"Unformed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... supplies us with that which made the greatest part of the food of mankind in the age which the poets have agreed to call golden. It is made with an egg, that miracle of nature, which the theoretical Burnet has compared to creation. An egg contains water within its beautiful smooth surface; and an unformed mass, by the incubation of the parent, becomes a regular animal, furnished with bones and sinews, and covered with feathers. Let us consider; can there be more wanting to complete the Meditation on a Pudding? If more is wanting, more may be found. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... then time to see what else I had caught; and turning over the net, found a few of the same fish I had taken before, and some others of a flat-tish make, and one little lump of flesh unformed; which last, by all I could make of it, seemed to be either a spawn or young one of ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... covered the center of the floor. Priscilla had taken off her jacket and hat. She had washed her hands, and removed her muddy boots, and smoothed out her straight, light brown hair. She looked what she felt— a very stiff and unformed specimen of girlhood. There was a great lump in her throat, brought there by mingled nervousness and home-sickness, but that very fact only made her ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... man there, that is three years past! and the one-armed man! that was long ago, too. Yes, but his letters yet lie near your family thoughts. Do not lose them, there is value attached. Yet there are imprisoned minds who do not know their real possessions. Now, these bars and unformed circles bespeak it. Behold the light on the obscure desk in the ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... delicate, her breathing more ardent than that of men. But he could not trust Regina Sussmann; she seemed to know too much. There was nothing of the plant-like about her, and without that characteristic any woman appealed to him as being unformed and uncultured. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... one, Digby," replied Hamilton, in a reserved tone; "nor am I going to wrong any one by uttering unformed suspicions." ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... credit for a story so well known. See The Jumping Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]—It contains a basic idea which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling is convincing and full of charm. It appeared in print at a time when American humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. We had a vast appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities for showing it. We were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... fell. If the little piece of obstinacy would stay, she would; and Mrs. Harlow politely declared they should all be delighted. But how would she behave at the table? Her manners were as yet unformed; she needed line upon line and precept upon precept. It was dreadful to think of her taking supper at one of the nicest houses in the city, in that dress, and without her watchful mother too! It was a severe trial to Susy. ...
— Little Prudy's Dotty Dimple • Sophie May
... leading politicians expressed rather than inspired the general will. The guilt which any of us can venture to attribute for this action of a whole deluded society must rest on men like Calhoun, who in a previous generation, while opinion in the South was still to some extent unformed, stifled all thought of reform and gave the semblance of moral and intellectual justification to a system only susceptible ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... its original elements,—when barbarism on the one hand, and superstition on the other, made the Middle Ages funereal, dismal, violent, despairing. But commerce, arts, and literature had introduced a new era,—still unformed, a vast chaos of conflicting forces, and yet redeemed by reviving intelligence and restless daring. The one thing which society needed in that transition period was a strong government in the hands of kings, to restore law and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... it? The more I thought of it the more I suspected there was some mistake in the murder, so to speak. Somebody had taken somebody there to throw him in, and yet he was not thrown in. I had already an ugly, unformed idea of some substitution or reversal of parts; then I stooped to turn the bookstand myself, by accident, and I instantly knew everything, for I saw the two cups revolve once more, like moons ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... some librarians even have said it) that for unformed readers to read a bad book is better than to read none at all. I do not believe it. You might as well say that it is better for one to swallow poison than not to swallow any thing at all. I hold that library providers are as much bound to furnish wholesome food ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... a she in the case," Hannibal laughed; "and my arrow drawn at a venture has struck home. Ah! yes, there were three of them, two tall and stately maidens and one still a slim and unformed girl. Indeed, I remember now having heard that you lost your armour and helmet in jumping off the bridge across the Po to fish out one of the daughters of Allobrigius, who turned out to be able to swim much better than you could. I had a hearty laugh over ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... best blood was to be shed in a stream flowing westward. A time was beginning for Wilhelm of powerful but very painful impressions, not, it is true, to be compared with those which the battlefields of 1866 had made on him when an unformed youth. The war unveiled to him the foundations of human nature ordinarily buried under a covering of culture, and his reason, marveled over the reconciliation of such antitheses. On the one hand one saw the wildest struggle for gain, and love of destruction; on the other hand were the daily examples ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Unheard by sharpest ear—unformed in clearest eye, or cunningest mind, Nor lore, nor fame, nor happiness, nor wealth, And yet the pulse of every heart and life throughout the world, incessantly, Which you and I, and all, pursuing ever, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... a damsel saunter, Fair, the while unformed to be all-eclipsing; "Maiden meet," held I, "till arise my forefelt ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... from one word to another. Tact is very essential. This quality requires often slight deceptions to be allowed or practiced; hence an unevenness in the writing is observed. Untruthfulness gives greater unevenness still; but do not rush to conclusions on this point for an unformed handwriting shows this peculiarity very often, being due, not to evil qualities, but to an unsteady hand employed in work to ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... twelve years old. The father soon after took to drinking and gambling, and spent all the property he possessed. His daughter was thus brought into the midst of profligate associates, at an age when impulses are strong, and the principles unformed. She led a vicious life for several years, and during a fit of intoxication married a worthless, dissipated fellow. When she was eighteen years old, she was imprisoned for perjury. The case appeared doubtful at the time, and from circumstances, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... fascinations of his fair daughters, and the various merits of his sons,—I could not help feeling how changed our relative position was since our last meeting; the tone of cool and vulgar patronage he then assumed towards the unformed country lad was now converted into an air of fawning and deferential ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... and fruit trees. Again, in a series of predella histories of the Virgin, in the same place, also a very mediocre and anonymous work, there is extraordinary charm in the conception of the respective positions of Mary and Joseph at their wedding: he is quite old and grey; she young, unformed, almost a child, and she has to stand on two steps to be on his level, raising her head with a beautiful, childlike earnestness, quite unlike the conventional bridal timidity of other painters. Leaving these unknown mediocrities, I would refer to the dramatic value (besides the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... loveliness. Twice—yes, three times—as my gaze thus wandered, I found her eyes fixed upon me with a kind of eager scrutiny—a fixed intensity which actually was startling to encounter. And strange, vague, wild, unformed memories arose, and odd ideas, and fantastic suspicions. Her face became thus like one of those which one sees in a crowd hastily, and then loses, only to rack his brain in vain endeavors to discover who the owner of the face might ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... such an altogether unexpected event distracted Lesbia's mind all through the last act of the Demi-monde. She hardly knew what the actors were talking about. Mary, her younger sister! Mary, a good looking girl enough, but by no means a beauty, and with manners utterly unformed. That Mary should be engaged to be married, while she, Lesbia, was still ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... and more of the civic interest, and urged that the clubs study the numerous questions dealing with the life of their communities. This seems strange, in view of the enormous amount of civic work done by women's clubs to-day. But at that time, when the woman's club movement was unformed, these civic matters found but a small part in the majority of programmes; in a number ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... no respectable writer is voluntarily obscure in the structure of his phrases — that is an abuse reserved for the clowns of literary fashion. But a book is a larger sentence, and if it is formless it fails to mean anything, for the same reason that an unformed collection of words means nothing. The chapters and verses may have said something, as loose words may have a known sense and a tone; but the book will have ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... I found upon my plate at breakfast, one morning, a letter directed in a bold though unformed hand, which I ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... not so much by the actual money as by the evidence of the royal favor. At any rate, he withdrew his opposition, and the two young people were married in October, 1822—both of them being under age, unformed, and immature. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... into the pleasant future with a tremulous joy, she stood beside her chosen one at the altar, how little did she dream of the shadows and darkness that were to fall upon her path! And alas! how little does many a careless girl, who gives herself away, thoughtlessly, to a young man of unformed character, dream of the sorrow too deep for tears that awaits her. Surely this were anguish enough,—and surely it called for the sustaining sympathy of friends. But the friend of her early years, the sister in whose arms, in the days of innocent childhood, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... of water, a strip of blue filled in with perpendicular zigzag black lines was used. From these few facts you can understand how unformed and awkward Egyptian pictures seem if we compare them with the existing idea of what is beautiful. There appear to have been certain fixed rules for the use of colors, and certain objects were always painted in the colors ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... number has passed suddenly from this world into the world beyond. By this tragic circumstance our thoughts are sobered and we find ourselves face to face with a sad and bitter incident—the termination of a life while it was still incomplete and unformed. I hope that the whole school will refrain from useless comment and will form no harsh or unjust judgments. This is a time ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... long after the moon had risen,—the waning moon, that comes up so weirdly, late in the night, like a spectre of light appointed to haunt the solemn old earth, and punish it with the remembrance of a brighter, better light gone, and a renewed consciousness of its own once unformed, chaotic existence. I saw rays from it coming in through the parted curtains, and distinctly traced tree-branches wavering to and fro out in the night-wind, set astir as the moon came up. At last ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... when he pulled off the cover of his box of shaving soap the next morning. He was belated, and in something of a hurry. If ever a man suddenly forgot his hurry, Mr. Randolph did, that morning. He knew the unformed, rather irregular and stiff handwriting in a moment; and concluded that Daisy had some request to make on her own account which she was too timid to speak out in words. That was what he expected ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... deterioration of mind and character was revealed to the country on the 7th of March, 1850. What a downfall was there! That shameful speech reads worse in 1867 than it did in 1850, and still exerts perverting power over timid and unformed minds. It was the very time for him to have broken finally with the "irreconcilable" faction, who, after having made President Tyler snub Daniel Webster from his dearly loved office of Secretary of State, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... fourteen, a dear little creature, with awkward limbs, and a face so wonderfully changeful in expression, that it could not fail to be by turns pretty and repellent. She always had beautiful eyes; all her other features were unformed, and might grow charming or exactly the reverse. When her work engrossed her attention, she bit her protruded tongue, and her raven-black hair, usually remarkably smooth, often became so oddly dishevelled, that she looked like a kobold; when, on the other hand, she talked pleasantly ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... cases, yes. How many young men fail to discover until too late what life work they are best fitted for, unless they possess a talent so strong that it amounts to genius. How many of necessity are sent out into the world at an unformed age to slavery in order that they and their dependents may live. What chance or time have they, grinding away at any work which brings a dollar, to know for what work they are most suited. They know only when it is too late that they are bound by chains, ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... soon found out it was a mistake—our marriage—for you. I wasn't half clever enough. I was only an ignorant, silly, unformed girl, and you were so different. Oh, I tried my hardest to improve. I wanted to prove to you that I wasn't quite such a little fool as you thought me. I wanted to show you I had a soul—Mr. Herrick said I had, and I tried to make ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... rivulet, about a mile from this place. Mrs. Cameron is a very good, simple-hearted woman. As to Lily, I can praise her beauty only with safe conscience, for as yet she is a mere child,—her mind quite unformed." ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... aging rapidly in those long periods of unbroken reflection. To develop a human being, leave him or her alone most of the time; it is too much company, too little time to digest and assimilate, that keep us thoughtless and unformed until life is half over. She astonished him by suddenly ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... hard physical labor, so soon begun and so unremittingly continued during the years usually given up to school work. An ordinary boy, placed in such circumstances, would doubtless have grown up ignorant and unformed. But while none of the Hecker boys was quite of the ordinary stamp, Isaac was distinctly sui generis and individual. He has said of himself that he could remember no period of his life when he had not the consciousness of having been sent into the world for some especial ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... them were his pride and delight, were made of no account. Flesh of his flesh, the keeper of his honour and his peace henceforth, the maker or marrer of his life's happiness, be it long or short, was this pretty unformed, wayward child. ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... thread of observation between black-fringed lids, dwelt musingly on the sky. She looked as if she might be dreaming a maiden's dream of love. He hazarded a tentative remark. Her eyes moved, touched him indifferently, and passed back to the sky, and an unformed murmur, interrogation, acquiescence, casual response, anything he pleased to think it, escaped her lips. He watched her as he could when she was not looking at him. A loosened strand of her hair lay among ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... of fixing similar impressions in the families of the most enlightened, and the unformed minds of children propagate in public schools the stories of their nurses. The lowest superstition pervades therefore all ranks, even of a population so comparatively enlightened as that of England; and, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... sketches by clever unknowns, rest beside sprawling frescos by youths whose ambition is vaster than their genius; and finished and accomplished works of art are set off by the foils of unnumbered pieces of unformed and not very promising mediocrity. Among them are the productions of many of the more humble painters of genre subjects—the class who delight in portraying homely cottage interiors, or troops of playing children, or bits of minutely-finished still life—or ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... can," replied Ellen, rather impatiently. This girl was irritating to a degree, and yet there was all the time that vague dejection about her, and withal a certain childishness, which seemed to insist upon patience. The girl was really older than Ellen, but she was curiously unformed. Some of the other girls said openly ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... as it should, impresses us first, powerfully and irresistibly. While under Mark Lemon, Mr. Sambourne, as an artist, was still unformed. Under Shirley Brooks was awakened his wonderful inventive faculty. Under the regime of masterly inactivity—the happy policy of laissez faire—of Tom Taylor, the talent had burst forth into luxuriance, not to say exuberance. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the memory of his mother's tenderness. The father, though less sympathetic, was proud of his son's precocity, and apparently injudicious in stimulating the unformed intellect. The boy was almost a dwarf in size. When sixteen he grew ahead,[202] and was so feeble that he could scarcely drag himself upstairs. Attempts to teach him dancing failed from the extreme weakness of his knees.[203] He showed a taste for music, and could scrape a minuet on ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... design was confided to Louise when she was only seventeen, and her unformed mind easily absorbed her mother's silly ambition. It was a pity, for Louise Merrick possessed a nature sweet and lovable, as well as instinctively refined—a nature derived from her dead father and with little true sympathy with Mrs. Merrick's unscrupulous ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... the modern reader it is dull because he has at hand far better compendia; it is uninspired no doubt: the theme did not lend itself to enthusiastic treatment; the obscurity and awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be to take the poem more seriously than Vergil intended it to be when he wrote currente calamo. Yet we may say that on the whole the modulation of the verse, the treatment of the caesural pauses[7] ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... the owl not only tolerable but stimulating. I like to hear the pessimist really let himself go. It is the nameless and unformed fears of the mind that paralyse, but when my owl comes along and states the position at its blackest I begin to cheer up and feel defiant and combative. Is this the worst that can be said? Then let us see what the best is, and set about accomplishing it. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Mr. LOWELL presented the public with a volume of poems, which after being read and blamed and praised with a most bewildering variety of opinion, lived through it all, and remained as a permanent specimen of unformed but most promising genius. Modest however as the offering was, it was duly valued by discerning judges, not so much for its own ripe excellence, as for its appearing a happy token of something else. In the major part of the annual soarings into Cloud-land which ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... cultivated; with a mind in which nature and knowledge seem to struggle for the possession. One, Mr. Effingham, so little like the cold sophistication and heartlessness of Europe on the one hand, and the unformed girlishness of America, on the other; one, in short, so every way what the fondest father or the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... other men. In his ascetic face, in his large, light-blue eyes, in his extraordinary air of abstraction and aloofness from mundane things, there was something that fascinated and repelled; and with a wondering interest the boy studied these things, trying in his unformed way to reconcile them with his narrow ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... are formed, organised, and established for the attainment of various ends of felt value. The establishment of these systems of means is only possible because in the human infant the nervous system is relatively unformed at birth, is relatively plastic, and so is capable of being organised in such and such a definite manner. On the other hand, in many animals the nervous system of each is definitely formed at birth; it is so organised that experience does little to add ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... Pan dance secret in a glade, And, dancing, roll his eyes; these, where they fell, Shed glee, and through the congregated oaks A flying horror winged; while all the earth To the god's pregnant footing thrilled within. Or whiles, beside the sobbing stream, he breathed, In his clutched pipe unformed and wizard strains Divine yet brutal; which the forest heard, And thou, with awe; and far upon the plain The unthinking ploughman started and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to an etymological dictionary he meditated, I went into explanations with him of an easy process for simplifying the study of the Anglo-Saxon, and lessening the terrors and difficulties presented by it's rude alphabet, and unformed orthography. But this is a subject beyond the bounds of a letter, as it was beyond the bounds of a report to the legislature. Mr. Crofts died, I believe, before any progress was made in ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... hidden in a convent down in the West Country, not very far from Crailing, and after a while people came to believe that she, too, had perished in the revolution. It was only then that Max allowed her to emerge from the convent, and by that time she had grown from a young, unformed girl into a woman, so that there was little danger of her being recognised by any casual observer—or even by the agents of the ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... conscience, with her better self. She knew that a word from her, and his prison doors would open to a free world. Time and again this word had trembled on her lips unuttered. She knew also that it was not hate of North that kept her silent. It was an intangible, unformed, unthoughtout fear of what might follow after. North, she knew, was innocent; who then was guilty? She closed her eyes and shut her lips. That North would ultimately clear himself she never seriously doubted, and ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... a little note: she was to be in St. Louis on the fourteenth for a short time and hoped that he would call on her at the hotel. A perfectly proper, colorless little note, written in an unformed hand, with a word or two misspelled,—the kind of note that gave no indication of the writer, but seemed like the voice of a stranger. However, as Vickers reflected, literary skill, the power to write personal little notes did not go necessarily with a talent for music—or for life. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... her room sat down, staring in a sudden panic. She needed to search out a certain faded picture. It was almost with a sob that she noted the thin shoulders, the unformed jaw, the eye betokening pride rather than vigour, the brow indicative of petulance as much as sternness. Mary Ellen laid the picture to her cheek, saying again and again that she loved it still. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... the clearest evidence, that the actual cellular contents of the ovarian tubes, by the gland-like action of a modified portion of the continuous tube, passes into the cementing stuff: in fact cirripedes make glue out of their own unformed eggs! (33/6. On Darwin's mistake in this point see "Life and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it; an invisible hand is suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation Providence took an immediate share in the affairs ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... often been assured that it has only to take from works of Art already in existence the most consummate Beauty, and thus, as at a step, to reach the final goal. Have we not already the Excellent, the Perfect? How then should we return to the rudimentary and unformed? ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Finn's sticky mouth could open in a bleat of protest, the Master's hand had returned him to the warm dugs. Again came the harsh, suspicious nose of the foster about Finn's tail, and this time a low growl followed the resentful sniff, and blind, helpless, unformed little jelly that Finn was, instinct made him wriggle fearfully from under that cold nose. The language in which bitches speak to the very young among puppies is simplicity itself. The Master, human though ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... in her friendship with Elsie now flooded in upon her in a mighty wave of undefined emotion. She was immediately conscious only of the wasted figure before her, and its peril, but back of consciousness were unformed memories of their girlhood together, of the inseparable intimacy of their young womanhood, and of that shy and tender time when she had been the ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... where every grace and every talent of a finely gifted and fully cultivated mind seemed playing together with all the rich stores of the past and realities of the present. She knew, that in very style and formalities of execution, her own letters were imperfect and unformed. But she was equally sure that in time what was wrong in this kind would be made right; and she was not afraid to be found wrong, at all, for her own sake. It was because of somebody else, that she ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... and Geology; but the question is not what department of study contains the more wonderful facts, or promises the more brilliant discoveries, and which is in the higher and which in an inferior rank; but simply which out of all provides the most robust and invigorating discipline for the unformed mind. And I conceive it is as little disrespectful to Lord Bacon to prefer the Classics in this point of view to the sciences which have grown out of his philosophy as it would be disrespectful to St. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... irresistible and magical influence, calls up from the unknown abyss of the feelings new combinations of fancy, which, though vague and obscure, as those nebulae of light that astronomers have supposed to be the rudiments of unformed stars, afterwards become distinct and brilliant acquisitions. In a crowd, I am like the somnambulist in the highest degree of the luminous crisis, when it is said a new world is unfolded to his contemplation, wherein all things have an intimate affinity with the state of man, and ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... a little bunch of violets, dropped as the flowers had been removed from the coffin. Attached by a bit of white ribbon to their stalks was a tiny square of notepaper, and on this was written in the careful but unformed hand the doctor ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... hardy adventurer, to cultivate the rich plains discovered, and lay the nucleuses of the towns and cities, which were so soon, and so rapidly, to spring up; and then came the surveyor, to mark the boundaries of individual possessions and give civil shape and strength to the unformed mass, the speculator to impart a new activity and keenness to the minds of men, and the chivalrous and educated gentleman, to infuse into the crude materials here collected together, the feelings and sentiments ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... think that this was the busy hour in the fortress: the corridors rustled gently, the unformed whispering of voices echoed behind her. The walls seemed to open at a dozen spots as she walked on, and little men with bright, grave faces hurried past her about ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... were spinning up along the shining Mohawk, and still his eyelids would not close. In his waistcoat-pocket lay a bulky letter, the last of many in the same superscription—a prim, unformed, school-girlish hand—that had come to him during the last two years of his cadet life. Its predecessors, carefully wrapped and tied, were in the old trunk somewhere ahead among the baggage. In his hand again was the telegram that, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... multiplied by these writers on the borders of the Rhine. Poetry is the remembrance and anticipation of things: what it celebrates is not yet dead, and what it sings already hath existence. Poetry sang everywhere the unformed but impassioned hopes of the people. It is a sure augury—it is full of enthusiasm, for its voice is heard on all sides; science, poetry, history, philosophy, the stage, mysticism, the arts, the genius of Europe under every ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... at the thought that the letter might be from Fulvia; but on breaking the seal he read these words, scrawled in an unformed hand:— ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... loss of your brother! Do you know, I think it likely he may not be as much lost to you as if he had chosen a superior person. When the first fancy is over, such a young unformed thing as this cannot have by any means the influence that must belong to you. You will find him recurring ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dinner, Jasper and Mysie happened to be together in the drawing-room, and Mysie took the opportunity of showing her brother the different cuttings of poetry. The lines were smooth, and some had a certain swing in them such as Mysie, with an unformed taste, a love for Miss Hacket, and amazement that the words of a familiar acquaintance of her own should appear in print, genuinely admired. But the eyes of a youth exercised in 'chaffing' the productions of one of his fellow 'men' were infinitely more critical. Besides, what could be more shocking ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gave him a little brandy. He sat down, and they were obliged to leave him, or miss the cannonading and fireworks themselves. From his own river front Gaspard saw the old lion's, ship come to port, and, in unformed sentences, he reasoned then that a man need not leave his place to take ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... he remarked, easily. "Red, dirty, unformed, no hair.... This is a little redder, a little more dirty, a little more unformed; it has a little ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... same trick of smiling with her eyes when there was no mirth lurking in the corners of her full lips, the same full-throated little laugh that carried the faintest hint of mockery in its thrill. Year by year her slim body lost its unformed boyishness in a new soft roundness which her long outgrown skirt and too scant little waist failed completely to conceal. And the hillsfolk were given to shaking their heads over her now, just as the generation before had done, for to cap it all—the last straw upon ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... then living with me alone, perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her up at all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed fancies. ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... also nothing appear. As smoke points to fire, so appearance to being. So much seeming, so much indication of being. Things in themselves may be known mediately, though not immediately, by following out the indications of being contained by the given appearance. Further, not merely the unformed matter of cognition is given to us, but it is rather true that everything comes under this concept which experience so presses on us that we cannot resist it; hence not merely single sensations, but entire sensation-groups, not merely the matter, but also the forms of experience. If the latter ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... for Richard Shafer was only twenty and had just finished his second year in college. To Carola Brune, who was a year younger, he seemed perfect as a playmate, but she simply could not imagine him as a husband. He was too vague, unformed, boyish in his moods and caprices. She was a strong girl, with quick and powerful impulses in her nature, and she felt that she would need a strong man to hold her. What Richard was, what he would be, she could not clearly see. She loved to make ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... what a clumsy boor he was till their handsome, dark-faced Trevlyn cousin had come amongst them, with his earnest eyes, his graceful movements, and his slim, attractive person. Cuthbert's manners, that in fine society would have been called rustic and unformed, were a great advance on anything Cherry had seen in her own home, save in the person of Anthony Cole and his son. She admired him immensely, and he was rapidly becoming the sun and centre of her life; whilst Cuthbert, who had always been used to the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... instant the kernel is going to send forth the acrospire, and form itself into the future blade; it is again discovered perfect when the ear is labouring at its extrication, and hastening the production of the yet unformed kernels; in this it appears, the medium of nature's chemistry, equally employed by her in her mutation of the kernel into the blade, and her formation thus of other kernels, by which she effects the completion of that circle to which the operations of the vegetable ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... influence of the father is, at the outset, as great as that of the mother. The unhappy or immoral thoughts of one alone at the critical moment when life is imparted, may fix for eternity a foul blot upon a character yet unformed. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... scattered centres determined by peculiarly favorable conditions. For a long time they retain the impress, and seek to reproduce the forms, of the art of the mother country. But new conditions impose a new development. Maturing commerce with other lands brings in foreign influences, to which the still unformed colonial art is peculiarly susceptible. Only with political and commercial independence, fully developed internal resources, and a high national culture do the arts finally attain, as it were, their majority, and enter upon a ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... settled over the land, and then a rising moon flooded the country in its weird light. I had been on many a wild expedition before, but in some ways never a wilder than this. Its very uncertainty, wrapped as it was in unformed suspicions, gave it an air ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... some repose, though it was not to be a long one, the Infant caused them to arm a little ship, which he gave to Antam Gonsalvez, his chamberlain, a young captain, only charging him to load a cargo of skins and oil. For because his age was so unformed, and his authority of needs so slight, he laid all the lighter his commands upon him and looked for all the less ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Bill, who was the joker of the family, had essayed a jest or two at first on our strange predicament, but they had been poorly received. The discomfort was too serious, and the extraordinary nature of the visitation filled every mind with nameless forebodings and a great, unformed fear. ...
— The Cold Snap - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... easily slipped, and let Sally slip? Should I instantly drag her off to France like a proper chaperone? Then how could I explain to Anne—Anne would be heavy dragging with that lodestone of a yacht in the harbor. Or could we stay here as we had planned and not see Cary again? The unformed shapes of different questions and answers came dancing at me like a legion of imps as I lay with my head on the pillow and looked at Anne's confident, handsome face, and admired the freshness and cut of her pale blue ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... we have seen, was only seventeen, unformed and wild, full of youthful passion and social despair, on the verge of what we call prostitution; reckless, hopeless, with a deep touch of sullenness and hatred. She was working at the time in the house of one of Terry's brothers. ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... to the remote era when men's theories of things were yet unformed; and conceiving to ourselves the conquering chief as dimly figured in ancient myths, and poems, and ruins; we may see that all rules of conduct whatever spring from his will. Alike legislator and judge, all quarrels among his subjects are decided by him; and his words become ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... back over the interval. In the urgency of action, Diana's colour had hardly changed until now; now she turned deadly white, and for one instant sank on her knees by her bedside with her heart full of a mute, unformed prayer for help. It was fearful to go on, but she must go on now; she must see Evan; he was there; questions were done; and as she went down-stairs, while her face was white, and pain almost confused her senses, there was a stir of keen joy ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... I am confident your lordship is by this time of my opinion, and that you will look on those half-lines hereafter as the imperfect products of a hasty muse, like the frogs and serpents in the Nile, part of them kindled into life, and part a lump of unformed, unanimated mud. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... morality, since the latter is so dependent on the former. We want grander minds, and we must have grander bodies to contain them. And it all rests with us women. To us is confided the care of the little ones—of the young bodies and the young minds yet unformed. Ours will be the joy of success or the shame of failure, and we should fit ourselves for the task both morally and physically by the practice of every virtue, and by every art known to the science and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... he had the paper in his hand. His fingers shook as he unfolded it, and he felt angry at his weakness. Yes, there it was—the address—written in an unformed hand. If he had only thought of the paper before, he would have been saved a deal of trouble—would have had more sleep. He read it over several times—"Three forty-one, North Parker Street"—so that he would remember it, if ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... and in a way fascinating, there is evidence that Margaret was crude and unformed socially, due perhaps to the habit of considering her mother as a negligible quantity. Cambridge ladies preserved an unpleasant portrait of the child as she appeared at a grand reception given by Mr. Fuller to President Adams in 1826, "one ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... his tragedy, which was not executed with his rapidity of composition upon other occasions, but was slowly and painfully elaborated. A few days before his death, while burning a great mass of papers, he picked out from among them the original unformed sketch of this tragedy, in his own hand-writing, and gave it to Mr. Langton, by whose favour a copy of it is now in my possession. It contains fragments of the intended plot, and speeches for the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... wearying of each other? She had little trust in her own fascinations, though she saw the General's eye approvingly fixed on her, and believing herself to be a more pleasing object in her womanly bloom than in her unformed girlhood. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that the passing world—the world of action and achievement—seemed to me to be an unworthy world, and the world of thought to be the true and real world. It will thus be seen that I was young and my mind unformed." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... added, met in the smithy and swore fealty to the great cause. Lajeunesse, by virtue of his position in the parish, and his former military experience, was made a captain, and the others sergeants of companies yet unnamed and unformed. The limeburner was a dry, thin man of no particular stature, who coughed a little between his sentences, and had a habit, when not talking, of humming to himself, as if in apology for his silence. This humming had no sort of tune ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Very unformed," was her comment. "And now, Daisy, you may sit down there in the window and study the multiplication table. See how much of it you ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... New York, and there, with his honours thick upon him, he settled down to the quiet life of a small garrison. He had gone out to Mexico a second lieutenant; he had come back a field-officer. He had won a name in the army, and his native State had enrolled him amongst her heroes. He had gone out an unformed youth; he had come back a man and a proved leader of men. He had been known merely as an indefatigable student and a somewhat unsociable companion. He had come back with a reputation for daring courage, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... antique than the Greek statues and temples with their immortal youth. 'It is not the full-grown, articulated, thoroughly accomplished periods of the world that we regard with the pity or reverence due to age, so much as those imperfect, unformed, uncertain periods which seem to totter on the verge of non-existence, to shrink from the grasp of our feeble imagination, as they crawl out of, or retire into the womb of time, of which our utmost assurance is to doubt whether they ever were or not.' And then, as usual, he passes to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... afar off; but it has been there. After a quarrel, or with some strong sense upon him of irritation or discomfort arising out of the continuance of this life in his path, the man has brooded over the unformed desire to take it. "Though he should be hanged for it." With the entrance of the Punishment into his thoughts, the shadow of the fatal beam begins to attend—not on himself, but on the object of his hate. At every new temptation, it is ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... younger and slimmer and more childish than I had thought her, her bosom without its kerchief meagre or unformed, and her cheeks not painted either, but much burned by the July sun. Nor were her eyes black, as I had supposed, but a dark, clear grey with black lashes; and her unpowdered hair seemed to be a reddish-chestnut and scarce longer than my own, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... emotions she could not have named, which she would have declined to recognize, even had they presented themselves frankly to her. She had known, of course, of Duncan's love for her friend, but until this hour there had always existed an unformed, unrecognized doubt in the mind of Beatrice that it would ever ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... afternoon following graduation. Many, indeed the greater portion of the graduates, had left for their homes, or to pay visits to friends before joining their ships at the end of their month's leave, though some still lingered, their plans as yet unformed. ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... wreaths project outward from the parent mass, and become gradually lost in the surrounding space. This object remained for long a profound mystery; no telescope was capable of resolving it, nor was it known what this 'unformed fiery mist, the chaotic material of future suns,' was, until the spectroscope revealed that it consists of a stupendous mass of incandescent gases—nitrogen, hydrogen, and other elementary substances, occupying a region of space ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... come forth from slime and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
