"Ineffably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people. She flashed an especial smile at Florian. Her hand went out as though to touch him, in an unforgotten gesture. "Old people do not understand," said Sylvie de Nointel in tones which took this handsome young fellow ineffably ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with—duped. Here again Margaret refused to believe. The fault was all her own. She had been full of herself, full of vanity; fancying, without cause, that she was much to another when she was little. She was humbled now, and she no doubt deserved it. But how ineffably weak and mean did she appear in her own eyes! It was this which clouded Heaven to her at the moment that earth had become a desert. She felt so debased, that she durst not ask for strength where she ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... and the tremendous structure of steel cleaves the hugest waves as though they were but clouds. Down below the luxurious passengers live in their fine hotel, and the luckier ones are quite happy and ineffably comfortable. If a sunny day breaks, then the pallid battalions in the steerage come up to the air, and the ship's deck is like a long animated street. A thousand souls, we said? True! Now let some quiet observant man of the sailorly sort go round at night ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... not to," she told him, her dark eyes ineffably beautiful with their luster of tears. "I don't see why I should try—why I should try to do anything you ask me to—but ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... orator of such set trash of phrase Ineffably—legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,— Nor even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... her temperament craved and which the little coterie of clever, brilliant people who had been her intimates in town had given her in full measure. The Trenbys' circle of friends interested her not at all. The men mostly of the sturdy, sporting type, bored her ineffably, and she found the women, with their perpetual local gossip and discussion of domestic difficulties, dull and uninspiring. Of the McBains, unfortunately, she saw very little, owing to the distance, between the Hall and ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... chapel the ineffably blasphemous rites proceeded. To the warm human blood which had been caught in the consecrated chalice, Guibourg had added, among other foulnesses, powdered cantharides, the dust of desiccated moles, and the blood of bats. By the addition of flour he had wrought the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... physician; "if they can muster the good sense to see that they'll not be so apt to marry prematurely. I needn't tell you I believe in marrying for love; but these needs-must marriages are so ineffably silly. You 'must' and you 'will' marry, and 'nobody shall hinder you!' And you do it! And in three or four or six months"—he drew in his long legs energetically from the hearth-pan—"death separates you!—death, sometimes, resulting directly from the turn your haste has given to ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... and have, therefore, no word left to describe the emotion with which I gazed upon the exquisite, living, palpitating picture beside me. A composite photograph of all the Madonnas ever painted, from the Sistine to Bodenhausen's, could not have been more lovely, more ineffably womanly than that young girl, radiant with the divine glow of artistic delight—at least, that is my opinion, which, by the bye, I should, perhaps, have stated a little more gingerly, inasmuch as ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... face became ineffably sad. "Please! I beg of you," he entreated. "I have arranged for reparation of that miserable mistake. You shall see what I have done. With your own eyes you shall read the furious correspondence I have carried on with the ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... There was something so ineffably low and greasy in his tone of addressing her, that it was impossible to be surprised at the disgust which she ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... such as that of any of the three great Venetians, of Correggio, or Turner, the awe of it is something greater than can be felt from the most stupendous natural scenery. For the creation of such a system as a high human intelligence, endowed with its ineffably perfect instruments of eye and hand, is a far more appalling manifestation of Infinite Power, than the making either ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the Hammal mounted one mule, a stout-hearted Bedouin called Fahi took a second, and we started to find the herds. The End of Time lagged in the rear: the reflection that a mule cannot outrun an elephant, made him look so ineffably miserable, that I sent him back to the kraal. "Dost thou believe me to be a coward, 0 Pilgrim?" thereupon exclaimed the Mullah, waxing bold in the very joy of his heart. "Of a truth I do!" was my reply. Nothing abashed, he hammered his mule with heel, and departed ejaculating, "What hath ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... became impossible, more especially as two of the farmers in the carriage were coming back from the Smithfield Cattle Show, and were discussing the prize oxen with all their might. It was very stuffy and close. Constance looked ineffably fastidious and uncomfortable, and Dolores gazed at the clouded window, and dull little lamp overhead, put in to enliven the deepening twilight. This avoiding of Uncle Reginald brought more before her mind a sense ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forms that support them appear to us in muslin or in deerskin. The only requisite needful to constitute a face a vision to any particular person, is that it should have in it that peculiar something which everybody wants, but which nobody can define; which is ineffably charming, though utterly incomprehensible; and which, when once seen by any one, constitutes the countenance that possesses ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... a ghastly instant as if he were kissing Nancy after she had died. It seems to him that everything in him has made itself into a question as discordant and unanswered as the tearing cry of a puppy baying the moon, struck out of his senses by that swimming round silver above him, ineffably lustrous, ineffably removed, none of it ever coming to touch him but light too pale to help at all. He is holding a girl in his arms—he can feel her body against him—but it is not Nancy he is holding—it ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... offend against every restraint of decorum; to invert the relation in which his sex stands to women, so that they appear the attacking, and he the passive or defensive party; to cut his best friends if they cease to have the strength and authority of fashion; to delight in the ineffably fade jargon and affectations of his set, and always to know what is "the thing"—these are the accomplishments that distinguish a young "lion" of fashion. Whoever reads the best of the recent English ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Mark's. Densher's sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention had by this time a corner of his mind all to itself; something that had begun for them at Lancaster Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape; her action, ineffably discreet, had at all events a way of affecting him as for the most part subtly, even when not superficially, in his own interest. They were not, as a pair, as a "team," really united; there were too many persons, at least three, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... had come about that before Ida had been in the house a week it was no longer as a mystery, or, at least, as an awe-inspiring mystery, but as an ineffably dear and precious reality, that her presence was felt. Had a stranger chanced to come there on a visit, at that time, he would doubtless have been struck with the fact that a young girl was the central figure of the household, ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... world in which they live and from the familiar scenes to which they have been accustomed from infancy, they have no conception; still less, if that is possible, have they any idea of a division of the world of the dead into a realm of bliss and a realm of woe, where the spirits of the good live ineffably happy and the spirits of the bad live unspeakably miserable. To their simple minds the spirits of the dead dwell all about them in the rocky gorges, the barren plains, the wooded dells, the rustling trees, the still waters of their native land, haunting in death the very spots where ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... you will never know how deep and ineffably precious are the consolations which Christ can give, unless you have learned despair of self, and have come helpless, hopeless, and yet confident, to that great Lord. Make your hearts empty, and He will fill them; recognise your desperate condition, and He will lift you up. The deeper down ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... face and washed his hands again and again at the basin in the corner, as though there were something on them which was ineffably unclean. The little one, who had been weeping again, stared at him with two big tears drying on ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... in white had listened to her quiet talk, for you could nowhere have found a nature more readily sensitive than his to all the beauty and wonder which life, as if it were haphazardly, produces every day. He pitied this betrayed child quite ineffably, because in her sorrow ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... looked in through the heavy bars. Three men were dining at the table: a freckled redheaded man with the high cheekbones of the Scot, a dissipated young Italian of a most romantic air, and a small, round, vivacious man, ineffably French. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... breadfruit would patter, and the sound of the reef become faint. The land breeze had awakened, and in a while, as if it had blown them away, looking up, you would find the stars gone, and the sky a veil of palest blue. In this indirect approach of dawn there was something ineffably mysterious. One could see, but the things seen were indecisive and vague, just as they are in the gloaming of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... affect inanimate things when in close neighborhood, and when they were not more than fifteen yards apart the personage we had been watching slowly lifted her arm, revealing a glittering bracelet, and, with an ineffably winning smile, made a gesture which said plainer than ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... foreign parts; it might have come from Acheron, sire by Cerberus, so portentous, and (if not irreverent the epithet) so infernal was its aspect, with that gray face, those antlered ears, and its ineffably weird demeanour altogether. A big dog, too, and evidently a strong one. All prudent folks would have made way for a man led by that dog. Whine creaked the hurdy-gurdy, and bow-wow all of a sudden barked the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... am I 'neath the constant thrall Of mine own vile heart, and the false world's taint, That much I fear while on the way to faint, And in the hands of my worst foe to fall. Well came, ineffably, supremely kind, A friend to free me from the guilty bond, But too soon upward flew my sight beyond, So that in vain I strive his track to find; But still his words stamp'd on my heart remain, All ye ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... open! I am as empty as a chrysalis-case, that the butterfly has gone out of to dwell amid sunshine and flowers. Yet I believe I had one once"—in ineffably mournful accents—"but two men killed it; and yet, neither intended the blow! O Miriam! I understand at last what Coleridge meant by his 'life in death.' There is such a thing—and that great necromancer found it out! I am the breathing impersonation of that loathly thing, I believe. Listen"—and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... by the circumstance, as he had all the benefit of the popular inference that no man could visit the city of Augusta without acquiring a vast superiority over all his untraveled neighbors, in every department of human knowledge. Mr. Suggs, then, very naturally, felt ineffably indignant that an individual who had never seen any collection of human habitations larger than a log-house village—an individual, in short, no other or better than Bob Smith—should venture to express ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... beautiful it was in its purity and stillness. Look whichever way I would, all was perfect whiteness and silence. When I walked the snow scarcely creaked under my feet. Above, beneath, around, it was everywhere the same. It was a solemn stillness, but ineffably sweet and tender. It was good to live. A feeling of sweetest peace and happiness swept over me, and tears sprang to my eyes. Was this heaven? It almost seemed like it, but glancing toward the grave of the ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... glinting from the altar ornaments, while before a rough coffin, which rested upon two pedestals, stood a third, whose rich, sonorous Latin filled the chapel with impressive sadness. "Give eternal rest to them, O Lord,"—the words seeming to become a part of the room. The ineffably sad, haunting melody of the mass whispered back from the roof between the assaults of the enraged wind, while from the altar came the responses in a low Gregorian chant, and through it all the clinking ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... them, shaking hands with them, and calling them friends. (Applause.) He was proud of these men, and all whom he was addressing must be proud of them also. They were worthy of esteem, they were entitled to applause; and mean, base, ineffably shabby, stupidly mean and base was the soul—if such a soul there were—that questioned their merit or grudged them a meet reward. (Applause.) He was delighted to have the opportunity of looking upon the two great heroes, Landsborough and McKinlay. They had undertaken and accomplished ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... from these muscular exercises. We saw no better, and we saw no worse. Toward the end we stood on the seats, with the same result. We behaved in exactly the child-like manner of an Italian audience at a fashionable concert. And to crown all, an aviator had the ineffably bad taste and the culpable foolhardiness to circle round and round within a few dozen ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... wilder series of adventures, satirising German ways, but to some extent perhaps inspired by German literature. Very commonly Pigault falls into a sort of burlesque melodramatic style, with frequent interludes of horse-play, resembling that of the ineffably dreary persons who knock each others' hats off on the music-hall stage. There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting something and finding that he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such tapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion of an empress. Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces—ineffably pure—adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth. Men and women of whom the world was not worthy—at the hands of those old painters they ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... inundate their unfortunate victims with such "weak, washy, everlasting floods"? Why will they haul everything out into the open day? Why will they make the Holy of Holies common and unclean? Why will they be so ineffably stupid as not to see that there is that which speech profanes? Why will they lower their drag-nets into the unfathomable waters, in the vain attempt to bring up your pearls and gems, whose lustre would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Sun's self!' Mysteries At source why probe into? Enough: display, Make demonstrable, how, by night as day, Earth's centre and sky's outspan, all's informed Equally by Sun's efflux!—source from whence If just one spark I drew, full evidence Were mine of fire ineffably enthroned— Sun's ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the blood in uncle Nathan's veins start again; it was music in itself, such music as brought back his youth, sad and ineffably sweet. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... the zone of serious consideration, as did the radiant world, and even the woman who stood before him; trifles, these: and his contentment spurned the stars to know that, somehow, this woman and he were but a part, an infinitesimal part, of a scheme which was ineffably vast and perfect.... That was the knowledge he sensed, unwordably, as he ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... seemed to be leaving me. Pains racked my head, and I seemed at one time to freeze and burn all over, at another time to freeze in one part and burn in another. I ached in my muscles, my bones, my stomach. At every step, I felt that it was vastly difficult to take another, that it would be ineffably sweet to sink down upon the earth and rest. Yet I knew that one taste of that sweetness meant death, and I was determined not to lose a life that had been saved from so great peril by so great effort. Despite all the soldiers at ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Lancelot, in his sulky way, made up his mind that the conversation was going to be ineffably stupid; and set to to dream, sip claret, and count the minutes till he found himself in the drawing-room with Argemone. But he soon discovered, as I suppose we all have, that 'it never rains but it pours,' and that one cannot fall in with a new fact or a new acquaintance but next day ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... more ineffably grateful. So crossing over, she again said, with warm protestations of thankfulness, good bye to lady Feng; after which, she repaired to dowager lady Chia's quarters on this side, where she slept, with one sleep, during ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... all,—that it is impossible to make out the design, or find what Turner is aiming at by those strange blotches of color. The other party declare that these pictures are not only good, but divine,—that whoever looks upon them in the true manner will not fail to find there somewhat ineffably and transcendently admirable,—the soul of Art. Books have been written to defend ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sentence, "Have you deserted me?" grew to be a voluminous indictment. I could think of nothing else. There was something ineffably sad and pathetic about it. Had she been unhappy because of my beastly behaviour? Was her poor little heart sore over my incomprehensible conduct? Perhaps she had cried through sheer loneliness—But no! It would never do for me to even think of her in tears. I remembered ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... across to the Valori restaurant. Here we encountered a polyglot major-domo, who spoke all languages of Europe indifferently ill. "What can we have for dinner?" asked our spokesman. "Ret moiled, domades varcies, et qvail!" He smiled ineffably and evidently thought that he was offering us food for the gods. We ate tough beefsteak, fried in oil, and cursed the delicacies of the country. The diners at Valori's made up the first really polyglot assembly I had ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... they were alone and before her mother came, Dorothy now observed that Richard carried himself in a manner easy and masterful, and as one who knows much in the presence of ones who know little. This air of the ineffably invincible made Dorothy forget the adoration which had aforetime glowed in his eyes, and she longed to ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... features of an angel and the face of a fool. What business has a woman to mock and disappoint one so! When I first saw her I thought I had discovered a prize—a new revelation of beauty; but a moment later she looked so ineffably silly that I felt as if I had bitten into an apple of Sodom. Of course the girl is nothing to me. I never saw her before and hope I may never see her again; but her features were so perfect that I could not help looking at them, and the more I looked the more annoyed I became to find ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... cold, whiffing sound. On the warm stones, in full sunlight, uplifted over all the beauty of Italy, one felt at first only delight in space and wild loveliness, in the unknown valleys, and the strength of the sun. It was so good to be alive; so ineffably good to be living in this most wonderful ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... merely negatively wicked. To poison her soul would rouse her mental power. "Oh, to know just once what it is to be loved!" "I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived," yet she often thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares. The world is ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... delicate mist of green. Beyond the sweep of the avalanche the maples were swinging their tassels, and the swelling buds of the oaks and aspens showed that they were almost ready to burst into leaf; the air was full of bird calls and fluttering wings, and the breeze, although chill, seemed ineffably soft in comparison with ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... being its only preparation. They seem to buy or catch haili by the ton, and then keep them for months in the cellar. We were always seeing them eat these haili, which looked something like sprats, and tasted ineffably nasty. On high days and holidays they partake of them accompanied with baked potatoes; but potatoes are somewhat rare, and therefore the fish on black bread alone constitutes the usual meal. Sometimes better-class folk eat haili, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... wise creatures who give themselves long spaces of silence, and so heal them quickly of their wounds, like the sage little animals that slip away from combat, to cure their hurt with leaves. Presently, a great sense of rest enfolded her, a rest ineffably precious because it was so soon to be over. It was like great riches lent only for a time. Outside this familiar quiet was the world, thrilled by a terrifying life pressing upon her and calling. She longed to put her hands before ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no ominous, difficult future beyond it. Ineffably sweet too was the aroma of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her consciousness. Ineffably sweet . . . and lost forever. There was no human being in the world as ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... different forms from those we know. A sense of the crudity of these great expanses of sea-becoming-land took possession of me; the horizon stretched away like a mere endless continuation of marshes and streams; the face of my companion was turned off sea-ward with an expression of ineffably mellow tranquillity; a glamour came about as if the world were again formless and void, and as if the marshes were chaos. I shivered with a certain eager expectation of beholding the shadowy outline of a great and beautiful spirit moving over the face of the waters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... ineffably dreary than the parcelling out of these wild and glorious visions, the attaching of them to this and that petty human fulfilment. That is not the secret of the Apocalypse! It is rather as a painter may draw a picture of two lovers sitting together at evening in a latticed chamber, holding each ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... orator of such set trash of phrase, Ineffably, legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile. Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... I was enormously, ineffably flattered and delighted, and all the boy in me wanted to caper around the room and then to fall on Alresca's neck and dissolve in gratitude to him. But instead of these feats, I put on a vast seriousness (which must ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... all things have their being, who upholds all things, as we have said; and His Son, Jesus Christ, whom, together with the Father, we testify to have always existed before the origin of the world, spiritually with the Father, ineffably begotten before every beginning; and by Him were the visible things made—was made man, death being overthrown, in the heavens. And he hath given Him all power over every name of things in heaven and earth and hell, that every tongue should ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... silence as the Zara's gaze, ineffably softened now, held Blaine's. Unconsciously he was drawn to the steps of the dais. Unwillingly, yet inexorably, his lagging footsteps brought him to her side. Cool white fingers touched his arm and he saw that the red flecks in the black of those wide eyes were golden now. Surely ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... firmness left. Ravengar's eyes, at once empty and significant, blank and yet formidable, startled him. He had the revolver and the handcuffs in his pocket, but he could not have used them. Ravengar's eyes, so fiendish and so ineffably sad, melted his spine. Ravengar stepped ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... they print him in all the play-bills, is ineffably stupid, his characters ill drawn, his plots meagre, and his dialogue as flat as the talk of a three-volume novel. The only palpable lesson derivable from him is, that all ranks and classes stand pretty much on an equality, and that as regards modes of expression the count and his coachman ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... open pane he caught a glimpse of blue sky and lilac-coloured cloud, touched with gold by the risen sun. He could guess the rest. A perfect morning!—clean and crisp, with the sea a translucent blue, and sunlight glittering on the Island beaches; the air still, yet bracing, and withal ineffably pure—a morning mysterious with the sense of autumn, but of autumn rarified by its passage over the salt strait, deodorised, made pure of marsh fog and the ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... rocking in swings suspended from the lintels, and where the same ruddy-faced septuagenarians sat smoking short pipes and playing nap on trays in the sun. From several doorways came the reek of fish frying. The houses looked ineffably petty and shabby. Esther wondered how she could ever have conceived this a region of opulence; still more how she could ever have located Malka and her family on the very outskirt of the semi-divine classes. But the semi-divine persons themselves had long ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Father and the Son through Thee Are linked in perfect unity And everlasting love; Ineffably Thou dost pervade All nature; and Thyself unsway'd ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... her good-morning had been even more perfunctory; her eyes, those great maternal radiances, turned their light elsewhere. Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a noble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the aspect of this mysterious being—something ineffably grand and imposing in her demeanor—as she thus suddenly rose from her almost recumbent posture, and burst into the attitude of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... asked whether he had been hurt by his fall, to which the man replied: "No, the fall didn't hurt me a bit, it was stoppin' so quick that did all the mischief!" The humour of the story was not very brilliant, yet somehow it seemed to Escombe at that moment to be ineffably amusing, and he laughed aloud at the quaintness of the conceit. And, as he did so, the remaining yarns of the second strand parted with a little jerk that thrilled him through and through, and he hung there suspended by a single strand, but still being lowered rapidly ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... you mean to come," said Laurence Fitzgibbon. Phineas was of course bound to go, though Lady Glencora was still talking Radicalism, and Violet Effingham was still smiling ineffably. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... black shadows of the solitary trees of the park, and through low yellow moonlight, they passed suddenly into the muffed ways of the wood. Mr. Pericles was ineffably provoking. He had come for gallantry's sake, and was not to be rallied, and would echo every question in a roar, and there was no drawing of the man out at all. He knocked against branches, and tripped over stumps, and ejaculated with energy; but though he gave no ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into your tired ear words of comfort, and of soothing, and of love. Ah, how I would love you, care for you, shield your ear from ever being hurt by a discordant word! And I would draw your heart within mine to rest there, and would feel life all too blissfully, ineffably sweet ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... tenderly at him when he was asleep—and she did. Something of the mother, something of the manumitted slave, something of the dumb creature brought up against a crisis which only speech can make tolerable,—something of these three lay in her wet eyes; she wanted ineffably more, but she was happy (she thought). She was not apt to look further than this, that she was in love, and suffered to serve her master. The dull torment of her life past, the doubts or despair which might beset ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... his castle, to follow where art and her genius beckon her. In Diane au Bois the goddess "that leads the precise life" turns her back on Eros, who has subdued even her, and passes from the scene as she waves her hand in sign of a farewell ineffably mournful. Nearer tragedy than this M. De Banville does not care to go; and if there is any deeper tragedy in scenes of blood and in stages strewn with corpses, from that he abstains. His Florise is perhaps too long, perhaps too learned; and certainly we are asked to believe ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... particular straw of this dank, damp bed was elastic with delight, at bearing such angelic pressure; and, as our heroine cast her ineffably beaming eyes about the dark void, lighting up with their effulgent rays each little portion of the dungeon, as she glanced them from one part to another, she perceived that the many reptiles enclosed with her in this ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the world, constructed after His own likeness by the Demiurgus. God is Beauty; the world is fair as He who made it. This metaphysical vision entranced Augustin; his whole heart leaped towards this ineffably beautiful Divinity. Carried away by enthusiasm he cries: "I marvelled to find that now I loved Thee, O my God, and not a phantasm in Thy stead. If I was not yet in a state to enjoy Thee, I was swept up ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... understood perfectly, better than I did myself. And all of a sudden he repeated some verses of Alfred de Musset. I felt myself choking, seized with indescribable emotion. It seemed to me that the mountains themselves, the lake, the moonlight, were singing to me about things ineffably sweet. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... happy and cheerful disposition at heart that she scattered pleasure always about her, but Aphiz's very love rendered him thoughtful and perhaps at times a little melancholy; for he feared that some future chance might in an unforeseen, way rob him of her who was so ineffably dear to him. He did not exactly fear that Komel's parents would sell her to go to Constantinople, though they were now, since war and pestilence had swept away lands, home and title, poor enough; and yet there was an ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... but it is good to be with you again, Signorina!" cried I, as I came with quick strides into the moonlit garden. I caught both her hands in mine, and laughed like an ineffably contented person. There was nothing very subtle about the boy that then was I; at worst, he overacted what he really felt; and just at present he was pleased with the universe, and he saw no possible reason ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... legal fashion—a bottle of wine from one town into another; or to import, by means of a sailing-boat, an old frying-pan into some village by the sea? It is a fine art, only to be learnt by years of apprenticeship. The regulations on these subjects, though ineffably childish, look simple enough on paper; they take no account of that "personal element" which is everything in the south, of the ruffled tempers of those gorgeous but inert creatures who, disturbed in their siestas or mandolin-strummings, may keep ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... was falling, the dusk closing, as I trotted briskly homewards down the road. Lonely spaces everywhere, above and around. Only Hesperus hung in the sky, solitary, pure, ineffably far-drawn and remote; yet infinitely heartening, somehow, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... happened, so nothing ever will happen. They see their children every day, and through the eyes of affection; and despite their natural charm and their own strong parental love, the children are apt to become not only commonplaces, but ineffably secure against evil. Mary is naturally a good girl—a little wild, but what harm can befall her? John is a straight-forward, steady-going boy—how could he get into trouble? The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... driving them into a watery grave; letting seven of himself occupy one lady called Magdalen, and others inhabit the bodies of lunatics; going about like a roaring lion, and then appearing in the new part of a dragon who lashes the stars with his tail; all these metamorphoses are ineffably ludicrous, and calculated to excite inextinguishable laughter. His one serious appearance in the history of Job is overwhelmed by this multitude of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... bronze water-vase; her features were more formed than exactly became her years, yet they were soft and feminine in their outline, and without being beautiful in themselves, they were almost made so by their beauty of expression; there was something ineffably gentle, and you would say patient, in her aspect. A look of resigned sorrow, of tranquil endurance, had banished the smile, but not the sweetness, from her lips; something timid and cautious in her step—something wandering in her eyes, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... that he was excited, and he admitted that he was: he had waked out of a trance. He had been on the wrong tack; he had piled mistake on mistake. It was the vision of his remedy that now excited him: ineffably, grotesquely simple, it had yet come to him only within a day or two. No, he wouldn't tell me what it was; he would give me the night to guess, and if I shouldn't guess it would be because I was as big an ass as ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... in frequency, in area, and in strength; and shortly before sundown a gentle, dainty little air of wind came stealing softly up from the eastward, to woo which we joyfully spread every rag of canvas we could show to it: and oh! how ineffably pleasant and delightful was the sound of the first faint liquid tinkling ripple that broke from our cutwater, and gushed gently past the bends in a stream of tiny bursting air-bells, as the beautifully moulded hull yielded to the faint impulse of the soft breathing and began to ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... forth Jesuitic eloquence in this strain; dusky d'Espremenil, Barrel Mirabeau (probably in liquor), and enough of others, cheering him from the Right; and, for example, with what visage a seagreen Robespierre eyes him from the Left. And how Sieyes ineffably sniffs on him, or does not deign to sniff; and how the Galleries groan in spirit, or bark rabid on him: so that to escape the Lanterne, on stepping forth, he needs presence of mind, and a pair of pistols in his girdle! For he is one of the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... myriad-thronged condition of life, that transcendent event occurred, Nature, as we half-idolatrously worship her, received her first baptism of life, and her solemn consecration as "the vicar of God." No wonder, then, that at that ecstatic moment, when the ineffably bright mantle, fringed with "the white radiance of eternity," fell upon her, "the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy." And nature has been true to both her baptism and her consecration. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... whom with their heart they believe unto righteousness, and with their mouth confess to salvation, him they shall see with their heart to light, and with their mouth shall praise to glory, when they behold how ineffably he is begotten of the Father, with whom he liveth and reigneth, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God to all ages of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... is the test of strictly dramatic quality, and King Lear is too huge for the stage. Of course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-play. It has scenes immensely effective in the theatre; three of them—the two between Lear and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the ineffably beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia—lose in the theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in Much Ado. But (not to speak of defects ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... an order of beings, which, touching the earth from a heavenly height on its most momentous occasions, could still, after ages of culture had refined the human taste and moral appreciation, remain ineffably superior in delicacy, in pure spirituality, to the demands of criticism? Their very coming and going is not with earthly movement. They suddenly are seen in the air as one sees white clouds round out from the blue sky, in a ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... argued in respectfully subdued voices. Finally one decrepit oldster, wearing a cloak of yellow ribbons and carrying a highly obscene and ineffably sacred wooden image, was brought forward and installed on the front-and-center cushion. He'd come from some village to the west that hadn't gotten the word of the swarming; Gonzales' men had snagged him while ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... for which he sought to steal the praise of Art. Here, too, were those grotesque faces which always grin at you from the projections of monkish architecture, as if the builders had gone mad with their own deep solemnity, or dreaded such a catastrophe, unless permitted to throw in something ineffably absurd. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... thank him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the indistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposed such special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice and the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have recognized the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not been brought home to the masses of the population; and the United Irishmen could only speak to them secretly, in whispers. But here were addresses glowing, and bold, and tender, brimful of native humour, scathing in their sarcasms, terrible in their denunciations, ineffably beautiful in their pathos—addresses that recalled the most glorious as well as the saddest memories of Irish history, and presented brilliant vistas of the future—addresses that touched to its fullest and most delicious ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... the faintest far-off twang of old chords; I ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, under what inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered to the Albany ear and eye (as we at least knew those organs) and with what queer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. Quite ineffably quaint and falot this proposition of that sort of resource for the battle of life as it then and there opened; and above all beautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness (ours as the whole kinship's) ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... princess, who was the embodiment of all the virtues of the unknown goddess of his fancy. She was proud yet humble, aloof yet compassionate, and above all ineffably beautiful. And ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... City Fathers meant to protect the honor of God, they were both absurd and blasphemous. There is something ineffably ludicrous in the spectacle of a host of fat aldermen rushing out from their shops and offices to steady the tottering throne of Omnipotence. And what presumption on the part of these pigmies to undertake ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... ineffably soft and sad in the last words, as the beautiful, petted, but still lonely orphan cast down her eyelids with a low long sigh, as though owning her errors, but pleading this extenuation. Robert, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... politics knows very well the ineffably low dodges and subterfuges under which the Arima Railway was prevented from having its terminus in the centre of that town. The public was promised a saving of Eight Thousand Pounds by their high-minded Governor for a diversion ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... Mrs. Alsager, she was not any woman he had seen upon earth, nor was it any masquerade of friendship or of penitence. Yet she was more familiar to him than the women he had known best, and she was ineffably beautiful and consoling. She filled the poor room with her presence, the effect of which was as soothing as some odour of incense. She was as quiet as an affectionate sister, and there was no surprise in her being ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... mandates, and, so far as opportunity offers or prudence permits, goes its own insolently wanton way. Our world is full of dilettanti in the colleges, anarchists in the state, atheists in the church, bohemians in art, sybarites in conduct and ineffably silly women in society, who have felt, and occasionally studied the scientific and naturalistic movement just far enough and superficially enough to grasp the idea of relativity and to exalt it as sufficient and complete in itself. Many of them are incapable ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... ignoble to sweep the wall in passing as he did, and eye the ground: but, once in the pulpit, his figure rose and swelled majestically, and seemed to fly over them all like a guardian angel's; his sallow cheek burned, his great Italian eye shot black lightning at the impenitent, and melted ineffably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... abroad: for the twilight was wrapping about the landscape its poppied dusk of gloom and shadow. Above, the birds were swirling in sweeping circles, raining down the ecstasy of their night-song; still above, far beyond them, across a zenith pure, transparent, ineffably pink, illumined wisps of clouds were trailing their scarf-like shapes. It was a scene of beatific peace. Across the fields came the sound of a distant bell. It was the Angelus. The ploughmen stopped to doff their hats, the women to ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Richmond, laying her hand in his, as an ineffably sweet look of content beamed from her eyes in his, and there was tender yearning love in every tone of her sweet deep voice; "but you have come back alive after we had long ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... charming ways,—and Christophe thrust from him as a shameful feeling. He wrestled with himself and forced himself to cherish this other man's child as though he were the child whom it would have been ineffably sweet for him to have had by the beloved. He would not allow himself to see Lionello's bad nature or anything that could remind him of the "other man": he set himself to find in him only Grazia. She, more clear-sighted, was ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... equestrian statues were laden with it so heavily, that the horses appeared to stagger beneath their trappings and the riders, having white tips to their noses, white lumps on their heads and shoulders, and white patches on their cheek-bones and chins, looked ineffably ridiculous, and miserably cold. Everything, in fact, was covered and blocked up with snow, and Londoners felt as if they had ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was just five feet, a height he never passed. His skin, as transparent and satiny as that of a little girl, showed a delicate tracery of blue veins; its whiteness was that of porcelain. His eyes, which were light blue and ineffably gentle, implored the protection of men and women; that beseeching look fascinated before the melody of his voice was heard to complete the charm. True modesty was in every feature. Long chestnut hair, smooth and very fine, was parted in the middle of his head into two bandeaus which ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... proudly, with the big, honest, clumsy dignity of a rugged man—and there was a loving quiet in his tones that touched her ineffably. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... often David slept sitting up in an arm-chair in the Vicar's bedroom. The Revd. Howel said nothing more about grandchildren; often—with a finer sense—spoke to him not as though he were a son, but as a beloved daughter. At last he died in his sleep one night, holding David's hand, looking so ineffably happy that the impostor inwardly gloried in his imposture as in one of the best deeds of ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... House; but it was a curious thing to see an assembly, as yet in its very infancy, so bored as to find refuge in every part of the building, except the hall appropriated to its deliberations. Mr. Chaplin is always to the front on such occasions; pompous, prolix, and ineffably dull. Mr. Herbert Gardner made his debut as the Minister for Agriculture, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... sight of a portrait of my mother, on the table, close to where he had been sitting. It was a photograph, taken in her youth; she was represented in brilliant evening attire, her bare arms shaded with lace, pearls in her hair, gay, ay, better than gay, happy, with an ineffably pure expression overspreading her face. My stepfather had sacrificed all to save her from despair on learning the truth, and was she to receive the fatal blow from me, to learn at the same moment that the man she loved ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... for a camping spot a streak of white gleamed in the gloomy nightmare of the garden and a flock of white egrets swept gracefully out into the gilding rays of the setting sun. A hundred in number, perhaps, they swerved in dignified fashion and in their ineffably beautiful posture of flying, necks gently bent backward and long legs trailing delicately, flew away to the west. They were beginning to rise for a long flight when a harsh rattle of shots broke the evening quiet. Pop-pop-pop! Repeating shotguns worked at full speed. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... but there was some subtile connection between it and the near presence of Margaret's spirit, of which I had that night been conscious. But the note had reached me by no supernatural method, as I was at first half inclined to believe. It was, probably, the touch, the atmosphere, the ineffably fine influence which surrounded it, which had penetrated my unconscious perceptions, and brought her near. The paper, the glove, were full of Margaret,—full of something besides what we vaguely call mental associations,—full of emanations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... of movement, languid of eye, languid of speech. His eyes drooped, half-closed beneath blond brows; a long wiry hand lazily twisted a rather affected blond moustache, his voice drawled his speech in a manner either insufferably condescending and impertinent, or ineffably ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... four-story apartment house a little way down the street. About to enter, he turned his face toward the running clerk, and even by the dim light at the entrance to the dingy house, Mr. Neal could see how ineffably spiritual and strong the face was. Joy filled the little clerk's heart so full that tears came to his eyes. At last he was to meet the man with the "good face"—after so long! He managed to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... uncomfortable, the Court sat and waited. No one pretended to conceal the blissful yawns that would not be denied. A drowsy, ineffably languid feeling took possession of the entire assemblage. Here and there a noble head nodded slightly; eyelids fell in the silent war against the god of slumber, only to revive again with painful energy ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... afar off in a quiet flat, softly lighted, ineffably cosy, in the place called home, where husbands ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... this only happy She, Whom, by a frantic flight of courtesy, Born of despair Of better lodging for his Spirit fair, He adores as Margaret, Maude, or Cecily? And what this sigh, That each one heaves for Earth's last lowlihead And the Heaven high Ineffably lock'd in dateless bridal-bed? Are all, then, mad, or is it prophecy? 'Sons now we are of God,' as we have heard, 'But what we shall be hath not yet appear'd.' O, Heart, remember thee, That Man is none, Save One. What if this Lady be ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore |
