"Unwitting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he is being borne unwitting over the Bridge of Care, into the Valley of Love, by Thicket Perilous, clean through the Waters of Anger to where the white road curls over that grey upland, and we can see it no more. As well for Anthony that ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... He had waited for something to come to pass. It had come. Like an Indian stealing horses he had skulked into the recesses of the canyons. He had found Oldring's retreat; he had killed a rustler; he had shot an unfortunate girl, then had saved her from this unwitting act, and he meant to save her from the consequent wasting of blood, from fever and weakness. Starvation he had to fight for her and for himself. Where he had been sick at the letting of blood, now he remembered it in grim, cold calm. And as he lost that softness ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... trying to shift the responsibility on Herod Antipas, he washed his hands, to show that it was no affair of his own, and gave the Victim up to the murderers. They chose the most shameful death of Roman slaves, that they might show their hatred and contempt, unwitting that each act and each word had been foretold and foreshown in their own Law and Prophets. For six hours He hung on His Cross, while the sun was dark, and awe crept on the most ignorant hearts. Then came the cry, "It is finished;" and ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... his shade thy floor still darken? dost thou still, despairing, hearken To that deep sepulchral utterance like the oracles of yore? In the same place is he sitting? Does he give no sign of quitting? Is he conscious or unwitting when he answers "Nevermore?" ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... consummate love-making, with all the base intent of betrayal, than this cavalier seduction of Michael by the elderly, six- quart ship's steward. When Michael, not entirely unwitting of the snub of the man's lack of interest, stirred restlessly with a threat to depart, he had ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... which has, for forty years, been the subject of parliamentary appeals in the country where it took place. The recent death of the widow of the unhappy sufferer excites a fresh interest in her wrongs, so strangely left unredressed by the very government that was the unwitting cause of them.] ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... prejudices so strong, and of prepossessions so deeply rooted, he paused. Then, "Why?" he repeated. "Can you ask me when you know how many a life as young as yours—and I take you to be scarcely, sir, in your twenties—has been forfeit for a thoughtless word, an unwitting touch, a look; when you know how many a bride has been widowed as soon as wedded, how many a babe orphaned as soon as born? And for ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Earl's dark scheme was cleared up to Wilton's eyes in a moment; and the secret of his own fate was only given to him in conjunction with an insight into that black and base transaction, of which he had been made an unwitting tool. ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... the increasing reprobation in the Church itself of the profound though doubtless unwitting immoralities of RECONCILERS. The castigation which followed the exploits of the greatest of these in our own time—Mr. Gladstone, at the hands of Prof. Huxley—did much to complete a work in which such eminent churchmen as Stanley, Farrar, Sanday, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... ever will come to you, Anne," said Gilbert, who could not connect the idea of sorrow with the vivid, joyous creature beside him, unwitting that those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths, and that the natures which enjoy most keenly are those which also ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... knew my mother, for she died in giving me birth; and my father, who adored her living, and revered her memory, was some years older before he fully forgave me for being the unwitting cause of her premature departure from this world. And in this I could sympathise with him as soon as I came to years of understanding, for she was not only, as everybody who had known her asserted, of a most amiable and loveable disposition, but—as ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... that she and Arthur lived otherwise than happily together. But, if all tales were true, she had no reason to regard him as a very faithful husband or a blameless man. She may not have known (for nobody but Merlin apparently did know) the early and unwitting incest of the King and his half-sister Margause; but the extreme ease with which he adopted her own treacherous foster-sister, the "false Guinevere," and his proceedings with the Saxon enchantress Camilla, were very strong "sets off" to her own conduct. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... The shaking bogs and morasses were to become solidified, and the waters that permeated them to retreat into well defined chains of ponds and lagoons. This the first explorer could not foresee, he was disheartened by what he found, and unwitting of the change that was to follow he gave a hostile verdict. But although it did not fall to his lot to trace out the great system of the Murray watershed, he had, at any rate, the proud satisfaction of achieving the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... to every lip. The Battery Major still crimsons with wrath at the thought of him, and the Observing Officer remembers bitterly the long, uncomfortable hours he spent, perched up in a tree a hundred yards or so from the German lines. And this is how Archibald Smith was the unwitting cause of so much anger to the battery, and the saver of many ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... and unwitting fashion, he found himself, an hour later, sitting on the string-piece of the Oakland city wharf and leaning his aching head against a friendly timber. From where he sat he could look down upon the decks of a number of small sailing-craft. Quite a crowd ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... of our spies, who will conduct you to the cavern in which he lies concealed. Of course I could have him seized at once if I chose, but I have a deeper game to play, and want to make Ravoninohitriniony an unwitting instrument. It seems that more of the people in the palace are Christians than I knew of. It has come to my ears that some of these intend going stealthily to the cave to meet Ravoninohitriniony, for they are fond of this ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... this third volume is that our heroes are no longer united. Though inseparable in their youth, now Aramis, with the unwitting Porthos in tow, is plotting against the king, who D'Artagnan has sworn with his life to defend. Athos, once the most upright defender of nobility, is now forced to break his sword before his monarch, and renounce the sacred vow he pledged with ...
— Dumas Commentary • John Bursey
... of her disillusionment, Helen was nevertheless exalted with the fierce ecstasy of power, with the knowledge that justice would at last be rendered. It would be her triumph and her expiation that she, who had been the unwitting tool of this miserable clique, would be the one through whom restitution was made. She arose with her eyes gleaming and ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... seemed to Ford that it was clearly his duty to make this fight against the grafters in the Denver management. North deserved no consideration, and while Mr. Colbrith was honest enough, his blind prejudice and narrow mentality made him North's unwitting accessory. Three months earlier Ford would not have hesitated; but in the interval a woman had come between to obscure all the points of view. A fight to the death against the Colbrith administration meant the antagonizing of the Adairs—of Alicia, ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... credit Jiro with the death of Sir Alan Hume-Frazer, nor even with complicity in the crime. The Japanese had acted as the unwitting tool of a stronger personality, and the little man's brain was even at this moment considering fresh aspects of the affair not previously ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... splendid joke if the dog of a Brahmin who persistently insulted him—even after he had been shown his error and ignorance—should be the unwitting means of his return to Aden—where a Somali gentleman is recognized. There is no harm about a Jail as such. Far from it. A jail is a wise man's paradise provided by fools. You have excellent and plentiful food, a roof against the sun, unfailing water supply, clothing, interesting occupation, and ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... whitened with coral lime, or arranged quarterly red and white, and their noses decorated with rings, which were their nearest approach to a pocket, as they served for the suspension of fish-hooks, or any small article. A radiate arrangement of skewers from the nose, in unwitting imitation of a cat's whiskers, had even been known. A few days taught dressing and eating in a civilized fashion; and time, example, and the wonderful influence of the head of the mission, trained these naturally intelligent boys into much that was hopeful. Dickie, who had been often at ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... belief—shared by the representatives of a number of humiliated nations—that greed of new markets was at the bottom of what purported to be a policy of pure humanitarianism. Some of the delegates were currently supposed to be the unwitting instruments of elusive capitalistic influences. Possibly they would have been astonished were they told this: Great Britain was suspected of working for complete control of the Baltic and its seaboard in order to oust the Germans from the markets of that territory and to have potent ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... look so pityingly as you describe, and bless me as I was praying, unwitting of his presence?" repeated she, with a look that searched the dame ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Mabinogion principally resides in the amiable serenity of the Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay, ever in suspense between a smile and a tear. We have in them the simple recital of a child, unwitting of any distinction between the noble and the common; there is something of that softly animated world, of that calm and tranquil ideal to which Ariosto's stanzas transport us. The chatter of the later mediaeval French and German imitators can give ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Major's heart thumped painfully, then the confusion of the unwitting eavesdropper compelled him to make his presence known. He did so with that fine discrimination and artful delicacy he summoned in times ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... curiously better. She has been talking awhile to her daughter and her voice has a latent strength that surprises one, and we have been unwitting listeners to a most remarkable story. Did you ever suspect that she might not be the ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... important thing is to develop the abstract viewpoint, since any attempt to prejudge results can only mean disaster. And it has been proved many times that a man with a certain interest will make many unwitting errors to shape an observation or experiment in favor of his interest. No, we could have ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... and spake: "And where now is your lyre?" The knight with both hands hid his changed, white face, Crying aloud, "Lost! lost! forever lost!" Then, gathering strength, he bared his face again Unto the frightened, wondering boy, and rose With hasty fear. "Ah, child, you bring me back Unwitting to remembrance of my grief, For which I donned eternal garb of woe; And yet I owe you thanks for one sweet hour Of healthy human intercourse and peace. 'T is not for me to tarry by the way. Farewell!" The impetuous, remorseful boy, Seeing sharp pain ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... for thy lover's freedom; hast forgotten our lord's temper when he finds I have so disgraced his house by fighting 'neath the very windows? And if the fellow can talk and tells of the marriage, why, I'm undone, and they will begin a search." All the while he led her further up the stair, she unwitting, until they stood fairly inside the threshold and his foot struck against ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... hidden as if of set purpose, fell asleep. As he slept Ghismonda, who, as it happened, had caused Guiscardo to come that day, left her damsels in the garden, softly entered the room, and having locked herself in, unwitting that there was another in the room, opened the door to Guiscardo, who was in waiting. Straightway they got them to bed, as was their wont; and, while they there solaced and disported them together, it so befell that Tancred awoke, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... with the received idea, and, with biassed minds, unconsciously to follow in the wake of public opinion, while professing to lead it. To the best of my belief half the dogmatism of those we daily meet is in consequence of the unwitting practices of this self-deception. Simply let us not talk about what we do not understand, save as learners, and we shall not by ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for funding and recruitment. Money for their operations is transferred surreptitiously through numerous banks, money exchanges, and alternate remittance systems (often known as "hawalas")—some legitimate and unwitting, ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... midst the cherub band? Or dost thou laugh in Paradise, or now Upon the Islands of the Blest art thou? Or in his ferry o'er the gloomy water Does Charon bear thee onward, little daughter? And having drunken of forgetfulness Art thou unwitting of my sore distress? Or, casting off thy human, maiden veil, Art thou enfeathered in some nightingale? Or in grim Purgatory must thou stay Until some tiniest stain be washed away? Or hast returned again to where thou wert ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... points out the strongly heathen character of this part of the epic. Beowulf's end came, so the old tradition ran, from his unwitting ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... not our intention in these words to cast doubt on the immortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief in it. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from the unwitting attacks made on them by many self styled Christian writers in their exaggeration of the practical importance of such a faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing to do with its quantitative contents: our duties rest not on the length, but on the faculties and relations, of our ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... matches,' quickly and deftly metamorphosed to escape the unobservant or untrained eye, but the same, notwithstanding. And now my interest grew apace. I knew that at last we were in the presence of that powerful official who dispensed virgin two-dollar notes to the unwitting foreigner or native; and Adam Camp was ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... fire-worshippers came with a very singular effect on the ear. When a boy, I have often passed through the fire myself on Midsummer eve, and such is still the custom. The higher the flame, the more daring the act is considered: hence there is a sort of emulation amongst the unwitting perpetrators of this Pagan rite. In many places cattle are driven through the fire; and this ceremony is firmly believed to have a powerful effect in preserving them from various harms. I need not say, that amongst the peasantry ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... so. Her very ignorance of what he had dared for her only confirmed his new sense of possession; and, if he could, he would not have marred the pleasure he felt by making her grateful yet, sweet as that might be in its time. Now he liked to keep his knowledge, to have had her unwitting compassion, to hear her pour out her unwitting relief in this laugh, ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... empire was of far greater importance than the establishment of a school, or mission, or any other institution—especially when the post was one which he himself had set about to control. The man's eyes gleamed and the thin lips smiled as his glance rested momentarily upon the figure of the girl—the unwitting, and therefore the more powerful, weapon that chance had placed in his hands ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... the secret purchase of the California timber lands from Trace, he became an unwitting participant in one of the strangest duels known to business history. Newmark opposed to him all the subtleties, all the ruses and expedients to which his position lent itself. Orde, sublimely unconscious, deployed the magnificent ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... week to visit her, they left their weeds at home, came in a close carriage in their gayest attire, and laughed and talked to her blithely with heavy hearts. All about the poor old mother we talked openly and freely of her loss and our pity, and she sat as unwitting as stone of it all. But when we put our mouths to her ear and asked for her son, a beautiful change always dawned upon the leaden countenance. "He has gone away," she invariably smiled,—"gone to a better country, where it is always summer. When I see him again he will be well, quite well." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Regent's Park I equally failed to obtain a sight of her niece. I judged it discreet in all the conditions not to make a third; but this didn't matter, for it was through Adelaide Mulville that the side-wind of the comedy, though I was at first unwitting, began to reach me. I went to Wimbledon at times because Saltram was there, and I went at others because he wasn't. The Pudneys, who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... many blind persons shut them when they sleep. Her sweet unwitting face wore all its ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... painstaking effort, the labour, is quickly forgotten; the blunders, the false quantities in our lives, are treasured up to be flung against our names. We play, but we do not know our parts; we are Oedipus, who has committed unwitting sin, and yet must reap his reward; we are Prometheus who is to be chained to the rock forever, for offending the gods; we are Orestes whom the Eumenides pursue, chasing him down for his guilt. And all the time we vainly ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... lay her discovery before Doctor Sherman. She was certain that with her new-found knowledge, and with her entirely new point of view, they could quickly discover wherein he had been duped—for she still held him to be an unwitting tool—and thus quickly clear up the whole case. But for reasons already known she failed to find him; and learning that he had gone away with Blake, she well knew Blake would keep him out of her reach ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... Socialist sitting at a great Banquet of Men, Sitting with honored leaders of the blind, unwitting Multitude; I saw him there with the writers, editors, painters, men of letters, Legislators and judges, the Leaders of the People, Leaders flushed with the wines of price, eating costly and rare foods, Making loud talk, and boastful, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... and sackless folk of Priam, and alow Proud Ilium lay, and Neptune's Troy was smouldering on the ground, For diverse outlands of the earth and waste lands are we bound, Driven by omens of the Gods. Our fleet we built beneath Antandros, and the broken steeps of Phrygian Ida's heath, Unwitting whither Fate may drive, or where the Gods shall stay And there we draw together men. Now scarce upon the way Was summer when my father bade spread sails to Fate at last. Weeping I leave my fatherland, and out of haven passed 10 Away from fields ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... be blest Full soon in the clear heavenly water, he Sleeps on unwitting of it, his little breast ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... influence; and without acquainting any of his friends of his designs, he took his departure, merely writing to his mother the cause of his sudden flight. In this letter to his parent, as may be imagined, he expatiated on the beauty, grace, accomplishments, and virtues of the unwitting instrument of his expatriation; confessed his undying love with his usual enthusiasm, and expressed his belief in her perfect indifference to his sufferings. He also stated that the lady had accepted the addresses of another; and while he deprecated his inability, through the disparity ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... the men first, the women following when we had done, according to native custom, to the side rooms, where a surprisingly good tiffin had been got ready for us, venison, chickens, French rolls, dulces (sweets), whiskey and soda, Heaven knows what else, to which, all unwitting of our doom, we did full justice. About two miles beyond Tayug lies San Francisco, the initial point of our real mounted journey. The people along this part of the road had simply outdone themselves in the matter of arches, there being one at every ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... echoed, faintly. The only pleasure left her was to raise the envy of those who had hooted her from Thrums, but she paid a price for it. Many a stab she had got from the unwitting Tommy as he repeated the gossip of his new friends, and she only won their envy at the cost of their increased ill-will. They thought she was lording it in London, and so they were merciless; had they known how poor she was and how ill, they would have forgotten ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... marvelous nature. Often his godlike nature is displayed by apparent sloth and indolence on his part, his followers performing miraculous feats while he remains inactive; hence he is reproached for idleness by the unwitting. Sometimes he acts as a transformer, changing the form of mountains and valleys with a step or stroke; sometimes as a culture hero bringing gifts to mankind and teaching them the arts learned from the ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... unwitting victim in a story of incest. Like Oedipus, she has lost her parent-lover by suicide; like him she leaves the scene of the revelation overwhelmed by a sense of her own guilt, "a sacred horror"; like him, she finds a measure of peace as ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... not understand, who lived before you could understand, in an age when great men were only the domestics of great lords—and you, too, servants of the resounding and opulent pride of to-day, eloquent flatterers and magnificent dunces, you unwitting enemies of mankind! You have all sung the laurel wreath without knowing ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... tree! Lo, when a stranger in soft Syrian glooms Shot through with sunset treads the cedar dells, And hears the breezy ring of elfin bells Far down by where the white-haired cataract booms, He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells, Bears thence, unwitting, plunder of perfumes. ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... toward white men. Many prisoners had she rescued. She had even befriended her nation's bitter foe, Deathwind. She had listened to the young missionary with rapture; she had been his savior. And now when she looked into the eyes of this young giant, whose fate had rested on her all unwitting words, she resolved to ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... and the band, With ready zeal and loosened bridle-chains, Rode for his hunting-palace, where they set A goodly banquet underneath the planes, And hung the house with guest-lights, and anon Welcomed the wondering strangers, thereto led Unwitting, by a world of winding paths; Messer Torello, at the inner gate, Waiting to take them in—a goodly host, Stamped current with God's image for a man Chief among men, truthful, and just, and free. Then he, ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... Oh, no! Father hath sett a Stone rolling, unwitting of its Course. It hath prostrated me in the first Instance, and will, I misdoubt, hurt my Mother. Father is bold enow in her Absence, but when she comes back will leave me to face her Anger alone; or else, make such a Stir to shew that he is not governed by a Woman, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... elbow—a position which gives to her countenance a keen inquiring expression, which is rather marked. Standing thus in repose, and yet keenly observant—the greatest sign of impatience at any time[B] a slight, perhaps unwitting motion of the firmly planted right foot—was Florence Nightingale—that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... revolt, unwitting as it was, had fired the imaginations of the Earth people, who in their degradation and despair had come to believe the Mercutian overlords invulnerable. It had been the little spark that touched off a far-reaching train of events. In ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... hideous little mind, he was telling himself—fearful in its latter day casting aside of all such small matters as taste and feeling. People stripped the garments from things in these days. He laughed inwardly at himself and his unwitting "these days." Senile severity mouthed just such phrases. Were they not his own days and the outcome of a past which had considered itself so much more decorous? Had not boldly questionable attitudes been held in those other days? How long was it since the Prince ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... intervenes, and the king and his sister-in-law decide to pick a young lady with whom the king can pretend to be in love, the better to mask their own affair. They unfortunately select Louise de la Valliere, Raoul's fiancee. While the court is in residence at Fontainebleau, the king unwitting overhears Louise confessing her love for him while chatting with her friends beneath the royal oak, and the king promptly forgets his affection for Madame. That same night, Henrietta overhears, at the same oak, De Guiche confessing his love for her to Raoul. The two embark on their ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... And "That I wrought; "but—ah, thou strong-armed Prince!— A better-lessoned mind, knowing the play Of visible things within the world of sense, And how the qualities must qualify, Standeth aloof even from his acts. Th' untaught Live mixed with them, knowing not Nature's way, Of highest aims unwitting, slow and dull. Those make thou not to stumble, having the light; But all thy dues discharging, for My sake, With meditation centred inwardly, Seeking no profit, satisfied, serene, Heedless of issue—fight! They who shall keep My ordinance thus, the wise and ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... her heart told her that she had been the unwitting cause of this new burden which had come upon daddy's mind. Those letters which Janice had never seen—the presence of which she had not even suspected in the secret compartment of the lost treasure-box—had been Broxton Day's ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... dupe than knave, and is therefore to be placed in the same category as the superstitious monks and townspeople on whom Mignon and Barre so successfully imposed. As to the possessed—the mother superior and her nuns—they may one and all be included in a third group as the unwitting tools of Mignon's vengeance. In fine, it is not only possible but entirely reasonable to regard Mignon as a seventeenth-century forerunner of Mesmer, Elliotson, Esdaile, Braid, Charcot, and the present day exponents of hypnotism; and the ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... (With vast results to come for thrice a thousand years,) These recitatives for thee,—my book and the war are one, Merged in its spirit I and mine, as the contest hinged on thee, As a wheel on its axis turns, this book unwitting to itself, Around the idea ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... with unwitting enthusiasm rhapsodized over the shipyard Jake's interest kindled. To get into a shipyard just growing, and spread his doctrines among the men as they came in, to bring off strikes and to play tricks with machinery everywhere, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... never spoke of Manisty. What Lucy's attitude implied was that she had in some unwitting and unwilling way brought trouble on Eleanor; that she was at Torre Amiata to repair it; and that in general she ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the English Protestants to whom he showed that tomb, situated as it is literally ad limina Apostolorum, waxed eloquent, but, on the other hand, the Irish Catholics whom he told that it contained the bones of the dead Pontiff invariably shook their fists at the ashes of the unwitting, but none the less actual, source of their country's ills. To this I replied by quoting to him a saying of Robert Louis Stevenson, who as a Scot viewed the matter impartially, and who declared "that the Irishman should not love the Englishman ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... part of his missionary life, tells us that in a village the family room was given up to him for the night, and in the morning he found a little son had been born in the stable. He supposed that he had been the unwitting cause of such an event occurring there; but longer acquaintance with the people shows that woman almost invariably resorts to that place in her hour of sorrow, and there she often dies. The number who meet death in this form is ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... keen perceptions that plagued him like a cloud of arrows as he ran, that beauty smote his conscience; her beauty and the worship and protection it deserved from all manhood and most of all from him, whose unhappy, unwitting fortune it was to have ensnared her young heart and brought it to the desperation of an unnatural self-revealment; her uncoveted beauty, uncourted love, unwelcome presence, and hideous peril! Was he not to all these in simplest honor peculiarly accountable? They lanced him ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... de Graville involuntarily drew off from the Saxon's side, as if made suddenly aware that he had grossly demeaned himself in such unwitting familiarity with a ceorl, and a ceorl's son; and he said, with a much more careless accent and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that word can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a dramatic "struggle" the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this description apply very closely to the part played by another great protagonist—Othello to ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... all unwitting; she intended to rally him sweetly. But seventeen is deathly serious at such junctures, and William was in a sensitive condition. He made no reply in words. Instead, he drew himself up (from the waist, that is, because he was sitting) with ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... residence in St. Petersburg, bringing with him some manuscripts that he had written while at school. He had the temerity to publish one, which was so brutally ridiculed by the critics, that the young genius, in despair, burned all the unsold copies—an unwitting prophecy of a later and more lamentable conflagration. Then he vainly tried various means of subsistence. Suddenly he decided to seek his fortune in America, but he was both homesick and seasick before the ship emerged from the Baltic, and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... bitterest of spinsters, influenced, all unwitting, the lives not only of a dog and a curate, but of the entire Cole family, and through them, of endless generations both of dogs and men as yet unborn. Miss Maple, sitting in her little yellow-curtained parlour drinking, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... log, and died the unwitting possessor of that very commission for which he had toiled throughout a life of hardship and danger. Until now Wilder had made good his quarter of the deck though pressed by a band as fierce and daring ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... came back, bit by bit, and listening to his happiness did much to ease the soreness of my heart—while the light lasted. It was in the night watches that my struggles came—though often some unwitting speech of his would bring back the pain. He took delight in telling me, for example, how for hours at a time I had been in a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he fooled with verses and refused the manual tasks that waited everywhere about the busy city. He might have cleaned the streets or earned a decent living handling garbage in the city scows. But he had preferred to speculate in blackmail and play the badger-game with his wife as an unwitting accomplice. He had hated millionaires, and counted them all criminals deserving spoliation, but he felt that he had sunk ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... continued. "Having explained to myself, in the way I have told you, the ease of my unwitting replenishment of force whenever I was brought low, I set myself to improve on my discovery. I saw before me a prospect of enjoyment of all the delights of life, deeper and more constant than most men ever know,—if I could only ensure to myself with absolute certainty a still more complete and rapid ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... as dusk folded its somber mantle about the meadow, the wolves gathered to feast on the dead horses, till Hazel's nerves were strained to the snapping point. Continually she was reminded of that vivid episode, of which she had been the unwitting cause. Sometimes she would open the door, and from out the dark would arise the sound of wolfish quarrels over the feast, disembodied snappings and snarlings. Or when the low-swimming moon shed a misty glimmer on the open she would peer through a thawed place ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the car slowed down and Pee-wee could feel that it was turning into another road. His unwitting captors were evidently either nervous or sleepy, for they ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... premeditated crime—the unoffending blood thou'dst spilt, The Thunderer on his throne sublime—had shaken at such tremendous guilt. Against the anchorite's sacred head—hadst, knowing, aimed thy shaft accursed, In th' holy Vedas deeply read—thy skull in seven wide rents had burst. But since, unwitting, thou hast wrought—that deed of death, thou livest still, Oh son of Raghu, from thy thought—dismiss all dread of instant ill. Oh lead me to that doleful spot—where my poor boy expiring lay, Beneath ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... despairing, he stood in the cold shadow and looked upon the home that should have been his haven, the wife that should have welcomed him, the child that should have been his comfort. He had banished himself from his home; his wife had forsworn him; his child was blossoming into intelligence unwitting of any father. Wife, and child, and home, were all doing well without him; what madness had tempted him thither? an hour ago, like a fanciful fool, he had thought she might be dead—dead with sad ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Nuta, hied him up with the things required; and though, when he got up, he was winded, for he was corpulent with drinking nought but water, he did Fra Cipolla's bidding by going to the church door and ringing the bells amain. When all the people were gathered about the door, Fra Cipolla, all unwitting that aught of his was missing, began his sermon, and after much said in glorification of himself, caused the confiteor to be recited with great solemnity, and two torches to be lit by way of preliminary ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... of Love in what fashion he * Robbeth heart and soul I had guarded me: But of malice prepense I threw self away * Unwitting of Love what his ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... left the village where the "good minister" lived, far behind, and now we approach a populous town. By our side travels a thoughtful man, all unwitting of his company. It is the Sabbath, and he has been ten miles to hear the gospel preached. No church-going bell has as yet ever gladdened the place which he calls his home. Deep sighs escape from his breast, as he rides ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... an exploration, of which the result, with its measure of weirdness, was for him alone. But, it seems, I was appointed an agent of the unexplainable without my knowledge, and it was simply my misfortune to find my first unwitting commission in the selling ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... first tramp the rooms with unwitting restlessness, halting, it might be, beside his wife to strive to engage her into speech with him; and, failing, would betake himself at length with a heavy sigh to solitude; or, yet, he would sit down to his organ—the new one in the great hall which had been put up since his marriage, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Unwitting perhaps of the fine time afforded by the feeble delays of Mr. Addington, and absorbed in the tissue of plot and counterplot now thickening fast in Paris—the arch-plotter in all of them being himself—the First Consul had ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... as we stood at the open door, "shall, of course, be commensurate to your high authority in this new field. Allow me, now, to thank you most deeply and sincerely for your unwitting aid in my youth. I assure you, Mr. Booth, I have often thought of that day we talked. And I hope to repay you, in some measure, for ...
— With a Vengeance • J. B. Woodley
... advantage of his acquaintance. On this account they are rarely stolen. Even in the daytime they are often dangerous for strangers to approach, and the most of the ill-usage which men receive from their heels arises where unwitting people venture to treat them as they would horses. Mules are much less liable to panic-fear than the most of our domesticated animals, yet, when kept in the herded way, they occasionally become stampeded. Many a soldier of our Civil War, where mules played a large part in ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the present. She had made a new friend. And at the same moment she had found in her—at last—the rival with whom her own knowledge of life had threatened her these many years. A rival so sweet—so unwitting! Alice had read her. She had scarcely yet ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... crown, and quickly placed it On his own unwitting head; But the king and all his princes, In the deed a ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... taunts Chafed me, and in the blindness of his rage Forgot himself so wholly as to strike me. Thus savagely provoked, I drew my sword; He, blind with fury, rushed upon the blade, And perished there by my unwitting hand. ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... just what Melbury had begun to suspect: Fitzpiers had mounted the mare which did not belong to him in mistake for his own—an oversight easily explicable, in a man ever unwitting in horse-flesh, by the darkness of the spot and the near similarity of the animals in appearance, though Melbury's was readily enough seen to be the grayer horse by day. He hastened back, and did what seemed best in the circumstances—got ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... party set off at full speed, all unwitting that four disconsolate maidens were marooned on the farther side of the river, waiting for some faerie boat to ferry them across. For a long time no knight-errant arrived for their relief, but at last, as chance would have it, an urchin came down on to the ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... and the marquis had come back with the partridges that were to make pretence for our quick return to the Prince Rupert. Ben Gillam had disguised as a bush-runner, and the canoe lay ready to launch. Fools and children unconsciously do wise things by mistake, as you know; and 'twas such an unwitting act sprung M. Radisson's plans and let the prize ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... hasten / knight and willing squire, For glad they were at all times / to do their lord's desire, And keen that thus their service / should not be rendered late. Unwitting Lady Gotelinde / ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler |
