"Inarticulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling, and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... delighted, and Denas was no more afraid of the gay fellow than the moth is of the candle. She was pleasantly excited by the idea of a walk all alone with Roland. She wondered what he would say to her: if he would venture to give voice to the inarticulate love-making of the last two years—to all that he had looked when she sang to him—to all that he meant by the soft, prolonged pressure of her hand and by that one sweet stolen kiss which he had claimed for ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of the water seemed dotted with bodies. Only a few of the lifeboats seemed to be doing any good. The cries of 'My God!' 'Save us!' and 'Help!' gradually grew weaker from all sides, and finally a low weeping, wailing, inarticulate sound, mingled with coughing and gargling, made me heartsick. I saw many men die. Some appeared to be sleepy and worn out just ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... curtain and watched the sufferer. Etienne glared at him with lacklustre eyes, but knew him not, and continued his inarticulate ravings. His forgiving nurse moistened his lips from time to time with water, and by him was a decoction of cooling herbs, with which ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... they bedewed with tears. Before they could speak to her she read in their faces that she no longer possessed a son. At that instant her large eyes, opening wildly, seemed to wander. Her face grew pale, her features changed, her lips lost their colour, she struggled to speak, but uttered only inarticulate sounds, accompanied by piercing cries. Her gestures were wild, her reason was suspended. Every part of her being was in agony. To this state of anguish and despair no calm succeeded, until her tears began to flow. Friendship and the tenderest cares succeeded for a moment in calming her grief, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... into my mind. One involuntarily associates her with anything wonderfully fine in art or literature, with the perfect assurance that she will be sympathetic and appreciative. She understands the deep, inarticulate emotions in the kindred way you have a right to expect of your lover, and which you are oftenest disappointed in, if you do expect it of him. If I were a man, I should be ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... They all belong to him now, for but for him they would have perished utterly; while his own matchless lyrics, altogether original, find the breath of life on the lips of a people who have gotten them all by heart. What a triumph of the divine faculty thus to translate the inarticulate language of nature into every answering modulation of human speech! And with such felicity, that the verse is now as national as the music! Throughout all these exquisite songs, we see the power of an element which we, raised by rank and education into ignorance, might not have surmised in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... idea. He felt upon him and around him, in his flesh and in his spirit, in the air and in the whole world, the all-enveloping shadow of remorse. The dormant possibilities of his own fanatical nature rose up before him—pale, inarticulate fiercenesses crushed so long, and now trembling eagerly under his breath at the prospect of a little more liberty in loving. A suspicion that already he loved perhaps too well and far too passionately thrilled through his conscience, and tortured a heart to whom ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... is a possession which we should not be easily persuaded to coin into sovereigns, and such a prize as the Evelyn copy of Spenser's Faery Queen, 1590, with the Diarist's cypher down the back and his note of ownership inside the old calf cover, is worth a library of inarticulate printed matter. So, again, Aubrey, in his Miscellanies, Remains of Gentilism and Judaism, History of Surrey, and Natural History of Wiltshire, presents us with works very imperfect and empirical ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... are so intolerably and confusedly written, and so interlarded with numerous letters about the subject of these differences with the Dutch, that we have been reluctantly under the necessity of omitting them, being so monstrously inarticulate as to render it impossible to make them at all palatable to our readers, without using freedoms that were altogether inadmissible in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first, that is. She had thought it all out—foreseen everything; and she wrung from me—I don't yet know how!—a promise that when I saw him I would make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible complicity, ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... But her beauty merely frightened her the more in her terrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthy whisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows up yonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a low inarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her out of the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on her face under a great tree, and wept and wept ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... humanity, where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth. But he cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of intelligible speech. His uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate genius, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... vast mass of material. Miss Macnaughtan was a very reserved woman.{1} She lived much alone, and the diary was her only confidante. In one of her books she says that expression is the most insistent of human needs, and that the inarticulate man or woman who finds no outlet in speech or in the affections, will often keep a little locked volume in which self can be safely revealed. Her diary occupied just such a place in her own inner life, and for that reason one hesitates to submit its pages ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... Rose began to cuddle it in the fond, foolish way women have a most comfortable and effective way, nevertheless and baby evidently felt that things were changing for the better when warm lips touched her cheeks, a soft hand smoothed her tumbled hair, and a womanly face bent over her with the inarticulate cooings and purrings mothers make. The frightened eyes went up to this gentle countenance and rested there as if reassured; the little claw crept to the girl's neck, and poor baby nestled to her with a long sigh and a plaintive murmur ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... adversary, but his grasp was like iron; and in spite of appearances, great Fritz proved but a weak and nerveless body, and greatly surprised at this unexpected attack, he could only open his large mouth and utter some inarticulate sounds. Gilbert had already dragged him to the top of the staircase. Then Fritz, recovering from his first flurry, tried to struggle, but he lost his footing, stumbled, and fell headlong down the staircase to the bottom. Gilbert came near following him in his descent, but fortunately saved himself ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... glanced at him in dull amazement. Then a flush crept into his sallow cheeks and mounted to his brow. An inarticulate grunt came ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... to life, weakly gasping. She opened her eyes upon him with the old, unwavering adoration in their depths. And then before his burning look hers sank. She hid her face against him with an inarticulate sound more anguished than ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... political; but here also he suffered from treating as true universality a thing that was only a sort of lukewarm local patriotism. Here also he suffered by the very splendour and perfection of his poetical powers. He was quite the opposite of the man who cannot express himself; the inarticulate singer who dies with all his music in him. He had a great deal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wanted for anything he had to express. He could not think up to the height of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... a something in the tone, a touch of sadness in the manner, and a deep sincerity in these words, that in some measure disabused Flora of her fears. She sobbed hysterically, and a gush of tears came to her relief, as, in almost inarticulate accents, she said,— ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... soul is looking into another soul. His hand had never been drawn away from hers until she had detected that slight, almost unwilling pressure that has only one meaning. When the tongue will not be the outlet of our thought, may we not have recourse to those inarticulate words that await utterance in the eye's fond depths, and in the hand's ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... housekeeper who knew his ways was absent on her annual vacation, and for the carelessness and stupidity of the servants he could find no adequate words. In truth he had exhausted his vocabulary early in the day, and now was reduced to inarticulate growls. ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... he loved to lie in his chair on the porch of his little cottage where he could look out upon the hills, his eyes reflecting his beloved landscape like those of a dreaming cage-weary lion. Inarticulate, like my mother, he was nevertheless the poet, and never failed to respond—at least with a meaning glance—to any imaginative word ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... have so much as a headache in her life until now. Her face was hid. Basil went up softly and laid his hand on her shoulder, and felt so the slight convulsive shiver that ran over her. But his inquiries could get nothing but monosyllables in return; hardly that; rather inarticulate utterances of assent or dissent to his questions or proposals. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... Margaret became inarticulate with dismay, indignation, disappointment, as these envenomed stings went to her very soul, further pointed by the curl of Louis's thin lips and the sinister twinkle of his little eyes. Almost choked, she stammered ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Much talk has been of her, in princely and other circles; nor is his marriage the only strange thing Leopold has done. He is a man to keep the world's tongue wagging, not too musically always; though himself of very unvocal nature. Perhaps the biggest mass of inarticulate human vitality, certainly one of the biggest, then going about in the world. A man of vast dumb faculty; dumb, but fertile, deep; no end of ingenuities in the rough head of him:—as much mother-wit, there, I often guess, as could ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... Oliver Wendell Holmes, who says: "Violins, too. The sweet old Amati! the divine Stradivari! played on by ancient maestros until the bow hand lost its power, and the flying fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the passionate young enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair. Passed from his dying hand to the cold virtuoso, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till, when his hoard was broken up, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... glasses, a strange cry sounded from below,—a stifled call, inarticulate, but in such a key of distress that all four faced about, and ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Then a half of the heavens was blotted out; She grew faint and sick, as she moved her head to the right and left, and up and down, and watched the dizzy revolutions of those vast orbs, between which she knew that she was to be crushed at last, as by the nether and upper millstones. Her inarticulate cries to God were unheard. It seemed as if there were no God for that accursed part ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... to cause pain, but the poor fellow's lips parted to cry out, and he gave forth an inarticulate sound caused by the sudden descent of the rolled-up pad of black silk vigorously planted in its place by the ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... cried. She turned and ran to him, and it was plain that an appeal couched in such terms was more than she could bear. "You are my father," she sobbed, "my dear, dear father! All the dearer," she went on, in words made half inarticulate by her tears, and all the more expressive and affecting—"all the dearer because we never knew each other through all those dreadful years! I love you, dear, and I am not undutiful, and I will do whatever you ask me; but I want to be with ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... inarticulate sound that in some fashion expressed what the drawing of his lips had made her feel. "Sweetheart—to-morrow!" he said, and kissed her again with a lingering persistence that to her overwrought nerves had in it something that was almost unendurable. It made her think of an epicurean tasting ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... discourse was interrupted by a sudden disaster; in consequence of which, the squire uttered an inarticulate roar, that startled the knight himself, who was very little subject to the sensation of fear. But his surprise was changed into vexation, when he perceived Gilbert without a rider passing by, and kicking his heels with great agility. He forthwith turned his steed, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... fourteen items. Being slightly deaf, he had heard scarcely anything, and had been noting the number and variety of the performances. It was his protest against much speaking. At dinner the same day, his cousin, Joseph Cartland, commented upon the inarticulate sounds that accompanied the remarks of one or two of the speakers. "Let us shame them out of it," he said, "let's call it grunting." "Oh, no, Joseph," said Whittier, "don't thee do that—take away the grunt, and ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... unnaturally polite as at first to excite your suspicion that the hotel has some hidden vice, so that the waiters and chambermaids are trying to pacify you in advance. There was one waiter in especial who was the most accomplished social being I have ever encountered; from morning till night he kept up an inarticulate murmur of urbanity, like the hum of a spinning-top. I may add that I discovered no dark secrets at the Hotel de l'Univers; for it is not a secret to any traveller to-day that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in an overheated room ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... "Thro' whom all beauty's beams concentred pass, "Dazzling and warm as thro' love's burning glass; "Whose gentle lips persuade without a word, "Whose words, even when unmeaning, are adored. "Like inarticulate breathings from a shrine, "Which our faith takes for granted are divine! "Such is the nymph we want, all warmth and light, "To crown the rich temptations of to-night; "Such the refined enchantress that must be "This hero's vanquisher,—and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of pretended pleasure in the prospect was rendered nearly inarticulate by the thought of Narcissa. He had not anticipated a return of the courtesy. He had no welcome for this stranger, and somehow he felt that he did not altogether understand Narcissa at times; that she had flights of fancy which were beyond him, and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... animal utters a cry of joy or pain it expresses its emotions in more or less definite tones; and at some remote period of the earth's history all primeval mankind must have expressed its emotions in much the same manner. When this inarticulate speech developed into the use of certain sounds as symbols for emotions—emotions that otherwise would have been expressed by the natural sounds occasioned by them—then we have the beginnings of ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... not mind," Gerard assured. He wanted to say something more, but found his thoughts singularly inarticulate. There was a certain verse commencing with "Inasmuch——" that he would have quoted to Corrie, had they been of any blood but the reticent Saxon. "They remembered part of your ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... easily conceive that such an intercourse scarce required a more refined language than that of crows and monkeys, which flock together almost in the same manner. Inarticulate exclamations, a great many gestures, and some imitative sounds, must have been for a long time the universal language of mankind, and by joining to these in every country some articulate and conventional sounds, of which, as I have already hinted, it is not very easy to explain the institution, ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... inside the city walls. Ahead of them, in that labyrinth of filthy streets lay the way to the distant square. His arm was now about her waist, for she was half-fainting; he could hear her gasping and moaning softly, inarticulate cries of despair. Switch-lights blinked in the distance. Off to the right of them windows showed lights; the clang of a locomotive bell came to them as ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... under a bitter wind, when a wagon came lurching into the Somasco valley. Four weary horses floundered in front of it, a thin white steam rising from them into the nipping air, and Okanagan swayed half asleep upon the driving-seat, growling inarticulate objurgations when the vehicle sank creaking into a hollow he could not see. He had, wearing out several horses during the journey, driven close upon a hundred miles through the frost and snow, and had ceased to encourage his companions during the last hour or so. In fact, he was almost as incapable ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... the terrible wrath of the knight when he heard the Princess thus slandered. His indignation and fury knew no bounds. He began to stammer and stutter, inarticulate with rage, until Sancho was scared out of his wits, afraid of being cut open by his raving master's sword. He was just about to turn his back on his master and disappear till the storm had passed, when Dorothea came to his rescue. ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... he demanded, in a voice almost inarticulate with fury, his hand resting meanwhile upon the butt of a pistol that was stuck in ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... the Colonel was on his feet in an instant, gasping with inarticulate rage. Flinging the door open, he confronted the ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... into strong emotion of maudlin sentiment when the great congregation sang a hymn. He sat upon a bench at the back and wept tears that even to himself had neither sense nor truth. Yet there was in them the stirring of something inarticulate, incomprehensible, like the stirring that comes at spring-time in the heart of the seed that lies below the ground. After that the voice of the preacher began to make its way slowly through the dull, dark ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... as well as between the young and the old,— is of the highest importance to them. This is generally effected by means of the voice, but it is certain that gestures and expressions are to a certain extent mutually intelligible. Man not only uses inarticulate cries, gestures, and expressions, but has invented articulate language; if, indeed, the word INVENTED can be applied to a process, completed by innumerable steps, half-consciously made. Any one who has watched monkeys will not doubt that they perfectly understand each other's gestures and ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... it, daddy!' 'Now ye have him!' 'Good on you, daddy!' 'Sure, you'll do him!' 'One round more, daddy, an' ye have him beat!' These phrases, and shrill inarticulate cries of applause and astonishment and joy, Danny reiterated breathlessly until his father was pronounced the victor; then he took the battered hero fondly by the hand and led him away to be bathed and plastered and bandaged by ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... have been, Joseph? An inarticulate harmony— sweetly mumbling, with never a thread of ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Baron went staggering a few feet back, but instantly he recovered himself and again leaped forward. The great sword flashed in the air, whistling; it fell, and the nearest man dropped his lance, clattering, and with a loud, inarticulate cry, grasped the mane of his horse with both hands. Again the blade whistled in the air, and this time it was stained with red. Again it fell, and with another shrill cry the man toppled headlong beneath ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... dead silence for two or three seconds. If a kitten had sneezed, everybody would have heard it. Then it started, first an inarticulate roar, and then a babel of unprintabilities. I thought I'd heard some bad language from these same men in this room when Leo Belsher's announcement of the price cut had been telecast, but that was prayer meeting to this. ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... upon a likely place to settle yet,"—said Mr. Simlins, in a manner equally careless and devoid of reliable information. Squire Deacon gave a little inarticulate reply. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... world could frighten him; when he saw this new kind of object, with its extraordinary gait, and the voice of no terrestrial beast, but such as you might hear in the leviathans of the deep, hoarse and inarticulate, he thought his thirteenth labour had come upon him. When he looked closer, the thing seemed to be a kind of man. Up he goes, then, and says what your Greek finds readiest ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... inarticulate exclamation of rage the younger man struck the proffered hands aside and led with a straight left for the other's head. Yorke blocked it cleverly ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... and went away and left her there—for fifteen minutes—it was all that the mother-heart could endure. Then she came softly back and listened—listened for the sobs, but there weren't any; there were muffled and inarticulate sounds, but they could not be construed into sobs. The mother waited half an hour longer; by that time she was suffering so intensely with sorrow and compassion for the little prisoner that she was not able to ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... tent to tell him that some of the sheep were missing. A single turn of the hand followed by a glance around, as if searching for something, was all that was required. He had been sitting quietly in the circle, looking at us talking; but the moment the communication was made he uttered an inarticulate sound betraying great excitement, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, stuck it into his boot, threw himself into the saddle, and rode off into the gathering darkness to search for the lost sheep. All agreed that he had an extra share of intelligence, and he was evidently ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... on to the bulwarks had been the last effort of that prince of demons, sea-sickness, rending her ere he left. When the occasion for remaining there had thus passed away, she soon tired of her cabin and of listening to the inarticulate moans of her beloved Agatha, who was a most faithful subject of the fiend, one who would never desert his manner so long as he could roll the tiniest wave, and, sallying forth, took up her position in the little ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... comfortable seat for Mrs. Burgoyne and little Mrs. Brown; Barry himself was just behind, and Mrs. Carew and her big son beside them. All about, in the darkness, were other groups: mothers and fathers and alert, chattering children. Alice Carter, the big mill-girl, radiant now, and with a hoarse, inarticulate, adoring young plumber in tow, went by them, and stooped to whisper something to Mrs. Burgoyne. "I wish you WOULD come, Alice!" the lady answered eagerly, ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... ministers then officiated according to the Roman liturgy; the creed was chanted with the addition of filioque; the acquiescence of the Greeks was poorly excused by their ignorance of the harmonious, but inarticulate sounds; [73] and the more scrupulous Latins refused any public celebration of the Byzantine rite. Yet the emperor and his clergy were not totally unmindful of national honor. The treaty was ratified by their consent: it was tacitly agreed that no innovation ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... any moment and blot him out should wish to keep out of the range of women's emotional sympathy. Men's sympathy is of a different calibre. Even when it is a practical, living thing that can be felt and built on, it is often almost cold-bloodedly inarticulate and undemonstrative, which is the only kind of sympathy acceptable to a man in trouble, especially a man of Druro's type, who did not want to discuss the thing at all, but just to take what was coming to ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... among the dogs, his face working, his eyes starting. Try as he would, he could not stretch his jaws wide enough to slip the ball out. Marcus lost his wits, swearing at the top of his voice. McTeague sweated with terror; inarticulate sounds came from his crammed mouth; he waved his arms wildly; all the four dogs caught the excitement and began to bark. A waiter rushed in, the two billiard players returned, a little crowd formed. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... into the town, had been laid in a settle-bed in the little inn, and had his wounds dressed with such surgical skill as the town afforded. He had spoken once since he fell, and had then begged, in an almost inarticulate whisper, that Henri Larochejaquelin would come to him, and this message had been delivered, and was ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... teacher. It is most true that the living and the dead are still one family, for of course there are no "dead," unless we most correctly put into this category the dull of hearing, the dull of heart, and the loveless who still walk this earth. But if we deem the pioneers defunct and inarticulate, then it is little likely that we shall comprehend the reality and the naturalness of this interplay and inspiration. If we never seek, information and insight will scarcely drop upon us from ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... indignation of Don Quixote when he heard the audacious words of his squire! So great was it, that in a voice inarticulate with rage, with a stammering tongue, and eyes that flashed living fire, he exclaimed, "Rascally clown, boorish, insolent, and ignorant, ill-spoken, foul-mouthed, impudent backbiter and slanderer! Hast thou dared to utter such words in ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... undiminished, but difference in temperament bred difference in their principles. They represented, as the author says, with the candour of the poet, the two poles of the truth; the two sides of the inarticulate, subterranean, fatal contention of the year of the Terror. Their arguments with one another make the situation more intelligible to the historic student, as they make the characters of the speakers more transparent for the purposes of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... was all it could be called—broke from his fever-dried lips and died away in an inarticulate gasp. Then, suddenly, sharply, a cry broke from him, an intelligible cry, and we heard ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... took me into the backyard and showed me his treasury—half a dozen rabbits, as many guinea-pigs, and a raven with a bald head. He was all kindness to these prisoners, fondled them with hands and voice, spoke a kind of inarticulate baby language to them, and gave them pet names. He forgot his misery, his poverty—I remember that he never had a handkerchief and always wanted one, that his jacket-sleeves were near his elbow, and that his wrist bones were red and broken. But now there shone a clear ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... seemed to bring with it to Reginald a realizing sense of all that the new order of things would mean. He relapsed into thoughtfulness, in the midst of which he half sprang from his seat with an inarticulate exclamation. ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... western civilisation hitherto, on written records of one kind or another. When literary memoranda have fallen short, stone monuments have sometimes been available, and fossil remains have given us a few unequivocal, though inarticulate assurances concerning the antiquity of the human race; but modern culture has lost sight of or has overlooked possibilities connected with the investigation of past events, which are independent of ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... utters various inarticulate sounds which seem to indicate the stoppage of a bone in his throat. Nevertheless he soon recovers his powers ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... voices of the nuns at their evening prayers. She listened breathlessly, a change came over her face, a light into her eyes, and she tightened her grasp of Graham's hand. The melancholy voices rising and falling in unison, seemed a pathetic, melodious interpretation of the inarticulate harmonies ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... an inarticulate, grunting sound, but I, who knew Harley so well, could see that he felt himself to be upon the eve of a signal triumph. What he proposed to do, I had no idea, save that it was designed to clear Colin ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... of her short life, to have been moved by any such thought. She might have poured forth a song, a prayer, a rude but sweet lament for her country, out of the still bosom of that rustic existence. Such things have been, the trouble of the age forcing an utterance from the very depths of its inarticulate life. But it was not for this that Jeanne ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... despair, an unformed, inarticulate sense of calamity, seemed to run from end to end of the line. What had happened? Those in the rear, unable to read the placard, surged forward, a sense of bitter ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... natural. English women, for instance, do not make them. They are sounds a bouche fermee, at once private and irrepressible. They are not demonstrations intended for the ears of others; they are her own. Other actresses, even English, and even American, know how to make inarticulate cries, with open mouth; Signora Duse's noise is not a cry; it is her very thought audible—the thought of the woman she is playing, who does not at every moment give exact words to her thought, but does ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... of time while that inarticulate passion of dread spent itself. But it was nearly half an hour later when she started up at the echo of a light step on the gravel path, dashing her handkerchief across ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... forward of some of the miners, and an inarticulate cry of pity and of anger; but a couple of the strangers emptied their six-shooters over the heads of the crowd, and they broke and scattered, some of them rushing wildly back to ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the line were not all of this calibre. Some were poor, wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of that, in many ways very human. I remember a carter, evidently returning home after the day's work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful, who had run to meet ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... us from the house, to find the whole white colony already gathered on the spot as by concerted signal. The Sans Souci was overrun with rabble, the stair and verandah thronged. From all these throats an inarticulate babbling cry went up incessantly; it sounded like the bleating of young lambs, but angrier. In the road his royal highness (whom I had seen so lately in the part of butler) stood crying upon Tom; ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... amid her broken ejaculations of tenderness, to be faithful to him if he lived, to be faithful to his memory if he died. She never thought of Neil; or, if she did, it was with an anger that frightened her. In the full tide of her anguish, Lysbet stood at the door. She heard the inarticulate words of woe, and her heart ached for her child. She had followed her to give her comfort, to weep with her; but she felt that hour that Katherine was no more a child to be soothed with her mother's kiss. She had become a woman, and a woman's ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... blows, until, growing furious in the task, he laid his musket beside him, and worked with both hands upon his victim. The cries for pity which blows at first excited, blows at length quelled. They had gradually increased with the suffering to the most terrible shrieks; then declined into low and inarticulate moans; until a deep-drawn and agonized gasp for breath, and an occasional convulsion, alone remained to show that the vital principle had not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... but as inevitably as lava down the slope of a volcano, bearing on its surface faces with staring eyes, thousands and thousands of eyes, some fierce and bloodshot, others filled with weariness, homesickness, pain. At night she still saw them: the white faces under the sweat and dust, the eyes dumb, inarticulate, asking the answer. She had been suffocated by German soldiers, by the mass of them, engulfed and smothered; she had stifled in a land ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... thrust out. The kick sent Kamasura rolling head over heels till he crashed against the rail. He lay partially stunned by the impact, and Eric Borgson, bellowing his enjoyment of this pleasant jest, collared poor Kamasura and dragged him back before White Henshaw. The Jap was now inarticulate ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... resembling it in Brown. After a while he made unlovely and inarticulate sounds; after a while the sounds became articulate. He said: "Betty!" several times, more or less distinctly. He opened one eye, then the other; then his hands closed on the hands that were holding his wrists; he looked up at her from where he ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... ever; and to-night there is a truculent wind about the house, shaking the windows and making a hollow inarticulate grumbling in the chimney. I cannot say how much I hate the cold. It makes my scalp so tight across my head and gives me such a beastly rheumatism about my shoulders, and wrinkles and stiffens my face; O I have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the way, never extravagant nor foolish in the expression of his love. He never ran to meet his god. He waited at a distance; but he always waited, was always there. His love partook of the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent adoration. Only by the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the unceasing following with his eyes of his god's every movement. Also, at times, when his god looked at him and spoke ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... was a man of iron, shuffled and cut, dealt and played as if he were in his cafe. From below we heard the inarticulate murmurings of the two mates, half smothered by the handkerchiefs which gagged them. Outside the timbers creaked and the sails hummed under the brisk breeze which was sweeping us upon our way. Amid the splash of the ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... think of it—I've just eaten my—my—dinner," expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate remonstrances a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared with plates, serviette, and tableware for his use, but she went on spreading them before him as if she heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent show of resistance, the young minister ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... shining into the room. Waking with a start, he hurried to his master's side, to find him with wide-open eyes full of terror as he tried to ask what had happened to him. All power to move except his head was gone, and when he tried to talk his lips gave only inarticulate sounds ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... thy pig-dog of a husband I wish to kill!" he said, after one hour had gone by in inarticulate murmurings. "Him I do not fear—it is the Russian, Verisschenzko, who fills me with hate—we have regard of him, he does not go unobserved, and if you allure him also among the rest, beyond the instructions which you had, then there will be unpleasantness ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... evils of civilization at this day, and many questions of humanity long adjourned and put off. The hideous aspect of pauperism, the debasement and vice in our cities, tell us by their eloquent silence or in inarticulate mutterings, that the rich and the powerful and the intellectual do not do their duty by the poor, the feeble, and the ignorant; and every wretched woman who lives, Heaven scarce knows how, by making shirts at sixpence each, attests ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... mere appeal to the senses, became in their performances the very poetry of motion. The young noblemen remained as though entranced, their eyes fixed upon the dancers, and totally unable to give utterance to their delight. While thus absorbed, they were suddenly startled by a hoarse inarticulate sound, proceeding from the further corner of the room. At the same moment the dance ceased; dancers and musicians retired through the door by which they had entered, and a figure became visible that will probably excite the astonishment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... and he leaped up and caught her in his arms. She struggled, beating upon his breast, and crying with a sad, inarticulate cry. She would have sunk to the floor if he had not kept his hold ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... was a truce to embraces and inarticulate exclamations. Pushed into a chair by the window with his face to the light, Maxime gave himself up to their delighted eyes. They were in ecstasies over his complexion, his cheeks more filled out, his healthy look. His father threw his arms around him ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... the dizzy spectator is fain at last to shut the eyes of his soul, and take refuge (as West Indian Spaniards do) in tobacco and stupidity. The man, too, who has not only eyes but utterance,—what shall he do where all words fail him? Superlatives are but inarticulate, after all, and give no pictures even of size any more than do numbers of feet and yards: and yet what else can we do, but heap superlative on superlative, and cry, "Wonderful, wonderful!" and after that, "wonderful, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... some inarticulate sort of sound in her throat, fully frightened now, seeing how mistaken she had been. ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... the king was very much in need of water to drink. And he entered that hermitage and asked for drink. And becoming fatigued, he cried in feeble voice, proceeding from a parched throat, which resembled the weak inarticulate utterance of a bird. And his voice reached nobody's ears. Then the king beheld the jar filled with water. And he quickly ran towards it, and having drunk the water, put the jar down. And as the water was cool, and as the king had been suffering greatly from thirst, the draught ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... giant saw the opening; two steps so nearly simultaneous the movement was like a leap—and he had the wrist of the other's armed hand in his grip. Words can convey no idea of the outburst attending the assault—it was the hoarse inarticulate falsetto of a dumb man signalizing a triumph. If the reader can think of a tiger standing over him, its breath on his cheek, its roar in his ears, something approximate ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... as a priest by a peculiar kind of hissing sound, made by the tongue against the teeth, while they are kept closed, and the lips open. The nun within, who delays to open the door, until informed what kind of an applicant is there, immediately recognizes the signal, and replies with two inarticulate sounds, such as are often used instead of yes, with the ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... prairie bird, it now roams wherever large stretches of open country that suit its purposes are cleared in the East, and remains resident. This species also sings in midair on the wing, but its song is a crude, half-inarticulate affair, barely audible from a height ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead. Down in Georgia there is a feeling—perhaps inarticulate—that this is the greatest wisdom of the South—so after a while the Jelly-bean turned into a poolhall on Jackson Street where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... behind by two porters carrying a large trunk; but as the summons, though loud, was without effect, they accidentally or otherwise swung their burden against him, nearly overthrowing him; when, by a quick start, a peculiar inarticulate moan, and a pathetic telegraphing of his fingers, he involuntarily betrayed that he was not alone dumb, but ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... horses, and stopped to listen for a moment to their deep-drawn sighs of contentment, and to the musical grinding of the oats in their teeth. His imaginative mind read his own thoughts into everything, and he believed that he could distinguish in these inarticulate ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... interpretation of Sheila she would be the first to make generous acknowledgment. It was an astonishingly sensitive performance. Miss COMPTON can be eloquent with a single word or none at all. By a turn of her eyes or lips she can make you free of her inarticulate thoughts. I must go again just to hear her say "Yes," and give that sigh of content at the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... off suddenly. The roar coming from the darkness around the swamp rose high on the gusty wind. He and David were now riding fast, and the roaring grew rapidly more continuous and distinct. The vast volume of inarticulate sound presently began to break into many human voices. At last a single voice pierced all the rest. Its shrill cry of spiritual anguish filled the dark forest with the wailing ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... sword, girdle and dagger shone the silver Molene cross which had gleamed on the dead man's armor. Knolles looked at them and then at the prisoners with a face of stone. At the sight of those fell eyes they had dropped with inarticulate howls upon their knees, screaming out their protests in a tongue which ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there seemed to him no way out of the scrape but by telling a plausible untruth. "Some one must have come into the kitchen and stolen it!" And with that, choking upon the handle of the mill, which projected into his throat, he burst into inarticulate sobs. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... volume of The Student in Arms, that widely read book of the war, Donald Hankey has a chapter on "The Religion of the Inarticulate," in which he shows that the "Tommy" who for so long has been accused of having no religion, really has a very definite one. He has a religion that embraces all the Christian virtues, such as love, ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... purpose are to slay Telemachus on his return; for he, To gather tidings of his Sire is gone To Pylus, or to Sparta's land divine. He said; and where she stood, her trembling knees Fail'd under her, and all her spirits went. Speechless she long remain'd, tears filled her eyes, 850 And inarticulate in its passage died Her utt'rance, till at last with pain she spake. Herald! why went my son? he hath no need On board swift ships to ride, which are to man His steeds that bear him over seas remote. Went he, that, with himself, his very name Might perish from among ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... fall, A memory ineffable and sweet Half tinged with voiceless passion, half Plaintive with sad imaginings that drift Like echoes of far-off autumnal bells. He starts up with a laugh, Binds up the last gaunt sheaf and turns away; Out of the dusk an inarticulate call Rings keen across the solemn Berkshire woods, And then the answer. Impotent farewells That eager voices lift Into the hush of the receding day; Full soon the silence surges in again, ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... down to an inarticulate murmur and then stopped. A moment afterwards the curtains were drawn back, the shutters parted, and the windows thrown open. A flood of sunset light streamed into the room. The candles burnt yellow and went out. The mystic rites ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... from Men or Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first 'impossible.' In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through Immensity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a miraculous ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... she continued to speak hysterically; at times her voice was choked with emotion. She rose from the chair. She smiled while the tears rained down her face. Her voice trailed off into inarticulate sounds. ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... expression of terror. He lay and quaked, grunting. When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth, he was still inarticulate, but clung to Halley's arm, feeling it from ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... point—I had almost said of betraying her. At all events, if he could only understand their silent language, they would prove rich in precious revelations. So he welcomed their recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat inarticulate ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... month which followed the death of Mary the King was incapable of exertion. Even to the addresses of the two Houses of Parliament he replied only by a few inarticulate sounds. The answers which appear in the journals were not uttered by him, but were delivered in writing. Such business as could not be deferred was transacted by the intervention of Portland, who was himself oppressed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... petals pierced deep into the ball of his thumb. In an instant the sleeping demon of insanity awoke. With eyes blazing and frame trembling with fury, he sprang to his feet, seized the knife, and with a hoarse, inarticulate shout, turned upon Bert, who, paralysed with terror, stood rooted to the spot half-way between the idiot and the door. It was a moment of imminent peril, but ere Crazy Colin could reach the boy, his hoarse cry was echoed by ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... its tone, gave intense pleasure to Constance; and, laden with parcels, they mounted the stairs together, very content with each other, very happy in the discovery that they were still mother and daughter, very intimate in an inarticulate way. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... gallery so deep that the receding voices and footsteps of Grant and his hostess in the long passage were distinctly heard until they reached the end. Then Fletcher arose with an inarticulate exclamation. Clementina instantly put her finger to her lips, glanced around the gallery, extended her hand to him, and saying "Come," half-led, half-dragged him into the passage. To the right she turned and pushed ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... and when the prisoner, gray with terror, bent and tottering, was led forth, he was surrounded by a silent but determined crowd, who, thrusting the sheriffs aside, seized and drove him before them, and had already slipped the noose about his neck, when an inarticulate shout caused the crowd to sway,—a horseman dashed into their midst and proclaimed that both boys were alive. Their disappearance had been explained on that morning by a letter forwarded by hand, ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... that moment what even he himself had sometimes doubted, that his boasted love for the boys was deep and sincere. Few fathers could have experienced a more poignant combination of pride and pain than that which shook him now. But he remained, as always, inarticulate. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... melancholy-looking man with a long jaw and eyes so deep-set that the observer took them on faith, and a nose which alone would have been sufficient to identify him. Beyond the first request to "step up," he vouchsafed no word and, save for an inarticulate gurgle to his horse, seemed lost in an ageless calm. His gaze was fixed upon some indefinite portion of the horse's back and he drove leaning forward in an attitude of complete bodily and mental relaxation. If his guest wished conversation it was apparent ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... time motionless in one attitude. But we are not to suppose from this, that the Greeks were contented with a cold and feeble representation of the passions. How could we reconcile such a supposition with the fact, that whole lines of their tragedies are frequently dedicated to inarticulate exclamations of pain, with which we have nothing to correspond in any ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... and stood opposite, a great light of joy in his eyes, his hands outstretched for hers. Benumbed with many emotions, Pocahontas half-rose, an inarticulate murmur dying on her lips. Thorne put her gently back into her chair, and drew one for himself up to the hearth-rug near her; he was willing to keep silence for a little space, to give her time to recover ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... in his collaborators. At his back he had an old friend of his fathers', a gifted, if somewhat inarticulate, man of letters, who had longed, in his early life, for the opportunity to do what Owen was doing; and was generous enough to feel that, though his own working days were over, he might well use a little of his ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... wagon-box filled with our things and Olie sitting there waiting, viewing me with wordless yet respectful awe. Olie, in fact, has never yet got used to me. He's a fine chap, in his rough and inarticulate way, and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. But I'm a novelty to him. His pale blue eyes look frightened and he blushes when I speak to him. And he studies me secretly, as though I were a dromedary, or an archangel, or a mechanical toy whose ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... the blunt reply. "I am now on my way to the doctor who should have seen her last night, but he never came." He rode on without waiting to hear Tommy exclaim, "Good God!" and Honor give an inarticulate cry of ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... young man in the uniform of a Spanish officer. His face was covered with blood, upon which a swarm of flies had settled, and he was so securely fastened that he could not move hand nor foot. He was also gagged so that he could make no sound beyond an inarticulate groan, which he uttered when he saw that Ridge was awake and ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... met by a rush of excited men and women, screaming, cursing, giving vent to inarticulate and indistinguishable speech. A man laid his hand upon his shoulder. Law caught the hand, and with a swift wrench of the wrist, threw the owner of it to the ground. At this the others gave back, and for half a moment silence ensued. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Meiklewham, who did not like Tyrrel's looks so well as to induce him to become approver on the occasion, replied with an inarticulate grunt, addressed to the company, and a private admonition to his patron's own ear, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... there last week, during the performance of a new farce, entitled Romney's Rum 'Un, I was again fascinated by the inexhaustible wit and allusive badinage of this great little comedian, beside whose ready gagging GEORGE GRAVES himself is inarticulate. Had not GEORGE ROBEY invented for application to himself the descriptive phrase, "The Prime Minister of Mirth," it should be at once affixed to the Law Courts' fun-maker; but, since it is too late to use that, let us think of him as "The Chancellor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... to incite you to preserve the gospel pure; bear faithful testimony that I died in the religion of Christ and His holy apostles." Hardly had these words passed his lips, than the death-blow was given and his chest crushed; a few inarticulate sounds, apparently prayers, were heard; the head fell back, the martyrdom ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... some inarticulate disavowals. She felt it presumption to let her name be coupled with Miss Martindale's, and there was a sense of something dangerous and wrong in ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... made by those mine-craters now doubly upheaved. Their screams and moans sounding above the guns, the frantic cries of men maddened under tons of earth, which kept them prisoners in deep pits below the crater lips, and awful inarticulate noises of human pain coming out of that lower darkness beyond the light of the rockets, made up a chorus of agony more than our men could endure, even in the heat of battle. They shouted across ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... nests, from broods, from pairings, from nuptials, from homes. This one, a trumpet, comes out of the Naught, which is All. Other voices express the soul of the universe; this one expresses the monster. It is the howl of the formless. It is the inarticulate finding utterance in the indefinite. A thing it is full of pathos and terror. Those clamours converse above and beyond man. They rise, fall, undulate, determine waves of sound, form all sorts of wild surprises for the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to conceal a smile. "It's not," he said briefly. He put his cap back on his head and looked down the street as though ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... to talk—it was too hot to sleep or think. And by and by the ox-wagons came up, and the oxen brought the flies. For a time then the only sounds were the slow crunching of the feeding horses and an occasional inarticulate snarl from some one or other who foolishly tried to brush the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... unreflecting delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a delight wholly physical,—pure sensation. A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... intelligible, that sound must open into a gamut of infinite compass. The pulses of the heart, the motions of the will, the phantoms of the brain must repeat themselves in secret hieroglyphics uttered by the flying footsteps. Even the inarticulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys—have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. Palmistry has something of the same dark sublimity. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... had commanded himself with difficulty from the first, broke out upon this into an inarticulate noise, and raised one hand with an appearance of real dismay, as if he were about to interfere and contradict. But she checked him at once, looking up at him with a swift glance and an angry ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was full daylight. A varied murmur came happily from outside, what the Africans call a kalele—a compound of chatter, the noise of occupation, of movement, the inarticulate voice of human existence. He glanced across the hut. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... guardians were bearing her past the trader's house. She had the little light prison room to herself all that wintry morning, and there, disdainful of bunk or chair, enveloped in her blanket, she squatted disconsolate, greeting all questioners with defiant and fearless shruggings and inarticulate protest. Not a syllable of explanation, not a shred of news could their best endeavors wring from her. Yet her glittering eyes were surely in search of some one, for she looked up eagerly every time the door was opened, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... grasped in his was icy cold; but however keenly she may have felt the parting under such terrible circumstances she contrived to maintain at least a semblance of outward composure, though there was a tremor in her voice which she found it quite impossible to control. She murmured a few low half-inarticulate words of farewell, gave Ned's hand a slight involuntary pressure ere she released it, and then hastily retreated to ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... poop;—Robin-a-dale himself upon them, his bonds broken, his eyeballs starting, a wild blue-jerkined Ariel filled with tidings. In this moment a scant respecter of persons, he threw himself upon Nevil, pointing and stammering, inarticulate with the wealth of his discovery. The eyes of the two men followed his lean, brown finger.... Above the quay where boats made landing a sand-spit ran out from the tamarind-shadowed bank, and now in the red dawning the mist that clung to it lifted. A ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... from the bursting into life of the seed which he has sown, and the pleasure of watching the harvest of his labours come to fruition. He, too, as has been seen, feels something corresponding to "That inarticulate love of the English farmer for his land, his mute enjoyment of the furrow crumbling from the ploughshare or the elastic tread of his best pastures under his heel, his ever-fresh satisfaction at the sight of the bullocks stretching themselves as they ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... was rolling, while the lips smiled. Her words came through deeper and deeper veils, fearless, defiant, a challenge inarticulate, a continuous mutter. Again he looked at the door as he struggled to move with her dragging weight. The drops rolled on his forehead and neck, his shirt was wet, his hands slipped upon her ribbons. Suddenly ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... gone! We are paupers once more. Boy! what do you know of this? Speak up, sir, speak up. Do you know of it? Where are they?" He had him by the arm, shaking him like a bag, and the boy's words, if he had any, were jolted forth in inarticulate murmurs. The Doctor, with a revulsion from his own violence, set him down again. He observed Anastasie in tears. "Anastasie," he said, in quite an altered voice, "compose yourself, command your feelings. I would not have you give way to passion like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into him dread of the club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must learn to fear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to be hustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for not comprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for not understanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements to obedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which were formulated in Washington and disseminated for the information of the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... preliminary to an encounter with the fair, that the spectacle of a man who enters a strange drawing-room and shakes hands quietly and naturally all round, without twisting his features into an agreeable smile and mumbling entirely inarticulate words of rapture, always arouses in me feelings of envy ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... exclaimed, in almost inarticulate murmurs; "my beloved, my idol!—it is so bitter to be absent from you! ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... him. She began to run, and again she said over and over her little inarticulate prayer. She knew the Spencer house. More than once she had walked past it, on Sunday afternoons, for the sheer pleasure of seeing Graham's home. Well, all that was over ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... height. Gladness becomes uncontainable, a pain of fulness, for which, after all effort, there is no complete relief; for language breaks under it in delivery, and Art falls to the ground. The psalm of David, the statue of Angelo, the chorus of Handel, are inarticulate cries. These men have not justified to us their confidence. It will be shared, not justified. They have divined what they cannot orderly publish, and their meaning will be by the same greatness divined again. The work of such men remains a haunting, commanding enigma to following ages. They do ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... But I heard an inarticulate murmur, and I saw that in the darkness his arm went round ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... privately two days after her birth. She rallied, and grew into a big sturdy girl. When she was four years old, my father had her received into the Church by the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace. During the service the Archbishop became inarticulate, and many of those present feared that he had sustained a stroke, or had been suddenly afflicted with aphasia. What had happened was this: As my sister was inclined to be fidgetty and troublesome, my mother had, perhaps unwisely, given ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... that the distance of time, and of place, hath one and the same effect in us. For as at a distance of place, that which wee look at, appears dimme, and without distinction of the smaller parts; and as Voyces grow weak, and inarticulate: so also after great distance of time, our imagination of the Past is weak; and wee lose( for example) of Cities wee have seen, many particular Streets; and of Actions, many particular Circumstances. ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... been tested in the old Matabele war against Lo-Bengula. Colebrook, in particular, was an odd-looking creature—a tall, spare man, bodied like a weasel. He was red-haired, ferret-eyed, and an excellent scout, but scrappier and more inarticulate in his manner of speech than any human being I had ever encountered. His conversation was a series of rapid interjections, jerked out at intervals, and made comprehensible by a running play ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... diversified, and in a few steps, or strokes of a paddle, I could pass from clean sand to mangroves and muckamucka swamp, thence to out-jutting rocks, and on to the Edge of the World, all within a distance of a hundred yards. For a time my beach walks resulted in inarticulate reaction. After months in the blindfolded canyons of New York's streets, a hemicircle of horizon, a hemisphere of sky, and a vast expanse of open water lent itself neither to calm appraisal ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... thought-relations. Now constructive imagination is the queen of those mental functions which meet in what we loosely term "thought"; and imagination is ever most active where, on the outer fringe of the mind's routine work, our inarticulate questionings radiate into the unknown. When the genius has his vision, almost invariably, among the ruder peoples, it is accepted by himself and his society as something supernormal and sacred, whether its fruit be an act of leadership ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... at the portrait). And I did curse thee? At midnight? on my knees? And I believed Thee perjured, thee polluted, thee a murderess? 305 O blind and credulous fool! O guilt of folly! Should not thy inarticulate fondnesses, Thy infant loves—should not thy maiden vows, Have come upon my heart? And this sweet image Tied round my neck with many a chaste endearment 310 And thrilling hands, that made me weep and tremble. Ah, coward dupe! to yield it to the miscreant Who spake ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... is what comes of trafficking with evil spirits in museum cases—" There his speech stopped, for the grass wad was jammed down his throat again, but distinctly I heard the inarticulate Bickley snort as he conceived the repartee he was unable to utter. As for myself, I reflected that the business served us right for not keeping a watch, and abandoned ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... the young giant's ravings were inarticulate, but now and then Virginia heard her name linked with words of reverence and worship. The man fought again the recent battles he had passed through, and again suffered the long night watches beside the sleeping girl who filled his heart. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... believed, a fraction of the sense of smell, and perhaps a fraction of the sense of taste, but of even this there was no positive ascertainment. Nature had walled in his soul most effectually. Occasional inarticulate murmurings, and an incessant knitting and kneading of the fingers were his only manifestations of energy. On bright days they would place him in a little rocking-chair, in some spot where the sun fell warm, and he would rock to and fro for hours, working his slender fingers ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... not make any reply. She had risen, and was walking hastily up and down, murmuring low, inarticulate words and heaving deep, convulsive sighs. Kaunitz followed her with the eye of a cool physician, who watches the crisis of a brain-fever. He looked down, however, as the empress, stopping, raised her dark, glowing eyes to his. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... conscious motives in the mind of the deserter. It is well for the social worker to make the latter the starting point in dealing with the man, accepting the most preposterous as at least worthy of discussion. The absconder is often too inarticulate and ill at ease to give a clear picture of what was in his mind when he went away. If he was out of work, it may have been a perfectly sincere belief that he would find work elsewhere, or perhaps only a speculative hope that he might. (These are not in the beginning genuine desertions, ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... toward the door, gathering the fragile sewing as she went. He started toward her—suddenly conscious of her power—a man again. A parting of the draperies arrested them. It was Salai, his face agitated, looking from the lady to the painter, inarticulate. ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?" It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... examination of the Speaker—a prolonged one— by Parnell. Both of them were in a way able men; but both were extraordinarily slow of intellect—that is, slow in appreciating a point or catching a new idea—and Mr. Brand (as he then was) and Parnell used to face one another in inarticulate despair in the attempt to understand each the other's meaning. There were a good many fairly stupid men on the Committee, but there was not a single member of it who did not understand what Parnell meant by a question ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn |
