"Undiscoverable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the goldfish, but the turtle died from some undiscoverable cause. Senorita Tanlozo, the snake charmer, offered to let Joe take one of her water anacondas into the ...
— Joe Strong, the Boy Fish - or Marvelous Doings in a Big Tank • Vance Barnum
... could not think of, for she did not think as she desired to; her thoughts came and went at their own wild will, they flitted lightly, touching with their wings but ever avoiding this deep and formless thought which lay in darkness, almost undiscoverable, like a monster ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... almost anything of the ether—that it is immaterial, and yet the source of all material; that it is absolutely motionless, yet the cause of all motion; that it is the densest body in nature, and yet the most rarified; that it is everywhere, but defies detection; that it is as undiscoverable as the Infinite itself; that our physics cannot prove it, though they cannot get along without it. The ether inside a mass of iron or of lead is just as dense as the ether outside of it—which ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... hiding his identity? Has he been banished, is he an outcast of society that he should have selected this place above all others? Am I not in the power of an evildoer anxious to ensure impunity for his crimes and to defy the law by seeking refuge in this undiscoverable burrow? I have the right of supposing anything in the case of this suspicious foreigner, ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... part of the bodies to account for it. He describes the case of a man of forty-three, and calls it 'emotional inhibition of the heart.' The heart was arrested in diastole, instead of systole, as is usually the case; the mode of death was syncope; the cause of death, undiscoverable. ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... one of the early months of 1781 (the exact date seems to be undiscoverable) that Crabbe addressed his letter, with specimens of his poetry, to Burke at his London residence. The letter has been preserved, and runs ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... perceive it to be so? The same question arises in respect of the distribution of many plants and animals; the reason of the limits which some of them cannot pass, being, indeed, perfectly clear, but as regards perhaps the greater number of them, undiscoverable. The upshot of it is that things do not in practice find their perfect level any more than water does so, but are liable to disturbance by way of tides and local currents, or storms. It is in his power to perceive and profit by ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... an early day of August, the precise date now undiscoverable, when Bouille, about to set out for the waters of Aix la Chapelle, is once more suddenly summoned to the barracks of Metz. The soldiers stand ranked in fighting order, muskets loaded, the officers all there on compulsion; and require, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... fact that in the old church at one time or another some saint or holy abbot had been buried,—hence the name of St. Rest or 'The Saint's Rest,' which had become attached to the village. But at what exact period such saint or abbot had lived and died, was undiscoverable. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... was rejoicing in his triumph; he had secured two criminals. He had crushed with the hand of justice one of the favorites of fashion, and he had found the undiscoverable Jacques Collin. He would be regarded as one of the cleverest of examining judges. So he left his prisoner in peace; but he was studying this speechless consternation, and he saw drops of sweat collect on the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... is said, the Jacobite Irishman, Count Lally of the Irish Brigade, was prime author of this notion,—a man of tragic notoriety in time coming. ["Thomas Arthur Lally Comte de Tollendal," patronymically "O'MULALLY of TULLINDALLY" (a place somewhere in Connaught, undiscoverable where, not material where): see our dropsical friend (in one of his wheeziest states), King James's Irish Army-List (Dublin, 1855), pp. 594-600.] Whoever was author of it, Marechal de Saxe adopts it eagerly, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the commencement of the fourth century of the Reformation, and that, therefore, it is a fair conclusion that further inquiry is quite hopeless, the imagined baptismal grace for unconscious infants being manifestly an undiscoverable, non-existent thing. I wish here to add, that a reference to obvious facts leads inevitably to the same conclusion. In the all-wise providence of the great Head of the church, the matter has been brought to the test ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... secure White Webbs. Commissioners were sent down to Enfield Chase, with directions to search for that undiscoverable house, to make thorough investigation of it, and to take into custody every individual therein. They found the place—an old rambling house in the heart of the Chase, full of trap-doors, passages, unexpected steps up or down, holes, corners, and cupboards ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... immemorial with like emulation, so that through centuries and centuries of tire-less effort and study, the primitive hieroglyph or ideograph has been evolved into a thing of beauty indescribable. It consists only of a certain number of brush- strokes; but in each stroke there is an undiscoverable secret art of grace, proportion, imperceptible curve, which actually makes it seem alive, and bears witness that even during the lightning-moment of its creation the artist felt with his brush for the ideal ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... Seminary, would seem to discredit the modest boast of the venerated Dr. Charles Hodge, that "Princeton has never originated a new idea." It consists in the hypothesis of an "original autograph" of the Scriptures, the precise contents of which are now undiscoverable, but which differed from any existing text in being absolutely free from error of any kind. The hypothesis has no small advantage in this, that if it is not susceptible of proof, it is equally secure from refutation. If not practically useful, it is at least novel, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... bed-chamber, conscious of his own guilt in the matter of the Arab Jew's death, fearing that, if the wit and power of Hogarth were given motive to move heaven and earth, the real facts might not be undiscoverable: then would Frankl be ground to fine powder by the grinders. But if he was ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... operations. We hear of how suddenly and unexpectedly in widely separated communities He begins to work His mighty work. Doubtless there are hidden reasons why He does thus begin His work, but often-times these reasons are completely undiscoverable by us. We know not whence He comes nor whither He goes. We cannot tell where next He will display His mighty and ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... the absence of explanation. Where the process of adaptation was discerned, the evidence of Purpose or Design was weak. It was strong only when the natural antecedents were not discovered, strongest when they could be declared undiscoverable. ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... agents or subjects gathering experience; and we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of experience without a world, as there were people in the world when the world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... matter has received too little attention in modern studies of the subject: partly because it was clumsily handled by some of the probably innumerable and certainly undiscoverable meddlers with the Vulgate. The unpopularity of Lancelot and his kin is not due merely to his invincibility and their not always discreet partisanship. The older "Queen's knights" must have naturally felt her devotion to him; his "undependableness"—in ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... another remnant of a feudal habitation on one of the more accessible ledges. Having half an hour to spare before my omnibus was to leave (I must beg the reader's pardon for this atrociously false note; call the vehicle a diligence, and for some undiscoverable reason the offence is minimised), I clambered up to this latter spot and sat among the rocks in the company of a few stunted olives. The Sorgues, beneath me, reaching the plain, flung itself crookedly across the meadows like an unrolled blue ribbon. I tried to think ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... people called the Basques. It matters not today what they are—chiefly mountaineers, I think—but they are of the old Iberian stock, and the Iberians were colonists from some unknown land, pre-historic, undiscoverable by us. Colonists and colonizers also. From some unknown land, hidden from us in the gloom of ages, these Iberians came to Southern Europe in ships. To Sicily they went in ships; to Britain and Ireland; to Norway also, and where else, or how far or for what, is left ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... had the most easy, and yet the most undiscoverable, access to me imaginable, and he seldom failed to come two or three nights in a week, and sometimes stayed two or three nights together. Once he told me he was resolved I should be weary of his company, and that he would learn to know what it was ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... but—but—to be frank with you—I hate to hear you going through them and wasting your acuteness. I suspect it was in an evil hour that I came out to-day and met you; my hopes were almost in my grasp; and now here are you plunging me into a slough of despond with your demonstrations; truth is undiscoverable, if the ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... themselves. Such an arrangement would be thoroughly artificial; and, while we are in many instances left to conjecture, we can always say that such and such a poem was composed not later than a particular year. When the precise date is undiscoverable, I have thought it best to place the poem in or immediately before the year in which it was ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works Die too. The deep foundations that we lay, Time ploughs them up, and not a trace remains. We build with what we deem eternal rock; A distant age asks where the fabric stood; And in the dust, sifted and searched in vain, The undiscoverable secret sleeps. ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... confessed to the marriage, but had also acknowledged its folly. And after his death, when Denis came to look about him and make inquiries, he found that the witnesses, if there had been any, were dispersed and undiscoverable. The whole question hinged on Arthur's statement to his brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child dragging the name of Peyton through heaven knew what depths. He ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... together in a slight frown. With that expression on his face he looked very much like an Italian poisoner of old time,—the kind of man whom Caesar Borgia might have employed to give the happy dispatch to his enemies by some sure and undiscoverable means known only to ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... quarreling, and not a farthing left unpaid: the lodger had gone, and there wasn't an explanatory circumstance to lay hold of anywhere. It was either Mrs. Mandeville's way to vanish, or there was something under the rose, quite undiscoverable so far. Pedgift had got the date on which she left, and the time of day at which she left, and the means by which she left. The means might help to trace her. She had gone away in a cab which the servant had fetched from the nearest stand. The stand was ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... dreams resigned, there come and go, 'Twixt mountains draped and hooded night and morn, Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne, From undiscoverable lips that blow An immaterial horn; And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees, Thy ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet— Past and Future in sad bridal met, O voice of everything that perishes, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... muddled up ruthlessly. We do not know the exact dates of many of those which are (many of the plays of the earlier time are not) extant; and of those which are extant, and of which the dates are more or less known, the authors are in not a few most important cases absolutely undiscoverable. Yet in the plays which belong to this period, and which there is no reason to attribute wholly to any of the Marlowe group, or much reason to attribute to them under the guidance, or perhaps with the collaboration ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... middle ages by the mosaics at Ravenna. The spirit that was to revive the moribund Roman world came from the East; that we know. It was at work long before the world grew conscious of its existence. Its remotest origins are probably undiscoverable. To-day we can name pioneers, beside Cezanne, in the new world of emotion; there was Tolstoi, and there was Ibsen; but who can say that these did not set out in search of Eldorados of which already ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Thurstane saw that they had reached the top of the tableland which lies south of the San Juan, and that nothing was before them for the rest of the day but a rolling plateau seamed with meandering fissures of undiscoverable depth. Traversable as the country was, however, there was one reason for extreme anxiety. If they should lose the trail, if they should get on the wrong side of one of those profound and endless chasms, they might reach the river at a point where descent to it would be impossible, and might die ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... my dear child; in six weeks they will be finished; I shall have found the Absolute, or the Absolute will be proved undiscoverable. You will ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... inhabitants, who flew to their windows at the sound of a step on the uneven pavements. They were at a loss in their conjectures; his motive for coming down three times a week must of course be bad, but it seemed undiscoverable. And Lucian on his side was at first a good deal put out by occasional encounters with members of the Gervase or Dixon or Colley tribes; he had often to stop and exchange a few conventional expressions, and such meetings, casual ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the time; it must be the prick of noon, for the slanting lights of morning and eve are quite another concern; only at noon can one appreciate the incomparable effects of palm-leaf shadows. The whole garden is permeated with light that streams down from some undiscoverable source, and its rigid trunks, painted in a warm, lustreless grey, are splashed with an infinity of keen lines of darker tint, since the sunshine, percolating through myriads of sharp leaves, etches a filigree pattern upon all that lies ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... those undiscoverable girls so happily educated by chance, so well endowed by nature, whose delicate souls endure so well the rude contact of the great soul of him we call a man, we mean to speak of those rare and noble creatures of whom Goethe has ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... what Marius had said to her on the subject of this absence which was to last only one day, and what explanation of it he had given her. Every one has noticed with what nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to lay the memory on them. Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless little effort ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep so quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century—the age of newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers. And she had taken no great trouble about it either: she had not hidden herself away in an undiscoverable hole; she had boldly settled down in a city of exhibition. The only secret of her safety that we could perceive was that Venice contained so many curiosities that were greater than she. And then accident had somehow favored her, as was shown for example ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... his. She knew by instinct what his face meant—the swollen, trembling lips, the hot eyes; and understood that he was capable of any baseness. To attempt to reach her home would be an abandonment of all hope, the ruin of Denzil. A means of escape from worst extremity, undiscoverable by her whirling brain, might suggest itself to such a mind as Mrs. Wade's. If only she could communicate with ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... without rest. He breaks his own bureau, since he may find something concealed there of which he is ignorant. This bureau belonged to the first husband—to Sauvresy. He takes out all the books in the library, one by one, shakes them furiously, and throws them about the floor. The infernal paper is undiscoverable. His distress is now too great for him to pursue the search with the least method. His wandering reason no longer guides him. He staggers, without calculation, from one thing to another, fumbling a dozen times in the same drawer, while he completely forgets others ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... sages, whose thoughts were profound, saluted them all with reverence and gave them a comprehensive answer, saying: Be it heard! This universe existed only in the first divine idea yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then the sole, self-existing power, himself undiscovered, but making this world discernible, with five elements and other principles of nature, appeared with undiminished glory, expanding his idea or dispelling the ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... victim. Then began a secret drama which was terrible in its effects,—the struggle of two determinations; one which impelled Minoret to drive his victim from Nemours, the other which gave Ursula the strength to bear persecution, the cause of which was for a certain length of time undiscoverable. The situation was a strange and even unnatural one, and yet it was led up to by all the preceding events, which served as a preface to what was ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... in the right company. The Salamander took its key from its leading director, and Mr. Murch's code of ethics briefly consisted of a belief that it was advisable to "stay inside the law"—unless he were absolutely certain that transgression would be undiscoverable or unpenalized. Into this scheme of things Mr. O'Connor fitted like water in a skin. Hence one need not have been astonished, half an hour later, had he overheard one end of a conversation conducted from Mr. Bennington ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... boast of the Briton, that "the British Constitution has no single date from which its duration is to be reckoned, and that the origin of English law is as undiscoverable as that of the Nile." Our Government, buttressed upon a written Constitution of enumerated and logically implied powers, had its historic beginning upon that masterful day, April 30, 1789, when Washington took solemn oath of office as ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Plato, Socrates, and other philosophers were able to bring their naturally fiery and violent tempers into complete subjection to their will. Can it be that this secret has been lost along with the other mysteries of those distant times, that the mode of controlling the temper is now as undiscoverable as the manner of preparing the Tyrian dye and other forgotten arts? It is surely a disgrace to those cowardly Christians who, having in addition to all the natural powers of the heathen moralist the freely-offered ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... man.'[617] Does religion, then, stimulate our obedience to the code of duty to man? 'Philip Beauchamp' admits for once that, in certain cases, it 'might possibly' be useful. It might affect 'secret crimes,' that is, crimes where the offender is undiscoverable. That, however, is a trifle. These cases, he thinks, would be 'uncommonly rare' under a well-conceived system. The extent of evil in this life would therefore be trifling were superhuman inducements entirely effaced from the human bosom, and if 'human ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Road to find the letter, but the letter was undiscoverable; with the spiteful waywardness which often characterizes such letters, it had disappeared. So Henry thought it would be as well to leave the incident alone. Their cheery politeness to each other when they chanced to meet was affecting ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations {486} made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... a little hitch in starting from Bagnara. From the windings of the carriage-road as portrayed by the map, I guessed that there must be a number of short cuts into the uplands at the back of the town, undiscoverable to myself, which would greatly shorten the journey. Besides, there was my small bag to be carried. A porter familiar with the tracks was plainly required, and soon enough I found a number of lusty youths leaning against a wall and doing nothing in particular. Yes, they would accompany me, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Clark's I learned that our man had camped there about noon on the day he left us, turned his horse and mule loose, instead of picketing them, and spent the rest of the sunlight in a siesta. When he arose, his animals were undiscoverable. He accordingly borrowed Clark's only horse to go in search of them, and the generous hermit had not seen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... acquaintance, a good and spiritually-minded man, but he could only shrug his shoulders and refer me to the Bible, saying, quite rightly I doubt not, that with what it reveals I ought to be contented. Then I read certain mystical books which were recommended to me. These were full of fine words, undiscoverable in a pocket dictionary, but really took me no forwarder, since in them I found nothing that I could not have invented myself, although while I was actually studying them, they seemed to convince me. I even tackled Swedenborg, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... and rebellion threatened to break out in Constantinople itself. He was then very anxious to ascertain the temper of the public mind; and, in his usual wary manner, determined to get a suit made that would make him undiscoverable by even his ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... assignable use for the energy which is constantly escaping from visible matter into invisible ether. The moment we ask how do we know that this energy is not really wasted, or that it is not put to some use wholly undiscoverable by human intelligence, this assumption of an organized ether is at once seen to be groundless. It belongs not to the region of science, but to that ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... at first "impossible." In very truth: for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through immensity, inarticulate, undiscoverable except ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... than three days later when the word came mysteriously through the undiscoverable "underground" route of India for all ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... regions (20 deg. round each pole, we may say) to the extent of something more than a foot thick, enough to give 1.1 foot of water over those areas, or 0.006 of a foot of water if spread over the whole globe, which would, in reality, raise the sea-level by only some such undiscoverable difference as three-fourths of an inch or an inch. This, or the reverse, which we believe might happen any year, and could certainly not be detected without far more accurate observations and calculations for the mean sea-level than any hitherto made, would ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... interchange of ordinary courtesies went. When, however, any member of the Society mingled with a group of visitors, the conversation was soon turned into a new channel. Secrets of science, which I had been accustomed to look upon as undiscoverable, were bandied about like the merest commonplaces of education. The absurdity of individuality and the subjectivity of the emotions were alike insisted on without notice of the paradox, which to me appeared extreme. The Associates ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... he threw upon her face a wistful glance, as if he had misgivings on the generosity of forsaking her thus. He gazed into her face in a vague, wondering manner, like that of one examining some strange old manuscript the key to whose characters is undiscoverable. He was not so young as to be absolutely without a sense that sympathy was demanded, he was not old enough to be free from the terror felt in childhood at beholding misery in adult quarters hitherto deemed impregnable; and whether she were in a position to cause trouble ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... impossibility of the thing made it charming. What course of thought, what set of circumstances, could turn the Puritan mind in the Celtic direction? Was there such genius in man to convert one personality into another so neatly that the process remained undiscoverable, not to be detected by the closest observation? He shook off the fascination. These two women believed it, but he knew that no Endicott ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... finely-wrought universe crystallized out around him as he looked again, at the crowns, the twining hair, the woman-faces. He liked all the better the unintelligible text of the German. He preferred things he could not understand with the mind. He loved the undiscovered and the undiscoverable. He pored over the pictures intensely. And these were wooden statues, "Holz"—he believed that meant wood. Wooden statues so shapen to his soul! He was a million times gladdened. How undiscovered the world was, how it revealed itself to his soul! What a fine, exciting thing ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... of the Divine purposes, than any other system of means or instruments that may be employed as subordinate agencies in the government of the world. This important view is strikingly illustrated in Scripture. For some of the purposes of God, which might have been undiscoverable in the mere light of Nature, are there explicitly declared; nay, they are thrown into the form of express promises, to which the Divine faithfulness is solemnly pledged; and yet the exercise of prayer, so far from being superseded by these promises, is rather stimulated and ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... they're not so hard to find when once the secret of it is known. Like the keys and things rattling about in her undiscoverable pocket, they're right with her. If she will but stop her fretting for a moment, sit down and think, then gird on her armor and begin the task—why, that's all ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... the nicety of his inflections, the elegance of his gestures, and the fine play of his expression, told us that. We, meanwhile, sat like aliens in a playhouse; we could see the actors were upon some material business and performing well, but the plot of the drama remained undiscoverable. Names of places, the name of Captain Hart, occasional disconnected words, tantalised without enlightening us; and the less we understood, the more gallantly, the more copiously, and with still the more explanatory gestures, Mapiao ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vanished—jumped off the earth into nowhere. This was my highest flight, Singleton, the best writing I ever did, and after the vast pains I took with the thing, the only woman I ever saw who could possibly act it is unavailable; worse than that, absolutely undiscoverable! Nobody knows I have this script; I've kept quiet about it simply because I'm not going to be forced into accepting a star I don't want. I have a feeling about this play that I never had about my other things. That girl was its inspiration. The public ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... walked through the churchyard (which has a very curious sun-dial in it) to the meadows beyond, in search of the castle, the site of which is mentioned on the map, but is quite undiscoverable now; while Robert made friends with an old labourer smoking his pipe outside the great tithe barn, and asked him about the road up Bredon' as it was his project to sleep on the very top of the hill the ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... fell into his private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger's. The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having seen most of the roughest ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... we have now no travellers employed in seeking undiscoverable countries, and although Eldorado, the city of the Cesares, and the Sabbatical River, are expunged even from the maps of credulity and imagination, Welshmen have gone in search of Madoc's descendants, and scarcely a year passes without adding ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... satisfaction more massive than any epic poem. Disinterested curiosity, which is the source of almost all intellectual effort, finds with astonished delight that science can unveil secrets which might well have seemed for ever undiscoverable. The desire for a larger life and wider interests, for an escape from private circumstances, and even from the whole recurring human cycle of birth and death, is fulfilled by the impersonal cosmic outlook of science as by nothing else. To all these must be added, as contributing to ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... warning must have unnerved me. I was perfectly safe from her ladyship. The disused door into her room was locked, and the key safe on the housekeeper's bunch. It was also undiscoverable on her side, the recess in which it stood being completely filled by a large wardrobe. On my side hung a thick sound-proof portiere. Nevertheless, I resolved not to use that room while she inhabited the next one. I removed my possessions, fastened the door of communication with my bedroom ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... was done, precisely, by princesses who had public considerations to observe and who came of age very early. If it was thus distinct to Mrs. Stringham then that Mr. Densher had gone off somewhere else in connection with his errand before her visit to New York, it had been also not undiscoverable that he had come back for a day or two later on, that is after her own second excursion—that he had in fine reappeared on a single occasion on his way to the West: his way from Washington as she believed, though he was out of sight ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... seen that Divine Revelation could only be necessary or conceivable for the purpose of communicating to us something which we could not otherwise discover, and that the truth of communications which are essentially beyond and undiscoverable by reason cannot be attested in any other way than by miraculous signs distinguishing them as Divine. It is admitted that no other testimony could justify our believing the specific Revelation which we are considering, the very ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... that inexplicable and undiscoverable smoke on the island; but on this day, about three o'clock in the afternoon, his attention was attracted by a long line of vapour, about the origin of which ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... rifles, both Enfield and Ross, it was utterly useless for machine guns. The difference of a minute fraction of an inch in the thickness of the "rim" would break extractors as fast as they could be replaced, while various other irregularities, so small as to be undiscoverable without the most accurate measurements by delicate micrometers, would cause stoppages and the breaking of different small parts. And, at that time, spare parts were almost unknown, so it required the utmost ingenuity on the part of the gunners to improvise, with what materials ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... trying moment for Brewer when we found him and volunteered to attempt a campaign for the top of California, because he felt a certain fatherly responsibility over our youth, a natural desire that we should not deposit our triturated remains in some undiscoverable hole among the feldspathic granites; but, like a true disciple of science, this was at last overbalanced by his intense desire to know more of the unexplored region. He freely confessed that he believed the plan madness, and Hoffman, too, told us we might as ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... this it was the sentry's part to reply, and as he answered the door parted; that at the other end of the vestibule having, I observed, closed as we entered, and so closed that its position was undiscoverable. Before us opened a hall of considerable size, consisting of three distinct vaults, defined by two rows of pillars, slender shafts resembling tall branchless trees, the capital of each being formed by a branching head like that of the palm. The trunks were covered with golden ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... was at the mercy of any delusion which common chances and common coincidences might suggest to my imagination? Impossible to say. I could only feel that what had passed between Miss Halcombe and myself, on our way from the summer-house, had affected me very strangely. The foreboding of some undiscoverable danger lying hid from us all in the darkness of the future was strong on me. The doubt whether I was not linked already to a chain of events which even my approaching departure from Cumberland would be powerless to snap asunder—the doubt whether we any of us saw the end as ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... the diurnal motion of the earth, the expansion of water by heat, may all combine to force it along and direct its course; and yet there may be some still more potent cause at work unperceived by us, perhaps undiscoverable. One thing we know, that it was the will of the Almighty that so it should flow, for a great and beneficent object; and that, to effect it, he has employed some potent and sufficient agent, which, when ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... were urging on miserable old horses, drawing frail carts, their wheels sunk in the ruts up to the nave, loaded with mattresses and eiderdowns, with appliances for eating and sleeping, and sometimes too, with cages in which birds were twittering. On they went, from village to village, seeking an undiscoverable lodging, but not complaining, ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... a mystery, a real, live, undiscoverable mystery. All that was really known of him was that he had come from England several years before and worked as an ordinary farm-hand with a farmer at the Brandon Hills. He was a steady, reliable man, very quiet and reticent. That ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... flutter around the fire until the water in the kettle began to boil. At the first ebullitions, she stood poised for an instant upon her toe, like the famous statue of Mercury, and so lightly that she seemed to be sustained by undiscoverable wings, or to float, like a bubble, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... could at times be vaguely ascertained that, while a portion of some great domain was held on occupation from the State, some other portion had been acquired by purchase; but what particular part of the estate was held on either tenure was undiscoverable, for titles had been lost, or, when preserved, did not furnish conclusive evidence of the justice of the original transfer. Even the ascertainment of the fact that a tract of land had once belonged to the State was no conclusive proof that the State could still claim rights ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... and laughter of some girls in an adjacent garden—they, too, likely to be soon away from the maternal nest; the crow of a cock pheasant from the margin of the wood; the clear, ringing melody of an undiscoverable lark. Everywhere white light, blue skies, and shadows of great clouds slow-sailing over the young green corn and over the daisied meadows in which the cows lay half-asleep. And when he looked beyond that low green hill, where there were one or two hares hopping about on their ungainly high ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... to join, for the second time, the great and agitated crowd of beings who are all intent in the search after that undiscoverable talisman, Happiness. That he entertained any hope of being the successful inquirer is not to be imagined. He considered that the happiest moment in human life is exactly the sensation of a sailor who has escaped a shipwreck, and that the mere belief that his wishes ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... friend of another sort tenderly devoted to me, I might have thought it worth while to continue my present existence. I have long dreamt of such an unattainable creature, as you know, and she, this undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume; the imaginary woman alone, for, in spite of what has been said in some quarters, there is no real woman behind the title. She has continued to the last unrevealed, unmet, unwon. I think it desirable to mention this in order ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was up to her eyes in promises to anxious Coxons. She was a woman of an inordinate conscience, and her conscience was now a distress to her, hovering round her bed in irreconcilable forms of resentful husbands, portionless nieces and undiscoverable philosophers. ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... him he quieted down, and with a zealous industry nosed the path from side to side, as if in search of something; nor did he have to go far, for they presently descried what seemed like a big snow-heap on one side of the now undiscoverable path. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... ink poured upon the beach by some horrible squid. My musings on whether sea-monsters did ever disport themselves on the shore under the cover of sufficiently dark nights would be broken into by discovering that I had plunged into a stream of undiscoverable dimensions, whose existence only revealed itself by the splash of my boots. Retreating cautiously, I would take a run, and then a terrific leap into the darkness, sometimes finding myself on firm dry sand, and as ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... course in life, Franconia in turn commenced relating the misfortunes that had befallen her uncle. She tells him how her uncle has been reduced to poverty through Lorenzo's folly, and Graspum, the negro dealer's undiscoverable mode of ensnaring the unwary. He has been importuned, harassed, subjected to every degradation and shame, scouted by society for attempting to save those beautiful children, Annette and Nicholas, from the snares of slavery. And he now welters in a ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... tended to shew that there may be many things about us, unknown even to the scientific world, but which well-followed accidents reveal with the most positive certainty. It is known that every beam of light is accompanied by a beam of chemical agency, totally undiscoverable to the senses of light or warmth, but admitting of separation from the luminous and warm rays; and producing photogenic effects. We know that there are disturbances of magnetism going on about us, affecting whole continents at a time, unknown to ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... many works of fiction, that those in attendance on loving couples should at certain seasons see cause to absent themselves from their duty, and search for a supposititious handkerchief or sprain an unoffending ankle, or hunt diligently in hedgerows for undiscoverable flowers. Three paths therefore lie open to her; which to adopt is the question. To return to the house for a handkerchief would be a decidedly risky affair, calculated to lead up to stiff and damning cross-examination from the aunts, which might prove painful; to sprain an ankle might prove even ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... expectation of the mortal resentment which would be felt by her brothers;[148] and the information was forwarded with the least possible delay to the cardinals of the imperial faction at Rome. The true purposes which underlay the contradiction of Clement's language are undiscoverable. Perhaps in the past winter he had been acting out a deep intrigue—perhaps he was drifting between rival currents, and yielded in any or all directions as the alternate pressure varied; yet whatever had been the meaning of his language, whether it was a scheme to deceive Henry, or was the expression ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... snow, and places where the track along the mountain-side was undiscoverable. Walking was tiresome enough on the loose shingle and shale, but it became worse when I actually had to cut each step into the frozen snow. The work was tedious to a degree, and the progress slow. After a while ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... millimeter long and almost as slender as a hair. It is very difficult to see because of its transparency. When tucked away in a fold of the skin of its fostering larva, an excessively fine skin, it remains undiscoverable to the lens. But the feeble creature is very active: it tramps over the sides of the rich morsel, walks all round it. It covers the ground pretty quickly, buckling and unbuckling by turns, very much after the manner of the looper ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... part of the desert; and that they had legends relating to the "hidden water-hole," running back for many generations. In this case, it was remarked that the water-hole was situated in such a peculiar and unusual manner, as to render it almost undiscoverable even to people familiar with the characteristics of that part of the country. The old lady who related the story, had it direct from the lips of one of the party, who regarded it as "something queer," but who had ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... account of charge and discharge, in which he was credited with three copies sold. Now, he knew that his family had bought two copies, but he never could find out who it was that had bought the third. The one mind into which his thoughts had thus passed, remained ever mysteriously undiscoverable. Whether or not he consoled himself with the reflection that what might have been diffused over many was concentrated in one, it is consolatory to others to reflect that such a book stands on record in the privileged libraries, to come forth to the world ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... and yet between those handsome features and the attenuated face of the dying pauper Faith soon perceived one of those resemblances, strong, yet indefinable, which are so apparent to some persons, so undiscoverable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... wall were closely shuttered, and the door they had come through when first they came on deck was shut too, and they couldn't find it in the dark. It seemed so odd to be feeling along a wall for a door they knew was there and not be able to find it, that they began to laugh; and the undiscoverable door cheered them up more than anything that had happened since seeing the last of ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... was there the complete disappearance of these two considerable personages in the state of Pennsylvania, but there was no news of the valet Frycollin. He was as undiscoverable as his master. Never had a Negro since Toussaint L'Ouverture, Soulouque, or Dessaline had so much ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... unexpected an appearance, and presaging from it the most auspicious consequences, full of her situation and sufferings, and having a thousand things that pressed at once to be told, was eager and impatient to communicate them to her faithful shepherd. She was also desirous of learning by what undiscoverable means, by what happy fortune, he had been conducted to this impervious retreat, and at so critical a juncture. "Edwin,—my gallant Edwin,—how came you hither?—Sure it was some propitious power,—some unseen angel,—that conducted you.—Oh, my friend,—I have ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... their true meaning is not undiscoverable. The perfect and eternal distinction of the two primitive terms of the creative syllogism, in order to attain to the demonstration of their harmony by the analogy of contraries, is the second grand principle of that occult philosophy veiled under the name "Kabalah," and indicated ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... snatch sung by the Fool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem proves to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some dark emprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable. "Count Gismond," again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour with his lance, and slays her traducer at her feet. But this is a dramatic monologue like any other, and only accidentally ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... taunt him with being English. Ah! youth with its simple puns and its full-blooded pleasures, when there is no gold dust in the hair and no wrinkles about the eyes, when the sources of an epigram, like the sources of the Nile, are undiscoverable, and the joy of being led into sin has not lost its pearly freshness! Ah! youth—youth! He sighed, and sighed again, for he thought his sigh as beautiful as the face of a ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... cinema where he had followed a girl with a vague resemblance to Sisily. As the days went on and he read nothing to alarm him, his tension grew less. It really looked as if Scotland Yard and the newspapers had forgotten all about the Cornwall murder, or had relegated it to the list of undiscoverable mysteries. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... jurisprudence had no claim to philosophical precision. It involved, in fact, one of those "mixed modes of thought" which are now acknowledged to have characterised all but the highest minds during the infancy of speculation, and which are far from undiscoverable even in the mental efforts of our own day. The Law of Nature confused the Past and the Present. Logically, it implied a state of Nature which had once been regulated by natural law; yet the jurisconsults do not speak clearly or confidently of the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... as Yasmini more than hinted in her letter to Tess, repeated efforts were made to administer poison in the careful undiscoverable ways that India has made her own since time immemorial. But you can not easily poison any one who does not eat, and who drinks wine that was bottled in Europe; or at any rate, to do it you must call in ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Nighthawk had evidently explained every thing: the cause of Swartz's imprisonment; his statement in reference to the paper—and now that Swartz was dead, the hiding-place of the document seemed forever undiscoverable. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the brow of a hill and routed the enemy with loss, they examined the dead bodies, and for the first time knew that Llewelyn was among the slain. A letter was found on his person giving a list, in false names, of the English nobles with whom he was in correspondence, but either the cipher was undiscoverable or the matter was hushed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... there is," persisted Flint, whom disappointment as usual rendered but the more obstinate; "and so is Sowerby: and he knows too, that it is so cunningly contrived as to be undiscoverable, except by a person in the secret, which he no doubt at first imagined Caleb to be. I'll tell you what we'll do—You have the necessary tools with you. Split the confounded chest of drawers into shreds—I'll be ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... head about the secrets undiscoverable," he resumed, "until I grow tired and want to forget, and so I drink swipes, and go fishing, and sing old songs, and dream I am a lark bird singing in the sky. I like that best of all, and often I dream it when I have drunk much swipes . ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... mouthpiece of a whistle, and you will find very distinctly imprinted in black the form of a heraldic fleur de lys, as if stamped with a hot iron. The scent being absent, we may here accept it as the symbol of humility—a humility so perfect that it is undiscoverable but ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... so-called colour reactions based upon the change of colour of the oil by various reagents such as sulphuric, nitric or phosphoric acids. These reactions were exceedingly indefinite and unsatisfactory and oil adulteration was prevalent and almost undiscoverable. It has been found, however, that the old ideas concerning the believed uniformity in the nature and constitution of oils were erroneous. Some oils, indeed, do consist of olein, almond oil being ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the She-Bears, after Conception, hide themselves in some secret and undiscoverable Place, till they bring forth their Young, which, in all Probability, cannot be long; otherwise, the Indians, who hunt the Woods like Dogs, would, at some time or other, have found them out. Bear-Hunting is a great Sport in America, both with the English and Indians. ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... after throwing away his crutch, he leaped a great ditch ten feet wide, and of undiscoverable muddy depth. I wonder if the old cripple would think me the lamer one now, thought Israel to himself, arriving ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... calibre, including the "seventy-five." The "seventy-five" is a very sympathetic creature, in blue-grey with metallic glints. He is perfectly easy to see when you approach him from behind, but get twenty yards in front of him and he is absolutely undiscoverable. Viewed from the sky, he is part of the forest. Viewed from behind, he is perceived to be in a wooden hut with rafters, in which you can just stand upright. We beheld the working of the gun, by two men, and we beheld the different sorts of shell in their delved compartments. ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... exhilaration which the winner of any battle must feel, when it is brought to a successful issue. She heard herself laugh aloud, defiantly and with a touch of glee, although it did not seem to her as if it were Patricia Langdon who laughed; it was, perhaps, some hitherto undiscoverable spirit of recklessness within her, which called forth that expression of defiant joy, which Richard Morton could not fail ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... Religion' starts from a rigid and somewhat antiquated view of Revelation—Revelation is 'a direct and external communication by God to man of truths undiscoverable by human reason. The divine origin of this communication is proved by miracles. Miracles are proved by the record of Scripture, which, in its turn, is attested by the history of the Canon.—This is certainly the kind of theory which was in favour at ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... passage of steam to lower temperatures at the moment when the contact of cold surfaces converts the vapor from the gaseous into the liquid state. This heat is so thoroughly merged in the compound that the most delicate thermometer cannot detect a variation. It is undiscoverable by our senses and yet it proves its existence beyond question by its work. Heat which is obtained by the combustion of coal or wood, lies also in water, to be drawn forth and utilised in steam. It is apparently a mere question ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... more forcibly was a weird resemblance between them all, a phantom thing, a link undiscoverable yet somehow there. This tribal expression is one of the strangest phenomena eternally comforting ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... the whole Shrine anew in dense clouds of smoke and jets of flame,—Lysia had perished! All that proud loveliness, that dazzling supremacy, that superb voluptuousness, that triumphant dominion, . . swept away into a heap of undiscoverable ashes! And Zephoranim's haughty spirit too had fled,—fled, stained with guilt and most unroyal dishonor, all for the sake of one woman's fairness—the fairness of body only—the brilliant mask of flesh that too often hides the hideousness of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... on one side, awaiting the last angel; his family held his hands and legs: they were all speechless, only one woman suddenly clasped his knee, and "keened" for the inside of five seconds, and fell silent again. Went home, and to bed about two A.M. What actually passed seems undiscoverable; but the Mataafas were surely driven back out of Vaitele; that is a blow to them, and the resistance was far greater than had been anticipated—which is a blow to the Laupepas. All seems to indicate a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... flower-pot, fling it as hard as ever she could at the devotee, then shut the door quick, fly out at the other door, and leave her faithless swain in the agony of knowing himself detected and exposed by some unknown and undiscoverable enemy. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... degradation of dogging his friend by night and listening covertly? "Wherefore to me this hell which no heaven can deliver me from? Wherefore to me this indignity which no suffering can wash out? The dreadful, deep, undiscoverable, thrice-mysterious reason,—who will reveal it to ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... the Philosopher, having classified Rhodora once and for all, had since received no impression sufficient to efface or modify the original one. I can say for them that to one who did not know them well their surprise would have been undiscoverable, yet to Hepatica and me it was perfectly evident that they considered ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is moulded ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the highest of the four-footed and four-handed world, rises into the dignity of pure manhood. No competent thinker of the present day dreams of explaining these indubitable facts by the notion of the existence of unknown and undiscoverable adaptations to purpose. And we would remind those who, ignorant of the facts, must be moved by authority, that no one has asserted the incompetence of the doctrine of final causes, in its application to physiology and anatomy, more strongly than our own eminent anatomist, Professor ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... only is of a kind and a magnitude requiring inconceivably less power and less skill than the admitted good of the creation—it also bears a very small proportion in amount; quite as small a proportion as the cases of unknown or undiscoverable design bear to those of acknowledged and proved contrivance. Generally speaking, the preservation and the happiness of sensitive creatures appears to be the great object of creative exertion and conservative providence. The expanding of our faculties, both bodily and ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... repeated, and say again, was white. And thus, in those long, dark nights, when it was my quarter-watch on deck, and not in the top, and others went skulking and "sogering" about the decks, secure from detection—their identity undiscoverable—my own hapless jacket for ever proclaimed the name of its wearer. It gave me many a hard job, which otherwise I should have escaped. When an officer wanted a man for any particular duty—running aloft, say, to communicate some slight order to the captains of the tops—how ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... happen to understand," Clarke observed thoughtfully. "I can very well conceive of a lecherous text-book of the calculus, or of a reporter's story of a picnic in which burnt, under the surface, undiscoverable, save to the initiate, the tragic ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... of this other world, so like ours and yet not the same; in the exploration of its continents; in the frequentation of its inhabitants; that the pleasure which he has to give consists. How he came himself to discover it is as undiscoverable as how his in some sort analogue Dickens, after pottering not unpleasantly with Bozeries, "thought of Mr. Pickwick," and so of the rest of his human (and extra-human) comedy. But the facts, in both ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... nesting places. Came also the sweep of cinnamon wings as the giant sickle-billed curlews wheeled in vast aerial phalanx, with their eager cries, "Curlee! Curlee! Curlee!"—the wildest cry of the old prairies. Again, from some unknown, undiscoverable place, came the liquid, baffling, mysterious note of the nesting upland plover, sweet and clean as ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke) that, like the veil of a sanctuary, they kept a vague imprint, traced a faint outline of that infinitely precious and, alas, undiscoverable truth;—what she had been doing, that afternoon, at three o'clock, when he had called,—a truth of which he would never possess any more than these falsifications, illegible and divine traces, a truth which would exist henceforward ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Porbus," Frenhofer continued, "hitherto I have never found a flawless model, a body with outlines of perfect beauty, the carnations—Ah! where does she live?" he cried, breaking in upon himself, "the undiscoverable Venus of the older time, for whom we have sought so often, only to find the scattered gleams of her beauty here and there? Oh! to behold once and for one moment, Nature grown perfect and divine, the Ideal at last, I would give all that I possess.... ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... mystery, deriving no light at all from the septuagenarian 'aeon' of the individual; though between the two aeons I have no doubt that some secret link of connection does and must subsist, however undiscoverable by human sagacity. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... of a generation ago, who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Real Captain, unless it be some Captain of mechanical Industry hired by Mammon, where is he in these days? Most likely, in silence, in sad isolation somewhere, in remote obscurity; trying if, in an evil ungoverned time, he cannot at least govern himself. The Real Captain undiscoverable; the Phantasm Captain everywhere very conspicuous:—it is thought Phantasm Captains, aided by ballot-boxes, are the true method, after all. They are much the pleasantest for the time being! And so no Dux or Duke of any sort, in any province of our affairs, now leads: ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... general conquest of Ireland. Marched easily victorious for a time; and got, some say, into the wilds of Connaught, but there saw himself beset by ambuscades and wild Irish countenances intent on mischief; and had, on the sudden, to draw up for battle;—place, I regret to say, altogether undiscoverable to me; known only that it was boggy in the extreme. Certain enough, too certain and evident, Magnus Barefoot, searching eagerly, could find no firm footing there; nor, fighting furiously up to the knees or deeper, any result but honorable death! Date is ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... meanwhile, limned in the wonder of an undecipherable or at least untranslatable geometry, silently roaring, enthroned in the undiscoverable colors beyond the spectrum, swept towards them ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... said, so she stooped down, and they went into an inextricable thicket of creepers, leaves and reed grass, which formed an undiscoverable retreat, and which the young man laughingly ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... difficult. Why a man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will. Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great undiscoverable indefinable Thought.... He was cold, He was efficient. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne |
