"Vacillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disunion among his enemies, by which he was certain to gain in the end. He never committed himself to a position of the security of which he was not sure; and he carried this spirit of caution to such an extremity that many of the early years of his reign present a succession of timid and vacillating movements, that more nearly resemble the subterfuges of a coward than the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... 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: unpractical; ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... 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, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Charles came back to London from France on October 20th, the Cabinet was still vacillating ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... 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 of the Catholics and Calvinists, to insistence that so-called mixed ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... for Louis to complete the conquest of his vacillating cousin whose allegiance was so vital to his plans of aggrandisement. Louise should go to Whitehall to play the part of beautiful spy on Charles, and, by her favours, to make him a pliant tool in the hand ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... creditable walking gentlemen as the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian Castel-Forte; and should not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil. For Nelvil, whatever faults he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating refusal to take the goods the gods provide him may be, is, after all, if not quite a live man, an excellent model of what a considerable number of the men of his time aimed at being, and would have liked to be. He is not a bit less life-like ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... Duke meanwhile saw that Lucien was deep in thought, and made a pretty good guess at the matter of his meditations. He himself had opened out wide horizons of public life before an ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... published by the Royal Aeronautical Society, displays a curious mixture of the true scientific spirit and colossal conceit. Walker appears to have been a man inclined to jump to conclusions, which carried him up to the edge of discovery and left him vacillating there. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... the feeble, vacillating monarch and his imperious consort were dragged back—a pair of humiliated prisoners— to the capital from which they had tried ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... him, sending his army flying terror-stricken back upon Armagh. This feat established him as the hero of the North. No army which Sussex could again gather together could be induced to risk the fate of its predecessor. The deputy was a poor soldier, feeble and vacillating in the field. He was no match for his fiery assailant; and after an attempt to get over the difficulty by suborning one Neil Grey to make away with the too successful Shane, he was reduced to the necessity of coming to terms. An agreement was ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... court-martialing him, as he had so justly deserved; but now six months of the monotony, the frightful isolation and the loneliness had wrought a change. The young man brooded continually over his fate. His days were filled with morbid self-pity, which eventually engendered in his weak and vacillating mind a hatred for those who had sent him here—for the very men he had at first inwardly thanked for saving him from the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... day (the 27th of May) the bank stopped payment in specie. Law and D'Argenson were both dismissed from the ministry. The weak, vacillating, and cowardly regent threw the blame of all the mischief upon Law, who, upon presenting himself at the Palais Royal, was refused admittance. At nightfall, however, he was sent for, and admitted into the palace by a secret door,[12] when the regent endeavoured ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... was contrasting this supercilious, vacillating weakling with the stern, strong man who lode yonder. A sigh fluttered across her lips. Had things but been different. Had Ombreval been the Revolutionist and La Boulaye the Vicomte, how much better pleased might she not have been. But since it was not so, why sigh? It was not as if she ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... that guard the run in, and the course-keeper in a shooting-jacket on a rough pony to crack his whip, and cry to half a dozen stable-lads to "clear the course," before the horses come flying towards home. Now all is tremor; hope and fear vacillating in each breast. Silence stands breathless with expectation—all eyes are riveted—the horses come within descrying distance—"beautiful!" three close together, two behind. "Clear the course! clear the course! pray clear the course!" "Polly Hopkins! ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... change that the very graces of face and form that a while ago had pleased her in Kenneth, seemed now effeminate attributes, well-attuned to a vacillating, purposeless mind. Far greater beauty did her eyes behold in this grimfaced soldier of fortune; the man as firm of purpose as he was upright of carriage; gloomy, proud, and reckless; still young, yet past the callow age of adolescence. Since the day of his coming to Castle Marleigh ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... The frontiersman was always ready for a fight, and just now he especially wanted a fight with England. He resented the insults that his country had suffered at the hands of the English authorities and had little patience with the vacillating policy so long pursued by Congress and the Madison Administration. Other grievances came closer home. For two years the West had been disturbed by Indian wars and intrigues for which the English officers and agents in Canada were held largely responsible. In 1811 Governor Harrison ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... 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 ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... battle presented itself. About an hundred soldiers, in one firm rank, stood at the opening of the pass, firing on the now vacillating steadiness of the enemy. Thaddeus checked his horse. Five hundred had been detached to this post; how few remained! Could he hope that Sobieski had escaped so desperate a rencontre? Fearing the worst, and dreading to have those fears confirmed, his heart sickened when he received ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... done? Study existing facts, and decide on a definite line of policy, and follow it through. Russia, having a definite line of policy, is strong; we have not one, and are weak and vacillating. 'A double-minded man is unstable in ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... think," replied David hesitatingly, as though he could not quite understand what had happened after that. "You see, this friend of mine was not of the vacillating and irresolute sort. I had always given him credit for that—credit for being a man who would measure up to a situation. He was quite an athlete, and enjoyed boxing and fencing and swimming. If at any time in his life he could have conceived of a situation such as he encountered in his wife's ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... and white from her enemy neuralgia, murmured to me in French that I had the honour to render desolate Miss L——n R——l, the reigning stage beauty, who was greatly desirous of precisely that pearl and whose too vacillating admirer would doubtless enjoy his bad little quarter hour a cause de moi. I do not deny that this put a point to my satisfaction. I was, in fact, idiotically gratified—God and man that is born of woman alone ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... 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 it was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... Athenian 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. ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Executives were tough-minded, realistic men. They were not going to step out now unless there were good reason for it. But if the subtle undercutting of the vacillating minority weakened Mannheim's own resolve, or if he failed to give solid, well-reasoned answers to their questions, then the whole project would begin to ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and vacillating current of warm air from the register, I was forced at times to wear my overcoat as I read, and at night I spread it over my cot. I did not see the sun for a month. The wind was always filled with rain or sleet, and as the lights in Bates' Hall were almost always ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... in the wrong with regard to Beauclerk," she continued quietly. "That is merely fair to him. Every one shall know that I have been weak and vacillating. May God forgive me and humble me—for I shall not be understood, even by many good people. But the next worst thing to making an error is to abide by it. Dear David, try to follow my feeling. It has all passed in my mind in such a way that it is impossible for me to describe it. In a sense, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Antoinette been the wife of a strong and able king, she would probably have been quite right in avoiding interference in the government of the state. Being married to Louis XVI., it was inevitable that she should try to direct his vacillating will in public matters. It therefore becomes pertinent to ask whether her influence was generally exerted on ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... of all the Swedish wellwishers, all the anti-imperialists of this court, believe me. They wish to place the Electoral Prince at their head, and hope by this means to bring it about that the weak and vacillating Elector shall secede from the Emperor and ally himself with the Swedes. They teased and goaded the Elector, until he even sent his Chamberlain von Schlieben to The Hague in order to fetch the Prince, and the latter has but to-day returned from his ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... occupying) and concentrate on matters in hand. What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so? But I knew in my heart that the matter was already decided. I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street, and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the papers. But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had me in its grip. Annoyed, and with a sense of chagrin, I hurried to ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... should be of the worst description. He received in 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 ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... would or would not permit the United States Government to do. Even a Cabinet officer, of whom better things might have been expected, and by whom better things are now nobly said and done, allowed himself to fall into the error of explaining to the vacillating Governor of Maryland that the intentions of the National Administration were purely defensive. While such language is current at home, it is not strange that foreigners should find themselves in a state of hopeless confusion about ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... their lodges for the next season. This done, they were to send out a small independent war party against the enemy. Their final determination left us in some embarrassment. Should we go to La Bonte's Camp, it was not impossible that the other villages would prove as vacillating and indecisive as The Whirlwinds, and that no assembly whatever would take place. Our old companion Reynal had conceived a liking for us, or rather for our biscuit and coffee, and for the occasional small presents which we made him. He was very anxious that we should go with the village which ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... should not feel more charity toward an unfortunate member of their sex; and I happen to know that it is a matter of terrible importance to Nan Brent that in Port Agnew people regard her as unclean and look at her askance. And because that vacillating old Daney didn't have the courage to fly in the face of Port Agnew's rotten public opinion, he subjected Nan Brent and her helpless old father to the daily and nightly association of depraved people. If he should dare ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... alone at the window. For the first time in weeks he was drawing the breath of freedom. A weight seemed removed from his soul. He had been weak and vacillating, but when the test had come he had not been false either to himself or to his friends. That ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... 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. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... days thereafter he was held in prison by order of Colonel de Peyster. The commander seemed to be in a vacillating mood. Now he was despondent, and then he had spells of courage and energy. Henry heard through Holderness that the negotiations with Timmendiquas were not yet concluded, but that they were growing more favorable. A fresh supply of ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 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 ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... 