"Vacillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... safely trusted him now; but he had forfeited her confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home. Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her family on ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Fleetwood. Lieutenant-General Charles Fleetwood was son-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, and for a time Lord-Deputy of Ireland. He was mainly instrumental in the resignation of Richard Cromwell, but so weak and vacillating that he lost favour with all parties. His name was excepted from the general amnesty, and it was only with great difficulty that, owing to the influence of Lord Litchfield, he escaped with his life. He died in obscurity at Stoke Newington, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... year, I now consider one of the most dangerous men that we have here to the peace and quiet of the city. The leading men of the convention—King, Cutler, Hahn, and others —have been political agitators, and are bad men. I regret to say that the course of Governor Wells has been vacillating, and that during the late trouble he has shown ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... Armstrong, despite his vacillating course the previous year, had never lost sight of his perfectly accurate conviction that Kingston, if not Montreal, was the true objective for the northern army. Convinced that he had been misled in the spring of 1813 by ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... in the labor of our right arm, the cunning of our right hand, or the still creative activity of our thought." Had he only but had the whisper of encouragement from any one he esteemed while in this vacillating mood, that would indeed have been a turning point in his career, but it seemed that a good impulse for Guy Elersley vaticinated infallibly an evil action. The fact that he had tried to vanquish himself by going willingly and ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Russia was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in the class of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second rank. Its monarch, Alexander II., humane and well-meaning, was irresolute and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid of all administrative and organising faculty himself, but so infirm of purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pass out of their ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... with his personal character. It had at first been liberal and just; it became arbitrary and even treacherous. His personal timidity made him at once harsh and vacillating. The heads of the great families, whom he had invited to a banquet, were seized and condemned to death on a charge of conspiracy. But a sudden terror of the possible consequences of his action caused him to relent, and he released his victims just ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Kuyper draws a conventional picture of British policy with regard to the Boers, making it out to be ever greedy of power. The contrary is the truth. A vacillating and timid policy has been England's great mistake in South Africa; it is this very vacillation that has brought ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... superior. Sir Rudolph hesitated whether to go himself at the head of a strong body of men and openly to take her, or to employ some sort of device. It was not that he himself feared the anathema of the church; but he knew Prince John to be weak and vacillating, at one time ready to defy the thunder of the pope, the next cringing before the spiritual authority. He therefore determined to employ some of his men to burst into the convent and carry off the heiress, arranging that he himself, ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... this confused period are so clearly prominent or have such far-reaching results as this; and after young Louis d'Outremer had been called over from England to the throne of France, this vacillating and weak Duke William was murdered by Arnoulf of Flanders at the conference held on the island of Pecquigny in the Somme, as William of Jumieges relates (III. cap. xi. et seq.). His courtiers found upon his body the silver key of the chest that guarded the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... his brief command of an army to prove or disprove the high estimate that had been placed upon his military ability; but after studying the orders and dispatches of Johnston I am compelled to materially modify my views of that officer's qualifications as a soldier. My judgment now is that he was vacillating and undecided in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... king and his parliament. He believed that the royal difficulties would be removed if a policy were adopted with which the people could heartily sympathize, and if the king placed himself at the head of his parliament and led them on. But his advice was neglected by the vacillating and peace-loving monarch, his proffered proclamation was put aside, and a weak, featureless production substituted in its place. Nevertheless the new parliament seemed at first more responsive than might have been looked for. A double subsidy was granted, which was expressly stated to be "not on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... his beliefs—he would not keep them secret—he did not care for unpopularity in the least. His great aim was to fight—at whatever odds— for whatever he felt by dogged conviction. He was often wrong; but never cowardly, never philandering, never vacillating. "I am anti-everything," as he said humorously of himself. And so he was. He was, in a sense, "anti-everything," and though, sometimes through the training of previous environments, sometimes through other reasons, he was ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... say, is going to become a great woman of business. But for that, and—I think—a curious streak of fidelity to her vacillating architect ('How happy could I be with either,' don't you know, he seems to feel—just now they say he is living steadily at Storrington with his wife No. 1, who is ill, poor thing) ... but for that and this, I think Beryl would enjoy a flirtation ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Fifth and sixth, a vacillating, staggering, decrepit creature with wildish white beard and eyes, who had been arrested—incredibly enough—for "rape." With him his son, a pleasant youth quiet of demeanour, inquisitive of nature, with whom we sometimes conversed on the subject ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... France in the year of Arthur Young's journey. The poverty was abject, the relief futile and the hatred of the poor for the rich was inflammatory. George III, slipping into feebleness and insanity, yet jealous of his unconstitutional power, was a vacillating despot, quarrelling with his Commons and his Ministers. Lord Eldon as Chancellor, but with as nearly the control of a Premier as the King would allow, was the staunch upholder of all things that have since been disproved and discarded. Bagehot said of him that ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... grandfather's collection of majolica. The sun shines there always. A long olive-grove secretes the garden from the sea. When you walk in the garden, you know the sea only in blue glimpses through the vacillating leaves. White-gleaming from the bosky shade of this grove are several goddesses. Do you care for Canova? I don't myself. If you do, these figures will appeal to you: they are in his best manner. Do you love the sea? This is not the only house of mine that ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... that general informed him that, having passed the Rhine on the 20th with brilliant success, and taken four thousand prisoners, it would not be long before he joined him. Who, in fact, can say what would have happened but for the vacillating and distrustful policy of the Directory, which always encouraged low intrigues, and participated in the jealousy excited by the renown of the young conqueror? Because the Directory dreaded his ambition they sacrificed the glory ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... vacillating and easily-led and ladylike and shockable. She herself knew that she had no strength of character; and she conscientiously strove to overcome this cardinal defect in a chaperon, by stubbornly opposing whatever her charges ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... to the altar and began mass. Being still young and having come straight from the seminary bench to the priesthood, Father Yakov had not yet formed a set manner of celebrating the service. As he read he seemed to be vacillating between a high tenor and a thin bass; he bowed clumsily, walked quickly, and opened and shut the gates abruptly. . . . The old sacristan, evidently deaf and ailing, did not hear the prayers very distinctly, and this very often led to slight misunderstandings. Before Father ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... only the radiant young creature in flowing muslin, with the narrowest sash in the room, and no ornament but a necklace of large pearls and her own vivid beauty. She had altered her mind about coming, with apologies for her vacillating disposition so penitent and disproportionate that her indulgent and unsuspecting mother was really quite amused. Alfred was not so happy as to know that she had changed her mind with his note. Perhaps even this knowledge could have added little to that exquisite moment, when, unhoped for, she passed ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... understand this somewhat vacillating position on the whole to favor democracy, but only a few pages further on Kautsky explains his reasons for opposing the initiative and referendum, and we see that when the point of action arrives, ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... course they ought to pursue. Finally, they virtually pronounced an opinion on the victory by rewarding the officers who achieved it; but they marred this action by despatching Admiral Sir John Gore to the Mediterranean, for the purpose of collecting information. By this vacillating conduct they gave their opponents an opportunity of taunting them with inconsistency. Before parliament met, however, and therefore before the question could be debated, the administration of Lord Goderich had become dissolved. At ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Porte had insisted. And lastly, the passage of the Dardanelles by our fleet, which more than any overt act made war inevitable, was ordered by the Government at home against Lord Stratford's counsel. Between panic-stricken statesmen and vacillating ambassadors, Lord Clarendon on one side, M. de la Cour on the other, the Eltchi stands ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... Pretorius was Commandant General in Natal, Potgieter Chief Commandant in the allied Western Districts. The legislative power was in the hands of a Volksraad of twenty-four members, whose ways were more vacillating and erratic than advantageous. "Every man for himself and God for all" seemed to be the convenient motto of this assembly, except perhaps on urgent occasions, when Pretorius and Potgieter were called upon as joint dictators to settle some knotty problem ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... side, the left, heavily grated loopholes, sunk in the walls, admitted a light which must be that of evening, for crimson bars at intervals rested on the flags of the pavement. What a terrible silence! Yet, yonder, at the far end of that passage there might be a doorway of escape! The Jew's vacillating hope was tenacious, for ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... become an obsession—their weakness. They are thorough Frenchmen and their critical sense must be unbridled. They love their ideas and their systems. They would doubtless not hesitate to advise Foch. Personally, if I were Foch, I should turn a deaf ear. But if I were a timid, vacillating, pessimistic spirit, still in doubt as to the final outcome, I should most certainly seat myself at a neighbouring table and listen to their conversation that I might come away imbued with a little of their patience, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... turned out to be only the prelude to a greater event—an event which must be reckoned as the foundation stone of the British Empire in India. It sprang from the character of Sirajuddaula. That prince was a cruel despot, but weak-willed, vacillating, and totally unable to keep a friend. One day he would strut in some vainglorious semblance of dignity; the next he would engage in drunken revels with the meanest and most dissolute of his subjects. He insulted his commander-in-chief, Mir Jafar: he offended ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there came to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had a good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness since the choice had been made had done much to render the first year in Chicago agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had seemed ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Octavius had free use of the sea for his supplies, while the heavier fleet of Antony lay idle in harbor. Nevertheless, Octavius did not dare to risk all on a land battle, and conducted his campaign in a characteristically timid and vacillating manner which should have made it easy for Antony to take the aggressive and win. But the famous lieutenant of Julius Caesar was no longer the man who used to win the devotion of his soldiers by his courage and audacity. He was broken by debauchery ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... been vacillating between two colleges, but finally he had settled on Yale. His parents had left him his choice, and ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... It is no phantasm. An intestine war, Of all the most unnatural and cruel, Will burst out into flames, if instantly We do not fly and stifle it. The Generals Are many of them long ago won over; 115 The subalterns are vacillating—whole Regiments and garrisons are vacillating. To foreigners our strong holds are entrusted; To that suspected Schafgotch is the whole Force of Silesia given up: to Tertsky 120 Five regiments, foot and horse—to Isolani, To Illo, Kinsky, Butler, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... an inquiry into the conduct of ministers with regard to the recently threatened hostilities with Russia. His animadversion upon the vacillating and ruinous measures of government were characterized by that fearless intrepidity, truth, energy, and eloquence, which have distinguished his political career. The motion for the inquiry was lost, though the powerful remarks of the mover drew from Mr. Pitt the following memorable confession: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 555, Supplement to Volume 19 • Various
... the young man, certainly, for he was strong and industrious, while the abbe was aged and weak; besides, his mind was too vacillating to allow him ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and counter-plots, the machinations and subterfuges that follow that Miss BOWEN justifies her title. Certainly The Cheats establishes her in my mind as our first writer of historical fiction. The character-drawing is admirable (especially of poor weak-willed vacillating Jaques, a wonderfully observed study of the STUART temperament). More than ever, also, Miss BOWEN might here be said to write her descriptions with a paint-brush; the whole tale goes by in a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... maintained a profound silence, which struck us as very singular; but then we did not know that a new ruler was on his way to Australia, and that the home government had got most heartily tired of the vacillating policy of Mr. Latrobe, and that the several gentlemen who surrounded him were aware of it, and were all ready to pay court to the rising star, as soon as he set ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... lumbago; excellent complaint for scoundrels; excellent! well, the boy—his great-aunt, you understand!—refuses to leave her. Says she likes to have him read to her! Preposterous! I insisted, Elizabeth Beadle insisted, with tears in her eyes; tears, sir! I mean my dear! Boy immovable; Gibraltar vacillating beside him; tottering, sir, on its foundations. I had to come away and leave him, perfectly happy, reading Tennyson to Elizabeth Beadle. Ask somebody else to coerce a boy like that; Thomas Ferrers is not the man for it. ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... separated from the Catholics than from a large party of those of their own co-religionists. These form, in a certain sense, the clerical wing of Protestantism. Hence in the Netherlands there are Catholics and Calvinists on one side, and on the other a liberal party, while between the two there hovers a vacillating legion that does not allow either side to gain an absolute supremacy. The chief point of contention between the extreme sections is the question of primary instruction, and this reduces itself, on the part ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... was vain of his accomplishments admits of no doubt. That he also sometimes lacked moral courage and was vacillating seems also true. But he was incorruptible in a corrupt age; above reproach when impure life was the rule; and when treason was common, he remained a firm patriot. His celebrated "Philippics" were delivered against practices which indicated the approaching ruin of the republic. That ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... brought about the downfall of Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only begins to ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... of the gloom, weighing upon the country about the days of Shiloh, the Confederate Congress moved on a point of vital import to its cause. Weak and vacillating as that body had proved; lacking as it was in decision, to force its views on the executive, or to resist popular clamor, backed by brutum fulmen of the press—a moment had come when even the blindest of legislators could not ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... treatment of their companion had left them in no humour for appreciating its beauty. When the sun had sunk, the horizon had remained of a slaty-violet hue. But now this began to lighten and to brighten until a curious false dawn developed, and it seemed as if a vacillating sun was coming back along the path which it had just abandoned. A rosy pink hung over the west, with beautifully delicate sea-green tints along the upper edge of it. Slowly these faded into slate again, and the night had come. It was but ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... early in the afternoon of Wednesday when Mr. Hastings, responding to the prolonged ringing of his telephone, took the receiver off the hook and found himself in communication with the sheriff of Alexandria county. This was not the vacillating, veering sheriff who had spent nearly four days accepting the hints of a detective or sitting, chameleon-minded, at the feet of a designing woman. Here was an impressive and self-appreciative gentleman, one who delighted in his own deductive ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... in the easiest way possible to Justina, "I shall ask our new clergyman to take Emily in to luncheon, and Mr. Mortimer to take you." Justina knew now that the game was up; she was not quick of perception, but neither was she vacillating. When once she had decided on any course, she never had the discomfort of wishing afterwards that she had done otherwise. There was undoubtedly a rumour going about to the effect that John Mortimer liked her, and was "coming forward." No one knew better than herself ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... back to London from France on October 20th, the Cabinet was still vacillating as ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... letter to Dr. Barnes the writer says: "My health still improves. There is one peculiarity about my will-power; it is so vacillating, not reliable and firm as before. Still I feel ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... to deal with Cicero in no vacillating spirit, but loudly exultant and loudly censorious. Within the two years following his return he made a series of speeches, in all of which we find the altered tone of his mind. There is no longer that belief in the ultimate success of justice, and ultimate triumph ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... been heard of this Boxer business it must cease at once. Is not the South African War still proceeding, and has England not enough troubles without this additional one? It is almost pathetic, this peremptory order from a vacillating Foreign Office that never knows its own mind—this Canute-like bidding of the angry waves of human men to stand still at once and be no more heard of. People in Europe will never quite understand the East, for the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... personality of Wilhelm II had magnetized the vacillating, timorous Nicholas. Count Buelow had courted the Russian Foreign Office with the assiduous arts of a lover, and his wooing had been crowned by complete success. Through Petrovitch the grand dukes ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... Marduk-belusate, "a vacillating king, incapable of directing his own affairs," came out to meet him, but although repulsed and driven within the town, he defended his position with such spirit that Shalmaneser was at length obliged to draw off his troops after having cut down all the young compelled the fruit trees, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... another villas. Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks, until the architect can make them something else. Thus it is that in the same family, in the same circumstances, one man rears a stately edifice, while his brother, vacillating and incompetent, lives for ever amid ruins: the block of granite, which was an obstacle on the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone on the pathway of the strong."—G. H. Lewes, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the rapacious Jehoiakim (608-597), who cared nothing for the warning words of Jeremiah (xxxvi.), and his successor Jehoiachin, who was exiled to Babylon after a three months' reign, was followed by the weak and vacillating Zedekiah, who reigned from 597 to 586, when Jerusalem was taken and the monarchy perished. The priests and prophets were no more faithful to their high office than the kings. The prophets were superficial men who did not realize how deep and grievous was the hurt of the people, xxiii. 9-40, ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... expected to see one of strong character, or to discern in it indications at least of great intelligence. One of the greatest characteristics apparent was of intense indolence, whilst the shifty eyes pointed to a nature vacillating almost to weakness. Whether this really were his true character, or whether it were simply a mask used to cover the inner workings of this remarkable man's mind, George did not know; at any rate, it was sufficient, after what he had heard, ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... King into the Catholic Church. Charles, in terror of the Puritans, declared that it was a purely malicious invention, but none the less he continued to temporise, and the court to regulate its conscience according to his vacillating example. Some of the nobility were received into the Church, and among them Lord Boteler and Lady Newport. Mass was again said in the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... single soldier ready to march on Albania. Ramadan, that year, did not close until the new moon of July. Had Ali put himself boldly at the head of the movement which was beginning to stir throughout Greece, he might have baffled these vacillating projects, and possibly dealt a fatal blow to the Ottoman Empire. As far back as 1808, the Hydriotes had offered to recognise his son Veli, then Vizier of the Morea, as their Prince, and to support him in every way, if he would proclaim the independence of the Archipelago. The Moreans bore him ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Hobbes of old, every advocate of liberty is impelled to try the strength and temper of his weapons. For a critical antagonist, Edwards is admirable, his use of language being far from precise and consistent, and his definitions and statements, through his extreme wariness, being vague and vacillating enough to allow abundant material for comment. Of these advantages Mr. Hazard knows how to avail himself, and shows not a little acuteness in exposing the untenable positions and the inconsequent reasoning of the New-England dialectician. The most ingenious of the chapters upon Edwards is that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... There is formed a clear bead which, with a certain degree of saturation, is clear when cold, but appears milk-white when overcharged, and of an opal, enamel appearance, when heated intermittingly, or with a vacillating flame, that changes frequently from the oxidating to the reducing flame. Baryta and its compounds produce the same ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... splendid hierarchy,—an Atheistic society, but still Catholic and One.[67] The change, in this respect, between the opinions which prevailed, respectively, at the era of the first and that of the second Revolution, is at once striking and instructive. It shows how variable and vacillating is the wretched creed of Infidelity, and how the firm maintenance of truth will eventually compel the homage, even where it may not succeed in carrying the convictions, of speculative minds. That Religion in all its successive forms, from the rudest ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... my dear mother took to the notion of our going to Crayshaw's only set seals to our fate, and the manner of her protests was not more fortunate than the matter. She was timid and vacillating from wifely habit, whilst motherly anxiety goaded her to be persistent and almost irritable on the subject. Habitually regarding her own wishes and views as worthless, she quoted the Woods at every turn of her arguments, which was a mistake, for my father was sufficiently like the rest ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... After vacillating for two or three days, Victor Emmanuel abdicated on the 13th of March. The Queen desired to be appointed regent, but, to her intense vexation, the appointment was given to Charles Albert. A more unenviable honour never fell to ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... reason for haste, which was not yet known to the French leaders. Maximilian had long been uncertain and vacillating in his alliances, but had now definitely decided to join the side of Pope Julius and the King of Spain. As usual there were companies of German and Swiss mercenaries both in the Italian army and also with the French, and these owed some kind of allegiance to the sovereign of their land. Thus ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare
... long ago, when the first freshness of his boyish delusions faded away before the penetrating clear daylight of reality, he had known long ago that his friend was not faultless; that except in that one faithful alliance with himself, John Saltram had been fickle, wayward, vacillating, unstable, and inconstant, true to no dream of his youth, no ambition of his early manhood content to drop one purpose after another, until his life was left without any exalted aim. But Gilbert had ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... have the head of the catfish for the snuff, and the whole catfish for the box," said La Certe, with the firmness of a man who has irrevocably made up his mind—for there are none so firm of purpose as the weak and vacillating when they know they have got the whip-hand of any one! "And, behold! I will be liberal," he added. "You shall have another goldeye into the bargain—six goldeyes for the five shillings and a whole catfish ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... boiling point, its editor, the elder James Gordon Bennett, dubbed its three journalistic contemporaries in New York, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil—the World, representing human life with all its pomps and vanities; the Times, as a sheet as vacillating as the flesh; and the Tribune, as the virulent champion of abolition, the ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... the other side for fear of contamination, if she sees a child in distress hesitates, before offering help, to see if it is cleanly, and then the hand she offers is so nerveless, helpless and lifeless, so weak and vacillating that perhaps it would have been just as well had she gone on her ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... anonymous correspondent shows her in a new aspect. Terrible is the scorn of the gentle. "He who wrote it does not seem to me to understand his trade very well; he ought to put himself to school," writes she, and proceeds with analysis so convincing and exhortation so invigorating that even the vacillating Gregory must have been magnetized afresh with power to resolve. One feels in the letter that Catherine is as near impatience with him and with the situation as is permitted to a saint. Gregory must have felt the sting in her words when she tells him plainly that his correspondent treats ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... feelings were not of that enthusiastic nature, which they might have been were he now in his green youth, they were not on this account the less intense. They were coloured by the energy of manhood. He had lost a portion of his self-respect: for he knew that his conduct had been vacillating with regard to one, whom each traversed league, each fleeting hour, proved to be yet dearer than he had ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... house too hot to hold him. The lord was a just man, though unreasonable, and would probably not turn him out without compensation; but the lady was a violent woman, who if she were angered would remember nothing of justice. Thinking of all this he stood distracted and vacillating before his patron. "I expect you," said the Marquis, "to comply with my wishes,—or to ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... glimmers whenever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of Nature, on our origin, and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light, feeble and vacillating, but which, none the less, pierces the darkness of the night in which the Intellect leaves us." [Footnote: Creative Evolution, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... exchange a reinforcement of the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers of the Irish army. Avaux and De Rosen were both sent back to France by James; and thus, with but few officers, badly-equipped troops, and his own miserable and vacillating counsel, he commenced the war which ended so gloriously or so disastrously, according to the different opinions of the actors in the fatal drama. In July, 1690, some of James' party were defeated by the Williamites at Cavan, and several of his best officers ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... his light-comedy laugh for special jury-men, which was a very different thing from his low-comedy laugh for comic tradesmen on common juries: 'he has been in Parliament for some time. Yet hitherto our star has been a vacillating and wavering ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Hogglestock on the next Sunday, and certainly he could not have softened the heart of the presiding genius at the palace. But things were very different now. The presiding genius was gone. Everybody at the palace would for a while be weak and vacillating. Thumble would be then thoroughly cowed; and it might at any rate be possible to make some movement in Mr Crawley's favour. Dr Tempest, therefore, sent ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... sees by the mind; and all that we call desire, imagination, doubt, belief, unbelief, certainty, uncertainty, shame, thought, fear, all that is but mind. Carried along by the waves of the qualities darkened in his imagination, unstable, fickle, crippled, full of desires, vacillating he enters into belief, believing I am he, this is mine, and he binds his self by his self as a bird with a net. Therefore, a man being possessed of will, imagination and belief is a slave, but he who is the opposite ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... had sent to North Germany as many as 257 transports, and of these 8 were now known to be lost, involving the death of 664 men, and the capture of about 1,000 on the enemies' coasts. All this effort and loss of life now appeared to be useless, in view of the vacillating conduct of Prussia. Only with her good will could the British troops, with the Russian and Swedish contingents, hope to conquer Holland. If she declared against us, the whole force would be in jeopardy. Such were the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... moment could be allowed for deliberation. The crisis demanded prompt and decisive action. The embarrassment of the duke is painfully conspicuous in the interviews which ensued. Anxiously he paced the floor of his library at Neuilly, bewildered and vacillating. ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... safety in flight, instead of taking his place among the men who were devoted to his cause. I can understand that, in England, where the majority of those who professed to be devoted to him were betraying him, and were in secret communication with William, he should be by turns obstinate and vacillating; but in Ireland, where every man who surrounded him was risking his life in his cause, he should have shown absolute confidence in them, listened to their advice, set an example of personal gallantry and courage, and, at least, remained among them until all ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... Confederacy, every Southern man back to his kinsmen, and divided the North itself into civil conflict. I have sought to guide and control public opinion into the ways on which depended our life. This rational flexibility of policy you and your fellow radicals have been pleased to call my vacillating imbecility." ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... there was a club ball, which I, being the oldest child, was allowed to witness. I took my position in one corner of the hall and looked on with vacillating feelings. When the dancing couples whirled past me I was happy, on the one hand, because I was permitted to stand there as a sort of guest and share in the pleasure with my eyes, and yet, on the other hand, I was unhappy, because I was merely an onlooker instead of a participator in the dance. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... vacillating fool the girl was! He could say no more at present, and he rose, leaving the room with Nettie staring dully across the table. He went outside, to the grass fronting on the harbor. Here, last night, he had thrown the opium into the water. It seemed to him that ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... recent times. In the Illyrian peninsula, and on the banks of the Danube, the country people, still feeling the influence of Roman civilization, celebrated feasts of flowers in spring and summer, under the name of rousalia. In the sixth century, when the Slavs were vacillating between the influence of the past and the present, the celebration of the Pentecost was mixed up with that of the half-pagan, half-barbarous rousalia. Southern Russians believe in supernatural female beings, called Rusalky, who bring prosperity to the fields ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... leg over another chair, and his right elbow on the table, was smoking a large cigar, while his companion was still eating. The dogs—half-a-dozen of various kinds were moving lazily in and out, taking attitudes of brief attention—gave a vacillating preference first to one gentleman, then to the other; being dogs in such good circumstances that they could play at hunger, and liked to be served with delicacies which they declined to put in their mouths; all except Fetch, the beautiful liver-colored water-spaniel, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... which Le Loutre had forced them to forsake. Threatened with excommunication and the scalping knife if they should return to their allegiance, and with starvation if they obeyed the commands of their heartless superiors at Quebec, they were girt about on all sides with pain and peril. Vacillating, unable to think boldly for themselves, they were doubtless much to blame, but their miseries were infinitely more than they deserved. The punishments that fell upon them fell upon the wrong shoulders. The English, who treated them for a long time with the most ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sudden ending: the degradation and drudgery of the life he was to return to on the morrow: all rose up in tumultuous conflict. A feeling of anguish that was elemental and not of the moment filled him. Drifting and vacillating nature—he saw himself as in a boat borne along by currents that carried him, now near isles of beauty, and then whirled him away from their vanishing glory into gloomy gulfs and cataracts that went down into blackness. He was master neither of joy nor sorrow. Without will: ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... prefer him to Clermont. Her life is the tragedy of a soul too indolent to swim against the current of events. Mrs. Haywood managed to give extraordinary vividness and consistency to the character of the vacillating Henrietta by making the plot depend almost entirely upon the indecision of the heroine. Consequently none of the author's women are as sharply defined as this weak, pleasure-loving French girl. The character drawing, though too much subordinated to the sensational elements ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... child-love. It is love with anxiety and trouble, a consuming flame, a burning passion; love which wastes itself like rain-drops upon the hot sand; love which is a longing, not a sacrifice; love which says "Wilt thou be mine," not love which says, "I must be thine." It is a most selfish, vacillating love. And this is the love which poets sing and in which young men and maidens believe; a fire which burns up and down, yet does not warm, and leaves nothing behind but smoke and ashes. All of us at some period of life have believed that these rockets of sunbeams were everlasting love, ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... to the place, where the Hibernian, clothed in his brief authority, sometimes perpetrated applications of birch without rhyme or reason; but much oftener allowed his authority to be trampled upon, according as the severe or loving humor prevailed. This vacillating administration was calculated for any result, rather than securing the affectionate respect of the children. Scarcely the first quarter had elapsed, before materials for revolt had germinated under the very throne of ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... more plausible than the suit of Cantemir, and his Lordship watched Katherine when she was with these two and soon found, so he thought, it was for the latter she cared; indeed 'twas hard for him to follow the trend of her vacillating mind. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a man," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... regard to the range of vision which, in his capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists mar the effect of their work—and among these Thackeray is notable—by adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating. Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through everything. At another ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... pitilessly. Stinging remorse for each new fault made me swear to lead a better life, to sin no more. What was the result of these periodical repentances? At the first temptation I forgot my remorse and good resolutions. I am weak and mean-spirited, and you are not firm enough to govern my vacillating nature. While my intentions are good, my actions are villainous. The disproportion between my extravagant desires, and the means of gratifying them, is too great for me to endure any longer. Who knows to what fearful lengths my unfortunate disposition may lead me? However, I will take my fate ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... from Barrow. It flooded Tracy's demoralized soul with waters of refreshment. These were the darlingest words the poor vacillating young apostate had ever heard—for they whitewashed his shame for him, and that is a good service to have when you can't get the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... seem to be his element; and when I find his high satisfaction at all personal recognition and bowing before his individuality, I almost doubt whether, if one wished to draw the character of a vain and vacillating pretender, it would be possible to draw anything more to the purpose than this. His general rule (before a certain date) is, to be cautious in public, but bold in private to the favoured few. I cannot think that such a character, appearing now, would seem to ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... events from Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and associate upon the North American Review, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the editors of the North American showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in yielding to the spell of a new political leadership, Lowell made full amends for it in that superb Lincoln strophe ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Christianity or Infidelity. The irresolution of Robespierre lost to us the victory of the first passage of arms, equally as decisive as Lafayette in 1830, and Lamartine in 1848, being Liberals, lost in each case the social Republic by their vacillating policy. The true Freethinkers of that age were the Girondists. With their heroic death, the last barrier to despotism disappeared; the Consulate became the only logical path for gilded chains and empire. With the ostracism of the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... recognize me. I attribute this not to the loftiness of their highnesses nor to prejudice, but to the depth of their ignorance, and of course I forgive and forget. Others again are so "reckless," so "don't care" disposed, that they treat me as fancy dictates, now friendly, now vacillating, and now inimical. With these I simply do as the Romans do. If they are friendly, so am I; if they scorn me, I do not obtrude myself upon them; if they are indifferent, I am ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... that the United States had no power to coerce a State which should secede. A majority of his cabinet were southern men, three of them zealous secessionists. His most intimate friends in Congress were southerners. These surrounded the vacillating Chief Magistrate, and paralyzed what little energy was in him, meanwhile taking advantage of his inaction to launch the Confederacy. Now and then, spurred on by loyal old General Scott and by the Union members of his cabinet, the President tried to break away from the toils which the conspirators ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... father looked at them searchingly, though it was too dark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he told himself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head and heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy was quicker, but vacillating. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... and despairing to think that women should be helpless—that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... basin, Bob being within arm's length of them; for another, Master Cheese liked his ease better than walking. He cast some imploring glances at Jan, but they produced no effect, so he had to get his hat. Vacillating between the toll that might be taken of the plums if he left them, and the damage to his hair if he took them, he finally decided on the latter course. Emptying the plums into his hat, he put it on his head. Jan was looking over what ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the most sanguine-nervous type. There is great charm in such a combination, especially to persons of a keen, alert nature. My sister was earnest, wise, resolute. John Gray was nonchalant, shrewd, vacillating. My sister was exact, methodical, ready. John Gray was careless, spasmodic, dilatory. My sister had affection. He had tenderness. She was religious of soul; he had a sort of transcendental perceptivity, so to speak, which kept him more alive to the comforts ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... hand, without subjecting them to the crucible of his acute and vigorous understanding;[3]—Selden, maintaining that crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]—The detector of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale;[6]—Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch it;[7]—The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels of the "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... as occasion offered, spoke of me in the highest terms as a gentleman and lawyer. My resentment accordingly died out, but I never could feel any great regard for him. He possessed a fair mind and a kindly disposition, but he was vacillating and indolent. Moreover, he loved drink and low company. He served out his second term and afterwards went to Nevada, where his habits became worse, and he sunk so low as to borrow of his acquaintances from day to day small sums—one or two dollars at a time—to get his food ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... vacillating, and futile methods are accompanied by decreasing water-borne commerce and increasing traffic congestion on land, by increasing floods, and by the waste of public money. The remedy lies in abandoning the methods which have so signally failed and adopting new ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... element in the Austrian councils of war which we don't understand, but which gives to their operations in this present phase of the campaign just as uncertain and as vacillating a character as it possessed during the campaign of 1859. On Friday they are still beyond the Mincio, and on Saturday their small fleet on the Lake of Garda steams up to Desenzano, and opens fire against this defenceless city and her railway station, whilst two battalions of Tyrolese sharp-shooters ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... itself into one or the other of these two principles—strict obedience, rigidly enforced by punishment; or a vacillating policy of petting and scolding, leading to moral confusion—there could be little hesitation in deciding which would be apt to give better results in the formation of character. The old way, if somewhat crude and summary, has proved ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... attention has been excited by a letter from Mr. Bartholomew Szemere, one of Kossuth's former friends, and even a minister in the Hungarian revolutionary cabinet, charging him with cowardice, weakness, and a fatally irresolute and vacillating policy in the administration of affairs. Szemere also denies that Kossuth has any just right to call himself the Governor of Hungary, or even the leader of the Hungarian people. On the other hand, Mr. Vukovitch, who ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of its delivery three days before would have formed something more than a coincidence. It would have been corroborative of this idea of motive. But, under the real circumstances of the case, if we are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and that whether he will or not. He may impose silence upon his lips, but his life must be eloquent in spite of himself. And what a terrible thought is this, when we look on our poor, unworthy, miserable lives rendered unto the Lord, for all His benefits toward us! When the world sees us vacillating between right and wrong—questioning how near we may go to the edge of the precipice and yet be safe—can it realise that we believe that right and wrong to be a matter of life and death? Or when it hears us murmuring continually over trifling ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... Shaw, "has discovered the new will—the will that turns inward upon the brain instead of passing out through hand or tongue. Wilson has this new will; the White House corroborates the results of the laboratory. To Roosevelt, Wilson seems weak and vacillating; but that is because T. R. knows nothing about the new will. T. R. has a primitive mind, but one of the most advanced type. In the T. R. brain, so to speak, will means set teeth, clenched fist, hunting, ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... that he must be content with a yearning friendship on earth and a union of souls in heaven? None of these suppositions can be said to prepare us fully for her actual conduct in the play, where she appears all along as a helpless bundle of tremors, vacillating between an alleged passion in which we do not fully believe and a sublimated sense of duty ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... 33). The short lines at Nos. 28, 29, 30, and 31, indicating departure from the path of propriety, terminate in rounded spots and signify, literally, "lecture places," because when a Mid[-e] feels himself failing in duty or vacillating in faith he must renew professions by giving a feast and lecturing to his confreres, thus regaining his strength to resist evil doing—such as making use of his powers in harming his kinsmen, teaching that which was not given him by Kitshi ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... and it was arranged that the main column should be joined at Niagara by a force of Hurons, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Pottawattamies, and Foxes, whom the coureurs de bois had rallied for a last supreme effort. But in spite of the strength of this array, it was not expected by those who knew the vacillating Governor that he would be successful. Even the most sceptical, however, were not prepared for the woeful fiasco which followed. Instead of advancing to destroy his enemies, La Barre summoned them to a council, where the Seneca deputies were not slow to perceive the weakness of their foe, and ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... something of accounts, a little designing, even a little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad work of nature, mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleams of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smouldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes, and ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... the same religion, nor the father who had led his child into distress by holding before her her sinful condition, could offer any genuine comfort. Miss Earle has summarized with briefness and force the results of such training: "A frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father sadly wrote, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... fashion, which brought some sneers from his compeers, the gay "company of the hose;" but he thought life not made for pain, nor ugliness, nor hardness of any sort; he was bred to luxury, yet his intellectual inheritance made learning easy for him; he was many sided and vacillating, an exquisite in taste and the science of trifles. His affectionate nature, repressed and chilled, refused absolute subjection to that purpose which the elder Giustinian held relentlessly before him; he wished to live for himself a little, and not wholly for Venice. ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... table before him covered with maps and papers at which he did not even glance, and with no other occupation for hours than slowly tracing large letters on sheets of white paper. This was while he was vacillating between his own will and the entreaties of his generals. At the end of two days of most painful suspense he yielded; and from that time all was lost. How much better it would have been had he not listened to their complaints, but had again ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... emperor in St Petersburg, in connexion with which occurred the famous revolt of the Russian Liberals, known as the rising of the Dekabrists. In this crisis Constantine's attitude had been very correct, far more so than that of his brother, which was vacillating and uncertain. Under the emperor Nicholas also Constantine maintained his position in Poland. But differences soon arose between him and his brother in consequence of the share taken by the Poles in the Dekabrist conspiracy. Constantine hindered ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... crowned Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental dignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in the measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry was no match for the stern wills against which he was destined to break in unavailing passion. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... history of Cicero's time. 'The quality which makes them most valuable is that they were not (like the letters of Pliny, and Seneca, and Madame de Svign) written to be published. We see in them Cicero as he was. We behold him in his strength and in his weakness—the bold advocate, and yet timid and vacillating statesman, the fond husband, the affectionate father, the kind master, the warm-hearted ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... limit the application of this principle. Protestants, as well as Catholics, have persecuted heretics. But while Catholics, in doing this, have been faithful to their own idea, and have therefore made of persecution a system, Protestants have been vacillating and undecided persecutors. They have been drawn in opposite directions by antagonist principles. Fundamentally, Protestantism, as such, claims for all the rights of private judgment, and is, therefore, in its whole stress and ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... perspicuity, but each has its own representative melodic theme. There is as music under the text, a constant accompaniment of exquisite passion, rising, sinking, and now rising once more, in a struggle with vacillating sensual pleasure and base inclination to supersede others. Around the simple action there is an atmosphere of poetry. The play opens with the superstition of olden times, in the old nurse's tale about the ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... cried out, "No, I will never go back. I will be steadfast to the very end, and keep my vow till death. Others may walk their different ways, but no one shall make me change. I have never doubted, have never been vacillating, and am not going to ...
— Everlasting Pearl - One of China's Women • Anna Magdalena Johannsen
... with one bound passed the portico, he traversed the house, and rushed with swift but vacillating steps, and muttering audibly to himself, down the starlit streets. The direful potion burnt like fire in his veins, for its effect was made, perhaps, still more sudden from the wine he had drunk previously. Used ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... married. It was, of course, a failure. Her vacillating nature was such that she could not be absolutely true to the man to whom she had given her life, and, after several bitter experiences, she had the horror of seeing him kill himself in front of her. There was a momentary spasm of grief, a tidal wave of remorse, and then the peculiar recuperation ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter |
