"Indistinctness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after is far more vague to me. Compared with the vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few months have only the blurred indistinctness of all childish memories. For I was a child once more, in all save stature, and had to learn to remember things just like ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... his tuition was terminated. I should not then have to regret this unfortunate marriage, to which I can never reconcile myself. Excepting the Abbe Dubois there is no priest in my son's favour. He has a sort of indistinctness in his speech, which makes it sometimes necessary for him to repeat his words; and ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... say that Brahman, which is homogeneous being, intelligence, bliss, has its nature obscured by avidy, and hence is seen indistinctly as it were.—But how, we ask, are we to conceive the distinctness or indistinctness of that whose nature is pure light? When an object of light which has parts and distinguishing attributes appears in its totality, we say that it appears distinctly; while we say that its appearance is indistinct when some of its attributes do not appear. Now in those aspects ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... that deepest feel, is ill exprest The indistinctness of the suffering breast; Where thousand thoughts begin to end in one, 1810 Which seeks from all the refuge found in none; No words suffice the secret soul to show, For Truth denies all eloquence to Woe. On Conrad's stricken soul Exhaustion prest, And Stupor almost lulled it into ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... His squat figure and red face suddenly loomed into a gigantic indistinctness in the girl's eyes. She would have fallen to the deck had not the captain's strong hands clutched her ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... Germany, many of whom frequent these cities in the summer session, find it difficult, nay, almost impossible, to understand at first, especially the broad Suabian of Tuebingen. Here, however, as the system of dictation prevails, the slowness of utterance compensates in a measure for its indistinctness and incorrectness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... and sing.' From the assembly came forth one whose countenance was calm unto awfulness; but whose eyes looked in love, mingled with doubt, on the face of a youth whom he led by the hand toward the spot where I lay. The features of the youth I could not discern: either it was the indistinctness of a dream, or I was not permitted to behold them. And, Lo! behind me was a great hole in the rock, narrow at the entrance, but deep and wide within; and when I looked into it, I shuddered; for I thought I saw, far down, the glimmer of a star. The youth entered and vanished. His guide strode ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... what she went on to say. Her mind and body both seemed to have floated into another region of quick-sailing clouds rapidly passing across each other and enveloping everything in a vaporous indistinctness. Meanwhile he remained conscious of his own concentrated desire, his impotence to bring about anything he wished, and his ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... for several days. It was for this reason that I had been able that evening to sit much later than usual with Madeline on the moon-lit porch. The figure was certainly that of John Hinckman in his ordinary dress, but there was a vagueness and indistinctness about it which presently assured me that it was a ghost. Had the good old man been murdered? and had his spirit come to tell me of the deed, and to confide to me the protection of his dear—? My heart fluttered ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... matter, which in different ways was a leading idea in the minds of Bacon, Hobbes and Gassendi. The defects of Descartes lie rather in his apparently imperfect apprehension of the principle of movements uniformly accelerated which his contemporary Galileo had illustrated and insisted upon, and in the indistinctness which attaches to his views of the transmission of motion in cases of impact. It should be added that the modern theory of vortex-atoms (Lord Kelvin's) to explain the constitution of matter has but slight analogy with Cartesian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... moonlight streamed in through the muslin curtains, it was lovelier yet. Matilda went to the window and gazed out. The fields and copses lay all crisp and bright in the cool moonbeams; and over beyond lay the blue mountains, in a misty indistinctness that was even more ensnaring than their midday beauty. And no bell of Mrs. Candy's could sound in that fairy chamber to summon Matilda to what she didn't like. She was almost too happy; only there came the thought, how she would ever bear to ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... for the sense of fatigue, Berenger began to impart to the Commandant his delight, but the only answer he got was 'Hope, yes, every hope;' and he again recognized what he had already perceived, that the indistinctness of his utterance made him entirely unintelligible to the deaf Commandant, and that shouting did but proclaim to the whole garrison, perhaps even to the enemy's camp, what was still too new a joy not to be ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... words were spoken low, as if doubtful whether they could be taken in good part, and they came with something that was like music. Was it the voice or some inexplicable feeling? I turned in wonder. Her head was raised, and in the indistinctness I caught that sweet look of hers which besought me, and which I answered without ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... commands are so clear that none could misunderstand them, but not so these under consideration; perhaps if we were to analyze a little deeper our hearts, we should find that the one owes its clearness to our freedom from any consequent burden on finding them clear; the other its indistinctness from the reverse, not having yet learnt the glorious liberty of depending on and yielding all to Christ. In heaven they are seen to be, I have no doubt, equally clear, equally commands, or rather privileges, of the saints ...
— Christian Devotedness • Anthony Norris Groves
... constrained attitudes and dead fixedness that distinguish all men that are born of wax, and this wrinkled, smoldering old fire-eater occupying the other side, mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in the ghostly stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight. It makes one feel crawly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... engine awoke to life and the propeller spun around, a blur of indistinctness. The motor was working sweetly. Toni throttled down, assured himself that everything was working well, and then, with a wave of his hand toward Jack, began to taxi across the field, to head up into the wind. All ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... mythology of Greece was first introduced into Rome by the poets, and was in no wise interwoven with the national recollections, as was the case in so many ways with those of Greece. The ideal of a genuine Roman Tragedy floats before me dimly indeed, and in the background of ages, and with all the indistinctness which must surround an entity, which never issued out of the womb of possibility into reality. It would be altogether different in form and significance from that of the Greeks, and, in the old Roman sense, religious and patriotic. All truly creative poetry ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... were to say all the words in the language," said Nettie, after a pause, with a breathless indistinctness and haste, "words will not change things if we should ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... pleasure and quality of conversation to speak in deliberate style. Rapidity of utterance often leads a speaker into such faults as indistinctness, monotony, and incorrect breathing. Deliberate speaking confers many advantages, not the least of which is increased ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his head from the blood-stained ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mean to tell me they actually went and ordered—" Henley began, but his voice trailed away into indistinctness. He could only stare at his ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... man, we must not study him in the folio Life of Des Maizeaux, whose laborious pencil, without colour and without expression, loses, in its indistinctness, the individualising strokes of the portrait. Look for Bayle in his "Letters," those true chronicles of a literary man, when they record his ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... merit of being, at least, perfectly clear and definite. In some particular cases, the principle may be difficult of application; but in the principle itself, as defined in this passage, there is not the slightest uncertainty or indistinctness. The author is very careful, however, to except from its operation all persons who are not in the maturity of their faculties, as well as all those backward nations who are not capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. The condition ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... poem, retaining its mythological, Christian, chivalrous, historical, and legendary elements. The mythological elements of the epic are indeed indistinct survivals of earlier ages. Hebbel leaned somewhat upon Norse myths in his reproduction of them, though it was part of his plan to preserve a certain indistinctness and mystery in these undramatic presuppositions. Similarly, he made more of the element of Christianity than is made of it by the Nibelungenlied. In both epic and drama the Burgundians are only formally Christian; the cardinal principles of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... Was there something amiss in my own hearing, then, that I could distinguish no word amidst these deeply emphasized tones? Slowly and deliberately the figure vanished, through the same stages of indistinctness, back to the globular, lamp-like whiteness, till it faded into nothingness. Before it had quite faded away, the face of a woman arose, indistinct and calm. The same emphatic hum, though in a subdued note, indistinct and dim. The same paralysis of voice and muscle, the same strange force, as if ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... The indistinctness with which people who introduce often pronounce a name is not infrequently the cause of awkwardness. The failure to hear is no fault on the part of those introduced, but rather a mishap chargeable to the person who brings ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... increasing perspective the six horses of the tally-ho were suddenly multiplied into a troop; and where the station agent had stood on the platform there seemed to be a dozen gesticulating figures fading into indistinctness, as the fast train swept ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... wonderful feats which many of these heroes have told me they performed would lead one to suppose that Napoleon's old Guard was but a flock of sheep in comparison with them. I cannot help thinking that by a certain indistinctness of recollection they attribute to themselves every exploit, not only that they saw, but that their fertile imaginations have ever dreamt to be possible. In all this nonsense they are supported ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... to maintain that there is a knowledge worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for what it does; and what minutes remain to me to-day I shall devote to the removal of some portion of the indistinctness and confusion with which the subject may ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... harm in confronting our disorders or misfortunes. On the contrary, the attempt is wholesome. Much of what we dread is really due to indistinctness of outline. If we have the courage to say to ourselves, What IS this thing, then? let the worst come to the worst, and what then? we shall frequently find that after all it is not so terrible. What we have to do is to subdue tremulous, nervous, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... of Hymen's torch the next morning. London was under one of the fogs, of which it is popularly said you may cut them with a knife. The church was in dim twilight; the bride and bridegroom loomed through the haze, and the indistinctness made Clara's fine tall figure appear quite majestic above the heads ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were primarily respected, but on the score of their descent from the aboriginal reign of Nature. This confusion has not been successfully explained away by the modern disciples of the jurisconsults, and in truth modern speculations on the Law of Nature betray much more indistinctness of perception and are vitiated by much more hopeless ambiguity of language than the Roman lawyers can be justly charged with. There are some writers on the subject who attempt to evade the fundamental difficulty by contending that the code of Nature ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... ancient works we sometimes see the mark of the chisel; in modern we might almost suppose that no chisel was employed at all, and that everything was done by grinding and rubbing. There is an ordinariness, an indistinctness, a generalization, not even to be found in a flock of sheep. As most reduce what is sand into dust, the few that avoid it run to a contrary extreme, and would force us to believe that what is original must be unpolished ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... daylight. He had seen more of Earth than anyone able to tell about it, but only he had the true feeling of it. The continents were clearly visible, as were the oceans and both polar ice caps. The shapes were familiar but in only a remote way. A vague indistinctness borne of distance served to modify the outlines and he alone was seeing and understanding. On the dark side of the planet large cities were marked by indistinct light areas which paled to insignificance compared to the ...
— Egocentric Orbit • John Cory
... was couched under this terrible threat, it is difficult to say; but certain it is that its awful indistinctness seemed to produce very little impression on ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... scene a certain charm from p 55 the power exercised by the imagination over the domain of the senses. In like manner, from the height occupied by the physical history of the world, all parts of the horizon will not appear equally clear and well defined. This indistinctness will not, however, be wholly owing to the present imperfect state of some of the sciences, but in part, likewise, to the unskillfulness of the guide who has imprudently ventured to ascend these ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... step presents unlooked-for vistas, and closes upon us our backward path. Our onward road is strange, obscure, and infinite. We are bewildered in a shadow, lost in a dream. Our perceptions have the brightness and indistinctness of a trance. Our continuity of consciousness is broken, crumbles, and falls to pieces. We go on learning and forgetting every hour. Our feelings are chaotic, confused, strange to each other and ourselves.' But in ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their departure. It had been determined between them, that the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... progressing and the noise of the machinery still reached her ears, with buzzing, humming, monotonous indistinctness. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... the boathouse a bonfire was burning, raining up sparks into the indistinctness of the dawn. Around this struggled a mass of black figures. I heard Montgomery call my name. I began to run at once towards this fire, revolver in hand. I saw the pink tongue of Montgomery's pistol lick out once, close to the ground. He was down. I shouted with all ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... curtained in a gray film. Torn breadths of it, driven by some local current of air, formed tented clouds along the promontory. It was as though yesterday's army was marshalled against other hosts that held the Chelan heights. A twilight indistinctness settled over the valley between. Rain, a downpour, was near. She hurried on to the brow of the plateau, but she dared not attempt to go down around those crumbling chimneys alone. And Tisdale had said he would come back this ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... heard a long-drawn "Oh!" of pleased surprise as she discovered Cardo hovering about the door, and he considerately entered into conversation with Shoni, endeavouring to express himself in his mother-tongue, but with that hesitation and indistinctness common to the dwellers in the counties bordering upon England, and to the "would-be genteel" of too many other parts of Wales, who, perfectly unconscious of the beauty of their own language, and ignorant of its literature, affect English manners and customs, and often pretend that English ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... the loch glittering in the sun, and the hills beyond it softly outlined with the indistinctness that mountains usually wear in summer, but with the soft summer coloring too, greenish-blue, lilac, and silver-gray varying continually. In the woods behind, where the leaves were already gloriously green, the wood-pigeons were cooing, and the blackbirds and mavises singing, ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... into consideration the indistinctness that was supposed to characterise the Communique, its general contents roused no unanimous approbation. In the Swedish Diet in May 1903, during a debate, serious doubts were rife, and it was emphatically declared that the Consular Question must be solved simultaneously with ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... The indistinctness of her vision was not due to any defect in her sight. The wet fog was rising like a shapeless evil genius out of the sluggish sea, rolling heavily across the little bay to the lovers' beach, with its swollen arms full of blight and mildew. Margaret shivered at the sight of it, and drew the lace ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... numberless smaller ones. Some evergreen shrubs in boxes stood around, and there were wooden arm-chairs, beside some settees. It was rather chilly, though the day had been very pleasant. And oh, how splendid the lights of Broadway looked to them, two long rows stretching up and up until lost in indistinctness. The stores were all open and lighted as brilliantly as one could with gas. No one thought of Saturday half-holidays then. It was very grand. But what would they have said to the Columbian ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... avoid indistinctness through over reduction, I have endeavoured to keep all reproductions in this paper as large as possible, and think I have succeeded in not losing any ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... you perfectly." It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the articulation was by any means perfect, and expectancy no doubt had a great deal to do with my recognition of the sentence; still, the articulation was there, and I recognized the fact that the indistinctness was entirely due to the imperfection of the instrument. I will not trouble you by detailing the various stages through which the apparatus passed, but shall merely say that after a time I produced the form of instrument shown in Fig. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... that exists in his fancy. We wish to be rightly understood. We do not mean that vagueness and generality are essential to poetical description. As on the one hand, mathematical accuracy, by allowing no play to the imagination, produces a feeble impression, so on the other the indistinctness arising from indefinite expressions is equally unfavorable. But in neither is the poetry of the description dependent on the greater or less degree of minuteness with which particular objects are spoken of. When Whitbread described ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... is observed, that "In poetry the same effect is produced by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity; but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply that the artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptions of his fancy. Mr. West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... more energy and power in the future; but Chopin thought he knew where this power was to be found, and for the next concert got a Vienna instrument instead of his own Warsaw one. Elsner, too, attributed the indistinctness of the bass passages and the weakness of tone generally to the instrument. The approval of some of the musicians compensated Chopin to some extent for the want of appreciation and intelligence shown by the public at ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... desired, provided they cross each other so as to leave diamond shaped spaces. After the lines are in rub a piece of clean cotton over them all, using pressure enough to subdue them to the degree of indistinctness desired; then finish with the large eraser and crayon point No. 2, putting in the cloud effect. Such lines as show too prominently you subdue with the nigrivorine eraser. If there are any light places, make them dark with ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... on the wall of mist. An idea had taken shape stealthily behind him and flung its shadow there. The idea was Lucia Harden. The fog hung in her hair in drops like rain; it made her grey dress cling close about her straight, fine limbs; it gave its own grandeur and indistinctness to her ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Susan had joined Virginia on the sidewalk, and the liquid honey of Mrs. Pendleton's voice dropped softly into indistinctness. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... passed if at least one sentence is repeated without error after a single reading. "Without error" is to be taken literally; there must be no omission, insertion, or transposition of words. Ignore indistinctness of articulation and defects of pronunciation as long as they do not mutilate ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... force, a witty scorn on the lip, a brow at once bright and weighty with satisfying reason: the other looking at the something instead of that which had been confuted, maimed, noseless, and weather-bitten into a sort of visionary confusion and indistinctness. [14] It looks like this—aye and very like that—but how like it ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... American line had run near it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding and infested with refugees, cowboys, and all kinds of border chivalry. Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... trust, in his own person, his sublime conception. The head alone is finished, or nearly so; and has a most extatic expression. The globe of the earth seems to sink from beneath the floating figure, which is just sketched upon the canvass, and has a shadowy indistinctness which to my fancy added to its effect. Guercino's chef-d'oeuvre, the Resurrection of Saint Petronilla, (a saint, I believe, of very hypothetical fame,) is also here; and has been copied in mosaic for ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals—all, all must be comprised in it, and oblivion of the past— how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... time the middle portion of the book was filling up with calculations, private memoranda, words intended for vocabularies, and extracts from books, whilst here and there the stain of a pressed flower causes indistinctness; yet the thread of the narrative runs throughout. Noting but his invariable habit of constantly repeating the month and year obviates hopeless confusion. Nor is this all; for pocket-books gave out at last, and old newspapers, yellow with African damp, were sewn together, and his notes ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... of belated rollers may be seen feeding their young. Before the beginning of the month nearly all the young crows and koels have emerged from the egg, and the great majority of them have left the nest. Young house-crows are distinguished from adults by the indistinctness of the grey on the neck. They continually open their great red ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... Marcella's voice had an indistinctness very unlike her ordinary tone. As a rule she spoke with that clearness and decision which corresponds to qualities of mind not commonly found in women. But confidence seemed to have utterly deserted her; she had lost her individuality, and was ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... to bed. As he threw open his window before undressing, it seemed to him that he could catch the sound of voices from the sea. He listened intently. A grey pall hung everywhere. To the left, with strange indistinctness, almost like something human struggling to assert itself, came the fitful flash from the light at the entrance to the tidal way. Once more he strained his ears. This time there was no doubt about it. He heard the sound of fishermen's ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the cause of that indistinctness of vision which has been ascribed to the smallness of the optic pencil. ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... Church, Venerable Bede included, wheeling about in giddy rapture like so many dancing dervises, and keeping time to their ecstatic anilities with voices tinkling like church-clocks. You may invest them with as much light or other blessed indistinctness as you please; the beards and the old ages will break through. In vain theologians may tell us that our imaginations are not exalted enough. The answer (if such a charge must be gravely met) is, that ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... he does not come, Alice, or sister, as I must call you," Helen remarked, in a graver tone, as the shadowy twilight deepened until everything wore a veil of indistinctness. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... of the infernal regions set upon the earth. While watching what goes on, we might imagine that we were far down in the earth, where Vulcan, the fire god, was at work. At night the scene is particularly weird and impressive, for the shadows and general indistinctness make everything appear strange. The glowing furnaces, the showers of sparks, the roar of the blast furnaces, the suffocating fumes of sulphur, and the half-naked figures of the Mexican workmen, passing to and fro with cloths over their mouths, form ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... upon its bloody work, at Salem; and this could only be done by renewing and fortifying the popular conviction, that such proceedings were necessary, and ought to be vigorously prosecuted, and all Sadduceeism, or opposition to them, put down. It was especially necessary to reconcile, or obscure into indistinctness, certain conflicting theories that had more or less currency. "I do not believe," says Mather, "that the progress of Witchcraft among us, is all the plot which the Devil is managing in the Witchcraft ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... considerable way, with little inconvenience. In the afternoon and evening, I felt myself light and easy, and began to plan schemes of life. Thus I went to bed, and, in a short time, waked and sat up, as has been long my custom, when I felt a confusion and indistinctness in my head, which lasted, I suppose, about half a minute; I was alarmed, and prayed God, that, however he might afflict my body, he would spare my understanding. This prayer, that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... three sources of vague and incorrect definitions: indistinctness of the object, imperfection of the organ of conception, inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas. Any one of these must produce a certain degree of obscurity. The convention, in delineating the boundary between the federal and State jurisdictions, must have experienced ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... their invariable companions, as many dogs, leading and tormenting four rein-deer down the mountains; and for two hours, along the narrow road of descent, we watched the whole troop enlarging from the indistinctness of black-beetles to the symmetry and size of men and animals. When they had reached the plain on which the small village was built, they shouted and beckoned to us; and although we made all possible haste, they seemed to fancy their excited ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... most lovely corner of it must needs be set apart as a place of banishment for the monsters that civilization had brought forth and bred! She cast her eyes around, and all beauty seemed blotted out from the scene before her. The graceful foliage melting into indistinctness in the gathering twilight, appeared to her horrible and treacherous. The river seemed to flow sluggishly, as though thickened with blood and tears. The shadow of the trees seemed to hold lurking shapes of cruelty and danger. Even ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... reproduced with great care by the photographic process. I thought best not to permit them to be retouched, preferring occasional indistinctness to modern tampering with the originals that would make them ...
— The Orbis Pictus • John Amos Comenius
... cultivation, had bestowed on him the faculty of conveying the impression he wished to convey, in tones that charm; and held his auditors, and penetrated ears dulled and fatigued by monotony and indistinctness. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... private education. The moral standing of the nation, taken as a whole, has been degenerating; in business, in public affairs, in private life, until the standards of value have been confused, the line of demarcation between right and wrong blurred to indistinctness, and the old motives of honour, duty, service, charity, chivalry and compassion are no longer the controlling motive, or at least the conscious ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... clear that what hinders a true understanding of anything is vagueness; and it is by this process of asking questions that vagueness is to be dispelled: for, in the first place, it removes one great vagueness, or indistinctness, which is very apt to beset the minds of many; namely, the not clearly seeing whether they understand a thing or no; and much more, the not seeing what it is that they do understand, and what it is which ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... have no doubt that many other resemblances might be discovered by careful investigation. We cannot wonder that Endymion attracted Shakespeare, for it is the most "romantic" of all Lyly's plays. Indistinctness of character seems to be in keeping with an allegory of moonshine; and even the mechanical action cannot spoil the poetical atmosphere which pervades the whole. Here if anywhere Lyly reached the poetical plane. He speaks of "thoughts stitched to the starres," ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... about them; but it was another day, or I was another man. In memory, none the less, all my visits blend in one, and the ruined mill in the dying orchard remains one of the bright spots in that strange Southern world which, almost from the moment I left it behind me, began to fade into indistinctness, like the landscape of ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... a small, hazy-looking, ill-defined object swam into the field of the instrument. The object was about one point before the weather beam, and was so far away that the rarefaction of the air imparted to it a wavering indistinctness of aspect that rendered it quite unrecognisable. The fact, however, that it was visible at all in the slightly hazy atmosphere led me to estimate its distance from the brig as about ten miles, while, from its apparent size, it might be either a boat, a raft, or a piece of ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... absurdity of thus approaching a man whom he saw twenty times a day, old Mivane would permit no such intimation of the extent of his affliction,—it being a point of pride with him that he was merely slightly hard of hearing, and suffered only from the indistinctness of the enunciation of people in general. And indeed, it was variously contended that he was so deaf that he could not hear a gun fired at his elbow; and yet that he heard all manner of secrets which chanced to be detailed in his presence, in inadvertent reliance on his incapacity, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... both sides. "The symptoms are, so to speak, grouped about the tongue as a centre, and it is in this organ that the earliest symptoms are usually manifested." (Gowers). Imperfect articulation of those sounds in which the tongue is chiefly concerned, viz. the lingual consonants l, r, n, and t, causing indistinctness of speech, is the first symptom; the lips then become affected and there is difficulty in the pronunciation of sounds in which the lips are concerned, viz. u, o, p, b, and m. Eventually articulate speech becomes impossible, and the only expression ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... of this Part is Edinburgh Castle, from the Grass Market, in which the fine old fortress is seen towering in all its picturesqueness and romantic beauty. Here and there it has some of the indistinctness of hoar antiquity: its fadings away are beautifully characteristic. The houses in the Grass Market are boldly contrasted with the Castle, and the "spirit" inscriptions on the Stablers are as distinct as the most panting soul could wish them. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... moon was getting higher. At the same time though, soft fleecy clouds began to hide the stars, and at times the shadow of the mountain was blotted out, for the moon was from time to time obscured, and the peculiar indistinctness of the earth seemed to Bart as exactly ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... eighteen feet long, each one showing a cloud of humming-birds of one species flitting about a flowery bush; but even in such a picture as that would be, the birds, suspended on unlovely angular projections instead of "hazy semicircles of indistinctness," and each with an immovable fleck of brightness on the otherwise sombre plumage, would be as unlike living humming-birds as ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... rightwards, if in the bewildering indistinctness I might guess where (but the where is not so important to us), Baireuth Dragoons, they of the 67 standards at Striegau long since, plunged into the Austrian Battalions at an unsurpassable rate; tumbled four regiments of them ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Swiveller, Stiggins, Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills are almost {271} equally good. In the innumerable swarm of minor characters with which he has enriched our comic literature, there is no indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that has been made to him is that his characters are too distinct—that he puts labels on them; that they are often mere personifications of a single trick of speech or manner, which ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... to recall even the undertow of my thoughts while he was speaking. I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery growing and stirring within me, my realisation that at any risk I must help him. But then comes indistinctness again. I was beginning to act. I know I persuaded him to put himself in my hands, and began at once to plan and do. I think that when we act most we remember least, that just in the measure that the impulse of our impressions translates itself into schemes and movements, it ceases ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... they denote only the faint, dull, indefinite echo returned by consciousness to an invariably distinct state of unconscious knowledge. Hence the word "presentiment," which carries with it an idea of faintness and indistinctness, while, however, it may be easily seen that sentiment destitute of all, even unconscious, ideas can have no influence upon the result, for knowledge can only follow upon an idea. A presentiment that sounds in consonance with our ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... the valley there was a low-spreading mist over the gray sage, which lent a warmth to the raw morning wind. There was a sense of indistinctness through the mist which was an ally to Chadron. Ten rods away, even in the growing morning, it would have been impossible to tell a cowboy from ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... finished speaking, a blurred mist came over his eyes, and, half buried in the scarlet sand, appeared a large circle of dazzlingly white pillars. For some minutes they flickered to and fro between distinctness and indistinctness, like an object being focused. Then they faded out of ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... word is, when an affirmation is intended, is not, when a negation; or by some other part of the verb to be. The word which thus serves the purpose of a sign of predication is called, as we formerly observed, the copula. It is important that there should be no indistinctness in our conception of the nature and office of the copula; for confused notions respecting it are among the causes which have spread mysticism over the field of logic, and ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... higher and looked out of the window. There was the sea, floundering and rushing against the ship's side just by her head, and thence stretching away, dim and moaning, into an expanse of indistinctness; and far beyond all this two placid lights like rayless stars. Now almost fearing to turn her face inwards again, lest Mrs. Jethway should appear at her elbow, Elfride meditated upon whether to call Snewson to keep her ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... like a more refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream. "When that power awakes, then has this world its full expansion; but when he slumbers with a tranquil spirit, then the whole system fades away." In the very indistinctness of their theogony a sublime truth is implied. It hardly allows the reader to rest in any supreme first cause, but directly it hints at a supremer still which created the last, and the Creator is still ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... into two equal segments to represent these two regions, and again divide each segment in the same ratio—both that of the visible and that of the intelligible species. The parts of each segment are to represent differences of clearness and indistinctness. In the visible world the parts are things and images. By images I mean shadows,[530] reflections in water and in polished bodies, and all such like representations; and by things I mean that of which images ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... moodily, from the depth of an absurd jealousy. The man whose voice was coming to them with a certain deep indistinctness from the bay-window was an ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... he could make inaudible to the dozing passengers. And now the engineer pulled out the throttle-valve to make up for lost time, and the clatter of the train faded into a distant roar and its lights began to twinkle into indistinctness. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... something gone from that innocent face, some of its sweet purity? Or would there be something added, a flicker of eternal fear in the wide, blue eyes, or the stamp of hell across the fair brow? The face merged slowly into a general indistinctness until with a shock it all cleared away, and he felt a sharp pain in the back ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... with that letter, Eugenie remained silent and thoughtful for more than an hour, Morton's letter before her; and sweet, in their indistinctness, were the recollections and the images ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in her face, and it remained there, enhancing the vivid richness of her beauty. She was dizzy with a strange and disconcerting intoxication. She seemed to be in a world of unrealities and incredibilities. Her ears heard with indistinctness, and the edges of things and people had a prismatic colouring. She was in a state of ecstatic, unreasonable, inexplicable happiness. All her misery, doubts, despair, rancour, churlishness, had disappeared. She was as softly gentle as Constance. Her ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... relationship with the more aerial tones of the true singers; and this is the second quality I spoke of, which gave a charm to this note and made it seem better than the others. This is partly the effect of distance, which clarifies and softens sound, just as distance gives indistinctness of outline and ethereal blueness to things that meet the sight. To objects beautiful in themselves, in graceful lines and harmonious proportions and colouring, the haziness imparts an additional grace; but it does not make beautiful the objects which are ugly in themselves, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... failed,—the fainter lines either disappearing altogether, or printing as dark as thick ones. In every attempt made to use this ink as a wash, the result was still more disastrous, producing only one dirty mass of indistinctness, amid which the original drawing was scarcely to be traced. For twenty years did Mr. Hullmandel labour to attain some mode of printing drawings, made by a series of washes, with a brush, on stone, ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... of excellent parts, and a pupil who does us great credit. It is true, as your sublime highness's discrimination has observed, that his enunciation, even to those who know the language, may have some appearance of indistinctness, because he is defective in the vowel-points; but we cannot help it, for all our books are unpointed. In this, which, indeed, we consider a matter of little importance, we do not pretend to compete with the Jews, who teach theirs from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... they were near stripped; they turned their faces towards Redwood, but with a watchful reference ever and again to the castings that they could not leave. He saw these nearer figures with a fluctuating indistinctness, by lights that came and went, and the remoter ones still less distinctly. They came from and vanished again into the depths of great obscurities. For these Giants had no more light than they could help in the pit, that ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... one of the most striking examples of Titian's want of feeling and coarseness of conception. (See above, Vol. I. p. 12.) As a work of mere art, it is, however, of great value. The traveller who has been accustomed to deride Turner's indistinctness of touch, ought to examine carefully the mode of painting the Venice in the distance at ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... threshold of the parlor, emerging from within, appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on them alone. Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had wandered miles away from Beynac. We very nearly met one night, both being out with the same object in view. I, however, had very little of his zeal for the sport, and was less interested by the crayfish than by the fantastic indistinctness of trees and shrubs and flowers, which, in the light of the stars and the lantern, seemed to belong to a world with which I was but vaguely familiar, although I had travelled all over ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... consistent; but Finella is sometimes handsome enough to make duke and king ready to be in love with her, and sometimes an odious little fury, clenching her hands, and to be lifted up or down stairs out of the hero's way. The indistinctness about her is not that indistinctness which belongs to the sublime, but that which arises from unsteadiness in the painter's hand when he sketched the figure. He touched and retouched at different times, without having, as it seems, a determined idea himself of what he would make her; nor had ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... him well to his task, and succeeded in implanting in him a fair knowledge of the science. Young Beecher also took lessons in elocution from Professor John E. Lovell. Under the instructions of this able teacher, he learned to manage his voice, and to overcome the thickness and indistinctness of utterance which previous to this had troubled him so much. He continued at this school for three years, devoting himself to study with determination and success, and taking rank as one of the most promising ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... so in the case of unaccented short vowels that are hurried over between the accents in talking, they are disguised and lose quality, but in good speakers a trace of the original sound will remain (as in parasite and obloquy), where, on the ground of indistinctness, Mr. Jones introduces the symbol of an alien unrelated sound, a sound, that is, which is distinctly wrong instead of being indistinctly right: and this fault vitiates all his books. Economy of symbols has led him to perversity ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... objects seen through a thin smoke, whilst each of the tall stems of the cocoa—nut trees on the beach, when looked at steadfastly, seemed to be turning round with a small spiral motion, like so many endless screws. There was a dreamy indistinctness about the outlines of the hills, even in the immediate vicinity, which increased as they receded, until the Blue Mountains in the horizon melted into sky. The crew were listlessly spinning oakum, and mending sails, under the shade of the awning; ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... had again woven the spell of romance around her. As she sat there, a sweet shadowy form touched to indistinctness by the soft dusk, he knew her gallant heart had gone with him in the Castilian battle song he had sung, had remained with him in the transition to the more tender ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... heat, and sweating are less marked in the child than in the grown person, and this indistinctness of its symptoms is greater in proportion to the tenderer age of the child. Shivering is scarcely ever well-marked, a condition of unaccountable depression usually taking its place, while once or twice I ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... horrid sea-sceptre, the trident of his power, he smote the air and the sea, and conjured up all his black storms, calling down night from the cope of heaven, and taking the earth into the sea, as it seemed, with clouds, through the darkness and indistinctness which prevailed; the billows rolling up before the fury of all the winds, that contended together ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... Biscayan urca pressed on the hour of departure all the same. They formed a busy and confused group, in rapid movement on the shore. To distinguish one from another was difficult; impossible to tell whether they were old or young. The indistinctness of evening intermixed and blurred them; the mask of shadow was over their faces. They were sketches in the night. There were eight of them, and there were seemingly among them one or two women, hard to recognize under the rags and tatters in which the group was ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... hesitatingly, and spoke with the indistinctness of awed humility. "You are to punish me," she explained, "by making me work out this original proposition"—showing the book—"and you are to keep me ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... range rose to correspond across the valley, the snow line distinctly visible, though the nearer ranges did their best to cut it off. Norikura, the Saddle, especially, showed a fine bit of its ten thousand feet, wrapped in the indistinctness of the spring haze. The heavy air gave a look of slumber to the peaks, as if those summits, waked before the rest of the world, had already grown drowsy. We had not yet ceased gazing at them when a turn of the road shut them ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... away of the waters. I tell myself now, as a profane fact, that I did stand by that river (Methley gathered some seeds from the bushes that grew there), but since that I am away from his banks, “divine Scamander” has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him as an unseen deity; a kind of indistinctness, like that which belongs to far antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream that I saw with these very eyes. One’s mind regains in absence that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their rude ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... long journey, re-crossing the treacherous Way of the Thousand Steps without a single mishap, and ascended to the lofty plateau of Omar's kingdom until, high up in the grey morning mist, we saw looming before us with almost spectral indistinctness the gigantic battlements and domes of the City in the Clouds. On ascending the rope steps at the Gate of Mo a few days previously we had ascertained that the expedition to the Hombori Mountains had been entirely successful, for the ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... distance, the seeing appears to be there; yet the seeing is in the eye, which is the subject, and is likewise an affecting of the subject. Distance is solely from the judgment concluding about space from things intermediate, or from the diminution and consequent indistinctness of the object, an image of which is produced interiorly in the eye according to the angle of incidence. From this it is evident that sight does not go out from the eye to the object, but that the image of the object enters the eye and affects its substance ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... great thickness and indistinctness of utterance, but with an immovable gravity of countenance. I never saw a Man who was manifestly so Drunk speak so sensibly, and behave himself in such a proper ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... pompous old gentlemen in black, with huge periwigs, and crowns round their hats, and a couple of melancholy pages in yellow and red. But pages and wigs and Grand Masters have almost faded out of the canvas, and are vanishing into Hades with a most melancholy indistinctness. The names of most of these gentlemen, however, live as yet in the forts of the place, which all seem to have been eager to build and christen: so that it seems as if, in the Malta mythology, they had been turned ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Arno. Some of their peaks, as well as the mountain of Vallombrosa, along the eastern sky, are tipped with snow. Imagine the air filled with a thick blue mist, like a semi-transparent veil, which softens every thing into dreamy indistinctness, the sunshine falling slantingly through this in spots, touching the landscape here and there as with a sudden blaze of fire, and you will complete the picture. Does it not repay your mental flight ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... previous his mind had been confused, wavering doubtfully between the past and the present, and hovering forward, as it were, at intervals, into the indistinctness of the world to come. There had been feverish turns which tossed him from side to side and wore away what little strength he had. But in his most convulsive struggles and in the wildest vagaries of his intellect, when no other thought retained its ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... light wind stirred the trees and the stream. Along the river meadows he could hear the cows munching and see their dusky forms moving through a thin mist. The air was amethyst and gold, and the beautiful earth shone through it, ennobled by the large indistinctness, the quiet ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... our phonological studies, either expect or desire more than general hints from physical ethnology. The proper and rational connection between the two sciences is that of mutual advice and suggestion, but nothing more. Much of the confusion of terms and indistinctness of principles, both in Ethnology and Phonology, are due to the combined study of these heterogeneous sciences. Ethnological race and phonological race are not commensurate, except in ante-historical times, or perhaps at the very dawn of history. With the migration of tribes, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... pointed out a similar indistinctness in the human actors, no less than in the landscape features of "Fingal" and "Temora." They have no dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all extremely shadowy. "Poor, moaning, monotonous MacPherson" is Carlyle's alliterative description of the translator of "Ossian"; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... former occasion my conceptions were in a state of the greatest indistinctness and confusion after leaving the mattress. For a long time I found it nearly impossible to connect any ideas; but, by very slow degrees, my thinking faculties returned, and I again called to memory the several incidents of my condition. For the presence of Tiger I tried in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... you are very welcome, however, and I am very much obliged to you. I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... words penetrated the wall of blankness which surrounded her thoughts, "I tell you it is the greatest menace to our civilization!" and then, as he controlled his excitement, his speech dropped quickly into indistinctness. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... heavily against the assured comforts and the opportunity of cutting a figure. On the other hand, I remember once being told by a communicative young trooper with whom I had some conversation that the desire to "see life" had been his own motive for enlisting. He appeared to be seeing it with some indistinctness: he was a little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... rapid speaking. To talk slowly and deliberately, is to enhance the pleasure and beauty of the conversation. Rapidity in speech results in indistinctness, and indistinctness ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... Beautiful and Beauty on the one hand, and the Poetical and Poetry on the other, has generally been seen, when seen at all, vaguely; that is to say, seen as the Beautiful and the Poetical themselves have been seen—"in a mirror darkly." This indistinctness seems to have grown out of the faulty views of nature taken by the speculators. . . . . . . . . . In brief, then, Nature is an effect—a product—of a Power lying behind or above it; and it stands, accordingly, to that Power in the relation of an effect to a cause. That cause we shall describe ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... gravel beach at the end. I noted a practicable way from it to the top of the cliff, and from the cliff down again to the sand beach. Everything was perfect. The water was a beautiful light green, like semi-opaque glass, and from the indistinctness of its depths waved and beckoned, rose and disappeared with indescribable grace and deliberation long feathery sea growths. In a moment the bottom abruptly shallowed. The motion of the boat toward the beach permitted us to catch a hasty glimpse ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... horrid sea-sceptre, the trident of his power, he smote the air and the sea, and conjured up all his black storms, calling down night from the cope of heaven, and taking the earth into the sea, as it seemed, with clouds, through the darkness and indistinctness which prevailed, the billows rolling up before the fury of all the winds, that contended ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... drifting nearer than was desirable. The wind came fresh and fair about ten, when we directed our course towards the distant bluff. Everything was again in motion. The cliffs behind us gradually sunk, as those before us rose, and lost their indistinctness; the blue of the latter soon became grey, and, ere long, white as chalk, this being the material of which ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue. Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple haze of distance. Gazing ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... left little trace, or little that was regarded; the mental journey had been much more lasting in its effects. That night there was a young moon, and Eleanor sat at her window, looking out into the shadowy indistinctness of the outer world, while she tried to resolve the confusion of her mind into something like visible order and definiteness. Two points were clear, and seemed to loom up larger and clearer the longer she thought about them; her supreme ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... look back, I saw what appeared to be a high island, covered with tall groves of palms, some two miles distant. The elevated shores, and the green tops of the trees, were plainly visible; but just at the point where land and water met, there was a kind of hazy indistinctness in the view. We were sailing directly from it, and I could not understand how we had passed as near as we must have done, without observing it. Browne, catching sight of it almost at the same time with myself, uttered an exclamation ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... could not 'link' anything. I follow all that, and I don't think the title is particularly artistic. It's not clear enough. Your own is much better from the view of intrinsic fitness. But the beauty of Linked Spheres is its indistinctness. You must not be too clear. That has been my great fault—perspicuity—and I am beginning to see it now. It has fatally barred my getting on. I always do try to make people see exactly what I mean, and that is apparently a mistake. When I write about ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... further on, the velocities with which the glowing gases on the sun are animated must be exceedingly great. Even in the hundredth part of a second (which is about the duration of the exposure of this plate) the movements of the solar clouds are sufficiently great to produce the observed indistinctness. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... efforts of the Shah on Herat in 1838 which were a cause of anxiety to the Indian Government; but, as Kaye writes,[Footnote: Kaye's War in Afghanistan.] 'far out in the distance beyond the mountains of the Hindoo Koosh there was the shadow of a great Northern army, tremendous in its indistinctness, sweeping across the wilds and deserts of Central Asia towards the frontiers of Hindostan.' That great Northern army, as we know now, but did not know then, was the column of Perofski, which had left Orenburg for the attempted conquest of Khiva, but which ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... said Cameron, his words coming with painful indistinctness, "I don't understand this. I can't think clearly. I can't remember. That money I got from Potts; at least I must have—I have had money from no ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... said my lady, but the Baroness would have you. It's all the Baroness's doing, and if she says a thing, it must be done; so you must just get up and come." Mr. Esmond delivered these words with the most amiable rapidity and indistinctness, running them into one another, and tacking about the room as he spoke. But the young Virginian was in great wrath. "I tell you what, cousin," he cried, "I won't move for the Countess, or for the Baroness, or for all ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mass. In his defining, isolating imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character without passing through ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... assemblage. The vault was deep, even below the common foundations of the city, and where the light of day never came. An iron lamp hung from one of the massy arches of the roof; the damp and stagnant vapours lending an awful indistinctness to the objects they surrounded. Chill drops lay on the walls and on the slippery floor. The stone benches were green with mildew; and it seemed as though the foot of man had ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... was printed in 1598. Here, for the first time, we meet with a genuine specimen of the English Historical Drama. The scene covers a period of twenty years; the incidents pass with great rapidity, and, though sometimes crushed into indistinctness, are for the most part well used both for historic truth and dramatic effect; and the dialogue, generally, is nervous, animated, and clear. In the great article of character, too, this play has very considerable merit. ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... groundless apprehensions which arise from the fear of invisible and incorporeal beings, let persons be instructed in the various optical illusions to which we are subject, arising from the intervention of fogs, and the indistinctness of vision in the night-time, which makes us frequently mistake a bush that is near us for a large tree at a distance, and let them be taught that under the influence of these illusions a timid imagination will transform the indistinct image of a cow or a horse into a terrific ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... often strangely turns to ribald mirth, As though I had no doubt nor hope beyond— Or brooding melancholy cloys my soul With thoughts of days misspent, of wasted time And bitter feelings swallowed up in jests. Then strange and fearful thoughts flit o'er my brain By indistinctness made more terrible, And incubi mock at me with fierce eyes Upon my couch: and visions, crude and dire, Of planets, suns, millions of miles, infinity, Space, time, thought, being, blank nonentity, Things incorporeal, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... The meeting was the more abrupt owing to the circumstance that Diane, unaware of his arrival, had just emerged from the adjoining ball-room, which was decorated for a dance. Mrs. Wappinger, coming forward at that minute with a cup of tea for her, pronounced their names with hurried indistinctness, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... with one eye through the telescope and the moon with the unaided eye, in such a manner that the two discs may coincide, and thus their relative apparent dimensions be at once recognised. Nor should the indistinctness and incompleteness of the view be attributed to imperfection of the telescope; they are partly due to the nature of the observation and the low power employed, and partly to the inexperience ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... eyes—like the eyes of a lion in color—at the street. Not for the world would she let him see that she wanted to cry! A figure, blurred to indistinctness, appealed in a doorway nearly opposite, stood for a moment looking up at the reddened sky, and came across the street. As the tears were beaten back she saw and recognized him, with a curl of ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... indistinctness must be in your powers of vision. Nothing can be more plainly traceda proper agger or vallum, with its corresponding ditch or fossa. Indistinctly! why, Heaven help you, the lassie, my niece, as light-headed a goose as womankind affords, saw the traces of the ditch at once. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... lay the Painted Desert, like a mirage, like a really painted landscape, glowing in red and orange and pink, an immense city rather than a landscape, with towers and terraces and facades, melting into indistinctness as in a rosy mist, spectral but constant, weltering in a tropic glow and heat, walls and columns and shafts, the wreck of an Oriental capital on a wide violet plain, suffused with brilliant color softened into exquisite shades. All over ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... more delicate ornaments undistinguishable at a distance, but still more by the transmission through it of glimpses of the most beautiful colours, which change with every movement, however slight, in the position of the eye, and whose very indistinctness and transitory character contributes not a little to the effect which they tend to produce ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... to rest, all night long I dreamed of the unhappy descendant of the Inca who was beneath our roof. Some of the incidents of which I had read in Peruvian history were strongly mixed up in my mind with the reality, with the indistinctness which generally ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... fought a minute before Catalina passed her sword through her opponent's body; and without a groan or a sigh, the Portuguese cavalier fell dead at his own door. Kate searched the street with her ears, and (as far as the indistinctness of night allowed) with her eyes. All was profoundly silent; and she was satisfied that no human figure was in motion. What should be done with the body? A glance at the door of the house settled that: Fernando ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... architecture, and which Michel Angelo looked longingly back upon when he was going to Rome to build that more wondrous orb of Saint Peter's. White and stately by its side shot up the airy shaft of the Campanile; and the violet vapor swathing the whole city in a tender indistinctness, these two striking objects, rising by their magnitude far above it, seemed to stand alone in a sort ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... on the nervous system that the most considerable action of electricity is exerted. A strong charge passed through the head, gave to Mr. Singer the sensation of a violent but universal blow, and was followed by a transient loss of memory and indistinctness of vision. If a charge be sent through the head of a bird, its optic nerve is usually injured or destroyed, and permanent blindness induced; and a similar shock given to larger animals, produces a tremulous state of the muscles, with general prostration of strength. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group by looking over many documents, I find nothing more amusing than a plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I imagine more or less reflected the sentiments of all of us. At any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not for his edification: "So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep, we find ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams |
