"Vacillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "This vacillating policy," he swept on, "annoys me. For my part, I should like to see so firm a stand taken on all questions that in any part of the world, whenever a man, and wherever a man, said 'I am an Englishman? everybody else ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... creating. But was he right in abandoning Stafford? should he also have sacrificed wife, faith, and crown? If yes, then was he wholly in the wrong; if no, he was partly—for once at least—in the right. Vices, other than duplicity, he had none, as we use the word. He was vague, vacillating, obstinate, unable to lead or to be led; superstitious, heedful of omens; unsympathetic and reserved where he did not love; intolerant of opposition to his will. But he was a good husband, a good father, a good churchman—no man so good was ever ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... curious indecision mingled with his other emotions at this thought. His face grew serious. Lately he was developing a vacillating will; whenever he meditated any action with regard to Betty he had an inclination to defer it. He postponed a decision now; he would think it over again. Before he made up his mind on that question he wanted to enjoy her discomfiture and confusion ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... a surrender, or to provoke real warfare by reinforcing the place. In vain did the unfortunate Major Anderson seek distinct instructions; the replies which he received were contradictory and more obscure than Delphic oracles. This unfair, vacillating, and contemptible conduct indicated the desire to lay upon him alone the whole responsibility of the situation, with a politic and selfish reservation to the government of the advantage of disavowing and discrediting him, whatever he might do. On January 9 a futile effort ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... James most resembled was, we think, Claudius Caesar. Both had the same feeble vacillating temper, the same childishness, the same coarseness, the same poltroonery. Both were men of learning; bath wrote and spoke, not, indeed, well, but still in a manner in which it seems almost incredible that men so foolish should have written ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... beg, right in sight of them on the grass. They think I'm an earless freak, maybe. She told him that dear Peggy was growing into such a strong, splendid woman; that she'd been talking to her, and she thought the child would be able to give up her weak, vacillating lover with hardly a pang, because she realized that he was unworthy of her; that Peg had said she couldn't marry a man she didn't admire—and wasn't that noble of her? Noble, your grandmother—to give up a perfect lady like Harry Goward, when she's got a real man up her sleeve! I'd have made ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... freight. A large elderly man, dressed like a farmer, with an exaggerated straw hat shading a face that gripped my attention at once, was looking down at me. It was the face of a born commander; it struck me that I should like to have it cast in bronze to look at whenever a vacillating ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... philosophy of In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a "damned vacillating state." The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far from ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... related to political or spiritual matters, He invariably turned them against His opponents, and made them minister to the cause of truth and righteousness. Sometimes He stood single-handed against a multitude of foes, they were often vacillating, cowardly, and inconsistent with themselves; but not so the Saviour. With what authority did He rebuke their selfishness, their duplicity, their sin; and yet how confidently could He appeal to His ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... will—the will that turns inward upon the brain instead of passing out through hand or tongue. Wilson has this new will; the White House corroborates the results of the laboratory. To Roosevelt, Wilson seems weak and vacillating; but that is because T. R. knows nothing about the new will. T. R. has a primitive mind, but one of the most advanced type. In the T. R. brain, so to speak, will means set teeth, clenched ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... of his nerves, and then the old man, with his three male companions, divided themselves in such a manner as they thought would enable them to turn the head of the rushing column, should it chance to approach too nigh their position. By the vacillating movements of some fifty or a hundred bulls, that led the advance, it remained questionable, for many moments, what course they intended to pursue. But a tremendous and painful roar, which came from behind the cloud of dust that rose in the centre of the herd, and which was horridly answered by the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... been impossible under Richard II's vacillating government, the first Lancaster now undertook: in full agreement with the Estates he a few days after his accession announced to Convocation that he purposed to destroy heretics and heresies to the best of his power.[65] In the next Parliament a statute was drawn up in which relapsed ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Girondists, who were also known as Brissotins. Vergniaud certainly was far superior to him in oratory, but Brissot was quick, eager, impetuous, and a man of wide knowledge. But he was at the same time vacillating, and not qualified to struggle against the fierce energies roused by the events of the Revolution. His party fell before the Mountain; sentence of arrest was passed against the leading members of it on the 2nd of June 1793. Brissot attempted to escape ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon, being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for the first time, he ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... while the doctor chatted, watching her changes of countenance. Her conscience was vacillating. Could she interpret her oath of silence as leaving her free to speak of the convict's claim to Mrs. Prichard as a parent? The extenuation of bad faith would lie in the purely exceptional nature of the depository of her ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... to make the poem appeal to our emotions with an intensity which the beautiful lines alone could not effect. Ichabod we read once, but when we know the meaning of its spiritual name and remember that it is Whittier's indignant rebuke of Webster for his vacillating policy in the slavery agitation, we read it again with a renewed and more vivid interest. Many things, however, are so universal that one cares not whether they were written by a Hindoo or an American, whether they are full of personal experience or drawn with the fervor of the most ardent ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... picture of a comfortable assured home over her head, and the conviction that the editor of the 'Morning Breakfast Table' would be powerful for all things, brought new doubts to her mind. But she could not convince herself, and when at last she went to her bed her mind was still vacillating. The next morning she met Hetta at breakfast, and with assumed nonchalance asked a question about the man who was perhaps about to be her husband. 'Do ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... my solitude. But this suspicion was soon removed. Our opinions harmonised upon all essential points. To a noble mind, full of ardour and generous sentiment, undaunted by misfortune, he added the most clear and perfect faith in Christianity, while in me this had become vacillating and at ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... A vacillating gleam, thrown from the shop-window of a shoemaker, suddenly illuminated from the waist down the figure of the woman who was before the young man. Ah! surely, she alone had that swaying figure; she alone ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... ample cause that he was restless and disturbed; within the last three days he had by his own instability of purpose, and vacillating tastes and temper brought himself down from as enviable a position as well can be imagined, to one as insecure, unfortunate, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... necessities and his childish capacities for business. With a keen sense of the power displayed in "Don Juan," and even in more melodramatic works, Shelley had acquired a full knowledge of the singularly licentious training from which Byron had then scarcely emerged, and of the vacillating caprice which enfeebled all his actions. His own ability to grapple with practical affairs was very great; but he himself had scarcely formed a sufficient estimate of it. Determined to maintain a thorough equality and freedom with the noble bard in their social ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return. His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December, 1817, he had written from Marlow ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 343 Fleetwood. Lieutenant-General Charles Fleetwood was son-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, and for a time Lord-Deputy of Ireland. He was mainly instrumental in the resignation of Richard Cromwell, but so weak and vacillating that he lost favour with all parties. His name was excepted from the general amnesty, and it was only with great difficulty that, owing to the influence of Lord Litchfield, he escaped with his life. He died in obscurity at Stoke Newington, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... thought he had again merited so much of the duke's confidence as would obtain for him permission to remain undisturbed at Genoa. But the duke still retained his suspicions; for he could not believe that a vacillating defender of his own country's liberty would be faithful to himself; and Francesco Spinola resolved again to try his fortune, and if possible restore freedom to his country, and honorable safety for himself; for he was there was no probability of regaining the ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... to Dr. Barnes the writer says: "My health still improves. There is one peculiarity about my will-power; it is so vacillating, not reliable and firm as before. Still I feel that it ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... decided to introduce a Bill for general compulsion, and to get rid of the piece-meal treatment of recruiting to which the House had objected. Members were, I think, hardly prepared for the vigour with which the PRIME MINISTER turned upon his critics, reminding them that just the same denunciation of "vacillating statesmen" was current in the days of PITT. No doubt there had been blunders both in policy and strategy, but nevertheless the contribution of this Kingdom and this Empire to the common cause was growing steadily, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... arms should be of the worst description. He received in exchange a reinforcement of the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers of the Irish army. Avaux and De Rosen were both sent back to France by James; and thus, with but few officers, badly-equipped troops, and his own miserable and vacillating counsel, he commenced the war which ended so gloriously or so disastrously, according to the different opinions of the actors in the fatal drama. In July, 1690, some of James' party were defeated by the Williamites ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... caste," came slowly to a recognition of Lincoln's true quality. Motley, watching events from Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and associate upon the North American Review, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the editors of the North American showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in yielding to the spell of a new ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... reached the shady side of threescore years and ten must remember many Lord-Lieutenants—the pompously visible symbols of much vacillating misdirection. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... and loose; blow hot and cold &c. (caprice) 608. shuffle, palter, blink; trim. Adj. irresolute, infirm of purpose, double-minded, half-hearted; undecided, unresolved, undetermined; shilly-shally; fidgety, tremulous; hesitating &c. v.; off one's balance; at a loss &c. (uncertain) 475. vacillating &c. v.; unsteady &c. (changeable) 149; unsteadfast[obs3], fickle, without ballast; capricious &c. 608; volatile, frothy; light, lightsome, light-minded; giddy; fast and loose. weak, feeble-minded, frail; timid, wimpish, wimpy &c. 860; cowardly &c. 862; dough-faced [U.S.]; facile; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... be the king not only as crowned and by right, but by the approval and consent of the clergy and people of Scotland. A few months afterwards James, the Steward of Scotland, whose course had ever been vacillating, died, and his son Walter, a loyal Scotsman, succeeded him. He afterwards married the king's daughter Marjory, and became the founder of the ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... in other respects: any timid and vacillating course with them is sure to get you into trouble. One must strike out boldly, and not be disturbed by the curveting and shying; the valley you want lies squarely behind them, but farther off than you think, and if you do not go for it resolutely, you will ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... able rule, succeed in obtaining the Protectorate, and thus defeat his own insidious design to dethrone the legitimate Ts'i house. The wily Marquess of Ts'i thereupon—of course at the instigation of the intriguing "great families"—tried another tack, and succeeded at last in corrupting the vacillating Lu prince with presents of horses, racing chariots, and dancing women. Then it was (497) that Confucius set out disheartened on his travels. Recalled thirteen years later, he soon afterwards began to devote his remaining powers to the Annals so frequently ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... think," replied David hesitatingly, as though he could not quite understand what had happened after that. "You see, this friend of mine was not of the vacillating and irresolute sort. I had always given him credit for that—credit for being a man who would measure up to a situation. He was quite an athlete, and enjoyed boxing and fencing and swimming. If at any time in his life he could have conceived of a situation ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... provisions and with hides to make their lodges for the next season. This done, they were to send out a small independent war party against the enemy. Their final determination left us in some embarrassment. Should we go to La Bonte's Camp, it was not impossible that the other villages would prove as vacillating and indecisive as The Whirlwinds, and that no assembly whatever would take place. Our old companion Reynal had conceived a liking for us, or rather for our biscuit and coffee, and for the occasional small presents which we made him. He was ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the peace and quiet of the city. The leading men of the convention—King, Cutler, Hahn, and others —have been political agitators, and are bad men. I regret to say that the course of Governor Wells has been vacillating, and that during the late trouble he has shown very little of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... until it reached the spot where it expected to be joined by Colonel Smith's battalion, about fifty miles up Ham's Fork. The very next day snow fell to the depth of more than a foot. Disheartened, vacillating, and perplexed, Colonel Alexander called another council of war, and, acting on its judgment, resolved to retrace his steps. An express reached him that same day, from Colonel Smith, by which he was informed of the approach of Colonel Albert S. Johnston, of the Second Cavalry, who had been detailed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... intellect of past ages can be put in comparison for a moment. Let us next inquire what is the rank of our critics. Public taste, I believe, as far as it is the encourager and supporter of art has been the same in all ages,—a fitful and vacillating current of vague impression, perpetually liable to change, subject to epidemic desires, and agitated by infectious passion, the slave of fashion, and the fool of fancy, but yet always distinguishing with singular clearsightedness, between ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... middle course, if she was apt to regard with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance, it was not because she was unacquainted with other standards than her own, or had never seen another side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn, in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no especial need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile self-commiseration, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... was particularly sought after, and that orders were given to shew him no quarter. Certain it is that he was overtaken, and "sacrificed to the fears of Prieto, who justly considered him the sword and buckler of the irresolute and vacillating Freire." He was pronounced by an English traveller, as "the handsomest man he had ever seen in either hemisphere," and undoubtedly his tall, athletic, and beautifully proportioned person, his almost Herculean strength, the elegance of his manners, and his ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... steady his nerves a little. And when the moon went down and the day was slowly breaking, he took his way, with a vacillating intention and many a chilling doubt, along the winding road to the ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... who had been a friend of her late husband, removed into the palace of the Pharaohs, he made her advances, and the clever and decided woman knew how to make herself at first agreeable, and finally indispensable, to the vacillating man. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... another crack, and then—was it my own excited imagination—or the disturbing influence of the atmosphere—or the uncertain twilight of the chamber that produced before me, in the stygian darkness of the recess, the vacillating and indistinct outline of something luminous, and horrid? I would gladly have risked futurity to have looked elsewhere—I could not. My eyes were fixed—I was compelled to gaze steadily in front ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... little girl she was pretty. In any case, it is certain that she was spoiled when she was a little girl, and because she was delicate and selfish she received a good deal more attention and obedience from weak and vacillating elders ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... determined to be first of all the Caliph, the Imam-ul-Mussilmin, and to sacrifice all other interests to this. His education had been exclusively religious, and in his retirement he had lived a serious life, associating much with the Ulema, who, no doubt, pointed out to him the vacillating policy of his predecessors, and the danger that there was that the Caliphate and the empire would be lost together. He determined to strengthen his empire by restoring the influence of the Caliphate, and rallying the Mohammedan world ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Southern man back to his kinsmen, and divided the North itself into civil conflict. I have sought to guide and control public opinion into the ways on which depended our life. This rational flexibility of policy you and your fellow radicals have been pleased to call my vacillating imbecility." ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... necessarily stable, communicate themselves gradually from mind to mind, descending lower as they extend wider, until they leaven the whole lump, and rule by absolute authority, even where the grounds and reasons for them cannot be understood. On this gradual victory of what is consistent over what is vacillating, depends the reputation of all that is highest in art and literature. For It is an insult to what is really great in either, to suppose that it in any way addresses itself to mean or uncultivated faculties. It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... much altered since the death of my aunt; grief had given softness and a winning mildness to her manners, which had before been remarkable for vivacity. Nor was her residence at her mother's house of a nature to restore her gaiety. The poor woman was very vacillating in her repentance. She sometimes begged Justine to forgive her unkindness, but much oftener accused her of having caused the deaths of her brothers and sister. Perpetual fretting at length threw Madame Moritz into a decline, which at first increased her irritability, ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... General Lee's ancient family estate, on the Virginia shore of the Potomac, for a drill ground, took possession of recalcitrant Maryland, and made of all railroads entering the capital the highways and instruments of war. Winfield Scott, the old and vacillating general of the regular army, was quickly set aside, and the able General Irvin McDowell took his place. Thirty thousand troops moved slowly into Virginia under the pressure of public opinion stimulated by newspaper editors, ministers of the Gospel, and stiff-backed Republicans, ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... pressed forward, the retreating columns again formed into squares to permit stragglers to come up. The rattle of small-arms, the heavy peal of artillery, the earth-quake crash of cavalry, rose on every side, while the cheers which alternately told of the vacillating fortune of the fight rose amidst the wild pibroch ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... his mind to follow his friend Tartarin to the summit of Mont Blanc. Since two in the morning—it was now four by the president's repeater—the hapless courier had groped along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed, vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations extorted from him by his mishaps, for an avalanche was on the watch, and the slightest concussion, a mere vibration of the crystalline air, might send down its masses of snow and ice. To suffer ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... evening Mr. Count mustered all hands on the quarter-deck, and addressed us thus: "Men, Captain Slocum is dead, and, as a consequence, I command the ship. Behave yourself like men, not presuming upon kindness or imagining that I am a weak, vacillating old man with whom you can do as you like, and you will find in me a skipper who will do his duty by you as far as lies in his power, nor expect more from you than you ought to render. If, however, you DO try any tricks, remember that I am an old hand, equal ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... Armagh. This feat established him as the hero of the North. No army which Sussex could again gather together could be induced to risk the fate of its predecessor. The deputy was a poor soldier, feeble and vacillating in the field. He was no match for his fiery assailant; and after an attempt to get over the difficulty by suborning one Neil Grey to make away with the too successful Shane, he was reduced to the necessity of coming to terms. ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... who condemned the vacillating conduct of his allies, had already passed from Africa into Sicily, where he spent the following winter. In the early part of the year 1271, he set sail for Acre, where he landed at the head of only ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... a few moments speechless, vacillating between a purple rage and a pallid fear. Then he ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... First was a saint compared with his son Charles the Second can easily be shown. He was cool, courageous, diplomatic, regular in church attendance, gentle in his family relations. He was objectionable only in his official capacity. He was weak, vacillating and full of duplicity. It is absolutely true that cutting off his head did not increase the sum total of love, beauty, truth, kindness and virtue in the breast ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Fifth and sixth, a vacillating, staggering, decrepit creature with wildish white beard and eyes, who had been arrested—incredibly enough—for "rape." With him his son, a pleasant youth quiet of demeanour, inquisitive of nature, with whom we sometimes conversed on the subject of ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... time of her trial he basely deserted her. No, there is no excuse except that at the King's side there were many men jealous of the success and military glory of Jeanne, to whisper tales in his ear. He was a weak and vacillating creature, at the best, ready to follow the last person who talked to him, and he probably believed some of the stories told him ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... the bottom of a mine shaft in Siskiyou county, were all drowned by a rain-storm last Wednesday night. They had neglected their usual precaution of putting an umbrella over the mouth of the shaft. The man-who had always been vacillating in politics-was taken out ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... use—O senseless cataract, Bearing all down in thy precipitancy— And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows And mine is living blood: thou dost His will, The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know, Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall Linger with vacillating obedience, Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to— Since the good mother holds me still a child! Good mother is bad mother unto me! A worse were better; yet no worse would I. Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force To weary her ears with one continuous prayer, Until she let me fly ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... Queen's Wake" issued from his establishment in the spring of 1813. Its success was complete; two editions were speedily circulated, and the fame of the author was established. With the exception of the Eclectic Review, every periodical accorded its warmest approbation to the performance; and vacillating friends, who began to doubt the Shepherd's power of sustaining the character he had assumed as a poet and a man of letters, ceased to entertain their misgivings, and accorded the warmest tributes to his genius. A commendatory article in the Edinburgh Review, in November 1814, hailed the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... boiling point, its editor, the elder James Gordon Bennett, dubbed its three journalistic contemporaries in New York, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil—the World, representing human life with all its pomps and vanities; the Times, as a sheet as vacillating as the flesh; and the Tribune, as the virulent champion of abolition, the counterpart ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Thomas meant to retreat, why had he not retreated when a proposition to that effect was made to him at his own chambers? Of all the weak, vacillating, ill-conditioned men that Mr. Griffenbottom had ever been concerned with, Sir Thomas Underwood was the weakest, most vacillating, and most ill-conditioned. To have to sit in the same boat with such a man was the greatest misfortune that ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... expressed the general joy. And yet Francis Bernard was hardly a faithful representative of the proud imperial power for which he acted. He was a bad Governor, but he was not so bad as the cause he was obliged to uphold. He was arbitrary, but he was not so arbitrary as his instructions. He was vacillating, but he was not so vacillating as the Ministers. When he gave the conciliatory reply to the June town-meeting, it was judged that he lowered the national standard, and it seriously damaged him at Court; when he spoke in the imperial tone that characterized the British rule of that day, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... the guardian and guide of the moral practices of these things. He thought himself able to recall the erring metal to the path of metalline virtue, to lead the extravagant mineral back to the moral home-life from which it had been seduced, to show the doubting and vacillating salt what it was ignorantly seeking, and to help it to find the unrealised object of its search. The alchemist acted as a sort of conscience to the metals, minerals, salts, and other substances he submitted to the processes of ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... defence were relatively insignificant, and indecision and weakness were shown by Sir George Prevost, then commander-in-chief and governor-general—a well meaning man but wanting in ability as a military leader, who was also hampered by the vacillating counsels of the Liverpool administration, which did not believe in war until the province was actually invaded. It was fortunate for Canada that she had then at the head of the government in the upper province General Brock, who ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... Morning Herald of July 11th, 1833, correctly characterized it as "the oddest mixture of slander and truth, of knowledge and ignorance, of bold assertion and vacillating opinion." ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... march on Albania. Ramadan, that year, did not close until the new moon of July. Had Ali put himself boldly at the head of the movement which was beginning to stir throughout Greece, he might have baffled these vacillating projects, and possibly dealt a fatal blow to the Ottoman Empire. As far back as 1808, the Hydriotes had offered to recognise his son Veli, then Vizier of the Morea, as their Prince, and to support ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... vacillating. She picked up a few tiny pebbles and flung them in a handful at his door. Some spattered on the panes sharply; some dropped dully in the room. One clinked on the wash-hand bowl. There was no response. Beatrice was terribly excited. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... Poor foolish monarch, vacillating, vain, Decaying victim of a race of kings, Swift Destiny shook out her purple wings And caught him in their shadow; not again Could furtive plotting smear another stain Across his tarnished honour. Smoulderings Of sacrificial fires ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... processes Russia was to be brought into its new life, no one knew. Russia was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in the class of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second rank. Its monarch, Alexander II., humane and well-meaning, was irresolute and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid of all administrative and organising faculty himself, but so infirm of purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pass out of their sight, lest in the course of a single journey or a single interview he should ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the two great attractions to which he was exposed. Myrtle looked so immensely handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to meeting, for she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton was going to be the preacher, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... deep-rooted conviction that Sandy Morley owed him a great deal and that he was conferring a mighty honour upon the young man by accepting his hospitality. No doubt arose as to his right in sharing Sandy's home, but as time went on he did, as all weak and vacillating natures do, resent young Morley's strength of character, simplicity and capacity for winning to himself that which Lans felt belonged to him by inherent justice. It had been one thing to know that his Uncle Levi Markham had taken another young man and set him on ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... deal of attention has been excited by a letter from Mr. Bartholomew Szemere, one of Kossuth's former friends, and even a minister in the Hungarian revolutionary cabinet, charging him with cowardice, weakness, and a fatally irresolute and vacillating policy in the administration of affairs. Szemere also denies that Kossuth has any just right to call himself the Governor of Hungary, or even the leader of the Hungarian people. On the other hand, Mr. Vukovitch, who was also ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... incarnation of honesty; but I can find excuses for myself when I desire them, I hug my personal esteem too close, and a thousand to one I am too great a coward at heart to tell myself the naked truth. You, on the other hand, are vacillating and ill at your ease. You shrink from the hards of life which I steer happily through. But you have no delusions with yourself, and the odds are that when the time comes you may choose the "high that proved too high" and achieve ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... be close shaved. See me, with the eye of fancy, in the chill hours of the morning—say about a quarter to twelve, noon—see me awake! First thing of all, without one thought of the plausible but unsatisfactory small beer, or the healthful though insipid soda-water, I take the deadly razor in my vacillating grasp; I proceed to skate upon the margin of eternity. Stimulating thought! I bleed, perhaps, but with medicable wounds. The stubble reaped, I pass out of my chamber, calm but triumphant. To employ a hackneyed phrase, I would not call Lord Wellington my uncle! I, too, have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his translation given those references. His work is not therefore what the original is, a Chrestomathia of the best Arabian jurists—a succedaneum for their complete works—an illustration of Arabic legal literature. Again, he is often loose and vacillating in the use of the English words he has selected as corresponding to the technical phraseology of the Arabian jurists, and sometimes infelicitous in the selection of his English terms. It has occurred to ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... which brought about the downfall of Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only begins to shape itself ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... often attempted to limit the application of this principle. Protestants, as well as Catholics, have persecuted heretics. But while Catholics, in doing this, have been faithful to their own idea, and have therefore made of persecution a system, Protestants have been vacillating and undecided persecutors. They have been drawn in opposite directions by antagonist principles. Fundamentally, Protestantism, as such, claims for all the rights of private judgment, and is, therefore, in its whole ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... sitting in absolute darkness, judges these sensations, and sends out corresponding impulses to action. The sensory nerves are the brain's sole teachers; the motor nerves, and through them the muscles, are the brain's only servants. The untrained brain learns its lessons poorly, and its commands are vacillating and ineffective. In like manner, the brain which has been misued [Transcriber's note: misused?], shows its defects in ill-chosen actions—the actions against which Nature protests through her scourge of misery. In this fact, that nerve alteration ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... was vain of his accomplishments admits of no doubt. That he also sometimes lacked moral courage and was vacillating seems also true. But he was incorruptible in a corrupt age; above reproach when impure life was the rule; and when treason was common, he remained a firm patriot. His celebrated "Philippics" were delivered against practices which indicated ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... civil war ensued between the brother and sister, which lasted for twelve or fourteen years. Bertha, whose reputation was not much fairer than that of her mother Matilda, was succeeded by her son Conan IV.; he was young, and of a feeble, vacillating temper, and after struggling for a few years against the increasing power of his uncle Hoel, and his own rebellious barons, he called in the aid of that politic and ambitious monarch, Henry II. of England. This fatal step decided the fate ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... not be severe enough to punish him; he, knowing this, might escape. All this—this old query without answer went hurrying through her mind. But she was young; the spirit of adventure was in her. Henry Fenn, weak, vacillating, chivalrous, adoring Henry Fenn, had not conquered her; and the fire in her blood, and the ambition in her brain, came over her as a spell. She slipped to her knees, putting her head upon her lover's breast, and cried passionately in a guttural murmur—"Yes, I'll go first, Tom—now, for God's ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... withering in oblivion, or whose genius the critic has deterred from pursuing the career it had opened for itself! To have silenced the learned, and to have terrified the modest, is the barbarous triumph of a Hun or a Vandal; and the vaunted freedom of the literary republic departed from us when the vacillating public blindly consecrated the edicts of the demagogues of literature, whoever ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the United States had no power to coerce a State which should secede. A majority of his cabinet were southern men, three of them zealous secessionists. His most intimate friends in Congress were southerners. These surrounded the vacillating Chief Magistrate, and paralyzed what little energy was in him, meanwhile taking advantage of his inaction to launch the Confederacy. Now and then, spurred on by loyal old General Scott and by the Union members of his cabinet, the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... have safely trusted him now; but he had forfeited her confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home. Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her family on ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... that the measures of such a congress, when not vacillating, were weak. If the time demanded anything, that demand was the promptest organization of an army, with an immediate basis of foreign credit, to arm, equip and clothe it. Next to this was the urgent need for a simple and readily managed machinery in ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... an inarticulate growl, but turned away with Griffith as Lord James sprang up the verandah steps and blandly led the vacillating Resident Engineer into his quarters. The visiting engineers crossed over to the big ungainly bunkhouse, and entered the section divided off for the bosses and steel workers and the ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... matter himself. Had it been her own happiness that was in question, her own conduct, her own greatness, she would not have dreamed of having an opinion of her own. She would have consulted the Doctor, and simply have done as he directed. But all this was for her child, and in a vague, vacillating way she felt that for her child she ought to be ready with counsel ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... the act of writing, somewhat like that of the penmen of the Holy Scriptures. His readers may, however, be disposed to believe that herein he was self-deceived, judging both from the character of his composition and the nature of his doctrine. As respects the former, he writes feebly, is vacillating in his views, and, when watched in his treatment of a difficult point, is seen to be wavering and unsteady. As respects the latter, among other extraordinary things he teaches that the world is the chief angel or first son of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... day and several days thereafter he was held in prison by order of Colonel de Peyster. The commander seemed to be in a vacillating mood. Now he was despondent, and then he had spells of courage and energy. Henry heard through Holderness that the negotiations with Timmendiquas were not yet concluded, but that they were growing more favorable. A fresh ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Patty, entirely unmoved by this criticism; for she knew that she was vacillating and sometimes undecided, as compared to Patty's quick-witted grasp of a ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... receive the King into the Catholic Church. Charles, in terror of the Puritans, declared that it was a purely malicious invention, but none the less he continued to temporise, and the court to regulate its conscience according to his vacillating example. Some of the nobility were received into the Church, and among them Lord Boteler and Lady Newport. Mass was again said in the houses of the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... compeers, the gay "company of the hose;" but he thought life not made for pain, nor ugliness, nor hardness of any sort; he was bred to luxury, yet his intellectual inheritance made learning easy for him; he was many sided and vacillating, an exquisite in taste and the science of trifles. His affectionate nature, repressed and chilled, refused absolute subjection to that purpose which the elder Giustinian held relentlessly before him; he wished to live for himself a little, and not wholly for Venice. He was ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... vessel. Yet the speaker was a youngish, feminine-looking man of about thirty, notable for his beardlessness, in the crowded circle of bearded and moustachioed Californians, and had been one of the most absorbed of the enthusiastic audience. A weak smile of vacillating satisfaction and uneasiness played on his face during the plaudits of his fellow-admirers, as if he were alternately gratified and annoyed. It might have passed for a discriminating and truthful criticism of the performance, which was a classical burlesque, wherein ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... this, and had already marked down all his enemies for destruction. He well knew what aversion the Tsar had to anyone who spoke what was unwelcome. Weak and vacillating, His Majesty hated to be told the plain truth, and for that reason he was so constantly kept in the dark. Even his loyal Ministers knew that by being outspoken they would be seeking dismissal. Indeed, with Rasputin's clever intriguing, Kokovtsov, ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... Remember the misery we were suffering but a short time since, and from which the idea of this raft at once relieved us. Measures of precaution, however irksome, should always be adopted. It is only the slothful and vacillating who ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... never committed himself to a position of the security of which he was not sure; and he carried this spirit of caution to such an extremity that many of the early years of his reign present a succession of timid and vacillating movements, that more nearly resemble the subterfuges of a coward than the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... he loses self-control. His observing coolness escapes; something in his brain explodes, and carries everything far, far away. Hazard and accident have a good share in Monsieur de Balzac's best production. He has his own manner, but vacillating, fidgety, often seeking to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... in: but my Letter must wait till I return to Woodbridge, where your Address is on record. I have thought several times of writing to you since this Year began; but I have been in a muddle—leaving my old Markethill Lodgings, and vacillating between my own rather lonely Chateau, and this Place, where some Nieces are. I had wished to tell you what I know of our dear Donne: who Mowbray says gets on still. I suppose he will never be so strong again. Laurence wrote me that he had ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... reverence resulted from her husband's vacillating viewpoint, the doctor could not fathom. More than a little, he surmised. Had Brenton never wavered in his theology, Kathryn would have clung like a limpet to the bed-rock of her congenital Baptist faith. And yet, the doctor could not hold Brenton ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... of Poland was an outrage upon the Polish people, but it was largely dictated by an entirely honest desire to settle a dangerous possibility. It seemed less injurious than the possibility of a vacillating, independent Poland playing off one neighbour against another. That possibility will still be present in the minds of the diplomatists who will determine the settlement after the war. Until the Poles make up their minds, and either convince the Russians that they are on the side ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... doing no great violence to common sense to persuade himself into all its usually admitted consequences." Then, again, would interpose his recollections of Bluewater's integrity and simplicity of character, to reassure him, and give him more cheering hopes for the result. Finding himself thus vacillating between hope and dread, the commander-in-chief determined to drive the matter temporarily from his mind, by bestowing his attention on the part of the fleet he had with him. Just as this wise resolution was formed, both Greenly and Wycherly appeared ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the rabble, vacillating, fool citizens said, "None, Brutus, none," and continue to ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... for the distant future, and every moment balancing in her mind what she should do the next, she nevertheless pushed on ten miles farther southward, to the royal palace of Fontainebleau, and found herself not far from half the way to Orleans. But change of place brought the vacillating queen mother no nearer to a decision. Soubise, the last of the avowed Protestants to leave her, still dreamed he might succeed in persuading her. Day after day, in company with Chancellor L'Hospital, the Huguenot leader spent two or three hours alone with her in ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... necessarily resolved itself into one or the other of these two principles—strict obedience, rigidly enforced by punishment; or a vacillating policy of petting and scolding, leading to moral confusion—there could be little hesitation in deciding which would be apt to give better results in the formation of character. The old way, if somewhat ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... upon the holy things that are above their natural inclination, and will make it certain that their reach shall not be beyond their grasp, as, alas! it so often is in the sadness and disappointments of human love. He will come into that feeble, vacillating, wayward will of yours, that is only obstinate in its adherence to the low and the evil, as some foul creature, that one may try to wrench away, digs its claws into corruption and holds on by that. He will lift your will and make it fix upon the good and abominate the evil, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... went on, "is why you interest yourself in as vain and shallow and vacillating a woman as I am. You don't care for my looks—and that's all there ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... of a background of interminable bickerings. There was constant quarreling between the factions within the English church, and between the Protestants and the Catholics, complicated by the discontent of the people and at times the nobles because of the autocratic, vacillating ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the wrong with regard to Beauclerk," she continued quietly. "That is merely fair to him. Every one shall know that I have been weak and vacillating. May God forgive me and humble me—for I shall not be understood, even by many good people. But the next worst thing to making an error is to abide by it. Dear David, try to follow my feeling. It has all passed in my mind in such a way that it is impossible ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... While Congress was vacillating between non-intercourse and partial non-intercourse, in the early months of 1810, with a strong inclination toward the path of least resistance, one voice was raised for war. Henry Clay was then filling out an unexpired term in the Senate upon appointment by the Governor of Kentucky. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... successes of the Austrians on the other hand what they may, their whole supply of stores and provisions comes from Trieste, across the Adriatic to the Po, and when this is cut off [as by our uncovering the sea it must be], they must retire." Above all he grieves for Naples. If a weak and vacillating ally, there was no doubt her heart was with them. "I feel more than all for Naples. The King of Naples is a greater sacrifice than Corsica. If he has been induced to keep off the peace, and perhaps engaged in the war again by the expectation of the continuance of the fleet ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... much on the order and connections of things as on the changing dispositions of the mind. They have a very marked subjective character. Some depend on the intellectual factor; the most usual are based on chance, on distant and vacillating analogies—further down, even on assonance and alliteration. Others depend on the affective factor and are ruled by the disposition of the moment: association by contrast, especially those alike in emotional basis, which have been previously studied. (First ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... deeds, and in her place would do the like. The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy; and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... hopes on the propitious star of Prussia," exclaimed Schill, enthusiastically, "on the future, on the wrath and grief which will awake now in all Prussian hearts, arousing the sluggards, strengthening the vacillating, and urging the timid. I base my hopes on the tears of Queen Louisa, which will move Heaven to help us and awaken avengers on earth. And, for ourselves, comrade, with our wounds, with our disgrace, we must be like the spirits of vengeance ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... and despairing to think that women should be helpless—that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a man," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and, following her, laid them against the wall at the side of the basement-steps, and sat down heavily beside her. He was a sickly-looking man, sandy-haired, with a depressed and shifty expression of face—not vicious, but weak and vacillating. Baubie seemed to have the upper hand altogether: every gesture showed it. She opened the paper that was wrapped about her fragment of rank yellow cheese, laid it down on the step between them, and then produced, in their order of precedence, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... of Monsieur Darzac. They slowly passed along the wall abutting on the Avenue Marigny. I took the central alley, walking parallel with them, and then crossed over for the purpose of getting nearer to them. The night was dark, and the grass deadened the sound of my steps. They had stopped under the vacillating light of a gas jet and appeared to be both bending over a paper held by Mademoiselle Stangerson, reading something which deeply interested them. I stopped ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... the English; the other was connected with the French party through his brother-in-law, King Charles, and with the Burgundian party through his father-in-law, the Duke of Lorraine. No wonder the fealty of the townsfolk was somewhat vacillating; downtrodden by men-at-arms, forever taken and retaken, red caps and white caps alternately ran the danger of being cast into the river. The Burgundians set fire to the houses, pillaged the churches, chastised ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... and made him tremble for the consequences to himself. He evidently believed that Agnes knew more about him than he thought. Or perhaps it was that mysterious influence which a positive mind in motion—like Miss Arnold's—wields over a vacillating temperament ...
— Angel Agnes - The Heroine of the Yellow Fever Plague in Shreveport • Wesley Bradshaw
... obliterate all traces of the disgrace. Even if she should not ultimately marry the Jew, it would be known that she had been engaged to a Jew,—and then it would certainly be said afterwards that the Jew had jilted her. She was thus vacillating in her mind, not knowing whether to go on with Brehgert or to abandon him. That evening Lady Pomona retired immediately after dinner, being 'far from well.' It was of course known to them all that Mr Brehgert was her ailment. She was accompanied by her ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... pretty, but Marion had associated with her intimately for two or three years, and had discovered qualities in her that mere acquaintances could never have discovered. She had found Helen apparently to be possessed of a strong, direct conception of integrity, never vacillating in manner or sympathies. Moreover, she exhibited a quiet, unwavering capability in her work that always commanded the respect, and occasionally the admiration, of both ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... had forced resolution on Dutton's vacillating mind. "That settles it," he soliloquised. "She is far too nice to be deceived. I know Kate won't let me off to-morrow, but I will have it out with my uncle directly I come back, and go to London ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... being so frightened, and why are we abandoning our good and gallant Fatherland to such rabble and implanting feelings of hatred and shame in all our subjects? What are we scared at and of whom are we afraid? I am not to blame that the Minister is vacillating, a coward, dense, dilatory, and has all bad qualities. The whole army bewails it and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... carelessness which proved ruinous in the long run. It was fortunate for Elizabeth that of the two necessary figure-heads for any conspiracy, Mary and Norfolk, one was more than half-believed even by her own party to be stained by the grossest crimes, while the other was nerveless and vacillating. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... have become an obsession—their weakness. They are thorough Frenchmen and their critical sense must be unbridled. They love their ideas and their systems. They would doubtless not hesitate to advise Foch. Personally, if I were Foch, I should turn a deaf ear. But if I were a timid, vacillating, pessimistic spirit, still in doubt as to the final outcome, I should most certainly seat myself at a neighbouring table and listen to their conversation that I might come away imbued with a little of their patience, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... of the fixity of species,[10] went the length of admitting (in 1762) that new species might arise by inter-crossing. Buffon's position among the pioneers of the evolution-doctrine is weakened by his habit of vacillating between his own conclusions and the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne, but there is no doubt that he had firm grasp of the general idea of ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... that he has done anything of the kind," said Mr. Wharton, who was vacillating between different opinions. He did in his heart believe that the Portuguese whom he so hated had saved his son from the thieves, and he also had almost come to the conviction that he must give his daughter to the man,—but at the same time ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... King gave her apart from the crowded gallery, when she is supposed to have revealed to him a secret known only to himself, his whole manner changed, and from that moment Joan exercised a strong influence over the man, all-vacillating as was his character. It has never been known what words actually passed in this private interview between the pair, but the subject probably was connected with a doubt that had long tortured the mind of the King—namely, whether he were legitimately ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... for a moment between them. Sidney, to tell the truth, was obsessed by a vision of Joe, young and hot-eyed, being haled to the police station by virtue of his betrothal responsibilities. The boy was vacillating between relief at having spoken and a heaviness of spirit that came from ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and, holding a quivering candle, with her finger to her mouth, there appeared his aunt. He looked at her coldly as she came across the room towards him. He had never felt any affection for her because she had always seemed to him weak and useless—a frightened, miserable, vacillating, negative person—even when he had been a very small boy he had despised her. Her eyes were red and swollen with crying, her grey and scanty hair had fallen about her collar, her old black blouse was unbuttoned at the top showing her bony ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... songs that were popular just before and during the war attest the vacillating temper of the people. Joyous airs were at first heard, these growing contemptuous and defiant as the struggle approached, then stirring war songs and hymns of encouragement. But as sorrow followed sorrow until all were stricken; as wounds, sickness, imprisonment, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... feeling became acute when he remembered that he had absolutely nothing on hand to eat. He hastened to saddle up. As he was about to mount he paused to look uncertainly up the trail on which he had thrown away the cigarettes. While he stood vacillating, his hand went to his hip pocket and drew out the silver-cased brandy flask. He looked at it, and its emptiness reminded him that he was thirsty. He went down to the pool for a drink. Having filled his flask, he returned up the bank and sprang ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... were the "President," Commodore Richard Dale; "Philadelphia," Capt. Barron; "Essex," Capt. Bainbridge; and the schooner "Enterprise," Lieut.-Commandant Sterrett. Though the fleet in itself was powerful, the commodore was hampered by the timid and vacillating instructions of Congress. War had not been actually declared, and he was therefore to commit no overt act of hostility. The vessels of the fleet were to be employed simply to convoy American merchantmen in and out of the Mediterranean ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... conscious of the incompleteness and vainly struggling for a more virile term. It is a clever woman who can fill out the many weak places in an inefficient man, by her own indomitability, re-enforce his vacillating nature, infuse her ambitious soul into his, and spur him on to great achievements. And it is indeed a very clever and tactful woman who can do all this, and do it so subtly that the man receives all the credit and believes in his inmost ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... which, in his capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists mar the effect of their work—and among these Thackeray is notable—by adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating. Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... father who had led his child into distress by holding before her her sinful condition, could offer any genuine comfort. Miss Earle has summarized with briefness and force the results of such training: "A frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father sadly wrote, 'God has delivered ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... the country just continued to pin their faith to the printed declarations of their oracles, while Grimes kept up the delusion of sincerity by every now and then fulminating a tremendous denunciation against his trimming, vacillating, inconsistent opponent on the Tuesday, and then retaliating with equal vigour upon himself on the Saturday. He wrote his own 'leaders,' both Whig and Tory, the arguments of one side pointing out answers for the other. Sometimes he led the way for a triumphant refutal, while the general ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... child-love. It is love with anxiety and trouble, a consuming flame, a burning passion; love which wastes itself like rain-drops upon the hot sand; love which is a longing, not a sacrifice; love which says "Wilt thou be mine," not love which says, "I must be thine." It is a most selfish, vacillating love. And this is the love which poets sing and in which young men and maidens believe; a fire which burns up and down, yet does not warm, and leaves nothing behind but smoke and ashes. All of us at some period of life have believed that ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... one bound passed the portico, he traversed the house, and rushed with swift but vacillating steps, and muttering audibly to himself, down the starlit streets. The direful potion burnt like fire in his veins, for its effect was made, perhaps, still more sudden from the wine he had drunk previously. Used to the excesses of nocturnal revellers, the citizens, with smiles and winks, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... which quickly runs through all the possible changes; or is this exercise, even while it lasts, so delightful to a man who has a variety of intellectual occupations, as it frequently appears to him who knows scarcely any other species of mental activity? The vacillating state of mind, peculiar to hope and fear, is by no means favourable to industry; half our time is generally consumed in speculating upon the reward, instead of earning it, whenever the value of that reward is not precisely ascertainable. In all occupations, where ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so? But I knew in my heart that the matter was already decided. I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street, and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the papers. But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had me in its grip. Annoyed, and with a sense of chagrin, I hurried to ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... glimmers whenever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of Nature, on our origin, and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light, feeble and vacillating, but which, none the less, pierces the darkness of the night in which the Intellect leaves us." [Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... vacillating between two impulses, take yourself at once in hand, decide upon the preferable course, and go ahead. Dominate your astrological tendencies, do not be dominated by them. Dominate your weaknesses as exhibited by ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... courage apart from you; no courage and no hope. Ask me to come!—a stranger with no history, no mockery, no miserable rant of a grave and darkness and fear behind me. Are we not all haunted—every one? That forgotten, and the fool I was, and the vacillating, and the pretence—oh, how it all sweeps clear before me; without a will, without a hope or glimpse or whisper of courage. Be just the memory of my mother, the face, the friend I've never seen; the voice that every dream leaves echoing. Ask me ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... and temper of his weapons. For a critical antagonist, Edwards is admirable, his use of language being far from precise and consistent, and his definitions and statements, through his extreme wariness, being vague and vacillating enough to allow abundant material for comment. Of these advantages Mr. Hazard knows how to avail himself, and shows not a little acuteness in exposing the untenable positions and the inconsequent reasoning of the New-England dialectician. The most ingenious of the chapters upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Marquis, she almost disdains herself for hesitating to prefer him to Clermont. Her life is the tragedy of a soul too indolent to swim against the current of events. Mrs. Haywood managed to give extraordinary vividness and consistency to the character of the vacillating Henrietta by making the plot depend almost entirely upon the indecision of the heroine. Consequently none of the author's women are as sharply defined as this weak, pleasure-loving French girl. The character drawing, though ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... back to London from France on October 20th, the Cabinet was still vacillating as ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... (the 27th of May) the bank stopped payment in specie. Law and D'Argenson were both dismissed from the ministry. The weak, vacillating, and cowardly Regent threw the blame of all the mischief upon Law, who, upon presenting himself at the Palais Royal, was refused admitance. At nightfall, however, he was sent for, and admitted into ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... conduct,—which neither rendered the present intelligible nor satisfactory, and left the future uncertain,—could not be that of noble souls and lofty intellects; and that he could not be the God of truth who had dictated, in the midst of thunder, his vacillating will, and had called to the performance of his narrow wishes the slaves of a vulgar terror. Always conversant with himself, Samuel, who had spoken what he thought, now performed what he had spoken; and, a year after his ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... opportunity for Louis to complete the conquest of his vacillating cousin whose allegiance was so vital to his plans of aggrandisement. Louise should go to Whitehall to play the part of beautiful spy on Charles, and, by her favours, to make him a pliant tool in the hand of ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... it belonged to her, and that she had lost it in the car. Of course, I had to give it up." After vacillating in delicate hesitation she went on. "I did n't mind losing the ring so very much, since it was really hers, but I was a little hurt that you did ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... some great central truths at its very core, continually working outward through all the great arterial ramifications of society, keeping up a brisk and healthy circulation by the force of its own eternal energy. Lack of a noble purpose, in nations as well as individuals, begets a vacillating policy, which is inevitably followed by degeneration and corruption. The soldier, who has passed many a weary month in the monotony of the camp, enduring all the hardships of rigorous winters and scorching summers, of fatigue ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... forward to the intimacy of three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf |
