"Obscurely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dead at Heraclea, raised the ghost of Cleonice, and entreated her to be reconciled. Accordingly she appeared to him, and answered, that as soon as he came to Sparta, he should speedily be freed from all evils; obscurely foretelling, it would seem, his imminent death. This story is related ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... swept through Ashe's mind, coupled also with a curious sense of something foreseen. He had never witnessed precisely this mood in her before; but now that it was thus revealed, he was suddenly aware "that something like it had been for long moving obscurely below the surface of her life. He took the child and laid him on the floor, where he rolled at ease, cooing to himself. Then he came back to Kitty, and soothed her with extraordinary tenderness and skill. Presently she looked at him, as though some obscure trouble of which she had been the ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or somewhat rough, more or less chinky or becoming obscurely small-areolate, ash- to green-gray, or becoming olivaceous, spreading over the substratum as a continuous, moderately thick crust; apothecia small to large, 0.5 to 1.5 mm. in diameter, adnate or more or less immersed, usually flat, almost always ...
— Ohio Biological Survey, Bull. 10, Vol. 11, No. 6 - The Ascomycetes of Ohio IV and V • Bruce Fink and Leafy J. Corrington
... a speedy retreat from a powerful adversary. This had been the secret of his secession at the time of Lord Raymond's election. In the unsteady glance of his eye, in his extreme desire to learn the opinions of all, in the feebleness of his hand-writing, these qualities might be obscurely traced, but they were not generally known. He was now our Lord Protector. He had canvassed eagerly for this post. His protectorate was to be distinguished by every kind of innovation on the aristocracy. This his selected task was exchanged for the far different one of encountering the ruin ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... pen—for he was an influential man in the community. Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was himself without great sympathy for a certain side of that man which he could not quite make out. He only felt it obscurely to be his real personality—the true—and, perhaps, the absurd. As, for instance, in that case of the assistant. Renouard had given way to the arguments of his friend and backer—the argument against ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... who fall afar from the battle, Lone and unknown obscurely die, But give at least our parting blessings Unto France and Freedom high. To die on Freedom's Altar—to die on Freedom's Altar! 'Tis the noblest of fates; who to meet it ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... I had yet found in literature. By that time my father had himself put me through the first two books of Livy, and I knew, therefore, what close-set language was; but I saw then that Livy, as afterward that Horace and Tacitus, were studiously, often laboriously, and sometimes obscurely concentrated; while Byron wrote, as easily as a hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in the precisely narrowest terms,—not only the exact truth, but the most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure Byron's greater powers at ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... If there exists a native spark of love in all of us, it must be fanned while we are young. Hers, if she ever had it, had been drenched in as ugly a lot of corrosive liquid as could be imagined. But I was surprised at Fyne obscurely ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... this story, if it does nothing else, will in some small measure enhance the not-too-strong interest in which the poorly paid, obscurely enacted heroism of the men in this service is ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... observe that the story is told very obscurely, and should have been assisted by an Argument in prose. Young writers are often astonished to find that passages, which seem very clear to their own heated imaginations, appear very dark to their readers.—The author of the poem before us may produce something ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... 1 1/2 to 3 inches broad, convex or nearly plane, viscid or glutinous when moist, often obscurely streaked (virgate). Flesh whitish or dull yellowish. Tubes plane or convex, adnate, small, nearly round, yellow, becoming ochraceous. Stem 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 inches long, 2 to 4 lines thick, equal, slender, pale or yellowish, dotted above and below the ring with reddish, brownish, ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... the rise of this prodigious fire, Which, in mean buildings first obscurely bred, From thence did soon to open streets aspire, And straight to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... to its Eastern bed, and the world was once more comparatively at rest, the continent of Greece rose visibly and majestically above the rest of the civilized earth. Afar in the Latian plains the infant state of Rome was silently and obscurely struggling into strength against the neighboring and petty states in which the old Etrurian civilization was rapidly passing into decay. The genius of Gaul and Germany, yet unredeemed from barbarism, lay scarce known, save where colonized ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... and living entity. Objectively every ideal must be embodied in "some one": and must be a standard, a measure, a rhythm, of various energies synthesized in a living soul. This is really the crux of the whole matter. Vaguely and obscurely do we all feel the pressure of these deep and secret impulses. Profoundly do we feel that these mysterious "ideas," which give life its dramatic intensity, are part of the depths of our own soul and part of the depths of the souls of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... beyond ideas of opportune time, or economy, influenced Colonel Armstrong in selecting her. The same thought which hurried him away from his old home under the shadows of night, has taken him aboard a third-rate river steamboat. Travelling thus obscurely, he hopes to shun encounter with men of his own class; to escape not only observation, but ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... jealousy, instantly fell dead in love with that sun-chequered, echoing corner. Holding his feet, he stared out of a drowsy trance, wondering, admiring, musing, losing his way among uncertain thoughts. There is nothing that so apes the external bearing of free will as that unconscious bustle, obscurely following liquid laws, with which a river contends among obstructions. It seems the very play of man and destiny, and as Otto pored on these recurrent changes, he grew, by equal steps, the sleepier and the more profound. Eddy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable—that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self into impersonal delight. Man needs to be a ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... correctly is not something one learns in a day, be he never so willing and eager; as one may discover who cares to take half a dozen plain, obscurely-colored small moths, and attempts to put them in their ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... namely, that it was an invisible vital [principle], like something of the ether. He said that he knew his spirit would live after death, since it was his interior essence, which cannot die, because it can think; and moreover that he could not think clearly concerning it, but only obscurely, because he had not possessed any knowledge on the subject except from himself, with a little also from the Ancients. Aristotle, it may be remarked, is among sane spirits in the other life, but many of his followers are among ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... and Pius V., but it is probable that the privilege was withdrawn by Pope Gregory XV. in 1622, in his letter Romanus Pontifex; and Urban VIII., 1635, withdrew all privileges granted vivae vocis oraculo. The text of the document granting the privilege is obscurely worded. Still, several theologians of repute maintain that the privilege still exists and extends to the whole office. This is taught by the Salaraenticenses, De hor. can. cap. 3, n. 55; Tamburini, Rodriguez, etc., others opposed this ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... some respects his weakness. As an ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a wild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whom stones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ran athwart both his body and his ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... lives something obscurely," answered the apprentice, "on account of suspicion of some villainy—I believe that horrid murder in Whitefriars, or some such matter. But I might have heard all about him from Dame Suddlechop, for she spoke of my meeting him at Enfield Chase, with some other good fellows, to do a robbery ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... fresh stimulus and prevented his zeal from flagging.[344] The timidity or treachery of one of the prisoners facilitated the inquest. Terrified by the prospect of torture and death, or induced by hope of reward, a person, obscurely designated as le Guainier, or Gueynier,[345] made an ample disclosure of the names and residences of his former fellow-believers. The pursuit was no longer confined to those who had been concerned in the distribution ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... so obscurely careful in selecting his way, will presently be seen. In the direction last taken, he traveled on until the sun was bending to the western horizon, when he came to a thicket of bushes and vines, so compact in growth it seemed ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... taken to be a proof that the time must be evil. Any century is bad if we assume all the good men to be exceptions. But the great man is really also the product of his time. He is the mouthpiece of its prevailing sentiments, and only the first to see clearly what many are beginning to perceive obscurely. The emergence of the prophet is a proof of the growing demand of his hearers for sound teaching. Because he is in advance of men generally, he sees existing abuses more clearly, and we take his evidence ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... as rebels and mutineers by their brother rebels. Scantily fed for a while with the offal of plunder, they will drop off by degrees; they will be driven out of sight and out of thought; and they will be left to perish obscurely, like ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... no emotion, it seemed, had ever tinged. The failure of her first attempt had exasperated her hatred against her husband and against the Countess to the verge of fury, but a concentrated fury, which was waiting for another occasion to strike, for weeks, patiently, obscurely. She had thought to wreak her vengeance by the return of Gorka, and in what had it ended? In freeing Lincoln from a dangerous rival and in imperilling the life of the only being ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... had watched over his career with sincere affection for several years. Every time I pass one of the commonplace statues placed in our public squares in memory of political chatterers who have died quietly in their beds, I think of all those brave fellows who have died obscurely for their country, with no funeral oration but the tears of their broken-hearted families, but who have carried away to their eternal dwelling-place the proud consolation of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... ineffectual goodness,—ah! if I could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... Underneath thee does not earth stand fast? See'st thou not, nightly climbing, Tenderly glancing eternal stars? Am I not gazing eye to eye on thee? Through brain and bosom Throngs not all life to thee, Weaving in everlasting mystery Obscurely, clearly, on all sides of thee? Fill with it, to its utmost stretch, thy breast, And in the consciousness when thou art wholly blest, Then call it what thou wilt, Joy! Heart! Love! God! I have no name to give it! All comes at last to feeling; ...
— Faust • Goethe
... delayed for some minutes to go to him; she moved about the room with a new sense of complications. But at last she presented herself and found him standing near the lamp. He was tall, strong and somewhat stiff; he was also lean and brown. He was not romantically, he was much rather obscurely, handsome; but his physiognomy had an air of requesting your attention, which it rewarded according to the charm you found in blue eyes of remarkable fixedness, the eyes of a complexion other than his own, and a jaw of the somewhat angular mould which is ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... Mississippi at a very remote period, as Colhuan colonies, and after a long residence there returned so much changed in speech and in other respects as to seem a distinct people. The Aztecs appear to have dwelt obscurely in the south before they rose to power. They must have been at first much less advanced in civilization than their predecessors, but ready to adopt the superior knowledge and methods of the country ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... I know?" replied the other negligently, throwing up his hands and letting them fall as they would. "What would you have? I am so obscurely born, that how can I say? I was very young, and all the rest of the family were men and women, and my so-called parents were old. Anything is possible of ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... general aspect of the Coleoptera. The number of minute and obscurely coloured beetles is exceedingly great. (2/7. I may mention, as a common instance of one day's (June 23rd) collecting, when I was not attending particularly to the Coleoptera, that I caught sixty-eight species of that order. Among these, there were only two of ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... obscurely the illumination after the battle of Waterloo, and the Militia exercising about that period, in the field ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... when enforced by concentrated will, and acting on the mind, where in each individual temptation found mind the weakest—almost infallible in its effect to seduce or to appall. And he closed these and similar boasts of demoniacal arts, which I remember too obscurely to repeat, with a tumultuous imprecation on their nothingness to avail against the gripe of death. All this lore he would communicate to Haroun, in return for what? A boon shared by the meanest ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... other thing like to it, and in that manner to spin out the whole course of their life; that is, if it may be explained, to live at ease. For this opinion of theirs is not to be concealed, many of them delivering it clearly, and not a few more obscurely." Who therefore did more grow old in this scholastic life than Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno, and Antipater, who left their countries not out of any discontent but that they might quietly enjoy their delight, studying, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes replacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of so much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but into which one was later on to read strange pages—to some of which I may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I have dubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the bacchanal sounds that, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... there, the Loire was open. If you ask, why I did not prefer throwing myself before the pursuers, and dying like a soldier, my reason was, that I should have been numbered merely among those who had fallen obscurely in the various skirmishes of the country; and besides, that if I escaped, I should have one chance more of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... and Carlyle,—this note we hear thus early and thus clear, in the dim and distant utterances of Heraclitus. The mystery of existence, the unreality of what seems most real, the intangibility and evanescence of all things earthly,—these thoughts obscurely echoing to us across the ages from Heraclitus, have remained, and always will remain, among the deepest and most insistent of the world's thoughts, in its sincerest moments and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... Clitopilus. Pileus thin, convex, then expanded or slightly depressed; dingy-white, cracked in areas or concentrically rivulose, sometimes obscurely ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... and becomes magnetic. Borax easily dissolves a considerable quantity of it, and gives a glass tinged with green. I have no idea what its true nature is. On first seeing it, I mistook it for lignite!) The beds are obscurely separated from each other; they are sometimes parted by seams of tuff and layers of pebbles. In one place they rested on, and in another place were capped by, tuffs and girt-stones, apparently ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... day when the Watteville family inaugurated the Belvedere, Savaron also was founding a monument. Thanks to the connections he had obscurely formed among the upper class of merchants in Besancon, he was starting a fortnightly paper, called the Eastern Review, with the help of forty shares of five hundred francs each, taken up by his first ten clients, on whom he had impressed the necessity for promoting the interests ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... inhabit the country between the Senegal and Gambia, on which latter river the Feloops reside. What is meant by Tukhusor in the text does not appear, unless it may obscurely indicate Karta.—E. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... ye, Our Muses, with a hundred tongues, And Thou, O Henley! blest with brazen lungs; Fanatic Withers! fam'd for rhimes and sighs, And Jacob Behmen! most obscurely wise; From darkness palpable, on dusky wings Ascend! and shroud him ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... this particular pretension. But, to a certain degree, they will be wrong. Coleridge was not very accurate in any thing but in the use of logic. All his philological attainments were imperfect. He did not talk German; or so obscurely—and, if he attempted to speak fast, so erroneously—that in his second sentence, when conversing with a German lady of rank, he contrived to assure her that in his humble opinion she was a ——. Hard it is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Son lived obscurely; he never carried weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off in his presence. But see how he figures in ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... became an apprentice to a bookseller in 1814; and Robert, at the age of sixteen, threw himself on the world, as a dealer in old books, a step in accordance with his natural tastes, and which proved fortunate. How the two lads struggled on obscurely, but always improving their circumstances; how they were cheered onward by the counsels of their widowed mother; how they finally went into partnership for the purpose of prosecuting literary undertakings—need not here be detailed. Robert, in 1822-3, began ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... best perhaps to leave the old allegory to speak for itself, because poetical thoughts are often mishandled, and suffer base transformation at the hands of interpreters; but for all that, it is a pretty trade to expound things seen in dreams and visions, or obscurely detected out of the corner of the eye in magical places; while the best of really poetical things is that they have a hundred mystical interpretations, none of which is perhaps the right one; because the poet sees things in a ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... blow over? No; apart from any choice or preference of war on the part of Napoleon, his very existence depended upon war. He lived by and through the army. Without a succession of wars and martial glories in reserve for the army, what interest had they in Napoleon? This was obscurely acknowledged by everybody. More or less consciously perceived, a feeling deep and strong ran through the nation that it was vain to seek expedients or delays; a mighty strife had to be fought out, which could not be evaded. Thence ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... merely speciously, in the two first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with, "What is the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, "To glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked opens to us Scots a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is asked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Herbert. 'But its solution, perhaps, may principally be found in the weakness of their political institutions. Nothing of the Athenians remains except their genius; but they fulfilled their purpose. The wrecks and fragments of their subtle and profound minds obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their language excels every other tongue of the Western world; their sculptures baffle all subsequent artists; credible witnesses assure us that their paintings ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... lodgings. Stradella was a musician and a singer, without settled fortune, and he must return to the business of earning bread for them both; moreover, he was famous, and therefore could not possibly get his living obscurely. The Pope's adopted family would vie with the ex-Queen of Sweden, the Spanish Ambassador and the rich nobles, to flatter him and attract him to their respective palaces. Alberto Altieri, who had lost his heart to Ortensia's ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... last it becomes plain that the right answer is negative. Go, ye Chimeras, with your magnetic vellum; sweet young Chimera, adust middle-aged one! The Prison-doors are open. Hardly again shall ye preside the Rouen Chamber of Accounts; but vanish obscurely into Limbo. (See Deux Amis, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... fillet crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely. We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms. I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and flocks and herds—between the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... They should with pleasure see Protestant Dissenters admitted in a proper manner to civil office. At that point their Highnesses must stop. They could not but entertain grave apprehensions that, if Roman Catholics were made capable of public trust, great evil would ensue; and it was intimated not obscurely that these apprehensions arose chiefly from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... (July, 1866) the rank of colonel in the auxiliary corps—under General Neigre, he was treated with no special cordiality. He then applied to the minister of war for permission to pass into the Belgian corps. From this time he and his attractive wife obscurely followed the fortunes of Colonel Van der Smissen, whose personal regard they had won, until the withdrawal of the French and the Austro-Belgian armies, by clearing the stage for the last scene, brought them in full relief, under the search-light of history, by the side of ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... in—let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton)—'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... more makes a warrior than to admire poetry makes a poet. The Parisian is not a coward; but his individuality is so strongly developed that he objects to that individuality being destroyed by some stray shot. To die with thousands looking on is one thing; to die obscurely is another. French courage is not the same as that of the many branches of the great Saxon family. A Saxon has a dogged stubbornness which gives him an every-day and every-hour courage. That of the Frenchman is more dependent ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... sounded somewhere in mediaeval poetry in Italy—but in a dreadful sense divine. At the first reading, this sentence against inconstancy, spoken by one more than inconstant, moves something like indignation; nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurely justified, on a ground as it were beyond the common region ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... a snail lands him somewhere finally, and the unassailed Bay, with a premonition of supper hovering obscurely in his lazy mind, at last consented to arrive ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror—their recorded history seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more of them—notably the sinister Paul Roulet—which obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried by the mob, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... strange distortions with the gout, which is not unpleasant pleasant,—to me, at least. What is the reason we do not sympathize with pain, short of some terrible surgical operation? Hazlitt, who boldly says all he feels, avows that not only he does not pity sick people, but he hates them. I obscurely recognize his meaning. Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of friends, etc.,—more complex things, in which the sufferer's feelings are associated with others. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... confessed to feeling a little unwell, and hinted obscurely that perhaps she should be obliged to leave the place. But it was quite evident that her leaving was connected with the near advent of the McPhersons in the next block; for I observed that she always showed some little irrepressible signs of nervousness whenever that subject ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... occasion required, out of a large body, for the despatch of peculiar branches of business, and which committees, by degrees, assumed an independent and permanent existence... Justices itinerant, who, despatched throughout the land, decided the ' Pleas of the Crown,' may be obscurely traced in the reign of the Conqueror; not, perhaps, appointed with much regularity, but despatched upon peculiar occasions and emergencies." 1 Palgrave's Rise and Progress, &c;., ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... that the crisis would pass, and that then—no matter how humbly, the more obscurely the better—he would at least earn honest bread away from home. Such was not his intention. He professed to be too ill to leave Haworth; and ill, no doubt, he was from continual eating of opium, and daily drinking of drams. He stuck to his comfortable ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the honest old baronet, bareheaded in the clear moonlight, waving his hand from the lowest step, with Lady Berenicia and the others standing above him, outlined upon the illumined doorway, and the negroes grouped on either side, obscurely gesticulating in the shadows of the broad, dark front of the Hall, which glowed against ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... the boy sang his first solo at the Church of the Lifted Cross: this at evening. His mother, conspicuously gowned, somewhat overcome by the fashion of the place, which she had striven to imitate—momentarily chagrined by her inexplicable failure to be in harmony—seated herself obscurely, where she had but an infrequent glimpse of his white robe, wistful face, dark, curling hair. She had never loved him more proudly—never before realized that his value extended beyond the region of her arms: never before ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... Englishman, and that even his father should have been a year old when he came to this country; but on his mother's side he could boast a grandfather and a great-grandfather who had taken part, however briefly or obscurely, in both the wars against Great Britain. He hated just as much as any of the boys, or perhaps more, to be the Bridish when they were playing war, and he longed as truly as any of them to march against the ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... (Figs. 838-840).—Plants oblong about 3-4 mm., stipitate or substipitate at the base, growing densely caespitose, in patches, black, smooth, the apices usually obscurely mammillate. Stipes usually short, but sometimes 6-8 mm. long, and when growing in clusters, the bases consolidated by a carbonous stroma. Interior of the receptacle in two compartments (Fig. 841 x6), the lower filled with soft tissue, ...
— Synopsis of Some Genera of the Large Pyrenomycetes - Camilla, Thamnomyces, Engleromyces • C. G. Lloyd
... unnecessary emphasis. He was, he told himself aggressively; he wanted nothing more from living and had nothing to give. Yet his pity for Millie Stope mounted obscurely, bringing with it thoughts, dim obligations and desires, to which he had ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of 1813 a new and potent influence came into his life. Mrs Leigh, whose home was at Newmarket, came up to London on a visit. After a long interval the brother and sister met, and whether there is or is not any foundation for the dark story obscurely hinted at in Byron's lifetime, and afterwards made public property by Mrs Beecher Stowe (Macmillan's Magazine, 1869, pp. 377-396), there is no question as to the depth and sincerity of his love for his "one relative,"—that her well-being was more to him than his own. Byron passed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the mesa. For ten years Mrs. MacDougall had done all of her own housework, including the washing; the two children had gone to school in clothes that seemed always too small for them; and MacDougall had laboured obscurely day and night in a small dark office. During these ten years the MacDougalls had been completely overlooked by local society, and if they felt any resentment ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... invited us—we were told that great things were to be done, that the question did not affect the Dobrzynskis alone, but the whole district, the entire gentry; Robak mumbled the same thing, though he never finished his talk and always stammered and expressed himself obscurely. Well, finally we have gathered, and have called in our neighbours by messengers. You Dobrzynskis are not the only men here; from various other hamlets there are about two hundred of us here; so let us all consult together. ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... steam, suddenly forced off, and driven up the chimney. His inventive mind was led on in a train of thought with reference to the practical application of steam as a first mover. His observations, obscurely exhibited in his "Century of Inventions," were successively wrought out by the meditations of others, and an incident, to which one can hardly make a formal reference without a risible emotion, terminated in the noblest ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... which touched her feelings, and awoke in her questions and imaginations; but when she attempted to express any of these, when she would take part and would show that she too could think and speak, then fell the words so ill, and her thoughts came forth so obscurely, that she herself was compelled to blush for them; especially when on this, Alette would turn her eyes upon her with some astonishment, and Harald cast down his; and she vowed to herself never again to open her mouth on subjects which she did ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... even expressive ugliness, when we say that a face possesses expression, we mean expression that may be stable, but which we conjecture to be mobile. It maintains, in the midst of its fixity, a certain indecision in which are obscurely portrayed all possible shades of the state of mind it expresses, just as the sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself in the haze of a spring morning. But a comic expression of the face is one that promises nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanent ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... his achievement. This chain of causation is stated in a long series of asserted processes, in which the connection between one generation and another, and the transmission from life to life of the melancholy heritage of desire and sorrow, is obscurely and enigmatically traced. The beginning of all is ignorance (of the four truths); from ignorance proceed the "samkharas" or forms of production, from these in turn consciousness, the senses, contact, sensation, thirst, and so on to birth and the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Chaptia aenea firmly woven and tied on to a fork in the branch of a little tree, at a height of about 10 feet from the ground. The nest was of roots and grass lined by soft fine black roots, and held three eggs, of a rich salmon-pink, obscurely spotted darker at the large end; they measure 0.83 by 0.61, 0.82 by 0.61, and ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... well as application to medical researches, in his mechanical account of poisons; which he informs us was begun some years before he had leisure to publish it. These subjects, our author justly observes, had been treated hitherto very obscurely, to place therefore the surprizing phoenomena, arising from these active bodies in a more intelligible light, was his professed intention; how well he succeeded, the reception this piece universally met with, even ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... kingship, like frivolity or play. Some of the figures are grotesque merely, and all the male ones at least, a little fantastic. Certain objects reappearing from scene to scene—love-letters crammed with verses to the margin, and lovers' toys—hint obscurely at some story of intrigue. Between these groups, on a smaller scale, come the slighter and more homely episodes, with Sir Nathaniel the curate, the country-maid Jaquenetta, Moth or Mote the elfin-page, with Hiems ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... many a messenger to consult the oracles, that he might learn what it behooved him to do or say, so as to perform what was well-pleasing to the divinities. And they came bringing a report back of oracles ambiguously worded, indistinct, and obscurely delivered. But at last a clear response came to Inachus, plainly charging and directing him to thrust me forth both from my home and my country, to stray an outcast to earth's remotest limits; and that, if he would not, a fiery-visaged thunder-bolt would come ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... the forest's side; Or in the meadow, or the wood, Or by the lone, romantic flood; Let us in the busy town, When sleep's dull streams the people drown, Far from drowsy pillows flee, And turn the church's massy key; Then, as through the painted glass The moon's faint beams obscurely pass, And darkly on the trophied wall Her faint, ambiguous shadows fall, Let us, while the faint winds wail Through the long reluctant aisle, As we pace with reverence meet, Count the echoings of our feet, While from the tombs, with confess'd breath, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... layers or strata, at least three deep. I follow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my own beneath it. Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two others. I will try to write out a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... tradition goes on to say that one of the brazen slippers of the philosopher was thrown up by the volcano, thus revealing his subterfuge. Another tradition of far more credible aspect asserts that Empedocles retreated from Italy, returning to the home of his fathers in Peloponnesus to die there obscurely. It seems odd that the facts regarding the death of so great a man, at so comparatively late a period, should be obscure; but this, perhaps, is in keeping with the personality of the man himself. His disciples would hesitate to ascribe a merely natural death ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... windless marshes, masked the Kentish coast. The Medway at flood-tide from Sheerness to Gillingham Reach was one maze of creeks and bends and inlets and tiny bays. Nothing was visible an oar's length overside but shifting cloudy shapes that bulked obscurely in the fog. But although this was Francis Drake's first voyage as master of his own ship, he knew these waters as he knew the palm of his hand. His old captain, dying a bachelor, had left him the weather-beaten cargo-ship as reward for his "diligence and fidelity", and at sixteen he was ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat in a democracy was a man's job. At no time in his life did he deny the value of birth and breeding; ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... to oval, obscurely toothed Tupelo A C Ovate to oval Persimmon A C Also 3-lobed Sassafras A C Sometimes opposite, clustered at the ends of the branchlets Dogwoods A D Tremulous habit, oval Poplars A D Lanceolate, finely serrate, sometimes entire Willows A D Ovate-oval, ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... and genesis of monotheism. This methodical process, which is characteristic of human thought, may be traced in all peoples which have really attained to the monotheistic idea, in the Aryan and Semitic races, in China, Japan, and Egypt, in Peru and Mexico; the belief may also be obscurely traced in an inchoate form among savage and inferior tribes, as, for example, among the Indians of Central and North America, and among some of the inhabitants ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... troubled him a little: whether Dick had built even obscurely in his own mind on the money Nan would have from Aunt Anne, and the more modest sum she had now from her dead father and mother. He concluded not. He hadn't got to worry about that. Dick had lived in the atmosphere of money and he took ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the memory and judgment. Truly, for myself, meseems I see before my eyes the lost child's disdainful prodigality, turned to envy a swine's dinner: which by the learned divines are thought not historical acts, but instructing parables. For conclusion, I say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him: that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught, but the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher, whereof Asop's tales give good proof: whose pretty allegories, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... have obtuse front teeth. The feet are armed with hoofs; in some whole or rounded, in others obscurely lobed or sub-divided. They live on vegetable food. The genera are, the horse, hippopotamus, tapir, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... Malarichus to explain in intelligible language what he wanted, and not to use such obscure terms. For he declared that he, being but a plain and somewhat rude man, had not in the least understood what was intimated so obscurely. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... to face with the great sacrifice she was obscurely contemplating. The magic potency of money was brought before her eyes as she contrasted the ragged, homeless boy with the man who sat beside her. The fact that he had not earned the money only made its magic the more clearly inherent in the gold itself. It panoplied the thief's carriage. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... or entertainment can it give the reader, to hear a long bead-roll of barbarous names, Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf; Elfwald, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert, who successively murdered, expelled, or inherited from each other, and obscurely filled the throne of that kingdom? Ethelbert, the last of these princes, was treacherously murdered by Offa, King of Mercia, in the year 792, and his state was thenceforth united with that of Offa, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... a sick Indian had lost the faculty of speech before he had confessed, so that he could not receive an exhortation to a pious death. Accordingly, he urged him to attempt at least to pronounce the name of Jesus. The sick man obeyed, and uttered it obscurely so that he could scarcely be heard. The father continued to urge him to speak more distinctly. Finally with a moderate effort he uttered it with the greatest distinctness, made a complete confession, and on the following day left his ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... flint. What follows next? that it, like a current, flies each bound it chafes. This may mean, that it expands itself notwithstanding all obstructions: but the images in the comparison are so ill-sorted, and the effect so obscurely expressed, that I cannot but think something omitted that connected the last sentence with the former. It is well knovn that the players often shorten speeches to quicken the representation; and it may be suspected, that they sometimes ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... "Mariner of York" was wrecked by the Orinoco River—the life of Robinson Crusoe. Unknown to Europe, far from any neighbors, by the shade of the pathless forest, they tried their best. They died, many of them obscurely, leaving no name to be engraved on the bronze tables of history, but leaving better than a mere name—families, many of which still subsist; better than families—examples of earnestness and endurance, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... robust, glaucous-green; ridges about eight, broad, prominent, obscurely tubercled; spines in bundles of nine, radiating, straight, less than 1 in. long, and pale yellow. Upon the growing part of the stem, the spines are intermingled with long, white, cottony hairs, often matted together like an unkempt head; these hairs fall off as the stem ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... Burke, Macaulay. But we cannot give them Homer and Virgil, who nevertheless continue to play an appreciable part in training the English mind; and we can hardly give them Milton, whose subtlest beauties depend on the niceties of the Latin speech. The trial for Latin literature came when obscurely, in the purlieus and kennels of Rome, like a hidden fermentation, Christianity arose. The earliest Christians were for the most part illiterate; but when at last Christianity reached the high places of the government, and controlled the Empire, a problem of enormous difficulty ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... to his Elders, is esteemed an unpardonable Insolence, and regarded as a reversing the Decrees of Nature. I am a young Man, I confess, yet I honour the grey Head as much as any one; however, when in Company with old Men, I hear them speak obscurely, or reason preposterously (into which Absurdities, Prejudice, Pride, or Interest, will sometimes throw the wisest) I count it no Crime to rectifie their Reasoning, unless Conscience must truckle to Ceremony, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... away, hiding her eyes. She was obscurely conscious that a wanton butchery went on, hearing its blows and groans as if from a great distance, while she entreated the Virgin for ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... see—" She debated a moment, then reached under the table, fumbled obscurely, and came up with more money. "Now, here, here's twenty more besides that first I gave you, so you can pay the dame her money and get all fixed up again, fresh suit and clean collar and a shine and everything. No, no—this is my scene; ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... tells me that the allusion to the Acanthus on the first page of this book is obscurely expressed, that it was not the root but the leaves of the plant that suggested the idea of the Corinthian capital. The root of the Acanthus produced the leaves which overhanging the sides of the basket struck the fancy of the Architect. This ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... chaungde, and men are growne to more wit, and their minds to aspire after more honourable thoughts: they were dunces in diebus illis, they had not the true use of gentility, and therefore they lived meanely and died obscurely: but now mennes capacities are refined. Time hath set a new edge on gentlemen's humours and they show them as they should be: not like gluttons as their fathers did, in chines of beefe and almes to the poore, but in velvets, satins, cloth of gold, pearle: yea, pearle lace, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... rosebud down the howe, Just op'ning fresh and bonny, Blinks sweetly 'neath the hazel bough, And 's scarcely seen by ony; Sae, sweet amidst her native hills, Obscurely blooms my Jeanie, Mair fair and gay than rosy May, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... introduction to the "Guide," to explain the allegories and "Midrashim" in two works to be entitled "The Book of Reconciliation" and "The Book of Prophecy." But after reflecting on the matter a number of years I decided to desist from the attempt. The reasons are these. If I expressed my explanations obscurely, I should have accomplished nothing by substituting one unintelligible statement for another. If, on the other hand, I were really to make clear the matters that require explanation, the result would not be suitable for the masses, for whom those treatises were intended. ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... apprehension. There is still a God's plenty of attics in Grub Street, tenanted by genuine artists, idealists and poets, amply sufficient to justify the lamentable conclusion of old Anthony a Wood in his life of George Peele. 'For so it is and always hath been, that most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Amid all these miseries, Gissing upheld his ideal. During 1886-7 he began really to write and the first great advance is shown in Isabel Clarendon.[5] No book, perhaps, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... yard, about as large as a blanket, surrounded by an insecure brick wall and paved with mud. You went up two steps, pushed at a door, and instantly found yourself in the principal reception-room, which no earthly blanket could possibly have covered. Behind this chamber could be seen obscurely an apartment so tiny that an auctioneer would have been justified in terming it "bijou," Furnished simply but practically with a slopstone; also the beginnings of a stairway. The furniture of the reception-room comprised two chairs and a table, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... (STUARTIA.) Leaves thick, ovate, acuminate, acute at base, obscurely mucronate, serrate, finely pubescent, 3 to 4 in. long, one half as wide. Flowers whitish cream-colored, one petal much the smallest; stamens of ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... thing is, that twenty-four hours after Boudin had uttered this warning, the Dauphin received a similar one from the King of Spain, vague, and without mentioning whence obtained, and yet also declared to be of good source. In this only the Dauphin was named distinctly—the Dauphine obscurely and by implication—at least, so the Dauphin explained the matter, and I never heard that he said otherwise. People pretended to despise these stories of origin unknown, but they were struck by them nevertheless, and in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... necessary stage in the culture of a pure percipience, capable of furnishing the pageant of the universe with a permanent and appreciative audience. In that case the Scottish Catechism would be justified, which asks "What is the chief end of man?" and answers (as Stevenson says) nobly if obscurely: "To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." But enough of these idle fantasies. What is certain is that we can hold up our heads serenely among the immensities, knowing that we are immenser than ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... and of the ash and the linden, are obscurely colored, and they are winged; hence they do not need the aid of any creature in their dissemination. To say that this is the reason of their dull, unattractive tints would be an explanation on a par with much that one hears about the significance of animal and vegetable coloration. ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... repels. His life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart from the main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the works on which his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meaner hands, as the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that of any other artist to reflect ideas ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... surviving curiosity as to the Prince's secret may be assuaged. In the days of 1749-1750, before Pickle's revelations begin, the drafts of the Prince's memoranda, notes, and angry love- letters, preserved in Her Majesty's Library, enable us to follow his movements. On much that is obscurely indicated in scarcely decipherable scrawls, light is thrown by the French memoirs of that age. The names of Madame de Talmond, Madame d'Aiguillon, and the celebrated Montesquieu, are beacons in the general ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... turn, to the left—into a small room, but obscurely lighted. Here is a Virgin and Child, by Sasso Ferrato, that cannot be surpassed. There is a freedom of design, a crispness of touch, and a mellowness of colouring, in this picture, that render it a performance very much above ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... in a great measure, the sense of accountableness. In neither of these rude states of the understanding, (that which confounds Providence and chance, and that which sinks in dull acquiescence to something obscurely imagined like fate,) is there any serious admission, at least during the enjoyment of health, of the duty ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... with the abrupt plans of the assembly, so entirely opposed to his ideas of gradual reform. At length, convinced or weary of the inutility of his efforts, he left Paris, after resigning, on the 4th of September, 1790, and obscurely traversed those provinces which a year before he had gone through in triumph. In revolutions, men are easily forgotten, for the nation sees many in its varied course. If we would not find them ungrateful, we must not cease for ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... workmen whom a compositor would hesitate to call skilled—already Edwin had the mien natural to a ruler, and Big James, with dignified deference, would submit unresentingly to his attitude. It was the subtlest thing. It was not that Edwin obscurely objected to the suggestion of his being present at the free-and-easy; it was that he objected (but nicely, and with good nature) to any assumption of Big James's right to influence him towards an act that his father would not approve. Instead of saying, "Why not?" Big James ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... but apparently much larger because of its wide wing-spread. Male and Female — Grayish brown or clay-colored above. Upper wings and tail darkest. Below, white, with brownish band across chest. Tail, which is rounded and more nearly square than the other swallows, is obscurely edged with white. Range — Throughout North America south of Hudson Bay. Migrations ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... simile is nobly conceived, but expressed somewhat obscurely. As Hercules contended in vain against Antaeus, the Son of Earth,—so long as the Earth gave her giant offspring new strength in every fall,—so the soul contends in vain with evil—the natural earth-born enemy, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... that shouldn't be but is somehow about Tony which no one quite knows what it is though they knows it shouldn't be, and that's what Nuggan said," Cullen observed fluently but obscurely. ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... by which the man of culture possesses himself of a half-forgotten and obscurely recorded experience and rehabilitates and interprets it, is so complete that ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... become to the rolling, pitching, and creaking of the vessel, the swash of water, and the whistling of the wind. There was not a zephyr abroad, and the surface of the miniature bay lay like a dark mirror, in which were obscurely reflected the high hills which formed its setting. A few scattered lights from the village threw long streams of radiance across the dark water, and from the black hillside on our right was heard at intervals the faint lonely tinkle of a cow-bell or the long melancholy howl of a wolf-like ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... as trained nurses and standing rigidly at attention. Then entered Painless himself, in snowy shirt-sleeves and serious professional preoccupation. Volunteers came up two by two. Painless explained obscurely the scientific principles on which the marvelous Oxodyne worked—by severing temporarily but entirely all communication between the nerves and the brain. Then much business with a ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... will pass into prayer to Him. As He not obscurely teaches us here (if we adopt the reading to which I have already referred), He has an ear to hear such requests, and He wields divine power to answer. Surely it was not blasphemy nor any diversion of the worship due to God alone, when the dying martyr outside the city wall cried ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... does the life of this obscurely-seated, and, in point of worldly wealth, poorly-repaid Churchman, present to that ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to catch glimpses of civilizations as far exceeding ours as ours surpasses society in the Stone Age. In all our democratic movements, in these efforts towards the harmonious fusion of human forces, humanity is obscurely intent on mightier collective exploits than anything conceived of before. The nature of these energies manifesting in humanity I shall try to indicate later on. But to let the general will have free play ought ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... Leading a retired life, in the solitude of a village, having quite enough to do with patiently and obscurely ploughing my humble furrow, I know little about modern scientific views. In my young days I had a passionate longing for books and found it difficult to procure them; to-day, when I could almost have them ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... 'Seek and ye shall find,'—the Church says 'Seek and ye shall not be tolerated'! How are we to reconcile these two assertions? We do not reconcile them; we cannot; it is a case of double sight,—oblique and perverted psychic vision. Christ spoke plainly;—the Church speaks obscurely. Christ gave straight commands,—we fly in the face of them and openly disobey them. Truth can always be 'discussed,' and Truth MUST be 'tolerated' were a thousand Holy Fathers to say it nay! But note again the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... instructions are received. In diplomacy, failure is a crime never forgiven. Abandoned by my Government I am now little better than an outlaw here. Two courses remain open to me—to go back in disgrace and live obscurely for the remainder of my life, or to risk my life by hanging on desperately here with an almost hopeless possibility before me of accomplishing something to serve ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers |
