"Undefined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... counsel, to advise and warn, and, if necessary, to take strong ground on all questions involving purely civil rights, and the constitutional exercise of the prerogative on the part of the Executive. This was the more necessary, as civil and religious freedom were largely identical in those days of undefined prerogative, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... they were! Look how amiable Mrs. Masham had made believe to be, an hour ago! A shade of graciousness—an infinitesimal condescension—certainly nothing worse than that! But the hypocrisy of it! She had never been quite comfortable in her ill-assigned position of guest undefined—dear, beautiful Gwen's fault! Never, since the housekeeper on first introduction had jumped at her reluctance to taint the servants' hall with Sapps Court, interpreting it as a personal desire to be alone. But she had never suspected that she was a plaguy old cat, and did not feel like ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... cases when the mother perishes in connection with childbirth. It is he who is in the best position to prevent the father from unconsciously attaching blame to the unoffending child and harboring an undefined resentment which may adversely affect both lives. The doctor can help the bereaved father to cling to his dream of family life, can assist him in building a happy home for his motherless child or children, or can advise him on problems which ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... unfolds the subject of the physical, intellectual and practical culture of the human race, and constitutes the main part of all books on Pedagogy. Here arises the greatest difficulty as to the limitations, partly because of the undefined nature of the ideas, partly because of the degree of amplification which the details demand. Here is the field of the widest possible differences. If e.g. one studies out the conception of the school with reference to the qualitative specialities which ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... felicity that I wasted. I resolved to live like Jean Jacques Rousseau, on little or nothing, and to retrench from my vanity, my dress, or my food, all that I wished to bestow on the rapture of my soul. I was not, however, without an undefined hope of making some use of my talents in the cause of my love. These were as yet made known to a few friends only by some verses; but in the last three months I had written during my sleepless nights ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... than the state to which the name is usually applied. I once took an enormous dose of this substance. After suffering from a series of symptoms which it is not necessary here to detail, I was seized with a horrible undefined fear, as of impending death, and began at the same time to have marked periods when all connection seemed to be severed between the external world and myself. During these periods I was unconscious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... her, appraising her beauty with eyes into which a new interest had come. In a moment she turned and halted so suddenly that the man found her face close to his as she spoke. "I don't know what's the matter with me tonight. I feel faint and giddy—and full of undefined longings. I sha'n't sleep—unless—" she looked questioningly up at him—"unless you will play ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... scene, there was something that invariably presented itself between my eyes and the object of my scrutiny; whichever way I looked, it stood in my way, and I could not remove it. It was like a cloud, yet transparent, and with a certain undefined shape. I tried for some time, but in vain, to decipher it, but could not. At last it appeared to cohere into a form—it was the Dominie's great nose, magnified into that of the Scripture, "As the tower which looketh towards Damascus." ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... homage with dignity; he refrained from any premature speech. She had heard that he was prone to take a glass too much, but she saw nothing in that. A handsome fellow, a man such as one seldom sees, a little weather-beaten perhaps, but most sailors are the same. Something undefined in his eyes frightened her, as did his greediness at table. Sometimes she was startled at the vehemence of his opinions. If only she had been at home, and could have made inquiries beforehand! But he was to leave very soon, and had said jestingly that the next time that he proposed, he ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... gravity in which the blossom of feeling already exists, but its plenitude and maturity are still to come. And in attentively examining our personage we are struck with his reflective and searching glance. We seem to have a glimpse in him of an undefined melancholy. This expression surprises us in this man, who ought to be happy at living and who lacks no pleasures ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... predicted by astronomers. My father again is engaged in the crucial correspondence with Fisher Unwin, at least it has begun by T.F.U. stating his proposed terms—a rise of 5/—from October, another rise possible but undefined in January, 10 per cent royalty for the Paris book and expenses for a fortnight in Paris. These, as I got my father to heartily agree, are vitiated to the bone as terms by the absence of any assurance that I shall not have to write "Paris," for which I am really paid ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... eighteen months. He was as dark as she was fair, as obedient and caressing as she was hasty and capricious. She well remembered that part of her life; neither wealth nor town life had altered it; and like a far-off dream of wild freedom it came back to her, or as the remembrance of an undefined and mysterious previous existence, where the sandy shores seemed longer, and the ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... halcyon hour, the highest point of their mutual adventure. The cabin was their palace, the soaked prospect a pleasance decked for their delight. And from this rude and ravaged outlook their minds reached forward in undefined and unrestricted visioning to all the world that lay before them, which they would soon advance on ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Joannes Diaconus (S. Greg. Vit. lib. i. cap. i.) employs these decisive terms, "quartus Felix, sedis Apostolicae Pontifex." It is of course possible to translate "atavus meus" merely "my ancestor;" and this will leave the relationship sufficiently undefined. ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... candle as it wavered in the night wind. The Prince of the Powers of the Air might have sat for his picture by proxy. It was just such a face as one has dreamed of after a hot supper and cold ale, when the whisky had been forgotten—horrible, changing, vague, glimmering, and undefined; and as if something was still wanting to complete the utter frightfulness of his aspect, the splinter wound in his head burst out afresh from his violent agitation, and streamed down in heavy drops from his forehead, falling warm on ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... a "young thing" is gifted with that undefined something that we call tact. Sarah Reade soon found out, from the gratuitous advice lavished upon her, that her chief trouble would be from Henrietta; so she took pains to get acquainted with the unruly girl the first day. Finding that the center of Henrietta's heart was Periwinkle, she took great ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... seat of Oriental splendour! that land of poets and roses! that cradle of mankind, that uncontaminated source of Eastern manners lay before me, and I was delighted with the opportunities which would be afforded me of pursuing my favourite subject. I had an undefined feeling about the many countries I was about to visit, which filled my mind with ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... strains of youth, the shadowing forth of vague possibilities, the expression of hope undimmed by disappointment. A nameless undefined longing for greater liberty. The desire to be free from the restraints of home, and to mingle with the busy world in all the pride of early manhood. Soon the voyager puts off from the shore, and at first all seems smooth and alluring. He drifts along the ocean of life, wafted by favourable ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... athwart the sky. She was working quietly at some little garment for a poor peasant girl or half-clad boy in the mountains; but over her gentle and usually placid face stole a look of apprehension, as if a shadow of coming evil was thrown forward by the undefined future. Yet why should she fear, who hated no one, but poured her love abroad upon all? Ah, why? is it not upon the gentle and the kind that the hailstones of destiny beat oftenest, as if they felt that here, and not upon the rugged and the stern, their pitiless ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... are sombre and lurid. Sometimes the terror foretold is nameless and mystic, yet even then the Prophet's simplicity does not fail but rather contributes to the vague, undefined horror. In the following it is premature night which creeps over the hills—night without shelter for the weary ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... on this celebrated occasion, vague and indefinite, but calculated to allay to a certain extent the anxiety of the head of the papal church.[877] There is good reason to believe that the king's intention of fulfilling them, not to say his plan for doing so, was equally undefined; although, so far as his own faith was concerned, he had no thought of abandoning the church of his fathers. The expressions by means of which Charles is made to point with unmistakable clearness to a contemplated ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... of a bull is even yet undefined; which is most extraordinary, considering that Miss Edgeworth has applied all her tact and illustrative power to furnish the matter for such a definition, and Coleridge all his philosophic subtlety (but in this instance, I think, with a most infelicitous result) to furnish its form. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... children were soon heard to utter shrieks and gasps of mingled delight and terror at the stories she told them, which stories invariably fascinated them to an extraordinary degree, yet left them with a sense of undefined horror that was ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... nomenclature and its regular schematic use. Thus, while here keeping to simple words in everyday use, we may employ and combine them to analyse out our Town into its elements and their inter-relations with all due exactitude, instead of either leaving our common terms undefined, or arbitrarily defining them anew, as economists have alternately done—too literally losing or shirking essentials of Work in the above formula, and with these missing essentials of Folk ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... the Pope, who, as the Head of Christendom, was regarded as having supremacy over all Religious Orders. But the Pope himself often encroached upon the rights of the Order, not only by sending nuncios to Malta with large and undefined powers, but by arrogating to himself the patronage of the langue of Italy when he wished to bestow gifts upon his relatives and friends. This led to bitter resentment among the Italian Knights, who saw all the lucrative posts of their langue given away to ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... O'Reilly spread lasting balm on many sores in the Middle East. The Golden Judge settled—in favor of Pakistan—her friction with Afghanistan over the long-disputed Pathan territory. Saudi Arabia won from Britain two small and completely worthless oases on the undefined border between Saudi Arabia and Trucial Oman. These oases had, over the years, produced many hot and vain notes, and desultory shooting, but the Lord of Saudi Arabia was subsequently much disappointed that they never produced oil. He was further ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... 4, Toombs urged that a special agent be sent and offered a resolution to that effect [Ibid., 105]. The day following, Congress passed the resolution [Ibid., 107]: but left the powers and duties of the special agent, or commissioner, undefined. Davis appointed Pike to the position and, after Congress had expressed its wishes regarding the mission in the act of May 21, 1861, had a copy of the act transmitted to him as his ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... us as heavily as it does upon Englishmen. The first question that suggests itself is whether this is really a fair statement of law, and, of course, the Pall Mall Gazette admits that there exist limitations of the right of cross-examination, but it contends that these are so undefined as to amount to little or nothing in the way of protection. The authorities contain little on the subject, except that cross-examination as to credit is allowed to go very far, and that judges may ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... seen and heard had proved mysteriously disturbing—all this outpouring of irrational sentiment in which he had no share. So had his conversation with the girl disturbed him. He was in a condition of mental unrest, undefined but acute; odds and ends of curious thought kicked about within him, challenging him to follow them down to unexplored depths. But he was paying no ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... handsomer and taller since then, she thought. With a nimble bound he leaped from his saddle, kissing his hand to Carrie, who with her sunniest smile ran past him to welcome Nellie. A pang, not of jealousy, but of an undefined something, shot through 'Lena's heart, and dropping the heavy curtain, she turned away, while the tears gathered thickly ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... expected the handsome young artist to feel the magic that hovered about her talks with him, to know the thrill that lay in the formal hand-clasp, to be aware that he interpreted for her poems and pictures, and incarnated the undefined ideal of girlish day-dreams? How could he ever have had other than an intellectual thought of her; how could any man, even the religious Raphael? Sickly, ugly little thing that she was! She got up and looked in the glass now ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... those hours. The widow still felt an undefined fear that she was wrong, and though her heart yearned to know that her daughter was happy in the sweet happiness of accepted love, yet she dreaded to be too confident. Not a word had been said about money matters; not a word of Aaron Dunn's ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... by the 56th Division on the south and the Guards on the north reduced the neck of the horseshoe, or pocket, to about 500 yards, but could not close it. The situation within the horseshoe was undefined, and the exact positions of the Quadrilateral and other trenches were not known, owing to the bad flying weather. Even our own positions were in doubt, as almost every vestige of roads, railways and even villages had ...
— A Short History of the 6th Division - Aug. 1914-March 1919 • Thomas Owen Marden
... largest lake which lies in the northern part of the territory: "The greatest extension of Devil's Lake is at least forty miles,— but may be more, as we did not, and could not, ascertain the end of the north-west bay, which I left undefined on the map. It is bordered by hills that are pretty well wooded on one side, but furrowed by ravines and coulees, that are taken advantage of by warlike parties, both for attack and defence according to circumstances. The lake itself is so filled up with islands and promontories, that, ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... ready and the most trustworthy gauge of probability that he has is an immediate appeal to consciousness as to whether he feels the probability. Thus every man learns for himself to endow his own sense of probability with a certain undefined but massive weight of authority. Now it is this test of relative conceivability which all men apply in varying degrees to the question of Theism. For if, from education and organised habits of ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... triumphal car drive heavily. He saw himself advancing, as he had advanced hitherto, from promotion to promotion, from command to command. He saw himself first alone, and then with a wife—a wife who was not Olivia Guion. Then suddenly the vision changed into something misty and undefined; the road became dark, the triumphal car jolted and fell to pieces; there was reproach in the air and discomfort in his sensations. He recognized the familiar warnings that he was not doing precisely the right thing. He saw Olivia Guion sitting ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... for this—years that his teachers had felt were wasted. He had explored all the crazy systems of logic abandoned in the march of progress. He had even devised systems of his own, synthesized from undefined symbols according to strange patterns ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... discipline themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is the only permanent, content is to be attained, not by grovelling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continual striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the highest Good—"a cloud by day, a pillar of ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not find that I have. Three of them, the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth, would be more in place in the Classic of Filial Piety than here in the Chung Yung. The meaning of the sixteenth is shadowy and undefined. After all the study which I have directed to it, there are some points in reference to which I have still doubts and difficulties. The twentieth chapter, which concludes the third portion of the Work, contains a full exposition of Confucius's views ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... intercepting and overshadowing each other, and resembling those fogs which in mountainous countries are wont to descend in obscure volumes, and disfigure or obliterate the usual marks by which the traveller steers his course through the wilds. The dark and undefined idea of danger arising to my father from the machinations of such a man as Rashleigh Osbaldistone—the half declaration of love that I had offered to Miss Vernon's acceptance—the acknowledged difficulties of her situation, bound by a previous contract to sacrifice herself ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ahead, its outline vague and undefined like that of the landscape around, but the sun was shining. It shone full on their young faces, as they went forward, hand ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his companions rode on to Downside. He intended, should May not have returned, to leave Julia there, and go in search of the mad woman. An undefined fear seized him that something might have happened to May. On reaching the house, Harry threw himself from his horse. Miss Jane, in a state of great agitation, was at the front door directing Susan to summon the gardener, that he might set off and ascertain what had become ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... (Turkish religious lands) lay claim to lands of vast and undefined extent, which are mystified by titles and gifts for charitable purposes, surrounded with clouds of obscure usages and ancient rules that will afford a boundless field for litigation. In fact, the existing government has arrived at the unpleasant position ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Europe for painting in color, distemper, tempera and oil, led to an exact study of form, the colors employed by the Orientals—at times brilliant, at times subdued with an almost studied restraint—preserved a singular fluidity and lent themselves to undefined evanescences which gave ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... human mind begins to droop and flag as in a strange road, or in a thick mist, benighted and making little way with many attempts and many failures, and that the best of us only escape with half a triumph. The undefined and the imaginary are the regions that we must pass like Satan, difficult and doubtful, 'half flying, half on foot.' The object in sense is a positive thing, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... with an attack on the Company and it would not send its papers to England by the investigating commissioners. Instead they were sent by a representative of the Assembly's choice. The status of the General Assembly under the King, when Virginia became a royal colony, was, for sometime, undefined and even its continuation was, perhaps, doubtful. It did, nonetheless, survive to become a chief instrument ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... which has glorified the reign of Elizabeth as perhaps the most splendid period in the annals of England can be endorsed, without ignoring the defects in the character of the Queen, her Ministers, her Courtiers, or her People. A new day had dawned upon the world; new possibilities, vast and undefined, were presenting themselves; new thoughts were possessing the minds of men; new blood was throbbing in their veins. The English race was awaking to a sense of its powers, grasping with a splendid audacity at the mighty heritage whose full import was yet unrealised. The Elizabethans ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... claims: continental shelf: 200-m or to the depth of exploitation exclusive economic zone: undefined ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... things that jarred unpleasantly on my nerves, and left an undefined sense of danger. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... of Hamlet's description—the ways of the world "flat, stale, and unprofitable;" the face of nature gloomy; the sky a "congregation of pestilent vapours." It was not the hazard of life; exposed, as it might be, in the midst of scenes of which the horrors were daily deepening; it was a general undefined feeling, of having undertaken a task too difficult for my powers, and of having engaged in a service in which I could neither advance with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked "When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose" (the implication is that the compiler may choose any arbitrarily ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... sympathy between music and fine scenery: they both affect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions, which express themselves in 'idle tears,' or evoking thoughts 'which lie,' as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears,' beyond the reach of any words. How little we know what multitudes of mingling reminiscences, held in solution by the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in its plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... shapeless were the characters, that it was not easy to resolve them into letters, or to believe that they were anything but arbitrary and dismal blots and scrawls upon the yellow paper; without meaning, vague, like the misty and undefined germs of thought as they exist in our minds before clothing themselves in words. These, however, as he concentrated his mind upon them, took distincter shape, like cloudy stars at the power of the telescope, and became sometimes English, sometimes Latin, strangely patched ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... passed his lips than the stranger drew back suddenly, with a hasty exclamation. Some suspicion seemed to engender a mixture of terror and defiance which placed him on his guard against undue intimacy, even when some undefined fear was knocking at his heart. "Who are you?" he demanded in a steadier tone. "How do ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... house. When she discovered that he had gone without again seeing her, she flew to the telephone and held a long incoherent talk with some one she not infrequently called "Ben, dear," to whom she confided certain undefined fears about her husband and her future. A suggestion of a trip to Europe from the other end of the telephone met with her unbounded gratitude and enthusiasm. After urging haste, she left the colloquy almost her old smiling self, and went to the library, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... awe into its face, he saw a something reigning there: a lofty something, undefined and indistinct, which made it hardly more than a remembrance of that child—as yonder figure might be— yet it was the same: the ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... exploration, we landed at a high grassy point on the west bank. From the top of the highest tree in the neighbourhood, I commanded an extensive view of the wide and far-spread landscape then first submitted to the scrutiny of a European. Varied and undefined are the thoughts called forth at such a moment; the past, the present, and the future, at once occupy, and almost confound the imagination. New feelings accompany new perceptions; and gazing for the first time upon a vast and unknown land, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... history is so hopelessly entangled in the meshes of subtle philosophical speculation, derived from the most complex sources. To deal with the facts of classic art, which is concerned with seeking a clearly-defined perfection, is a simple matter compared with the unbounded and undefined concepts of a school which waged war upon "the deadliness of ascertained facts" and immersed itself in vague intimations of glories that were to be. Its most authorized exponent declared it to be "the delineation of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... arbitrary,—sub-genera,—genera,—sub-families, families, orders and classes and kingdoms. The kind of classification which everyone feels is most correct is called the natural system, but no can define this. If we say with Whewell undefined instinct of the importance of organs{135}, we have no means in lower animals of saying which is most important, and yet everyone feels that some one system alone deserves to be called natural. The true relationship of organisms is brought before one by considering relations of analogy, an otter-like ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... found rumors prevailing, as yet undefined and crude, of Kirby Smith's advance through Southeastern Kentucky. Our friends in Glasgow welcomed us with their usual kindness and after enjoying their hospitality for some hours, we marched off ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... of that abyss into which he looked, flashing from his mind to my own, left me silent and helpless before him. Yet I longed to give him comfort; for, with the regal self-possession which had fallen from him, there had slipped from me too some undefined instinct of distrust and disapproval. All that I felt now was the sad tie of brotherhood which united us, poor human atoms, strong only in our capacity to suffer, tossed and driven, whitherward we knew not, in the purposeless play ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... the moon, Perdlugssuaq was for the time forgotten; in their hearts men felt a vague, tender, and ineffable stirring—the lure of a passion stronger and stranger even than death. They gazed upon the moon with instinctive, undefined pity. So, as the years passed, and ages melted and remade the snows, the long day was golden with the Beauty that is ever desired, the Ideal never attained; the night was softly silver with the melancholy and eternal hope of the deathless love that eternally desires, eternally ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... conquest won, The more he came to green Moyarta's bowers; Even as the earth, by gazing on the sun, In summer-time puts forth her myriad flowers. The yearnings of his heart—vague, undefined— Wakened and solaced by ideal gleams, Took everlasting shape, and intertwined Around this incarnation of ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... then the public career. The reply which, as John Quincy Adams said, "utterly demolished the fabric of Hayne's speech and left scarcely a wreck to be seen," went straight home to the people of the North. It gave eloquent expression to the strong but undefined feeling in the popular mind. It found its way into every house and was read everywhere; it took its place in the school books, to be repeated by shrill boy voices, and became part of the literature and of the intellectual life of the country. In those solemn sentences men ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... pure types of each still linger unblended in their most ancient seats; for, though races mingle, they do not thereby lose their own character. The law is rather that the type of one or other will come out clear in their descendants, all undefined forms ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook. His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in him. It was constantly in his mind, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... and of adroitness of intellect, and endowed with all that the schools can do for one, and of high social position, yet moving in society with superciliousness and hauteur, as though she would have people know their place, and with an undefined combination of giggle and strut and rhodomontade, endowed with allopathic quantities of talk, but only homeopathic infinitesimals of sense, the terror of dry-goods clerks and railroad conductors, discoverers of significant meanings in plain conversation, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... looked very bright to him, very easy, and very peaceful. He could hardly have thought of anything at all likely to happen which could darken the future, or even give him reasonable cause for anxiety. There was no imaginative sadness in his nature, no morbid dread of undefined evil, no melancholy to dye the days black; for melancholy is more often an affliction of the very strong in body or mind than of the weak, or of average men and women. Marcello was delicate, but not degenerate; he seemed gentle, cheerful, and ready to believe the world ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... any hope for ultimate safety under his management. Whether or not he had a hand in Egerton's removal was still a matter of conjecture. She felt, in addition to this uncertainty, no slight degree of awe and apprehension in her approaches to this solitary being; and a sort of undefined notion that, however modified and controlled by circumstances, yet his communications with the world of spirits were still in operation, imparting to his converse and communion with his fellow-men a strange and dubious character, which even strangers did not fail ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She found his sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to be wanted! You must tolerate my frivolousness. You're ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Arabs; but the most enterprising of the Arabs, in their search after ivory, only touched the frontiers of Rua, as, the natives and Livingstone call it; for Rua is an immense country, with a length of six degrees of latitude, and as yet an undefined ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... think how the children will have outgrown daisy-chains, or even got beyond the season of climbing trees. The middle-aged man enjoys the prospect of the time when he shall go to his country house; and the vague, undefined belief surrounds him, like an atmosphere, that he and his children, his views and likings, will be then just such as they are now. He cannot bring it home to him at how many points change will be cutting into him, and hedging him in, and paring him down. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... it could not be his place to go. Somewhere in the priory ruins was Percival Thorne, hiding his sorrow and himself: should he find him and persuade him to make the attempt? But Harry had an undefined feeling that Mrs. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... reader, what was the origin of this poem; nor does any argument show its object, or train of thought. Who the maid is, no one can tell, and if there be a vision respecting the destiny of nations, it is nearly as confused and incoherent as a true vision of the night; exciting in the mind some such undefined wonderment, as must have accompanied the descent of one of ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... his own position, while Jaspar lit another cigar. Each was striving to penetrate the thoughts of the other, but neither had the boldness to enter upon the subject which occupied his mind. The lawyer wanted the lady and the fortune, and he had an undefined purpose of obtaining them through the agency of Jaspar, who wanted only the fortune, and had a decided anticipation of being able to retain the attorney in his service. Neither knew the purposes of the other; but each wanted ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... simply, "I forgot! If a good deed is done in the world by the force of the undefined Spirit of Christ, it is judged as trickery,—and we must never forget that even the Resurrection of our Blessed Lord from the dead is believed by some to be a mere matter of conspiracy among His disciples. True—I forgot the blindness,—the melancholy blindness of the world! But we must always say, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the moment, a flood of feeling begotten by the tragedy. It had in it more of remorse than aught else; it was, in part, the agitation of a soul surprised into revelation. Yet there was, too, a strange, deep, undefined pity welling up in her heart,—pity for Rudyard, and because of what she did not say directly even to her own soul. But pity was there, with also a sense of inevitableness, of the continuance of things which she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... itself forth from the air in very undefined outline. I cannot say it was of a human form, and yet it had more resemblance to a human form, or rather shadow, than to anything else. As it stood, wholly apart and distinct from the air and the ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... fatality, or fatal justice, is less defensible, and less acceptable too, than the ancient and elementary power, which, being general and undefined, and offering no too strict explanation of its actions, lent itself to a far greater number of situations. In the special case selected by Ibsen, it is not impossible that some kind of accidental justice may be found, as it is not impossible that the arrow a blind man shoots into a crowd may ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... misgiving of which she was hardly conscious: any misgiving that had sprung into an indistinct and undefined existence since that recent night when she had gone down to her father's room: that Walter's accidental interest in her, and early knowledge of her, might have involved him in that powerful displeasure and dislike? Had Walter any such ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... principles of the Protestant Reformation and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed, inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human element"; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping-boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... frolic in a duchess. Josiana was in everything—in birth, in beauty, in irony, in brilliancy—almost a queen. She had felt a moment's enthusiasm for Louis de Bouffles, who used to break horseshoes between his fingers. She regretted that Hercules was dead. She lived in some undefined expectation of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... The night was warm. Glow-worms lay here and there, brooding out green light in the bosom of the thick soft grass. There was no wind save what the swift wing of a bat, sweeping close to their heads, would now and then awake. The creature came and vanished like an undefined sense of evil at hand. But it was only Richard who thought that; nothing such crossed the starry clearness of Barbara's soul. Her skirt made a buttony noise with the heads of the rib-grass. Her red cloak was dark in the moonlight. She threw back the hood, and coming out of its shadow like ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... Perhaps in her ears was still ringing Pollyanna's story of that same girl who had found a crowd in a big city the loneliest place in the world, yet who had refused to go with the handsome man that had "noticed too much." Perhaps in Mrs. Carew's heart was the undefined hope that somewhere in it all lay the peace she had so longed for. Perhaps it was a little of all three combined with utter helplessness in the face of Pollyanna's amazing twisting of her irritated sarcasm into the wide-sweeping hospitality of a willing hostess. Whatever it was, ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... her face bleeding and blackened. He was going to rush away when there sprang up in his agitated soul the mysterious and undefined instinct that guides all beings in the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... earlier part of October. Some of the ministers, apparently the two Colberts, Seignelai, and Croissi, insinuated that it would be better not to be precipitate. The Dauphin, a young prince of twenty-four, who resembled, in his undefined character, his grandfather more than his father, and who was destined to remain always as it were lost in the splendid halo of Louis the Great, attempted an intervention that deserves to rescue his name from oblivion. "He represented, from an anonymous memorial that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... famine. But then no sooner had he done this than he was bound to perceive that in cutting down the corn or in eating his totem-bear or kangaroo he was slaying his own best self and benefactor. In that instant the consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some undefined yet no less disturbing and alarming form would come in. If, before, his ritual magic had been concentrated on the simple purpose of multiplying the animal or, vegetable forms of his food, now in addition his magical endeavor would ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... certain parts of the city are more dangerous and more "wicked" than others; that her comings and goings must always be in safe and familiar company; that her acquaintanceships and her friendships must be scrutinized by her natural protectors and that, altogether, there is a definite but undefined danger in the very atmosphere of the city for the girl or the young woman which demands ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... packed his burro and turned its thoughtful, mouse- coloured forehead to the north. Many citizens escorted him to the undefined limits of Yellowhammer and bestowed upon him shouts of commendation and farewells. Five pocket flasks without an air bubble between contents and cork were forced upon him; and he was bidden to consider ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... skill. For they would not fly to the refuge of falsehood for any other reason than that they are not vigorous enough to elicit beauty from the subject itself. Truth, indeed, is limited and defined, but the realm of lies is unlimited and undefined. Hence the one offers difficulties for invention, the other is obvious and easy, and for that reason also is to ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... was no great difficulty about it. But Gorman's bribes were offered in vain. A curious fear possessed the islanders; the same fear which laid hold of the souls of simple people all over Europe at that time. They were afraid of some vast evil, undefined, unrealized, and their terror kept them close to the shadows of their homes. The most that Gorman could persuade them to do was to take him a few miles out to sea in one of their boats. There he used to stay for an hour or ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... that man's look which makes a woman's heart beat faster, even if she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face glow. It shone through the half-light as though a ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... minority directors, by the suffering women and children, by the keen excitement of the struggle, by the religious scruples sternly suppressed but occasionally asserting themselves, now on one side and now on the other, and by that undefined psychology of the crowd which we understand so little. All of these factors also influence the public and do much to determine popular sympathy and judgment. In the early days of the Pullman strike, as I was coming down in the elevator of the Auditorium hotel from one of the futile meetings of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... court, and the muffled splash of the bucket as it struck the water deep in the shaft. She even thought she could hear the drops dripping back from it as it slowly ascended, but that was fancy. Everywhere arose the auricular vapour, as it were, of action, undefined and indefinable, the hum of the human hive, compounded of all confluent noises—the chatter of the servants' hall and the nursery, the stamping of horses, the ringing of harness, the ripping of the chains of kenneled dogs, the hollow stamping of heavy boots, the lowing ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... land of the Cyclops, Odysseus and his company sailed to the Isle of Aeolus, the king of the winds. This place too is undefined; we only learn that, even with the most favourable gale, it was ten days' sail from Ithaca. In the Isle of Aeolus Odysseus abode for a month, and then received from the king a bag in which all the winds were bound, except that which was to waft the hero to his home. This ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... a magnificent diamond of enormous size and incomparable purity and of that undefined blue which clear water takes from the sky which it reflects, the blue which we can just suspect in newly-washed linen. People admired it, went into raptures over it ... and cast terrified glances round the ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... explored, but the torch of investigation that guided us through it now flares out upon new regions we did not see before. Like one who goes with a candle into some immense cavern, presently a little circle becomes clear, the shadows vanish before him, and undefined forms grow distinct, he thinks he is near the end, when lo! what seemed a solid boundary of rock dissolves and floats away into a depth of darkness, the path opens into an immense void, new shapes ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... felt himself to be provoked. When next he went to Bolton Street he found that Lady Ongar had left London. She had gone down to Ongar Park, and, as far as the woman at the house knew, intended to remain there till after Easter. Harry had some undefined idea that she should not have taken such a step without telling him. Had she not declared to him that he was her only friend? When a friend is going out of town, leaving an only friend behind, that friend ought to tell her ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... touch the sense of terror, or satisfy the expectation of things strange, which have been prompted by the mystery or the majesty of the surrounding scene. And thus, your leaving forms more or less undefined, or carrying out your fancies, however extravagant, in grotesqueness of shadow or shape, will be for the most part in accordance with the temper of the observer; and he is likely, therefore, much more willingly to use his fancy ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... that this is not the sole motive, and some weight must be accorded to the desire to reduce the amount of available labor, and to protect adults who tend machines from the competition of children who could do it as well or better. There is, however, an undefined feeling in the laborers' minds that when children all work from an early age the wages of the whole family somehow become low, and that it takes all of them to do for the family what the parents might do under a different condition. The Malthusian law shows how, in the long ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... life in China. There is no special class to take care of it; every one has to attend himself to those sacrifices which are incumbent on him; this is a natural, matter-of-course part of a man's duty. As there is no Bible, there is no religious instruction, and the doctrine is quite vague and undefined. The ritual, however, is fixed by tradition in every detail, and if a man attends to it he does his duty; religion is a set of acts properly and exactly done, the proper person sacrificing always to the proper ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... were right, if all were so undefined, why not do as did the birds and squirrels, and seek all sunny places? He could not work at his fence Sunday. He had not done that yet, but he would walk the miles Saturday night and spend his Sunday ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... the afternoon the boatbuilder's heart was, somehow, heavy with undefined dread as to what he was to ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... clearly show that such characters are usually not "specific," in the sense that they are such as distinguish species from each other, but are found in numerous allied species. Again: "Thus a large yet undefined extension may safely be given to the direct and indirect results of natural selection; but I now admit, after reading the essay of Naegeli on plants, and the remarks by various authors with respect to animals, more especially those recently made ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... away. There was nothing to talk about. The prisoners, without memory of the past, had nothing upon which to base a speculation of the future. Personalities could not be exchanged, for those personalities were newly emerged and still undefined. ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... humblest growth into anything from a grazing steer to a moving vehicle; from a prowling coyote to a log hut. The music of the waking night-world droned on the scented air, emphasizing the calm, the delicious peace. It was like some fairy kingdom swept by strains of undefined music which haunted the ear without monotony, and peopled with shadows which the imagination ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum |
