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Borderland

noun
1.
District consisting of the area on either side of a border or boundary of a country or an area.  Synonyms: border district, march, marchland.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Borderland" Quotes from Famous Books



... gatherings were disinclined to admit that the possession of independence and sovereignty entitled them to equal representation on international council boards. To a greater or less degree, therefore, they continued to stay in the borderland where no one either affirmed or denied their individuality. To quote the phrase of an Hispanic American, they stood "on the margin of international life." How far they might pass beyond it into the full privileges of recognition and association on equal terms, would depend upon the readiness ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... the way. Much of "Marmion" was composed on horseback. "I had many a grand gallop," he says, "when I was thinking of 'Marmion.'" His two chief powers in verse are his narrative and his pictorial power. His boyhood was passed in the Borderland of Scotland— "a district in which every field has its battle and every rivulet its song;" and he was at home in every part of the Highlands and the Lowlands, the Islands and the Borders, of his native country. But, both in his novels and his poems, he ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... become more attuned to its surroundings, I cannot tell—probably it was so. But, however this may be, I am assured now, only of the fact that I became steadily more conscious of a new mystery about me, telling me that I had, indeed, penetrated within the borderland of some unthought-of region—some subtle, intangible ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson

... made ready for the two women, clothes of very various sizes for the Doctor and Jean-Marie; and for the remainder of the night, while madame dozed in and out on the borderland of hysterics, her husband sat beside the fire and held forth to the admiring neighbours. He showed them, at length, the causes of the accident; for years, he explained, the fall had been impending; one ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... inhabitants are wofully benighted, but they possess wonderfully the quality of brotherhood, of oneness, hence arises their wonderful psychology and their aesthetics, so full and overflowing with pathos, so piercing, it carries one to that borderland where ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... attractive features with the finer surroundings of hill, crag, and moorland as picturesquely beautiful as those of Rothbury. In the old church here Bernard Gilpin, "the Apostle of the North," often preached; and even the fierce rival factions of the Borderland were so influenced by the gentle, yet fearless preacher, that they consented to forego their usual pleasure of "drawing" whenever they met one of a rival family, at least so long as Gilpin dwelt among them, and especially to refrain from showing ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... receives education, development and culture, and in time earns a competence that makes life desirable and opens up vistas to new happiness, for the old life is now only a memory of what the new man once was, and the new man is on the borderland of new love and marriage befitting all his advancements, while the mulatto slave boy, the slave girl, the black slave-wife and the slave connections are left forever behind. But in all these twenty-five years the black slave wife is still living, still ignorant and yielding all ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... two, however, between mind and body, there lies, like a borderland of fancy, yet most real, the nervous system, crossed and recrossed by the most delicate, the most sensitive filaments ever spun, filaments that touch, caress, or permeate each and every muscle concerned in voice-production, calling them into play with the rapidity of mental telegraphy. ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... mother's spirit; it was no delirious fancy. I know that she is dead. Even in the world of the released, she grieves over the awful consequences of my obedience to her wishes. Mortal agony of body and soul brings us so near to the borderland, that we have glimpses; and those we love, lean across the boundary line and compassionate us. So my Gethsemane called down the one strengthening Angel of all the heavenly hosts, who had most power to comfort my heart, and gird me for my fate, my father, my noble father. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... is not the custom in Greece for fathers to die for children," his father informs him; while Adinetus indulges in coarse abuse: "By heaven, thou art the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland of life, would'st not, nay, could'st not find the heart to die for thy own son; but ye, my parents, left to this stranger, whom henceforth I shall justly hold e'en as mother and as father too, and none but her." This "stranger" is his wife Alcestis, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... tasks to be fulfilled if we are to discharge our highest duty. They form the necessary platform from which we can mount to the highest goal. These duties lie in the domains of science and politics, and also in that borderland where science and politics touch, and where the latter is often directly conditioned by the results ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... desperation, making feints with his board as a batter does before the ball is thrown. Mackenzie passed Mrs. Carlson, backing away from Swan, sparring for time to recover his wind and faculties after his swift excursion to the borderland of death. He parried a swift blow, giving one in return that caught Swan on the elbow and knocked the plank out of his hand. Mackenzie sprang forward to follow up his advantage with a decisive stroke, when, to his amazement, Mrs. Carlson threw herself ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden

... He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. "Charles II.," said Thackeray, with unerring brevity, "was a rascal, but not a snob." Unlike George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises strange virtues nameless ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... university was an enviable one. The enthusiasm of the students for him quite reached the borderland of reverence. To get some work in Dr. Hubers' laboratory was regarded, among the scientific students, as the triumph of a whole university career. And it was those students who worked as his assistants who came to know the fine fibre of the ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell

... of Great Falls is leaping into life in a legend-haunted region. Its horizon is a borderland of wonders. Afar off gleam the Highwood Mountains, with roofs of glistening snow. Buttes (hills with level tops) rise like giant pyramids here and there, and one may almost imagine that he is in the land of the Pharaohs. Bench lands diversify the wide plains. ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth

... Such an adrenal personality is entirely normal, within the definition of the normal as something not threatening the duration of life, nor comfortable adaptation to it. So are the other glandular types. No sharp line can be drawn between the normal and the abnormal in any case, the borderland is ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... Washington, where officials took a summary of all the reports and attempted an analysis of them, one fact seemed clear. The wraiths were traveling northward. It could almost be fancied that this was an army, traveling in the borderland of the Unknown. Appearing momentarily as though coming out to scout around and see the contour and the characteristics of our realm; disappearing again into invisibility, to show themselves in an hour or so ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... is not the only product of the three prairie provinces. On the borderland between Manitoba and Saskatchewan are enormous deposits of coal which have not yet been explored. Canoeing once through Eastern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba, I saw a piece of almost pure copper brought down from the hinterland of Churchill River by an Indian, from ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... was wakened, yet but partly wakened, by a voice which seemed to belong to the borderland ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... the first invincible band of pioneers of universal freedom met in that little church in Seneca Falls, N. Y., in 1848. It means that in this body are women from four States of our Union already crowned with full citizenship; that delegates from more than two-score States have crossed the borderland of freedom, and that representatives from nearly every State and Territory are banded together in an unfaltering purpose to become politically free. It also means that more has been accomplished for the betterment of the condition ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... and desolate hills travellers often lost their way. Hence crosses were set up to guide them along the trackless heaths. They were as useful as sign-posts, and conveyed an additional lesson. You will find such crosses in the desolate country on the borderland of Yorkshire and Lancashire. They were usually placed on the summit of hills. In Buckinghamshire there are two crosses cut in the turf on a spur of the Chilterns, Whiteleaf and Bledlow crosses, which were ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... however, many true lovers of poetry who are enthusiastic about these poems. And parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they have been conceived and made in a wild borderland between analysis and imagination. They occupy a place apart, a backwater in the noble stream of English poetry, filled with strange plants; and the final judgment of Browning's rank as an artist will not depend on them but on the earlier ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... the borderland between these sharply defined classes lay many in the twilight zone. Bob, without knowing it, was to a certain extent exercising a despotic power. He possessed a latitude of choice as to which of these involved land cases ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... political, of the principality and those of the empire: that is postulated by the mutual advantages of both countries. As I have already remarked, Russians could not contemplate otherwise than with pleasure the possible union and assimilation—in principle—of the borderland with the other parts of our vast fatherland: they will also be unanimous in wishing this task as successful an issue as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... some childish fancy, some fairy tale, some glad anticipation. Hughie lived in the golden age. A year or two more, and the best of life would be over with him; for boyhood is but a leaden time compared with the borderland between it and infancy; and manhood—the curse of ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... that we had in Bibi a specimen of the decayed Nihilist. In view of the fact that he often proclaimed himself a socialist, this seemed to bear some colour of probability; but against it argued the circumstance that of the members of that little clan of Russian refugees which inhabits the southern borderland of the Latin Quarter, not one would have aught to say to Bibi. They gave him the widest of wide berths, and when questioned as to their motives, would only shrug their shoulders, and answer that he was a disgraceful ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... Kenya region. The whites are mostly agriculturists. There are also numbers of Indian settlers in the same districts. The African races include representatives of various stocks, as the country forms a borderland between the Negro and Hamitic peoples, and contains many tribes of doubtful affinities. The Bantu division of the negroes is represented chiefly in the south, the principal tribes being the Wakamba, Wakikuyu and Wanyika. By the north-east shores of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects about him. The light began to fade as he reached ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... fiat, or conquest, resulting in sometimes arbitrary and imposed boundaries; maritime states have claimed limits and have so far established over 130 maritime boundaries and joint development zones to allocate ocean resources and to provide for national security at sea; boundary, borderland/resource, and territorial disputes vary in intensity from managed or dormant to violent or militarized; most disputes over the alignment of political boundaries are confined to short segments and are today less common and less ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... still remained on the borderland. She did not attempt to sit up; her husband stood on his feet, contemplated his waistcoat and trousers, shook his head, and then lay down again. The inside of his brain was still rising and falling like the sea on the stage. At four o'clock he woke from sleep and saw the ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... be more interesting than a study of these characters from the borderland of history? These great figures come forth from the shadows of the past and move before us like living men: Beowulf, the Saxon; Frithiof, the Norse hero; Siegfried, the German; Roland, the French knight; The Cid, Spain's ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... After this the Jewish borderland of Bohemia, where writers and painters are courted, began to see Barstein again. But, unfortunately, this was not Mabel's circle, and Barstein was reduced to getting himself invited to that Jewish Bayswater, his loathing for ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... field of her own; we heard her calling her mates and proposing all manner of attractive games. (Even "Beckoning" was included. Once I distinctly heard her "choose" me.) But more often she was in deadly fear. Her solitary little spirit was too plainly beset by those nameless ghosts that haunt the borderland separating the realms of Death from those of his brother Sleep. Once her voice rose to ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... still hesitated. She was just on that borderland between childhood and womanhood when all the sensibilities, the nervous system, the emotions, are strung to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... her supper daintily, like one who has been so near the borderland of starvation that he cannot understand the uses of plenty, and then she went heavily to sleep in Ethel Blue's lap before the ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith

... himself a member of a depressed class, without education, political privileges, or capital. It was the struggle of this class for wider opportunity and better conditions of life that made most of the history of the previous century. Among the peoples in the racial borderland the effect of this struggle has been, on the whole, to substitute for a horizontal organization of society—in which the upper strata, that is to say, the wealthy or privileged class, was mainly of one race and the poorer and subject class was mainly of another—a vertical organization ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... what he had said, Velo must have known that! Yet Velo had tried to kill him. He had seen the leveled revolver, and besides, Velo had just told him, as though he didn't in the least mind his knowing. As a matter of fact, Velo did care; but he was so near the shadowy borderland that lies between the living and the dead, that there was nothing left for him but the truth. And because of that, he ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske

... grove is spoken of as situated in Eridhu. This city, altogether the most ancient we have any mention of, was situated at the then mouth of the Euphrates, in the deepest and flattest of lowlands, a sort of borderland between earth and sea, and therefore very appropriately consecrated to the great spirit of both, the god Ea, the amphibious Oannes. It was so much identified with him, that in the Shumirian hymns and conjurings his son Meridug ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... Africa. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and from the foot of the Atlas Mountains to the Sudan, it is a weird panorama of rock waste—level, rugged, shingly, and mountainous, according to locality. In places only it is penetrated by large and permanently flowing streams. On the eastern borderland the Nile pours a mighty flood, winding a sinuous passage along its self-made flood-plain, the Egypt of history. In the west the Niger has forced its way into the confines of the desert and then, as if rebuffed, turns ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... to-day, are living so close to the borderland of the new birth that they catch fleeting glimpses of the longed-for freedom, but the full import of its meaning does not dawn. There is yet another veil, however thin, between ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... a few days before had come from France, where he had hovered for a long time in the borderland between life and death. Although he had been severely wounded, it was the nervous strain of the previous four years that told most heavily against him. Week after week he lay, listless and almost unconscious; but gradually youth ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... grating quality of the voice, that yet seemed humorous in its utterances, since his two listeners laughed frequently and made brief, profane comment that encouraged the talker to go on. Finally, as he slowly returned from the hazy borderland of slumber, Lance became indifferently ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower

... moving which was very individual to himself, a slight, ever so slight, exaggeration of stride and gesture, a kind of captivating awkwardness and diffidence that was on the borderland of grace and assurance. Like all slender people who work much with their heads, he had a strong grip, but he felt that his hand was as inconsistent as an eel when St. John's ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris

... and elsewhere on the wild borderland between savagery and civilization, men go quite as often by nicknames as by those to which they are lawfully entitled. Half the cowboys and hunters of my acquaintance are known by names entirely unconnected with those they ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... age of romance. It is the borderland where is fought the battle of individuality, and it is probable that at this time is decided in a very deep way what is to be the trend of the whole after life. There is at this period such susceptibility to impressions that there may be indelibly ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley

... else I resorted to the shore of the lake,—to the one small part of it, that is to say, which was at the same time easily reached and comparatively unfrequented. There—going one day farther than usual—I found myself in the borderland of a cypress swamp. On one side was the lake, but between me and it were cypress-trees; and on the other side was the swamp itself, a dense wood growing in stagnant black water covered here and there with duckweed or some similar growth: a frightful place it seemed, the very abode of snakes ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey

... to judge Anarchist doctrine, or the views of its leading exponents, by such phenomena; but it remains a fact that Anarchism attracts to itself much that lies on the borderland of insanity and common crime.[18] This must be remembered in exculpation of the authorities and the thoughtless public, who often confound in a common detestation the parasites of the movement and the truly heroic and high-minded ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... a dim land of doubts and shadows. He who wanders here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and that which at one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the quest advances, to prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland, and its explorers need to know something of the regions on both sides of the frontier. I make no claim to that double knowledge. I have merely tried, using such evidence as I can, to sketch the character of one region, ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield

... his power to so great an extent that the seat of government was transferred to Cordova, where Abd-el-Rhaman I. reigned for more than a quarter of a century as the first kalif of the Moslem Church resident in Spain. On the borderland there was continual fighting between the Moors and the Christians, and many are the legends which tell of this spirited epoch. The Christians had rallied about the standards of various leaders in the hill countries, and they fought among themselves quite as much as with the ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... ought to note a borderland in which the concern is professedly not with beauty, but with ideas of life. Aristotle's lover of knowledge, who rejoiced to say of a picture "This is that man," is the inspirer of drawing as opposed to the ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones—when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now—perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most extravagant ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... unmixed with fear, I retired to rest that night, scarcely expecting to sleep, so eager was I for the morrow. The musical voice of Karamaneh seemed to ring in my ears; I seemed to feel the touch of her soft hands and to detect, as I drifted into the borderland betwixt reality and slumber, that faint, exquisite perfume which from the first moment of my meeting with the beautiful Eastern girl, had become to me inseparable ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... while a message went from the town to Offa, and next day there came to meet us some score of the best thanes of the Welsh borderland, who should be our guides to the end of the journey. Hard warriors and scarred with tokens of the long wars they were, but pleasant and straightforward in their ways, as warriors should be. Only I did not altogether like the smooth way of the man who was their leader. ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler

... this tale was told by the Hindu who had tried to console his dying friend, was himself smitten with dangerous illness, and lay in the dim borderland, unable to think or frame a prayer. Then like the melody of long familiar music, without effort, without strain, came the calming words of the old prayer: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord; and by Thy great mercy defend ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael

... touching the borderland of this mysterious realm of the occult, the subconscious and the spiritual forces that have such an important bearing upon all phases of human life, and which, when intelligently applied to the ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... disciples from the saddle of their own philosophy, in a thesis couched in terms of the strictest Hegelian dialectic. After he had got philosophy off his chest, as he expressed it, he proceeded to Switzerland, where he preached communism, and thence wandered over France and Germany back to the borderland of the Slav world, from which quarter he looked for the regeneration of humanity, because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilisation. His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... death-bed addresses, his Adieux a ses Amis et a l'Eglise, one admirable chapter, the second, is devoted to the passage before us, Phil. i. 21-26. From the borderland of eternity the great French Christian looks backward and forward with St Paul's letter in his hand, and comments there upon this divine possibility of "Happiness in Life and in Death." "The Apostle," he says, "is asking here which is most worth while for ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule

... delirium, the lad felt that he would not be justified in sending the Indian away. While the two were still engaged in debating the question of what was best to be done under the distressing circumstances, Butler ended the difficulty by quietly breathing his last, crossing the borderland between life and death without a struggle, and without recovering consciousness. Indeed so perfectly quiet and peaceful was the end that it was some time before young Escombe could convince himself that his chief was really dead; but when at length there ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... and thought she is French—French in her liveliness of spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town, she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved France fought and why she was happy to have remained in Gerbeviller to welcome ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... goes to make an orator has God denied us? Reason, fancy, passion, a pathos and humour where the smile trembles on the borderland of tears. ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan

... death and blindness, find a ray of light within their own being need not fear the judgment of the Mediator. Here in the freedom of the mountains I feel something of the inscrutable certainty, the joy of a secret conviction, that wisdom waits on our tortuous paths in the Borderland. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... when Hanny stood on the mysterious borderland. She used to steal up and look at the wraith of a ball-dress hanging in the third-floor closet, put away with the "choice" garments. The skirt looked so long, almost uncanny. She could see the girl who had ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... Greek word, phrase, or sentence there are two dangers to be guarded against. There are a Scylla and a Charybdis. On the one hand there is the English of Society, on the other hand that of the utterly uneducated, each of these patois having also its own special, though expressive, borderland which we name 'slang.' But all these salient angles (as a professor of fortification might say) of our language are forbidden ground to the reverent translator ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth

... they told me that Tarrano and I hovered for days unconscious on the borderland between life and death, living finally, for our vehicle had plunged into a tremendous snow-bank, to ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... that drowsy, semi-conscious state, that most delightful borderland which lies midway between sleeping and waking, I knew it could not be the woodpecker who, as I judged from sundry manifest signs, lodged in the tree above me. No woodpecker that ever pecked could originate such sounds as these—two quick, light strokes, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... a borderland. Literature was retreating further and further from the classic models, and culture was declining to its fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night were broadening over literary activity, thought, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... of the poets. I don't suppose the temperament was more inclined to aesthetic emotion in me than in other youths; but I was highly nervous and delicate, and having never been at school had not had sentiment and delicacy crushed out of me; also, living on the borderland of oak woods, with green lanes before me, and an expanse of wild heather extending into Northumberland behind, I was favourably placed for imbibing a knowledge by contrast of the physical features of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... the fears that might, for another, have filled the empty house with visitants from another world, and might have taught her to listen for footsteps in the echoing passages and knocks on the shaking doors. She had always lived on the borderland, and was naturalised in both spheres, but to-night, the voices that had so often given her help, were, when she ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... lighted room, he wondered whether, had her trained and inbred policy been less precise, less worldly, she might have responded to such a man as he. Perfectly conscious that he had been capable of loving her; aware, too, that his experience had left him on that borderland only through his cool refusal to cross it and face a hopeless battle already lost, he leisurely and mentally took the measure of his own state of mind, and found all well, all intact; found himself still master of his affections, and probably clear-minded ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... tendril of the vine that touched his cheek gently? He started, his face toward the haze in the open borderland. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... stimulating books, such, for example, as Bagehot's Physics and Politics or Mr. Bryce's philosophical study of the United States. What I propose to do is to suggest a few considerations as to the real value and proper direction of these arguments, which lie, as it were, on the borderland between the immediate "platform" and the ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... off in that delicious glow that follows the removal of wet clothes and the immediate snuggling under warm blankets, when his consciousness, hovering on the borderland between sleep and waking, was vaguely troubled by a sound that rose indistinctly from the depths of the house, and, between the gusts of wind and rain, reached his ears with an accompanying sense of uneasiness and discomfort. It rose on the night air with some pretence of ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... there is a mystery about it all that is insoluble. The miracle of vitality takes place behind a veil that we cannot penetrate, in the inmost sanctuary of the molecules of matter, in that invisible, imaginary world on the borderland between the material and the immaterial. We may fancy that it is here that the psychical effects its entrance into the physical—that spirit weds matter—that the creative energy kindles the spark we call vitality. At any ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... Belgium had been recognized by England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia; and the triumphal march of the Dutch was arrested by a French army which happened to be in the place where they could be most effective in the circumstances. The Dutch had occupied Antwerp, a town on the borderland of Belgium and Holland. It had been in the possession of the French in 1794, but had been taken from them at the Restoration in 1814. The French now laid siege to it, being under the command of Gerard, while the Dutch were led by Chasse. The citadel was taken in 1832, and the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... fate that I can regard these lines, written from mechanical professional habit and never to be seen by human eyes, as the words of one who is already dead, so closely does he stand to the shadowed borderland over which all outside this one little circle of friends have already gone. I feel how wise and true were the words of Challenger when he said that the real tragedy would be if we were left behind when all that is noble and good and beautiful had passed. But of that there can surely ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... confused. One would suppose at first that the stream traversed by the two perilous bridges formed the frontier of the kingdom. But here (v.2102), before reaching such a frontier, the captives are already met. Foerster suggests that we may be here at a sort of foreground or borderland which is defended by the knight at the ford (v. 735 f.), and which, though not within the limits of the kingdom, is nevertheless beneath the sway of Bademagu. In the sequel the stream with the perilous bridges is placed immediately before the King's palace (cf. Foerster's note ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... come to be Science master at a great College in the North, and thus meeting Linda at the Philosophical Institute of Leeds had caused her to fall in love with him whilst he lectured on the Cainozoic fauna of Yorkshire. He was himself a Northumbrian of borderland stock: something of the Dane and Angle, the Pict and Briton with a dash of the Gypsy folk: a blend which makes the Northumbrian people so much more productive of manly beauty, intellectual vivacity, bold originality than the slow-witted, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... And it must be admitted that the "libretto" of "Ulalume," for instance, is nearly or quite meaningless to many lovers of poetry who value the "score" very highly. In a period marked by enthusiasm for new experiments in versification, new feats of technique, the borderland between real conquests of novel territory and sheer nonsense verse becomes very hazy. The Spectra hoax, perpetrated so cleverly in 1916 by Mr. Ficke and Mr. Witter Bynner, fooled many of the elect. [Footnote: See Untermeyer's New Era, etc., pp. 320-23.] I have never believed that ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... astonishment at his own feet. "What are those two beautiful and industrious beings," I can imagine him murmuring to himself, "whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I was born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... learned a good deal of French, Russian, and Austrian geography in the last ten months; and, in the same sad school, we shall now become better acquainted with the region of mountain and plain which, through and for 140 miles east of Lake Garda, is the Austro-Italian borderland, and with the northeastern coast of the Adriatic, where there will be important side issues. There is this great difference, among others, between the Adriatic and the Alpine military problems: On the one side, the Germanic powers can now only assume the defensive; on the other, they can, and probably ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various



Words linked to "Borderland" :   border district, district, territory, marchland, territorial dominion, dominion



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