"Nebulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Educational facilities, inclusive of schools, libraries, and museums; railroads, telegraph and telephone service, electric lighting and electric trams,—all the ways and means of the modern mechanism of life are, inevitably, in a nebulous state in Italy. The political situation is extremely interesting at the present time. That the "Blacks" and the "Whites" are diametrically opposed to each other is in the nature of history rather than that of contemporary ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... weakly defended by his political co-religionists, which was scarcely surprising. Not knowing how to explain his conduct, the Opposition papers were afraid to commit themselves in favor of a man whose future was daily becoming more nebulous. ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... corona seems most developed over the spot-zones—i.e., neither at the equator nor the poles. The four great sheaves of light give it a square appearance, and are made up of rays or plumes, delicate like the petals of a flower. During a minimum the nebulous ring seems to be made of tufts of fine hairs with aigrettes or radiations from both poles, and ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... nebulous and noiseless, went on in the darkness, and another like it seemed to rise from the plain and join it. Then they were lost to the sight of the pursuer, seeming to melt into and become a part of the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... He was glad when it came time for Steve's watch on deck, and he could lie down and let sleep drive it out of his mind. He did not live solely to revenge himself upon Horace Gower. He had his own way to make and his own plans—even if they were still a bit nebulous—to fulfill. It was only now and then that the past saddened him ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in numbers. Towards the circumference it grows darker, becoming clouded and confused, and at one end a black expanse of waveless water is whitened by the nebulous outline of flitting sails. As a first attempt it is on the whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what we may hope to see accomplished in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... floating with wild caprice in the midst of this nebulous mass of fourteen hundred thousand times the volume of the earth into which it will one day be condensed, and carried forward amongst the planetary bodies. My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... confession. A hazy notion haunted Evelyn that people who were in straits borrowed money from somewhere, or some one. But her knowledge of this mysterious transaction went no further; and even she was able to perceive that from so nebulous a starting-point no definite advance could be made. She had also heard of women selling their jewels, and wondered vaguely who were the convenient people who bought them; though this alternative did not commend itself to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... regular deep breathing, and La Mothe slipped past noiselessly, seeking anew for the promised signal. And midway to the well of the stairs, where faint murmurings told of sleepless life even in ill-lit, ill-guarded Amboise, he found it—a nebulous dusky cross, broader than long, stretching its shadowy arms upon the flags, and at his first low tap on the panel the door was softly opened and as softly closed ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... great, very great, trouble to trace the path of the fugitives in Lytton's immortal work. But I have an idea that at certain points Lytton was rather nebulous. I met your young friend and asked him what he thought. He only laughed, however. He is ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... is I—YOU! There is no God but this, and in one moment the interior consciousness becomes at-one-with-self, God, and from that inconceivable height of profound vision we again look upon Nature. Behold Sun, Moon and planets in all the original magnificence of their nebulous luminosity; from nebulous rings we proceed, stage after stage, each producing its own degrees of life. On, on we pass the ages, the geological cycles of inconceivable duration in time, but only a mere instant in eternity; and on and on, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... was no dweller in that darkness, the terrible voice of God drove it far away from the eyes of men—Heaven was thundering as if it would have smashed this nebulous star of ours here below into fragments. Who could sleep at ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... topples over the edge. Seizing us by the crown-tuft of hair upon our shaven head, he plants the foamy bunch of fibres full in our face. The world vanishes; sight, hearing, smell, taste (unless we open our mouth), and breathing, are cut off; we have become nebulous. Although our eyes are shut, we seem to see a blank whiteness; and, feeling nothing but a soft fleeciness, we doubt whether we be not the Olympian cloud which visited lo. But the cloud clears away before strangulation begins, and the velvety mass descends upon the body. Twice we are thus "slushed" ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... it, with the essay on the Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in full. The essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks and sent ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 40,000 miles in diameter, and of that class termed nebulous, having no tail, and probably no solid nucleus. The point where the comet's centre crosses the plane of the ecliptic is within and very near the curve which the earth describes,—so very near, that the outskirts of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... unmeasurable gaps there floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rain suggested—and from which broader conceptions proceeded and ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... appropriately named Antelope, Bear, Bison, Boulder, Buffalo, Coyote, Cedar, Cottonwood, Deer, Golden, Granite, Moose, etc. The names of most trees, most precious stones, the great States and Territories of the West, with a sprinkling of Spanish, likewise beguile you off into space, and leave the once nebulous burg beaming in ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... dark, moonless night, with only a faint, nebulous whiteness where the clouded stars shone overhead. His lantern, swinging lightly from his hand, cast a shining yellow circle on the ground before him, and it was by this illumination that he saw presently, as he neared the sunken road into which ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the glory of those ten days spent by me elsewhere! The journeys through the long chain of existences! The long darks, the growings of nebulous lights, and the fluttering apparitional selves that ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... emotion stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into the gathering evening. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to him to be practically certain that no one of them was infallibly in the right, and that the truth probably lay in certain wide religious ideas which underlay all forms of Christian faith. Maitland rejected this with scorn as a dangerous and nebulous kind of religion—"nerveless and flabby, without bone or sinew." They then diverged on to a wider ground, and Hugh tried to defend his theory that God called souls to Himself by an infinite variety of appeal, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the candid reader as to whether this sort of thing is not too nebulous and tenuous for the uninitiated mind to discuss. "An orderly development"—but of nobody knows what nor in what direction—"a prophesy," an intangible "inspiration"; these may be very fine, but where are we, and what are we talking ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Customs official was gloating over them already. Perhaps Curtis felt a faint whiff of surprise that his young friend had not introduced him to his relatives, but it vanished instantly. Steamer acquaintance is a nebulous thing at the best; in that respect, the land is more unstable ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... low down and glittering swiftly nearer, were two little patches of nebulous light. And then two more, and then a glow of swiftly driving shapes. Presently he could count them. There were four and twenty. The first fleet of aeroplanes had come! Beyond ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... vol. civ.—Astronomical Observations relating to the Sidereal Part of the Heavens, and its Connection with the Nebulous Part; arranged for the Purpose ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... blown and radiant on the mountain summits around us, was yet nebulous and uncertain in the valleys into which we were plunging. Lights still glimmered in the cabins and few ranch buildings which began to indicate the thicker settlements. And the shadows were heaviest in a little copse, where a note from Judge Thompson in the coach was handed up to Yuba Bill, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... closed, the Colonel drew his chair toward the fire, picked up a magazine, and commenced idly to slit the pages. Shirley studied the back of his head for some time, then got out some fancy work and commenced plying her needle. And as she plied it, a thought, nebulous at first, gradually took form in her head until eventually she murmured loud enough for the Colonel ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... constitution "invented" exclusively in the interests of "order?" Is not the only difference that the "materialist" transforms the Utopian programme of the "idealist," into something even more Utopian, more nebulous, more absurd? ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... consequence of physical agencies than the accumulation of vegetable matter in a peat bog and its transformation into coal? No scientific person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast extent, from which the specific existing worlds have been developed one by one What theist doubts that the actual results of the development in the inorganic worlds are not ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... by. At its centre the trail is brightest;—towards either edge it pales off cloudily,—curling like smoke of phosphorus. Great sharp lights burst up momentarily through it like meteors. Weirder than this strange wake are the long slow fires that keep burning at a distance, out in the dark. Nebulous incandescences mount up from the depths, change form, and pass;—serpentine flames wriggle by;—there are long billowing crests of fire. These seem to be formed of millions of tiny sparks, that light up all at the same time, glow for a while, disappear, reappear, and swirl ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... I heard to the reader would be impossible; so chaotic was most of it that it left no impression on my own memory. All I can do is to tell him what fragments stuck, and what nebulous classification I involved. The letters ran from A to G, and my best continuous chance came when Bhme, reading rapidly from a paper, I think, went through the letters, backwards, from G, adding remarks to each; thus: 'G. . . completed.' 'F.. . bad. . . 1.3 (metres?).. .2.5 ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Down nebulous ways they went, the thin darkness flowing past them. The sloping avenue ran all the width of the palace grounds, and here among slim-trunked trees faint fringes of the light touched away the dimness in the open spaces and expressed the borders of the dusk. Always the way led down, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Kyushu, Japan held no intercourse with the outer world for several decades, nor does her friendship seem to have been sought by any oversea nation. In the closing year of the thirteenth century, merchantmen flying the Yuan flag are reported to have arrived, but the record is nebulous, and the same may be said of a passing reference that, in 1341, Japanese vessels were sent to China to procure articles manufactured there. We reach more solid ground a year later (1342), when the Ashikaga ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... demands of society, and of military manners and customs. And yet his face wore constantly, even though he might be drinking a glass of champagne, that dreamy look, that air of silently despising life, that nebulous expression which belongs, though for other reasons, to blases men,—men dissatisfied with hollow lives. To love without hope, to be disgusted with life, constitute, in these days, a social position. The enterprise ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... and rakes; Rust's on the garden-tools. Yet, where the moonlight makes Nebulous silver pools A ghostly shape is cast— Something unseen has stirred.... Was it a breeze that passed? Was ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... were termed the lake poets, because they were lovers of the countryside; these were Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Southey was an epic and elegiac poet, whilst he was also descriptive; Coleridge, philosopher, metaphysician, a little nebulous and disordered, had very fine outbursts and some lamentable falls. Wordsworth was a most distinguished lyricist. Lord Byron did not acquire honour by so roughly ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... filmy when compared to the whole bulk of the globe, to form upon the surface of such a molten mass? At this point of the investigation the geologist must appeal to the astronomer; for in this vague and nebulous border-land, where the very rocks lose their outlines and flow into each other, where matter exists only in its essential elements, not yet specialized into definite forms and substances,—there the two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... faculties spontaneously develop, and a certain kind of knowledge which each requires during its development; and that it is for us to ascertain this sequence, and supply this knowledge. All the improvements above alluded to are partial applications of this general principle. A nebulous perception of it now prevails among teachers; and it is daily more insisted on in educational works. "The method of nature is the archetype of all methods," says M. Marcel. "The vital principle in the pursuit is to enable the pupil rightly to instruct himself," writes Mr. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... has discovered stars hitherto unknown and inaccessible to all our means of mensuration; it has penetrated distances so great, that luminous and necessarily immense bodies present themselves to us only like nebulous ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... being merged in a central authority which did not exist. The country was without a centre. There was small chance of apoplexy where there was no head. The danger lay in the mutual repulsiveness of these atoms of sovereignty—in the centrifugal tendencies which were fast resolving a nebulous commonwealth into chaos. Disunion and dissension would soon bring about a more fatal centralization—that of absorption in a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... small aggregation of matter rushing together in the line or orbit which the coming planet was to pursue. The planetary matter was already revolving in this orbit and in the surrounding spaces. It was already floating along in a nebulous superheated form capable of condensation by the loss of heat, but in particular capable of growth and development by the fall of surrounding matter upon the forming globe. We must remember that in the primordial state the elements of a planet, as for instance our ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... watch as the land was approached and to see that nobody left the ship. Once more he felt that vague suggestion of a cloaked trap in the second mate's smiling acceptance of the instructions, but now, strangely, the feeling did not bother him. The hint remained nebulous; he shook it off and went to sleep on the more ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... future was as nebulous as the planetary system in the Milky Way, at the back of his mind was a vague conviction that it would be connected somehow with the welfare of those men whom he had learned to know and love: the men to whom reading was little pleasure, writing ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... had a portfolio of plans for a Welfare Building which he had drawn exactly according to Mary's suggestions. As long as the idea had been a nebulous one—drawn only in fancy and coloured with nothing stronger than conversation, she had liked it immensely; but seeing now precisely how the building would look—how the space would be divided, she found herself ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... admit that the substance of which the solar system consists once existed in a nebulous condition, and was in rotation, all the above peculiarities follow as necessary mechanical consequences. Nay, more, the formation of planets, the formation of satellites and of asteroids, is accounted for. We see why the outer planets and satellites are larger ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... made him slow to accept marvellous stories and many forms of superstition. Yet, as a man of science, he well knew that just on the verge of the demonstrable facts of physics and physiology there is a nebulous border-land which what is called "common sense" perhaps does wisely not to enter, but which uncommon sense, or the fine apprehension of privileged intelligences, may cautiously explore, and in so doing find itself behind the scenes which make ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... affection; at the same time, they, being closed and concealed, render him unquiet, and being open, they will tranquillize him, because at this time, when the eyes of the human mind in this body are covered with a nebulous veil, the soul, through such studies, becomes troubled and harassed, and he being thus torn and goaded, will attain only that amount of quiet as will satisfy the condition ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... arm. As he looked up from the bottom of the boat where he lay, the old man's head, round and smooth, like a boulder, stood out against the black above him. It grew and expanded and filled the horizon—thick and nebulous and dizzy. ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... library, but Colonel Belmont had, and she was a life member of the Mercantile Library; the membership had been presented to her two birthdays ago by her luncheon guests, who respected what they would not emulate. She pressed her face into her hands, striving to arrange the nebulous thoughts and ambitions which burned ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... necessities of the new situation. President Lincoln had applied this principle to absolute contraband, such as powder, shells, rifles, and other munitions of war. Great Britain now proceeded to apply it to that nebulous class of commodities known as "conditional contraband," the chief of which was foodstuffs. If the United States, while a war was pending, could evolve the idea of "ultimate destination" and apply it to absolute contraband, could not Great Britain, while another war was pending, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... like—and kept a sharp look-out for erratic strangers. Of these there was a constant succession coming to the Farm; reformers of everything under the sun; fanatics demanding the instant adoption of—their nebulous theories; mental aliens not quite crazy but pretty near it; egotists, wild to be noticed, freaks and fakirs and humbugs of every description, and, worst of all, wrecks of humanity seeking refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. These creatures, all and sundry, John Cheever ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... subconscious mind of the rough rider was preoccupied with a sense of a vague groping. The thought of violet perfume associated itself with something else in addition to the darkness of his uncle's living-room, but he did not find himself able to localize the nebulous memory. Where was it his nostrils had ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... in studying it and while playing it from the composer's attitude. By this I mean that during the mental process of conception, before the actual transference of the thought to paper, the thought itself is in a nebulous condition. The composer sees it in a thousand lights before he actually determines upon the exact form he desires to perpetuate. For instance, this theme might have gone through Chopin's mind much ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... eyes. It always aggravates. When the inflammation is in a scrofulous person, especially in infants, it assumes a purulent character, and may leave the cornea in clouded (nebulous) condition, and the sight more or less obliterated. For this condition use Conium first, and apply it in tinct., half water, to the eyes ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... to this, my motive existed somewhere in that nebulous fore-life where both men and books have their impalpable beginning; for even you cannot have forgotten that when a certain passionately enterprising young editor asked you for a novel to be printed in his journal, you so far imagined me as to say that I would be about a girl. ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... had given this inheritance to the most sensitively constituted of his children, whose musical genius, the least sane of all gifts, put her in touch with the greater mysteries of the Universe? That nebulous memories moved like ghosts in her soul he did not doubt, nor that at such moments she was tormented with vague maternal pangs. He conquered his first impulse to confess himself to her; doubtless she needed more help than ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... wrecked his youth—had the woman who had figured in it some material hold upon him? Could she—was it possible she could still come between them in some way? Ann had heard of such things. It seemed to her as though, betwixt herself and Eliot, there hovered a dim, formless shadow, vague and nebulous—a shadow which had crept silently out from some memory-haunted corner of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... hall a blizzard of flame swept back into the gore between Turk and Market streets. Peeled of its heavy stone facing like a young leek that is stripped of its wrappings, the dome of the city hall rose spectral against the nebulous background ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses, with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon; what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer," to drink of the spiritual waters of "Sartor Resartus." Here was a new spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... his heart warm toward the grizzled old warrior as he, dropping the nebulous matter of Kumari, said: "And to think, Captain Sahib, that but for the Gulab we would have slain you as the murderer of Amir Khan. As a Patan, even if I had wished it, I could not have fended the tulwars from your body. And you were a brave man, such as a Pindari loves; rather than announce ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... most strained situations. Such embarrassment as was shown was on Mrs. Trenor's side, and manifested itself in the mingling of exaggerated warmth with imperceptible reservations. Her loudly affirmed pleasure at seeing Miss Bart took the form of a nebulous generalization, which included neither enquiries as to her future nor the expression of a definite wish to see her again. Lily, well-versed in the language of these omissions, knew that they were equally intelligible to the other members of the party: ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... to a stealthy walk. Behind them and beside them was chilly darkness lurking in caverns among black, bare tree-trunks. Before them they could see a nebulous glow and hear the monotonous voice singing the same ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... every story, Shine with far-off nebulous glory! Round her in that luminous cloud Stars obedient press and crowd, She the centre of all gazing, She the sun her planets dazing! In her eyes' victorious lightning Some are paling, some are brightening: Those on which they ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the telescope and tried to balance it as the keeper had done; but either his hand was trembling, or the wind had a purchase on the long tube, or he was unaccustomed to its use; at all events he could make out nothing but nebulous and ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... lenses on the hearth. She rose trembling to her feet, and her lips parted as if to cry out. They emitted no sound, and she turned with a terrified fascination and looked back. The shutter had opened; there was no glass; the small square of the window showed the nebulous gray mist without, and defined upon it was Evelina's head, her dark hair streaming over the red shawl held about it, her fair oval face pallid and pensive, and with a great wistfulness upon it; her lustrous ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its finny droves. The Nature and the Physical Universe of the old ethnic Greek formed only a little niche and recess, on the walls of which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... records. Continuing such inquiries, you might discover, after consulting thirteen Acts and Regulations, what was the actual state of things. People, of course, really learnt such points by practice and conversation, though their knowledge would probably be in a nebulous condition. The whole system was put upon a clear footing in an Act of thirty-eight sections, prepared by Mr. Cockerell, which was passed on February ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... being clothed upon with a garment showing ever some new fold of surprising beauty and wonder. If she had remained in the Father's house—like the elder brother in the Parable—then would all that He had have been hers, in nebulous simplicity. But now, holding her revels apart, she seems to sing her own song, and to dream her own beautiful dream, wandering, with a motion wholly her own, among the gardens of cosmic order and loveliness. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... my 'fatal secret.' The subplot developing within my mind is still nebulous with me,—you would lose all interest, as would I, if you knew what was going to happen. But the time has passed, and now we can go to the theatre. I bought the tickets by messenger this afternoon. I will let you do the talking to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... all was void. That nebulous light had been extinguished. That feeble thrill had vibrated itself into quiescence. Many lustra had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The worm had food no more. The sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... up your comets: if that fails, Then notch their ears and clip their tails, That you at need may swear to 'em; And watch your nebulous flocks at night, For, if your palings are not tight, He may, to gratify his spite, Let in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only through his own brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, formally the most nebulous person in the Trinity, and now become its sole survivor as it has always been its real Unity, can help him in any way. And so, if the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man's intentional and well-considered contrivance. Conviction ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... inside who were high in authority, place had been made for us, we were in possession of all necessary documents, and our pasts were accounted for. With help on the inside, this was not difficult, for in that shadow-world of secret service identity was nebulous. Like ghosts the agents came and went, obeying commands, fulfilling duties, following clews, making their reports often to officers they never saw or cooperating with other agents they had never seen before and would never ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... the "Jerry-builder" had no being. But where, among them all, might be found such another parlour as this at Dapplemere, with its low, raftered ceiling, its great, carved mantel, its panelled walls whence old portraits looked down at one like dream faces, from dim, and nebulous backgrounds. And where might be found two such bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, quick-footed, deft-handed Phyllises as the two buxom maids who flitted here and there, obedient to their mistress's word, or gesture. And, lastly, where, ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... not to me so much of suns and of nebulous bodies; Think ye Nature but great, in that she gives thee to count? Though your object may be the sublimest that space holds within it, Yet, my good friends, the sublime dwells not in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... miles distance of the base of operations (Cape Town) from England, the large number of men and animals, and the great quantity of stores to be dealt with. The third duty, involving the much disputed matter of contraband, etc., was, and is always likely to be, a difficult one, owing to the rather nebulous state of International Law on questions which were likely to, and did arise, and to the many interests, belligerent and neutral, which might be involved. It was further complicated by the fact that the enemy possessed no seaport and no carrying trade of his own, so that all goods for ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... spread out with inconceivable rapidity, and in the midst of this blazed the central nucleus—the sun which in far-off ages to come would be the giver of light and heat, of life and beauty to worlds unborn, to planets which were now only little eddies of atoms whirling in that ocean of nebulous flame. ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... couldn't be sure—it would be all right); and somehow even before she mentioned Merrimac Avenue (they had come all the way from there) my imagination had associated her with that indefinite social limbo known to the properly-constituted Boston mind as the South End—a nebulous region which condenses here and there into a pretty face, in which the daughters are an "improvement" on the mothers and are sometimes acquainted with gentlemen more gloriously domiciled, gentlemen whose wives and sisters are in turn ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... it as glibly in his everyday conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen, the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin, and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer—don't you know?—and a lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the best-informed circles that evolutionism ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... white blot in the middle distance; a nebulous blur in the painting, as if there had been some chemical impurity in the pigment causing it to fade, or rather as if a long drop of some acid, or perhaps a splash of salt water, had fallen upon the canvas while it was wet, and ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... simple, David. The earth was once a nebulous mass. It cooled, and as it cooled it shrank. At length a thin crust of solid matter formed upon its outer surface—a sort of shell; but within it was partially molten matter and highly expanded gases. As it continued to cool, what happened? Centrifugal force hurled the particles of the nebulous ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... daylight will be as delightful and artistic as are the walls of our hoardings and Railway-stations. The anthem of "The Heavens are Telling" will have to be adapted for large towns. Perhaps pictures may be projected on the nebulous back-ground. If so, some of our best Artists may not object to taking a good sum, and then ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... where I shall go, Mr. Daney," Nan informed him truthfully, "except that I shall betake myself some distance from the Pacific Coast—some place where the opportunities for meeting people who know me are nebulous, to say the least. And I shall leave no forwarding address. When I leave Port Agnew"—she looked Mr. Daney squarely in the eyes as she said this—"I shall see to it that no man, woman, or child in Port Agnew—not even Don McKaye ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... old Equerries' quarter lying behind, and west of, the Kremlin hill. It was possible that he had some hazy idea of startling his wife's family by an unwelcome visit; and from them gaining the latest gossip concerning last night's ball. But the idea remained nebulous. Nicholas had responded too readily to his touch, the few lines of cipher on his map had proved too disturbing to the royal mind, for the tormentor's pride not to have been restored by such evidence of his power. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... are scarcely less crowded than those of London, but as you drive through the town, now and then there is a glimpse of a greenish mist afar off between the houses. The green mist thickens in one spot almost at the horizon; or is it the dark nebulous sails of a vessel? Then the foam suddenly appears close at hand—a white streak seems to run from house to house, reflecting the sunlight: and this ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... above: that is an indefinite phrase. What do you mean by it?' I will tell you what the Bible means by it. It means Jesus Christ. All the nebulous splendours of that firmament are gathered together into one blazing sun. It is a vague direction to tell a man to shoot up, into an empty heaven. It is not a vague direction to tell him to seek the 'things above'; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... on this northern frontier were often lawless and difficult to control, of loose habits and morals, and intent on their own profit; and the region itself was inhospitable to organized and settled government. Yet out of these somewhat nebulous beginnings, four settlements arose—Portsmouth (Masonian and Anglican), Dover (Anglican and Puritan), Exeter and Hampton (both Puritan), each with its civil compact and each an independent town. The ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... writing of reports the non-commissioned officers have considerable practice, but no uniform or systematic method or fixed principle is observed, and the practical performances of the men are subject to no superior check. It is left to the Leaders to apply practically their, for the most part, very nebulous, theoretical knowledge. The young officer in particular is altogether left to his own devices; no one takes the trouble to teach him what is essential, and yet he is expected to instruct his inferiors. The ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... his appreciation. There was an element of discovery in this second meeting that was not unwelcome. Emmet's implied acceptance of his friendship suddenly added a new interest to his life, and served to enrich for him the city of Warwick, which until now had appeared a somewhat nebulous place, where only one spot glowed ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... love," very softly, as he rose to go; and she smiled sadly to herself. She folded her hands in her lap, and thought, not bitterly, not listlessly, but deeply. She wanted to consider all cheerfully now; she tried to do so. She was musing among those flying perceptions, those nebulous facts of a new life, experienced for the first time; she was now not herself as she had been; another woman was born; and she was feeling carefully along the unfamiliar paths which she must tread. She was not glad that these words ran through ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Nebulous gold Throwing an ephemeral glory about life's vanishing points, Wherein you burn... You of unknown voltage Whirling on your axis... Scrawling vermillion signatures Over the night's velvet hoarding... Insolent, towering spherical ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... torrent; it circulates among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of Urdoz and Oleron, and at last rising over their unequal ridges, turns their nebulous peak into a new country which has also its mountains and its depths, and, quitting France, descends into Spain. Never has the hoof of the mule left its trace in these windings; man himself can with difficulty stand upright there, even ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... could have calculated the enormous potential energy of the nebulous gases, required by contraction to cause the prodigious heat of a universe ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... nebula was endowed with a general movement of rotation in the direction west to east. As it cooled it could not fail to experience a gradual condensation, and in consequence to rotate with greater and greater rapidity. If the nebulous matter extended originally in the plane of its equator, as far as the limit where the centrifugal force exactly counterbalanced the attraction of the nucleus, the molecules situate at this limit ought, during the process of condensation, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... like another to him, who had lost his hold on everything worth while. He had a vague notion to invoke the aid of the law to hold Bland and the plane, wherever he might be located, but he was not feeling particularly friendly toward the law just now, and the idea remained nebulous and remote. He went on because there was really nothing ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... in the room was God and that God was watching me, but I was not afraid. Yet I entertained, in common with most children, a nebulous distrust of this mysterious Person, a distrust of which I was particularly conscious on winter nights when the gas had been turned down to a blue fleck, and the shadow of the mantelpiece flickered and plunged on the ceiling, and the clock ticked louder and louder, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... of me, as I turned off into Main Street, the scattered lights of the city showed like blurred patches upon the darkness. Gradually, while I went rapidly downhill, I saw the patches change into a nebulous cloud, and the cloud resolve itself presently into straight rows of lamps. Few people were in the streets at that hour, and when I reached the dim building of the Old Market, I found it cold and deserted, except for a stray cur or two that snarled at Samuel from a heap of trodden ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... men, mainly, but men, for the most part, whose intellectual attitude towards the Christian faith was one of detachment, indifference, or conventional acquiescence. That could not be his attitude. He was the last man in the world to be content with anything nebulous. The active exercise of thinking {138} was to him a pleasure in all matters, and in things important a duty as well. He was certain not to avoid it in the most important question of all. He might have been ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... deck my beaver—proud as Scipio!. . . —You hear me?—I forbid you succor me!— One, two three! Porter, open wide the doors! (The porter opens the doors; a view of old Paris in the moonlight is seen): Ah!. . .Paris wrapped in night! half nebulous: The moonlight streams o'er the blue-shadowed roofs; A lovely frame for this wild battle-scene; Beneath the vapor's floating scarves, the Seine Trembles, mysterious, like a magic mirror, And, shortly, you shall see ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... Let us look at England, Europe, and America, and consider the condition of the entire Protestant world. Religion, it is true, we shall still find in it; but it is religion from which not only the supernatural element is disappearing, but in which the natural element is fast becoming nebulous. It is indeed growing, as Mr. Leslie Stephen says it is, into a religion of dreams. All its doctrines are growing vague as dreams, and like dreams their outlines are for ever changing. Mr. Stephen has pitched on a ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... world, he had attained to a clear sanity, to a just sense of values; the romantic blur of his early poetic vision clarifying into the strong definiteness of the Real. Assuredly he could now no longer write those nebulous, elusive word-harmonies. Nor for him the mere aesthetic toying, the dainty piece of colour-work; but poetry that should throb with vitality and humanness. From dream poetry he had passed to dream life. Now that he had won his way to true life, was he not, ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... worn with nursing and full of grief for the passing of her old friend, Nance threw a coat about her and slipped out on the terrace. Above her, nebulous stars were already appearing, and their twinkling was answered by responsive gleams in the city below. Against the velvety dusk two tall objects towered in the distance, the beautiful Gothic spire of the cathedral, ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to pack ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... little wearily. "But we're not getting anywhere, Bob, my boy. You're simply wasting your breath. Just what nebulous idea for the acquisition of this desert land have you floating around in that red head of yours? Now, ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... long time sat doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice that there were some quaint little specks floating in the rays of the moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way. I watched them with a sense of soothing, and a sort of calm stole over me. I leaned back in the embrasure in a more comfortable position, so that I could enjoy more fully the ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... gazing on the waters that heaved and swept astern, but without knowing that she saw them, her mind full of such nebulous matter as, condensed, would have made such thoughts as I have set down. And still and ever the water rolled and tossed away behind in ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... obtruding itself as I walked to the Cabin, with the beautiful moth clinging to my fingers. I did not feel quite happy about her, so she was placed in a large box, lined with corrugated paper, to wait a while until the mist in my brain cleared, and my nebulous disturbance evolved an idea. It came slowly. I had a caterpillar long ago, and had investigated the history of this moth. I asked Raymond where he found her and he said, "Coming from the game." Now I questioned him about the kind of ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter |
