesson ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... has been and still is a good deal of mutual ill-feeling both in Germany and in England cannot be denied. Rivalry between nations is always accompanied by feeling which is all the stronger when it is instinctive and therefore, though not unintelligible, apt to be irrational. But what in this case is really at the bottom of it? There have no doubt been a number of matters that have been discussed between the two Governments, and though they have for the most part been ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... she had made up her mind whether she would refuse or not the Baroness was in the brougham with her, and the coachman had been desired to take them to Green Street. Throughout the whole distance the Baroness was voluble and unintelligible; but Lady George could hear the names of Selina Protest and Olivia Q. Fleabody through the thunder ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... sense of her comparatively small share in this ardent life. In spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as though he were no longer hers—as though a craving hungry world, whose needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him from her, claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the quick mind ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Servia and Bulgaria. Here the Greek emperors, with correct notions of right and wrong, had governed wisely and justly in a simple administration, which gave place to a complicated system of laws and refinements, as unintelligible as they were useless and ineffective. In the double heritage of Greece and Rome, the conquerors imitated only their faults, moral and intellectual, and thus made more prominent the fall of the two countries. The Turks were not sufficiently enlightened to understand the laws and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to work. They live in the Bush, and the bark of a large tree forms their habitation. There are three distinct tribes around us in a circuit of about a hundred miles, and the difference of features amongst these tribes is easily observed. The three tribes speak three different languages unintelligible to one another. They meet at different periods of the year, and hold what they term a "corroborice,"—that is—a dance. Their bodies on these occasions are covered with oil, red paint, and green leaves. I have seen two hundred at a meeting, but they assemble ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... though in all probability my client is guilty there is practically no possibility of his being convicted of anything higher than manslaughter in the first degree. The defense will produce many witnesses—probably as many as the prosecution. Both sides will tell their stories in a language unintelligible to the jury, who must try to ascertain the true inwardness of the situation through an interpreter. They will realize that they are not getting the real truth—I mean the Syrian truth. As decent-minded men they won't dare to send a fellow to the ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... and killed by the onrushing motor. He flagged the ambulances and got cursed for it. He flagged the General's car and got cursed for it. Impossible pieces of paper were shoved out to him to read, filled with unintelligible hieroglyphics, which he could not read, which he made a vain pretence of reading and then concluded were all right. After which the car or the ambulance dashed on again, and he communed with himself within his hut, wondering whether the car was carrying a uniformed ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... of Broadway. I have had enough of the peace of the country. I want the crack, and crash, and rattle, and grind of wheels, the confused cries, the snatches of talk and laughter, the tread of crowds, the sound of bells, and clocks, and chimes. I long for all the chaotic, unintelligible noise of the streets. How suggestive it is! Yet it never explains itself. It only gives one a full sense of life. Love may need just the same stimulus. I wish grandmother would come home. I should not require Broadway as a ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... wing. The sister swift of Philomel, Intent on business, prosper'd well; In spite of the complaining pest, The insects carried to her nest— Nest pitiless to suffering flies— Mouths gaping aye, to gormandize, Of young ones clamouring, And stammering, With unintelligible cries. The spider, with but head and feet, And powerless to compete With wings so fleet, Soon saw herself a prey. The swallow, passing swiftly by, Bore web and all away, The spinster ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... understand each other—nobody else would." When Wordsworth said this he was an old man and like most old men unable to appreciate the new. Compared with the simplicity of much of Wordsworth's poetry a poem like A Death in the Desert might seem unintelligible; but surely the same objection cannot be urged against the poetry of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... includes an intelligent knowledge the Bible. But the secular education of the masses is now so much severed from the stream of tradition and sentiment which unites us with the older civilisations, that the very language of the Churches is becoming unintelligible to them, and the influence of organised religion touches only a dwindling minority. And yet the past lives in us all; lives inevitably in its dangers, which the accumulated experience of civilisation, valued so slightly by us on its spiritual side, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... to be altogether a mistake. We find no notice or trace elsewhere of any such spurious work attributed to Papias. Moreover these titles are quite unintelligible. There is no reason why the five genuine books should be called 'esoteric,' or the five spurious books 'exoteric.' About the notice of the four Maries again Hilgenfeld is in error. It is not taken from any ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... thus attempt to learn what was passing in these mysterious groups, and every time the result was the same. I accosted individuals in the streets, and questioned them as to the meaning of the curious scene, so unusual in the dead of night in a quiet cathedral city. No man answered me, except in some unintelligible syllable. I was not molested, nobody was uncivil, but from no one could I get a word of explanation. Gradually, as morning began to break, the throng became thinner. It was dispersed like the ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... hieroglyphics. These lessons of the olden time were the riddles of the Sphynx, tempting the curious by their quaintness, but involving the personal risk of the adventurous interpreter. "The Gods themselves," it was said, "disclose their intentions to the wise, but to fools their teaching is unintelligible;" and the King of the Delphic Oracle was said not to declare, nor on the other hand to conceal; but ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... And then there came a great reaction, an overpowering weakness, a great sense of thankfulness, and tears gushed up in my eyes, and fell upon my numbed hands. The good fellows about me, whose German was for the most part unintelligible to me, appreciated well the condition in which I was; and, with many encouraging pats on the back, they forced me down their companion way to the skipper's cabin, and so to a bunk, where I lay inanimate, and deep in sleep for many hours. But I awoke as another ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... excited companions, who were standing with coils of rope over their shoulders, and one arm through the ring, shouting again with their hands to their mouths, and one who had a speaking-trumpet roared some unintelligible order through it to the wind that cast it back into ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... Lords Appellants must be told as shortly as possible, but without some account of it much of the remainder of my story will be unintelligible. They drew a cordon of forty thousand men round London, capturing the King like a bird taken in a net; granted to themselves, for their own purposes, twenty thousand pounds out of the royal revenues; ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... was completely satisfied with the success of this comedy. Their awe of the mysterious and the unintelligible had made his comrades his slaves; he need have no ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... odours, came to her mixed with the chill air from the dark hills around, already spiced with keen atoms of frost, soon to appear in spangly spikes. Beneath the bridge the river flowed maunderingly, blundering out unintelligible news of its parent bog and all the dreary places it had come through on its way to the strath of Glamerton, which nobody listened to but one glad-hearted, puzzle-brained girl, who stood looking down into it from the bridge when she ought to have been in bed and asleep. She was ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... said, stooping lower to catch the unintelligible answer. "You ought to go home to bed; little boys have no business out of doors at night; you'll be quite frozen! Give me your hand and jump up like a man! Where do ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... the unintelligible jargon. He looked from La to Tarzan. Would the latter understand this strange tongue? To the Belgian's surprise, the Englishman answered in a language evidently ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a kind of envelopment that they have seemed to philosophers, not a few nor those common philosophers, altogether unintelligible; nay even to the Stoics themselves they seem difficult to understand. And all our assent is changeable; for where is the man who never changes? Carry thy thoughts then to the objects themselves, and consider how ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... difficulty by my difficulty. But as he had a reputation to maintain, he was ashamed to admit before the company that he could not answer my challenge or determine the question at issue; and he made an unintelligible attempt to hide his perplexity. In order that the argument might proceed, I said to him, Well then Critias, if you like, let us assume that there is this science of science; whether the assumption is right ...
— Charmides • Plato
... or it can not be accomplished at all. An inscription, therefore, in words, on a Mexican monument, that a certain king suppressed an insurrection, and beheaded the governors of four of his provinces, would be wholly blind and unintelligible to the mass of the population of such a country; and if the learned sculptor who inscribed it, were to attempt to explain it to them, letter by letter, they would forget the beginning of the lesson ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... for a seaman to speak of ships in any other than technical language, which must be the next thing to being unintelligible to one of your sex and condition. You have never ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... us than they are. Indeed, when I consider the strong incitements that all travellers have to pursue some part at least of these qualifications, especially drawing; when I consider how much it would facilitate their observations, assist and strengthen their memories, and of how tedious, and often unintelligible, a load of description it would rid them; I cannot but wonder that any person who intends to visit distant countries, with a view of informing either himself or others, should be wanting in so necessary ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... overwhelmed Gwynplaine. He was terrified by a confession that was unintelligible to him, and began in his distress to stammer and protest his innocence. "Have pity on me, my lord. You have before you ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... I am to blame," she said. "A man came here a day or two ago, and apparently endeavoured to tell me something. He was, however, unintelligible, and I fancy somebody ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... not surprised to hear you say so. Any sympathy for the husband is unusual, no doubt, yet I am not prepared to admit that it is unintelligible. You go too far." ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... in the immediate foreground shared in the neglect which attached to certain seasons. They were ignored as organized members of what should be a living foreground, and their places were concealed by unintelligible pigment. As to life there, he wanted none: light,—light that gleams, and color to reflect it, were his aim. As an inevitable attending result of these principles, or practices, the structure of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... back into her chair, utterly exhausted. Nevertheless, she went on speaking unintelligible words; and it was only gradually by leaning over her, that they ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... address to a conclusion, and sat down; when another slowly rose and commenced a harangue which was equally unintelligible to me. Still, I felt very sure that the discussion was one on which our lives depended; and, judging from the countenances of the Indians, I was nearly certain that ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... listening. As Amber concluded he seemed to find what he had been seeking, thrust it hurriedly into the breast-pocket of his coat, and with a muttered word, unintelligible, dashed to the door and flung it open and ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... but their great Brags and undertakings; notwithstanding all which, (sayes Themistius smiling) I scarce know any thing they have performed worth wondering at, save that they have been able to draw Philoponus to their Party, and to engage him to the Defence of an unintelligible Hypothesis, who knowes so well as he does, that Principles ought to be like Diamonds, as well very clear, ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... and the experiment stations offered good advice to the Southern farmer, but they reached only a small proportion. Their bulletins had a small circulation and were so full of technical expressions as to be almost unintelligible to the average farmer. Recently the writers have attempted to make themselves more easily understood, and the usefulness of their publications has consequently increased. The bulletins of the Department of Agriculture are read in increasing numbers, and several agricultural ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... in Loge's handwriting, contained a series of notes, mostly unintelligible to Cleggett, dealing with experiments in two sorts of manufacture: first, the preparation of counterfeit money; second, the production of ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... few miles the car stopped on a steep rise. The driver with some trouble started the engine, but soon after they had crossed the crest of the hill it stopped again, and he looked grave as he supplied Bland with some details that Sylvia found unintelligible. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... another, and when the mechanism of mind, fabricated by these scholastic dictators, is attempted to be set in motion, it is found incapable of working. For the grand moving power we have an undefined, and consequently unintelligible doctrine of Ideas, of supposed spiritual and directing agency; the admission of which would destroy the responsibility of a human being both here and hereafter, and degrade his ennobled condition to the instinct of the speechless brute. To endow these insubstantial and reflected phantasms with ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... Panjabi, Urdu and Sindhi, The [v.03 p.0294] Baluchi language belongs to the Iranian branch of the Aryan subfamily of the Indo-European family. It is divided into two main dialects which are so different that speakers of the one are almost unintelligible to speakers of the other. These two dialects are separated by the belt of Brahui and Sindhi speakers who occupy the Sarawan and Jalawan hills, and Las Bela. Owing probably to the fact that Makran was for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... have, as far as they dared, refused it) to the new incorporation. I stand in his independent place. Who are these insolent men, calling themselves the French nation, that would monopolize this fair domain of Nature? Is it because they speak a certain jargon? Is it their mode of chattering, to me unintelligible, that forms their title to my land? Who are they who claim by prescription and descent from certain gangs of banditti called Franks, and Burgundians, and Visigoths, of whom I may have never heard, and ninety-nine out of an hundred of themselves certainly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... still left polygamy untouched. [Here Dr. Wisner again asked if Dr. R. regarded the Bible as sustaining the polygamy of the Old Testament.] Dr. R.—Yes, sir; yes, sir; yes, sir. Let the reporters mark that question, and my answer. (Laughter.) My principle vindicates God from unintelligible abstractions. I fearlessly tell what the Bible says. In its strength, I am not afraid of earth or hell. I fear only God. God made no law against polygamy, in the beginning. Therefore it was no sin for a man to have more wives than one. God sanctioned it, and ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... Review, April, 1804.) Scott said of Dunbar, "This darling of the Scottish muses has been justly raised to a level with Chaucer by every judge of poetry to whom his obsolete language has not rendered him unintelligible." (Memoir of Bannatyne, p. 14.) After naming the various qualities in which Dunbar was Chaucer's rival, he pronounces the Scottish poet inferior in the use of pathos. The relative position here assigned to the two poets seems ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... colloquy was conducted in the native tongue it was unintelligible to Nigel, but after the interview with the chief the hermit explained matters to him, and bade Moses get ready for a start several ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... to quit the field she had so rashly ventured upon. Her answer to Mr. Stoutenburgh, if made, was too unintelligible to be understood or remembered; and meanwhile she was as the Squire had hinted, looking very well, and a picture of dainty confusion. It might not help the confusion, though it did put her face more out of sight, to be rescued from the Squire's ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... properties of the components and the properties of the resultant, but neither was there in the case of the water. It is also true that what I have spoken of as the influence of pre-existing living matter is something quite unintelligible; but does anybody quite comprehend the modus operandi[53] of an electric spark, which traverses a mixture ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of the word, is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.' But he explained these blots on the mythology of Greece, for example, as the result practically of old words and popular sayings surviving in languages after the original, harmless, symbolical meanings of the words and sayings were lost. What had been ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... is omitted in many editions, though it is certainly genuine. I have rendered it very freely, as otherwise it would be unintelligible. The fact is, three lunations twice meeting together in course of the same lunar fortnight is very rare. The lunar-fortnight (Paksha) being then reduced by two days, the day of full-moon or that of new moon, instead of being ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... manifested. In 1904 the House Labor Committee sidetracked a similar bill by recommending that the Department of Commerce and Labor should investigate its merits. Secretary Metcalf, however, declared that the questions submitted to his Department with reference to the eight-hour bill were "well-nigh unintelligible." In 1906 the House Labor Committee, at a very late stage in the session, reported "favorably" upon the eight-hour bill. At the same time it eliminated all chances of passage of the bill through the failure of a majority of the members of the committee to sign the "favorable" report made. This ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... German literature—J. S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men, like G. W. Curtis, and T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking into an odd volume of the Harbinger, will find in it some stimulating writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible talk about "Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now fallen silent. The most important literary result of this experiment at "plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and agriculture, was Hawthorne's Blithedale ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... anchor, a-ho-oy!'' In a short time every one was in motion, the sails loosed, the yards braced, and we began to heave up the anchor, which was our last hold upon Yankee land. I could take but small part in these preparations. My little knowledge of a vessel was all at fault. Unintelligible orders were so rapidly given, and so immediately executed; there was such a hurrying about, and such an intermingling of strange cries and stranger actions, that I was completely bewildered. There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life. At length ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... writer to have been a seafarer. The spelling and handwriting were those of a man imperfectly educated, but still the language itself was forcible. In the expressions of endearment there was a kind of rough, wild love; but here and there were dark unintelligible hints at some secret not of love,—some secret that seemed of crime. "We ought to love each other," was one of the sentences I remember, "for how every one else would execrate us if all was known." Again: "Don't let any one be in the same room with you at night,—you ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... poor New England! He who hurricanoed The house of Job is making now on thee One last assault, more deadly and more snarled With unintelligible circumstances Than any thou hast hitherto ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... unity, which is nothing but a logical notion, nor a collective unity, which is nothing but a company who are naturally many: but a true subsisting numerical unity of nature; and if the difficulty of explaining this, and his zeal to defend it, forced him upon some unintelligible niceties, to prove that the same numerical human nature too is but one in all men, it is hard to charge him with teaching, that there are three independent and co-ordinate Gods, because we think he has not proved that Peter, James, and John, are but one man. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... injustice, however, if we allowed the reader to remain under the impression that the unwillingness to have the Swallow-Tails monopolize or even have a share of the office was peculiar to them, or that John Morrissey's protest would be unintelligible anywhere out of New York. On the contrary, when he started out with his French dictionary he was giving expression to a feeling which is to be found in greater or less intensity in every State in the Union. The great ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life. ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... is supposed to have been made for this great occasion. Songs, we know, were chanted at religious festivals of Rome from an early period, indeed from so early a period that some of the sacred verses were popularly ascribed to Numa, and were utterly unintelligible in the age of Augustus. In the Second Punic War a great feast was held in honor of Juno, and a song was sung in her praise. This song was extant when Livy wrote; and, though exceedingly rugged and uncouth, seemed to him not wholly destitute of merit. A ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... however, as our hero grew in the good graces of his school-fellows, he fell out of those of his masters, for lessons were brought only half-learned, and exercises only half-written, or blotted and scrawled so as to be nearly unintelligible; and after he had been a fortnight at school, he seemed much more likely to descend to a lower class than to mount a step in his own. Day after day saw Louis kept in the school-room during play-hours, to learn lessons which ought ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... Irishman, "but I can't walk on wather, and this ice-slush isn't much betther." "Unless you answer, I'll fire," shouted the sentry, to whom Mickey's maunderings, half drowned by the crashing ice and gusty wind, were unintelligible. ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... to open his eyes with languid curiosity, and Marzavan seized this moment to pay him his compliments, contriving at the same time to express the condition of the Princess of China in terms unintelligible, indeed, to the Sultan and his vizir, but which left the prince in no doubt that his visitor could give ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... righteous indignation, was entirely unprecedented in that era of pedantry and simulation of the classic and heathen oratory. The scholastic jargon indulged in by the preachers of the time was utterly unintelligible to the common people. Savonarola's voice was the only one that addressed the multitude in familiar and fascinating tones and in an accent that evinced true affection for the people. They knew that he alone fought for truth and was fervently devoted to goodness. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly unintelligible articles—a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the word "left" ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... of the door," he said. "Put her out of the place!" and some hot words, fearful and unintelligible some of them to the small girl, burst ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... of their several Founders, the Merits of their different Sects, and if 'tis possible, about Trifles of less Importance: yet all agreeing in a different way to dupe and amuse the poor People, by the fantastick Singularity of their Habits, the unintelligible Jargon of their Schools, and their Pretensions to ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... her hand stopped and the automatic writing ceased, her powers of thought seemed suddenly to reassert themselves. Probably what she had been writing was mere unintelligible scribble. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... were half through breakfast, Selphar came down, blushing, and frightened half out of her wits, her apologies tumbling over each other with such skill as to render each one unintelligible, and evidently undecided in her own mind whether she was to be hung or burnt ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... honey. The woman looked at her, and answered again with the unintelligible grunt, of unbelieving wonder, which Daisy had heard once before. Daisy thought on the whole the safest way was not to talk but to fetch her beautiful "Jewess" flowers to speak for themselves. So she ran off and brought the pot and set it on the ground before Molly. ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... that they wish. Such a man speaks to their very core. All feel that a master-hand tears off the veil of cant, with which, from necessity, they have enveloped their souls; for cant is nothing more than the sophistry which results from attempting to account for what is unintelligible, or to defend ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... by a uniformed boy in that unintelligible fashion which seems to be the habit of his species. The boy hovered round. Then he came up behind the chair on which Bull was seated and ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... recovered from her night of terror. Her face was grey, her eyes heavy, her heart still beating and aching with some unintelligible sense of wrong or grief. And she looked at her child with such a dumb, sorrowful inquiry that Denas sat down near her and put her head on her mother's breast and asked: "What is it, mother? Have I done ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... beseeching glance at her lover, and murmured some unintelligible words, but they did not save her. Montgomery crossed himself over the stool, and, after running his fingers ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... are split up into a large number of dialects, each of which is confined to a relatively small area, and it often happens that a little [clan] or even a single family uses a form of speech which is differentiated from other dialects to be practically unintelligible to all except the members of the little ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... still more to those of the Prince, to go out on Monday; but it appears to Lord Melbourne that your Majesty judged quite correctly in doing so. Lord Melbourne hardly knows what to say of this repeated attempt. It is a depravity and a malice as unintelligible as it is atrocious. Lord Melbourne is at least as grateful as any one of your Majesty's subjects, and the gratitude is universal and fervent ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... remains. My instincts, therefore, have undergone a considerable change, but the change is not entirely in the direction of normality. The instinct for sodomy in the proper sense of the word used to be unintelligible to me; since the object of attraction has become a woman this instinct is mixed with the normal in my desire. Further, an element which much troubled me, as being most foreign to my ideal feelings, has not ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... day, I became an office drudge, condemned to copy the same unintelligible, uninteresting law forms, from early morning until late at night. Mr. Bassett, a quiet, methodical, business man, was kind in his own peculiar way. He had a large family, and perhaps felt a paternal ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... delicious beccaficoes in commanderia wine; with merry banter from Carnaby, professing to despise a man who knew nothing of game but its taste. The conversation reverted to technicalities of sport, full of terms and phrases unintelligible to Harvey; recounting feats with 'Empress' and 'Paradox', the deadly results of a 'treble A', or of 'treble-nesting slugs', and boasting of a 'right and left with No. 6'. Hugh appeared to forget all about his domestic calamity; only when his guests rose ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... dialects; so that in following the course of a river, one may sometimes find in a day's journey of a score of miles half a dozen or more villages, the people of each of which speak a dialect almost, or in some cases quite, unintelligible to their neighbours. A necessary consequence of this state of affairs is that, with the exception of the Sea Dayaks, almost all adults speak or at least understand two or more dialects or languages, while most of the chiefs and leading men speak several dialects fluently and ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... Genevieve Ryan's engagement to Lord Hastings were in lively circulation, Faraday called at the lion-guarded mansion on California Street, and, in answering to his regulation request for the ladies, received the usual unintelligible Chinese rejoinder, and was shown into the gold drawing-room. There, standing in front of a long mirror, looking at her skirts with an eye of pondering criticism, was Miss Genevieve, dressed to go out. She caught sight of him ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... muttered something unintelligible, but which bore some resemblance to the word "Shasta," and he made a motion toward his mouth and then threw his head back and ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... a somewhat unintelligible seriousness. "If I were ever in love, it seems to me I should stop ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... I was to let you know, and that you would tell your uncle.' This was quite unintelligible to Marie; but it was clear to her that she could make no such announcement, after the conversation which she had had with her uncle. It was quite out of the question that she should be the first to announce George's return, when she had been twice warned on that Sunday afternoon ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... Governor-General,—on the contrary, after having received the presents, we cannot avoid expressing our approbation of his conduct in bringing them to the credit of the Company,—yet we must confess the statement of those transactions appears to us in many points so unintelligible, that we feel ourselves under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily made to us. We therefore desire to be informed of the different periods when each sum was received, and what were the Governor-General's ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity venders who are called marchands de bric-a-brac in that Parisian argot which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... already mentioned he wrote The Cenci, Adonais, Prometheus, and a number of smaller pieces. As a poet he was gifted with genius of a very high order, with richness and fertility of imagination, but of a vague and partly unintelligible character. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
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