"Nebulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scarcely the word, because that is too definite; this is exceedingly vague. Harley spoke of it the other night, and although he did not call Prescott by name, his manner indicated that he was the man meant. Harley seems to have received a little nebulous information from a certain quarter, not enough upon which to take action had one the malice to wish it, but enough to indicate that he might obtain more ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... married to William Scarp, a fellow-clerk in Minot Brothers—wholesale wool. Addie represented that Mr. Scarp was of excellent Southern blood from somewhere in North Carolina. It is needless to enter into that nebulous question. He was earning thirty dollars a week with Minot Brothers when they became engaged and was a few years younger than his bride. The firm gave him a five-dollar increase of salary on his marriage, old Savage ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... will she have attained the first half century of her united life. Educational facilities, inclusive of schools, libraries, and museums; railroads, telegraph and telephone service, electric lighting and electric trams,—all the ways and means of the modern mechanism of life are, inevitably, in a nebulous state in Italy. The political situation is extremely interesting at the present time. That the "Blacks" and the "Whites" are diametrically opposed to each other is in the nature of history rather than that of contemporary record or of prophecy; and that this is a traditional attitude in this city ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... yet the saffron light lingers; The stars throb in nebulous lustre, As our hearts to the ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... the circle grew nebulous, and Colwyn was fast falling asleep through sheer weariness, when a slight sharp sound, like that made by turning a key in a lock, brought him back to wide-eyed wakefulness. He sat up in bed, listening with strained ears, feeling for the box of matches ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... French paper published in Cairo, and London papers, the "Times," the "Morning Post." Isaacson bought two or three, vaguely. It was but rarely he felt vague, but now, as he sipped his tea, his excitement was linked with something else, that seemed misty and nebulous, yet not free from a sort of enchantment. By the railing, before and beneath him, a world of many of his dreams—his nargeeleh dreams—flowed by. The abruptness of his decision to come—that made half the enchantment of his coming, made a wonder of his arrival. The boy in him was alive to-day, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the liquid vault of ether hung the starry gems of light, Blazing with unwonted splendor on the ebon brow of night; Far across the arching concave like a train of silver lay, Nebulous, and white, and dreamy, heaven's ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... tragedies of real life is that they are never clear-cut. It takes art to weave a selvage about them or fit them into a frame. But in reality they're as ragged and nebulous as wind-clouds. The days drag on into weeks, and the weeks into months, and life on the surface seems to be running on, the same as before. There's the same superficial play of all the superficial old forces, but in the depths are dangers and uglinesses ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... enjoyed this feeling of well-being, then a disturbing element insinuated itself. At first it was merely an uneasiness, which he could not place, a vague and nebulous irritation, a single crumpled rose-leaf. Then it grew to the proportions of a menace which banked his horizon with thunder, though the sun still shone overhead. Finally it became a terror, clutching him at the throat. He seemed to feel the need ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... a centre. There was small chance of apoplexy where there was no head. The danger lay in the mutual repulsiveness of these atoms of sovereignty—in the centrifugal tendencies which were fast resolving a nebulous commonwealth into chaos. Disunion and dissension would soon bring about a more fatal centralization—that of absorption in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... cranks. Though somewhat peculiar himself he had no use for odd fish—queer folk and the like—and kept a sharp look-out for erratic strangers. Of these there was a constant succession coming to the Farm; reformers of everything under the sun; fanatics demanding the instant adoption of—their nebulous theories; mental aliens not quite crazy but pretty near it; egotists, wild to be noticed, freaks and fakirs and humbugs of every description, and, worst of all, wrecks of humanity seeking refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. These creatures, all ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... and full of grief for the passing of her old friend, Nance threw a coat about her and slipped out on the terrace. Above her, nebulous stars were already appearing, and their twinkling was answered by responsive gleams in the city below. Against the velvety dusk two tall objects towered in the distance, the beautiful Gothic spire of the cathedral, and the tall, ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... his wife did these turbulent fears rise to the surface. She complained that he seemed nervous, that she couldn't understand why he did not want to "drop in at the Littlefields'" for the evening. He tried, but he could not express to her the nebulous facts of his rebellion and punishment. And, with Paul and Tanis lost, he had no one to whom he could talk. "Good Lord, Tinka is the only real friend I have, these days," he sighed, and he clung to the child, played floor-games ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... either edge it pales off cloudily,—curling like smoke of phosphorus. Great sharp lights burst up momentarily through it like meteors. Weirder than this strange wake are the long slow fires that keep burning at a distance, out in the dark. Nebulous incandescences mount up from the depths, change form, and pass;—serpentine flames wriggle by;—there are long billowing crests of fire. These seem to be formed of millions of tiny sparks, that light up all at the same time, glow for a while, disappear, reappear, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... low down and glittering swiftly nearer, were two little patches of nebulous light. And then two more, and then a nebulous glow of swiftly driving shapes. Presently he could count them. There were four and twenty. The first fleet of aeroplanes had come! Beyond ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... “Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistently emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himself through the human attribute of the highest ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... full blown and radiant on the mountain summits around us, was yet nebulous and uncertain in the valleys into which we were plunging. Lights still glimmered in the cabins and few ranch buildings which began to indicate the thicker settlements. And the shadows were heaviest in a little copse, where a note from Judge Thompson in the coach was handed up ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thy crest a brirnless hat, Poverty's aristocrat! Nonne habeam te tristem, Planet of the human system? Comet lank and melancholic —Orbit shocking parabolic— Seen for a little in the sky Of the world of sympathy— Seldom failing when predicted, Coming most when most restricted, Dragging a nebulous tail with thee Of hypothetic vagrancy— Of vagrants large, and vagrants small, Vagrants scarce visible at all! Matchless oracle of woe! Anarchy in embryo! Strange antipodes of bliss! Parody on happiness! Baghouse of the great creation! Subject meet for strangulation, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... road, and into the hotel. Then Medenham noticed how dark it had become—reminded him of the tropics, he thought—and made for his own caravanserai, while his brain was busy with a number of disturbing but nebulous problems that seemed to be pronounced in character yet singularly devoid of a beginning, a middle, or an end. Indeed, so puzzling and contradictory were they that he soon fell asleep. When he rose ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... is evidence in favour of the hallucination theory that: "A flower or other small object is seen to move; one person present will see a luminous cloud hovering over it, another will detect a nebulous-looking hand, whilst others will see nothing but the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... Past golded-sanded bars, And nebulous isles of amethyst, They dropt like falling stars: Till on a scarped and wrinkled coast, Washed by dark waves below, They came upon the glittering tents— The ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... mud, where the whitened dome of the modest house of prayer is surmounted by a cross and not a crescent. They are the villages of those Copts, those Egyptians, who have preserved the Christian faith from father to son since the nebulous times of the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... with the turn the conversation had taken that I did all in my power to maintain it in the same groove, with the help of my most recent studies, by a long exposition of the chemical composition of those nebulous bodies which, although extending over a length of billions of leagues, could be contained in a small bottle. My father, a little surprised at my unusual eloquence, watched me with his peculiar, placid, ironical ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... is an historical expression of the successive Ages of the world's growth. The central fountain symbolizes the nebulous world, with its innate human passions. Out of a chaotic condition came Water (the basin), and Land (the fountain), and Light (the Sun, supported by Helios, and the electroliers). The braziers and cauldrons symbolize Fire. The two sentinel columns to the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... That his thirty-three nebulous birds had become forty before they took flight, Anthony never knew. A man whose sole assets are a Sealyham, a very few clothes, and twenty-two shillings and sixpence, does not, as a rule, go ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... to become misty, shadowy, and to lift out of Manhattan up above the roof-tops of skyscrapers still remaining, nebulous and wraithlike as ghost-shrouds—yet swinging outward from the earth with speed almost too swift for the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... brilliant, but unequal, and often somewhat nebulous Essay on Method, is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of method. Method is the road by which you reach, or hope to reach, a certain end; it is a process. It is the best direction ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... sense lies hidden, as a symbol which it is the poet's business to penetrate and illumine. It also moved away from the clear images, precise contours, and firm lines by which the Parnassiens had given such an effect of plasticity to their verse, and sought rather vague, shadowy, and nebulous impressions and the charm of music and melody (cf. VERLAINE'S poem, Art poetique, p. 288). This is in general the direction taken by the latest generation of poets, symbolists, decadents, or however ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... inside his bullet-head that the idea of a plot that could not be discovered came into its first nebulous being. Absalom found out that Mhtoon Pah was looking for a gold lacquer bowl, and through the agency of Leh Shin the bowl was eventually marked down as the property of a seaman who was lodging temporarily near the opium den by the river, one of Leh Shin's clients. ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... measure and accepted, ere there can be faith in Him. Apart from them, the image of Christ must stand a pale, colourless phantom before the mind, and the faith which is directed towards such a nebula will be an unintelligent emotion, as nebulous and impotent as the vagueness towards ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... herself. She folded her hands in her lap, and thought, not bitterly, not listlessly, but deeply. She wanted to consider all cheerfully now; she tried to do so. She was musing among those flying perceptions, those nebulous facts of a new life, experienced for the first time; she was now not herself as she had been; another woman was born; and she was feeling carefully along the unfamiliar paths which she must tread. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the history of Indian Buddhism has proved singularly nebulous. The most important dates are a matter of argument, the chief personages half mythical. But when the records of the Chinese pilgrims commence we are in touch with something more solid. They record dates ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... remembered in the awakening that followed was the face of another man. It stood out in the nebulous gathering of his returning self-consciousness like the face of an angel; there was the flame of enthusiasm in the eyes, a force of will had chiselled handsome features into tense lines; but in spite of that, or rather perhaps because of it, it was ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... building which constituted the main edifice of Sky Top. She was in effect a prisoner. El Paso seemed like a dream, San Francisco a figment of the brain, and New York a wholly imaginary spot upon some undiscovered planet, lost in the nebulous universe of space. She trod the uneven floor as some creature caged, on her face that which boded no good to the next ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... claim to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists, and not Christians. Well, I venture to say that that is a phase that will not last. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know outside of Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a reality. He, or rather It, is a film of cloud shaped into a vague form, through which you can see the stars. It has little power to restrain. It has less to inspire and impel. It has still less to comfort; it has least of all to satisfy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the ground and opened his mouth to speak. But his knees grew weak and he quivered all over like one who beholds the god. The abstract nebulous romance of his pilgrimage had been crystallized, in a flash, into the concrete. "Ay," ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... perfectly happy and care-free. A career seemed a far-off, nebulous thing that one need not fret over. It was very pleasant to be walking up over the hills in the moonlight and sunset with Gavin at her side carrying flowers for her. She felt it would be beautiful to be able to always stroll around this way ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in full. The essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks and sent them ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... a time when the earth was only a nebulous mass whose particles were scattered far apart through the expanding force of heat; when she had not yet attained her definiteness of form and had neither beauty nor purpose, but only heat and motion. Gradually, ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... planet was then in existence. The solar nebula was endowed with a general movement of rotation in the direction west to east. As it cooled it could not fail to experience a gradual condensation, and in consequence to rotate with greater and greater rapidity. If the nebulous matter extended originally in the plane of its equator, as far as the limit where the centrifugal force exactly counterbalanced the attraction of the nucleus, the molecules situate at this limit ought, during the process of condensation, to separate from the rest of the atmospheric ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... thought of that, also? Dared she tread on this nebulous fairy-ground? Dared she lead Corrie to set foot ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... pressure employed in these experiments were not, however, stated. This system has been used at certain stations on the "Midi" railway in France. Nevertheless even where the admixture of air to acetylene is legally permissible, the risk of obtaining a really dangerous product and the nebulous character of the advantages attainable ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... and the silence seemed to strike at him with a nebulous hostility as he went. He had a vague sense of intrusion, of being in a forbidden place. The blood was no longer hot in his veins. He even shivered in the warmth of the summer night as he followed the winding walk between ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... not be regarded as a fanciful figure: it is not a nebulous hope which is to be realised at some indefinitely remote period, thousands of years hence; nor is it a new species (in the Darwinian sense) of which we can know nothing, and which it would therefore be somewhat absurd to strive after. But it is meant to be a possibility which men of the present ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... best describe the passage of day and night, at this period, as a sort of gigantic, ponderous flicker. Moment by moment, the acceleration of time continued; so that, at nights now, I saw the moon, only as a swaying trail of palish fire, that varied from a mere line of light to a nebulous path, and ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... been called to the Bar in my tentative youth, while I drafted documents for my betters to pull to pieces and rewrite at the Foreign Office; but I had never seen a brief, and my memories of Gaius, Justinian, Williams's "Real Property," and Austin's "Jurisprudence," were as nebulous as those of the Differential Calculus over whose facetiae I had pondered during my schooldays. The law was as closed to me as medicine. I had no profession. I therefore drifted into the one pursuit for ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... the forest, and the slope, with its soft dried grass, seemed an inviting place to rest. The Maimed Man continued until he had reached the farther belt of trees, and then he turned about and faced the sinking sun, that by now was changing itself into a nebulous radiance on the horizon. The forest stretched in gentle billows as far ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... in the room was God and that God was watching me, but I was not afraid. Yet I entertained, in common with most children, a nebulous distrust of this mysterious Person, a distrust of which I was particularly conscious on winter nights when the gas had been turned down to a blue fleck, and the shadow of the mantelpiece flickered and plunged on the ceiling, and the clock ticked louder and louder, in prediction (I suspected) ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... heart warm toward the grizzled old warrior as he, dropping the nebulous matter of Kumari, said: "And to think, Captain Sahib, that but for the Gulab we would have slain you as the murderer of Amir Khan. As a Patan, even if I had wished it, I could not have fended the tulwars from your body. And you were a brave man, such as a Pindari loves; ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... which his proposals took would be difficult to tell. Seemingly they remained nebulous even in his own mind. They certainly so remained in the minds of those to whom he confided them. At any rate his scheme, though in reality less dangerous than those of his predecessors in Western treason, were in theory much more comprehensive. He planned the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... necessary considerably to extend that doctrine in order to meet the necessities of the new situation. President Lincoln had applied this principle to absolute contraband, such as powder, shells, rifles, and other munitions of war. Great Britain now proceeded to apply it to that nebulous class of commodities known as "conditional contraband," the chief of which was foodstuffs. If the United States, while a war was pending, could evolve the idea of "ultimate destination" and apply it ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... amongst the Discomycetes, and which are sometimes called by the same name. The sporidia are at first a little smaller than when mature, and are surrounded by mucilage. After this period the sporidia lose their nebulous granulations, whilst still preserving their nucleus; their outlines are distinct, and, amongst the true Ascobolei, commence acquiring a rosy colour, the first intimation of maturity. This colour ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed[59] and Herschel,[60] in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,—watching days and months sometimes for a few facts; correcting still his old records,—must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... have seen him then and there, I did realise, nevertheless, the overwhelming interest of him. I knew him to be a stranger sight, a more memorable and instructive, than any of the fair sights I had been seeing. He made them all seem nebulous and unreal to me. Beside me lay my despatch-box. I unlocked it, drew from it all the notes and all the photographs I had brought back with me. These, one by one, methodically, I tore up, throwing their fragments out of the window, not grudging them ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... horizon, the pole star holds its fixed position, and the Great and the Little Bear, dipping toward the ocean wave, but not yet dipping in it, pursue their nightly revolutions. Long after sunset, and long before sunrise, night after night, the faint, nebulous gleam of the zodiacal lights stretches up toward the zenith. The shortness of the twilight frequently leaves the fugacious planet, Mercury, so seldom seen at the north, in distinct view. While Venus not merely casts a shadow in a clear night, as she does with us, but when she is brightest, actually ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... end of the march I ran into a rather nebulous, middle-aged sort of a gentleman soldier who was sitting on the curb looking moodily at a manhole as if he would like ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... realising—with the priceless knowledge of a spirit made reasonable through pain—that the girl was romantic and the Prince incurably old. His flaxen wig heightened the tone of a complexion much ravaged by gout and its antidotes. His nebulous eyes with twitching lids were not improved by the gold-rimmed glasses which magnified their insignificance. He possessed a striking nose and chin, but, as these features were more characteristic than ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... could not have forced its way into her mind, from birth to death, that there was anything in her conduct save the inevitable best, as ordered as the stars. So, Raven knew, she had probably never talked over his nebulous relation with her to Nan; but he was suddenly alive with curiosity to know. He couldn't coax Nan into betraying that confidence, but he was nevertheless set on getting at it somehow. He wondered if it might be decent to do it ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... most mischievous of the old theories which will fall, will be that figment of the imagination—the Nebular Hypothesis.[14] How strangely, and how strongly, has that hypothesis maintained its ground, even after nebulous masses have been resolved into clusters of stars. If gravity be the result of retro-acting forces, there could be no element of attraction in the flimsy gaseous particles whereby they might be drawn together. If gravity be the result of retro-acting forces, ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... explain, "the power's all on your side now; and I'll show you how little the doing will hurt you as soon as I can have a quiet chat with your husband." He branched off again into technicalities, nebulous projections of capital and interest, taxes and rents, from which she finally extracted, and clung to, the central fact that if the "deal went through" it would mean a commission of forty thousand dollars ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... these data,—matter, force, and the law of gravitation,—what must happen? We have the strongest scientific reason to believe that the matter of the solar system primordially existed in a highly diffused or nebulous form. By mutual gravitation, therefore, all the substance of the nebula must have begun to concentrate upon itself, or to condense. Now, from this point onwards, I wish it to be clearly understood that the mere consideration of the supposed ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... She abandoned the nebulous idea of protest when she found that she in turn was clinging to him, giving kiss for kiss with a delirious intensity that refused to be denied. Nevertheless, the sheer joy of her emotions frightened her, and she was ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... given certainty and actuality to the fleeting shadow of half-divined truth which lies in the core of the worship of Serapis. The pure and radiant star of Christian love has risen in the place of the dim nebulous mist of Serapis; and just as the moon pales when the sun appears triumphant, the worship of Serapis has died away in a thousand places where the gospel has been received. Even here, in Alexandria, its feeble flame is kept alive only ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... position the dignity of a philosophical doctrine and hold that, in the somewhat nebulous realm inhabited by the philosopher, men are not bound by the same rules of evidence that obtain elsewhere? That this is actually done, those who read much in the field of modern philosophy are well aware. Several excellent ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... aspirations before some favorite altar or saintly shrine. Soon all have left, and the silence of the abandoned sanctuary shrouds the fabric in greater solemnity. The aromatic incense still floats in nebulous veils around ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... a dark nucleus and a penumbra of the shape of an aureola. This aureola, frequently very large in proportion to the diameter of the central nucleus, eclipses it to the naked eye, so that the whole shadow appears like a nebulous circle projected in yellow upon the green ground of the woods and meadows. I have noticed, too, that this luminous shadow is generally all the more strongly marked in proportion to the greater humidity of the surface of ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... shabbily away in Manchester House, busy with housework drudgery. Since the collapse of Throttle-Ha'penny, James Houghton had become so stingy that it was like an inflammation in him. A silver sixpence had a pale and celestial radiance which he could not forego, a nebulous whiteness which made him feel he had heaven in his hold. How then could he let it go. Even a brown penny seemed alive and pulsing with mysterious blood, potent, magical. He loved the flock of his busy pennies, in the shop, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... professional training had made him slow to accept marvellous stories and many forms of superstition. Yet, as a man of science, he well knew that just on the verge of the demonstrable facts of physics and physiology there is a nebulous border-land which what is called "common sense" perhaps does wisely not to enter, but which uncommon sense, or the fine apprehension of privileged intelligences, may cautiously explore, and in so doing find ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... surrounds you—it is exhaled and produced by your physical and moral being,— and those among us who have cultivated their inner organs of vision see IT before they see YOU. It can be of the purest radiance,— equally it can be a mere nebulous film,—but whatever the moral and physical condition of the man or woman concerned it is always shown in the aura which each separate individual expresses for himself or herself. In this way Dr. Brayle reveals his nature to me as well as the chief tendency of his thoughts,—in this ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... the air, until at a certain height the smoke remains stationary, and hangs in clouds above the houses. Looking from some great elevation, such as the tower of Ivan Veliki in the Kremlin, you see these clouds beneath you, agitated like waves, and forming a kind of nebulous sea, which is, however, soon taken ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... a special spiritual predilection, we must not nevertheless forget the historical conditions which prepared the way for it and made its logical development easy. Russian literature, called on to struggle against tremendous obstacles, could hardly have gone astray in the domain of a nebulous idealism. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the air before them seemed to thicken in a curious fashion. Lura gave a cry of alarm and pressed close to Damis. The sun's rays penetrated with difficulty through a patch of air directly before them. Gradually the mistiness began to assume a nebulous uncertain outline and separated itself into four distinct patches. The thickening air took on a silvery metallic gleam and four metallic cylinders made their appearance. Two of them were about eight feet in height ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... speech of April 27th, 1907, he promised to "fight to the death any scheme of Old-Age Pensions based on thrift or on the workers' contributions." Later, when the proposals as to workmen's insurance were nebulous, but nevertheless pointed to a contributory scheme, he, criticizing some words of Mr. Haldane's, spoke his anxiety lest "to have a system for all labour, including the underpaid labour of unskilled women, based on contributions by ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... told him exactly what had happened and repeated the words that Natalie spoke, he was much interested in his own nebulous way, and said that it was delightful to meet with an example of a good Christian, such as my wife had been, who actually saw something of Heaven before she had gone there. His own faith was, he thanked God, fairly robust, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... seen, then, that according to Kant's theory we are to suppose that millions of years ago there appeared a nebulous mass possessing a rotary motion, and unequally distributed through space. This is what science calls a beginning, and may assert that every physical event of a hundred million of ages existed potentially ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... the runner in the skies, With her blowing scarf of stars, And our Earth and sun hovering like bees about her blossoming heart? Her feet are on the winds, where space is deep, Her eyes are nebulous and veiled, She hurries through the night to a ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... brilliant, vivid, glossy, fulgent, naif, lucent, glaring, garish, crystalline; intelligent, precocious, apt, acute, discerning, clever, smart, knowing; auspicious, propitious; illustrious, glorious. Antonyms: dull, lackluster, obscure, dim, opaque, murky, nebulous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Genesis, and she read out, 'In the beginning God created the heaven, and the earth.' 'But of course you all know He didn't. Modern science teaches us——' Then she went on with a lot of rot about gases and forces and nebulous things." ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... sinners and the abolition of hell, was rejected by Schiller, who later characterized the song as a 'bad poem'. The 'Song to Joy' sprang from noble sentiment and has the genuine lyric afflatus; but its author had not yet emerged from that nebulous youthful sentimentalism according to which joy, sympathy, love, friendship, virtue, happiness, God, were all very much the same thing. And the thought is a trifle incoherent. If the good Spirit above the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... invasion of Kyushu, Japan held no intercourse with the outer world for several decades, nor does her friendship seem to have been sought by any oversea nation. In the closing year of the thirteenth century, merchantmen flying the Yuan flag are reported to have arrived, but the record is nebulous, and the same may be said of a passing reference that, in 1341, Japanese vessels were sent to China to procure articles manufactured there. We reach more solid ground a year later (1342), when the Ashikaga chief, Takauji, being engaged in building the temple Tenryu-ji, opened trade ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... nocturnes, notes, symphonies in rose and silver, his colour-sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical phrases, that in their new estate took on fresher meanings even if remaining knee-deep in the kingdom of the nebulous. It must be confessed modern composers have retaliated. Musical impressionism is having its vogue, while poets are desperately pictorial. Soul landscapes and etched sonnets are not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much? There was a time when to say a "sweet voice" ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... real darkness down there in that narrow valley, but there was dusk of a kind that made everything grey and uncertain. It was a vague, nebulous atmosphere in which objects merged into each other confusedly. Bushes came down to within a few feet of where we were working, dense-growing alder and birch that would have concealed a ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... immortality for sagacious and affectionate dogs and horses, they leave it ajar for the admission of animals of less intelligence—even for all the kinds that Noah took into the ark, perhaps, although the theory is still nebulous and undefined. Now, I would beg the kind-hearted adherents to this theory not to think I am seeking to play off a satirical pleasantry upon it, if I express a hope, which is earnest and true, that, if there be an immortality for any class of dumb animals, the donkey shall ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... boundless vision burst Through yawning gulfs of gloom; To human hunger, human thirst Infinite hell did loom; Infinite bale to vision burst In tracts of nebulous bloom; And life through peril, lorn, accurst, Passed on from ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... so much of suns and of nebulous bodies; Think ye Nature but great, in that she gives thee to count? Though your object may be the sublimest that space holds within it, Yet, my good friends, the sublime dwells not in the regions ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... windows, every story, Shine with far-off nebulous glory! Round her in that luminous cloud Stars obedient press and crowd, She the centre of all gazing, She the sun her planets dazing! In her eyes' victorious lightning Some are paling, some are brightening: Those on which they gracious turn, Stars combust, all tenfold burn; Those ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... which they gave to those who performed them. But these had no rational basis behind them on which they could lean for support. These were probably then just tending towards being affiliated to the nebulous Sa@mkhya doctrines which had grown up among certain sections. It was at this juncture that we find Buddha erecting a new superstructure of thought on altogether original lines which thenceforth opened up a new avenue of philosophy for all posterity to come. If the Being of the Upani@sads, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... I dragged it from her none the less. The nebulous white-shirted figure in the canoe, that had skimmed past Dan Levy's frontage as we were trying to get him aboard his own pleasure-boat, and again past the empty house when we were in the act of disembarking him ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... of a school in such a case. A school lives on the confidence of parents, a nebulous foundation which the slightest breath can destroy. Everything connected with it must be done with exaggerated discretion. I do not suppose Mr MacGinnis had thought the thing out in all its bearings, but he could not have made a sounder move if he had been a Napoleon. Where ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... roseate air Nebulous floating of tone-sacrifices, Twilight in churches now broadens and rises, Incense and word fill the evening with prayer. Over the Sabines the flame-belt is knotted, Shepherds' lights through the Campagna are dotted, Rome with her lamps dimly breaks on the sight,— Shadowy ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... inconceivable rapidity, and in the midst of this blazed the central nucleus—the sun which in far-off ages to come would be the giver of light and heat, of life and beauty to worlds unborn, to planets which were now only little eddies of atoms whirling in that ocean of nebulous flame. ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... that she failed of striking resemblance to the portraits of these admirable ancestors, nevertheless it seemed to me that, had I not known definitely of their place in her family history, I might almost have sensed them hovering behind her: a background, nebulous and shadowy, out of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... he added, "is not the true deluge. The Arctic ice-cap is melting, and the frozen soil is turning into a sponge in consequence of the heat of friction developed in the air by the inrush of nebulous matter. The aqueous vapor, however, has not yet touched the earth. It will begin to manifest its presence within a few days, and then the globe will drink water at every pore. The vapor will finally ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... frail, with large ears, and a gap in his front teeth, he had none of the outward appearance of dominance. His appeal lay in the simplicity of his life and character, for asceticism is still revered in the East. But his intellectual equipment was mediocre, his political ideas nebulous and impracticable to a degree, his programme archaic and visionary; and from the start he was doomed to fail. The Hijrat movement which he advocated brought ruin to thousands of Moslem homes; his attack on Government ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... discovery in the Wochenschrift fur Astronomie in March of the following year, the existence of the object described by Dr. Klein was confirmed, and it was sedulously scrutinised under various solar altitudes. To most observers it appeared as an ill-defined object with a somewhat nebulous border, standing on an irregularly-shaped dusky area, with two or more small dark craters and many low ridges in its vicinity. A little E. of it stands a curious spiral mountain called the Schneckenberg. The question as to whether Hyginus N. (as the dusky spot ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... I can see it," she cried. He looked at her incredulously. There was nothing but a nebulous mass of blue. "Well, I have seen it," she protested, "two or three times. To-day it is ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... thought, would life be like when at last I had her always with me, brightening my life, filling my own home—our home—with laughter and with the music of her voice! Again and again she rose to my enthralled vision, and ever she was Youth and Love, the vision crowned with the wonder of her nebulous, brown-gold hair as she gazed at me out of her sweet, clear eyes in which I seemed still to read unfathomable purity ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... perhaps conveyed a wrong impression; what I intended the reader to understand was that I had no finished scheme, complete in all its details, to depend upon. A plan of a sort I certainly had, but it was of the vaguest and most nebulous kind, consisting in nothing more specific than the mere determination to seize the felucca at the first favourable opportunity, and sail her, single- handed, to the nearest British port; but of ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... my window at night, And the welkin above is all white, All throbbing and panting with stars, Among them majestic is standing, Sandalphon, the angel, expanding His pinions in nebulous bars. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... striving after brevity and conciseness—to keep the size of my statement within the limits of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, generously elastic though it is—I have left the argument in a rather nebulous form. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... said the Vicar. "I will put aside all my other work, and talk to Jack after tea; if any difficulty should arise, I may look to you for further counsel. This is really most satisfactory. This matter has been in my mind in a nebulous way for a long time; and you enter the scene with your intellectual grip, and your psychological penetration—if that is not too intricate a word—and the situation is clear at once. Well, I am most ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... penetrate the thin haze brooding over the Gardens. Although it was the last day of October, the air was mild; but, contrary to his usual custom, Malcolm failed to notice the effect of the clinging mist round the leafless trees, the nebulous distances, and the faint golden streaks of sunshine; his mind was full of the approaching interview and the difficult work that ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... texts. Hugh said that it seemed to him to be practically certain that no one of them was infallibly in the right, and that the truth probably lay in certain wide religious ideas which underlay all forms of Christian faith. Maitland rejected this with scorn as a dangerous and nebulous kind of religion—"nerveless and flabby, without bone or sinew." They then diverged on to a wider ground, and Hugh tried to defend his theory that God called souls to Himself by an infinite variety ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... grown strangely nebulous; impossible to reconstruct, for example, what went on during the days of drowsy discomfort at Montecelio. A lethargy seems to have fallen on me; I lived in a dream out of which there emerges nothing ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... previous occasions that he found Ann Veronica interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was a civil servant of some standing, and after a previous conversation upon aesthetics of a sententious, nebulous, and sympathetic character, he had sent her a small volume, which he described as the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine aspects ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... El Toro, you found that old mortgage carried in its list of assets. You also discovered that it had been renewed several times, each time for a larger sum, from which you deduced that the prospects for the ultimate payment of the mortgage were nebulous and distant. Your hypothesis was correct. The Farrels never did to-day a task that could be deferred until to-morrow. Well, you went out and looked over the security for that mortgage. You found it to be ample—about three to one, as ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch—not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward—a man who was aware ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... into an isolated system—mere islands of matter in an infinite ocean of space. So distant from our universe are these now universes of Herschel's discovery that their light reaches us only as a dim, nebulous glow, in most cases invisible to the unaided eye. About a hundred of these nebulae were known when Herschel began his studies. Before the close of the century he had discovered about two thousand more of them, and many of these had been ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... but formed by Nature. The walls were solid, yet they were composed of huge trees standing close together, like columns; and the roof of the pavilion was formed by their massive foliage, through which not a ray of outer light penetrated. Such light as there was seemed nebulous, and appeared to rise out of the ground. In the centre of this pavilion I stood alone, happy to have got clear away from those terrible beasts and the gaze of their steadfast eyes. As I stood ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... play of his face, that he lacked firmness of purpose. He certainly was no fool. He had read much, and, though he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his readings certain nebulous lights, begotten by other men's thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects. It cannot be said of him that he did much thinking for himself;—but he thought that he thought. He believed of himself that he had gone rather deep into politics, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... has discovered stars hitherto unknown and inaccessible to all our means of mensuration; it has penetrated distances so great, that luminous and necessarily immense bodies present themselves to us only like nebulous and almost ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... monotony, with no slackening or diminution of the waters. Even the drifts became less, and a vacant sea at last spread before him on which nothing moved. An awful silence impressed him. In the afternoon rain again began to fall on this gray, nebulous expanse, until the whole world seemed made of aqueous vapor. He had but one idea now—the coming of the evening boat, and he would reserve his strength to swim to it. He did not know until later that it could no longer follow ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... a stealthy walk. Behind them and beside them was chilly darkness lurking in caverns among black, bare tree-trunks. Before them they could see a nebulous glow and hear the monotonous voice singing the ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... are scarcely less crowded than those of London, but as you drive through the town, now and then there is a glimpse of a greenish mist afar off between the houses. The green mist thickens in one spot almost at the horizon; or is it the dark nebulous sails of a vessel? Then the foam suddenly appears close at hand—a white streak seems to run from house to house, reflecting the sunlight: ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Asia Minor.[23] There lay the chief objective of his strategy, and its net outcome was to widen the breach between him and those elements in the country which still believed that the policy of Greece must be governed by the solid necessities of the Balkan situation, not by nebulous visions of Imperialist expansion. ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into the gathering ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... What it is now, it was in the beginning; and what it will be, it is now. Granting the hypothesis of evolution, there can be no quarrel with the view that the crude beginnings of things, matter in its most nebulous state, contains potentially all the rich variety of both natural ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... worth a cent and who were now buying and selling blocks of property. How much they were actually worth was a question which in the excitement of the "boom" did not seem to matter. It is never a rare incident among our people for a man with a nebulous fortune of a few hundred dollars to plunge into a commercial undertaking involving many thousands; but during that period this was an every-day affair. At first I treated it like something that was going on in another ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... sun slanted over Greenhill this morning and lighted the dewy flat upon its crest, nebulous clouds of dust were to be seen floating between the pairs of hedges which streaked the wide prospect around in all directions. These gradually converged upon the base of the hill, and the flocks became individually ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... moved by gusts that were numerous and contrary rather than violent. Within the walls all was silence, chaos, and obscurity, till towards eleven o'clock, when the thick immovable cloud that had dulled the daytime broke into a scudding fleece, through which the moon forded her way as a nebulous spot of watery white, sending light enough, though of a rayless kind, into the castle chambers to show the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... aside and reading faces and dissecting emotions. Three faces interested him curiously. The Chevalier hid none of his thoughts; they lay in his eyes, in the wrinkles on his brow, in the immobility of his pose. How easy it was to read that the Chevalier saw nothing, save in a nebulous way, of the wonderful panorama surrounding. He was with the folly of the night gone, with Paris, with to-day's regrets for vanished yesterday. The vicomte could see perfectly well that Victor's gaiety was natural and unassumed; that the past held him but loosely, since this ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... eminent man of science, himself an eye-witness of the great meteoric shower on the American continent, after carefully collecting and comparing facts, proposed the following theory: The meteors of November 13th, 1833, emanated from a nebulous body which was then pursuing its way along with the earth around the sun; that this body continues to revolve around the sun in an elliptical orbit, but little inclined to the plane of the ecliptic, and having its aphelion near the orbit of the earth; and finally, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the most ingenious marvels of fairy tales in real life—a love that would spring over a precipice to find a roc's egg, or to gather the singing flower. I explained that the Southern Cross was a nebulous constellation even brighter than the Milky Way, arranged in the form of a cross, and that it could only be seen ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... "gospel of freedom"? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses, with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon; what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer," to drink of the spiritual waters of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... could have calculated the enormous potential energy of the nebulous gases, required by contraction to cause the prodigious heat of a universe ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... the quaint settlements of the U.E. Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the Premier of Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the minority ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... Natur," we say, "da Gott die Menschen schuf hinein"—that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick man's dream! Away with it. Away with all ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... us a lesson in admiration as valuable as those we might learn in regions superior to chance. If we let our gaze travel beyond the creatures that are possessed of a glimmer of intellect and consciousness, beyond the protozoa even, which are the first nebulous representatives of the dawning animal kingdom, we find, as has been abundantly proved by the experiments of Mr. H. J. Carter, the celebrated microscopist, that the very lowest embryos, such as the myxomycetes, manifest a will and desires and preferences; ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of this picture is crossed with nebulous black streaks. These were originally present in all the pictures. I have omitted them in all but this, lest they might obscure the details of the reduced copies. It has been explained to me (although in the myth it is ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... going to do, Uncle Chris?" asked Jill curiously. Apart from a nebulous idea that he intended to saunter through the city picking dollar-bills off the sidewalk, she had ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... nearer the centre. The closer we are connected with the centre, the nearer we are to those whom we call dead. Our communion with them is spiritual, because 'God is spirit' and they are in Him. But the {71} spiritual is not the unsubstantial, the nebulous, the gaseous; it is the personal—to my mind the awful—reality. The more truly we understand persons, the more we shall ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... as an incipient love affair with a neighbor's son already existed. Some notes and occasional shy glances had been exchanged between Mademoiselle de La Valliere and young Bragelongne, who lived next door to the Saint-Remis at Blois, and had she not been suddenly carried off to court this nebulous romance might have materialized into a happy marriage, and a career more honorable, if less brilliant and exciting, than that which ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... distant hill, the battlemented sky line of an old-time hall, or the spires of a cathedral, but always melting back into the mist again as in a dream. Then vague stretches of gloom again, foggy stations obscured by nebulous light and blurred and moving figures, and the black relief of a tunnel. Only once the captain, catching sight of Randolph's awed face under the lamp of the smoking carriage, gave way to his long, low laugh. "Jolly place, England—so very 'Merrie.'" And then they came to ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... harvest could be reaped from fields where the sheaves are already garnered. Thus disregarding the fruits of action, we could work like those who have made the Great Sacrifice, for whom even Nirvana is no resting place. Worlds may awaken in nebulous glory, pass through their phases of self-conscious existence and sink again to sleep, but these tireless workers continue their age-long task of help. Their motive we do not know, but in some secret depth of our being ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... clothed upon with a garment showing ever some new fold of surprising beauty and wonder. If she had remained in the Father's house—like the elder brother in the Parable—then would all that He had have been hers, in nebulous simplicity. But now, holding her revels apart, she seems to sing her own song, and to dream her own beautiful dream, wandering, with a motion wholly her own, among the gardens of cosmic order and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... should hark back to 1820 port, a wine which I remember to have had a rich colour and a full refined flavour, and once I tasted the famous comet wine, 1811, which, however, had lost something of its nucleus, and only retained a certain tawny, nebulous tone. On one occasion I remember my host said he had some seventeen-ninety something wine in his cellar, which he proposed we should taste, but for some reason, now forgotten, it was not produced, and I sometimes ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... those spiritual exiles, and it was in his nature to feel the relation as a strong chain, nay, to feel his imagination moving without repugnance in the direction of Mordecai's desires. With all his latent objection to schemes only definite in their generality and nebulous in detail—in the poise of his sentiments he felt at one with this man who had made a visionary selection of him: the lines of what may be called their emotional theory touched. He had not the Jewish consciousness, but he had a yearning, grown the stronger for the denial which had been his grievance, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... sea of molten air that stretched before him, that nebulous chaos of quivering bars and belts of heated atmosphere which remains above the desert as a memorial of the first stage of the entire planet's existence, the imagination of the prospector created a paradise of his own. There took shape before his eyes a Mexican hacienda, larger ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... opening, inserted the torch, and stood outside, the canvas flaps carefully closed round his hand. With the intrusion of the flaming brand the tent suddenly became a rosy transparency. The young' girl's figure moved in the midst of the glow, a shape of nebulous darkness, its outlines lost in the mist ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... days, and indeed down to my own time, when a suit of clothes was wanted, to have the journeyman tailor at home to make it. One, Danny of that ilk, was once at Bishop's Court making a long walking coat for the Bishop. In trying it on in its nebulous condition, that leprosy of open white seams and stitches, Danny made numerous chalk marks to indicate the places of the buttons. "No, no, Danny," said the Bishop, "no more buttons than enough to fasten it—only one, that will do. It would ill become a poor priest like me to go a-glitter with ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... fears of Ulster took any concrete form, it would be easier to combat them; but they are unformulated, nebulous. Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine what measure of oppression could possibly be invented by the most malignant Irish Government which would not recoil like a boomerang upon those in whose supposed interests it was framed. I shall have to deal with this point again in ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers |
