"Bewildering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poetical enthusiasm. The forms of nature undergo a half humanising process under the intensity of our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because only the soul of genius can give it a presence—though afterwards all eyes dimly recognise it, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... in the cold, waiting for the train to get a start. People keep on signaling with green lights and red lights. And it's all very bewildering. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... before the particular individual who makes his clothes. Yet the novelist and the playwright, who hold the mirror up to modern humanity, are occasionally kind even to curates and tailors. There is a youthful athlete in Holy Orders who thrashes, to our immense admiration, the village bully, bewildering his victim and his admirers with his mastery of what is described a little vaguely as the 'old Oxford science.' Once, at least, a glamour of romance has been shed over the son of a tailor, and it becomes imaginable that even the chalker of unfinished coats may in the future be ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... 'It's perfectly bewildering the interest some people take in music,' she resumed later, building a little tent on the side of her plate with the debris of fish. 'There's Bartlett Browning, telling me the other evening a melancholy story of some melodious fishes, off the coast of—Weiss nicht wo; oysters, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that neither words nor melody was of the least importance, but that the man's manner of performance or display was everything. Now, in enjoying gypsy singing, one feels at once as if the vocalists had entirely forgotten self, and were carried away by the bewildering beauty of the air and the charm of the words. There is no self-consciousness, no vanity,—all is real. The listener feels as if he were a performer; the performer is an enraptured listener. There is no soulless "art for the sake of art," but art for ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... are filled with stubborn facts, bewildering realities, and extraordinary inconsequences. Up by the N'gombi lands lived a tribe who, for the purposes of office classification, were known as "N'gombi (Interior)," but who were neither N'gombi nor Isisi, nor of any known branch of the Bantu race, ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... we feel the waves' bewildering motion, And winds from mighty mud-flats, weird and wild: His clam-filled bosom answered to the voice of ocean, And rose and ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... dresses of the ladies, the scarlet robes of the senators and high officials of the Republic, the imposing vestments of the old doge, Cristofero Moro, as he sat in state upon his massive throne, and the bewildering array of the seventy-two candidates for a king's choice. Seventy-two, I say, but in all that company of puffed and powdered, coifed and combed young ladies, standing tall and uncomfortable on their ridiculously high-heeled shoes, ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... middle of the afternoon, while Sandy MacPherson was still carting sawdust, and Vandine tending his circular amid the bewildering din, Stevie and some other children came down to ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... great followed in bewildering succession in Utah. The people were besought to take sides with the South in the awful scenes of cruel strife; it was openly stated in the east that Utah had allied herself with the cause of secession; and by others that the design was to make Salt Lake City the ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... outlook never changed; occasionally the cliffs vanished and our way would lie across the tundras—marshy plains—which in summer encircle the Polar Sea with a belt of verdure and wild flowers, but which in winter-time are merged with the frozen ocean in one boundless, bewildering wilderness of white. In hazy weather land and sky formed one impenetrable veil, with no horizon as dividing line, when, even at a short distance away, men and dog-sleds resembled flies crawling up a white curtain. But on clear days, unfortunately ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... erubescent admiration. He spoke of, and he was clearly on familiar terms with, the fashionable restaurants and actresses; he stopped at a hairdresser's to have his hair curled. All this was very exciting, and a little bewildering. I was on the tiptoe of expectation to see his apartments; and, not to be utterly outdone, I alluded to ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... light he pushed his intrepid way through the darkness and the bewildering intricacies of the Downs, and in due time, in the full sunlight of the next day, the Croonah sidled alongside the quay in the Tilbury Dock. The passengers, with their new lives before them, stumbled ashore, already forgetting the men who, smoke- begrimed and weary, had carried these lives within ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... sparsely dotted here and there with a few gnarled and unwholesome-looking trees, the whole intersected by a labyrinth of canals filled with stagnant water, which wound hither and thither in a most purposeless and bewildering fashion. That insect life abounded there was manifest at the most cursory glance, for great clouds of midges or flies could be seen hovering in the air in every direction, while Earle's surmise as to the presence of alligators was abundantly confirmed by the ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... faint dawn was flushing up the skies When, dreamland still bewildering mine eyes, I looked out to the oak that, winter-long, — a winter wild with war and woe and wrong — Beyond my casement had been ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... began to inquire in my mind whether there were, or ever had been, any other gentlemen, not in the dancing profession, who lived and founded a reputation entirely on their deportment. This became so bewildering and suggested the possibility of so many Mr. Turveydrops that I said, "Esther, you must make up your mind to abandon this subject altogether and attend to Caddy." I accordingly did so, and we chatted all the rest of the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... difference," said he. As he spoke there was a crash a little farther behind them, another ahead, and they stood still; Alton gripping the horse's bridle, Seaforth staring about him and scarcely breathing, while concussion answered concussion, until there was a silence that was almost bewildering again. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... say this to her, either; to warn her as he had done before. She must wear out her illusions, as she would wear out her glistening silk dress. He must leave her now, with the shimmer of them all about her imagination, bewildering it, as the lovely, lustrous heap upon her lap threw a bewilderment about her own very face and figure, and made it for the moment beautiful with all enticing, outward ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... of youth are apt to be more bewildering than those of age, and a decade scarcely perceptible in an old civilization often means utter revolution to the new. It did not seem strange to me, therefore, on meeting Jack Bracy twelve years after, to find that he had forgotten Miss Circe, or that SHE had married, and was living unhappily ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... weary Of the bewildering masquerade of life— Where strangers walk as friends and friends as strangers, Where whispers overhead betray false hearts; And through the mazes of the crowd we chase Some form of loveliness that smiles and beckons. ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... no more: or closer watch Thy course in Earth's bewildering ways, For every glimpse thine eye can catch Of what shall be in those dread days: So when th' Archangel's word is spoken, And Death's deep trance for ever broken, In mercy thou mayst feel the heavenly hand, And in thy lot unharmed before thy ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... to herself in those days, telling herself that it would be folly to love a young man of twenty, so far apart from her socially in the first place; and her behavior to him was a bewildering mixture of familiarity and capricious fits of pride arising from her fears and scruples. She was sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she was tender and flattered him. At first, while he was overawed by her ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... bewildering politics! I've placed my fences round; Pass on, with all your party tricks, Nor tread my holy ground. Stand back—I'm weary of your talk, Your squabbles, and your hate: You cannot enter in this walk— I've closed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... take great pleasure in showing him in a department devoted to that very end. It was after one bewildering glance about the counters that he became of the opinion that his question should have been: "What is it that a lady does not wear when traveling by motor?" He saw coats and bonnets and goggles and vanity boxes and gloves, ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the thrilling excitement attending an aristocratic "crush,"—an extensive, sweeping-off-of-old-cores "at home,"—that scene of bewildering confusion which might be appropriately set forth to the minds of the vulgar in the once-popular ditty, "Such a getting-up-stairs I never did see!" Who can paint in sufficiently brilliant colors the mere outside of a house thus distinguished by this strange festivity, in which there is no actual ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... and the consequent need of expiation for sin, were gradually unfolded in the Greek mind. The idea of sin was at first revealed in a confused and indefinite feeling of some external, supernatural, and bewildering influence which man can not successfully resist; but yet so in harmony with the sinner's inclination, that he can not divest himself of all responsibility. "Homer has no word answering in comprehensiveness or depth of meaning to the word sin, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... muffled by the bedclothes. She was ever, indeed, the most telephonic of her sex. In talking to Eva you always had, as it were, your lips to the receiver. If you didn't try to meet her fine eyes, it was that you simply couldn't hope to: there were too many dark, too many buzzing and bewildering and all frankly not negotiable leagues in between. Snatches of other voices seemed often to intertrude themselves in the parley; and your loyal effort not to overhear these was complicated by your fear of missing what Eva might be twittering. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... girl named Ida Starr idealises him, and is helped thereby to a purer life. In the four years' interval between this somewhat hurried work and his still earlier attempt the young author seems to have gone through a bewildering change of employments. We hear of a clerkship in Liverpool, a searing experience in America (described with but little deviation in New Grub Street), a gas-fitting episode in Boston, private tutorships, and cramming engagements ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... explanation entirely puzzled the Baron. The first statement, though eminently satisfactory, was also a little bewildering. ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... dwelt a priest in the house of Aphrodite: for to such praise are men moved by the thankfulness that followeth the recompense of friendly acts. But of thee, O thou son of Deinomenes, the maiden daughter of the Lokrian in the west before the house-door telleth in her song, being out of bewildering woes of war by thy might delivered, so that her eyes are not ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... his mother at Southwell,—among the small, but select, society of which place he had, during his visits, formed some intimacies and friendships, the memory of which is still cherished there fondly and proudly. With the exception, indeed, of the brief and bewildering interval which he passed, as we have seen, in the company of Miss Chaworth, it was at Southwell alone that an opportunity was ever afforded him of profiting by the bland influence of female society, or of seeing what woman is in the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... Well, the demoralization of our class,—which (the newspapers are constantly saying it, so I may repeat it without vanity) has done all the great things which have ever been done in England,—the demoralization of our class caused, I say, by the Bow tragedy, was something bewildering. Myself a transcendentalist (as the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the infection; and day after day I used to ply my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my transcendentalism ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... over the misery so plainly written in the face of Martin, walked boldly down the middle of the road, while Martin's feet lagged so he could not keep pace with the man who had imparted the bewildering news. Martin kept along the side of the road, scuffing along in the grass, thinking bitter thoughts about the arrogant youth who walked in the middle of the road. The honk, honk of a speeding automobile fell heedlessly upon the ears of both, ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... time, here was the troublesome day passing over him, and pestering, bewildering, and tripping him up with its mere sublunary troubles, as the days will all of us the moment we try to do anything that we flatter ourselves is of a little more importance than others are doing. Aunt Keziah tormented ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... breaking prairie, and building cabins; and while our party were looking about them, a party of Delawares drove into town with several ox-carts to carry away the purchases that one of their number had already made. It was bewildering to boys who had been brought up on stories of Black Hawk, the Prophet, and the Sacs and Foxes of Illinois and Wisconsin. A Delaware Indian, clad in the ordinary garb of a Western farmer and driving a yoke of oxen, and employing the same curious lingo used by the white farmers, ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... obvious enough for the reader to conclude, "She loves young Emerson." A reader in Lucy's place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... had passed, almost to the week, since a brash youngster named Alan Donnell had crossed the bridge from the Spacer's Enclave and hesitantly entered the bewildering complexity of ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... he found himself in the bewildering streets, inquiring his way to the great square in the West End ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception of either the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene—or of the wild, bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm. There are some passages of this description, nevertheless, which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... for her cubs, Tera would have gone out in spite of all, for the noise was terrifying and bewildering, and she scarcely knew where she was or what she was doing. But she had her little ones to think of, and, at that moment, would rather have died ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... of mundane embarrassments, he turned with fresh enthusiasm to the skies, and his discoveries followed one another in bewildering profusion. He found various hitherto unseen moons of our sister planets; he made special studies of Saturn, and proved that this planet, with its rings, revolves on its axis; he scanned the spots on the sun, and suggested that they influence the weather ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... quite believe, if I gave you his measure, and so old that his birthday was lost in the mists of antiquity. Boxer, feeling that his attentions were due to the family in general, and must be impartially distributed, dashed in and out with bewildering inconstancy; now, describing a circle of short barks round the horse, where he was being rubbed down at the stable-door; now feigning to make savage rushes at his mistress, and facetiously bringing himself to sudden stops; now, eliciting a shriek from Tilly Slowboy, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... air; the skies overhead were as blue as the great plain of the sea; and all the beautiful green world was throbbing with the upspringing life of the flowers. It was just like any other wedding, but for one little incident. When the bride came out into the bewildering glare of the sun, she vaguely knew that the path through the churchyard was lined on both sides with children. Now, she was rather well known to the children about, and they had come in a great number; and when she passed down between them it appeared that the little folks had brought ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... and her head was drooping. The bough that she had held was released, and sprang back, rustling its foliage. The stillness, the grey light, the heavy shadows of the trees, gave a strange unreality to the moment. She felt as if she were part of some bewildering dream. ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... ideas of her. What should they do? How could they carry on a campaign planned against a certain kind of enemy, when lo, as they came upon the field of action the supposed enemy had taken another and more bewildering form than the one for whom they had prepared. They were for the moment silent, gathering their thoughts, and trying to fit their intended ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... pearls—emeralds, rubies, diamonds. And the top he saw before him with ease, for its pattern was odd—a snake's head with jaws distended by a large amethyst. Yes, it was unique, that purse. And its value must have been bewildering for any but the idle rich. Ah! how he hated all this money, coming from nowhere, pouring in golden streams nowhere. He was not a revolutionist,—not even a socialist,—but there were times when he ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... weddings, and street fights, would seem from some contemporary accounts to be invariably mixed up together in helpless and apparently inextricable confusion. The general bewilderment was made more bewildering by the very babel of street cries bawled from the sturdy lungs of orange-girls, chair-menders, broom-sellers, ballad-singers, old-clothes men, and wretched representatives of the various jails, raising their plaintive appeal to "remember the poor prisoners." The ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... bewildering, beautiful day was over and the three candidates for the coming competition were being dressed ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... exercise them. A land of enchantment have I been led into, and spells have been cast around me—every one has met me in disguise—every one has spoken to me in parables—I have been like one who walks in a weary and bewildering dream; and now you blame me that I have not the sense, and judgment, and steadiness of a waking, and a disenchanted, and a reasonable man, who knows what he is doing, and wherefore he does it. If one must walk with masks and spectres, who waft themselves ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... sculptured chapels gorgeous in gold and colour stand silent and open: within are saints sitting grave and passionless behind the lights that burn on their altars. The multitude of calm stone faces, the strange silence and emptiness, unaccompanied by any sign of neglect or decay, the bewildering repetition of shrines and deities in this aerial castle, suggest nothing built with human purpose but some petrified ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... fulfilment of which, rather, we are drawn in joy by the forces of our own being. How a man could, even in the immature stages of these thoughts, have been persecuted for atheism, it is not easy to see, although we may admit that his earlier forms of statement were bewildering. When we have his whole thought before us we should say rather that it borders on acosmic pantheism, for which everything is God and ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... are the same. I hear no sound, I have no notion of a door or entrance. Watson had said of the Rhamda, "Sometimes you see him, sometimes you don't." It is so with the Nervina. I remember only my working at the data and the sudden movement of a hand upon my desk—a girl's hand. It was bewildering. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... or passed other family groups, stiffly armoured for the weekly penance to a bewildering puzzle of mortality. Ceremonious greetings were exchanged with these. The day was bright and the world all fair, but there could be no levity, no social small talk, while this grim business was on. They reached the white house of worship, impressive under its ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... a rich fund of enjoyment. Nowhere are types so abundant and various as on the routes of travel between Bucharest and Rustchuk, or Pesth and Belgrade. Every complexion, an extraordinary piquancy and variety of costume, and a bewildering array of languages and dialects, are set before the careful observer. As for myself, I found a special enchantment in the scenery of the lower Danube—in the lonely inlets, the wildernesses of young shoots ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... frigate as my wife, but mind, not without he has a purse well filled with the right sort, and as long at least as the maintop bowline, or two cables spliced on end. Love is very pretty, very sentimental, and sometimes very romantic, but love without rhino is bewildering misery. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... you are just wonderful, Nan Sherwood," said Bess, when they were gliding swiftly off through the bewildering traffic. "I was frightened to death when all those men started shouting at us at once. I wanted to run back into the station and hide. But you didn't, and of course I didn't, and here we are!" She gave an excited little bounce ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... ground of burnished copper. A most signal failure, this young Prince! The stuff prematurely burnt out of him: little left but foul smoke and ashes of expiring sensualities: what might have been Thought, Insight, and even Conduct, gone now, or fast going,—to confused darkness, broken by bewildering dazzlements; to obstreperous crotchets; to activities which you may call semi-delirious, or even semi-galvanic! Paris affects to laugh at his charioteering; but ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... adore. He finds a fair capacity, And fills it with himself, and glad would die For that sole She.' 'Know'st thou some potion me awake to keep, Lest, to the grief of that ne'er-slumbering Bliss, Disgraced I sleep, Wearied in soul by his bewildering kiss?' 'The Immortals, Psyche, moulded men from sods That Maids from them might learn the ways of Gods. Think, would a wakeful Youth his hard fate weep, Lock'd to the tired breast of a Bride asleep?' 'Ah, me, I do not dream, Yet all this does some heathen fable seem!' 'O'ermuch thou mind'st ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... house is also unknown. The local authorities in London keep a strict watch over the manufacture or storage of combustible materials in populous parts of the city. Although overhead telegraph wires are multiplying to an alarming extent in London, their number is nothing to be compared to their bewildering multitude in New York, where their presence is not only a hinderance to the operations of the firemen, but a positive danger to their lives. Finally—and this has already been partly dealt with in speaking of the comparative ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... with me evening after evening; I plunged my young mind deep into the bewildering confusions of the language—and no one realizes the confusions of the English language as does the foreign-born—and got what I could through these joint efforts. But I gained nothing from the much-vaunted public-school system which the United States had borrowed from my own country, ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... grown up, almost bewildering in its range, diversity of aims and style of procedure. It is a chaos, with many paths leading into the maze, but as yet very few take us to a position commanding a view of the whole intricate terrain with its ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... around, in and out and across! The swift movement of the figures was well nigh bewildering; while the intermingling of colored lights, their weaving in and out, made a brilliant pattern that brought applause again and again from ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... a resident Scotchman, and a man of considerable wealth, was employed as the guide to lead the British army by the nearest road to Winnsboro, S.C. Tradition says, that after so bewildering the army in the swamps that much of their baggage was lost, he contrived to escape, and left them to find their way out, as best they could, by the returning light of day. As the British army progressed, ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... Heath," she said to the chauffeur. As soon as we were in motion again, she drew ever so little nearer and said, in her lowest, richest notes, and with a coquetry that was bewildering on ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Still more bewildering was the behavior of Ellaphine. As soon as he heard of his good fortune he hurried to tell her about it. Her mother answered the door-bell and congratulated him on his good luck. When he asked for Ellar, her mother said, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... House, and with another in the Capitol buildings before taking his seat for business. He drank at lunch and at dinner, and he drank more freely at party or levee in the evening. Only in the early morning was he free from the bewildering effects of liquor. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... and New-Year came the Christmas pantomime at the Tivoli, with its bewildering array of scantily clad fairies and dashing Amazons and languishing princes in pale-blue tights; to say nothing of the Queen Charlottes consumed between acts through faintly yellow straws. How Claire would ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... business; and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular investments he should favour when he came into the receipt of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch, and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for a good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at home. Also how she had seen ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... distinctive and coherent, while yet it enlarges the reader's capacities instead of making demands upon his credence. Whether there be theories, they shall pass; whether there be systems, they shall fail; the true epoch-maker in the history of the human soul is the man who educes from this bewildering universe a new ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... It is bewildering to know that this is the last chapter, and that it must not be long. I remember so many of our pleasures of which I have hardly said a word. There were our guests, of whom I have told you nothing, and of whom there ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... with such bewildering quickness of movement that Jack, who had turned with his rifle half raised, saw no chance of firing with effect. Fortunately, the necessity for doing so did not exist, for the boys at the same moment recognized the red man as their friend Deerfoot, who walked forward smiling and pleased, ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... amount of money into circulation. In fact, the greater portion of the eight to ten million dollars the war had cost had been circulated among the Illinois volunteers. Immigration, too, was increasing at a bewildering rate. In 1835 the census showed a population of 269,974. Between 1830 and 1835 two-fifths of this number had come in. In the northeast Chicago had begun to rise. "Even for Western towns" its growth had been unusually rapid, declared Peck's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... Overend and Gurney's company, and he immediately forgot his luxurious habits and turned to work with blithe courage. How he worked only those who knew him can tell, for no four men of merely ordinary power could have achieved such bewildering success as he did. But a man who is on the downward slope of life cannot fare like the lamented Proctor; he must endure the pangs of neglect, until death comes and relieves him of the dire torture of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... time, is profoundly affecting our sexual morality. A transference of values is constantly taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral, what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard. Such a process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... clearly gentlemen, however, and men of education, with considerable linguistic acquirements; for they chatted and sang, and declaimed and "did orations" all the way from Paris to Calais, in a slightly bewildering variety of tongues. ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... where I attended to a small matter, and then, as the rain was over, walked to my rooms. A bath and a change of garments left me free to consider the adventure and its too probable results. What was meant by the affair? It was really a somewhat bewildering business. ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... to nationalise the nation. The Capitalists praise competition while they create monopoly; the Socialists urge a strike to turn workmen into soldiers and state officials; which is logically a strike against strikes. I merely mention it as an example of the bewildering inconsistency, and for no controversial purpose. My own sympathies are with the Socialists; in so far that there is something to be said for Socialism, and nothing to be said for Capitalism. But the point is that when there ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Indian past of the Mohawk Valley, but here he was foiled by the immense ignorance of his wife, who, as a true American woman, knew nothing of the history of her own country, and less than nothing of the barbarous regions beyond the borders of her native province. She proved a bewildering labyrinth of error concerning the events which Basil mentioned; and she had never even heard of the massacres by the French and Indians at Schenectady, which he in his boyhood had known so vividly that he was scalped every night in his dreams, and woke up in the morning expecting to see marks of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of departed grandeur, and beyond the Place Neuve on our right come upon a great portal which opens on a vaulted passage leading to one of the most bewildering and extraordinary congeries of ruined monastic buildings in France, now inhabited by a population of poor folk—two hundred families, it is said—who, since the Revolution, have settled in the vast buildings of the once famous and opulent Charterhouse of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... criticisms of Mitchell and Patten, and the most significant small book by Taussig, entitled 'Inventors and Money-makers.' It is this complementary field of psychology to which the economists must turn, as these writers have turned, for a vitalization of their basic hypotheses. There awaits them a bewildering array of studies of the motives, emotions, and folkways of our pecuniary civilization. Generalizations and experiment statistics abound, ready-made for any structure of economic criticism. The human ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... passed the splendid, forbidding houses on the avenue, in the green that here and there banked massive doors; but most of all, you saw it in the shops. Up here the shops were smallish, and chiefly of the provision variety, so there was no bewildering display of gifts; but there were Christmas-trees everywhere, of all sizes. It was astonishing how many people in that neighbourhood seemed to favour the old-fashioned ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... through the leafy canopy overhead, fighting for its share of the life-giving sunlight. In the green gloom below tangled masses of bushes, covered with large, bell-shaped flowers and tall grasses in which lurked countless thorny plants obstructed the view between the tree-trunks. Above and below was a bewildering confusion of creepers forming an intricate network, swinging from the upper branches and twisting around the boles, biting deep into the bark, strangling the life out of the stoutest trees or holding up the ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... and desires and secret longings of which we can only with the greatest difficulty take account. They influence our conscious thought in the most bewildering fashion. Many of these unconscious influences appear to originate in our very early years. The older philosophers seem to have forgotten that even they were infants and children at their most impressionable age and never could by ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... be said that this evening at the Cottage was an agreeable one. To think that Elinor should be there, and yet that there should be so little pleasure in the fact that the old party, which had once been so happy together, should be together again, was bewildering. And yet there was one member of it who was happy with a shamefaced unacknowledged joy. To think that that which made her child miserable should make her happy was a dreadful thought to Mrs. Dennistoun, and yet how could she help ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... remoter and greater 'day of the Son of Man' at the end of the days. The recognition of that aspect of the fall of Jerusalem is forced on us by the eschatological parts of the Gospels, which are a bewildering whirl without it. Here, however, it is the crash of the fall itself which is in view, and the thought conveyed is that there would be cities enough to serve for refuges, and scope enough for evangelistic work, till the end of the Jewish ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... am old and experienced enough to warn you not to make shipwreck of your happiness on that shoal. I hovered around it, and vexed my soul over the whole bewildering question until I suddenly discovered that I was held absolutely responsible only for my own soul, and that the Lord would look ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... Revolution would have been different; but its march would have been just as irresistible, for revolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis, however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him in bewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man who was watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from distant Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined that this procession from Versailles ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... was a most bewildering world to the boy, and for the first week he stood off and looked at it questioningly, suspiciously. True, there were no dark cellars or freezing streets, no drunken fathers or frightened children, or blows, or hunger or privation; but this education he had come to seek that he might ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... rode often in those days to the very rim of the Basin, there to search the wild, wide land with straining eyes for signs of her friends, the white glare of the camps was lost in the bewildering maze of color. The columns, clouds and spirals of dust— save perhaps from a near supply wagon coming in or passing out— could not be distinguished from the whirling dust-devils that danced always over the hot plains. The toiling pigmy dots of the little army were far ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... ones indulged in snatches of song and fancy skating, gliding around each other in bewildering and graceful curves. The three were experts, as are nearly all people in that section of the Union. Any one watching their exhibitions of skill and knowing the anxiety of the mother at home would have wondered why she should feel ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... the most droll accounts of His Majesty's frivolities. "How wicked a wretch Cromwell was, and yet how much better and safer the country was in his hands than it is now." And often he will end the bewildering account with some such bitter comment as the assertion "that every one about the Court ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... you, page after page, from the beginning to the end of the book. The banter is not good-natured; though, on the other hand, it cannot justly be pronounced ill-natured; and it is, in final effect upon the reader's mind, bewildering and depressing in the extreme. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,—such is the comfortless doctrine of the book. The apples are the apples of Sodom, everywhere in the world. There is no virtue anywhere, no good, no happiness. Life is a cheat, the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... man with the same plea, that he was a Yorkshireman, and this turned out to be Mr. Monckton Milnes. Then came Dr. Forbes, whom I was sincerely glad to see. On Friday, I went to the Crystal Palace; it is a marvellous, stirring, bewildering sight—a mixture of a genii palace, and a mighty bazaar, but it is not much in my way; I liked the lecture better. On Saturday I saw the Exhibition at Somerset House; about half a dozen of the pictures are good and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... said, were the real tragedies of her life. When returning overland to Denver, Abbey telegraphed ahead to Field, and he, with Cowen, went up to Cheyenne to meet the party. On entering the drawing-room car the visitors were hurried into Abbey's compartment with an air of bewildering mystery, and were there informed in whispers that Madame Nilsson was furious against the Tribune and would never ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... be cleared up, but it seems that one of the best means to find a way through the bewildering maze of the phenomena of inheritance, is to make groups of related forms and to draw conclusions from a comparison of the members of such groups. Such comparisons must obviously give rise to questions, which in their turn will directly ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... two girls left the room, "like twin cherries on a stalk." The resemblance between them was bewildering; every line of feature, every tone ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... rolling over the surface of the plain, and between them is a clear space of perhaps half a mile in width. The rain-dispensing columns pass me by on either side with muttering rolls of thunder and momentary gleams of lightning, enveloping me in swirling eddies of dust and bewildering atmospheric disturbances, but not a drop of rain. It is plainly to be seen, however, that the two columns are united further west, and that it behooves me to don my gossamer rubbers; but before being overtaken by the rain, the heads of the flying columns are drawn ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... aching most atrociously, and when the young man sat up and attempted to rise to his feet he discovered, to his astonishment and chagrin, that he had no control over himself, the room seemed to be whirling and spinning round with him at bewildering speed, and his legs ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... that evening they related the manner in which they had discovered Nimmie Amee, and told how they had found her happily married to Chopfyt, whose relationship to Nick Chopper and Captain Fyter was so bewildering that they asked Ozma's advice what to ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... from a point in front, he made another change in his course. This time it was to the right, and again he put forth a burst of speed the like of which his enemies had never seen. He passed in and out among the trees, and through the undergrowth, with such bewildering swiftness, that, though he was within gunshot, neither would risk firing, where it was more difficult to take aim than at the bird darting through ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... comfort and warmth of the small salon, as the mistress of it entered. Clad in soft draperies of dull blue, which but thinly veiled the white arms and fell away from the rounded throat, Miss Case was just as beautiful to look upon as when she stands in bewildering evening gown before a rapt audience. And, what is much more to the point, she is a thoroughly sensible, sincere American girl, with no frills ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... bowed. The train steamed out of the station. As it went, I fell back, half fainting, in the comfortable armchair of the Pullman car, hardly able to speak with surprise and horror. It was all so strange, so puzzling, so bewildering! Then I owed my escape from the stenographic myrmidons of the Canadian Press to the polite care and attention ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen |
