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More "Obscurity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... growth. But the mountaineer is always a thinker; he has even in his poverty a hearty contempt for luxury, for material gain at the expense of personality. With his disposition to philosophy, fostered by solitude and isolation, he readily overleaps those gradations, and would step at once from obscurity to the position of a man of culture were the means ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... the nitrogen of plants, and the real cause of the value of nitrogenous fertilizers, are topics that have excited more discussion than any other points in Agricultural Chemistry. This is the result of two circumstances. One is the obscurity in which some parts of the subject have rested; the other is the immense practical and commercial importance of this element, as a characteristic and essential ingredient of the most precious fertilizers. It is a rule that the most valuable manures, commercially considered, are those ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... true origin of the art of paper-making, it is now lost in obscurity. It is almost certain that the earliest form of paper was the papyrus of the Egyptians and that they were the first to use it as a writing material. They manufactured it from the stem of the papyrus plant, from ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... Verloc and related directly or indirectly to her tragic suspicion that "life doesn't stand much looking into," are the outcome of that very necessity. Personally I have never had any doubt of the reality of Mrs. Verloc's story; but it had to be disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town, it had to be made credible, I don't mean so much as to her soul but as to her surroundings, not so much as to her psychology but as to her humanity. For the surroundings hints ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... used to oily words; I am used to speak what I think, of men, and to men. I am, perhaps, more of a come-by-chance than any of you ever saw; I have made my way to the place I now fill, without wealth, and against education; I was raised from obscurity, and placed in the high councils of the nation, by the kindness and liberality of the good people of my district—a people whom I will never be unfaithful to, here or elsewhere; I love them, and they have honored me; and according as God has given me judgment, ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... they must either penetrate the heart of the town, or follow the dark streets of the outskirts. In the latter case, their association would arouse surprise and comment, but in the throng, reasonable safety might be expected. Once in the station, they might hope to pass the hour of waiting in obscurity, since that was the last place that a ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... passed a cup of coffee she seemed to confer an honour; when she returned a receipted bill it was as if she repulsed an insult. People said that she had been born to greatness and that she had never adapted herself to the obscurity that had been thrust upon her—but they said it when her back was turned. To her face the subject was never broached, and her former prosperity was ignored along with her present poverty. Of her own sorrows she, herself, made no mention. When she spoke from the depths of her bitterness of ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... foolish excuses, as well as Dr. Tonge's prevaricating answers and mysterious statements, into consideration, the king was now convinced the "Narrative of a Horrid Plot" was an invention of a fanatic or a rogue. He was, therefore; desirous of letting the subject drop into obscurity; but Lord Danby, foreseeing in the sensation which its avowal would create, a welcome cloud to screen the defects of his policy, which parliament intended to denounce, urged his majesty to lay the matter before his privy council. This advice the king refused to accept, saying, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... presently it grew so dark that I could scarcely see where I was going, though I was able to guide myself in the path that stretched before me by means of the pale luminous rays that frequently pierced the deepening obscurity, and these rays I now noticed fell ever downwards in the form of a cross. As I went on I was pursued as it were by the sound of those delicate harmonies played on invisible, sweet strings; and after a while I perceived at the extreme end of the long, dim vista a door standing open, through ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... or mist, suspended in the atmosphere, becomes visible exactly as dust does in the air of a room. In the shadows, you not only cannot see the dust itself, because unillumined, but you can see other objects through the dust, without obscurity; the air being thus actually rendered more transparent by a deprivation of light. Where a sunbeam enters, every particle of dust becomes visible, and a palpable interruption to the sight; so that a transverse sunbeam ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... Providence for children and idiots," said Laura gently. We didn't ask her whether she meant us or Tony McGinnis or both. There are some things better left in obscurity. I'd have probably said something much sharper than that if anybody had made off with ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a large, dingy, dirty, water-stained and somewhat dilapidated hall to which the stone stair, ascending immediately from the door, led them; and it would have looked considerably worse but for the obscurity belonging to the nature of the entertainment, through which it took some pains to discover the twenty-five or thirty people that formed the company present. It was indeed a dim, but not therefore, a very religious light that pervaded rather than overcame the gloom, issuing ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the language in which he expressed it clear of ambiguities; and such earlier draughts of his system as are supposed still to be extant in MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary, rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... so grave, when he opens his case, In obscurity finds it is hid, Till the bright glass of knowledge illumines his face, As he gives the three taps on ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... among California cattlemen. It must have paralyzed that flying personage, for I gained upon him shockingly. I could hear him pant, a queer, patient panting, a sigh rather, a gentle, lamenting sighing, and the white camisa flapped ghostily in the darkness. Suddenly he burst out of obscurity, past the plantation, into the glaring moonlight. And I—I stopped short, went down on my hands and knees, and crouched back into the shadow. For the man running was Miller; Miller, wild, sobbing, disheveled, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... looked towards the farther end of the room, which lay in obscurity; for it was a large room, lighted only by the four candles on the table ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... and the service of the dinner were equally superb. The broad table seemed small in the midst of the great mysterious chamber, of which the illumination was confined by shades to the centre. The glance wandering round the obscurity of the walls could rest on nothing that was not obviously in good taste and very costly. The three men-servants, moving soundless as phantoms, brought burdens from a hidden country behind a gigantic screen, and at intervals in the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... obscure passage: but I think Theobald's interpretation right, namely, that "thirsty entrance" means the dry penetrability, or bibulous drought, of the soil. The obscurity of this passage ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... countries mixing their colors with as much filth as the police will allow. His keen thrusts at these incarnations of folly and obscenity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially at those who seek to hide the poverty of their ideas in the obscurity of their phrases, encourage one to think that in the next generation the day of such pretenders will be done. His prophesying against "art for art's sake"; his denunciation of art which simply ministers ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... change! A cloud, which floated in the atmosphere, An inconsiderable and feathery speck Of no proportions, now augmented, wears A threatening aspect, ominously dark; Enveloping the heaven's canopy In lowering shadow and portentous gloom; In pall of ambient obscurity. The fork-ed lightnings ramify and play Upon a background of sepulchral black; The growling thunders rumble a reply Of detonation awful and profound, To every corruscation's vivid gleam; In deep crescendo and fortissimo, In quavering tremolo ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... is the child of Knowledge. When a mind is full, like a wholesome river, it is also clear. Confusion and obscurity are much oftener the results of ignorance than of inefficiency. Few are the men who cannot express their meaning, when the occasion demands the energy; as the lowest will defend their lives with acuteness, and sometimes even with eloquence. ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... the facts relating to Sir John Harding's illness remained, until lately, in more or less obscurity, and Mr. Mozley's was not the only erroneous version of them which got abroad. One such version having been mentioned, as if authentic, in a debate in the House of Commons on March 17, 1893, I wrote to the "Times" to correct it; and in confirmation of my statement the gentleman who had been Sir ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... watched the Whig party go to pieces. He saw a great part of its vote lodge temporarily among the Know-Nothings, but before the end of the year even they began to lose their prominence. In the autumn, from the obscurity of his provincial life, he saw, far off, Seward, the most astute politician of the day, join the new movement. In New York, the Republican state convention and the Whig state convention merged into one, ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... of America, particularly the celebrated Mr. Rittenhouse,) but from similar motives to those which induced the editors to give this calculation the preference,—the ardent desire of drawing modest merit from obscurity, and controverting the long-established illiberal prejudice ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... the tide, but the water being then ebbing, it was left behind. There were also some lighters lying over against the dock, and one of the lightermen walking then on board, saw them throw the pail into the dark; but by the obscurity of the night, the distance, and having no suspicion, they did not apprehend anything of the matter. Having thus done, they returned home again to Mrs. Hayes's where they arrived about twelve o'clock and being let in, found Mrs. Hayes had been very busily employed in washing ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... 'new woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the deprecation—perhaps well placed—which is contained in this presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The grievance of the new woman is made up of those things which this typical characterization of the movement urges as reasons why she should be content. She is petted, and is permitted, or even required, to consume largely ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... basis, the mist of obscurity evolved by error deepens the false claim, and finally declares that God knows error and that error can improve 523:6 His creation. Although presenting the exact opposite of Truth, the lie claims to be truth. The crea- tions of matter arise from a mist or ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... on either hand, and Sir Guy deemed it wiser to move at a reasonable pace, for fear of attracting suspicion in a neighborhood already aroused by rumors of the man-hunt which had begun. They could count upon the obscurity ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... When wrecked in reputation, one might as well be wrecked in fortune, too. What would their future be, how could that proud, sensitive man her father bear this humiliation, this disgrace? To be condemned to a life of obscurity, social ostracism, and genteel poverty! Oh, the thought was unendurable! She herself could earn money, of course. If her literary work did not bring in enough, she could teach and what she earned would help ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... His Eminence, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Bourges, had converted to the Catholic faith a young person, the daughter of one of the citizen families, who were the first upholders of Calvinism, and who, thanks to their obscurity or to some compromise with Heaven, had escaped from the persecutions under Louis XIV. The Piedefers—a name that was obviously one of the quaint nicknames assumed by the champions of the Reformation—had set up as highly respectable cloth ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... to the bottom of the dingle. It was nearly involved in obscurity. To dissipate the feeling of melancholy which came over my mind, I resolved to kindle a fire; and having heaped dry sticks upon my hearth, and added a billet or two, I struck a light, and soon produced a blaze. Sitting down, I fixed my eyes upon the blaze, and soon fell into a ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... or variety in which far greater discrepancies are not to be founds, it is doubtful whether we can receive any thing as absolutely veritable history; and that the Book of Genesis, and Gospel of Luke, and History of Lingard, and History of Hume, are alike covered with a mist of sceptical obscurity." ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... out of the semi-obscurity of the side street into a brilliantly lighted thoroughfare and bowled down a broad and busy road. A drizzle of rain was falling and blurred the glass; but even had the windows been open, she could ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... embarrassed young consciousness, there had welled up the hesitating confession, "She—doesn't like me," she could not, of course, have found words in which to make the reasons for her knowledge clear, but they had for herself no obscurity. The fair being who, at rare intervals, fluttered on the threshold of her world had a way of looking at her with a shade of aloof distaste in her always ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... animal being carved in relief around them, had become famous as the receptacles of secret accusations under the name of the Lion's Mouths. Something he dropped into the grinning aperture of the marble, though what, the distance and the obscurity of the gallery prevented Gino from perceiving; and then his form was seen gliding like a phantom down ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... history does not determine; but it is very possible that they are, because they came, it is said, originally from the north of Ireland, and one of the sons is actually called Robin. Leaving this point, however, in the obscurity which involves the early history of the most ancient and illustrious families, we proceed to less disputable and perhaps more useful facts. It is well known, that is, by all his neighbours, that farmer Gray began life with no very encouraging prospects: he was the youngest of a large ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... all day long, roaming from bar to office, from one room to another, silently opening doors of unoccupied chambers to peer about in the dusty obscurity, then noiselessly closing them, he would slink away down the dim corridor to his late wife's room and sit there through the long sunny afternoon, his weak ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... meaning and beauty, while the youthful genius who had created it sank almost unnoticed into his grave; but they had not seen the advent of a work which almost in a day set the world on fire and raised an unknown musician from penury and obscurity to affluence and fame. In the face of such an experience it was scarcely to be wondered at that judgment was flung to the winds and that the most volatile of musical nations and the staidest alike hailed the young composer as the successor ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Ralph; then they surged up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. But he felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his side. A series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his mind; then obscurity settled down on it. "THIS man...THIS man..." was the one fiery point in his darkened consciousness.... "What on earth are you talking ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... was nearer, more insistent; the closer it came the more completely was the real world obscured. This obscurity was now shutting oil from him everything; it was exactly as though his whole body bad been struck numb so that he might touch, might hold, but could feel nothing. Again it was as though he were confined in a damp, underground cell and the world above his head was crying out with life and ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... him who established rational government witnessed the death of him who perfected literature. In 1873, Martin Farquhar Tupper—next to Smith the most notable name in history—died of starvation in the streets of London. Like that of Smith, his origin is wrapped in profoundest obscurity. No less than seven British cities claimed the honour of his birth. Meagre indeed is our knowledge of this only bard whose works have descended to us through the changes of twenty centuries entire. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... by the great thoroughfares, and by hidden streets of which Nancy had never heard, talking or silent as the mood dictated. Crewe had stories to tell of this and that thriving firm, of others struggling in obscurity or falling from high estate; to him the streets of London were so many chapters of romance, but a romance always of to-day, for he neither knew nor cared about historic associations. Vast sums sounded perpetually on his lips; he glowed with envious delight in telling of speculations ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... confinement.[382] It appears that a number of moths, especially the Sphingidae, when hatched in the autumn out of their proper season, {158} are completely barren; but this latter case is still involved in some obscurity.[383] ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the megalithic monuments themselves we cannot expect to know very much, especially while their origin remains veiled in obscurity. Yet there are a few facts which stand out clearly. We even know something about their appearance, for the skulls found in the megalithic tombs have in many cases been subjected to careful examination and measurement. Into ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... among the birds of our woodlands in its personal interest for the historian. It is not, in fact, a British bird, save by acclimatisation, at all, and is generally regarded as a legacy of the Romans. The time and manner of its introduction into Britain are, it is true, veiled in obscurity. What we know, on authentic evidence, is that the bird was officially recognised in the reign of Harold, and that it had already come under the aegis of the game laws in that of Henry I, during the first year of which the Abbot of Amesbury held a licence to kill it, though how he contrived ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... permanently of their occupations, with nothing but starvation looking them in the face. Of course, nothing could be wider of the truth than this, but Kay had to flee his country, and died in poverty and obscurity in a foreign land. Still the shuttle continued to be used, for the makers of cloth had learned that increased production meant more work, and possibly greater profit, and though Kay disappeared, his works remained behind. The demand for weft grew more and more. It has been said that it is ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... of the primitive inhabitants of Chili, like that of all the nations and tribes of the aboriginal Americans, is involved in impenetrable obscurity. Many of the natives consider themselves as indigenous, while others derive their origin from a foreign stock, supposing their ancestors to have come from the north or from the west; but as they were utterly unacquainted with the art of writing, they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... not, indeed, sir, universally and unvariably certain, that a man, raised from meanness and poverty, will be insolent and oppressive; nor do I doubt but there are many now languishing in obscurity, whose abilities might add new lustre to the highest honours, and whose integrity would very faithfully discharge the most important trust, and in their favour, wherever they can be discovered, some exceptions ought to be made; but ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... made in the craft are involved in some obscurity. He may have merely carried over from college days what he then had in hand. At all events his sister Elizabeth, from whom the information comes in respect to these details, remembered a little collection which ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... vast obscurity, with death threatening us if we took another step; and I could not help thinking how easy it was for a people of a low order of intellect, blindly superstitious, to make this solemn hall the home of their poor idol. It was a place ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... later part of their enormous subject is precious because it is inexhaustible. It is the best to know because it is the best known and the most explicit. Earlier scenes stand out from a background of obscurity. We soon reach the sphere of hopeless ignorance and unprofitable doubt. But hundreds and even thousands of the moderns have borne testimony against themselves, and may be studied in their private correspondence and sentenced on their own confession. Their deeds ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... no doubt, flicking him, he let go restraint, disobeyed his own orders, raised his head, and looking at her as in the enfolding obscurity she ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the obscurity grew less, and seemed to be slowly floating in the direction of the praus. Once there was the wave-like motion of the earth again, making them catch at each other to keep themselves from falling, and then the sun ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... Bedford was one of the first men of position in the country to come to the aid of Joseph Lancaster—a young Quaker philanthropist, who, in spite of poverty and obscurity, did more for the cause of popular education in England in the early years of the century than all the privileged people in the country.[10] Here a floating straw of reminiscence may be cited, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... regent, and allowed the Inquisition and the edicts to fall almost entirely into disuse. This forbearance of the government, combined with the brilliant representations of the Gueux, lured from their obscurity the Protestants, who, however, had now grown too powerful to be any longer concealed. Hitherto they had contented themselves with secret assemblies by night; now they thought themselves numerous and formidable enough to venture to these meetings openly and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... footsteps deepened, merged into actual sound, drew nearer. Thorne, in the deep obscurity of the trees, listened, moving near to the dusky, trunk of an old magnolia; he was in no mood for passing civilities, and in this friendly country all wayfarers exchanged greetings. In the sound of the advancing ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... In resting his case on the Pyrenees, Mr. Lea shows his usual judgment. But his very confident note is a too easy and contemptuous way of settling a controversy which is still wearily extant from Spain to Silesia, in which some new fact comes to light every year, and drops into obscurity, riddled with the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... was a man whose life was one of meritorious achievement, every one knows. That he was a diligent and successful working geologist, scarcely needs saying. That with indomitable perseverance he struggled up from obscurity to a place in the world of literature and science, shows him to have been highly endowed in character and intelligence. And that he had a remarkable power of presenting his facts and arguments in an attractive form, a glance at any of his books will quickly ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of their greatest need, they bring them forth, the base place having kept them more safe than the dainty chamber would have done. And so these two arbitresses of the world not seldom hide their most precious commodities in the obscurity of the crafts that are reputed most base, that thence being brought to light they may shine with a brighter splendour. Whereof how in a trifling matter Cisti, the baker, gave proof, restoring the eyes of the mind to Messer Geri Spina, whom the story of his wife, Madonna ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the tale, as when some beautiful temple or theatre is shut up. But now the informing of ourselves with the truth herself is a thing so delectable and lovely as if our very life and being were for the sake of knowing. And the darkest and grimmest things in death are its oblivion, ignorance, and obscurity. Whence, by Jove, it is that almost all mankind encounter with those that would destroy the sense of the departed, as placing the very whole of their life, being, and satisfaction solely in the sensible and knowing part of the mind. For even the things ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... and he had thought she was speaking of her poverty. It was a cruel vengeance, for, before he had read the letter through, he knew that if the story were correct, she could be his wife in name only—that they must part. Poverty, obscurity, seemed as nothing now—but crime? Oh, Heaven, that his name and race should be so dishonored! If he had known the real truth, he would have died rather than have uttered one ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... be combated until they are recognized, simply and frankly, and honestly discussed. It is a significant and even symbolic fact that the bacteria of disease rarely flourish when they are open to the free currents of pure air. Obscurity, disguise, concealment furnish the best conditions for their vigor and diffusion, and these favoring conditions we have for centuries past accorded to venereal diseases. It was not always so, as indeed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and, on emerging from the waves, supported ourselves for some time by treading- water, while we held the two bundles above our heads. This we did in order to let our eyes become accustomed to the obscurity. Then, when we could see sufficiently, we swam to a shelving rock, and landed in safety. Having wrung the water from our trousers, and dried ourselves as well as we could under the circumstances, we proceeded to ignite the torch. ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... brigades, under Kershaw and Wofford, advanced through the woods in the direction of the firing, but the retreat was so rapid, that they could only join in the pursuit. A dense fog settled over the field, increasing the obscurity, and rendering great caution necessary to avoid collision between our own troops. Their movements were ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... monarchy. The Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in the Speak House and debate: and the king's chief superiority is a form of closure—'The Speaking is over.' After the long monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous of the influence of Maka. Calumny, or rather caricature, was called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was reported to have said in church that the king was the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this phrase is involved in some obscurity. Jacob, in his Law Dictionary, speaks of it as "from the French," and his definition is verbatim that given in The Termes of the Law (ed. 1598), with a very slight addition. Blackstone (book II cap. 12.) says, "which term I shall explain in the very words ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... caused by my present successes. I see that you despise everything that can make you worthy to reign after me. What you call inability, I call rebellion, for you cannot excuse yourself on the ground of the weakness of your mind and the state of your health. We have struggled from obscurity through the toil of war, which has taught other nations to know and respect us, and yet you will not even hear of military exercises. If you do not alter your conduct, know that I shall deprive you of my succession. I have not spared, and I shall not spare, my own life ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... of having misled Dr. Lightfoot on this point by any obscurity in the statement of my object, but, as he and other apologists have carefully ignored it, and systematically warped my argument, either by accident or design, I venture to quote a few sentences from Supernatural Religion, both to justify ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... south, and beheld the sea heaped up and covered with foam, like a huge watery ridge the height of the ships, rolling towards them. As this furious surge approached, rendered more terrible in appearance by the obscurity of night, he trembled for the safety of his vessels. His own ship was lifted up to such a height that he feared she would be overturned, while another was torn from her anchorage. The crews expected to be swallowed up, but the surge passed on and ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... former chapter, of the import of names, many examples are not needed to illustrate the import of propositions. When there is any obscurity, or difficulty, it does not lie in the meaning of the proposition, but in the meaning of the names which compose it; in the extremely complicated connotation of many words; the immense multitude and prolonged series of facts ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... shameless. Such strokes of policy have not wholly ceased to be recommended, but they have ceased to be practised, except occasionally through the medium of paper money, in which case the character of the transaction, from the greater obscurity of the subject is ...
— The Paper Moneys of Europe - Their Moral and Economic Significance • Francis W. Hirst
... have been laid open to his inquiries are the archives of the principal capitals of Europe, which have been thoroughly explored for the first time during that period. Numerous manuscripts of great value, for the most part unknown to the learned world, have been rescued from obscurity. At the side of the voluminous chronicles long since printed, a rich abundance of contemporary correspondence and hitherto inedited memoirs has accumulated, which afford a copious collection of life-like and trustworthy views of the past. The secrets of diplomacy have been revealed. The ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Behind the victory of Louis Bonaparte could be seen something hateful, but something which was familiar—the Empire; behind the victory of the Left there was obscurity. We must bring in daylight behind us. That which causes the greatest uneasiness to people's imagination is the dictatorship of the Unknown. To convoke a new Assembly as soon as possible, to restore France at once into the hands of France, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... above the necessity of active employment, yet not in a condition to place their own children advantageously, if they happen to have families. Many of them are content to live unmarried. Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so that you may see on handcarts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... from my wife's mother, likely to do well. After dinner I to the office, where Mr. Prin come to meet about the Chest business; and till company come, did discourse with me a good while alone in the garden about the laws of England, telling me the many faults in them; and among others, their obscurity through multitude of long statutes, which he is about to abstract out of all of a sort; and as he lives, and Parliaments come, get them put into laws, and the other statutes repealed, and then it will be a short work to know the law, which appears a very noble ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... they prize renown and glory. All heroism is dear to them. Perhaps there is no one among them who would think it possible to pay too dearly for a brilliant action; and yet, let us say it with reverence, many of them devote to obscurity their most holy sacrifices, their most sublime virtues. But however exemplary these quiet virtues of the home life may be, neither the miseries of private life, nor the secret sorrows which must prey upon souls too ardent not to be frequently wounded, can diminish the wonderful ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... so that there seemed to be no way of gaining access to the rest of the world, unless by climbing above the clouds. By and by they partially dispersed, giving glimpses of the mountain ramparts through their obscurity, the separate clouds lying heavily upon the mountain's breast. In warm mornings, after rain, the mist breaks forth from the forests on the ascent of the mountains, like smoke,—the smoke of a volcano; then it soars up, and becomes a cloud in heaven. But these clouds to-day ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and, in short, there is not a step I take in the labyrinth of unpublished history that I do not stumble against some illustrious compatriot. It is my purpose to draw all these names out of the unjust obscurity and oblivion in which they have so long lain. How pure a joy, dear Pepe, to restore all their lustre to the glories, epic and literary, of one's native place! And how could a man better employ the scant intellect with which Heaven has endowed him, the fortune which he has inherited, and the brief ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... as Gibbon says of the Empress Theodora, that this passage could be left "veiled in the obscurity of a learned language"; but it may be noted that the locus classicus for the play on the word is the incident of the Megarian "mystery pigs" in Aristophanes' Acharnians, 728 ff. Cf. also Athenaeus, ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... could count, but when, a few years later, Miss Dix returned to England as a kind of angel of mercy, giving back much more than she had ever received, the Rathbone family must have been glad that they had befriended her in her obscurity and ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... lady possessed some secret intelligence in regard to the mysterious pageant of that night. However this might be, such knowledge has never become general. The actors in the scene have vanished into deeper obscurity than even that wild Indian band who scattered the cargoes of the tea ships on the waves, and gained a place in history, yet left no names. But superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... was the disappointment of all his hopes. The bright dreams that he had entertained, the visions of gay things which he had suffered the enchanter Imagination to call forth from the former obscurity of his fate, were all dispelled by the words that he had just heard spoken; and everything dark, and painful and agonising, was spread out around him in its stead. He was as one who, having fallen asleep in a desert, has dreamt sweet dreams, and then suddenly wakes with ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... and latterly also Browning, with protests against his obscurity and his occasionally most unmusical English. The inspiration of his brave and optimistic philosophy she felt strongly. She was extremely fond of reading Dante, and she was better acquainted with German and Italian poetry than most cultivated women. But though she read much and often in ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... you ever question your spiritual state, doubting as to whether you are a child of God or not, wondering in the obscurity of your mind as to how you stand in the sight of God? I do not think any one need be in doubt as to this matter. Are you living a life of obedience to Christ? Let us see. You surely have been baptized. As baptism was his first public act, for you to ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... natural that, during their sojourn in Asia, they should have acquired some tastes and habits surprising, if not disgusting, to persons who never had quitted Europe. It was natural that, having enjoyed great consideration in the East, they should not be disposed to sink into obscurity at hom; and as they had money, and had not birth or high connection, it was natural that they should display a little obtrusively the single advantage which they possessed. Wherever they settled there ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... law, was suppressed for fear of the law of libel.[228] The Fragment was published anonymously, but Bentham had confided the secret to his father by way of suggesting some slight set-off against his apparent unwillingness to emerge from obscurity. The book was at first attributed to Lord Mansfield, Lord Camden, and to Dunning. It was pirated in Dublin; and most of the five hundred copies printed appear to have been sold, though without profit to the author. The father's indiscretion ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... of vehicles, that London began in earnest. Just pausing to observe which appeared the most crowded streets, and consequently the most to be avoided, he crossed into Saint John's Road, and was soon deep in the obscurity of the intricate and dirty ways, which, lying between Gray's Inn Lane and Smithfield, render that part of the town one of the lowest and worst that improvement has left in the ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... find for it, Herrera took the weapon. The rope was round his waist, and, with his hands upon the embrasure of the window, he only waited to spring out for a signal from the gipsy, who was watching, as well as the obscurity would permit, the movements of the soldier. The night was growing lighter, the wind had risen and swept away the mist from the fields, overhead the clouds had broken, and stars were visible, sparkling in their setting of dark ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... succeeded in compressing into a small compass all the leading events of history, without the slightest obscurity, or without sinking her book into ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... had then deleted the three words, "years just six," and written "nine" above them. It looks as if he had meant at first to refer to the change in his fortunes, "just six" MONTHS before, and had afterwards thought it better to refrain. This would account for a certain obscurity of meaning. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... as this. Mr. Nahum Tate is not of a class of whom it can be safe to say that they are "well known:" they and their desperate tricks are essentially obscure, and good reason he has to exult in the felicity of such obscurity; for else this same vilest of travesties, Mr. Nahum's Lear, would consecrate his name to everlasting scorn. For himself, he belonged to the age of Dryden rather than of Pope: he "flourished," if we can use such a phrase of one who was always withering, about the era of the Revolution; and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... capital are lost in the obscurity which covers all the germs of civilization. The more one comes to understand the case of the primitive man, the more wonderful it seems that man ever started on the road to civilization. Among the lower ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... in the world,—blessed with power, with a large income, with influence throughout all the world around him, courted, feted, feared and almost worshipped,—that he should desire to share her fortunes, her misfortunes, her struggles, her poverty and her obscurity, was not within the scope of her imagination. There was a homage in it, of which she did not believe any man to be capable,—and which to her would be the more wonderful as being paid to herself. She thought so badly of men and women generally, and of ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... man to pierce the obscurity by his intuition or by his research. Yet we must not be too critical of the want of proportion in his writing when we remember that he was a pioneer; for it was an original idea to piece together the stray fragments of history that referred to his people. It has been shown that in his ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... as if Nature were favouring him further, for the darkness came on like magic till there was quite obscurity enough to favour his designs, and, going straight to the window he thrust out ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... doubts, the misgivings which fluctuate in, and irritate the minds of a very large proportion of the Americans; and such is the decided conviction of a portion who retire into obscurity and are silent; and every year adds to the number of both these parties. They remind one of a husband who, having married for love, and supposed his wife to be perfection, gradually finds out that she is full of faults, and renders him anything but happy; but his pride will not ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... imagined yourself on the deck of a Mediterranean steamer, looking at a town in Algeria or Tunis. And beyond, under the low-hanging stars, was the Mexican desert—a blank page, with only here and there the obscurity of a garden, or a hacienda, or a mere speck which would be a lonely ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... The botanist can now conveniently watch the development of aquatic plants under conditions not unnatural, throughout the entire period of their existence, from their germination to the production of flowers and the perfection of seeds; and we are in hopes that much of the obscurity that invests many aquatic vegetables will in consequence be cleared up. The zoologist is perhaps even more indebted to the invention. The habits, not only of the fishes, but of the mollusca, can be accurately studied under natural conditions, and many important facts of their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... Cadiz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows and pillars of the Church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp, hanging from the centre of the roof, broke the solemn obscurity. At mid-day the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced one of the Seven Words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... haste, We now of winters sharpness 'gins to taste This moneth the Sun's in Sagitarius, So farre remote, his glances warm not us. Almost at shortest, is the shorten'd day, The Northern pole beholdeth not one ray, Nor Greenland, Groanland, Finland, Lapland, see No Sun, to lighten their obscurity; Poor wretches that in total darkness lye, With minds more dark then is the dark'ned Sky. Beaf, Brawn, and Pork are now in great request, And solid meats our stomacks can digest. This time warm cloaths, full diet, and good fires, Our pinched flesh, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... why the Cockpit at Whitehall has remained so long in obscurity (its history is here attempted for the first time) are obvious. Some scholars have confused it with the public playhouse of the same name, a confusion which persons in the days of Charles avoided by invariably saying "The Cockpit in Drury ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... voyages and travels, Leigh Hunt, with his happy appreciation of whatever is most quaint in description, most sympathetic in impression, has helped us to an arrangement, which, with a convenient modification of our own, we shall follow congenially. We shall seek for remoteness and obscurity of place,—marvellousness of hearsay,—surprising, but conceivable truth,—barbaric magnificence,— the grotesque and the fantastic,—strangeness of custom,—personal danger, courage, and suffering,—and their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... have given a very good guess at the reasons which led Anstice to shun notoriety and welcome the obscurity of Littlefield; but in the meantime Dr. Willows was left to wonder in vain; though his wonder was leavened with a genuine admiration for his colleague's skill, and a fervent gratitude for the other man's unwearying ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the rise now and a bitter wind met them in the face. There was not very much of it as yet, but all feeling seemed to die out of the lad's cheeks under it, and it brought a little doleful moaning out of the darkness. Behind them stars shone frostily in the soft indigo, but elsewhere a deepening obscurity was creeping up across the prairie, and sky and snow were blurred and merged one into ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... other single area in the city—should have been the home of the well-beloved William Dean Howells. One also likes to recall that Jenny Lind was married at number 20. Chestnut Street—which after a period of social obscurity is again coming into its own—possesses Julia Ward Howe's house at number 13, that of Motley the historian at 16, and of Parkman at 50. In this hasty map we have gone up and down the hill, but the cross-street, Charles, although not so attractive, is nevertheless as rich ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... see the stars at evening, sometimes because there are clouds intervening, but oftener because there are glimmerings of light; thus many truths escape us from the obscurity we stand in, and many more from the state of mind which induces us to sit down satisfied with our imaginations and of our knowledge unsuspicious. [This sentence is correctly balanced, except at ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... the Constitution of 1799 came into existence, and it was not his fault that it degenerated in the strong hands of Napoleon. He named the three Consuls, refusing to be one himself, and he passed into ceremonious obscurity as president of ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... us, all but Monsieur ——-, who, although recovered, cannot yet be moved. All money, plate, and jewels in our charge, are restored to their rightful owners; and the Spanish colours, which have never been hoisted, return to their former obscurity. I reopen the piano, uncover and tune the harp, and as we have been most entirely shut up during thirteen days of heavenly weather, feel rejoiced at the prospect of getting out again. As yet, I have not seen the state of things in the city, but the "Cosmopolite" ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of these in the dust which I sent him. On the other hand, he finds in it two species which hitherto he knows as living only in South America. The dust falls in such quantities as to dirty everything on board, and to hurt people's eyes; vessels even have run on shore owing to the obscurity of the atmosphere. It has often fallen on ships when several hundred, and even more than a thousand miles from the coast of Africa, and at points sixteen hundred miles distant in a north and south direction. In some ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... were enshrined in the heart of poor Mrs Leather, and not a few of these—painted by the hand of May—hung on the walls of their little sitting-room, but the word to which she turned her eyes in seasons of profoundest obscurity, and which served her as a sheet-anchor in the midst of the wildest storms, was, "Hope thou in God, for thou shalt yet praise Him." And alongside of that text, whenever she thought of it or chanced to look at it, there invariably flashed another: "Immanuel, ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... of wild turkeys awakened Jean, "Chuga-lug, chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug-chug." There was not a great difference between the gobble of a wild turkey and that of a tame one. Jean got up, and taking his rifle went out into the gray obscurity of dawn to try to locate the turkeys. But it was too dark, and finally when daylight came they appeared to be gone. The mule had strayed, and, what with finding it and cooking breakfast and packing, Jean did not make a very ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... open, simple, childlike. My interior resembles a drop of water, mingling and lost in the ocean, and no more discerning itself,—the sea not only surrounding, but absorbing it. In this divine immensity, the soul discerns and enjoys all objects in God. All is darkness and obscurity in respect to itself; all is light on the part of God. Thus, God is all to me. This has been my state more than thirty years, although in latter years I have realized greater depths in these experiences. Think of the bottomless sea; what is thrown therein, ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... later," continued the lady; "and how is that to be done unless I keep the footing which I have attained—with trouble enough, as I only know, and without any thanks to you, Mr. Smith. If I give up parties, I may fall at once into the obscurity for which you have such a taste. People of fortune and distinction can voluntarily withdraw for a while, and then reappear with as much success as ever, but that is not the case with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... a very recent date, in ignorance of the facts, and despite his notable services of twenty-four years to the colonies, left Ludlow to die in obscurity in Virginia or elsewhere, and some of the traditions, based on no record or other evidence, have been recently repeated. It is therefore proper to state here in few words who Ludlow was, what he did both in Massachusetts ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... Through the pale obscurity of a French night, cool, raw, moist, with a hint of spring in its freshness, a line of soldiers plodded along the lonely, melancholy lanes. Wan starlight showed in the rifts between the clouds. Neither ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... fringes of the town in the obscurity of approaching night; a thick tulle fog had blown down on the north wind. The little foot-hill city was all drowned in it; tree-tops, roofs, the gable ends of houses, the illuminated dial of the town clock on the city hall, sticking up from the blur like things seen in a ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... pretended to be rather an authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in Aeronautics at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim had endeavored to launch ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... the inside, and on the altar a candle was lighted, which burned dimly amid the surrounding darkness, and lengthened the shadow of the altar itself, and those of six or seven persons who stood on its upper steps, until they mingled in the obscurity which shrouded the lower end of the chapel. The faces of the men who sat on the altar steps were not distinctly visible, yet their prominent and more characteristic features were in sufficient relief, and I observed, that some ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... assuredly have complacent gullets and adaptable stomachs. Yet these robust eaters die of hunger or poison for no greater cause than a drop of syrup, the lightest diet imaginable, adapted to the weakness of extreme youth, and a delicacy to the adult! What a gulf of obscurity in the stomach ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... passed without accident, but in such profound obscurity, that it was necessary to ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... harm done, brother, I warrant you: since there is no harm done, anger costs a man nothing; and a tall man is never his own man till he be angry. To keep his valour in obscurity, is to keep himself as it were in a cloak bag. What's a musician, unless he play? What's a tall man unless he fight? For, indeed, all this my wise brother stands upon absolutely; and that made me fall in with ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the outhouse, whose beams upon the haze ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... pray; And all through the high Liturgy My spirit rejoiced without allay, Being, for once, borne clearly above All banks and bars of ignorance, By this bright spring-tide of pure love, And floated in a free expanse, Whence it could see from side to side, The obscurity from every part Winnow'd away and purified By the ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... soon. As I entered the well-known thoroughfare, the fog closed down into impenetrable obscurity. The world of visible objects was extinguished and replaced by a chaos of confused sounds. Even the end of my barrow faded away into spectral uncertainty, and the curb against which I kept my left wheel grinding looked thin ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... minister of a parish in Herefordshire[94]. During his life the place of his birth was undetermined. He was contented to be called an Irishman by the Irish; but would occasionally call himself an Englishman. The question may, without much regret, be left in the obscurity in which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... is essentially the story of the successive ascendancy of a series of dominant families, each of which attained its maximum, in organisation as well as in extent, and then sank into comparative obscurity, giving place to other families, which under new conditions were better able to take a leading place. As each family ran its downward course, either its members underwent an actual reduction in structure as they became ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Great was his surprise upon receiving a telegram from the Secretary of War announcing that he had won the medal. For a few days he was a national sensation. The distinction of the first winner, who was again a contestant, and Philip's youth and obscurity, made such a striking contrast that the whole situation appealed enormously to the imagination of the people. Then, too, the problem was one of unusual interest, and it, as well as Philip's masterly treatment of it, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... scraps of cambric had been gathered up from the threadbare arabesques in the carpet; the chairs had been placed at respectable distances apart; the gas-jets in the chandelier were flaming extravagantly under the damaged garlands; and the sewing machine had been wheeled into the obscurity of the hail, for it would have humiliated Gabriella's mother to think that her daughter received young men in a room which looked as if somebody ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Under the specious pretext of abolishing human sacrifices, the emperors Tiberius and Claudius suppressed the dangerous power of the Druids: [11] but the priests themselves, their gods and their altars, subsisted in peaceful obscurity till the final destruction of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... which, in 1872, was a sheep-ranch, yet whose assessed valuation, in 1892, was more than four million dollars, is called Riverside; but, save in the rainy season, one looks in vain for the stream from which it takes its name. The river has retired, as so many western rivers do, to wander in obscurity six feet below the sand. "A providential thing," said a wag to me, "for, in such heat as this, if the water rose to the surface it would all evaporate." The sun was, indeed, ardent as we walked through the town, and we were impressed by the fact that ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... set up on earth, becoming more and more a kingdom of this world. Later, when the Hundred Associates lost their charter and Canada became a Royal Province governed directly by the Crown, Maisonneuve was deprived of the government of Montreal and retired to die in obscurity in Paris. Louis d'Ailleboust, Governor of Montreal when Maisonneuve is absent, Governor at Quebec when state necessities drag him from religious devotion, moves also in the gay throng of the Fur Fair. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... me. I was anxious to have it all over with. We went out. Once in the street the passing from semi-obscurity to daylight dazed me and I staggered. I began to fear that it would no longer be possible for me to conceal the crime. I kept my eyes steadily fixed upon the ground and took my place in the procession. When all was over, I breathed once more. ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... the Nationalist or Young Persian Movement. To follow this Movement through its various ramifications would require a clue as plain and as clear as a golden thread, and the best we can do in our present obscurity is to give a few of the ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... MS. in the library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. This poem, Elisaeis, Apotheosis poetica, Spenser highly esteemed. "Who lives that can match that heroick song?'' he says in Colin Clout's come home again, and begs "Cynthia'' to withdraw the poet from his obscurity. In June 1596 Alabaster sailed with Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, on the expedition to Cadiz in the capacity of chaplain, and, while he was in Spain, he became a Roman Catholic. An account of his change of laith is given in an obscurely worded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and history is shrouded in obscurity. We know not whether she married a husband worthier of such a partner in those trying times, or whether she retired to brood alone over a sorrow with which shame for the object of her grief must have mingled. Whatever her lot may have been, her name deserves ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... sunny. Over the big desolate space of the market-place the blue sky shimmered, and the granite cobbles of the paving glistened. Shops down the Long Row were deep in obscurity, and the shadow was full of colour. Just where the horse trams trundled across the market was a row of fruit stalls, with fruit blazing in the sun—apples and piles of reddish oranges, small green-gage plums and bananas. There was a warm scent of fruit as mother and son passed. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... sign or sound to betray her presence, for she was curious to hear the remainder of this strange story—to learn how her beautiful rival had risen from disgrace and obscurity to her present prosperity and enviable position ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... mist became a fog and grew denser, until Augustus disappeared, or was but a formless shadow. Centuries passed by; the fog began to withdraw before the returning sun of the ancient culture; his figure reappeared. Fifty years ago, the obscurity cleared quite away; the figure stands in plain view with outlines well defined. I believe that the history I have written is more like the truth than those preceding it, but I do not consider myself on that ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... bewildered youth Safe from the fierce assaults of hostile rage? Such war can Virtue wage, Virtue, that bears the sacred shield of Truth! Alas! full oft on Guilt's victorious car The spoils of Virtue are in triumph borne; While the fair captive, marked with many a scar, In lone obscurity, oppressed, forlorn, Resigns to tears her angel form. Ill-fated youth, then, whither wilt thou fly? No friend, no shelter now is nigh, And ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... are named, is variously rendered Reason, Nature, the Way; the last is the nearest, though by no means a full rendering of it. By the manifold operations attributed to it, it reminds us of the Indian Brahma, and the riddle of Lao's obscurity has been proposed to be solved by the supposition that he was dealing with a doctrine imported from India which Chinese forms of speech could but imperfectly express.[6] Tao is not personal, but something that precedes all persons, all particular beings. It was there before ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... income, with influence throughout all the world around him, courted, feted, feared and almost worshipped,—that he should desire to share her fortunes, her misfortunes, her struggles, her poverty and her obscurity, was not within the scope of her imagination. There was a homage in it, of which she did not believe any man to be capable,—and which to her would be the more wonderful as being paid to herself. She thought so badly of men and ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... pretend but to make it Probable by the Experiments I mention, that some Colours may be Plausibly enough Explicated in the General by the Doctrine here propos'd; For whensoever I would Descend to the Minute and Accurate Explication of Particulars, I find my Self very Sensible of the great Obscurity of things, without excepting those which we never see but when they are Enlightned, and confess with Scaliger[5], Latet natura haec, (says he, Speaking of that of Colour) & sicut aliarum rerum species in profundissima caligine ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... people will be also conscious of a {124} certain vagueness and elusiveness in its presentation. We are constrained to ask what is this independent spiritual life? Is it a personal God, or is it only an impersonal spirit, which pervades and interpenetrates the universe? The elusive obscurity of the position and function which Eucken assigns to his central conception of the Geistes-Leben must strike every reader. Even more than Hegel, Eucken seems to deal with an abstraction. The spiritual life, we are told, 'grows,' 'divides,' 'advances'—but it appears to be as much a 'bloodless ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... fascinated glances, a few years ago, she now stood in fear. It was a cruel world, cold and big and selfish; it had torn her heart out of her, and cast her aside like a dry husk. She could not keep too far enough away from it to satisfy herself in future, she only prayed for obscurity and solitude for the rest ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... Valley lies deep within the mountains. What it is now called we do not know. At that time the people of the country gave it this appellation on account of the deep obscurity in which the low land lay, owing to the shadows of the lofty trees, and especially firs, that grew there. Even the brook which bubbled between the rocks wore the same dark hue, and dashed along with none of that gladness with which streams are wont to flow that have the blue sky ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of Maryland and of Virginia may consent to live in obscurity; but if this be so, who is to rule in those States? From whence are to come the senators and the members of Congress; the governors and attorney-generals? From whence is to come the national spirit of the two States, and the salt that shall preserve ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... accuracy any sound given her, and had a special preference for ng (ngang, ngeng), beginning a mimicry of language again, this time using real or imaginary words, without reference to signification. But an obscurity of vowel-sounds had begun again. After the first year her facility of utterance seemed to have been lost, so that she watched the mouths of others closely when they were talking, and labored painfully after the sounds. Finally, she dropped her mimicry of language, and, at first very slowly, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... gave way to misfortune. For they were afraid that if Cremona too[82] was demolished, there would be no hope of pardon; the victors' fury would fall not on the common poor but on the tribunes and centurions, whom it would pay to kill. The common soldiers felt safe in their obscurity, and, careless of the future, continued to offer resistance. They roamed the streets or hid themselves in houses, and though they had given up the war, refused even so to sue for peace. Meanwhile the tribunes and centurions did away with the name and portraits of Vitellius.[83] ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... is this obscurity in the nature of possession of currency, there is a charm in the seclusion of it, which is to some people very enticing. In the enjoyment of real property, others must partly share. The groom has some enjoyment of the stud, and the gardener of the garden; but the money is, or seems, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... appears, however, to have been so learned a cat—one may say so deep a puss—that she had furnished more notes than there was original matter. Another peculiarity which distinguished her labours was the obscurity of her style; I call it a peculiarity, and not a defect, because I am not quite certain whether the difficulty of getting at her meaning lay in her mode of expressing herself or my deficiency in the delicacies of her language. I think myself a tolerable linguist, yet have too great ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... son of Hyllus. From this period Achilles has been honoured like a god in Epirus and is called Aspetus in the dialect of the country. After the earliest kings, the dynasty sunk into barbarism, and ceased to attract attention from its weakness and obscurity. Of those of later days, Tharrhypas was the first of those who made himself famous. He adopted the customs and letters of Greece, and gave just laws to his country. Tharrhypas was the father of Alketas, who was the father of Arybas, who ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... a certain spot some red and yellow lamps, lamps the beams of which seemed to be saying, "Come up hither!" were shining through the obscurity. ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... vortex. Every passenger in the quivering car involuntarily clung spasmodically to its sides, and as the two atmospheres amalgamated, clouds accumulated in heavy masses, involving all around in dense obscurity, while flashes of lurid flame threw a ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... may be added aisles and transepts, the latter often being wrongly called "cross-aisles." When the walls of the nave above the arcade rise above those of the aisles and are pierced with windows, the upper portion is called the clerestory, the meaning of which word is not free from obscurity; it seems probable that it indicates the clear story—the story which rises clear of the nave and aisles. In large buildings, they are important both for utility and beauty, but in small and early churches, ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... from a scarlet handkerchief bound smooth over his head. He was of a sinewy, muscular build, his coppery skin, hard black eyes, and high cheek bones showing the blood of his mother, a Crow squaw. His father, long forgotten in the obscurity of mountain history, had evidently bequeathed him the French Canadian's good-humored gayety. Zavier was a light-hearted and merry fellow, and where he came laughter sprang up. He spoke English well, and could sing French songs that were brought to his father's country by ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the time we reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away under the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in a hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of them great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the various Indian styles, the origin of the forms used, the history of their development, are all wrapped in obscurity. All the monuments show a fully developed style and great command of technical resources from the outset. When, where, and how these were attained is as yet an unsolved mystery. In all its phases previous to the Moslem conquest Indian architecture appears like an indigenous art, borrowing ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... One searches in vain for balanced and detailed statements on the question. This may be due in no way to lack of intention, but to lack of opportunity. Therefore, no excuse is needed for this contribution, but rather an apology for the obscurity which has so far surrounded the subject. What is the cause of this emotional or almost hysterical background from which a clear definition of the matter is only now beginning to emerge? Circumstances are to blame; the first open act of ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... midnight that Eve's mother, rising to close an open window, caught sight of an outline in the obscurity, and discerned Luigi leaning on the railing below, with one arm supporting his upturned face. "Ah, the sad day! the sad day!" he was sighing in his native speech. "Pardon, pardon, Signorina! Alas! I was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... would not consult his own personal gratification, when the question was to render justice to a Frenchman. She therefore recommended to her husband, with all her ability, the poor composer Lesueur, who was unknown to fame, and lost in obscurity; she represented his appointment as such an act of generosity and of policy, that Bonaparte acceded to her wishes at once, and appointed Lesueur to the office of first master of the ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... Archie came forth again into a changed world. Had there been the least redeeming greatness in the crime, any obscurity, any dubiety, perhaps he might have understood. But the culprit stood, with his sore throat, in the sweat of his mortal agony, without defence or excuse: a thing to cover up with blushes: a being so much sunk beneath the zones of sympathy that pity might seem harmless. And the judge ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to power. One day he and France were to pay for these things; but meanwhile he was a popular ruler, accepted and approved by the nation he governed, anxious for its prosperity, and earnest in keeping it friendly with Great Britain, which he had found a hospitable home in the days of his obscurity, which was again to offer an asylum to him in a day of utter disaster and overthrow, and where his life, chequered by vicissitudes stranger than any known to romance, was to come to a quiet close. It has been the singular ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... for her crimes, her evil nature, her flint-like callousness, her more than inhuman cruelty, her contempt for the laws of God and man, she was condemned to bury her magnificent personality, her transcendent beauty, her superhuman charms, in gilded obscurity at a King's left hand. A powerful story ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values—the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... turn in its favour before it can rise from obscurity into importance; but public opinion is never in favour of the poor and deserted. Time, however, will eventually develope those resources, which at present lie dormant for ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... the Itinerant Theatrical Company of which Nicholas Nickleby and Smike were for a time Members caused the insertion in a local paper of a paragraph stating "Mr. Crummles is not a Prussian," there was some obscurity about his object. It is now clear that his instinct was sure, his prevision acute. After experience of last seven weeks all decent-minded men would like it to be known that they ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... why American women have so great a liking for European society is to be found in the fact of the far more important position that married ladies occupy in that society than they do with us. For a woman who feels that she has still attractions which should not be buried in obscurity, but who has found that since her marriage she has, to all intents and purposes, been "laid upon the shelf," it is a very delightful experience to see herself once more the object of solicitous attention, considered as one of the brilliant central ornaments ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... lost or known the dread of losing a love so vast and glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if a man who has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by his own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if by some incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the woman with whom he hoped to know the same felicity makes it clear that it will never be revived for him; if, with the sweetness of divine love still on his lips, he has dealt a deadly wound to her, his wife in truth, whom he forsook for a social chimera,—then he must ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... slowly towards the right shore. The young girl watched the unknown man with secret terror. He had carefully turned off the light of his dark lantern. A glimpse could be caught of him in the obscurity, in the bow of the boat, like a spectre. His cowl, which was still lowered, formed a sort of mask; and every time that he spread his arms, upon which hung large black sleeves, as he rowed, one would have said they were two huge bat's wings. Moreover, he had not yet ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... secret correspondences, deciphering and classifying despatches. Ranking higher than a mere bourgeois, his position at the ministry was superior to that of the other subalterns. He lived obscurely, glad to feel that such obscurity sheltered him from reverses and disappointments, and was satisfied to humbly pay in the lowest coin his debt to the country. Thanks to Jules, his position had been much ameliorated by a worthy marriage. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... songs into an English dress, did not become popular. The verses by his female friend, in which the lady is made to be the sufferer by misplaced affection, and commencing, "Stay, my Willie, yet believe me," though published, remain likewise in obscurity. "Roy's Wife" was originally written to an old tune called the "Ruffian's Rant," but this melody is now known by the name of its favourite words. The sentiment of the song is peculiarly pleasing. The rejected lover begins by loudly complaining of his wrongs, and the broken assurances ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... were under the walls of the Acropolis, walking in the shadow of the olive groves, among god-like statues, to which the gathering obscurity of evening gave an impressive distinctness—as if the light departing from the ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... was cloudy, and a drizzling rain, which fell without intermission, added to the obscurity. The great square before the palace was deserted, as, indeed, it had been since the fall of Montezuma. Steadily, and as noiselessly as possible, the Spaniards held their way along the great street of Tlacopan, which so lately had resounded to the tumult ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... extinguish it in his own heart. He called to mind how many there were, whose families, engaged in the late troubles during the reigns of Charles and James, had never been able to raise themselves again, but had sunk into obscurity, and died in poverty and exile. He recollected how many of them and of their children had been driven to betake themselves to the lowest, and even the most criminal courses; and he bethought him, that if he were ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... from out the darkness of the central depths, filtered into purity by time and travel. The waters are copious, sometimes to overflowing; but they are always limpid and unforced, singing their own quiet tune, not saddening, though sometimes sad, and their darkness not that of obscurity, but of depth, like that ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Assaults made by the Spaniards, they consulted about their departure, and did leave this Kingdom accordingly which remain'd destitute of all Christian Doctrin and these poor Souls are at this day involv'd in the obscurity of their former Misery and Ignorance, they being deprived by these accursed Spaniards, of all hopes of remedy, and the irrigatioon of Divine knowledge, just like young withering Plants for want of Water: for in that very juncture of time, when these ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... stretch out his hand and push Craig away. The picture glowed and faded and glowed again. Then they saw through the gloom the figure of a woman approach, a diamond necklace around her neck. They saw the hands steal out and encircle her throat—and then more darkness, silence, obscurity. The mirror was empty ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he strove with the fluency of Ovid, and to this hour his labours, much flaccid verse, survive in a decent obscurity. It was late in the afternoon before he yielded to his growing disgust with the whinings of the Tristia and sought relief ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... to let the opera sink into its native obscurity. I did it in a fit of d——ble good nature long ago, for Hullah, who wrote some very pretty music to it. I just put down for everybody what everybody at the St. James's Theatre wanted to say and do, and that they could say and do best, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... conscience of the soldier is the liberty of the people,' and the refusal of private soldiers to obey a plainly illegal order will be generally though not universally applauded. In all such cases, however, there is much obscurity and inconsistency of judgment. The rule that the moral responsibility falls exclusively on the person who gives the order, and that the private has no voice or responsibility, will even here be maintained by some. Ought a private soldier ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... bestial horrors of marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her birth-brand of shame. She and Rod could be poor without shame; they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... memorandum—that on no account were popular pageantry or trade interests to be disturbed during so golden an opportunity as the Silver Jubilee. While that was going on defense of Church and State must be relegated to obscurity. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... steeped in the great poets of the Augustan age: men of comparatively small creative imagination, but, thanks to their education, possessed of great technical skill, they ran into violent extremes to avoid the charge of imitating the great predecessors whom they could not help but imitate; hence the obscurity of Persius—the disciple of Horace—and of Statins and Valerius Flaccus—the followers of Vergil. Hence Lucan's bold attempt to strike out a new type of epic, an attempt that ended in a wild orgy of ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... persistently aggressive, continuously launching attacks against various points of the Russian lines, while the Russians remained on the defensive. With the coming of darkness, however, regularly, night after night, the Germans redoubled their efforts everywhere, taking advantage of the obscurity to fling forward dense swarms and columns of men in massed formation, to storm the entrenched Russian position, apparently at any cost. They failed every time, it would appear, beaten back after literally a massacre. The Russian tactics, it is ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 21, Dec. 30, 1914 • Various
... believed to have the power to cause, within the year, the certain death of the person against whom the assistance of Our Lady of Hatred has been invoked. And it is said that even yet occasionally, in the silence and obscurity of the evening, the figure of some assassin worshipper at this accursed shrine may be seen to glide rapidly from the solitary spot, where he has spoken the unhallowed prayer whose mystic might has doomed to ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the same time, a striking confirmation of their system. Here I seem to stray far from the solution which I thought I already grasped! Far from it; the light is breaking. Hitherto the examples evoked had only increased my obscurity by their multiplicity, and I saw nothing in all these remarks but a series of contradictions whence it seemed impossible to deduce anything but confusion, into which ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... his private letters mostly to speak for themselves. It has been thought that "a king is never a hero to his valet," and the proverb has been considered undeniable; but this volume shows that Jefferson, if not exactly the "hero" to whom a little obscurity is so essential, was at least warmly loved and enthusiastically esteemed and admired by those who knew him best. The letters in this volume are full of interest, for they are chiefly published for the ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... unexampled extent and duration have recently existed in this as in other commercial nations is undoubtedly true. To suppose it necessary now to trace these reverses to their sources would be a reflection on the intelligence of my fellow-citizens. Whatever may have been the obscurity in which the subject was involved during the earlier stages of the revulsion, there can not now be many by whom the whole ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Dick developed exceptional brilliance in his school work, together they planned for him, the mother and the older brother, the mother painfully making and saving, the brother accepting as his part the life of plodding obscurity in order that the younger boy might have his full chance of what school and college could do for him. True to the best traditions of her race, the mother had fondly dreamed of a day when she should hear from her son's lips the word of life. With never a thought of the sacrifice she was demanding, ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... of his tales of the Bowery and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in Aeronautics at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... George's Island, which lay directly in her track, but which it was manifest her pilot could not discern from the deck. In a few moments she was stationary. All this I could plainly perceive, although the hull of the vessel was invisible. Some idea may be formed of the obscurity occasioned by the fog, from the absurd stories that were waggishly put abroad at the time of the accident. It was gravely asserted that the first notice the sentinel had of her approach, was a poke in the side from her jibboom, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... called these mountains Agiocochook, though one of the eastern tribes bestowed upon them the name of Waumbek Ketmetha, which signifies White Mountains. A mythic obscurity shadows the whole historical life of this region till the advent of the white men. The red man held the mountains in reverence and awe. What Olympus and Ida were to the ancient Greeks, what Ararat and Sinai were to the Jews, what Popocatapetl ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... cannot, with Mr. Malone, interpret the same passage, by supposing the third line of the triplet to apply to Dryden. Had he been actually a member of a committee of sequestration, that circumstance would never have remained in the dubious obscurity of Shadwell's poetry; it would have been as often echoed and re-echoed as every other incident of the poet's life which was capable of bearing an unfavourable interpretation. I incline therefore to believe, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... was right. Behind the victory of Louis Bonaparte could be seen something hateful, but something which was familiar—the Empire; behind the victory of the Left there was obscurity. We must bring in daylight behind us. That which causes the greatest uneasiness to people's imagination is the dictatorship of the Unknown. To convoke a new Assembly as soon as possible, to restore France at once into the hands of France, this was to ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... something of the comedy and tragedy of cigar ends, for times and again I have seen a race and almost a struggle for a "fat end" when some thriving merchant has thrown one into the street or gutter. Suddenly emerging from obscurity and showing unexpected activity, two half-naked fellows have made for it; I have seen the satisfaction of the fellow who secured it, and I have heard the curse of the disappointed; but there! at any time, on any day, near the Bank, or the Mansion House, in Threadneedle Street, or in Cheapside ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... man but simply a germ, evolving higher powers, and destined for a purer and nobler existence! His latent life secretly emerges from mysterious obscurity, is incarnated, and borne upon the flowing stream of time to a spiritual destination—to realms of immortality! As he nears those ever-blooming shores, the eye of faith, illuminated by the inspired word, dimly discerns the perennial glories. Quickened by ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... within the obscurity of the corridor, and just to reassure themselves that everything was ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... recent wandering in the white dust which dropped on the carpet from her frock and her shoes, as she advanced towards the place in which I was sitting. Arrived in front of me, she peered quaintly up at my face, through the obscurity of the room; lifted her doll by the legs; hit me a smart rap with the head of it on my ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... given years of her life to say "Sacrifice all, and let us go!" He seemed even to invite her to say it, but she strove with herself. Sacrifice of his career meant sacrifice of the whole man. Not in her eyes, oh no!—but she had studied him so well, and knew that he could no longer be content in obscurity. She choked her very ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... a nobleman; but what unnatural cruelty could induce him to abandon his offspring, I never was able to determine. I was brought up a retainer in the house of the sire of my bitter foe, Don Lope Gomez Arias, where I was subjected to indignities at which my proud nature revolted, whilst the obscurity of my birth powerfully contributed to exasperate those feelings already too much excited by repeated contumelies and scorn. Wherever I turned my eyes I discovered a dreary waste in the midst of society; for I was an ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... attracted my attention was an human figure standing on the edge of the bank. Perhaps my penetration was assisted by my hopes. Be that as it will, the figure of Carwin was clearly distinguishable. From the obscurity of my station, it was impossible that I should be discerned by him, and yet he scarcely suffered me to catch a glimpse of him. He turned and went down the steep, which, in this part, was not difficult ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... the development of events and institutions is traced, the story of the United States becomes, as it should become, the most, fascinating as it is the most important of histories to Americans; and whatever in historical inquiry and writing promotes accuracy, adds detail, and clears up obscurity, increases the worth and the, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 19, March 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... which, that the religious systems of those times, however ill supported by evidence, had been long established. The ancient religion of a country has always many votaries, and sometimes not the fewer, because its origin is hidden in remoteness and obscurity. Men have a natural veneration for antiquity, especially in matters of religion. What Tacitus says of the Jewish was more applicable to the heathen establishment: "Hi ritus, quoquo modo inducti, antiquitate defenduntur." It was also ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... should not be too confident in our belief of anything; for we are frequently disturbed by some subtle conclusion. We give way and change our opinions even in things that are more evident than this; for in this there certainly is some obscurity. Therefore, should anything of this kind happen, it is well ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... first time I saw, to my astonishment, that he was a Yankee, and that I was in rear of a regiment of Yankees. Well, I saw that there was no hope but to brazen it out; my dark blouse and the increasing obscurity befriended me, so I approached quite close to him and shook my fist in his face, saying, 'I'll soon show you who I am, sir; cease firing, sir, at once.' I then turned my horse and cantered slowly down the line, shouting in an authoritative manner ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... she is sad, with a wild and savage silence. She either laughs in wild peals, or weeps moaning. She has not the gentle smile, the joyful brightness that distinguishes the man from the animal. If she laughs it is showing all her teeth; her inner meaning is always gloomy, with the obscurity of a cavern in which all passions rage like wild beasts ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... "but I am not a learned man myself, and what is celebrity in one set is obscurity in another. Besides, I have never been in this ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Doocheek had plenty of natural courage, but he was apt to quail before the supernatural. Apart from the conscience, which even in Arctic bosoms tends to produce cowardice, the strange surroundings of the place—the deep shadows, merging into absolute obscurity, and the feeling of mystery that attached to everything connected with the vessel—all had the effect of rendering Doocheek's enjoyment somewhat mixed. To look at him as he sat there, glaring nervously on all sides, one would have been tempted to say that ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... our fellow-men, even from the approbation of the best and wisest? The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in secret? The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber? The Godlike lives lived in obscurity?—a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce in the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; women of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... relating but for a curious proof it gives of the {74} obstinate courage of the poet. The House ordered his release on December 15; and one would have supposed that he would have been glad to escape into obscurity and safety again on any terms. But no; the Sergeant-at-Arms demanded high fees which Milton thought unreasonable; and even then, when he had almost felt the hangman's rope on his neck, he would not be bullied by any man. He refused to pay: and though the Solicitor-General ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire, it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Malays. This is a more considerable error, and productive of greater confusion than the former. By attempting to reduce things to heads too general we defeat the very end we propose to ourselves in defining them at all: we create obscurity where we wish to throw light. On the other hand, to attempt enumerating and distinguishing the variety, almost endless, of petty sovereignties and nations into which this island is divided, many of which differ nothing in person or manners from their neighbours, would be a task both ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... look about her, while the lightning flashed brighter than ever; and then, rolling and pitching, and cutting numerous other antics, she lifted up her stern as if she was going to give a vicious fling out with her heels, and downwards she plunged into the dark obscurity, amid the high foam-topped seas, which hissed and roared high above her bulwarks. Her crew walked her deck with but little anxiety, although they saw that the gale was likely to increase into a hurricane; for they had ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... courage, the Colonel saw, from the depths of his retirement, his friends and comrades make their way, and gain upon the battlefield fame, rank, and glory, while he himself was condemned to inaction and obscurity, and to pass his days in following on the map the triumphant march of those armies in which he felt himself worthy to resume his rank. Innumerable applications were addressed by him and his friends to the head of the Empire, that he ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... Queen Christina of Sweden. This great woman was wise enough not to regard the crown of Sweden as a rare and precious gem; she chose a simple life of obscurity and poverty in beautiful Italy, rather than a throne in cold and unfruitful Sweden. This act alone establishes her superiority. Yes, sister, you are right. Christina was the greater woman, even because she scorned to ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... street, not differing much from the others that ran parallel with it, except in a general air of retirement and obscurity, owing to a "No Thoroughfare" placarded up on the blank wall of a brewery, which had rather a depressing effect on the end houses that looked ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... long steeped to the lips in disgust and chagrin, sends in his demission. His accounts lie all ready, correct in black-on-white to the uttermost farthing: these he wants but to have audited, that he might retire to remote obscurity to the country and his books. They will never be audited those accounts; he will ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... were their fathers' sons, and that was about all. This man did not need a pedigree: he won a name and reputation for himself without the help of a distinguished ancestry. By prayerfulness, and energy, and courage, he fought his way from obscurity to honour. And when that happens, when a man has fought the fight with adverse circumstances and overcome them, when he has made his mark in the world by sheer force of work and character, no one cares to grope through musty fusty parchments in search ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... mass, lifted to five times the height of this building—its own height swelling far beyond; no dome so sublime but that of heaven was ever spread above mortal eye. And beyond this dome, beneath which I stood, stretched away into dimness and obscurity the mighty roofing of this stupendous temple—arches behind arches, fretted with gold, and touched with the rays of the morning sun. Around me, a wilderness of marble; with colors, as variegated and rich as our autumnal woods; columns, pillars, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... return to the simplicity and power of the Gospel of Christ! Then we should not roll stumbling-blocks like these in our Indian brother's way. Oh for a return to the days of the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, to obscurity, and poverty, and suffering, and shame, and the utter absence of all earthly glory, and the winning of souls of a different make to the type thought sufficiently spiritual now! Oh for more of the signs of Apostleship—scars, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... horizon—no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... she was staying had an inner and an outer door. In the obscurity between these two we stood for a little while at ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... Shakespeare, so that I am unaware of the manner in which he renders it; perhaps I ought to have done so before I troubled you. Possibly some of your readers may be disposed to coincide with me in the "new reading;" and if not, so to explain it that it may be shown it is my own obscurity, and not Shakespeare's, with which I ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... tribulation and prosperity, kept serenely upon the path they had marked out for themselves, living and growing into one of the most flourishing and devoted missionary bodies of the present day. As is natural under such conditions, their origin is not free from obscurity. Men connected them with the Waldensians of Southern France, or traced them, as we have seen, to a leader from Picardy. Through the fifteenth century they grew steadily in strength and unity, sheltered ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... obscurity, Lee was not forgotten. President Davis knew his man and knew that his hour would come. When, in May, 1862, the vast Federal army stood almost at Richmond's gates, Albert Sidney Johnston being dead and Joseph E. Johnston lying wounded, the Confederacy lifted up its voice and called Robert ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... train; the arrival and departure of the train while she was still half a mile from the line, and her shelter at a cottage for the night; these things stood out plainly, whatever else remained in obscurity. How far she had provoked her own fate, and how far even now she was delivered from the morbid spell of Cliffe's personality, Ashe would not allow himself to ask. As she neared the end of her story, it was as though the great tempest wave in which ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... whose Hamlet, Shylock, Richard III., and Falstaff were the most popular of his day. He died suddenly in 1785, at the age of thirty-eight, and it was thus in the last year of his life that his power of recitation drew "John Gilpin" from obscurity and made it the nine days' wonder of the town. Pictures of John Gilpin abounded in all forms. He figured on pocket-handkerchiefs. When the publisher asked for a few more pages to his volume of "The Task," Cowper gave him as makeweights an "Epistle ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... account of the walk," &c. I am glad that you are come, the rather that I have work for you to do, i. e. "more on account of the work which I have for you to do, or for the sake of the work," &c. Any obscurity that is attached to the use of the word, has arisen from the abuse of it, or rather from its right signification being not ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... ploughshare, held between his rigid hands. Even the hoof-beats of the six horses had fallen into a vague, monotonous, distant roll. Then the ridge was crossed, and we plunged into the still blacker obscurity of the brush. Rather we no longer seemed to move—it was only the phantom night that rushed by us. The horses might have been submerged in some swift Lethean stream; nothing but the top of the coach and the rigid bulk of Yuba Bill arose ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... it shone down upon her, instinct with all that is finest and best in masculine nature. Was she ready for this revelation of what she had nevertheless dreamed of for many more nights than four? She did not know, and instinctively drew herself back till it was she who now stood in the semi-obscurity made by the drooping vines. From this retreat, she faltered forth a very tremulous No, which in another moment was disavowed by a Yes so faint it was little more than a murmur, followed by a ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... one o'clock in the morning watch, the night being dark as Erebus, the ship pitching heavily into the seas and straining terrifically, Delisle and I were on deck together, endeavouring to pierce with our eyes the thick obscurity into which we were driving. It was much of a time for moralising, considering the showers of snow which ever and anon beat into our faces, the sheets of spray which came aboard and froze as it fell over us, and the biting wind which ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the entrance to Gotham Court, and Detective Finn dug a tunnel of light with his bullseye lantern into the foulness and blackness of that smirch on civilization, a score or more of boys who had been congregated at the edge of the court suddenly plunged back into the obscurity, and we heard the splash of their feet in the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... ocean, disclosed every now and then the works on some high—lying sugar estate, and again rolled over them like the tide covering the shallows of the sea, while shouts of laughter, and the whooping of the negroes in the fields, rose from out the obscurity, blended with the signal cries of the sugar boilers to the stockholemen of "Fire, fire grand copper, grand copper," and the ca cawing, like so many rooks, of the children driving the mules and oxen in the mills, and the everlasting splashing and panting of the water—wheel of the estate immediately ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... may appear incongruous to refer to a philosopher of this earth as illustrating the work of a philosopher of another planet, the Editor cannot help quoting a passage from a man possessed of wondrous prescience, who, to use his own words, "held up a lamp in the obscurity of philosophy that would be seen ages after he was dead." It will also in a measure convey the difference between the process of grafting and the course pursued by the Tootmanyoso in the creation of ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... youth this gloom used to call forth to my fancy a thousand fairy visions, and romantic images; and, I own, I am not yet wholly insensible of that high enthusiasm, which wakes the poet's dream: I can linger, with solemn steps, under the deep shades, send forward a transforming eye into the distant obscurity, and listen with thrilling delight to the ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... events, and as it were, fuse two truths into one error. And this was what actually happened. The credulous Saxo put together the different exploits of both Ragnars, and ascribing the whole of them to his favorite hero, has involved in obscurity one of the most interesting parts of the early history ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... passion in a glorious union of music, picture and impassioned sentiment,—these await the pleasure of the enthralled seeker in every book. To encounter such passages (perhaps in a mood of protest over some almost insufferable defect) is to find the reward rich indeed. Let the cause of obscurity be what it may, we need not doubt that with Meredith style is the man, a perfectly honest way of expressing his personality. It is not impossible that his unconventional education and the early influence of German upon him, may come into the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Morgarten has always taken the first place in the long record of heroic victories that since 1315 has made the fame of Swiss arms second to none in Europe. This victory at once brought the Waldstaette out of their long obscurity, and placed them in the front rank as powerful and respected ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... left them in undisputed possession of the park, that she had come to feel as if it belonged to them by right, and she had grown so into a life of ease and luxury, that to give it up now and go back to Langley seemed impossible to her. She could see it all so plainly—the old life of obscurity and toil in the little kitchen where she had eaten her breakfast on winter mornings so near the stove that she could cook her buckwheats on the griddle and transfer them to her own and her husband's plates without leaving her seat. She had been happy, or comparatively so there, ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... exhibit a scene that strikes the imagination more than this little desert in these depths of Western obscurity, occupied not by a gross herdsman, or amphibious fisherman, but by a gentleman and two ladies, of high birth, polished manners and elegant conversation, who, in a habitation raised not very far above the ground, but furnished with unexpected neatness and convenience, practised ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... was searching the obscurity of the fringe of woody shelter in which the camp was made—the last camp on the return journey from Seal Bay to the fort. The smell of cooked meat rose from the pan which Julyman held over the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... of him, "He raised himself by his merit from a state of obscurity to a degree of eminence, but rarely, if ever before, equalled in the character of a gardener." Mr. Loudon (in that "varied and voluminous mass of knowledge," his Encyclopaedia), thus remarks:—"Miller, during ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... rocks. Sea-weeds are no mere playthings for children; and to buy at a shop some thirty pretty kinds, pasted on paper, with long names (probably mis-spelt) written under each, is not by any means to possess a collection of them. Putting aside the number and the obscurity of their species, the questions which arise in studying their growth, reproduction, and organic chemistry are of the very deepest and most important in the whole range of science; and it will need but a little study of such a book as Harvey's "Algae," to show the wise man that he who has ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... been in print continuously since it was first published in 1903. It is certainly Mrs. Wiggin's most famous book, and the only one of her many books that is still in print. Everything else she wrote has slipped into complete obscurity. Occasionally in an antique shop, one may still find a copy of her immensely popular seasonal book, "The Birds' Christmas Carol", but that is about the extent of what is readily available, ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the lock he turned. The gaoler had left him with no light but the rays of the moon, which, shining through a barred window some eight or ten feet from the ground, shed a gleam upon a miserable truckle-bed and left the rest of the room in deep obscurity. The prisoner stood still for a moment and listened; then, when he had heard the steps die away in the distance and knew himself to be alone at last, he fell upon the bed with a cry more like the roaring of a wild beast than any human sound: he ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... desirous to conceal her privilege and dignity, she submitted with great punctuality and exactness to every humbling circumstance which the law required. Pride indeed proclaims its own advantages, and seeks honors not its due; but the humble find their delight in obscurity and abasement, they shun all distinction and esteem, which they clearly see their own nothingness and baseness to be most unworthy of: they give all glory to God alone, to whom it is due. Devotion also and zeal to ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... romantic as the most feather-headed Amadis that ever came out of Gaul; and so he is to make himself a deal of trouble and have himself much laughed at before ever he succeeds in slipping through the fingers of this history to seek obscurity with Dorothy by his side. For all that, it is Richard's due to say that his "R. S." letters attracted polite as well as political attention, and got him much respected and condemned. Also they lodged him high in the esteem of Senator Hanway, who discovered daily new excellencies in him; and this ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... parliament appointed a levy of 10,000 foot and 3000 horse to be instantly raised for the defence of the king and kingdom; among whom it behoved the captain again to take the field, for he was now become too popular to be hid in obscurity. ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... was a scene of awful and utter desolation. Huge mountain-walls, towering to immense heights and enclosing great circular and oval plains, one side of them blazing with intolerable light, and the other side black with impenetrable obscurity; enormous valleys reaching down from brilliant day into rayless night—perhaps down into the very bowels of the dead world itself; vast grey-white plains lying round the mountains, crossed by little ridges and by long black lines, which could only be immense fissures with perpendicular sides—but ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... viewed the whole empty length, east and west. The semi-Norman arches of the nave, with their multitudinous notchings, were still visible by the light from the tower window, but the lower portion of the building was in obscurity, except where the feeble glimmer from the candle of the organist spread a glow-worm radiance around. The player, who was Miss Tabitha Lark, continued without intermission to produce her wandering sounds, unconscious of any one's presence except that of ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
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