"Obscurely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not quite relished of the Countess of Romfrey. The glittering of Cecilia's eyes frightened him. Taking her for the moment to know almost as much as he, the colonel doubted the weight his communication would have on her; he talked obscurely of a scandalous affair at Lord Romfrey's house in town, and Beauchamp and that Frenchwoman. 'But,' said he, 'Mrs. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have been dashed to pieces. The dell was so narrow that the trees met in some places from the opposite sides. They were now loaded with snow instead of leaves, and thus formed a sort of frozen canopy over the rivulet beneath, which was marked by its darker colour, as it soaked its way obscurely through wreaths of snow. In one place, where the glen was a little wider, leaving a small piece of flat ground between the rivulet and the bank, were situated the ruins of the hamlet in which Brown ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... of popular education in modern democratic states, cheap labour is no longer willing to play without protest this humble and suffering part in national progress. The workers of the nations began to declare, clearly or obscurely, as they were able, that they no longer intended to sell their labour and their lives so cheaply. The rising birth-rate of the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to a large extent doubtless produced, the organisation of labour, trades unions, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... thereto yet shooteth one nigher than another";[159] and again, "Sure I am that there cometh more knowledge and understanding of the scripture by their sundry translations than by all our sophistical doctors. For that one translateth something obscurely in one place, the same translateth another, or else he himself, more manifestly by a more plain vocable."[160] Occasionally the number of experimenters awakened some doubts; Cromwell suggests that the bishops make a "perfect correction";[161] ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes replacing the earlier concert; so that I feel how one's impression of so much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling increase. It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but into which one was later on to read strange pages—to some of which I may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of observation though I have dubbed myself, I won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the bacchanal sounds that, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... thought man also was immortal; yet must we needs affirm that he had a different essence from the angels; having, therefore, no certain knowledge of their natures, it is no bad method of the schools, whatsoever perfection we find obscurely in ourselves, in a more complete and absolute way to ascribe unto them. I believe they have an extemporary knowledge, and upon the first motion of their reason do what we cannot without study or deliberation; that they know things by their forms, and define by ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... stores of thought unspoken, what unknown treasures of observation never to be communicated, what patient reflections unuttered, may be housed in those toil-worn brains, in which, perhaps, slowly and obscurely, accumulate the germs of faculties and talents by which some more favoured descendant may one day benefit? How many poets have died unpublished or unperceived, in whom only the power ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... from the battle, Lone and unknown obscurely die, But give at least our parting blessings Unto France and Freedom high. To die on Freedom's Altar—to die on Freedom's Altar! 'Tis the noblest of fates; who ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... What instruction or entertainment can it give the reader, to hear a long bead-roll of barbarous names, Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf; Elfwald, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert, who successively murdered, expelled, or inherited from each other, and obscurely filled the throne of that kingdom? Ethelbert, the last of these princes, was treacherously murdered by Offa, King of Mercia, in the year 792, and his state was thenceforth united with that of Offa, as ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... outline seems to be peculiarly that which we ought to begin to reason upon, because it is simple and open-hearted, and does not endeavor to escape into mist. A pencil line may be obscurely and undemonstrably wrong; false in a cowardly manner, and without confession: but the ink line, if it goes wrong at all, goes wrong with a will, and may be convicted at our leisure, and put to such shame as its black complexion is capable of. May we, therefore, begin with the hard line? It will ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... bugbear conscience; In early life I heard the phantom nam'd, And the grave sages prate of moral sense Presiding in the bosom of the just; Or planting thongs about the guilty heart. Bound by these shackles, long my lab'ring mind, Obscurely trod the lower walks of life, In hopes by honesty my bread to gain; But neither commerce, or my conjuring rods, Nor yet mechanics, or new fangled drills, Or all the iron-monger's curious arts, Gave me a competence of shining ore, Or gratify'd my itching palm ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... springingly. It sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly's want of common adventurous daring. She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture from a flowing purse with a heavy heart—unfeminine, one might say; she preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think—but it was unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a strain and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... you that the name of magic has been used in a good sense for any uncommon science, and a sublimer sort of philosophy. It is in this sense that it must be understood where Pliny says,[674] although rather obscurely, "that Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato, traveled a great deal to acquire instruction in it." For the rest, people are naturally led to attribute to sorcery everything that appears new and marvelous. Have not we ourselves, with M. Leguier, passed for magicians ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... man verbosus, that was a fine generosus; He was a great guller, his name I take to be Fuller; See where he stands, that unto my hands convey'd a powder; And, like a knave, sent her to her grave, obscurely to shroud her. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Malarichus to explain in intelligible language what he wanted, and not to use such obscure terms. For he declared that he, being but a plain and somewhat rude man, had not in the least understood what was intimated so obscurely. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... a higher quality, some of which, like the lovely Never the Time and Place, I have been already quoted. Ixion is too obscurely put to attain its end with the general public. But it may be recommended, though vainly, to those theologians who, hungry for the Divine Right of torture, build their God, like Caliban, out of their own minds; who, foolish enough to believe that the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... in rich clothes and jewels; for Hermione had made it very fine when she sent it to Leontes, and Antigonus had pinned a paper to its mantle, and the name of Perdita written thereon, and words obscurely intimating its high birth and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... obscurely the illumination after the battle of Waterloo, and the Militia exercising about that period, in the field ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Sophia,—hidden under a disguise none would be likely to penetrate. There are hundreds of stories. The common thought is that representatives of this Lodge, or their disciples, often appear; are not so far away from the world of men; may be teaching, quite obscurely, or dropping casual seeds of the Secret Wisdom, in the next village. Well; I imagine pralayic conditions may allow benign spiritual influences to be at work, sometimes, nearer the surface of life than in manvantara. The brain-mind is less universally dominant; there ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... heaven love towards the neighbor. They both go forth from the Lord, and they both make heaven. How these two loves are distinct and how they are conjoined is seen in heaven in clear light, but in the world only obscurely. In heaven loving the Lord does not mean loving Him in respect to His person, but it means loving the good that is from Him; and to love good is to will and do good from love; and to love the neighbor ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... 838-840).—Plants oblong about 3-4 mm., stipitate or substipitate at the base, growing densely caespitose, in patches, black, smooth, the apices usually obscurely mammillate. Stipes usually short, but sometimes 6-8 mm. long, and when growing in clusters, the bases consolidated by a carbonous stroma. Interior of the receptacle in two compartments (Fig. 841 x6), the lower filled with soft tissue, black around the edges, but ...
— Synopsis of Some Genera of the Large Pyrenomycetes - Camilla, Thamnomyces, Engleromyces • C. G. Lloyd
... obscurely to his ears; hints of jobs, getting each day more definite, reached him. Railway lobbyists swarmed about and began to lay their cajoling, persuasive hands upon members; and he could not laugh when the newspaper said, for a joke, that the absent-minded speaker ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... people, who came down hither to sell their honey, their cheese, and woollen stuff, in the tiny market-place. At dawn the great stars seemed to halt a while, burning as if for sacrifice to some pure deity, on those distant, obscurely named heights, like broken swords, the rim of the world. A little later you could just see the newly opened quarries, like streaks of snow on their russet-brown bosoms. Thither in spring-time all eyes ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... chap. i. "The name which, used by Ptolemy and Pliny in a more confined, by Ammianus and Procopius in a larger sense, has been derived, ridiculously, from Sarah, the wife of Abraham, obscurely from the village of Saraka, more plausibly from the Arabic words, which signify a thievish character, or Oriental situation. Yet the last and most popular of these etymologies is refuted by Ptolemy, who expressly remarks the western ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... of windless marshes, masked the Kentish coast. The Medway at flood-tide from Sheerness to Gillingham Reach was one maze of creeks and bends and inlets and tiny bays. Nothing was visible an oar's length overside but shifting cloudy shapes that bulked obscurely in the fog. But although this was Francis Drake's first voyage as master of his own ship, he knew these waters as he knew the palm of his hand. His old captain, dying a bachelor, had left him the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... that we have no common code; our moral notions are always fluid; and you must consider the times, the class from which men sprang, the surrounding influences, the masters in their schools, the preachers in their pulpits, the movement they obscurely obeyed, and so on, until responsibility is merged in numbers, and not a culprit is left for execution.[92] A murderer was no criminal if he followed local custom, if neighbours approved, if he was encouraged by official advisers or prompted by just authority, if he acted ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... has occurred to me of the system being affected from the matter issuing from the heels of horses, and of its remaining afterwards unsusceptible of the variolous contagion; another, where the smallpox appeared obscurely; and a third, in which its ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... discovery of which he regards as a great part of his achievement. This chain of causation is stated in a long series of asserted processes, in which the connection between one generation and another, and the transmission from life to life of the melancholy heritage of desire and sorrow, is obscurely and enigmatically traced. The beginning of all is ignorance (of the four truths); from ignorance proceed the "samkharas" or forms of production, from these in turn consciousness, the senses, contact, sensation, thirst, and so on to birth and the miseries ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them, by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the Law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... twittering of little birds in the forest, you have to interrupt with your infernal din!" The caustic quality of French wit is illustrated plenteously by Voltaire. There is food for meditation in his utterance: "Nothing is so disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged." He it was, too, who sneered at England for having sixty religions and only one gravy. To an adversary in argument who quoted the minor prophet Habakkuk, he retorted contemptuously: "A person with a name like that is capable of ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... rough, more or less chinky or becoming obscurely small-areolate, ash- to green-gray, or becoming olivaceous, spreading over the substratum as a continuous, moderately thick crust; apothecia small to large, 0.5 to 1.5 mm. in diameter, adnate or more or less immersed, usually flat, almost always white or rusty-green pruinose, ...
— Ohio Biological Survey, Bull. 10, Vol. 11, No. 6 - The Ascomycetes of Ohio IV and V • Bruce Fink and Leafy J. Corrington
... oracle had obscurely declared, "When everything else in the land of Cecrops shall be taken, Zeus grants to Athena that the wooden walls alone shall remain unconquered, to defend you and your children." The oracle was believed to be, as was declared, "firm ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... put me through the first two books of Livy, and I knew, therefore, what close-set language was; but I saw then that Livy, as afterward that Horace and Tacitus, were studiously, often laboriously, and sometimes obscurely concentrated; while Byron wrote, as easily as a hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in the precisely narrowest terms,—not only the exact truth, but the most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure Byron's greater powers at that ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... comprehension not elevated, for the appearance is that a form cannot make a one except as its elements are quite alike. I have spoken with angels often on the subject. They said that this is a secret perceived clearly by their wiser men, obscurely by the less wise. They said it is the truth that a form is the more perfect as its constituents are distinctly different and yet severally united. They established the fact from the societies which ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the books then called the Scriptures)— that it cannot but seem strange, and assuredly is against all analogy of Gospel revelation, that such a doctrine—which, if true, must be an article of faith, and a most important, yea, essential article of faith—should be left thus faintly, thus obscurely, and, if I may so say, OBITANEOUSLY, declared and enjoined. The time of the formation and closing of the Canon unknown;—the selectors and compilers unknown, or recorded by known fabulists;—and (more perplexing still) the belief of the Jewish Church—the belief, I ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... are chaungde, and men are growne to more wit, and their minds to aspire after more honourable thoughts: they were dunces in diebus illis, they had not the true use of gentility, and therefore they lived meanely and died obscurely: but now mennes capacities are refined. Time hath set a new edge on gentlemen's humours and they show them as they should be: not like gluttons as their fathers did, in chines of beefe and almes to the poore, but in velvets, satins, cloth of gold, pearle: ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... If there exists a native spark of love in all of us, it must be fanned while we are young. Hers, if she ever had it, had been drenched in as ugly a lot of corrosive liquid as could be imagined. But I was surprised at Fyne obscurely feeling this. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... treachery,' he had said himself in his hours of brief authority. His wheel had turned full cycle. Within three years his fate, like that of Charles XII., was destined to a foreign strand, a petty fortress, and a dubious hand. Given over to Spain he passed three years obscurely. 'He was struck down in a fight at Viana in Navarre (1507) after a furious resistance: he was stripped of his fine armour by men who did not know his name or quality and his body was left naked on the bare ground, bloody and riddled with wounds. He was only thirty-one.' ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... now. What was his grievance? What had Plowden done to provoke this savage hostility? Thorpe could not tell. He knew only that unnamed forces dragged him forward to hurt and humiliate his former friend. Obscurely, no doubt, there was something about a woman in it. Plowden had been an admirer of Lady Cressage. There was her father's word for it that if there had been money enough he would have wished to marry her. There had been, as well, the General's hint that if the difficulty of Plowden's ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... the mind grows upon what it consumes, Prescott was soon stricken with a second thought, and the next day at twilight he bought as obscurely as he could a Virginia-cured ham and carried it away, wrapped in ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the deputy, or some member of the Court interposed, if I interpret rightly Parris's report, which is here obscurely expressed, inasmuch as he does not say who spoke; but the import of the words indicates that they proceeded from some member of the Court, who ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... natural one; the varying of a creature as much in a wild state as the ants and butterflies are wild. There is less occasion here for the continual "might be" and "may be," which we are compelled to put up with when dealing with plants and animals, of the workings of whose minds we can only obscurely judge. Also, there is more prospect of pecuniary profit attaching to the careful study of machinery than can be generally hoped for from the study of the lower animals; and though I admit that this consideration should not be carried too far, a great deal of very unnecessary suffering will be spared ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... throes of a gigantic revolution have not sufficed to outweigh the instinctive love of law and order peculiar to the English race. Though events unforeseen by the authors of the Federal Constitution have called for exercises of power, obscurely permitted perhaps by that instrument, yet unknown to former practice, still there has been no popular convulsion at the North, no armed outbreak, no phrensy of mob power. There is as yet no such thing known as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... circumstance in the history of the people of Israel essentially depended on each previous occurrence, and stood connected with each succeeding one. We perceive sometimes more distinctly by a prophetic light, sometimes more obscurely through the hieroglyphical characters of the Mosaic economy of types and shadows, a wonderful series of events, that guides the devout inquirer to "God manifest in the flesh;" and, if human penetration cannot always discover the bright concatenation, we feel assured that it ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... and he seeing what chances there were of food, and what kinds of it, for Mr. Mouse was rather dainty in his eating, if he were not hard up for food, as they had been a good deal lately. They found everything perfection. As to lodgings, Mrs. Mouse found a hole which delighted her extremely. It was obscurely hid in the wainscot under the wardrobe, where nobody could possibly see them going in and out—just to her liking. With a little nibbling of the wood here and there inside the hole, she thought it would make the most delightful ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and knows it all. One meets with few spectacles more afflicting than that of a young man with a free spirit, with impetuous though honourable feelings, condemned to waste the flower of his life in such a calling; to fade in it by slow and sure corrosion of discontent; and at last obscurely and unprofitably to leave, with an indignant joy, the miseries of a world which his talents might have illustrated and his virtues adorned. Such things have been and will be. But surely in that better life which good men dream of, the spirit of a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... evident, therefore, that her, brain did act and calculate, obscurely it is true, and within very restricted limits, for I could never succeed in making her distinguish persons as she distinguished the time; and to stir her intellect, it was necessary to appeal to her passions, in the material sense of the word, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... statue that used to stand on the pedestal over there has been removed. It was an anachronism," Captain Mitchell commented, obscurely. "There is some talk of replacing it by a marble shaft commemorative of Separation, with angels of peace at the four corners, and bronze Justice holding an even balance, all gilt, on the top. Cavaliere Parrochetti ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... hold on life. A bridge constructed according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long, honourable and useful career. But a book as good in its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth. The art of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life. Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity of human minds, those that the Muses would love best lie more than all others ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable—that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self into ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Present independence, opening to fortune and renown. Ay,—and who shall say? renown beyond that of the mere writer. Behind the gaudy scaffolding of this rickety Empire, a new social edifice unperceived arises; and in that edifice the halls of State shall be given to the men who help obscurely to build it,—to men like me." Here, drawing her hand into his own, fixing on her the most imploring gaze of his dark persuasive eyes, and utterly unconscious of bathos in his adjuration, he added: "Plead for me with your whole mind and heart; use your uttermost ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which are highly odoriferous depend solely on this quality for their fertilisation, such as the night-flowering stock (Hesperis) and some species of Daphne; and these present the rare case of flowers which are fertilised by insects being obscurely coloured. ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... "Just as soon as I've finished it you shall have it." I wanted to ask whether he would reciprocate by lending me one of his own books, which would give me some clue to his tastes; but again I felt obscurely that he ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... witness of Priscian, it was the custom of ancient writers to express obscurely some portions of their books, so that those who came after might study with greater diligence to find the thought within their words. The philosophers knew this well, and were the more unwearied in labour, the more subtle in distinctions, so that the truth might ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... front teeth. The feet are armed with hoofs; in some whole or rounded, in others obscurely lobed or sub-divided. They live on vegetable food. The genera are, the horse, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... while he lived abroad, had served in some degree as a preparation for what came after his return to England in the following year. It came with a great shock nevertheless; because it told plainly what before had never been avowed, but only hinted at more or less obscurely. The opening reference is to the reply which had been made to a previous expression of his wish for some confidences as in the old time. I give only what is strictly necessary to account for what followed, and even ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in order to find more lucrative employment. The expedition would be gone five or six months, perhaps, and there were many reasons why it would be better to keep the young people apart for a time. Any one would understand that, he was sure. While Angela was living obscurely with a former governess, a brilliant young officer of some distinction, like Giovanni, could not see her regularly without seriously compromising her. It was the way of the world and could not be helped, yet if Giovanni stayed in Rome it would be too much to expect that he should stay away from ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... indeed, not impossible, sir, that I might express myself obscurely; and it may be, therefore, necessary to declare that I intended no disrespectful reflection on the conduct of his majesty; but must observe, at the same time, that obscure or inaccurate expressions ought always to be interpreted in the most inoffensive ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... see—" She debated a moment, then reached under the table, fumbled obscurely, and came up with more money. "Now, here, here's twenty more besides that first I gave you, so you can pay the dame her money and get all fixed up again, fresh suit and clean collar and a shine and everything. No, no—this is my scene; you ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... enough in ordinary affairs, and he was forced to think for himself. The many books he had read filled his mind with ideas which, because he only half understood them, gave more scope to his imagination. Beneath his painful shyness something was growing up within him, and obscurely he realised his personality. But at times it gave him odd surprises; he did things, he knew not why, and afterwards when he thought of them found himself all ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... office. At that point their Highnesses must stop. They could not but entertain grave apprehensions that, if Roman Catholics were made capable of public trust, great evil would ensue; and it was intimated not obscurely that these apprehensions arose chiefly from the conduct of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... England are sometimes found persons of higher birth and more important station than among the peers—(a term somewhat synonymous with that of Equal.) But the higher class enjoyed certain privileges which we can but obscurely trace [146]. Forming an assembly among themselves, it may be that they alone elected to the senate; and perhaps they were also distinguished by some peculiarities of education—an assertion made by Mr. Mueller, but not to my mind sufficiently ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Britain above the tide Of wars and windy fate; And passed content, leaving to us the pride Of lives obscurely great. ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... mourned, obscurely, the destruction of the new soul that had been given her last year, on her birthday, when she had been born again to her sweet human destiny. At times she had glimpses of the perfect thing it might have been. There was ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... advertise it. Stephen mostly came, on afternoons when there was no rehearsal, to tea. He, Stephen, had a perception of contrasts which answered fairly well the purposes of a sense of humour, and nobody could question hers; it operated obscurely to keep ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... little procession moved gravely and silently up from the bridge to the cabin, their silence was in no way conspicuous, for the whole air throbbed with the rising and falling shriek of the saws, the trampling of the falls, and the obscurely rhythmic rush of the torrent around the island base. They were presently joined by Susan, shambling on her ungainly legs, wagging her big ears, and stretching out her long, ugly, flexible, overhanging nose to sniff inquiringly at the Boy's jacket. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a new and potent influence came into his life. Mrs Leigh, whose home was at Newmarket, came up to London on a visit. After a long interval the brother and sister met, and whether there is or is not any foundation for the dark story obscurely hinted at in Byron's lifetime, and afterwards made public property by Mrs Beecher Stowe (Macmillan's Magazine, 1869, pp. 377-396), there is no question as to the depth and sincerity of his love for his "one relative,"—that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... him to go over the details of the trust which Mrs. Manson Mingott wished to create for her granddaughter. For a couple of hours Archer had examined the terms of the deed with his senior, all the while obscurely feeling that if he had been consulted it was for some reason other than the obvious one of his cousinship; and that the close of the conference would ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... achieve progeny, therefore, without the narrow concentration of the sympathies about the home, and he found it in a multiple marriage in which every member of the governing class was considered to be married to all the others. But the detailed operation of this system he put tentatively and very obscurely. His suggestions have the experimental inconsistency of an enquiring man. He left many things altogether open, and it is unfair to him to adopt Aristotle's forensic method and deal with his discussion as though it was a fully-worked-out project. It is clear that Plato intended every member ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... him cheap in this particular pretension. But, to a certain degree, they will be wrong. Coleridge was not very accurate in any thing but in the use of logic. All his philological attainments were imperfect. He did not talk German; or so obscurely—and, if he attempted to speak fast, so erroneously—that in his second sentence, when conversing with a German lady of rank, he contrived to assure her that in his humble opinion she was a ——. Hard it is to fill ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... quick-witted method, that his delicately feathered barbs made no dent on the hard head of Pepys. Like his neighbor of the Avon, the author of "Hudibras" was a merciless scourge to the vainglorious follies of the time in which he poorly and obscurely lived; and like the truths which he told in his inimitable satires, the virtue and decency of his life was obscured by the disorder of the Commonwealth and the unfaith of the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... pardon, doctor—but I thoucht ye was some scunnert at it; an' I canna bide Shargar to be luikit doon upo'. Luik here,' he continued, going to his box, and bringing out Shargar's little heap of coppers, in which two sixpences obscurely shone, 'he brocht a' that hame last nicht, an' syne sleepit upo' the rug i' my room there. We'll want a' 'at he can mak an' me too afore we get ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... energetic lad, that he was wasting his time. Was he to remain for ever a lawyer's clerk who has not the means to be an articled clerk, and who can never, therefore, aspire to become a full-blown solicitor? Was he to spend the future obscurely in the dingy purlieus of the law? His father, in whose career "something," as Mr. Micawber would have said, had at last "turned up," was now a reporter for the press. The son determined to ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... he) concerning the gods pervades, as I may say, through all the Platonic dialogues, and in all of them conceptions of the first philosophy, venerable, clear, and supernatural, are disseminated, in some more obscurely, but in others more conspicuously;—conceptions which excite those that are in any respect able to partake of them, to the immaterial and separate essence of the gods. And as in each part of the universe and in nature itself, the demiurgus of all which the world contains ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... this I remained taciturn, self-absorbed without expansion, without confidants. This work of mental exaltation was brought about obscurely but surely. The nerves of children are quickly excited; one ought to have regard to the fact that they live in a state of deep quiescence up to the time of their almost complete development. But does anyone reflect that, for certain students, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... all the cities of America, in those busy and worldly centres of traffic and trade, of luxury and wealth, with their average of good and evil, virtue and crime, this "volunteer army" distributes itself noiselessly, quietly, and as it were obscurely, not heralded nor preceded by the emblems of pomp or worldly power, but nevertheless making its conquests and asserting its quiet influence in lanes and alleys, gathering up the little children, taking them to its camps, and instructing and educating ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... violence necessary to elicit sparkles from the flint. What follows next? that it, like a current, flies each bound it chafes. This may mean, that it expands itself notwithstanding all obstructions: but the images in the comparison are so ill-sorted, and the effect so obscurely expressed, that I cannot but think something omitted that connected the last sentence with the former. It is well knovn that the players often shorten speeches to quicken the representation; and it may be suspected, that ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... remained with us later than usual. Twilight melted into darkness. The room was obscurely lit by a shaded lamp, placed behind a screen that kept the sun out of the sick ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... here on Earth! The "Mosaic Cosmogony," as Mr. Goodwin phrases it, (fond, like all other smatterers in Science, of long words,) is a Revelation: and the same HOLY GHOST who gave it, speaking by the mouth of St. John, not obscurely intimates that it is mystical, like the rest of Holy Scripture,—that is, that it was fashioned not without a reference to the Gospel[127]. But we are touching on a high subject now, of which Mr. Goodwin does not understand so much as the Grammar. He is thinking of the structure of the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... often but obscurely present, it would indeed be a superficial glance that did not read in much of modern thought, however unsatisfactory, in much of modern art, however imperfect —we can hardly trace, or, if at all, only as lightest ripples on ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... hampered by no restrictions except the restrictions of English grammar and literary composition. Although we have sought simplicity of expression before, we may now strive for subtlety and for effect; we may write suggestively and even obscurely. We are dealing with the only part of the newspaper that makes any effort toward literary excellence and only our originality and cleverness can ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... a fancy of an old German couple, spectacled and peering, puzzled by his letter. Perhaps they would be obscurely hurt by his perplexing generalisations. Why, they would ask, should this ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... natural history and habits has developed itself so slowly, that little or nothing was precisely ascertained till very recently regarding either its early state or its eventual changes. The salmon-trout, in certain districts of almost equal value with the true salmon, was also but obscurely known to naturalists, most of whom, in truth, are too apt to satisfy themselves rather by the extension than the increase of knowledge. They hand down to posterity, in their barren technicalities, a great deal of what is neither new nor true, even in relation to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... parisis to his salary afforded him a fresh stimulus and prevented his zeal from flagging.[344] The timidity or treachery of one of the prisoners facilitated the inquest. Terrified by the prospect of torture and death, or induced by hope of reward, a person, obscurely designated as le Guainier, or Gueynier,[345] made an ample disclosure of the names and residences of his former fellow-believers. The pursuit was no longer confined to those who had been concerned in the distribution of the placards. All reputed heretics ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... show you this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their light, which operates the change; second—that this heat possesses a peculiar chemical quality which is not possessed by the purely calorific rays outside of the visible spectrum, though far more intense; and third—that the heat radiated from obscurely hot iron abounds especially in rays analogous to those of the region of the spectrum ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... while later and the prairie became obscurely shadowy, peopled all at once by frightful things, familiar everyday things changed to hideous hobgoblins by ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... a dream," said Turnbull, thickly and obscurely, "in which I saw the cross struck crooked ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... which has produced the conflict in the mind of the sufferer—will seldom fail to discover the influence of sexual forces and sexual attractions which, while capable of causing disorders of mind and of conduct, show themselves only obscurely and indirectly, as, for example, in dreams ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... naturally not forthcoming; but all probability is against the sceptical view. For 1) if the quarrel between the brothers were a fiction, we should expect it to be detailed at length and not noticed allusively and rather obscurely—as we find it; 2) as MM. Croiset remark, if the poet needed a lay-figure the ordinary practice was to introduce some mythological person—as, in fact, is done in the "Precepts of Chiron". In a word, there is no more solid ground for ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... I think this bird is polygamous, for several of the brown ones were always seen with one of the red-and-black ones. The bright colours of the male must make it very conspicuous to birds of prey, and, probably in consequence, it is not nearly so bold as the obscurely-coloured females. When a clear space in the brushwood is to be crossed, such as a road, two or three of the females will fly across first, before the male will venture to do so, and he is always more careful to get himself concealed amongst the ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... be effected by weakening my remembrance of these events. In proportion as I gain power over words, shall I lose dominion over sentiments. In proportion as my tale is deliberate and slow, the incidents and motives which it is designed to exhibit will be imperfectly revived and obscurely portrayed. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... That girl! Obscurely, in the laboratory of the senses where, without our knowledge, often against our will, our impulses are dictated, a process, intricate and interesting, which Stendhal called ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... and quartered the lilies of France on the royal shield. The Flemish proved a very reed; and though the French army came up to meet the English in the Vermando country, no fighting took place, and the campaign of 1339 ended obscurely. Norman and Genoese ships threatened the southern shores of England, landing at Southampton and in the Isle of Wight unopposed. In 1340 Edward returned to Flanders; on his way he attacked the French fleet which lay at Sluys, and utterly ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... relation of all things of the created universe to man may be known from the foregoing statements, yet it can be seen only obscurely; whereas in the spiritual world this is seen clearly. In that world, also, there are all things of the three kingdoms, and in the midst of them the angel; he sees them about him, and also knows that they are representations ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... bodies which belong to man's timeless existence, curiously named and obscurely defined. There is apparently a causal body which is possibly the vehicle of will and, more involved still, a super-spiritual body which is the reality of God deep within us, and the carrier and vehicle of our supreme and enduring personal values. All this is a curious enough mingling of psychology, ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... was led through doors and passages, and at length came upon the shrieking inferno of the shops. The uproar and din were maddening. Overhead, huge cranes were swinging great bulks of steel from one end of the cavernous shed to the other; vague figures were moving obscurely in the murk; the floor was piled and littered with heaps of iron-work of unimaginable shapes. After a time we made our way into another area where there was more quiet but no less confusion. I yelled to my guide, "Such a rumpus and row I never ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... explain the allegories and "Midrashim" in two works to be entitled "The Book of Reconciliation" and "The Book of Prophecy." But after reflecting on the matter a number of years I decided to desist from the attempt. The reasons are these. If I expressed my explanations obscurely, I should have accomplished nothing by substituting one unintelligible statement for another. If, on the other hand, I were really to make clear the matters that require explanation, the result would not ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... yet darker perils which the Iolo MSS. (as his father had named the collection) hinted at more or less obscurely. There were suggestions of an awful region which the soul might enter, of a transmutation that was unto death, of evocations which could summon the utmost forces of evil from their dark places—in a word, of that sphere which is represented to most of us under the ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... on Professor Teufelsdroeckh 'were undoubtedly welcome to the Family, the National, or any other of those patriotic Libraries, at present the glory of British Literature'; might work revolutions in Thought; and so forth;—in conclusion, intimating not obscurely, that should the present Editor feel disposed to undertake a Biography of Teufelsdroeckh, he, Hofrath Heuschrecke, had it in his power to ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... nut," said Miss Winch, for though she might wrap up her meaning somewhat obscurely in her telegraphic communications, when it came to the spoken word she was directness itself, "stop picking straws in your hair and listen to ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... entertainment," and the young people of his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far from exclusive—for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited social circle—and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were, without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon the people who had ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... enemies of his truth to keepe in their registers maye appeare how mercifully God hath looked vppon this realme, retayning within it some sparke of his light, euen in the time of greatest darknes. Neither ought any m[a] to wonder albeit that some things be obscurely and some thinges doubtfully spoken. But rather ought al faithfull to magnifie Gods mercy who without publike doctrine gaue so great light. And further we ought to consider that seeing that the enemies of Iesus Christe gathered the foresaide articles there vppon ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... diminished, and a degree of insensibility took place. I seized this opportunity to examine the region of the heart, which had not been done before, from fear of alarming the active and irritable mind of the patient. The heart was perceived palpitating, obscurely, about the 7th and 8th ribs; its movements were very irregular, and consisted in one full stroke, followed by two or three indistinct strokes, and sometimes by an intermission, corresponding with the pulse ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... the physical constitution of the boy. So, also, it is by no means improbable that the little girl, whose pelvis and hips have already begun to indicate by their development their adaptation for the supreme functions of the sexually mature woman, should experience obscurely a certain impulsion towards her predestined maternal occupation, and that her inclinations and amusements should in this way be determined. Many, indeed, and above all the extreme advocates of women's rights, prefer to maintain that such sexually ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... and the hot March sun beat down on him, paining his bleared and puffy eyes. The contrast between his own lump of a body, drink-dazed, dull-throbbing, and the warm, bright day came in on him with a sudden sinking of the heart, a sense of degradation and personal abasement. He realized, however obscurely, that he was an eyesore in nature, a blotch on the surface of the world, an offence to the sweet-breathing heavens. And that bright silence was so strange and still; he could have screamed to ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... figure he had seen the night before, with the features of Miriam. Was it she indeed? Was this she? To doubt the identity of the individual is to lose one's footing on the solid earth. For the first time it occurred to him that this doubt might affect Miriam herself. Was she obscurely conscious of two states of being in herself, and did she therefore fear to trust her own impulses? But, again, love is the master-passion; its fire fuses all things, and gives them unity. Would not this love that they confessed for each other burn ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... modified by the ideas of Aryan invaders. For the greatest deities of Hinduism, Siva, Krishna, Rama, Durga and some of its most essential doctrines such as metempsychosis and divine incarnations, are either totally unknown to the Veda or obscurely adumbrated in it. The chief characteristics of mature Indian religion are characteristics of an area, not of a race, and they are not the characteristics of religion in Persia, Greece ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... violin. It appeared out of keeping in such an atmosphere and rather the antithesis of force and violence than a complement for it. And again, though the rifles were disquietingly bright and effective-looking, the violin was old and shabby, hanging obscurely in its corner, as if, whatever it might have in common with its master, it had nothing in common with ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... was much to which she alone had the clue, too deep, and too obscurely hinted, to be understood at a glance. She met with such evidence of suffering as made her shudder and weep, tokens of the dark thoughts that had gathered round him, of the manful spirit of penitence and patience that had been his stay, and of the ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... can't be her mother's daughter," said Mrs. Mallow obscurely, and finished the discussion in what she considered to be a triumphant manner. Nor would she renew it, though her son tried to learn more about the Loach and Saul families. However, he was satisfied with ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... the Fort, either for purposes of traffic with the only merchant residing in its vicinity, or of business with the officer commanding. It was not likely, he reasoned, that men coming with hostile designs, would have suffered first the boy to be despatched on a mission which, obscurely as he had worded his directions, must in some measure have been understood by the chief; and, secondly, permitted Ephraim Giles to leave the house in the manner just seen—particularly when the suspicion ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... mouth of the subterranean; there, the Loire was open. If you ask, why I did not prefer throwing myself before the pursuers, and dying like a soldier, my reason was, that I should have been numbered merely among those who had fallen obscurely in the various skirmishes of the country; and besides, that if I escaped, I should have one chance more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various |