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 Republicans by Napoleon the Little, a Parallel is completed ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... any, before he returns to his wife? In his soliloquy in Act I, scene 7, what two considerations are keeping him from the murder? What argument of Lady Macbeth was effective in bringing him to a decision? How do you account for the fact that he is extremely vacillating in Act I and fearful in the first part of Act II, while in the battle with the rebels he was the personification of bravery and decision? What is his state of mind as soon as the act is committed? What change takes place as soon as it is discovered? Is his fear of ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... A vacillating gleam, thrown from the shop-window of a shoemaker, suddenly illuminated from the waist down the figure of the woman who was before the young man. Ah! surely, she alone had that swaying figure; she alone knew the secret of that chaste gait which innocently ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... so many arguments on both sides of the question that I am always vacillating between them, and it would therefore be impossible for me to treat the matter here. All I can say is, that the longer I live the more I am convinced that it is personal character which most helps the world forward, and I think our hearty allegiance to the ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... heard these opinions with great indignation; and when he completed the last arrangement for the division, by carrying with his own hands a trout of a large size, and placing it on four different piles in succession, as his vacillating ideas of justice required, gave vent to ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... was in these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon, being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for the first time, he could not affect by any of those ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... impertinent and uncompromising boldness, he could not forbear uttering a panegyric upon her better qualities, which convinced the minister that their misunderstanding was not destined to be of long duration, an opinion in which he was confirmed when the weak and vacillating Henry, at the close of this enthusiastic apostrophe, proceeded to institute a comparison between the Marquise and the Queen, in which the latter suffered on every point. The earnest wish to please of the favourite was contrasted with the coldness of Marie de Medicis, the wit of the one with ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... conduct, her own greatness, she would not have dreamed of having an opinion of her own. She would have consulted the Doctor, and simply have done as he directed. But all this was for her child, and in a vague, vacillating way she felt that for her child she ought to be ready with counsel of ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... "But Fraeulein—" Willibald, vacillating between shame and anger, would have interfered to save his roses, but the dangerous look in the dark eyes warned him to ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... family, of which he was by much the cleverest member, and he was well calculated to fill the situation in which fortune had placed him. His talents were certainly of a superior description, but their efficacy was counteracted by the eccentricity of his habits, the indolence of his mind, and his vacillating and uncertain disposition. He was, however, occasionally capable of intense application, and competent to make himself master of any subject he thought fit to grapple with; his mind was reflecting, combining, and argumentative, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... consequently forced into much solitude and a precocious amount of reading. Educated at home and in public schools of St. Louis. Graduate of Washington University. Two years' graduate work at Columbia. After vacillating between writing and the stage, the pen finally conquered, and between 1909 and 1912 just thirty-three manuscripts were submitted to and rejected by one publication alone,—a publication which later came to feature her work. First short story published in Reedy's Mirror, 1909; second ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... still refused to believe that the Mormons were sincere in their intention to depart, and the county meetings of the year before were reassembled to warn the Mormons that the citizens stood ready to enforce their order. The vacillating course of Governor Ford did not help the situation. He issued an order disbanding Major Warren's force on May 1, and on the following day instructed him to muster it into service again. Warren was very outspoken in his determination to ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... reasons, the coffee houses should be closed. His argument was much the same as that advanced more than a hundred years later by Charles II of England, namely, that they were hotbeds of sedition. Kuprili was a military dictator, with nothing of Charles's vacillating nature; and although, like Charles, he later rescinded his edict, he enforced it, while it was effective, in no uncertain fashion. Kuprili was no petty tyrant. For a first violation of the order, cudgeling was the punishment; for a second offense, the victim was sewn in a leather bag and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... voice broke upon his ear addressing Juliet Galt—the vibrant tones of Dudley Webb. He had come in late and was standing in mock helplessness before Juliet and Carrie, his plump white hand vacillating ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... grief had given softness and a winning mildness to her manners, which had before been remarkable for vivacity. Nor was her residence at her mother's house of a nature to restore her gaiety. The poor woman was very vacillating in her repentance. She sometimes begged Justine to forgive her unkindness, but much oftener accused her of having caused the deaths of her brothers and sister. Perpetual fretting at length threw Madame Moritz into a decline, which at first increased her irritability, but she ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... to act in whatever way may be necessary, You had better go forth, and if anything occurs, give notice to the proper authorities. We have not now such a lord mayor as we had during the season of the plague. The firm and courageous Sir John Lawrence is but ill succeeded by the weak and vacillating Sir Thomas Bludworth. Still, the latter may be equal to this emergency, and if anything happens, you must ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and safe upon the safest side. There was a tolerably numerous party ready, in times so dangerous, to attach themselves to Barrere, as a leader who professed to guide them to safety if not to honour; and it was the existence of this vacillating and uncertain body, whose ultimate motions could never be calculated upon, which rendered it impossible to presage with assurance the event of any debate in the convention during this ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... spread that he was a disguised Jesuit, come to receive the 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
... Duck-billed Platypus A sad example sets for us. From him we learn how indecision Of character provokes derision. This vacillating beast, you see, Could not decide which he would be— Fish, flesh or fowl—and chose all three. The scientists were sorely vexed, To classify him so perplexed Their brains that they with rage at bay Called him a horrid name one day, A name ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... again like an infant. Mr Methusaleh took quick advantage of his success. Rushing wildly to a corner cupboard, he produced from it a plate of cold crisp fried fish, which he placed with all imaginable speed exactly under the nose of the still vacillating Aby. He vacillated no longer. The spell was complete. The old gentleman, with a perfect reliance upon the charm, proceeded to prepare a cup of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... eleemosynary grub and gew-gaws may be wheedled, the Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta considers himself to be the superior of every created being. The Eskimo knows what he wants; he is always sure of it, and there is no vacillating. When he comes into the H.B. Company's post to trade, skins are his currency, the pelts of the silver-fox his gold coinage. A good silver, or black-fox is worth here about one hundred ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... policy, adherents of Calvinism. Thus the Protestants in France became a political party, as well as a religious body, and a party with anti-monarchical tendencies. Anthony of Bourbon, a weak and vacillating person, had married Jeanne d'Albret, the heiress of Bearn and Navarre, a heroic woman and an earnest Protestant, the mother of Henry IV. His brother Louis, Prince of Conde, a brave, impetuous soldier, whose wife, the niece of the Grand Constable ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Ohio black walnut is prone to hybridize with butternut trees in its vicinity and others have told me of its hybridizing with English walnut trees near it, which shows it to be almost as vacillating in character as our Japanese walnuts or heartnuts. Ohio black walnuts, when planted, usually produce vigorous stocks, many of which show hybridity of some sort. If one examines the nuts of the Ohio and finds them dwarfed or deformed, he may be sure that they have been pollinized by something other ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... Robert Louis in a degree he had never before known. He also had dignity and a precision such as his parents and kinsmen had despaired of seeing in one so physically and mentally vacillating. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... his friend Tartarin to the summit of Mont Blanc. Since two in the morning—it was now four by the president's repeater—the hapless courier had groped along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed, vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations extorted from him by his mishaps, for an avalanche was on the watch, and the slightest concussion, a mere vibration of the crystalline air, might send down its masses ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... form of melancholia, and compares the effect of the tarantula bite upon it to stimulating with spurs a horse which is already running. The reality of that effect he thus admits, and, therefore, directly confirms what in appearance only he denies. By shaking the already vacillating belief in this disorder he is said to have actually succeeded in rendering it less frequent, and in setting bounds to imposture; but this no more disproves the reality of its existence than the oft repeated ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... happiest day of my life, Diana. We are going to be great friends, are we not! And the philosophers tell us that friendship is the most soul-satisfying of all human relationships. I have been very vacillating in my attitude to you, since you came to Washington. But I cannot lose the feeling that those wise, wistful eyes of yours have seen my trouble and understood. I wonder how soon I can see you again. I'm rather proud of my ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... secretly left the Diet on August 6. War seemed inevitable to many. The reading of the Confutation had shattered the last hopes of the Lutherans for a peaceful settlement. They said so to each other, and wrote it to those at home, though not all of them in the lachrymose tone of the vacillating Melanchthon, who, filled with a thousand fears was temporarily more qualified for depriving others of their courage than ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... before he places his merchandise before the public. Thus art and literature sink to the level of bad taste and speculation. The artistic individuality shrinks before the calculating reckoner. Not that which moves the artist or the writer most receives expression; the vacillating demands of mediocrity of every-day people must be satisfied. The artist becomes the helper of the dealer and the average men, who trot along in the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... him at Stretton House, Mr. Caryll had left a scene of strife between Lady Ostermore and her son on one side and Lord Ostermore on the other. Weak and vacillating as he was in most things, it seemed that the earl could be strong in his dislike of his son, and firm in his determination not to condone the infamy of ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... The Rollestons, vacillating between Tadousac, the Falls, a trip in the "Algoma," and a journey to Boston, their large party being an objection to each and all, were finally attracted by an advertisement of a fishing-lodge to be let or sold on ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... from the situation of the place it was possible also to effect a junction by rail with General French. Thirdly, a victory gained in the centre of the disaffected districts would have been a feather in the cap of the General, for it must have drawn to him such waverers whose vacillating loyalty was daily growing dangerous. The melancholy reverse was, therefore, from many points of view to be regretted. Perhaps, however, it achieved one object. It forced those at home to realise the necessity for sending more than sprinklings of troops to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... opposition to sexuality, directly a synthesis had been effected, Christianity should have drawn the obvious conclusion from its fundamental principle and acknowledged love, which united the hostile elements. Protestantism did so, half-heartedly. Luther's vacillating attitude towards sexuality is typical of this indecision. At heart he could not justify sexuality; he regarded it, in the same way as did the Fathers of the Church, as an evil with which one had to make terms. His sanction of marriage was nothing but a crooked and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... of supplying matter to be recorded, devotes its special attention to superintendence of the hand, directing its movements, so that the hand no longer glides naturally and automatically over the paper, but moves slowly with a halting, vacillating motion, as the eye passes to and from the copy to the pen, moving under the specific control of the will. Evidence of such a forgery is manifest in the formal, broken, nervous lines, the uneven flow of the ink, and the often retouched lines and shades. These evidences ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... weary column toiled along until it reached the spot where it expected to be joined by Colonel Smith's battalion, about fifty miles up Ham's Fork. The very next day snow fell to the depth of more than a foot. Disheartened, vacillating, and perplexed, Colonel Alexander called another council of war, and, acting on its judgment, resolved to retrace his steps. An express reached him that same day, from Colonel Smith, by which he was informed of the approach ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... was females who possessed the world's good report, and to whom it was justly valuable, who were most strongly tempted, by shame and fear of the world's censure, to the crime of infanticide: That the child was murdered, he professed to entertain no doubt. The vacillating and inconsistent declaration of the prisoner herself, marked as it was by numerous refusals to speak the truth on subjects, when, according to her own story, it would have been natural, as well as advantageous, to have been candid; ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 was also a minister in the same cabinet, ...
— 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 and his ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... should despise a feeble, vacillating Hercules most of all— a burly, assuming sort of person, who could be made a tool of, and led to do what he knew ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... work hitherto easy and enjoyed. Sometimes they are obsessed with the thought that they have lost their nerve completely, and so dread to commit themselves in even the most trivial of situations. The vacillating frame of mind is so distressing at times as to arouse thoughts of suicide. When these symptoms concur in the type of personality whom I shall describe as the unstable adrenal-centered individual, there is evidence for explaining the process as the effect ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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 ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... administration of Buchanan and the Thirty-Sixth Congress can only here have a brief notice. There was a pretty general disposition to make further concessions and compromises to appease the disunion sentiment of the South. His administration was weak and vacillating. Two serious attempts at conciliation were made. President Buchanan, in his last Annual Message (December 4, 1860), while declaring that the election of any one to the office of President was not a just cause for dissolving the Union, and while denying ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... experience, the presentation of the doctrine will be faulty and cold and lifeless, or weak and vacillating, or harsh and sharp and severe. With the experience, the preaching of the doctrine will be with great joy and assurance, and will be strong and searching, but at the same time warm and ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... unfortunate for Canada. The resources for defence were relatively insignificant, and indecision and weakness were shown by Sir George Prevost, then commander-in-chief and governor-general—a well meaning man but wanting in ability as a military leader, who was also hampered by the vacillating counsels of the Liverpool administration, which did not believe in war until the province was actually invaded. It was fortunate for Canada that she had then at the head of the government in the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... glimmers now and then for a few moments at most. But it 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, p. 282 (Fr. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... difficulty by the dictators, and General San Martin was placed in command. This man had rendered good service to Chili when, in conjunction with O'Higgins, he had led the movement of independence; but his success had turned his head. He was vain and arrogant, and at the same time dilatory and vacillating. He, like the dictators, was jealous of the success and popularity of Lord Cochrane, and was bent upon thwarting him to the utmost. His army, four thousand two hundred strong, was embarked at Valparaiso in the ships of the squadron. Lord Cochrane ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... with all that tenacity of devotion which every Northern heart has for the flag and the country, was covered with ignominy by these late events. She blushed with shame as she thought of the weak, vacillating nation which had given the promise of freedom to the ears of four millions of weak but trustful allies, and broken it to their hearts. She knew that the country had appealed to them in its hour of mortal agony, and they had answered ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... of fancy, in the chill hours of the morning—say about a quarter to twelve, noon—see me awake! First thing of all, without one thought of the plausible but unsatisfactory small beer, or the healthful though insipid soda-water, I take the deadly razor in my vacillating grasp; I proceed to skate upon the margin of eternity. Stimulating thought! I bleed, perhaps, but with medicable wounds. The stubble reaped, I pass out of my chamber, calm but triumphant. To employ a hackneyed phrase, I would not call Lord Wellington my uncle! I, too, have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imagination, inventiveness, thoughtfulness, receptiveness, quickness, analytical power, constructiveness, breadth, grasp? Can you manage people well? Do you know a fine picture when you see it? Is your will weak, yielding, vacillating, or firm, strong, stubborn? Do you like to be with people and do they like to be with you?"—and so on. It is clear that the replies to questions of this kind can be of psychological value only when the questioner ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... just what the Lord said to Eve, she must have had the capacity to understand it. But all speculations as to what Eve thought in that eventful hour are vain. Clarke asserts that Cain and Abel were twins. Eve must have been too much occupied with her vacillating joys and sorrows to have indulged in any connected train of thought. Her grief in the fratricidal tragedy that followed can be more easily understood. The dreary environments of the mother, and the hopeless prophesies of her future struggling ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... suffered; she is rarely taken by surprise, a few moments' reflection will suffice for her to determine what is to be done under the circumstances; she is rarely taken in the snare of deception, for she knows that human nature is weak, vacillating and unreliable, and, consequently, she keeps herself on ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... away his patrimony, sought to restore himself from his fallen position in society, by assuming principles of patriotism which in his heart he despised. Moreover, the conduct of their rulers, which had been too frequently vacillating and manifestly corrupt, taught the great body of the people to look upon them with suspicion and distrust. Talk they as loud as they might of honesty of intention, of unimpeachable integrity, and of pure patriotism, the people nevertheless would not now believe ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... found in more 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 ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... other side, is to make the poem appeal to our emotions with an intensity which the beautiful lines alone could not effect. Ichabod we read once, but when we know the meaning of its spiritual name and remember that it is Whittier's indignant rebuke of Webster for his vacillating policy in the slavery agitation, we read it again with a renewed and more vivid interest. Many things, however, are so universal that one cares not whether they were written by a Hindoo or an American, whether they ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... meantime, while your men of science are thus vacillating, in the definition of the species of the only animal they have the opportunity of studying inside and out, between one and sixty-three; and disputing about the origin, in past ages, of what they cannot define in the present ones; and deciphering the filthy heraldries which ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... conciliated nor tamed into submission. To make matters worse, Blois was given up, and Pontoise was substituted for it! This latter town being close to Paris, the chastisement became ridiculous, showed the vacillating weakness of the Regent, and encouraged the Parliament to laugh at him. One thing was, however, well done. The resolution taken to banish the Parliament was kept so secret that that assembly had not the slightest knowledge ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 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. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... fitful, vacillating and morbid, Samuel Adams was persistent, undeviating, and sanity itself. While Samuel Adams never abated by a hair his opposition to the British policy, James Otis, who at the outset had given the watch-word to the patriots, ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... this, President Tyler within three days sent another message to the House of Representatives asking for reconsideration of the subject, but the matter went over until after the Presidential campaign in the autumn. Henry Clay's vacillating stand throughout this controversy proved fatal to his ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... 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 ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... at Verona some 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 of our arms and the honour of the nation; for it cannot be doubted ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... resembled was, we think, Claudius Caesar. Both had the same feeble vacillating temper, the same childishness, the same coarseness, the same poltroonery. Both were men of learning; bath wrote and spoke, not, indeed, well, but still in a manner in which it seems almost incredible that men so foolish ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is ever the excuse of a weak, vacillating mind. Opportunities! Every life is full of them. Every lesson in school or college is an opportunity. Every examination is a chance in life. Every patient is an opportunity. Every newspaper article is an opportunity. Every client is an opportunity. Every sermon ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Ireland the young Earl of Desmond was in a particularly strong position, but, unfortunately, he was personally weak and vacillating, and by playing off the Earl of Ormond against him Elizabeth was able to keep him in subjection to England, to use him against Shane O'Neill, and to prevent him from taking part in a national or religious confederation. In 1567 the Earl was arrested and sent to London, where he was detained ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... some sense of that great and gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye; that the man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himself up for an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out a hand, and then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysed will recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power to say, 'Thou oughtest,' but no power to enforce the execution of its decrees, and the heart turning away from the salvation that it would have found in the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... ambassadors, and lost us the rest of that day and the whole of the next. But Joan was on hand, and so they had their journey for their pains. The rest of us took the road at dawn, next morning, July 20th. And got how far? Six leagues. Tremouille was getting in his sly work with the vacillating King, you see. The King stopped at St. Marcoul and prayed three days. Precious time lost—for us; precious time gained for Bedford. He would know ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... but 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 ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... 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
... 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 Fetishism up to the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... men whom he instructed in the arts of dissolute living, and to whom he communicated his own selfish Epicureanism. To him in a great measure may be attributed the corruption of the Florentine aristocracy in the sixteenth century. In his public action he was no less vacillating than unprincipled in private life. After prevailing upon Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici to leave Florence in 1527, he failed to execute his trust of getting Pisa from their grasp (moved, it is said, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... however, been her intention only to pourtray the bright ornaments of the party. She has endeavoured to show that it was composed, as well as most other political combinations, of materials differing in value—some pure, some base, some noble, some mean and vacillating. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... is in our hearts, though it be but as a grain of mustard seed, be sure of this, that He will watch over it and bless the springing thereof. So, although when we think of ourselves, our own slowness of progress, our own feeble resolutions, our own wayward hearts, our own vacillating wills, our many temptations, our many corruptions, our many follies, we may well say to ourselves, 'Will there ever be any greater completeness in this terribly imperfect Christian character of mine than there is to-day?' Let us be of good cheer, and not think only ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Russia together as a unit. On account of this political interest the small intelligent class acquiesce in the autocracy. The autocracy imposes force on the people to crush out their inherited mores, and to force on them western institutions. The policy is, moreover, vacillating. At one time the party which favored westernizing has prevailed at court; at another time the old Russian or pan-Slavic party. There is internal discord and repression. The ultimate result of such an attempt to control mores by force is an interesting question of the future. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... are we to do?" As he asked this question, he approached her and put his arm round her waist. This he did in momentary vacillating mercy,—not because of the charm of the thing to himself, but through his own inability not to give ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... the period specified of two years, of checking and eradicating the worst abuses, and, at the same time, of maintaining his own sovereignty and the native institutions of his kingdom unimpaired; but if he does not, if he takes a vacillating course, and fail by refusing to act on the Governor-General's advice, he is aware of the other alternative and of the consequences. It must, then, be manifest to the whole world that, whatever may happen, the King has received a friendly ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... can the King do?" demanded Perousse impatiently, and with scorn for the vacillating humour of his companion; "Granted that he knew ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... it is both amusing and painful to follow the author's vacillating description of Judaism. At first Judaism is a form of belief. Then it becomes the effect of that belief upon thought and conduct. From that it evolves into some irreducible minimum of conformity, if ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... of a portrait—I mean while we still, more or less, look at it—we must beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting, vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghast sometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... and to sacrifice all other interests to this. His education had been exclusively religious, and in his retirement he had lived a serious life, associating much with the Ulema, who, no doubt, pointed out to him the vacillating policy of his predecessors, and the danger that there was that the Caliphate and the empire would be lost together. He determined to strengthen his empire by restoring the influence of the Caliphate, and rallying the Mohammedan world once more around the throne of Othman. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... holding up the bits of candle, lost in wonder, in amused contempt at that thing there. It is I, certainly: that I must admit. There is the high-curving brow—really a King's brow, after all, it strikes me now—and that vacillating look about the eyes and mouth which used to make my sister Ada say: 'Adam is weak and luxurious.' Yes, that is wonderfully done, the eyes, that dear, vacillating look of mine; for although it is rather a staring ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... The vacillating conduct of the imbecile old man throughout his whole reign, the apathy with which he was contented to remain a passive spectator of those bloody dramas of which his court was for so long a period the theatre, deprive him of all claim to commiseration in his present degraded position, which, ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... wages. A gift was legitimate, but pay ignoble; and the stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all labor. The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. A curse rested upon all labor; and even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress and retrogression, ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... natural inclination, and will make it certain that their reach shall not be beyond their grasp, as, alas! it so often is in the sadness and disappointments of human love. He will come into that feeble, vacillating, wayward will of yours, that is only obstinate in its adherence to the low and the evil, as some foul creature, that one may try to wrench away, digs its claws into corruption and holds on by that. He will lift ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... cases. This reasonable expectation, however, is far from being realized. We have already seen that in numberless cases, such as that of the fore-limbs of serpents, no vestige of a rudiment is present. But the vacillating policy in the matter of rudiments does not end here; for it is shown in a still more aggravated form where within the limits of the same natural group of organisms a rudiment is sometimes present and sometimes absent. For instance, although ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... States are practically lost to us. The crest of the noble Mexican Gulf has separated from us. Let us exert every power we possess to bring them all back to the fold. Why should we not? Every motive of interest or patriotism should induce us to do so. Suppose the States were vacillating and in doubt where to go. Suppose they were set up for sale in market overt, and the States of Europe were to bid for them—for this, not only the richest portion of our own country, but of the world—because this portion ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... at these delays. Political events in England swayed the destiny of Ireland then as now. The poor vacillating, double-dealing king was delivered to the Puritans, tried, and executed. But before Cromwell came to smash the confederation and everything papal in Ireland, the Irish chief gladdened the hearts of his countrymen by the glorious victory ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... to the vacillating state of his being that, finding Savina in an exceptionally engaging black dress with floating sleeves of sheer lace and a string of rare pearls, he should forget all his doubts in the pleasure of their intimacy. Even now, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the two great attractions to which he was exposed. Myrtle looked so immensely handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to meeting, for she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton was going to be the preacher, that the young poet was on the point ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... necessities and his childish capacities for business. With a keen sense of the power displayed in "Don Juan," and even in more melodramatic works, Shelley had acquired a full knowledge of the singularly licentious training from which Byron had then scarcely emerged, and of the vacillating caprice which enfeebled all his actions. His own ability to grapple with practical affairs was very great; but he himself had scarcely formed a sufficient estimate of it. Determined to maintain a thorough equality and freedom with the noble bard in their social relations, he shrank from any position ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and 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 ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... 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 ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... 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 for the box and snuff—voila!" The poor ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disdains herself for hesitating to 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 ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... she 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, ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... more slowly. These two men, who became friends and generous rivals, were very different in character and disposition. Instead of possessing the self-confidence, energy, and industry that brought Dickens fame in his youth, Thackeray had to contend with a somewhat shy and vacillating temperament, with extreme modesty, and with ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... beat about the bush in 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 ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... of the Commonwealth," brought on him a fresh imprisonment at the hands of the Council, which lasted till the dissolution of the Parliament and with which the Commons declined to interfere. But while vacillating in its assertion of the rights of individual members, the House steadily claimed for itself a right to discuss even the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the succession, the Church, and the regulation ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... punctilious, to 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 ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... parties did not cease to strive with one another in England. Harvey had been appointed by the vacillating Charles to please the former court party, but during the quarrel with his Parliament over the Petition of Right he became anxious again to conciliate the colonists and the members of the old company; and in May, 1631, he appointed[41] ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... 