"Nebulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... envelope, however slight and filmy when compared to the whole bulk of the globe, to form upon the surface of such a molten mass? At this point of the investigation the geologist must appeal to the astronomer; for in this vague and nebulous border-land, where the very rocks lose their outlines and flow into each other, where matter exists only in its essential elements, not yet specialized into definite forms and substances,—there the two sciences meet. Astronomy shows us our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... that up to the present hour there was nothing in the bank, and only the money for impending needs in the house. He could not be called a man of learning; he was only a great bookworm; for his reading lay all in the nebulous regions of history. Old family records, wherever he could lay hold upon them, were his favourite dishes; old, musty books, that looked as if they knew something everybody else had forgotten, made his eyes gleam, and his white taper-fingered hand ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... again all was void. That nebulous light had been extinguished. That feeble thrill had vibrated itself into quiescence. Many lustra had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The worm had food no more. The sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its stead—instead of all things—dominant ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... liquid vault of ether hung the starry gems of light, Blazing with unwonted splendor on the ebon brow of night; Far across the arching concave like a train of silver lay, Nebulous, and white, and dreamy, heaven's ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty—the nebulous country in which words play the part of realities—is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality or immortality—appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of Scandinavian heroes, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... his name whispered in another direction, in connection with the cashiership of the new bank which was to be built. The cashiership and the mayoralty might be nebulous honors, but it was sweet, for once, to be recognized for what he was—man of might; a man ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... could not but be thankful that she failed of striking resemblance to the portraits of these admirable ancestors, nevertheless it seemed to me that, had I not known definitely of their place in her family history, I might almost have sensed them hovering behind her: a background, nebulous and shadowy, out ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Nebulous gold Throwing an ephemeral glory about life's vanishing points, Wherein you burn... You of unknown voltage Whirling on your axis... Scrawling vermillion signatures Over the night's velvet hoarding... Insolent, towering ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... discern only a few pious souls crouched behind the pillars, or pouring forth their last fervent aspirations before some favorite altar or saintly shrine. Soon all have left, and the silence of the abandoned sanctuary shrouds the fabric in greater solemnity. The aromatic incense still floats in nebulous veils ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... ground of this picture is crossed with nebulous black streaks. These were originally present in all the pictures. I have omitted them in all but this, lest they might obscure the details of the reduced copies. It has been explained to me (although in the myth it is expressly stated only in one case, ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... silence seemed to strike at him with a nebulous hostility as he went. He had a vague sense of intrusion, of being in a forbidden place. The blood was no longer hot in his veins. He even shivered in the warmth of the summer night as he followed the winding ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... and the like—and kept a sharp look-out for erratic strangers. Of these there was a constant succession coming to the Farm; reformers of everything under the sun; fanatics demanding the instant adoption of—their nebulous theories; mental aliens not quite crazy but pretty near it; egotists, wild to be noticed, freaks and fakirs and humbugs of every description, and, worst of all, wrecks of humanity seeking refuge from the slings and ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... afraid, Lieutenant Rutter, it will remain in the beautiful and nebulous realms of thought, unless——" He paused and drained his beer ostentatiously, though all the while his eyes ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... got hold of the telescope and tried to balance it as the keeper had done; but either his hand was trembling, or the wind had a purchase on the long tube, or he was unaccustomed to its use; at all events he could make out nothing but nebulous and ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... pale edge of light stole along the east, throwing out the high, crumpled line of the Sierra. The landscape developed from nebulous shadows and enfoldings to hill slopes, tree domes, the clustered groupings of barns. A stir passed, frail and delicate, over the earth's face, a light tentative trembling in the leaves, a quiver through the grain. Birds made sleepy ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... height at the place where they were gathered together, for it has been proved in regard to the Red Sea, that the sea is higher than the land, as Basil remarks (Hom. iv in Hexaem.). The second explains the water that covered the earth as being rarefied or nebulous, which was afterwards condensed when the waters were gathered together. The third suggests the existence of hollows in the earth, to receive the confluence of waters. Of the above the first seems the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... life. Educational facilities, inclusive of schools, libraries, and museums; railroads, telegraph and telephone service, electric lighting and electric trams,—all the ways and means of the modern mechanism of life are, inevitably, in a nebulous state in Italy. The political situation is extremely interesting at the present time. That the "Blacks" and the "Whites" are diametrically opposed to each other is in the nature of history rather than that of contemporary record or of prophecy; and that this ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... is transformed into motion of expansion. Hence the shock of sun and planet would at once result in the vaporization of both bodies; and there can be no doubt that by the time the sun has absorbed the outermost of his attendant planets, he will have resumed something like his original nebulous condition. He will have been dilated into a huge mass of vapour, and will have become fit for a new process of contraction and for a new production ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... enlightenment? Was he really high-minded? Did he not have the gesture and the touch of the magician, the abandonment of the indifferent demigod—indifferent to the higher and the deeper currents of man's life? I tried to formulate some of these nebulous ideas to Reverdy, but found myself running into denials, facts of contradiction in Douglas' attitude and thinking. Reverdy was equally unable to state the case against Douglas, which he felt a keener critic of thought ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... another nebulous resistance to our own notions. As to eclipses, I have notes upon several of them that did not occur upon scheduled time, though with differences only of seconds—and one delightful lost soul, deep-buried, but buried in the ultra-respectable ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... than the air before them seemed to thicken in a curious fashion. Lura gave a cry of alarm and pressed close to Damis. The sun's rays penetrated with difficulty through a patch of air directly before them. Gradually the mistiness began to assume a nebulous uncertain outline and separated itself into four distinct patches. The thickening air took on a silvery metallic gleam and four metallic cylinders made their appearance. Two of them were about eight feet in height and three feet in diameter. The other two were fully thirty feet in length and about ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... crosses Mrs. Grubb was moderately cheerful, for her troubles were as nebulous as everything else to her mind. She intended to invent some feasible plan for her deliverance sooner or later, but she was much more intent upon development than deliverance, and she never seemed to have the leisure to break her shackles. Nothing really ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... possible, they will be partly elective; in many cases they will, I expect, have to begin by being almost entirely nominated. In some cases it will be upon the official members alone that the main burden will fall. I could not ask the House to confer upon bodies of this nebulous character, not representative, not elective in any democratic sense, responsible not to constituents, nor to a public department, nor to Parliament itself in any way, the absolute and final power of enforcing by the whole apparatus of the law any decision, whether wise or foolish, upon ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... he did not love her. He admired her. He had become accustomed to her. He felt her force. He knew he ought to be very grateful to her for many things. She was devoted to him. Or was she—was she not rather devoted to his "interests," to those nebulous attendants that hover round a man like shadows in the night? How would it be in Algiers when they were quite ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... imagination it will be time enough to give him a name, seeing he is neither Republican nor Democrat, nor Tammany, nor even a Stalwart, nor a three-hundred-and- sixer—seeing, in fact, that he is not an astronomical point in any political heaven with which the world is acquainted, but only the most nebulous of nebulae which have ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... maintained by Kant's Cosmogony that every substance, be it solid or liquid, constituting the entire universe, was, inconceivable ages ago, in their homogeneous gaseous or nebulous condition. Owing to an impulse being given to the nebulous mass, it acquired a rotary movement, which divided the nebulous mass up into a number of masses which, owing to the rotation, acquired greater density than the remaining gaseous mass, and then acted on the latter ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... centre. The closer we are connected with the centre, the nearer we are to those whom we call dead. Our communion with them is spiritual, because 'God is spirit' and they are in Him. But the {71} spiritual is not the unsubstantial, the nebulous, the gaseous; it is the personal—to my mind the awful—reality. The more truly we understand persons, the more we ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... established on this northern frontier were often lawless and difficult to control, of loose habits and morals, and intent on their own profit; and the region itself was inhospitable to organized and settled government. Yet out of these somewhat nebulous beginnings, four settlements arose—Portsmouth (Masonian and Anglican), Dover (Anglican and Puritan), Exeter and Hampton (both Puritan), each with its civil compact and each an independent town. The inhabitants were few in number, and "the generality, of mean and ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... and obtained the name of "Poet Squab." His portraits show a shrewd, but rather sluggish face, with long gray hair floating down his cheeks, not unlike Coleridge, but without his dreamy eye, like a nebulous star. His conversation was less sprightly than solid. Sometimes men suspected that he had "sold all his thoughts to his booksellers." His manners are by his friends pronounced "modest;" and the word modest has since been amiably confounded by his biographers with ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... his bullet-head that the idea of a plot that could not be discovered came into its first nebulous being. Absalom found out that Mhtoon Pah was looking for a gold lacquer bowl, and through the agency of Leh Shin the bowl was eventually marked down as the property of a seaman who was lodging temporarily near the opium den by the ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... the process of mutilating the original idea of God, as a unity and an unseen Spirit, is seen in those pantheistic religions which lie behind all the mythologies of the ancient world, like a nebulous vapor out of which the more distinct idols and images of paganism are struggling. Here the notion of the Divine unity is still preserved; but the Divine personality and holiness are lost. God becomes a vague impersonal Power, with no moral qualities, and no religious attributes; and it is difficult ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... to length of days, the Tower has no rival among places and prisons, its origin, like that of the Iliad, that of the Sphinx, that of the Newton Stone, being lost in the nebulous ages, long before our definite history took shape. Old writers date it from the days of Caesar; a legend taken up by Shakespeare and the poets in favor of which the name of Caesar's tower remains in popular use to this very day. A Roman wall can even yet be traced near some parts of the ditch. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... looked dim and nebulous. Other things could be set right; there was always a fighting chance. It was ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... emphasized nowadays by the fact that many men wear their hair clipped close to the head, and no chins (the lack of chins in Germany is almost a national peculiarity) has any physiological or psychological relation to their prowess in, and love of, and critical appreciation of, the more nebulous arts: music, poetry, philosophy, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... oblivion; and at night, when its cloudy wings were folded over his cabin, he would sit alone with a sense of security he had never felt before. On such occasions he was apt to leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for what might not come to him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond? Perhaps even SHE,—for this strange solitary was not insane nor visionary. He was never in spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping or waking, pacing the beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a woman's face was always before him,—the ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... she was deeply pained at her sister's behaviour. It may be unbalanced to fly out of England, but to stop away eight months argues that the heart is awry as well as the head. A sick-bed could recall Helen, but she was deaf to more human calls; after a glimpse at her aunt, she would retire into her nebulous life behind some poste restante. She scarcely existed; her letters had become dull and infrequent; she had no wants and no curiosity. And it was all put down to poor Henry's account! Henry, long pardoned by his wife, was still too infamous ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... night was senescent 30 And star-dials pointed to morn, As the star-dials hinted of morn, At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent 35 Arose with a duplicate horn, Astarte's bediamonded crescent ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... thing I hate to see in a young fellow, it is the desire to make fun of a superior's conversation. Being an American sailor, I had little use for r's in every word which held an a but I had no objection to any one else talking the way they wished. I was somewhat doubtful just how to sit upon this nebulous third mate, ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... so much. I see the logic and admirable sense of his attitude so clearly that even while a primitive root jealousy is eating me up I am so infected by his theory that I don't blame him. I feel myself nebulous as regards him, as blurred at edge ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of Urdoz and Oleron, and at last rising over their unequal ridges, turns their nebulous peak into a new country which has also its mountains and its depths, and, quitting France, descends into Spain. Never has the hoof of the mule left its trace in these windings; man himself can with difficulty stand upright there, even with the hempen boots which can not slip, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a quantity of snow from a piece of ice that had been washed by the sea, and was greatly discoloured by the decomposition of some peculiar substance upon it. A little of this snow dissolved in a wine-glass appeared perfectly nebulous—the water being found to contain a great number of semi-transparent spherical substances, with others resembling small portions of fine hair. On examining these substances with a compound microscope, I was enabled to make ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... There were other tales of "plague" ships wandering free with their dead crews, or discovered and shot into some sun by a patrol cruiser so that they might not carry their infection farther. Plague—the nebulous "worst" the Traders had to face. Dane screwed his eyes shut, tried to concentrate upon the droning voice in his ears, but he could not control his thoughts ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... sheaves are already garnered. Thus disregarding the fruits of action, we could work like those who have made the Great Sacrifice, for whom even Nirvana is no resting place. Worlds may awaken in nebulous glory, pass through their phases of self-conscious existence and sink again to sleep, but these tireless workers continue their age-long task of help. Their motive we do not know, but in some secret depth of our being we feel that there could be nothing ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... intellectual attitude towards the Christian faith was one of detachment, indifference, or conventional acquiescence. That could not be his attitude. He was the last man in the world to be content with anything nebulous. The active exercise of thinking {138} was to him a pleasure in all matters, and in things important a duty as well. He was certain not to avoid it in the most important question of all. He might have been either Hume or Butler, either Wesley or Gibbon, but he was ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... called, her smoky black hair floating around her and her arms cutting through the room's blackness. "Gerald!" Suddenly the room was not black. It was light with the Scandinavian blondness of Gerald, the head of him nebulous there above the pink-satin canopy of her dressing table, and, more than that, the drained lakes of his sockets were deep with eyes. Yes, in all their amazing blueness, but queerly sharpened to steel points that went through Hester and through her as if bayonets were pushing into her breasts ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... had reached our last moments. The hot winds of the Desert even reached us; and the fine sand with which they were loaded, had completely obscured the clearness of the atmosphere. The sun presented a reddish disk; the whole surface of the ocean became nebulous, and the air which we breathed, depositing a fine sand, an impalpable powder, penetrated to our lungs, already parched with a burning thirst. In this state of torment we remained till four in the afternoon, when a breeze from the north-west brought us some relief. Notwithstanding the privations ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... days that nebulous mass of whirling particles—the disorderly children—began to take definite form. The children seemed to begin to find their own way; in many of the objects they had at first despised as silly playthings, they began to discover a novel interest, and, as a result of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... industries, the old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.E. Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the Premier of Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the minority as all masters of majorities are. Clearly—it was Gouin's main ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... frequent amongst the Discomycetes, and which are sometimes called by the same name. The sporidia are at first a little smaller than when mature, and are surrounded by mucilage. After this period the sporidia lose their nebulous granulations, whilst still preserving their nucleus; their outlines are distinct, and, amongst the true Ascobolei, commence acquiring a rosy colour, the first intimation of maturity. This colour manifests itself ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... country appeared, at that moment, like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses. Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to have grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the Pyrenees, one felt something soaring ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... the "Jerry-builder" had no being. But where, among them all, might be found such another parlour as this at Dapplemere, with its low, raftered ceiling, its great, carved mantel, its panelled walls whence old portraits looked down at one like dream faces, from dim, and nebulous backgrounds. And where might be found two such bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, quick-footed, deft-handed Phyllises as the two buxom maids who flitted here and there, obedient to their mistress's word, or gesture. And, lastly, where, in all ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... spirited engagements with his wife did these turbulent fears rise to the surface. She complained that he seemed nervous, that she couldn't understand why he did not want to "drop in at the Littlefields'" for the evening. He tried, but he could not express to her the nebulous facts of his rebellion and punishment. And, with Paul and Tanis lost, he had no one to whom he could talk. "Good Lord, Tinka is the only real friend I have, these days," he sighed, and he clung to the child, played floor-games with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... friend, should utter the word than which nothing is more sacred. "Let there be light, and there was light"—a ripple of light, and a flash, then the darkness broke and dispersed from the face of the waters. It was a trumpet-call of words bringing drama into a nebulous creation. Let the Word break up our night and let us not only grant, but avow the conviction it brings us, no matter what the consequence. Let us ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Nations. An arrangement was also proposed by which the city was to be administered by Italy, while the Yugoslavs should have a guarantee of access to the sea. These negotiations were still in a nebulous state, but certain proposals were going to be put into force which were suggested by the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry. With French, American, Italian and British representatives this commission had ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... from it to innumerable crimes to secure its fruits with fluctuating fortunes and perils, to his final fall on the field of battle. Such a tragic exhibition resembles a comet's course, which, hardly visible at first, and revealing itself only to the astronomic eye, appears at a nebulous distance in the heavens, but soon soars with unheard-of and accelerating rapidity towards the central point of our system, scattering dismay among the nations of the earth, till, in a moment, when least expected, with its portentous tail it overspreads the half of the firmament ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... intellectual and physical power which they gave to those who performed them. But these had no rational basis behind them on which they could lean for support. These were probably then just tending towards being affiliated to the nebulous Sa@mkhya doctrines which had grown up among certain sections. It was at this juncture that we find Buddha erecting a new superstructure of thought on altogether original lines which thenceforth opened ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... among the foremost and withal the most mischievous of the old theories which will fall, will be that figment of the imagination—the Nebular Hypothesis.[14] How strangely, and how strongly, has that hypothesis maintained its ground, even after nebulous masses have been resolved into clusters of stars. If gravity be the result of retro-acting forces, there could be no element of attraction in the flimsy gaseous particles whereby they might be drawn together. If gravity be the result of retro-acting forces, then must those ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... regard to the issues of this war. We have confounded causes and occasions and purposes and incidents until it has become almost impossible for any considerable number of us to form a sound and correct judgment in regard to it. But we shall emerge from that nebulous condition. We are beginning to see more clearly now, and it would not surprise me greatly if the means used for producing our confusion would some day come back, if not to plague the consciences, at least to foil the purposes ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... line of the circle grew nebulous, and Colwyn was fast falling asleep through sheer weariness, when a slight sharp sound, like that made by turning a key in a lock, brought him back to wide-eyed wakefulness. He sat up in bed, listening with strained ears, feeling for the box of matches at his ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... nucleus—the sun which in far-off ages to come would be the giver of light and heat, of life and beauty to worlds unborn, to planets which were now only little eddies of atoms whirling in that ocean of nebulous flame. ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the nickering, nebulous crimson, God has set ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... of themselves for their open-mindedness, the questing lovers were of the same purpose as at the beginning of their inquiry. He still felt the urge to take up his pilgrimage again, to let the "decent job" and Omaha carry him another stage in his search for the shrouded gods of his nebulous faith. And she still begged for a chance to love, to be needed; still declared that he was ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... on the waters that heaved and swept astern, but without knowing that she saw them, her mind full of such nebulous matter as, condensed, would have made such thoughts as I have set down. And still and ever the water rolled and tossed ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... attained to a clear sanity, to a just sense of values; the romantic blur of his early poetic vision clarifying into the strong definiteness of the Real. Assuredly he could now no longer write those nebulous, elusive word-harmonies. Nor for him the mere aesthetic toying, the dainty piece of colour-work; but poetry that should throb with vitality and humanness. From dream poetry he had passed to dream life. Now that he had won his way to true life, was ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... once with the rise of the science of thermodynamics. In 1854, Helmholtz showed that the supposition of an original fiery condition of the nebulous stuff was unnecessary, since in the mutual gravitation of widely separated matter we had a store of potential energy sufficient to generate the high temperature of the sun and stars. We could scarcely go wrong in attributing the light of the nebulae ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... great warming-pan of a watch. It was drawing near eleven. He fell into a reverie, and rambled slowly up and down the aisle, with his hands behind his back, and his dripping hat in them, swinging nearly to the flags,—now lost in the darkness—now emerging again, dim, nebulous, in the foggy light of the lanterns. When this clerical portrait came near, he was looking down, with gathered brows, upon the flags, moving his lips and nodding, as if counting them, as was his way. The doctor was thinking all the time ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... In the southward, low down and glittering swiftly nearer, were two little patches of nebulous light. And then two more, and then a glow of swiftly driving shapes. Presently he could count them. There were four and twenty. The first fleet of aeroplanes had come! Beyond ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... massed and arranged on some kind of system; but it is only by the help of fanciful analogies that we can treat the mass as a definite object. Such phrases may give hints and suggestions concerning the method of the novelist; the whole affair is too nebulous for more. Even if a critic's memory were infallible, as it can never be, still it would be impossible for him to give a really scientific account of the structure of the simplest book, since in the last resort he cannot lay his finger upon a single one ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... fragmentary, scattered melodies were the wandering, floating, nebulous part of a great whole, that they fully answered the conditions for the production of an harmonious unity which would comprehend the very flower of their essential properties, their most unique beauties," and "might be united in one ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Mountchessington Lawk moved solemnly backward and forward in a warning, funereal manner, as though protesting against some appalling fate. That she was in possession of my apartment, if not my house, I instinctively realized. She sat bolt upright, firm and strong as a Hindoo idol on its altar; a nebulous glare invested her head with a halo, through which bristling hair-pins stuck out in all directions, like lightning-rods with fitfully luminous points. The crystal wall of spectacles that bridged her nose seemed graven with the cabalistic words, "I've got you." ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... and, very probably, a long "Entwickelungsgeschichte" out of a nebular blastema. Who knows how far that amount of likeness among sets of minerals, in virtue of which they are now grouped into families and orders, may not be the expression of the common conditions to which that particular patch of nebulous fog, which may have been constituted by their atoms, and of which they may be, in the strictest sense, ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... blind to the trend of events. After the fall of Tsingtao and the subsequent complications with Japan, which so greatly served to increase the complexities of a nebulous situation, certain lines of thought insensibly developed. That the influential classes in China should have desired that Germany should by some means rehabilitate herself in Europe and so be placed in a position to chastise a nation that for twenty years had brought nothing ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... flush of morn Rosendo departed for the hills. The emerald coronels of the giant ceibas on the far lake verge burned softly with a ruddy glow. From the water's dimpling surface downy vapors rose languidly in delicate tints and drew slowly out in nebulous bands across the dawn sky. The smiling softness of the velvety hills beckoned him, and the pungent odor of moist earth dilated his nostrils. He laughed aloud as the joyousness of youth surged again through his veins. The village still slumbered, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are the looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic, miraculous moonshine, These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... thus appear where nothing had been seen previously. Again, a similar effect might be produced by a dark body, or a star too faint to be seen, being heated to incandescence by plunging in its course through a nebulous mass of matter, of which there are many examples ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... perhaps not the least dangerous part of it, that it has an increasing or multiplying power of its own. The desire to do increases the power to do; and desire and power united find new ways for the exercise of strength. Up to now Stephen's inclination towards Leonard had been vague, nebulous; but now that theory showed a way to its utilisation it forthwith began to become, first definite, then concrete, then substantial. When once the idea had become a possibility, the mere passing of ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... star holds its fixed position, and the Great and the Little Bear, dipping toward the ocean wave, but not yet dipping in it, pursue their nightly revolutions. Long after sunset, and long before sunrise, night after night, the faint, nebulous gleam of the zodiacal lights stretches up toward the zenith. The shortness of the twilight frequently leaves the fugacious planet, Mercury, so seldom seen at the north, in distinct view. While Venus not merely casts a shadow in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... an eminent man of science, himself an eye-witness of the great meteoric shower on the American continent, after carefully collecting and comparing facts, proposed the following theory: The meteors of November 13th, 1833, emanated from a nebulous body which was then pursuing its way along with the earth around the sun; that this body continues to revolve around the sun in an elliptical orbit, but little inclined to the plane of the ecliptic, and having its aphelion ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... views expressed in the personal letter to King would have been favoured with the imprint "de l'Imprimerie Imperiale." Peron's anthropological studies among Australian aboriginals led him to conclusions totally at variance with the nebulous "state of nature" theories of the time, which pictured the civilised being as a degenerate from man unspoiled by law, government, and convention. The tests and measurements of blacks which he made, and compared with those of French and English people, showed him that even physically ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... neither moved nor changed its regular deep breathing, and La Mothe slipped past noiselessly, seeking anew for the promised signal. And midway to the well of the stairs, where faint murmurings told of sleepless life even in ill-lit, ill-guarded Amboise, he found it—a nebulous dusky cross, broader than long, stretching its shadowy arms upon the flags, and at his first low tap on the panel the door was softly opened and ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... looked behind and around her, and there were the grey levels of ordinary existence; she looked below her, and there was the deep; she was going into the darkness of it, swiftly, helplessly, blown on by the wind of vanity. She saw no darkness for the light before her—a nebulous light; but it dazzled her like the sun ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Uranus now revolves. No planet was then in existence. The solar nebula was endowed with a general movement of rotation in the direction west to east. As it cooled it could not fail to experience a gradual condensation, and in consequence to rotate with greater and greater rapidity. If the nebulous matter extended originally in the plane of its equator, as far as the limit where the centrifugal force exactly counterbalanced the attraction of the nucleus, the molecules situate at this limit ought, during ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the ideas to which they are applied. His pages are frequently as chaotic as those of Wagner's music; leaf after leaf may be turned over in the despairing search for a single crystallized idea. Fiery sparks, flying meteors, inchoate masses of nebulous matter are around us, but no glass in our possession can resolve them into ordered orbs of thought and beauty. If a man have anything to say, why not say it in clear, terse, vigorous English, or why use worlds of vigorous words to say nothing. Some years ago, one of Browning's books ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "is not the true deluge. The Arctic ice-cap is melting, and the frozen soil is turning into a sponge in consequence of the heat of friction developed in the air by the inrush of nebulous matter. The aqueous vapor, however, has not yet touched the earth. It will begin to manifest its presence within a few days, and then the globe will drink water at every pore. The vapor will finally condense ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... affiliated than cognate. He has a tremendous, though ill-assorted vocabulary. His prose is jolting, rambling, tumid, invertebrate. An "arrant artist," as Mr. Brownell calls him, he lacks formal sense and the diffuseness and vagueness of his supreme effort—the Lincoln burial hymn—serves as a nebulous buffer between sheer over-praise and serious criticism. He contrives atmosphere with facility, and can achieve magical pictures of the sea and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for me his most spontaneous offering. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into the gathering evening. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... avoid its glare. The nebula is exceedingly faint, and we can be satisfied if we see it simply as a hazy spot, although with much larger telescopes it has appeared at least half a degree broad. Tempel saw several centers of condensation in it, and traced three or four broad nebulous streams, one of which decidedly ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... apparently new art, but Art itself. In view of this, all modern arts, as arts of luxury which have degenerated through having been insulated, have become almost worthless. And the same applies to the nebulous and inconsistent reminiscences of a genuine art, which we as modern Europeans derive from the Greeks; let them rest in peace, unless they are now able to shine of their own accord in the light of a new interpretation. The last hour has come for a good many things; ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. But it's true what I was saying. I am afraid ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous moonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine, These that we feel in the blood ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... great peaks and small, lone sentinels and groups and councils of mighty Titans. And from the tip of every peak, swaying, undulating, flaring out broadly against the azure sky, streamed gigantic snow-banners, miles in length, milky and nebulous, ever waving lights and shadows and flashing silver from ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... designate a definite sequence of ideas, i.e., in a logical order. "Metamorphosis, says Hegel, belongs to the Idea as such since its variation alone is development. Rational speculation must get rid of such nebulous concepts as the evolution of the more highly developed animal organisms from ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... heart warm toward the grizzled old warrior as he, dropping the nebulous matter of Kumari, said: "And to think, Captain Sahib, that but for the Gulab we would have slain you as the murderer of Amir Khan. As a Patan, even if I had wished it, I could not have fended the tulwars from your body. And you were a brave man, such as a Pindari loves; rather than ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... admirably with the warm bloom of her neck and face. The furthermost candle on the piano comes immediately in a line with her head, and half invisible itself, forms the accidentally frizzled hair into a nebulous haze of light, surrounding her crown like an aureola. Her hands are in their place on the keys, her lips parted, and trilling forth, in a tender diminuendo, the closing words ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... hope and fortitude into the challenging field of literature. And from the first, however ignorant and unkempt the effort, he wrote a kind of literature, for he buckled to no work that he knew, and was forever striving after an ideal (nebulous, indescribable, and far) of his own, and that is literature. Go to those who have wrought for—forever (without, of course, knowing it) and those who have wrought earnestly for the day, and these things you will find ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... with the tragedies of real life is that they are never clear-cut. It takes art to weave a selvage about them or fit them into a frame. But in reality they're as ragged and nebulous as wind-clouds. The days drag on into weeks, and the weeks into months, and life on the surface seems to be running on, the same as before. There's the same superficial play of all the superficial old forces, but in the depths are dangers and ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... ill-adapted, and homophony reestablishes the equilibrium. The irritations of the external world, therefore, furnish the material for the construction of organisms. I confess to having been converted by Semon to this way of conceiving the heredity of acquired characters. Instead of several nebulous hypotheses, we have only one—the nature of mnemic engraphia. It is for the future to discover its origin in ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... with wild caprice in the midst of this nebulous mass of fourteen hundred thousand times the volume of the earth into which it will one day be condensed, and carried forward amongst the planetary bodies. My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... and I both felt at his attitude of unemotional superiority towards all the world. Some people may think it almost a pity that the lady cannot deal similarly with Mr. SHEPPARD himself in just reprisal for his long-winded and nebulous way of talking about Anti-Christ and Armageddon, and for his revolting incidents of murder and insanity introduced without any excuse of necessity. The book contains a considerable element of lively if undiscriminating humour, but its insistence on the gruesome is so unfortunate that unless ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... rate, she was married to William Scarp, a fellow-clerk in Minot Brothers—wholesale wool. Addie represented that Mr. Scarp was of excellent Southern blood from somewhere in North Carolina. It is needless to enter into that nebulous question. He was earning thirty dollars a week with Minot Brothers when they became engaged and was a few years younger than his bride. The firm gave him a five-dollar increase of salary on his marriage, old Savage remarking facetiously that he believed in rewarding courage. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... for the Count's return, and for a long time sat doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice that there were some quaint little specks floating in the rays of the moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way. I watched them with a sense of soothing, and a sort of calm stole over me. I leaned back in the embrasure in a more comfortable position, so that I could enjoy more ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... sinners and the abolition of hell, was rejected by Schiller, who later characterized the song as a 'bad poem'. The 'Song to Joy' sprang from noble sentiment and has the genuine lyric afflatus; but its author had not yet emerged from that nebulous youthful sentimentalism according to which joy, sympathy, love, friendship, virtue, happiness, God, were all very much the same thing. And the thought is a trifle incoherent. If the good Spirit above the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... was no dweller in that darkness, the terrible voice of God drove it far away from the eyes of men—Heaven was thundering as if it would have smashed this nebulous star of ours here below into fragments. Who could sleep ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... a French paper published in Cairo, and London papers, the "Times," the "Morning Post." Isaacson bought two or three, vaguely. It was but rarely he felt vague, but now, as he sipped his tea, his excitement was linked with something else, that seemed misty and nebulous, yet not free from a sort of enchantment. By the railing, before and beneath him, a world of many of his dreams—his nargeeleh dreams—flowed by. The abruptness of his decision to come—that made half the enchantment of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the child (which argues that no one else has cared much about her salvation) we should not be disqualified for guardianship on the sole ground that we are not related? In such a case the relatives are the last people with whom she would be safe. An order may go forth from that nebulous and distant Impersonality, the British Government, to the effect that a certain child is not to be dedicated to gods during her minority. But far away in their villages the people smile at a simplicity ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... idols. The three elements appear in their proper sequence even in the amorphous phantasms which these types first shadow forth, and which are subsequently perfected and embodied in human form. For the consciousness of the external form always exists in the first vague and nebulous conception of the phantasm which gradually appears and formulates itself in the vivid imagination; and hence follows the phenomenal vest, which, as usual, generates the corresponding subject, informed with a causative ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... be regarded as a fanciful figure: it is not a nebulous hope which is to be realised at some indefinitely remote period, thousands of years hence; nor is it a new species (in the Darwinian sense) of which we can know nothing, and which it would therefore be ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... harbour. The stiff frozen plumes of ghostly goldenrod stand up pale and powdery along the way. How many tints of brown and fawn and buff in the withered grasses—some as feathery and translucent as a gauze scarf, as nebulous as those veilings Robin Herrick was so fond of—his mention of them gives an odd ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... over the edge. Seizing us by the crown-tuft of hair upon our shaven head, he plants the foamy bunch of fibres full in our face. The world vanishes; sight, hearing, smell, taste (unless we open our mouth), and breathing, are cut off; we have become nebulous. Although our eyes are shut, we seem to see a blank whiteness; and, feeling nothing but a soft fleeciness, we doubt whether we be not the Olympian cloud which visited lo. But the cloud clears away before strangulation begins, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... for you. I will be near you always." Here was another inspiration. For three years or more he had been thinking of her as dead. Or rather he had thought of her in that nebulous, undefined fashion in which we consider the dead; the slumberous people who forget everything, who see nothing; who, if they exist at all, are like stones upon the beach rolled to and fro blind and senseless, not of their own desire, but by the waves of ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... Under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our Professor has now shrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nevertheless progressive, and growing: for how can the 'Son of Time,' in any case, stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the Paris photographs depicted a series of nebulous bars on either side of Merope, and a curious streak extending like a finger-post from Electra towards Alcyone . . . Streamers and fleecy masses of cosmical fog seem almost to fill the spaces between the stars, as clouds choke a mountain valley. The chief points of ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to pack into ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of Chemistry. We have seen that heat lies at the basis of chemical as well as of physical changes. By the loss of heat, or perhaps by the change of potential into kinetic energy, in a nebulous parent mass, planets were formed, capable of supporting living organisms. Heat changes solids to liquids, and liquids to gases; it resolves compounds, or it aids chemical union. In every chemical ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... reality been carefully designed by the French manipulator of underground wires. Louis Delgado he already knew, and held in contempt, yet Louis was the only possible instrument for use in converting certain vague possibilities into definite realities. Changing the nebulous into the concrete; shifting the dotted line of a frontier from here to there on a map; changing the likeness that adorned a coin or postage-stamp: these were things to which Monsieur Jusseret lent himself with the same zest that actuates ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... did it in the approved German manner. Germany would be forever disgraced if any philosopher took up a new position about anything without going back to the first beginnings of the orderly universe in nebulous matter, and showing that from that time on to the discovery of the latest design in tin kettles everything that happened simply went to prove his ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... light so little that it was difficult to see their designs, even when the sun shone full into that long and wide and lofty chamber. The silver lamp, placed upon the mantel of the vast fireplace, lighted the room so feebly that its quivering gleam could be compared only to the nebulous stars which appear at moments through the dun gray clouds of an autumn night. The fantastic figures crowded on the marble of the fireplace, which was opposite to the bed, were so grotesquely hideous that she dared not fix her eyes upon them, fearing to see them move, or to hear ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... is very simple, David. The earth was once a nebulous mass. It cooled, and as it cooled it shrank. At length a thin crust of solid matter formed upon its outer surface—a sort of shell; but within it was partially molten matter and highly expanded gases. As it continued to cool, what happened? Centrifugal force hurled the particles ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... newspapers the action of two Republican police commissioners, who championed Tammany's right to its share of poll inspectors, pointed unmistakably to a bargain, since it gave Tammany and the Republicans power to select a chairman at each poll.[1662] Evidence of a real alliance, however, was nebulous. The defeat of Robinson meant the election of Cornell, and Republicans naturally welcomed any effort to accomplish it. They greeted Kelly, during his tour of the State, with noise and music, crowded his meetings, and otherwise sought to dishearten ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... in 19 Surrey thinking of Helen, he tried to summon that glorious intoxication again. But he failed. Carl, the college, registration—a thousand thoughts intruded themselves. Already Helen seemed far away, a little nebulous. He wondered why.... ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... Mr. Foley admitted, "which I have always considered a little nebulous. However, we shall see. We have a few ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sweet, dulcet, sweet, saccharine young, juvenile bloody, sanguinary deadly, mortal red, florid bank, riparian hard, arduous wound, vulnerable written, graphic spotless, immaculate sell, mercenary son, filial salt, saline meal, farinaceous wood, ligneous wood, sylvan cloud, nebulous glass, vitreous milk, lacteal water, aquatic stone, lapidary gold, aureous silver, argent iron, ferric honey, mellifluous loving, amatory loving, erotic loving, amiable wedded, hymeneal plow, arable priestly, sacerdotal arrow, sagittal wholesome, salubrious warlike, bellicose timely, temporary fiery, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the sound of their feet flung back hollowly from the walls. They rounded curves, looking eagerly for some sign of habitation, only to be met by the same stretch of deserted track leading off into nebulous gloom. Or perhaps they would see a dim white speck ahead or the black outlines of a rocky spur where the track disappeared and they would comfort themselves with the thought that around that particular curve or beyond that mile-post they would see buildings. But when they had hobbled down the ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... speculations which forcibly remind us how empirical was the notion of the earth's rotundity before the inauguration of physical astronomy by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. We now know that our planet has the only shape possible for such a rotating mass that once was fluid or nebulous, the shape of a spheroid slightly protuberant at the equator and flattened at the poles; but this knowledge is the outcome of mechanical principles utterly unknown and unsuspected in the days of Columbus. He understood that the earth is a round ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... misgiving there were other, rather wild moments, when the draw and pull of his fascination seemed invincible. At those times she realized that, should he open his arms and say, "Come," she would have to go as the iron filing goes to the magnet. To Alexander the whole world of love was in a nebulous and constructive state of ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... is always preceded by the formation in the horizon of a sort of nebulous veil, which slowly ascends to a height of 4, 6, 8, and even to 10. It is towards the magnetic meridian of the place that the sky, at first pure, begins to get brownish. Through this obscure segment, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... demoniac that the divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps there floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rain suggested—and from which broader conceptions proceeded ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... had left the trees and a few dying gleams were coloring the tops of the tall houses on Carey street, on the east side of the Square, the Ghost showed itself at the window the children had pointed out. It was a figure nebulous and hazy, but undeniably pink. It appeared right at the window, and after standing still for a moment began to wave its long arms with fantastic gestures, and to make other movements which the children interpreted as beckoning ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... Never was a more soul-thrilling vision sent to man to illumine his earthly pathway. There is the kneeling saint with outstretched arms reaching forward to embrace the Christ child, who comes sliding down through the nebulous light from among a host of joyous angels. From the ecstatic look on St. Anthony's face we know that the Child of God has been drawn to earth by the prayerful love in the saint's heart. We feel certain that the open ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... you still awake?" he asked anxiously. "It is not yet late."—"The sky is so clear. I want to look at the stars once more. If you wish you may come with me." At first she remained standing, then he heard her coming after him. When he had directed his telescope to a nebulous star he invited her to look in. She placed herself so awkwardly that he laid his hand on her shoulder and asked her, "What do you see?"—"Oh!" she said, "I see—I see—a large farmhouse, which is burning. It has a thatched roof. Oh!—Everything is burning; the roof is all in ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... from established facts, the conclusion is almost irresistible, that this earth, now so rock-ribbed and solid, so ponderous, so ragged with mountain ranges, and cloud piercing peaks, was once but vapor, floating without form through limitless space, drifting as mere nebulous matter among the older creations of God. However this may be, it is regarded as quite certain, that time was when ft was entirely void of solidity, void of dry land, with no continent, island, or solid ground, with no ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond |
