"Vagueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... think anyone comparing it as a whole with the work of the old masters, will be struck as against their distinctness, containedness, simplicity and serenity; with its complexity, restlessness, and vagueness, and emotion, and suggestiveness in place of delineation, and impressionism in place of literal transcription—and this alike in execution and motive. I do not mean to say that these qualities are better than the qualities that preceded them, or worse—but only that ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... undetermined. Continuation, resurrection, eternity are hereditary and habitual ideas; they have become almost inseparable and congenital parts of the mental system. This condition renders it nearly as difficult for us to understand the vagueness and mistiness of savage and unwritten creeds, as to penetrate into the modus agendi of animal instinct. And there is yet another obstacle in dealing with such people, their intense and childish sensitiveness ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... The vagueness and looseness of the information one receives in answer to that much abused question, "Is he better?" would be ludicrous, if it were not painful. The only sensible answer (in the present state of knowledge about sickness) would be "How can I know? I cannot tell ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... line between activities to be wholly absorbed by the State and those which would be left to private enterprise. No wise Socialist I think—if there are wise Socialists—would attempt to draw such a line at present. There is a certain vagueness in the ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... the will of a research foundation or industrial empire, I overlooked the vital fact that I had also chosen not to do God's Will, but what I stupidly thought to be my own. It was not. It was faintheartedness, sloth, placation, doubt, vagueness and romantical misconception. In a word, it was the aimlessness and falsity of the nineteenth century coming back in the window after having been booted out the door; my folly was the failure to recognize it. I have deluded myself, I have taken halfmeasures, I have followed false paths. Condemn ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... seemed by an effort to recall his wandering attention. "Oh yes," he said, with lethargic vagueness—"I haven't thought it out yet. I'll let ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... sure of the morality of this counsel; it seemed possible that Aunt Maria shared the vagueness about right and wrong which she quarrelled with in her nephew. She ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... him the most diligent research could discover, the Author is compelled to report as his unbiassed and deliberate judgment, that the character with which Henry of Monmouth's name has been stamped for profligacy and dissipation, is founded, not on the evidence of facts, but on the vagueness of tradition. Still such is the tradition, and it must stand for its due value. And if we allow tradition to tell us of his faults, we must in common fairness receive from the same tradition the fullness of his reformation; if we give credence to one who reports both his ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... pleading. 'The new system was by no means a bad one.... I never learnt it, at least not properly, and while I ought to have been learning, I was still under the spell of an unpractical frame of mind which inclined me to generalities and vagueness, and had in it a vast deal of laziness. When I look back on these times, I feel as if I had been only half awake or had not come to my full growth, though I was just under twenty-five when I was called. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... his wits rapidly, and the clarifying of his senses rendered him obviously unwilling to give any information as to the cause of his own plight. Nor would he speak French. For some reason, probably because of a permissible vagueness in statements couched in a foreign tongue, he insisted on ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... score of questions, but to no avail. He could add nothing to what he had supplied, and the vagueness that shadowed the figure of the man had not been illumined in the least. Beyond the fact that a small man had followed Dorothy inside the store and purchased the duplicate of her cigars, there ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... necessarily any increase in the number, or any alteration in the position of the buds, but the form and appearance of the latter differ from what is usual. Chloranthy, then, is a more complete form of frondescence. Owing to the vagueness with which the word has been applied by various authors, it becomes very difficult to ascertain whether the recorded instances of chloranthy were really illustrations of what is here meant by that term, or whether they ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... degrees, which would entitle the recipients to the enjoyment of the privileges attached to these titles. The learned council discussed, hesitated, tried to decide the question, but finally left it in a situation which was neither clear nor conclusive. This hesitancy and vagueness are very significant; a few years ago a negative decision would have been given promptly and in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... himself the age transfigured ... and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... But their glory, their genius, success and happiness, are expended and survive in the few great spirits their fortunate condition produced. The governments of antiquity were great and glorious, because their proletarians were intelligent, thrifty and brave, but the proletarians fade into vagueness, and are great only in the few great names which have been handed down to us. It has been said that a nation expends a hundred years of its vitality in the production of a great man of genius like Socrates, or Bacon, or Toussaint l'Overture, or Fulton. And this may be true. ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... after" him. Only the change of belief, due to the rapid accumulation of observed facts, has come in a period shorter than "two or three centuries;" for, at the end of the very century in which Lamarck, whatever his crudities, vagueness, and lack of observations and experiments, published his views, wherein are laid the foundations on which natural selection rests, the consensus of opinion as to the direct and indirect influence of the environment, and the inadequacy ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... emblematic, that in fact all these things were devices to keep the common herd of men in subordination; in the seventh the doctrines of Dualism, of a greater and a lesser deity, were introduced and the unity of God—fundamental doctrine of Islamism—was destroyed; in the eighth a great vagueness was expressed on the attributes of the first and greatest of these deities, and it was pointed out that real prophets were those who concerned themselves with practical matters—political institutions and good forms of government; ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... of the people were less definite than either the privileges or the powers of Parliament. They were, perhaps, attractive and valued somewhat in proportion to their vagueness. They certainly included right of freedom from arrest or imprisonment except on a definite charge and by due process of law; they included exemption from taxation except after consent of Parliament, [Footnote: Hakewell's argument in the Bates case of 1610 (State Trials, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... hypocrisy of persons over fifty, and terribly constrained and alarmed, turned vaguely back up the stairs. Miss Ingate, not quite knowing what she did, with an equal vagueness followed her. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... Hymns to Night exhale a delicate melancholy, moving in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than experienced. Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above life. In his Spiritual Poems we feel a simple, passionate intensity of adoration, a yearning sympathy for the hopeless and the heavy-laden; in their ardent ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... confused horizon two or three motionless sails that had been invisible began to show white against a rising cloud. This cloud had not the definition of sudden conquering storms, proper to the summer, and leaving a blessing behind their fury. The edge of it against the misty and brooding sky had all the vagueness of smoke, and as it rose up out of the sea its growth was so methodical and regular as to disconnect it wholly in one's mind from the little fainting breeze that still blew, from rain, or from any daily thing. It advanced with the fall of the evening till it held half the sky. There it seemed ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... and dumb—better for the type, better for the immortality of the world's soul. This to me is a vital thought, therefore life or death is in the issue. For the rest I know not. By the glimmer of light lent me, I can but guess greatness and descry vagueness. You go further and would touch the phantasmagorial veil. "Right!" I say, and I pray, "Godspeed." But there must be intensity. Are you thrilled? Do you stretch out your arms and dream the beauty? It is only when you gaze into a reality empty of the voices of life that I would ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... was in itself a rose-bower partly disclosed itself. The other gentlemen had lagged behind. "I will amuse MYSELF, and console your other guardian, dear," said the vivacious Milly, with a rapid exchange of glances with Yerba, "until this horrid business is over. Besides," she added with cheerful vagueness, "after so long a separation you must have a great deal to say to ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... the apparent vagueness and casualness of war on its present scarcely conceivable scale. When you are with a Staff officer, you see almost everything. I doubt not that certain matters are hidden from you; but, broadly speaking, you do see all that is to be seen. Into the mind of the General, which ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... this into account, we will not remain within the vagueness of the concept, but will take a particular example to argue upon, viz. that of an external perception. I open my window on a fine day, and I see before me a sunny plain, with, as far as the eye can reach, houses amongst the trees, and again more houses, the most distant ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... measure—such, soon enough, as things went with him, became the inference with which his old obsession had to reckon: and this it was not helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest itself, almost no margin left. Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... at the hand; the vagueness of the countenance became condensed, and he recognized Pablo Valls bending over him, moving his lips as if murmuring affectionate phrases which he could not hear. Again? The captain was always appearing in ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of intense experience which it contains; the interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene; the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines like a winter mist; the half-realised ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... but too short, and she would gladly have recalled those fleeting hours. Ignorant of the direction in which they had been traveling, she realized that the driver had been unsparing and the distance covered not inconsiderable. The mystery of the assault, the obscurity of the purpose and the vagueness of their destination were unknown quantities which, added to the declining of the day and the brewing terrors of the night, were well calculated ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... wonders, moreover, was exactly in this, that so interrupted a man should ever have got, as the phrase was, should above all have got so early, to where he was. It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made of the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... with his usual vagueness that he supposed in the hut where the late Teacher had died after the mission-house was burnt down. So they trekked on a little way, passing beneath the shelf of rock that has been mentioned as projecting from that side of the koppie which overhung the stream, where there was just ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... of hell, which lends him all its forces; Paris crowned him, Sodom would have banished him.[3] Locke, again, did not understand himself. His distinguishing characteristics are feebleness and precipitancy of judgment. Vagueness and irresolution reign in his expressions as they do in his thoughts. He constantly exhibits that most decisive sign of mediocrity—he passes close by the greatest questions without perceiving them. In the study of philosophy, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... thought—is going beyond the bounds of vagueness. Let there be some thread of coherence in your thoughts, as there is in the progress of this evening, fast fading into night. Return to the consideration of the nature and purposes of Art! And recognize that much of what you have thought will seem on the face of it heresy to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... woman had gazed vacantly about her with an air of indifference. She seemed scarcely to realize that through the yellow vagueness the eyes of a hundred persons were centered on her ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... problems. And there were real enigmas to be solved at every step. The old engraved scores of Gluck's works reproduced his manuscripts faithfully enough, but they bore evidence of carelessness and amazing inaccuracy. They are mere sketches instead of complete scores. Many details are vague and vagueness is not permissible in a serious edition. It follows that the different editions of Gluck's works published in the Nineteenth Century, however sumptuous or careful they may be, are worthless. The Pelletan ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... life, then it is the duty of parents and teachers to make a careful selection of the habits that are to be formed by the children. The habits that will be necessary for the child to form in order to meet the various situations of his future life, should be determined. There should be no vagueness about it. Definite habits, social, moral, religious, intellectual, professional, etc., will be necessary for efficiency. We should know what these various habits are, and should then set about the work of establishing them with system and determination, just as we would the building of ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... street," I answered, with deliberate vagueness. Nancy had suddenly become demure. I did not dare look at her, but I had a most uncomfortable notion that she suspected the plot. Meanwhile we had begun to walk along, all three of us, Tom, obviously ill at ease ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in regard to chapter i. It seemed necessary and important, in view of the general vagueness and uncertainty in regard to the place of sociology among the sciences and its relation to the other social sciences, particularly to history, to state somewhere, clearly and definitely, what, from the point ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of coming across anything of a ghostly character—all my fears had been of malicious natives and tigers; they now, however, changed, and I was confronted with a dread of what I could not understand and could not analyse—of something that suggested an appearance, alarming on account of its very vagueness. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... the time thought highly of this performance. I remember one fellow saying that Number 2 seemed to have caught the spirit of Mr Browning without his vagueness, which was ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... are thus summarized by Ayrton. It absorbs a good deal of energy; it cannot be constructed for small potential differences, as the wire cannot be made thicker, as it would make it more sluggish; there is vagueness in the readings near the zero point and sometimes inaccuracy in the upper part ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... know, the poet says, ought themselves to light out from the shoulder, and all that sort of thing," suggested Crosby, with cheerful vagueness. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... prolificness, etc.; that there is something about our wonderful Oregon climate that causes the so-called second generation trees to bear larger and better fruits than the parent plant. And these writers love to dwell on the subject of generation. There is at times a sort of mystery, an uncanny vagueness connected with this subject that is baffling and bewildering to the layman, and causes him to listen with mouth agape. It is the same sweet silly story that we have had to learn by bitter experience with other nuts and fruits, ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... congregation. The Hebrew studies, however, notwithstanding the personal assistance which we drew from the kindness of Dr. Bailey, languished. For this there were several reasons; but it was enough that the systematic vagueness in the pronunciation of this, as of the other Oriental languages, disgusted both of us. A word which could not be pronounced with any certainty, was not in a true sense possessed. Let it be understood, however, that it was not the correct and ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of it, and struggled to make glimmering inebriated generalisations on life and romance. And one last picture I have, standing out very clear and bright in the midst of vagueness before and blackness afterward. We—the apprentices and I—are swaying and clinging to one another under the stars. We are singing a rollicking sea song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and we are marking the rhythm with waving square faces. From up and down the street come far ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there would have been no necessity for the further action of 1596. In any case, on October 20, 1596, a draft, which remains in the College of Arms, was prepared under the direction of William Dethick, Garter King-of-Arms, granting John's request for a coat-of-arms. Garter stated, with characteristic vagueness, that he had been 'by credible report' informed that the applicant's 'parentes and late antecessors were for theire valeant and faithfull service advanced and rewarded by the most prudent prince King Henry the Seventh of famous memories sythence ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Barlasch, who seemed to be going in the wrong direction with an odd vagueness in his movements. Louis ran towards him with ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... and natural capacity, has had the opportunity to know New England so well as she, or who has the peculiar genius so to profit by the knowledge. Already there have been scenes in 'The Minister's Wooing' that, in their lowness of tone and quiet truth, contrast as charmingly with the humid vagueness of the modern school of novel-writers as 'The Vicar of Wakefield' itself, and we are greatly mistaken if it do not prove to be the most characteristic of Mrs. Stowe's works, and therefore that on which her fame will ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... were not compelled to the discharge of their duty by the just authority of magistrates, and by the wholesome terrors of the laws. With the same views this law has been styled, and (notwithstanding the objections of some writers to the vagueness of the language) appears to have been styled with great propriety, "the law of nature." It may with sufficient correctness, or at least by an easy metaphor, be called a "law," inasmuch as it is a supreme, invariable, and uncontrollable rule of conduct to ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... and philosophical grasp, yet he has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have convicted his preaching of falsity ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... at it, it had begun to take the shape and semblance of a head, swathed in drapery, with that same drapery, hanging, as it appeared in folds, dripping downwards to the ground, where it lost itself in vagueness. Then, as he still stared, conscious of nothing but the amazing fact, features appeared to be forming—first blots and lines as of shadow, finally eyes, nose, mouth, and chin as ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... other idea than the proximity of the last judgment, would not have had this care for the amelioration of man, and would not have given utterance to the finest moral teaching that humanity has received. Much vagueness no doubt tinged his ideas, and it was rather a noble feeling than a fixed design, that urged him to the sublime work which was realized by him, though in a very different manner to ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... afternoon in writing away at the fourth Georgic; Upton staying in a part of the time to help him a little, by dictating the lines to him—an occupation not unfrequently interrupted by storms of furious denunciation against Mr Gordon's injustice and tyranny; Eric vowing, with the usual vagueness of schoolboy intention, "that he would pay ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... student of biology, I will venture to propose a definition of education which is new, so far as I know, and which I hope and believe to be true and important. Comprehensively, so as to include everything that must be included, and yet without undue vagueness, I would define education as the provision of an environment. We may amplify this proposition, and say that it is the provision of a fit environment for the young and foolish by the elderly and wise. It has really scarcely anything in the world to do with my trying to make you pay for the teaching ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... which puzzled her. Had Ella shown her a way to something better, something higher, something better worthy of the aspiration of a woman? She could not say that that had been the drift of her large discourse. What she had said had actually been puzzling in its vagueness, its daring images—all images are vague; ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... could bear. Do you not see that by your very vagueness you are exciting my thoughts and hopes? You do not ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... vagueness and uncertainty of the doctrinal speculations of infidelity, and the looseness and immorality of its rules of life, are not the only objections to it. Its tendency, wherever it has been introduced in the history of our world, has been evil, and only evil. France, at the commencement of her revolution ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... notes, of intense but peculiar sweetness, a man's voice which had much of a woman's, but more even of a chorister's, but a chorister's voice without its limpidity and innocence; its youthfulness was veiled, muffled, as it were, in a sort of downy vagueness, as if ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... a little—you are right, it gives a softness, a vagueness, a—it is very funny, that little pot of blue. How ugly it must be! How things lead on one to another! Once one's hair is powdered, one must have a little pearl powder on one's face in order not to look as yellow as ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... young Englishman who had at one time served aboard the German Emperor's yacht, Meteor. Nothing could have been more courteous than his manner or more intelligent than his explanations; but the moment I tried to draw him out on the subject of life on the yacht he relapsed into a vagueness from which I could extract no gleam of enlightenment. After fencing for some time with my queries he suggested that I might like to have a glass of sherry and a biscuit in the secretaries' library, and, piloting me ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... and generosity. She showed the absurdity of denouncing her as "the Austrian"—her who had left Vienna while still little more than a child, and had ever since fixed her heart as well as her home in France. She argued truly that the vagueness, the ridiculousness, the notorious falsehood of the accusations brought against her were in themselves her all-sufficient defense. She showed how useless to every party and in every point of view must be ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... is useful as a preliminary to deliberate study, either of a whole or of any part, scarcely needs showing. Vagueness of thought accompanies the wandering about in a region without known bounds or landmarks. Attention devoted to some portion of a subject in ignorance of its connexion with the rest, leads to untrue conceptions. The whole ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the endorsement of such diverse protagonists as Royall and Randolph, the wording of the executive order was in part both vague and misleading. The vagueness was there by design. The failure to mention either segregation or integration puzzled many people and angered others, but it was certainly to the advantage of a president who wanted to give the least offense possible to voters who supported segregation. In fact integration was not the precise word ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... parti-coloured hand, fiercely clutching a dejected head; but nearly all were already busily at work, eagerly painting, or as eagerly obliterating strokes too hastily made. The subject, hackneyed as it certainly is, had pleased and stimulated the girls. There was a mingled vagueness and familiarity in its suggestion which puzzled them and spurred them on at ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... the vagueness of her apprehension. It made her position difficult, speech hard for her. She felt that she wanted something, yet scarcely knew what, or exactly why ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... language, being a chief instrument of culture, has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr. Whewell; "Language is often called ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... gently, like her father, for she had all his understanding of and nearness to the dumb animals of the fields. They came slowly and silently. The light failed rapidly as they came down the hill. Everything was merged in a shadowy vagueness, the colour of the white goat between the two dim figures alone proclaiming itself. A kid bleated somewhere in the distance. It was the cry of a young thing for its suckle, and the Herd saw that ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... had secured enough States to insure a trial. The Constitution had been ratified; it must now be made to work, and Washington wrote earnestly to the leaders in the various States, urging them to see to it that "Federalists," stanch friends of the Constitution, were elected to Congress. There was no vagueness about his notions on this point. A party had carried the Constitution and secured its ratification, and to that party he wished the administration and establishment of the new system to be intrusted. He did ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... This last fact struck right home to him, banishing all his vagueness, setting his mind on ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... wish to exalt their own pursuit at the expense of the 'special' sciences, and students of natural science who are accustomed to pride themselves on the contrast between the finality and definiteness of their own results and the vagueness and dubiousness of the conclusion of the metaphysicians. But I must avow my own conviction that the only distinction we can make is one of convenience, and it may help to make my peace with both parties if I explain where I take this ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... to Hell is easy. On the pale, white faces which the great billows whirl upward to my tower I see again and again, often and still more often, a writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate hatred, vast by the very vagueness of its expressions. Down through the green waters, on the bottom of the world, where men move to and fro, I have seen a man—an educated gentleman—grow livid with anger because a little, silent, black woman was sitting by herself in a Pullman car. He was a white ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... natural outcome of empty creeds. "The dominant tendencies are indeed increasingly identified with those currents of thought which are making way from the definiteness of the ancient Faith, toward Unitarian vagueness." If Bishop Kinsman, Anglican Bishop of Delaware, a recent convert to the Catholic Faith, gave this statement as one of the reasons for leaving the Anglican Creed, with how much more truth could it not be made of the kaleidoscopic tenets of ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... the water stood about in what it is easier to call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools. A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform; I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the whole huge desert had vanished, and ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... of the total failure of this story was the inability to draw any real response from the children, partly because of the hopeless vagueness of the questions, partly because, there being no time for reflection, children say the first thing that comes into their heads without any reference to their ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Company's money, or the Liberal Party's money, or the English Nation's money. It was buried treasure; but it was not private property. It was the acme of plutocracy because it was not private property. Now, by following this precedent, this unprincipled vagueness about official and unofficial moneys by the cheerful habit of always mixing up the money in the pocket with the money in the till, it would be quite possible to keep the rich as rich as ever in practice, though they might have suffered confiscation ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... there a distant blur of smoke which marked the village of Grimpen. Between the two, behind the hill, was the house of the Stapletons. All was sweet and mellow and peaceful in the golden evening light, and yet as I looked at them my soul shared none of the peace of nature but quivered at the vagueness and the terror of that interview which every instant was bringing nearer. With tingling nerves, but a fixed purpose, I sat in the dark recess of the hut and waited with sombre patience for ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... cause had been demonstrated by the War of Independence; but the mass of Americans had not yet risen sufficiently above local traditions and interests to discern clearly the noble ideal of national unity, and vagueness of apprehension resulted inevitably in lukewarmness of sentiment. This condition goes far to palliate actions which it cannot excuse; the reproach of helping the enemies of one's country is somewhat less when the nation ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... wrote, "comes back to me with all the vagueness of a dream—you will know what morning I mean, and why it fills so shadowy a page in the book of my memory. And it might as well have been a dream, for aught of present peace or future hope that it has brought me. I often think that ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... know that I had rather have my present definite, positive belief based on this evidence, than to be floundering on doubts and uncertainties. There is no doubt that the profession believe that intermittents have a cause; but this belief has a vagueness which cannot be represented by drawings or photograph. Since I have photographed the Gemiasma, and studied their biology, I feel like holding on to your dicta until upset by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... circle without circle, vista beyond vista, till the imagination was staggered and the mind exhausted. Now here was a scheme for the accumulation of wealth and for laying the foundation of family aggrandisement purely imaginary, romantic—one might almost say, disinterested. The vagueness, the magnitude, the remoteness of the object, the resolute sacrifice of all immediate and gross advantages, clothe it with the privileges of an abstract idea, so that the project has the air of a fiction ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Father Brown, and passed his hand through his hair with the same strange vagueness of manner. "Yes, I've heard ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... disappeared. For an instant her face changed into something quite different from what they had seen. Mr. Welles could not at all make out the expression which very passingly had flickered across her eyes with a smoke-like vagueness and rapidity. He had the queerest fancy that she looked somehow scared,—but of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... delighted—I haven't written so very many," Overt pleaded, feeling, and without resentment, that the General at least was vagueness itself about that. But he wondered a little why, expressing this friendly disposition, it didn't occur to the doubtless eminent soldier to pronounce the word that would put him in relation with Mrs. St. George. If it was a question of introductions Miss Fancourt—apparently ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... the Question which struck everyone; R the Reply which could satisfy none; S was the Station where passengers wait; T was the Time that they're bound to be late; U was the Up-train an hour overdue; V was the Vagueness its movements pursue; W stood for time's general Waste; X for Ex-press that could never make haste; Y for the Wherefore and Why of this wrong; And Z for the Zanies who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... few words more, he turned round, saying, 'Let all who love me follow.' So ended this famous scene—in which, more than in any other upon record, eloquence and presence of mind were needful. And if it should be said that vagueness was not altogether the least eligible feature in a speech whose very purpose was to confuse, and to leave no room for answer, we reply—true; but then it was the vagueness of art, which promised to be serviceable, and that of preconcerted perplexity, not the vagueness ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... with the anxiety which became him, where the happiness and interests of so many thousands were concerned, and with the minuteness which would be expected of him, on account of the responsible situation which he held; and he averred, that it was sophistry, obscurity of ideas, and vagueness of reasoning, which alone could have hitherto prevented all mankind (those immediately interested in the question excepted) from agreeing in one and the same opinion upon the subject. With respect to the propriety of introducing ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... like the soft rush of waves up the sand, would murmur, "Somewhere away! Somewhere away! Somewhere away!" And in the indefiniteness of that answer he found an inexplicable joy. The vagueness of "Somewhere away" was as vast with pregnant possibilities as his desert. His was the eternity of hope, boundless and splendid in its extravagant promises. Drunk with the wine of dreams, he knew himself to be a monarch, a monarch uncrowned and unattended, ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... hand is raised slightly toward the face of the gesturer and shaken a few times in the direction of the person conversed with. This is inquiry, not a mere interrogative, but to express that the person addressed has not been clearly understood, perhaps from the vagueness or diffusiveness of his expressions. The idea appears to suggest the gathering of his thoughts together into one distinct expression, or to be pointed in what ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a wonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and rules and procedures. Harmony with him is something different than it is with any other composer. Piano colors of a violence and garishness are hurled against each other. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... race, if any, he has not yet explained. Professor Mueller and his contemporaries used to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... utmost distinctness combined with perfect freedom and expressiveness. Even as early as the Second Act of Siegfried the freedom threatens to degenerate into sloppiness—or, to put it rather more mildly, at least into vagueness. Perhaps he felt this himself; for certainly at the end of the act we are discussing, and often in the Dusk of the Gods, he gives us straightforward song. At best his song-recitative is sublime; at ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... What, when he should be free to follow his inclination, he'd do, Lee never particularized; it was in the clouds nebulous and bright, and accompanied by music. His dream left him imperceptibly, its vagueness killed partly by the superior reality of pig iron and ore and partly because he never had anyone with whom to talk it over; he could find no sympathy ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... throbbed with inexpressible agony as he beheld her thus! The wildest remorse possessed him, . . it was as though he looked on the dim picture of a ruin which he himself had recklessly wrought, . . and he could have groaned aloud in the horrible vagueness of his incomprehensible despair! Sah-luma caught the girl's hand, and peered ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that some day he must reckon ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... meeting the declaration half-way, which her growing passion sometimes urged her to invite. Thus the lovers had instinctively understood the situation without explaining to each other their secret motives. There are times in life when such vagueness pleases youthful minds. Just because each had postponed speaking too long, they seemed to be playing a cruel game of suspense. He was trying to discover whether he was beloved, by the effort any confession would cost his haughty mistress; ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... the infinite greatness of the universe to the finite smallness of man, and draws the inevitable conclusion as to the importance of our joys and sorrows and labours. I am aware that this definition errs on the side of vagueness; but possibly it may be found to include the truth. Obviously, the natures of those who possess this sense will tend to be static rather than dynamic, and it is therefore against the limits imposed by this sense that intellectual anarchists, among whom I would number Dale, and ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... pantomime or a burlesque Arabian Night—it was all a dream—a fairy fortune that, like fairy gold, would change to dull slate stones at light of day. She would never be Lady Catheron, never be mistress of this glittering Aladdin's Palace. It grew upon her day after day, this feeling of vagueness, of unreality. She was just adrift upon a shining river, and one of these days she would go stranded ashore on hidden quicksands and foul ground. Something would happen. The days went by like dreams—it ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... final decisions and examples of judicial wisdom. In fact, I accept neither the strictures of the one nor the sublimifications of the other, although the confident self-assertion of the former and the mystic vagueness of the latter ought, according to use and wont, to carry the weight of authority with them. Schumann, the Chopin champion par excellence, saw clearer, and, writing three years later (1836), said that the Trio belonged to Chopin's ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... getting only unmeaning softness. An artist prefers to see few shades employed, and those chosen with judgment and placed with deliberate intention. If they mean something, there is no harm in letting it be seen where they meet: broad masses give breadth: vagueness generally means ignorance. That is, perhaps, why one dislikes it, and why it ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... those for St. George's, Hanover Square) was contested, and there were often as many as six or seven candidates for one division. It was said at the time that "the uncertainty of the issues, the multitude of candidates, and the vagueness of parties made it impossible to tabulate the results with the same accuracy and completeness which are possible in the case of the House of Commons." Some candidates stood professedly as Liberals, and others as Conservatives. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... vagueness of a mainland, the explanation "up from one place and down in another" is always good, and is never overworked, until the instances are massed as they are in this book: but, upon this occasion, in the relatively small area of Jamaica, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... black scarf over her bare shoulders. She sat, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, and once, when she glanced round and found Althea's eyes fixed on her, she looked back for a moment, but with something of the same vagueness and unseeingness with which she looked out of ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... humour, full of love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... speech of her mother's Katharine had turned away, and Ralph felt that Mrs. Hilbery was talking to him apart, with a desire to ascertain something about him which she veiled purposely by the vagueness of her words. He felt curiously encouraged and heartened by the beam in her eye rather than by her actual words. From the distance of her age and sex she seemed to be waving to him, hailing him as a ship sinking beneath the horizon ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... cheaper barley are stated. Man's promises are vague; God's are specific. Mark, too, the entire silence of the promise as to the mode of its fulfilment. Probably Elisha knew as little as any one, how it was going to be accomplished. The particularity and vagueness combined are remarkable. A hint as to how the thing was to be done would have made the belief in the fact so much easier. Yes, and just because it would have smoothed the road for worthless belief, it was not given, but the apparently impossible promise was left in nakedness, for any ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Neet" renders it. It would be tempting to conjecture the precise significance of this allusion, and to connect it with other primitive myths and legends of a similar character; but space fails us, and it may well be that the very vagueness of the allusion is of more haunting tragic power than precise knowledge. It is also interesting to notice the effective use which is made in "A Dree Neet" of all the superstitions which gather about the great pageant ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... so sure of that, at all," says Olga, airily. "It is quite within the possibilities that I may marry him some time or other,—sooner or later. There is a delightful vagueness about those two dates that gives me ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... this supreme hour of his life, his faith should not utterly break down. "Making mention of thee in my prayers"—does this not bring us near to the secret of prevailing prayer? We are afraid to be individual and particular; we lose ourselves in large generalities, until our prayers die of very vagueness. There is surely a more excellent way. "My God," Paul wrote to the Philippians, "shall fulfil"—not merely "all your need," as the Authorized Version has it, but—"every need of yours." There is a fine discrimination in the Divine love which ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... was one region of heads stretched far in innumerable vagueness, and down the river to Woolwich a continuous dull roar and murmur of bees droned from both banks to cheer ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... crested, fanged, clad in glittering scales, poised above the world and ready to strike. We were benumbed and terrified. There was nothing that we could do. The monstrous thing advanced, but even while we shuddered we could not make ourselves feel that it was real. It had the vagueness and the horrid pressure ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... and let in upon them not a little light. Even today, however, a great deal of metrical analysis has wrecked itself on the visible rocks of a false accuracy, and it is therefore not only out of caution but also out of mere common sense that we should eschew the arbitrary, even at the risk of vagueness and an 'unscientific' admission of uncertainty. For the only great and annihilating danger of writing on versification is dogmatism. Our theorists, both old and new, are first tempted and then possessed with their theories—all else becoming ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... achievements, there is certainly little in our present art of words to show a literary lineage running back to the same ancestry. Of course it is always admitted that there WAS an English poetry as old to Chaucer as Chaucer is to us; but it is admitted with a certain inclusive and amateur vagueness removing it out of the rank of facts which involve grave and important duties. We can neither deny the fact nor the strangeness of it, that the English poetry written between the time of Aldhelm and Caedmon in the seventh century and that of Chaucer in the fourteenth ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... accumulated effect of repeated innovations has carried us. The mere fact of completing the investigation will help us to rate at their true value the changes which have been introduced; will show us what to retain, what to reject, and what to substitute. There is no essential vagueness in these allusions. If they seem vague, it is because the moment for particularising has not yet come. The public opinion of the navy must first be turned in the right direction. It must be led to question the soundness of the basis on which many present methods rest. Having once begun to ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... volunteered an explanation of the apparent inconsistency between his support of General Jackson in 1828, and his authorship of the "South Carolina Exposition" in the same year. Falsehood and truth are strangely interwoven in almost every sentence of his later writings; and there is also that vagueness in them which comes of a superfluity of words. He says, that for the strict-constructionist party to have presented a candidate openly and fully identified with their opinions would have been to court defeat; and thus they were obliged either to abandon the contest, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and "on the whole"-ness, which can with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man in dealing with these matters is obnoxious. No ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... danse mauresque, the same adjective is used with something of the vagueness to be noticed in connection with India and Turkey (p. 52). Shakespeare uses ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... night of love with the dying Agathon Geyer and to bear him the first child of a better time, Beatus, the fortunate. Sultry sensuality and outrageous bombast characterize the work, the action of which is not clearly set forth, but floats in a sea of nebulous somnambulistic vagueness. Visionary representation and mythical creation are indeed the program which Wassermann lays out for himself in a theoretical treatise, The Art of Narrative. Ernst von Wolzogen, the discoverer of Wassermann, and a critic who has perhaps contributed to an over-estimate of him, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... look, which seemed to overtake the invisible, was almost too holy to gaze upon. Riches, station, honors, kindred, he had resigned them all, more than half a century since, in his love for the poor and his longing after truth. Here was none of the wavering or vagueness or incoherence of a wandering, delirious death. He was going to his clear, eternal calm. With a smile of perfect peace he said: "To your Majesty I commend the poor; and this that remains of me I give to be burned." And that, his last gift, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... in the doctrine lies in the extreme vagueness of the terms, protective and self-regarding. The practical difficulty begins with the definition of these terms. Can any opinion, or any serious part of conduct, be looked upon as truly and exclusively self-regarding? ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... and, so far as I could judge, he very well might be, for he had taken his Professorship more seriously than any of the other Professors had done. I heard of his having plucked one poor fellow for want of sufficient vagueness in his saving clauses paper. Another was sent down for having written an article on a scientific subject without having made free enough use of the words "carefully," "patiently," and "earnestly." One man was refused a degree for being too often and too seriously ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... panorama. In those days the panorama filled the place now taken by the stereopticon; and though its crude pictures lacked the photographic truth of lantern slides, they were by no means devoid of interest. In fact, their gorgeousness of color, and the vagueness of detail that allowed each to represent several scenes, according to the pleasure of the lecturer, rendered them quite as popular, if not so instructive, ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... independent as well as free! How great to drift with the tide of innocent women and law-abiding men, once more one of themselves, and not even a magnet for morbid curiosity! That would come soon enough; the present was all the more to be enjoyed; and even the vagueness of the immediate future, even the lack of definite plans, had a glamor of their own in eyes that were yet to have their fill of street lamps and shop windows and ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the pinnacle of tragic power. Cassandra advances to the palace, but starts back in horror as a series of visions of growing vividness comes before her eyes. These find utterance in language of blended sanity and madness, creating a terror whose very vagueness increases its intensity. First she sees Atreus' cruel murder of his brother's children; then follows the sight of Clytemnestra's treacherous smile and of Agamemnon in the bath, hand after hand reaching at him; quickly she sees the net cast about him, the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... presentment; the virtues of the other style are glow of the spirit, with magic and richness of suggestion." Mr. Colvin then goes on to enforce and illustrate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of things" in classical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light—the "halo"—with which the romantic writer invests his theme. "The romantic manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions, may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle; absurdity &c. 497; vagueness &c. (unintelligibility) 519. [routine or reflexive statements without substantive thought, esp. legal] boilerplate. V. mean nothing; be unmeaning &c. adj.; twaddle, quibble, scrabble. Adj. unmeaning; meaningless, senseless; nonsensical; void of sense ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... doubt. That some people did doubt the historical accuracy of the Bible I knew, for one or two of the Harrow masters were friends of Colenso, the heretic Bishop of Natal, but fresh from my Patristic studies, I looked on heretics with blind horror, possibly the stronger from its very vagueness, and its ignorance of what it feared. My mother objected to my reading controversial books which dealt with the points at issue between Christianity and Freethought, and I did not care for her favorite Stanley, who might have widened my views, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... from his laboratory, was in wildest disarray, and his eyes were still a little vague, as he followed Brenton up the stairs to the nursery. Across the threshold of the nursery, however, the vagueness vanished; the eyes grew keen as sharp-pointed bits of steel, yet strangely gentle, while he sat down beside the crib and laid one mammoth brown hand above the scrawny little claw. Then, for just a minute, the keen eyes narrowed to a line. A minute afterward, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray |
