"Baffling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Miss Thusa would call her a foolish child, and tell her parents all her terrors of the worm-eaten traveler, and she raised her timid eyes to her face, wondering at her silence. There was something in those prophetic orbs, which she could not read. There seemed to be a film over them, baffling her penetration, and she looked down with ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... wherefore—he is wholly unacquainted, though he dogmatizes like a doctor. He soon makes his escape from the real difficulties with which the subject is beset, and mouths away at immense length and width about what he calls "the secret of Chaucer's rhythm in his heroic verse, which has been the baffling subject of so much discussion among scholars, a trifling increase in the syllables occasionally introduced for variety, and founded upon the same laws of contraction by apostrophe, syncope, &c., as those followed by all modern poets; but employed in a more free and varied manner, all the words ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Jack made no mistake. He beckoned to Big Bob Jeffries to try for goal. It was an oblique slant, and only a clever kicker could succeed, with that baffling wind against him. Big Bob looked once in the direction of the grandstand as if to draw inspiration. Most people believed he must know some girl, whose encouragement he sought; but Mollie and Lucy and ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... that Beverly could in a very few moments, with his smile and his manner, find his way to any Dutchman's heart; he had that divine gift of winning over to him quickly all sorts and conditions of men; and my account of the ingenious and law-baffling contrivances, which you found at these little grocery shops, at once roused his curiosity to make a trial; but he decided that the club was better, if less picturesque. And he told me that all the men of the automobile party had received ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the stranger regarded him intently, his sad, far-seeing eyes absolutely devoid of evil intent, yet baffling in their inscrutable reserve—then he closed his lips again resolutely, as if denying expression to some secret that lay close to his heart, turning it with undue vehemence to the cause of those who ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... and by blue-coated, silver-buttoned functionaries at the gates. Within rose two Wonder Houses gorgeous with dome and pinnacle, bewildering with gold and snow, displaying before the aching sight the long cool stretch of verandahs, and offering the baffling glimpse of vast interiors whence floated the dim sound of music and laughter; and bright, happy beings, in wondrous raiment, wandered in and out unchallenged, unconcerned, as if the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Baffling and blood-curdling events center about the ranch where Hal Keen and his friends had gone ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... human suffering and human life, had strangely affected his inner self. Callous to the woes of others, yet high strung to a degree, his nature at this time presented a stage of complexity which was utterly baffling. That mesmeric property to which Hazon had alluded more than once as one of the effects of the interior was upon him too. It seemed as though he had somehow passed into another world, so dulled was all recollection ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... bitter a foe to her own happiness? Leonardo da Vinci might have painted her, less sensual and cruel than his women, more restless and disharmonic, but physically, spiritually enticing, and, by her refusals to surrender either to her spirit or her senses, baffling her own enticements. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... time, an organized band of thieves had been stealing stock in the Ozark range, baffling all efforts to apprehend them. The boys had been warned to guard their own stock carefully, but despite this, their ponies were stolen from camp, one by one and in a most mysterious manner, until not an animal was left. Then, one by one, the Pony Rider Boys became lost ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... me on the flood. With both hands oaring thence my course, I swam Till past all ken of theirs; then landing where Thick covert of luxuriant trees I mark'd, Close couchant down I lay; they mutt'ring loud, Paced to and fro, but deeming farther search Unprofitable, soon embark'd again. Thus baffling all their search with ease, the Gods 430 Conceal'd and led me thence to the abode Of a wise man, dooming me still to live. To whom, Eumaeus, thou didst thus reply, Alas! my most compassionable guest! Thou hast much moved me by this tale minute Of thy sad wand'rings and thy num'rous woes. But, speaking ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes— ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... M. Desmalions watched that resolute face, those intelligent eyes, at once innocent and satirical, grave and smiling, eyes through which you could certainly not penetrate their owner's baffling individuality, but which nevertheless looked at you with an expression of absolute frankness and sincerity. Then ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... cool corner was a huge bowl of thin silver, whence issued a baffling fragrance. Discreet observation, as the throng gathered, revealed this to contain a large block of ice and a colored liquid in which floated cherries with slices of lemon and orange. A ladle of generous lines reposed in the bowl, ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... month of November. Suchet was master of Aragon and the east of Spain, nor was he dislodged from it until the end of the war; Andalusia was nearly conquered; Cadiz was only saved by the self-reliant courage of the Duc d'Albuquerque, baffling the intrigues and treachery of the supreme junta there assembled; and Napoleon was preparing a fresh army to overrun Portugal, under the command of Massena. The Perceval ministry, in which Liverpool had taken Castlereagh's post of secretary for war ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... The baffling smile of the debonair club man returned to Shirley's face, as he twitted back: "Purely an altruistic inquiry, Dick. I feared that you might be risking your own heart and the modicum of freedom which you still possess. But I'll wager a supper-party for four that I'll find out who ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... his secrets, Uncle Cassius?" she asked. "He has such an aggravating smile, just as if he were amused at baffling you." ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... journey, a notice was posted up, advertising the first "throw off" for the next day. On this occasion they hunted an old fox round the Claudian Aqueduct, into the body of which, on getting over his surprise, he scoured a retreat, thus baffling the pursuers. The next field-day his successor was not so fortunate, losing both brush and life at the end of a long run. The third was distinguished by the feat of a Roman prince, who contrived to be in at the death, and received the brush for his encouragement. After this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... baffling any attempt at explanation, for there were no ships in the roadstead, and hence it was impossible for the pair to have taken French leave. While a search party was being organized there came word that the missing saddle-horses had been ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... were laboring upon a difficult and baffling work in Helen's chamber. Patiently and earnestly, with their stiff old fingers, they were trying to forge the required note. They made failure after failure, but they improved little by little all the time. The pity of it all, the pathetic humor of it, there was none to ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... cannot be; I've seen no rag of canvass on the sea." "Belike," said Ben, "you might not from the bay, But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day, I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind Was light and baffling."—"When the Sun declined Where lay she? had she anchored?"—"No, but still 510 She bore down on us, till the wind grew still." "Her flag?"—"I had no glass: but fore and aft, Egad! she seemed a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... have either overlooked or else have not had the genius to construct. They plan with rare cunning to baffle the victim. They plan with vast wisdom, almost genius, to baffle the trailer. But they fail utterly to provide any plan for baffling the punisher. Ergo, their plots are fatally defective and often result in ruin. Hence the vital necessity for providing the third element—the escape ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... shore. Constance raised her eyes and studied the towering crag above their heads; when she lowered them again, her gaze for an instant met Tony's. There was a new light in his eyes—amusement, triumph, something entirely baffling. He gave her the intangible feeling of having at last got the mastery of ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... for the words which are already yours, or which you can make yours through your own unaided efforts. For convenience we have grouped with them some words of a nature more baffling—words of which you know perhaps but a single aspect rather than the totality, or upon which you can obtain but a feeble and precarious grip. These slightly known words belong more to the class now to be considered than to that just disposed of. For we have now to deal ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... hostile Indians that flocked to the village, any conclusive delineation of character, or any satisfactory analysis of their mental state in regard to the paleface religion, eluded him. Their passive, silent, sphinx-like secretiveness was baffling. Glickhican had taught him how to propitiate the friendly braves, and with these he was successful. Little he learned, however, from the unfriendly ones. When making gifts to these redmen he could never be certain that his offerings ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... the stratagems for baffling pursuit practiced in Indian warfare, none perhaps are so often resorted to as that of wading up and down shallow streams, in whose beds no foot-print may be left that eye of man can discern, or scent thereof ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... unseen, beaming across the ages, Brimful of fun And wit and wisdom, baffling all the ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... dormant powers. In putting into effect that interference which his office exacts of him, he has been more than once terribly assaulted by whites, foiled in their plans, and exasperated by the agency that had stepped in for the baffling of their ill-formed designs. On one occasion, his death was all but brought about by a ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... councils held behind those tall, white columns, there was one man so unusual, so brilliant, so incomprehensible, that a certain baffling interest if not actual romance attaches itself automatically to the bare utterance or inscription of his name,—Aaron Burr. He was aide-de-camp to General Putnam, and already had a vivid record behind him. It was during Washington's occupancy of Richmond Hill that Burr grew to love ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... perished? Was no mind In that graceful form enshrined? Can the love that filled those eyes With most eloquent replies, When the glossy head close pressing, Grateful met your hand's caressing; Can the mute intelligence, Baffling oft our human sense With strange wisdom, buried be "Under the wild-cherry tree?" Are these elements that spring In a daisy's blossoming, Or in long dark grasses wave Plume-like o'er your favorite's grave? Can they live in us, and fade In all else that God has ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... had extended without a break till it merged into that of Epping—leagues away to the south. The modern clearance and tillage, however, which separated it now from Epping had served as a curiously effective barrier—more baffling than the Romans and Angles in their turn had found the original wildwood. No stranger seemed ever to find his way into that broad, minutely-cultivated fertile plain which High Thorpe looked down upon. No railway had pushed its cheapening course across ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... men who have been most eagerly sought in friendship have not as a rule been the most open-hearted and expansive natures. I suppose that a certain law of pursuit holds good, and that people of self-contained temperament, with a sort of baffling charm, who are critical and hard to please, excite a certain ambition in those who would ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... societies. The phenomena which early societies present us with are not easy at first to understand, but the difficulty of grappling with them bears no proportion to the perplexities which beset us in considering the baffling entanglement of modern social organisation. It is a difficulty arising from their strangeness and uncouthness, not from their number and complexity. One does not readily get over the surprise which they occasion when looked ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... idealist to the extent of preferring a simple country life to all the glamour of London, a man seemingly endowed with all the ambitions of the most sober and unimaginative middle class—truly he presents strange and baffling contrasts. ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... power in Sicily, which he was now trying to extend to North Italy by crushing the Lombard League. This was a fatal bar to the policy of a papal state in Central Italy, inaugurated by Innocent III. No less imminent was the danger from the success of Frederick in baffling the papal schemes for the separation of the Sicilian and German crowns. It was becoming apparent that only by the extinction of the Hohenstaufen line could the papal ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... so he calmly drives past my house, knowing full well that it is efficiently guarded, and fires a pot shot at the first person seen through one of the windows. The man whom I have spoken to over the telephone shares that opinion. He is one of the legal advisers of the Home Office. Just to show the baffling nature of the problem, he says that it will be absolutely impossible, on the evidence available at present, to frame a charge against any Chinaman other than Wong Li Fu. Yet we know that he has at least four or five, and probably three ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... Jove-descended folk, And father Tros, and Troy's first founder, lord Of Cynthus. And accursed Envy there Shall dread the Furies, and thy ruthless flood, Cocytus, and Ixion's twisted snakes, And that vast wheel and ever-baffling stone. Meanwhile the Dryad-haunted woods and lawns Unsullied seek we; 'tis thy hard behest, Maecenas. Without thee no lofty task My mind essays. Up! break the sluggish bonds Of tarriance; with loud din Cithaeron calls, Steed-taming Epidaurus, and ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... said he was about thirty, and though the handsome face was repellently cold and grave, it was difficult to believe that that smooth, fair brow had been for so many years uplifted for the handwriting of time. He looked just what he was, a baffling, fascinating mystery. You felt that his countenance was a volume of hieroglyphics which, could you decipher, would unfold the history of a checkered and painful career. Yet the calm, frigid smile which sat on his lip, and looked out defiantly from his deep-set eyes, seemed ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... lectures, to teaching men by means of the menagerie, which was a sly burlesque of the courtiers of Louis XIV., perhaps he might have made idolatrous partisans there as elsewhere; but it seems as if in the exposition of his theory, he posed rather as a censor than a teacher; he delighted in baffling the mind by paradoxes. By annexes superimposed and ill-blended with his system, he sometimes compromised those scientific truths whose splendor bursts forth when they are freed from heterogeneous accessories. We cannot otherwise explain the resistance of certain minds, distinguished ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... almost always, in speaking of unwholesome food making itself known to us by its nasty taste; for it is an unfortunate truth that men have invented a thousand plans for baffling their natural guardian, and for bringing thieves secretly into the company of honest people. They sometimes put poison, for instance, into sugar—as is too often done in the case of those horrible green and blue sugar plums, against which I have an old ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... been no speculation, no philosophising. He had no mental process in him worthy the dignity of either of those terms. In his good clothes and fine health, he was a merry, unthinking moth of the lamp. Deprived of his position, and struck by a few of the involved and baffling forces which sometimes play upon man, he would have been as helpless as Carrie—as helpless, as non-understanding, as pitiable, if you will, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... man and your national hero can become very poor worms when, so to speak, they are off duty. But I didn't come here, at great inconvenience, to talk this sort of stuff at midnight. Go ahead; give me the details of this sabotage case which is baffling Dawson and the naval authorities; let me hear about the cutting ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... light, disperse my baffling fears, Give me a look but for a moment's space Upon the tranquil glory of Thy face, To serve as force to fight the chilling years. Clouds hide Thee from me, and the bitter tears Run down my cheek in floods. Out of Thy grace Let my ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... asked the Cornal, like a recruiting sergeant bringing the question home to a lad at a country fair; and he fixed Gilian with an eye there was no baffling. ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... so light and baffling, that we made no progress until the 2nd of January; when, with a freshening breeze from the eastward, we moved rapidly on our way, and flattered ourselves with the hope of clearing the strait before night. In this hope we were not ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... of the Union; the yet unfinished ranks of the Southern Confederacy; the baffling questions of compromise with the claims and rights of the South to national property are agitated. The incredulous folly of the North and the newspaper sympathy of the great Northern cities drag the whole question ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... him. At this hour there was very little wheeled traffic, for Lattice Street is almost a cul-de-sac, and she had taken the middle of the road. She was dressed with that effective neatness which brings the wealthy and the work-girl to a baffling level, in a blue serge costume of severe cut; a plain white linen coat-collar and a small hat, which covered, but did not hide, a mass of hair which, against the slanting sunlight at her back, lent the illusion of a golden ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... palace, a farm-cottage or a tiny apartment, did not reflect the charm of its owner. Every visitor feels impelled to linger, and is loath to go. Houses without personality are a series of rooms with furniture in them. Sometimes their lack of charm is baffling; every article is "correct" and beautiful, but one has the feeling that the decorator made chalk-marks indicating the exact spot on which each piece of furniture is to stand. Other houses are filled with things of little intrinsic value, often ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... are confronted by the baffling fact that important traits of morphology are frequently found distributed among widely differing languages within a large area, so widely differing, indeed, that it is customary to consider them genetically unrelated. Sometimes we may suspect that the resemblance ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... not altogether satisfactory, however. She felt that, if she had a certain physical something, which she must lack, nothing else would matter—nothing she said or did. It was baffling; for, there, before her eyes were precisely the charms of feature and figure that in other women, in far less degree, had set men, many men, quite beside themselves. Her lip curled, and her eyes laughed satirically as she thought of the follies ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... would be likely to have, or more accurately would be likely to pretend to have. Still, it did just happen that on this occasion his auntie's expression was more convincing than usual. She seemed more human than usual, to have abandoned, at any rate partially, the baffling garment of effusive insincerity in which she hid her soul. The Eve in her seemed to show herself, and, looking forth from her eyes, to admit that the youthful dalliance of the sexes was alone interesting in this life of strict ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... surrounded by his mysterious electric machines under shining glass domes, among costly leather-bound volumes whose very titles questioned the foundation of reason; telephones and telegrams ready to hand upon his orderly desk. And it seemed to me that he smiled mockingly at me behind his baffling eye-glasses. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... ourselves, we originate nothing. When Lombardo set about his work, he knew not what it would become. He did not build himself in with plans; he wrote right on; and so doing, got deeper and deeper into himself; and like a resolute traveler, plunging through baffling woods, at last was rewarded for his toils. "In good time," saith he, in his autobiography, "I came out into a serene, sunny, ravishing region; full of sweet scents, singing birds, wild plaints, roguish laughs, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... also well that we were unaware of their baffling fears, when the vigorous efforts incited by the memorial presented by Reed to Commodore Stockton, the military Governor of California, were likewise frustrated ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... courage indeed to transgress that indefinable barrier of decorum with which she managed to surround herself. There was something about her as cold and as pure as blue ice, and she gave the same impression of crystal clarity. All in all, hers was a baffling personality and Phillips fell asleep with the riddle of it unanswered. He awoke in the morning with ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... to Guernsey, wrote to Governor Le Mesurier, and, in reply to his letter, informed him that the appearance of the Crescent and squadron off Cherbourg had the desired effect of baffling the meditated attack on Alderney; nevertheless, the Crescent was detained on that station until the 25th, in consequence of other reports of the enemy's intentions to attack either Jersey or Alderney, and his squadron therefore was reinforced. In the mean time he succeeded in filling up ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... but recently arrived in New York city, is drawn into a mystery, partly through financial need and partly through his interest in a beautiful woman, who seems at times the simplest child and again a perfect mistress of intrigue. A baffling detective story. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... encircled, and which was, moreover, full of inextricable passes, morasses, and natural strengths, unknown to any but the inhabitants themselves, where a few men acquainted with the ground were capable, with ordinary address, of baffling the pursuit of numbers. ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... December 16, 1773. What a contention is going on far over seas at Boston, New England. The case is well known and still memorable to mankind. British parliament, after nine years of the saddest haggling, and baffling to and fro under constitutional stress of weather, and such east winds and west winds of parliamentary eloquence as seldom were, has made up its mind that America shall pay duty on their teas before infusing them, ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... life or poetry. The materials for the former are almost overwhelmingly copious and strangely discordant. Those who ought to meet in love over his grave, have spent their time in quarrelling about him, and baffling the most eager seeker for the truth. (See Lady Shelley v. Hogg; Trelawny v. the Shelley family; Peacock v. Lady Shelley; Garnett v. Peacock; Garnett v. Trelawny; McCarthy v. Hogg, etc., etc.) Through the turbid atmosphere of their recriminations it is impossible ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... for her tremendous effort, but she took me, I recollect, into her counsels. We were to unite to oblige my Father to start to his feet and face the world. Alas! we might as well have attempted to rouse the summit of Yes Tor into volcanic action. To my mother's arguments, my Father—with that baffling smile of his—replied: 'I esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt!' and that this answer was indirect made it none the less conclusive. My mother wished him to give lectures, to go to London, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... North America the war came to its crisis. In the earlier part of the year the British at New York and the French at Newport continued to watch one another. In April the British admiral Arbuthnot did indeed succeed in baffling an attempt of the French to carry reinforcements to the American cause in Virginia. The action he fought off the capes of Virginia on the 16th of April was ill conducted, but his main purpose was achieved. Washington, who was wisely anxious ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to-night, Skirting lawns of sleep to chase Shifting dreams in mazy light, Somewhere then I'll see your face Turning back to bid me follow Where I wag my arms and hollo, Over hedges hasting after Crooked smile and baffling laughter, Running tireless, floating, leaping, Down your web-hung woods and valleys, Garden glooms and hornbeam alleys, Where the glowworm stars are peeping, Till I find you, quiet as stone On a hill-top all alone, Staring outward, gravely pondering ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... my faithful.. Ah, no.. no.. The Princess Goneril is right; she judges me: A sinful woman cannot steadily gaze reply To the cool, baffling looks of virgin untried force. She stands beside that crumbling mother in her hate, And, though we know so well—she and I, O we know— That she could love no mother nor partake in anguish, Yet she is flouted when the King forsakes her dam, She must protect her very flesh, her tenderer flesh, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... senses—the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any common or low meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the race, and to every age. A long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement. The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the secession period comes to a head, and is gather'd in one brief flash of lightning-illumination—one simple, fierce deed. Its sharp culmination, and as it were solution, of so many bloody and angry problems, illustrates those climax-moments on the stage of universal ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... depths and sinister shadows I was frightened, and more than frightened. Conflicting and confusing emotions, a sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... said, "my son." The former bowed with formal civility, but gave a baffling effect of mockery which, Howat discovered, enveloped practically every movement and speech. He was, he said, enchanted to meet Mr. Penny; and that extravagant expression, delivered in a slightly harsh, negligent voice, heightened the impression of a personality ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... preparations had been pushed with great vigor. A powerful squadron under Admiral Cervera, which had assembled at the Cape Verde Islands before the outbreak of hostilities, had crossed the ocean, and by its erratic movements in the Caribbean Sea delayed our military plans while baffling the pursuit of our fleets. For a time fears were felt lest the Oregon and Marietta, then nearing home after their long voyage from San Francisco of over 15,000 miles, might be surprised by Admiral Cervera's fleet, but their fortunate arrival ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... evenings to see her. When he was in an idealistic mood she was warmly responsive. When he was arbitrary and opinionated, she met him with chaffing and raillery, and at such times she was as elusive, as baffling, as exasperating as a sprite. On occasions when he rather insistently asked her plans and her progress in her father's case, she evaded him and held him at bay. She felt that he admired her, but with a grudging, unwilling admiration that left his fundamental ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... am going to take the case largely because it has interested me, and it will be a pleasure to work it out, not only on your daughter's account, but on my own. You know, to me, such matters are of absorbing interest, like the solving of some complex and baffling puzzle." ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... In the first place, the object in recording these tales has been a literary one, not a linguistic one. In the second place, the number of distinctly different languages represented by the originals might be baffling even to the reader interested in linguistics, especially as our method of approach has been from the point of view of cycles of stories, and not from the point of view of the separate tribes telling them. In the ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... wrinkled as though with some sort of suppressed pain, to the girl's still, stony expression. This was indeed a house of mysteries! There was something here incomprehensible, some thing about the relations of these three and their knowledge of one another, utterly baffling. It was the queerest household, surely, into which any stranger ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mode of allegory, which was historical as well as moral, and contains a good deal of history, if we knew it, often seems devised to throw curious readers off the scent. It was purposely baffling and hazy. A characteristic trait was singled out. A name was transposed in anagram, like Irena, or distorted, as if by imperfect pronunciation, like Burbon and Arthegal, or invented to express a quality, like Una, or Gloriana, or Corceca, or Fradubio, or adopted with no ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... only along the coast but far into the little known interior of the Great Amazon basin, while southward it borders all the coast as far as southern Brazil. In the Amazon basin it reaches its highest development and becomes the crowning glory of the vegetable world, the most baffling obstacle ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... he left the solicitor's office, that much of what Tansley had said was true. There was something baffling in the very atmosphere of Hathelsborough—he felt like a man who fights the wind. Everything was elusive, ungraspable, evasive—he seemed to get no further forward. And, if Tansley was right in affirming that Hathelsborough people ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... Another baffling story by the great detective-story writer who is already becoming world-famous for his marvellously intricate and ingenious plots. This story is a jewel of many facets in brilliant setting. Here Mr. Keeler's genius for the mystery-plot comes into an ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... continued on our course, no longer benefiting by the trade-winds, but having frequently to encounter the light and baffling breezes to be met with off the African coast, and now and then to contend with the heavy black squalls of those regions, which more than once carried away some of our spars and blew our lighter sails out of the bolt ropes. By keeping in with the African coast, we had a strong current in our ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... arm a friendly squeeze. Then he studied her again, the most baffling member of his staff. About five feet six. Lithe, hard, trained down fine—as a tennis champion, she would be. Stacked—how she was stacked! Not as beautiful as Sandra or Teddy ... but with an ungodly lot of something that ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... metal (like the rose of a watering-pot) through which the Sister-portress peeps and talks, is pasted a printed form, an arrangement of holy names and texts in triangles, and the stigmatized hands of St. Francis, and a variety of other devices, for the purpose, as is explained in a special notice, of baffling the Evil One, and preventing his entrance into that building? Had you seen Dionea, and the stolid, contemptuous way in which she took, without attempting to refute, the various shocking allegations against her, your Excellency would have reflected, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Froelich. I'll try and explain it to you. Madame de Corantin is known to us. She is a very clever emissary of the German Government, and she has succeeded in baffling us entirely up till now because by a chain of coincidences there has been no one who could identify her on the various occasions that she has been in England. Thanks to her influential connections, she has succeeded in obtaining information of considerable value, and has also been enabled ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... of the common notion in which we think of our relation to other lives. We fancy that another life is perfectly interpretable in its motives and aims, but that our own lives are much disguised; whereas the fact is that nothing is more mysterious and baffling than the interior purposes of another soul, and nothing is more self-disclosed and transparent than the nature of a judging life. One man goes through the world and finds it suspicious, inclined to wrong-doing, ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... and carry it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the supreme religious belief. There was some compensation for his enforced attendance ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... his tone proved startling to her by virtue of its unusualness. What might it portend, she wondered, and sought with grave eyes to read his baffling countenance; and then a wild alarm swept into her and shook her spirit in its grip; there was something of which until this moment she had not thought—something connected with the fateful matter of that letter. It had stood as a barrier between them, her buckler, her sole ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... half a mile. The wind was variable and squally, but we made great progress, along the land to the S.W.b.W., and the Griper, by keeping up tolerably with the Hecla, in some measure redeemed her character with us. Having arrived off Cape Providence at eleven P.M., the wind became light and baffling, so that we had just got far enough to see that there was a free and open channel beyond the westernmost point visible of Melville Island, when our progress was almost entirely stopped for want ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... o'clock when she reached it, and she had hurried along the short trail, too. Mary was not in sight, but the living-room door was open and Nancy stood looking in with a baffling sense of unreality; the place looked different; almost as if she had never seen it before. She mentally took note of the furniture as though checking the ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... he in intense anxiety,) believing that he could establish the same facts by another and, as he thought, a better witness, did not re-examine; but calling that other, with an air of nonchalance, succeeded in extracting from him all that the former had failed in; baffling all the attempts of the Attorney-General to affect his credit. At length, another ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... with a bold attack upon the prerogatives of George III, ended it as his champion, even consenting to surrender a cherished conviction in order that the Monarch's peace of mind might not be troubled. Was ever a Minister beset by more baffling problems, by more hampering restrictions? Peace might have solved and shattered them. But peace he could not secure in the years 1796, 1797; and when finally it came it proved to be no peace, merely a pause before a still greater ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... ruefully, they acknowledged this, tore up their artificial resolution not to look at the future, and deliberately set themselves to the contemplation of a life that would have to take into account complex and baffling considerations, that their honeymoon became a success. It was well along in their month ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... that had ended his task was baffling O'Connor, the bridge contractor. For the irregular, winding gouge in the earth, reminder of the day when some tremendous torrent teemed there from the mountains hundreds of miles to the west, was more than a mere cutting to fill. Eleven hundred yards, one foot, four inches from bank ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... had come, and she began to wish that she had not permitted herself to follow her impulse, or that at the last moment she had forbidden Gay to accompany her. In place of the cool determination of an hour ago, a confusing hesitancy, a baffling shyness, had taken possession of her, weakening her resolution. She felt all at once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion against which she ought to have struggled to the end. Simple as the incident of the ride had appeared to her in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... when running at full speed; the sensation being that some one has grasped the boat and is pushing her back. With the resistance come the rush and ripple, as the sharp stem plunges through the floating mass of weed. The wind, which had been light and baffling all the forenoon, after I had passed Nahant, and was abreast of Egg Rock with its little whitewashed light-house, freshened, and, veering to the southeast, blew across my track. The vessels began to lean to its force, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... it we are still talking for nonpublication?" When Miles nodded, he continued: "This whole situation is baffling, Miles. It seems that the government here knew all about the weather conditions they could expect at periastron, and had made plans for them. Some of them excellent plans, too, but all based on the presumption that the natives would co-operate ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... extravagantly, and in the fodder for the horses and cattle, which was rather wasted. She was as miserly about her master's money, as if it had been her own, and by dint of making good bargains, of getting high prices for all their produce, and by baffling the peasants' tricks when they offered anything for sale, he at last entrusted her with buying and selling everything, with the direction of all the laborers, and with the quantity of provisions necessary for the household, so that in a short time she became indispensable to him. She ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... most formidable veterans of Europe, commanded successively by the first captains of the age. That, with no lieutenant of eminent valor or experience, save only his brother Louis, and with none at all after that chieftain's death, William of Orange should succeed in baffling the efforts of Alva, Requesens, Don John of Austria, and Alexander Farnese—men whose names are among the most brilliant in the military annals of the world—is in itself, sufficient evidence of his warlike ability. At the period of his death he had reduced the number of obedient ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... touchdown, played favorites no more with Wilton than with Ridgley. The home team was outgeneraled. By a series of strong rushes the visitors carried the ball sixty-five yards for a well-earned touchdown. The baffling thing about their play was a sudden shift; the quarter-back began to shout his numbers, then he yelled "Shift" and with a quick jump several members of the Wilton team took new positions; almost instantly the pigskin was snapped and before the Ridgley players had the Wilton runner ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... remonstrances of the executioner, threw open the wicket. Blueskin therefore had nothing to stop him. Dashing through the open door, he crossed the Old Bailey, plunged into a narrow court on the opposite side of the way, and was out of sight in a minute, baffling all pursuit. ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the British made ready to carry the privateer by boarding. The shoals rendered it impossible for the heavy ships to approach, and the lack of wind and the baffling currents also interfered for the moment with the movements of the sloops-of-war. Accordingly recourse was had to a cutting-out party, always a favorite device with the British seamen of that age, who were accustomed to carry French frigates by boarding, and ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... proposes to use the bourgeois state with its fraudulent democracy, its illusory theory of 'unity of all the classes,' its standing army, police and bureaucracy oppressing and baffling the masses; the revolutionary Socialist maintains that the bourgeois state must be completely destroyed, and proposes the organization of a new state—the state of the organized producers—of the Federated Soviets—on the basis of which ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... third conference at The Hague may have seemed beautiful to them, but it looked as if they felt that it was lacking in actuality. Possibly I did not understand them. That was just the trouble—I could not. It was all puzzling, baffling, mysterious. ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... of stammering is that the stammerer in many cases seems to be able to talk perfectly in concert. This has long baffled the investigator in this field, no reason being assignable for this ability to talk in connection with others. The baffling element has been this—that the investigator has assumed that the stammerer talked well in concert, whereas a very careful scientist would have discovered the stammerer to be a fraction of a second or a part of ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax,[211] without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... outer edge of the rock of Doom. A loud sea and ominous, and it was hard for Count Victor, in that welter of midnight voices, to hear the call of an owl, yet it came to him by and by, as he expected, with its repetition. And then the flageolet, with its familiar and baffling melody, floating on a current of the wind that piped about the castle vents and sobbed upon the stairs. He opened his door, looked into the depths that fell with mouldering steps into the basement and upwards ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... extreme, and the laughter which followed the malicious pranks of Gangogo, the professional jester of the tourney, must, if I am to take the author's word for it, have made the glaciers ring. There is a great deal in the way of philosophy and psychology that is very baffling in this book, but of one thing I feel certain, and that is that the Elemental Spirits of the Heights, to whom frequent allusion is made, must find the winter sports of a later age a sorry substitute for the rare old frolics of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... Periphas extended where he died, And flew to cope with Tydeus' valiant son. 1010 Full nigh they came, when Mars on fire to slay The hero, foremost with his brazen lance Assail'd him, hurling o'er his horses' heads. But Athenaean Pallas in her hand The flying weapon caught and turn'd it wide, 1015 Baffling his aim. Then Diomede on him Rush'd furious in his turn, and Pallas plunged The bright spear deep into his cinctured waist Dire was the wound, and plucking back the spear She tore him. Bellow'd brazen-throated Mars 1020 ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... me lay Dejah Thoris, and with her were Phaidor, daughter of Matai Shang, and Thuvia of Ptarth. But how to reach them, now that I had found the only vulnerable spot in their mighty prison, was still a baffling riddle. ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... treacherous was the navigation of this strait, whose weather is never to be trusted, and whose winds, tides, and currents are baffling and perilous. Embarking with his followers, he looked for an easy and rapid progress; but a terrible storm arose, tossing the boats so frightfully that death ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... With speed, thought baffling, unabating, Earth's splendour whirls in circling flight; Its Eden-brightness alternating With solemn, awe-inspiring night; Ocean's broad waves in wild commotion, Against the rocks' deep base are hurled; And with the spheres, both rock and ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... this feature which is familiar to us—and this—and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one, pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a cloud—some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly; the phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully mocking our incapacity to ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... not heed the city any more, It has given me a duty to perform. I pass along nonchalantly, Insinuating myself into self-baffling movements. Impalpable charm of back streets In which I find myself: Cool spaces filled with shadow. Passers-by, ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... himself. He was polite, engaging, and handsome; the objection to his complexion, if such there were, was at least offset by a very positive faculty of entertaining; besides which, the unspeakable something in manner, always baffling disguises, always whispering of other conditions, always exciting suggestions and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... seized upon and how he made this his own. I tried to determine what were the relationships he used to order his experiences. Fortunately for the purposes of writing stories I did not have to get behind the baffling eyes and the inscrutable sounds of a small baby. Yet I learned much for understanding the twos by watching even through the first months. What "the great, big, blooming, buzzing confusion" (as James describes it) means to an infant, I fancy we grown-ups will really never know. But I suppose ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... commerce. Accordingly there is every indication that the conflict upon the Continent will represent a distinctive epoch in aeroplane design and construction. Many problems still await solution, such as the capacity to hover over a position, and it is quite possible that these complex and baffling questions will be settled definitely as the result of operations in the field. The aeroplane has reached a certain stage of evolution: further progress is virtually impossible unless something revolutionary is revealed, perfected, and brought to ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... baffling, puzzling, unbelievable, bordering, indeed, on the miraculous—herself, everything about her, her acts, her methods, her cleverness, intangible in one sense, were terrifically real in another. Jimmie Dale shook his head. The miraculous and this practical, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... know about that necklet, and to appropriate two of the stones, we only discovered much later. I will not here anticipate that disclosure. One thing at a time is a good rule in life. For the moment he succeeded in baffling us altogether. ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... "It's a most baffling one," continued the financier. "I suppose, Mr. Carson," he added, "that if we do put it in and pass around a subscription paper, we can count on you for—say two ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... and baffling winds so that labor as they might, it was fully dark when the Pilgrim pinnace entered what is now Barnstable, then Cummaquid Harbor. Anchoring for safety, they lay down to get such rest as the position afforded, and woke betimes in the morning ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... Mr Fledgeby's gaze with such a baffling hitch, that that agreeable gentleman was for some time at a loss how to resume his fascinating part in the dialogue. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... and the grave diversion with which Louis received them. The lady was evidently trying to discover what had been the intermediate history of Mrs. and Miss Dynevor; and Louis was taking pleasure in baffling her, with cool, quiet answers, especially when she came to the question whether Miss Dynevor had not a brother, and why he was not present. It appeared that Oliver had made almost as if his mother had been buried and dug up again; involving the thirty-four years ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bewildering, blinding slush fast and far, on every face and badge that they could hit; and the pump stream hit Kenna square in the face as he yelled in wrath. The paraders were not armed for such a fight. Men that could face bullets, knives, and death, were dismayed, defeated, and routed by these baffling bucketfuls and the amazing precision of the ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... heart misgives him, and he is cowed and abashed by his success. "The deed, no less than the attempt, confounds him." His mind is assailed by the stings of remorse, and full of "preternatural solicitings." His speeches and soliloquies are dark riddles on human life, baffling solution, and entangling him in their labyrinths. In thought he is absent and perplexed, sudden and desperate in act, from a distrust of his own resolution. His energy springs from the anxiety and agitation of his mind. His blindly rushing forward on the objects of his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... till you felt warm and happy just to look at him. She wondered if the closely-set lips she was studying could curve into a welcoming smile if anybody ran to meet him with happy outstretched arms. But the picture was baffling and disappointing, because ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... only smiled a baffling smile, and turned the subject. "Wouldn't you like something to drink before ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... plausible we agreed to pretend a misunderstanding; the man hit was to have thought that his opponent would fire only one shot, the man who escaped would express deepest regret, but maintain that the arrangement had been for two successive shots. I had very little doubt that these arrangements for baffling inconvenient inquiry would prove thoroughly adequate. For the rest, I made up a packet for Varvilliers containing a present for Coralie. To make any other preparations would not have been fair to Wetter; ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... to be considerate. His temper was slightly hasty; but he was bearing the request in mind, and controlling it, though his heightened colour and flashing eyes showed that he suffered keenly from a baffling sense of shame and impending disgrace. These feelings, however, were subsiding, and as they retired his astonishment seemed to grow, and his hand trembled when he folded up the letter for the last time and laid ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... and eighty thousand men Have made good speed across Bavaria To wait the French and give them check at Ulm, That fortress-frontier-town, entrenched and walled, A place long chosen as a vantage-point Whereon to encounter them as they outwind From the blind shades and baffling green defiles Of the Black Forest, worn with wayfaring. Here Mack will intercept his agile foe Hasting to meet the Russians in Bohemia, And ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... above definitions, the more baffling they become. Try as I may, I have not been able to fit them, not only to the facts of my own experience, which may not be strange, but I cannot reconcile them even to each other. There seem to me inherent ambiguities ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... found no one on the balcony, and the evening of that trying day had been one of baffling disappointment. Eleanor was in her room, apparently tired out by the adventures of the night before; and although Miss Foster appeared at dinner she had withdrawn immediately afterwards, and there had been no chance for anything but the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... poverty, with a half-crazy mother-in-law, and a rheumatic brother- in-law, in such a looking hovel?" Mrs. Sewell did not group these disadvantages conventionally, but they were effective. "You have allowed your feelings about that baffling creature to blind you to everything else, David. Why should you care so much for his future, and nothing for hers? Is that ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... were writing on the Speaker, edited by Mr. J. L. Hammond with an independence of idealism to which I shall always think that we owe much of the cleaner political criticism of to-day; and Belloc himself was writing in it studies of what proved to be the most baffling irony. To understand how his Latin mastery, especially of historic and foreign things, made him a leader, it is necessary to appreciate something of the peculiar position of that isolated group of "Pro-Boers." We were a minority in a minority. Those who honestly disapproved ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... high mountains to the dark-blue sea, With groans and tumult urge their headlong course, Wasting the works of man; so urg'd their flight, So, as they fled, the Trojan horses groan'd. The foremost ranks cut off, back tow'rd the ships Patroclus drove them, baffling their attempts To gain the city; and in middle space Between the ships, the stream, and lofty wall, Dealt slaughter round him, and of many a chief The bitter penalty of death requir'd. Then Pronous with ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... farther we called for refreshments, and learned that a steamboat called periodically at Luss. We left this favourite resort by the Dumbarton road, walking alongside Loch Lomond—one of the finest walks we ever took and quite baffling description. It was rather provoking, therefore, when darkness came on just as we reached the widest part of the Loch where quite a number of islands could be seen. The road still continued beautiful, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... when I hinted that my remarks must have hit the bull's-eye . . . he laughed again. He is a baffling ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... budding rosebushes; and this soft shadow of light calmed and charmed him. In it, he could believe all his dreams possible. He leaned forward and watched the silvery disc, struggling in soft, white clouds; parting them, as with hands, when they formed in baffling, airy masses in her way. And the heavenly traveller was not silent; she had a language he understood; for as he watched the sweet, strong miracle, he ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... splendour," which intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release. But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... odour or taste) which saves it from attack. Now the arched costa and falcate form of wing is generally supposed to give increased powers of flight, or, as seems to me more probable, greater facility in making sudden turnings, and thus baffling a pursuer. But the members of the Polydorus-group (to which belongs the only unchanged Celebesian Papilio), being already guarded against attack, have no need of this increased power of wing; and "natural selection" ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... General Whitlock did a similar work in Central India and Bundelkund. Rose's campaign was peculiarly difficult. It was carried out amid the jungles and ravines of the Vindhya Mountains, and in the secluded regions of Bundelkund. He fought battles against baffling odds, and captured the stronghold of Jhansi. He then marched against Tantia Topi, who had an army of 40,000 near Kalpi, which he routed and scattered. Having brought his campaign to a close, he congratulated his troops on having marched a thousand ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... resting against a window which looked upon the garden.... But the scene has been made popular by Ary Scheffer's too well-known painting. You remember it: two faces, pale, bloodless, stripped of flesh, in which live only the burning eyes cast upward to the sky—a dense sky, baffling, heavy with all the secrets of eternity. No visible object, nothing, absolutely nothing, distracts them from their contemplation. The sea itself, although indicated by the painter, almost blends ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... past fuses with the present you awaken to a larger privilege of life than man now knows. You feel yourself encompassed by truth, vital and strong. This art, erstwhile so baffling, stands revealed as the struggle of a superhuman entity for self-expression. The tendency toward God has to begin anew with each round of the life-spiral - that eternal circle ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... was not due to any assistance he had received from the detective in the elucidation of baffling crime mysteries. It arose from an entirely different cause. Wolfe is supposed to have said that he would sooner have been remembered as the author of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" than as the conqueror of Quebec. Mr. Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... done. I may write my friends. Hum: well thought upon! I shall leave her joyes without any bound to entertaine me if I first beat this foolish rivall of mine and present her with his sword. She assures me he dares not fight: it shall be so. Thus with one baffling and disarming him I shall secure my Mistresse and get the reputation of a fighting Cavallier, which may save me many a knock hereafter among men of strong faith that shall heare how much honour I have elsewhere taken ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... likewise guessed the President's underhand manoeuvres with the Blandureaus, and his object in baffling old Blondet's efforts, but she saw nothing to be gained by opening the eyes of father or son to the perils of the situation; she was enjoying the beginning of the comedy; she knew about the proposals made by Chesnel's successor on behalf of Fabien ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... elegantly spurning the roof sods, went at easy, measured bounds toward the open chink—toward its doom. One, two, three—clearing the prickly cedar bush, its forefeet fell on the hidden trap; clutch, a savage shriek, a flashing,—a struggle baffling the eyes to follow, and the master of the squirrels was ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Egypt, and produced strange hybrids of the human mind. The one point of agreement between them is that they conceive the Supreme God as impersonal and entirely inactive, "a deified Zero," and endeavor by a system of emanation to trace the descent of this baffling principle into man and the universe. Philo was as unfortunate in his philosophical as in his religious following, who both transformed his poetical metaphors into fixed and rigid dogmas. His doctrine of ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... not. The pre-war Peggy had swiftly turned into the patriotic English girl who had hounded him into the army. He found himself face to face with an amorphous, characterless sort of Peggy whom he did not know. It was perplexing, baffling. Before he could formulate an idea, she ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... of the problem is especially disturbing and baffling to the uninitiated. Compared with the brief adulthood of an individual the life span of communities is immensely long. The individual is at his or her best for a few years or decades. Communities and their institutions endure for hundreds and in some cases for thousands ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... incredulous. Those baffling eyes of his twinkled with quiet amusement, and the man in ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling of modern social problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of affairs ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr |