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 shape itself ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... carried by Jeremiah. The effect verges on the grotesque. The balance of Christ's Church seems uncertain. The Evangelists clutch the Prophets by the hair, and while the synagogue stands firm, the Church looks small, feeble, and vacillating. The new dispensation has not the air of mastery either physical or intellectual; the old gives it all the support it has, and, in the absence of Saint Paul, both old and new seem little concerned with the sympathies of Frenchmen. The ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... and songs that were popular just before and during the war attest the vacillating temper of the people. Joyous airs were at first heard, these growing contemptuous and defiant as the struggle approached, then stirring war songs and hymns of encouragement. But as sorrow followed sorrow until all were stricken; as wounds, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... interrupted by a request from Sir Christopher Hatton for one of the many harassing interviews that beset her during the days following the trial, when judgment was withheld, according to the express command of the vacillating Elizabeth, and the case remitted to the Star Chamber. Lord Burghley considered this hesitation to be the effect of judicial blindness—so utterly had hatred and fear of the future shut his eyes to all sense of ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inordinately selfish, and was consumed by deep-rooted conviction that Sandy Morley owed him a great deal and that he was conferring a mighty honour upon the young man by accepting his hospitality. No doubt arose as to his right in sharing Sandy's home, but as time went on he did, as all weak and vacillating natures do, resent young Morley's strength of character, simplicity and capacity for winning to himself that which Lans felt belonged to him by inherent justice. It had been one thing to know that his Uncle Levi Markham had taken ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... opinion, not to make learned men, but to maintain "a sound mind in a sound body;" and he begins the education of the future man even from his cradle. In his philosophical writings, he is always simple; but, as he is loose and vacillating in his use of terms, this simplicity is often purchased at the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... their acquaintance, a handsome simple young fellow, with a very moderate allowance of brains; indeed, in his heart Mr. Huntingdon knew that Lord Bertie Gower was merely a feather-brained boy with a weak vacillating will that had already ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... excerpt, he has not in his translation given those references. His work is not therefore what the original is, a Chrestomathia of the best Arabian jurists—a succedaneum for their complete works—an illustration of Arabic legal literature. Again, he is often loose and vacillating in the use of the English words he has selected as corresponding to the technical phraseology of the Arabian jurists, and sometimes infelicitous in the selection of his English terms. It has occurred to us that he would have succeeded ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare
... hardly two years since opinion had opened the breaches against the monarchy, yet it had already accomplished immense results. The weak and vacillating spirit of the government had convoked the Assembly of Notables, whilst public spirit had placed its grasp on power and convoked the States General. The States General being established, the nation had felt its omnipotence, and from this feeling to a legal insurrection there was but a word; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... 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 ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Charles Albert's heart was with the growing cry for independence, but he wished for independence without liberty. This was the "secret of the king" which has been sought for in all kinds of recondite suppositions: this was the key to his apparently vacillating and inconsistent character. Yet he revealed it himself in some words spoken to Roberto d'Azeglio, the elder brother of Massimo. "Marquis d'Azeglio," he said, "I desire as much as you do the enfranchisement of Italy, and it is for that ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... before the strong rays of the sun, had yielded before the masculine and practical display of the energetic hate of its object, while on the contrary she, whose beauty of person was now to him a thing without price, acknowledged no other feeling than contempt for the vacillating character of her associate. In this only did they agree that each looked upon each in the light of a being sunk in crime—steeped in dishonor—and while the love of the one was turned to almost loathing at the thought, the other merely wondered how one so feeble of heart had ever been linked ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... through the world, looking through and down upon my neighbours, the incarnation of honesty; but I can find excuses for myself when I desire them, I hug my personal esteem too close, and a thousand to one I am too great a coward at heart to tell myself the naked truth. You, on the other hand, are vacillating and ill at your ease. You shrink from the hards of life which I steer happily through. But you have no delusions with yourself, and the odds are that when the time comes you may choose the "high that proved too high" ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... man of great influence. No person has more power than himself. He instructs tens of thousands, and leads them to virtue, to honor, to happiness. No man will have more to answer for than the conductor of a corrupt and vacillating press. ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... presented himself for treatment in October, 1874. He had at various times made the attempt to study some profession, but had never been able to concentrate his mind sufficiently on any object to enable him to persevere in its pursuit. He was fretful, irritable and vacillating; would desire one thing to-day, another to-morrow; never long of the same mind. Melancholia, digestive disturbances and hypochondriacal phenomena accompanied this condition. No organic disease was discoverable. On October 1st he took his first ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... not in this girl's nature to be concerned only with herself. If she possessed a single womanly virtue, it was supreme unselfishness. There was some one beside herself to take into consideration—a poor, vacillating, weak, miserable woman who wished to do what was right and had agreed to do so, but who, in the privacy of her own apartments, had gone down on her knees and begged Annie to protect her from the consequences of ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow |
