"Bewildering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well as I've thought I've know you, I find that I've never known you at all. You're a creature of bewildering transitions. I hear that you're ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision—a moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... had an intention of saying (and had been studying the best form of words for three miles) that I thought them beautiful before I saw them so near HER. But I couldn't manage it. She was too bewildering. To see her lay the flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power of language in a feeble ecstasy. I wonder I didn't say, 'Kill me, if you have a heart, Miss Mills. Let ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... that your festival is over, I wish I could have overcome my scruples and apprehensions. It is hard to say—when kind people press one to 'just speak for a minute'—that the business, so easy to almost anybody, is too bewildering for oneself. Ever ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... you. The one I have on has been admired by everybody. Even Ann Woolper this morning, when I was going into the butcher's book with her—for I insist upon going into the butcher's book with her weekly, whether she likes it or not; though the way that man puts down the items is so bewildering that I feel myself a perfect baby in her hands,—even Ann admired it, and said how young-looking it is. And then she brought up the time in Fitzgeorge Street, and poor Tom's illness, and almost upset me for the rest of the day. And now, dear, let ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... statement that helped Le Chapelier at last to understand, at least in part, this bewildering change in Andre-Louis, which rendered him faithless to ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... boy!" she cried, with a bewildering laugh, of delight and pride. "I hate people all prim and circumspect, and you—You'd have flown back there straight at him, before my—before all the others. That's why I like you so!—But you must leave that horrid, lying fellow ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... came to his senses he found himself in a most bewildering position. He was lying face downwards along a log, his mouth pressed upon the rough bark. His arms and legs were in the water, on either side of the log. Other logs moved past him sluggishly. For a moment he thought himself still in the grip of his nightmare, and he struggled to wake himself. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... striking things to say. Instead of learning from the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from Klopstock; and what he had learned was to pose and philosophize and invest fictitious sentiment with a maze of bewildering and far-fetched imagery. Then he had lost sympathy with Klopstock's religiosity, had acquired a better opinion of the things of sense, and had had his introduction to doubt and disgust and rebellion. When now these moods sought expression in verse, the verse took the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... sunlit clouds was warm above. They rose toward it, until, high over the buildings' tallest spires, there spread on every hand the bewildering beauty of that forest of minarets and sloping roofs and towers, whose many facets made glorious blendings of soft color. Aircraft at many levels swept in uniform directions throughout the sky. The ship they were in hung quiet for a time, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... institutions. (As if American institutions needed sympathy!) And some of the more generous-minded among us are writing books showing our duty to the struggling young nationalities of Europe. It is bewildering to be confronted by all these problems, each demanding ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... possibility of an innocent double life, without which existence would have been too savourless for Eileen. Even a single line of railway always appeared dismal to her; she liked the great junctions with their bewildering intertanglements, their possibilities of collision. And now that Lieutenant Doherty had faded away into Afghanistan and silence—he did not even acknowledge the letter announcing her approaching marriage—Robert ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of these various instruments, the orchestra, the shouting, the 'scratchers,' and the dancing, is perfectly bewildering. The dancing, itself, beggars description—every figure lasts about an hour, and the ladies bounce up and down the middle, with a degree of spirit which is quite indescribable. As to the gentlemen, they stamp their feet against the ground, every ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Still the bewildering strains of the music came to our ears, and yet we stood there unperceived, though in the full glare ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... fifty leagues of coastline similar to that which confronts us. In this stretch there are at least a hundred mouths, connected one with the other by thousands of cross channels. The whole delta is a bewildering maze of waterways. Some of these are deep enough to carry our ship well into the country; others are too shallow to float a ship's boat. Moreover, the guide says that he has had a free passage up a channel on one ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... away brusquely from his side and climbed upon his stool. In the first forward surge of people towards him, Razumov expected to be torn to pieces, but they fell back without touching him, and nothing came of it but noise. It was bewildering. His head ached terribly. In the confused uproar he made out several times the name of Peter Ivanovitch, the word "judgement," and the phrase, "But this is a confession," uttered by somebody in a desperate shriek. In the midst of the tumult, a young man, younger than ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... as anyone need wish for, showing the author to have made a notable advance in his art. Again the setting is Wild West, on the Mexican border, the theme of the tale being the outrages inflicted upon American citizens by VILLA, and what seemed then the bewildering delay of Washington over the vindication of the flag. The "Alley" of its unfortunate name is the slum in Kansas City where Dave, stranded on his way westward, met the girl to whom the laws of fiction were inevitably to join him. I fancy that one of Mr. CULLEY'S difficulties ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... of the real business was the huge marble soda fountain, with its bewildering array of gaudy silver-plated faucets. Above the rows of bottled "bitters," the fiery drink of the temperance frauds, high over the three score jars of "nervines" and pick-me-up preparations, towered a life-size marble statue of Hygeia, glowing in a ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... shot full of splinters of gold which the natives had not taken the trouble to recover. This quartz was of a terrific hardness and was used in building, paving, and public works generally. The effect was bewildering. It was a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... become very dear.... Ill and weary, all his nerves smarting with terrific fatigue, as the eyes smart before tears, and yet her ministering had made him a little boy again.... His eyelids were shut and he was happy. It was a bewildering sense, so long had he been, and so far, from a moment like this. His immortal heroine was close once more—she of the answered questions and the healing arms. So real was it, that he thought this ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... knocked away; all her assumptions were found baseless; her defences had been erected against nothing; her fears and her hopes were alike come to nought. That is, bien entendu, her old fears and her old hopes; and amid the ruins of the latter new ones were starting, in equally bewildering confusion. Like little green heads of daffodils pushing up above the frozen ground, and fair blossoms of hepatica opening beneath a concealing mat of dead leaves. Ah, they would blossom freely by and by; now Lois hardly knew where they ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... "Stand back, bewildering politics! I've placed my fences round; Pass on, with all your party tricks, Nor tread my holy ground. Stand back—I'm weary of your talk, Your squabbles, and your hate: You cannot enter in this walk— I've closed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... untrammelled and uninterfered with; and it appeared as though in the riotous delight of her creative powers she had put forth all her energies in the production of strange and curious shapes and bewildering combinations of the richest and most dazzling colours. True, the water of the creek, which in consequence of the sheltering height of the bordering vegetation was glassy smooth, was so fully charged with mud and soil held ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... but its murmur had the sweep of the eternal breath, while, when it waxed in power, it rose like the swell of some great cosmic organ. Through the pines and in the underbrush it whispered and crackled and crashed, with a variety of effect strangely bewildering to the young man's city-nurtured senses. There were minutes when he felt that not only the four country constables whom he had escaped were about to burst upon him, but that weird armies of gnomes were ready to ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... confusion, and blazed also through unbroken expanses of limpid glass of yet larger dimensions than the doors. Silks, laces, Cashmere shawls, damask, heavy and sumptuous velvets of bright colors, and fit for a queen's train, muslins of bewildering beauty, dresses at L200 a piece, and handkerchiefs of Manilla of almost fabulous value. The interior presented similar displays on all sides, multiplied by reflections from broad mirrors, gleaming among marble columns. Perhaps those numerous mirrors were intended ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... carriage together, with nobody but my two little pupils for our companions. We gave the coachman his orders, and drove round by St. Crux. The moment Miss Garth mentioned her name we were let in, and shown all over the house. I don't know how to describe it to you. It is the most bewildering place I ever saw ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... to and from the water. In a dazed, wondering way he sought to follow them, eventually finding where a single line of tracks led directly toward a clump of trees to his left. At the edge of this he found a confusion of bewildering barefoot moulds, mixed with others unquestionably made by a shoe on the foot of a civilized person. Hurrying through the trees, fearful that savages had attacked Lady Tennys at this place, he was suddenly confronted by a spectacle that ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... very mad object on the part of both. But they were not gratuitously gone into, on the part of England; far from that. England undertook them, with its big heart very sorrowful, strange spectralities bewildering it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a gloomy solidity of purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the whole, with a depth of stupidity, which were very great. Yet look at the respective net results. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... She was glad to have her mind relieved from the waterfalls, but she had rather have been quite alone with her husband. She knew that Lord and Lady Keith had taken a house at Littleworthy, while Gowanbrae was under repair, and she dreaded the return to the bewildering world, before even the first month was over; but Alick made the proposal so eagerly that she could not help assenting with all the cordiality she could muster, thinking that it must be a wretched, disappointing wedding tour for him, and she would at least not prevent his being happy with ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... honey-dew, may often be found in the hollows of the immense petals, in search of which large black ants make pilgrimages from the root to the top of the largest tulip-trees, patiently toiling for two or three hours over the rough bark, among the bewildering wrinkles of which it is, a wonder how the way is kept with such unerring certainty. I have calculated that in making such a journey the ant does what is equivalent to a man's pedestrian tour from New York City to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... 'unconventional style and the boyish enjoyment of his pastime'—to use Lord Desborough's words—which were characteristic of Sir Charles. His mischievous attempts to distract his adversary's attention, his sudden drops to the ground and bewildering recoveries, his delight at the success of his feints, and contagious merriment, must have gained the sympathy of even the most formal fencer. Many stories of these bouts are told. One is that, having driven an antagonist from the terrace into the Garden Room, into which he was followed by his favourite ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Mr. Walters. Fleeing from the bewildering flood of technicalities and profanity of the three chauffeurs, he made his way direct to Sir Lyster's room. Here he told his tale, and was instructed instantly to telephone ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... I can't convey in words an idea of this apparition, drawn as it seemed in black and white, venerable, bloodless, fiery-eyed, with its singular look of power, and an expression so bewildering—was it derision, or anguish, or cruelty, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... door or entrance. Watson had said of the Rhamda, "Sometimes you see him, sometimes you don't." It is so with the Nervina. I remember only my working at the data and the sudden movement of a hand upon my desk—a girl's hand. It was bewildering. I looked up. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... read it wrongly, shows clearly that there was once a time in the history of the Earth when the only backboned animals were Fishes. Ages passed, and there evolved Amphibians, with fingers and toes, scrambling on to dry land. Ages passed, and there evolved Reptiles, in bewildering profusion. There were fish-lizards and sea-serpents, terrestrial dragons and flying dragons, a prolific and varied stock. From the terrestrial Dinosaurs it seems that Birds and Mammals arose. In succeeding ages there evolved all the variety of Birds and all the variety ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... for the range or the remoter forest. Weston, however, could not see them, and it was, indeed, a few seconds before he saw anything except a confused glimmering behind a dusky pall of vapor. Then, as the smoke thinned, a bewildering glare shot up, and ranks of trees were silhouetted against a sea of fire that flung itself upon the rearmost of them and ran aloft from spray to spray, while the snapping of the smaller branches resembled volleys of riflery. After that the smoke drove ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... was at least deemed unfit to exercise them. A land of enchantment have I been led into, and spells have been cast around me—every one has met me in disguise—every one has spoken to me in parables—I have been like one who walks in a weary and bewildering dream; and now you blame me that I have not the sense, and judgment, and steadiness of a waking, and a disenchanted, and a reasonable man, who knows what he is doing, and wherefore he does it. If one must walk with masks and spectres, who waft themselves from place ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... identity, and seemed to be waking into some new terrible existence. She had no sense of chill resolute repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a lash never experienced before. What another nature felt in opposition to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness. When Will had ceased to speak she had become ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... anything more remarkable, Mrs. Lecount, than the variableness of the wind in this climate?" proceeded the captain, shifting the camp-stool to the scientific side of him. "Is there any natural phenomenon more bewildering to the scientific inquirer? You will tell me that the electric fluid which abounds in the air is the principal cause of this variableness. You will remind me of the experiment of that illustrious philosopher who measured the velocity ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... stouter than we think, and up those icy rocks, along the edges of bewildering precipices, over, under, and around great masses of rock, across steep glaciers where every footstep must be made in a hole cut in the ice, brave men have climbed and crept and gradually and painfully worked their way, until at last they stood proudly on the summit, and gazed ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... girls left the room, "like twin cherries on a stalk." The resemblance between them was bewildering; every line of feature, every tone ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... when the life sands seem to run slowly, and others when they flow swiftly, as during this bewildering week. All manner of things happened, mostly perplexing or sad, and none quite agreeable. On the 28th, coming in about nine at night, I saw that there were persons in the great front sitting-room, which overlooked Dock Creek. ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... scale carried out for several decades. The husbandry of the earth goes on from century to century with little change, and the methods followed are the winnowings of experience, tempered with indolence. And even with the bewildering progress of science in other directions, sound improvements in this field are rare discoveries. There is great scope for the application of physical and chemical knowledge to the production of the raw materials of the tropics. ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... rejects the "pastors and teachers" of Christ's appointment and the morality of the sabbath? These, and many other questions of similar or analogous import, will suggest negative answers to all who fear God, respect his authority, and are free from the bewildering ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... personally. Three more weeks of weary expectation passed before a second letter reached me. This time it was impossible to say whether the news were good or bad. It might have been either—it was simply bewildering. Even Mr. Playmore himself was taken by surprise. These were the last wonderful words—limited of course by considerations of economy—which reached us (by telegram) ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... live on seal alone in the North, for there is a bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town. None but an antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which the Boston of to-day offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century can begin to appreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I underwent during that time. Viewed from the house-top the day before, the city had indeed appeared strange to me, but that was only in its general aspect. How complete the change had been I first realized now that I walked the streets. The few old landmarks which still ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... assembles in this conjuncture, and the debates are solemn, earnest, and bewildering. Interest, passion, conscience, freedom, and humanity, all have their advocates. Shall new loans and levies be granted to prosecute still farther a war so glorious? or shall it be abandoned? Shall we be content with the humiliation of the foe? or shall we ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... day, I found the sentry—an overgrown lad, with broad, crimson, beardless cheeks—in a perfect paroxysm of excitement, using great freedom of gesticulation and blasphemy. I had had immense success in bewildering this particular warrior a few days previously: so I went ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... of the whole arrangement, which, under the blue sky of California, brings one straight back into the land of sunshine and artistic tradition. The whole arrangement of this Italian group seems somewhat bewildering at first, but on closer inspection resolves itself into a very interesting scheme which takes full advantage ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it. If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any further. Of course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated, will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... appeared to be the one agency which freed the boys and girls from that destructive isolation of those who drag themselves up to maturity by themselves, and it gave them a glimpse of that order and beauty into which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore the bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic young people bear testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration of this came to us during our second year's residence on Halsted Street through an incident in the Italian colony, where the men have always boasted that they ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... to retire, but he checked her and put a lighted candle into her hand. "There are half a dozen rooms there I don't use," he said, pointing through an open door. "Go and look at them and take your choice. You can live in the one you like best." From this bewildering opportunity Mrs. Bread at first recoiled; but finally, yielding to Newman's gentle, reassuring push, she wandered off into the dusk with her tremulous taper. She remained absent a quarter of an hour, during which Newman ...
— The American • Henry James
... man looked over the mystic hieroglyphics of the art, inscribed on a paper that was placed before the visionary, with deep and scrutinising attention. Without bewildering the reader with those words and figures of weird sound and import which perplex the uninitiated, and entangle the disciple of astrology, I shall merely observe that there was one point in which the judgment appeared to admit doubt as to the signification. The Englishman ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the King would mind his business!" he would exclaim, after having delighted himself and his readers with the most droll accounts of His Majesty's frivolities. "How wicked a wretch Cromwell was, and yet how much better and safer the country was in his hands than it is now." And often he will end the bewildering account with some such bitter comment as the assertion "that every one about ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... who was placed in special charge of the case, confessed that he had never known anything more bewildering: ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... truthfulness and was not ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future long before they were due,—all this made the task a grave one. But when I found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill; the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical, estimate ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the steps, Fletcher unhesitatingly drawing her forward. The garden was a marvel of many-coloured lights, intricate and bewildering as a maze. Its paths were all carpeted, and their feet made no sound. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... which for other men [57] bring a world of technical diction, brought perfect form and expression, as in those two lofty books of The Prelude, which describe the decay and the restoration of Imagination and Taste. Skirting the borders of this world of bewildering heights and depths, he got but the first exciting influence of it, that joyful enthusiasm which great imaginative theories prompt, when the mind first comes to have an understanding of them; and it is not under the influence of these thoughts that his poetry ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... from four to five miles an hour, and has so sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... presently the tourists flocked down with variant emotions, to be besieged by fruit sellers, water carriers, cabmen, blind beggars, and maimed, naked little children with curious, insolent black eyes, women with infants straddling their hips, stolid Chinamen; a riot of color and a bewildering babel of tongues. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... here in Murderers' Row in Folsom, the drowsy hum of flies in my ears as I ponder that thought of Pascal. It is true. Just as the human embryo, in its brief ten lunar months, with bewildering swiftness, in myriad forms and semblances a myriad times multiplied, rehearses the entire history of organic life from vegetable to man; just as the human boy, in his brief years of boyhood, rehearses the history of primitive man in acts of cruelty and savagery, from wantonness ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... were the statues which Julius Caesar contrived to crowd together, that the Emperor Constantine, during his famous visit to Rome, is said to have been almost stupefied with amazement. Some such feeling is produced in our own minds when we reflect that the bewildering array of sculptures in the Roman galleries, admired by a concourse of pilgrims from every country, are but chance discoveries, unnoticed by history, and of no account in their own time. What must have been the feast of splendour of which these are ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... could win your esteem and affection. That I should desire the friendship of a pure, young girl would sound strange to the ears of many worldly people, but to you, who are as distant from worldliness as are the angels in heaven, the suggestion can bring only bewildering sensations. To say that I am ashamed does not half express my feelings. To say that I wish to make immediate amends does not convey to you the half of my eagerness ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... Dale and Saxe knelt together there, with their hearts throbbing wildly at their discovery. There was a bewildering train of thoughts, too, running through their minds, as to how the poor fellow could have got there; and Saxe could only find bottom in one idea—that they had been confusedly wandering about, returning another way, till they ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... getting into a dangerous mood with his sentimentalism. No lawful passion can ever be so bewildering or ecstatic as an unlawful one. For that which is right has all the powers of the universe on its side, and can afford to wait; but the wrong, having all those vast forces against it, must hurry to its fulfilment, reserve nothing, concentrate all its ecstasies upon to-day. Malbone, greedy ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... is not more bewildering To her drowsed eyes, than to her ears, the sound Of dim, sweet singing voices, interwound With purl of flute and subtle twang of string, Strained through the lattice, where the roses cling And, with their fragrance, waft the notes around Her haunted senses. Thirsting beyond bound Of her ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... and there seemed to be a vast deal of jollity within. No one tried to prevent our entering; we merely followed the others; and, indeed, it was all a mystery to us. Cards were being dealt at the faro tables, and dealt by beautiful women in bewildering attire. They also turned the wheels of fortune or misfortune, and threw dice, and were skilled in all the arts that beguile and betray the innocent. The town was filled with such resorts; some were devoted to the patronage of the more exclusive set; many were traps into which the miner from the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... aching most atrociously, and when the young man sat up and attempted to rise to his feet he discovered, to his astonishment and chagrin, that he had no control over himself, the room seemed to be whirling and spinning round with him at bewildering speed, and his legs immediately ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... lapse of more than four score of years the voyageur from the frigid North returned from his philanthropic visit to the red man. A wonderful change met the eye. A transformation as magnificent as it was bewildering had occurred. The same grand old bluffs looked proudly down upon the Father of Water. The same magnificent river pursued its unmolested course toward the boundless ocean. But all else had changed. The hostile warrior ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... a work as the present presents, is the proof that the black, whatever his degree of intelligence may be, is abundantly capable, under enlightened discipline, of becoming infinitely more profitable to himself and to the world than he has ever yet been. From the tales of distress, from the bewildering, sorrowful negro piety, from the jargon and rags and tears of poor childish contrabands, as simply and sadly set forth by Mrs. FRENCH, making every allowance, and penetrating to the depth of the dark problem, we still realize ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... teaching in the fields and gardens, consisting as yet of only twenty-five hectares, or nearly sixty acres, a somewhat bewildering course of study is given. The list of subjects begins well. First, a lad is here taught his duties as the head of a family, a citizen, and a man of business. Then come geography, history, arithmetic, book-keeping, trigonometry, linear drawing, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... eyes with her hands and pressed hard as if to make clear her bewildering thoughts. "Oh, ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... government, is a matter of careful handling." Then with delicious frankness he flashes out: "I cannot allow myself to have my feet entangled." "A free hand or resignation." That is his ultimatum. This thunderbolt of bewildering audacity sent a flutter through the sanctuary of Fraternity, and in hot haste a message of confidence, coupled with an order that he shall be left in supreme control, was dispatched by a vigilant energetic courier. The Directory were made to see that a ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... into her eyes, trying to catch what was in her mind, but there was a bewildering glamour playing across those gray, opal-tinted wells of mystery, from which he could draw only a ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... edifice, he superimposed tiers of orders one above the other. Church, cupola, and spires are built up by a succession of Vitruvian temples, ascending from the ground into the air. The total impression produced by the mass, as we behold it now in the great wooden model at S. Peter's, is one of bewildering complexity. Of architectural repose it possesses little, except what belongs to a very original and vast conception on a colossal scale. The extent of the structure is frittered by its multiplicity ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... nothing more, would alone have been amply sufficient to vindicate Aphara Behn's genius and immortality. It was a great favourite with Swinburne, who terms it 'that melodious and magnificent song'; Mr. Bullen is warm in its praise, whilst Professor Saintsbury justly acknowledges it to be 'of quite bewildering beauty'. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... and on the outer edge of the platform are small pagodas, each with its ti, or umbrella, and also holding its usual offerings of fruit, flowers, or small gifts. Seen at twilight and as the candles are being lighted, it is almost bewildering, even uncanny, as I found one evening when there alone with my guide, the renowned Abraham, who, even though a rigid Mohammedan, assumed ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... queen stood for a single long breath to grasp the scene in its entirety. Panting slightly from her exertions, her blazing eyes and heaving breast rendered her a figure of bewildering and awful loveliness; and the Feu Follette's men paused in the fight out ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... books and accounts. According to the branding for the past few years, it would indicate a brand of five or six thousand cattle. The only trouble in trading was to arrange the terms, my offer being half cash and the balance in six months, the cattle to be gathered early the coming spring. A bewildering list of references was given and we returned home. Within a fortnight a letter came from the trustee, accepting my offer and asking me to set a date for the gathering. I felt positive that the brand ought to run forty per cent steer cattle, ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... measures hymn'd to Alla's praise; Or what the Bard from his heart's inmost stores O'er his Friend's grave in loftier numbers pours: 60 Yes, Bard polite! you but obey'd the laws Of Justice, when the thimble you had sent; What wounds your thought-bewildering Muse might cause 'Tis well your finger-shielding gifts ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not going direct?" suddenly inquired Hollyer, after they had travelled perhaps half-a-dozen miles. The night was bewildering enough but he had ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... dreams of a dying man. Shifting colors, confused images, moments of clear light, hours of long darkness—all things gross, refined, material, and spiritual were shaken up in my life like the fragments in a kaleidoscope, ever changing into new forms and bewildering patterns. My brain was clear; yet I often questioned myself whether I was not going mad—whether all the careful methodical plans I formed were but the hazy fancies of a hopelessly disordered mind? Yet no; each detail of my scheme was too complete, too consistent, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... touch. In that one moment her heart went from her, and she experienced the sweet elysium of a young life just awakening to love's bewildering dream. ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... where the bottom seems to be is only the beginning of other chasms which lie in the dark shadows and descend into yet deeper depths below. The canon is not a single empty chasm, which is the universal conception of a canon, but consists of a complex system of sub and side canons that is bewildering. Out of its depths rise an infinite number and variety of castellated cliffs and sculptured buttes that represent every conceivable variety of architecture. They have the appearance of a resurrected city of great ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... age (1840-1900) that the field is most bewildering. It is true, as Frederick Harrison says, that "this Victorian age has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott—no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... manuscripts, are also in the same manner thrown open, and they are thronged with visitors almost all the time. These apartments are so numerous and so extensive that in one day a person can do little else than to walk through them, and give one general gaze of bewildering wonder at the whole scene. And a very long walk it is, I can assure you. At one time, when I set out from the painting rooms, (which are far in the interior of the buildings,) with a party of friends, ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... had borne fruit beyond his wildest imaginings. Fact had piled upon fact with bewildering rapidity. As yet he had been unable to sort them in his mind, to catalogue each properly, to test ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... would die with the harness of the money-game on his back, reaching for more. Gower was of the same type, skillful in all the tricks of the game, ruthless, greedy for power and schooled to grasp it in a bewildering variety ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... self-deception, and we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less than decent: you do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread dragoon. It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where they figure so prettily—pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... understand the complicated plan of these combined buildings, where a fortress, a church, an abbey, a prison and a dungeon, are mingled, and where you can find every style of architecture, from the Romance of the eleventh century to the bewildering Gothic of the sixteenth. We could catch only a glimpse of the knights' hall, which has been converted into a loom-room and is for this reason barred to the public. We saw only four rows of columns supporting a ceiling ornamented with salient mouldings; they were decorated with clover leaves. The ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... Governed at different moments by totally different passions, and impelled sometimes, as in his excess of parsimony in Italy, by springs of action never before developed in his nature, he presents the strangest contradictions and inconsistencies, a bewildering complication ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... sin, and the consequent need of expiation for sin, were gradually unfolded in the Greek mind. The idea of sin was at first revealed in a confused and indefinite feeling of some external, supernatural, and bewildering influence which man can not successfully resist; but yet so in harmony with the sinner's inclination, that he can not divest himself of all responsibility. "Homer has no word answering in comprehensiveness or depth of meaning to the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... these the guests whose glances Seemed like sunshine gleaming round me? These the wild, bewildering fancies, That with dithyrambic dances As ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... caught the word "Patented." It was strange enough to find the tin box in such perfect preservation while the stout oak plank above it had rotted into fragments; but the wisp of newspaper, and the brass plate with its utterly out-of-place inscription, were absolutely bewildering. My head seemed to be going around on my shoulders, while something inside of it was buzzing dreadfully. Suddenly Susan exclaimed, in a tone of disgust and consternation: "It's—it's ...
— Our Pirate Hoard - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... evening, achieved and enjoyed a success capable of bewildering all not born to those altitudes termed thrones; which, in spite of their elevation, are sheltered from such giddiness. From that very moment Louis XIV. acknowledged Madame as a person to be recognized. Buckingham regarded her as a coquette ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... notice to fill the place of one of the most eminent Parliamentary writers of the day, and to supply a leading article on a subject of the surroundings of which one was absolutely ignorant, might seem appalling. It all came very naturally to me. I did my best in the strange, somewhat bewildering, circumstances, and as long as the morning edition of the Pall Mall lasted, I continued to write its summary. Fyffe came round again in a week; but he never more took up the summary, leaving it in my hands, with many ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Province; as if Montreal had sent her chief edifices to be electro-plated, and they had just come home brightly burnished. In front was the shining blue current of the St. Lawrence, escaped from a bewildering perplexity of islets and rapids, which had apparently ruffled its temper not ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... should hold sway over them. Nonjuring bishops were scarce in France; but Lescure contrived to supply the need of the moment. Here, in the midst of so much that was tragic, and of so much that was of good report, we come to the bewildering and grotesque adventure ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... arsenal in that little house at 3 Zion Place. A large cast of the Venus of Milo, it was known, had come from Covent Garden, London, via a poor little dealer in artistic materials in the town, who on one occasion had shown a bewildering picture to one of his customers with the remark, "What do you make ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... the difficulty," said Sally, with her most bewildering smile, which quite captivated the young doctor. "I met the young lady only once, and I have forgotten her address as well as her last name, remembering only her Christian name—Bernardine. I met her in Doctor ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... Anne stood quite still, with a strange, bewildering fear at her heart. Then she turned—picture postcards had lost all their charm—and went ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... timid and stood still the brave." "The bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony." "For he, poor fellow, had a wife and children, Two things to dying people quite bewildering,"— ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Within the palace a hundred harpers smote their strings, flooding the scene with music. Slowly each circumference began to move. Step and measure increased their speed. The circles were now revolving, one around another, with swift and bewildering motion. At a signal the silent figures broke into song. They sang of the glories of Jerusalem and the great king. Herod's hand was up—he would have no more of it. The song ceased, the circles, one by one, rolled into helices which, ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... and I exclaimed: Forget that thou art a woman! Ask me rather to forget I am a man. Art thou blind, or hast thou never even looked into a mirror? Dost thou imagine me less than a man, bidding me forget that she is a woman who stands before me, as thou dost, smiling, and bewildering my soul with her maddening loveliness, and the absolute perfection of her body and her soul, showing the hungry man food, and forbidding him to eat, and the thirsty man water, and requiring him to think of it as something it is not? Or art ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... describe all that followed on that bewildering day, the dismay of Grandmamma and Nursey, the wrath of Jennings over the match, the joy of everybody at Lady Bird's escape, or her own confusion of mind at the fire and the excitement and the new Papa, who was ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in embarrassing superfluity. ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... oriental through the bewildering hall, until he saw Senor Rey standing in a doorway—and behind him a low-lit arcanum of leather and metal.... The face of the Spaniard was startling, like the discovery of a crime. It was lean and livid as a cadaver. The pallor of the entire left cheek, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... the merry-makers sprang off with baskets of fish. Annette had distinguished herself by catching one small shark, and had immediately ceased to fish and devoted her attention to her fisherman and his line. Philip had angled fiercely, landing trout, croakers, sheepshead, snappers in bewildering luck. He had broken each hopeless captive's neck savagely, as though they were personal enemies. He did not look happy as they landed, though paeans of praise were ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... have liked to stay a little longer surveying this fairy-like scene, but my brother declared he could smell our breakfast, which by this time must have been waiting for us below. Our exit was a little delayed, as we took a wrong turn in the rather bewildering labyrinth of arches and passages in the cathedral walls, and it was not without a feeling of relief that we reached the door we had so carefully locked behind us. We returned the key to the caretaker, and then went to our hotel, where we ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... doing?" breathed Lethbridge in his ear. Harrow calmly turned his back on his closest friend and gazed rapturously at his goddess. And again her bewildering smile broke out and he fairly ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... With bewildering facility, she named the owners of the great houses—usually striking amiss, though Shelby could not know—and from some little experience with New York horse shows, could recognize an occasional carriage occupant. Her adaptability abashed him, setting her mysteriously ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... to-day has a bewildering iridescence of aspect. Each present impulse is reformatory. Correction, like a centipede, shows a hundred legs and wants to run upon them all. Much of the so-called philanthropy is not well balanced and is run by cranks. Cranks attach themselves ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... quiet and solitude of Kilmore Castle, to be at Chessington College seemed like plunging into the world. It was almost bewildering to meet so many companions, all of whom were busily occupied with employments into which she had not yet been initiated. It was an especially fresh experience for Honor to belong to a class, instead of learning ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Middle Ages, the Titurel, the Parsifal, and the Lohengrin. Here indeed we find ourselves face to face with Romantic Poetry. We look deeply into her great sorrowing eyes; she twines around us, unsuspectingly, her fine scholastic nets, and draws us down into the bewildering, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with the calm beauty of that river scene, and found it difficult to decide when it was most beautiful—whether the morning light best gilded its glories or whether the evening lent additional calm. We passed island after island in bewildering succession. Away towards the drift three huge black masses were splashing in the water, which we easily made out to be hippopotami taking their evening bath, and as we glided along a sleepy crocodile slipped back into ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... stung. It was the first time in his life that Kenny had faced it. That he, Kennicott O'Neill, Academician, with Heaven knows how many medals of distinction, could fail at anything, was a new thought, bewildering and bitter. This time he escaped from the table and flung up a window. Whitaker, he grumbled, never toasted crackers without burning them. Whitaker brought ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... yet how many wonderful things await us in the church. In the second chapel of the transept, the Chapel of Filippo Strozzi, who is buried behind the altar, Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra Lippo, the pupil of Botticelli, has painted certain frescoes,—a little bewildering in their crowded beauty, it is true, but how good after all in their liveliness, their light and shadow, the pleasant, eager faces of the women—where St. John raises Drusiana from the grave, or St. Philip drives out the Dragon ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... explained in this way: that is, that by ruling out certain directions of activity they enabled people to concentrate more effectually, for the time being, on other directions. To primitive folk the great world, whose ways are puzzling enough in all conscience to us, must have been simply bewildering in its dangers and complications. It was an amazement of Fear and Ignorance. Thunderbolts might come at any moment out of the blue sky, or a demon out of an old tree trunk, or a devastating plague out ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing, listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth voice and with a rather bewildering smile. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... direction of some hapless officer of the General Staff. For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a closely articulated program, almost as helpless as a package in a pneumatic tube—night expresses, racing military motors, snapshots at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and punctilious military salutes. You are under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or barracks or ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... the new wisdom, the new points of view, and the new interests must, of course, be from time to time bewildering and confusing. Today those who have a voice in the body politic have expressed their wishes and sufferings. The result has been a smaller or greater balancing of their conflicting interests. The appearance of new interests ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... There is something very bewildering and distressing in the sudden disappearance or even the absence of a human being to whose affectionate and constant presence one has become accustomed. And as the hours went by, and no letter or message ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... of the bow, Gandiva. To-day even by (the help of) illusion-creating arms, will I dispel this deep gloom and also this horrible illusion of theirs. Do not fear, O charioteer. Pacify thyself.' Having said this, O lord of men, I created for the good of the celestials, an illusion of arms capable of bewildering all beings. And when (their) illusion had been dispelled, some of the foremost amongst the Asuras, of unrivalled prowess, again spread diverse kinds of illusion. Thereupon, now (the world) displayed itself, and now it was devoured by darkness; and now the world disappeared from view and now it was ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... beautiful vision must have burst with bewildering power: to Arthur Stanley she united memory with being, the past with the present, with such an intensity of emotion, that for a few minutes his very breath was impeded. She turned, without seeing him, in a contrary direction; and ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... leave; and the count felt great comfort in being once more alone. Since morning, events had followed one another with such bewildering rapidity that his thoughts could scarcely keep pace with them. At last, he was able ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant dim that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... adaptation. The wealth of material available is so great as to be bewildering. As yet there is no common agreement as to just which stories are best for our purpose, nor is there any as to where particular stories should be used. The adapters and story-tellers differ much in their ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception of either the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene—or of the wild, bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm. There are some passages ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... that has been done, Or say that nought is done amiss; For who the dangerous path can shun In such bewildering world as this? But love can every fault forgive, Or with a tender look reprove; And now let nought in memory live, But that we meet, ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... through them, almost afflict the reader's sense of sight. There is a fine irony in the title of the other poem of contention, A Womans Last Word: In a quarrel a woman will have the last word, and here it is—the need of quietude for a little while that she may recover from the bewildering stroke of pain, and then entire oblivion of the wrong with unmeasured self-surrender. The poem of union, Love among the Ruins, is constructed in a triple contrast; the endless pastures prolonged to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are contrasted with the vast and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... own generations, Those sages and sagas of old? They have pass'd; o'er their names and their nations Time's billows have silently roll'd; They have pass'd, leaving little to their children, Save histories of a truth far from strict; Or theories more vague and bewildering, Since ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... to quick scenes and dramatic changes, Berrington was surprised for the moment. The thing was like some bewildering Eastern vision. A moment ago the place had been dull and dark, and now like a flash, warmth and light were there, to say nothing of the tasteful extravagance of the supper-table. Berrington could see the fruit and the flowers, the dainty confections and the costly wines. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... not know. He had not himself escaped from it all by leaving it, and then that undermining bewildering suspicion that perhaps after all there was something in all of this, that it was not only charlatanism, confused and disconcerted him. He was like a man who hears sounds and faint cries behind a thick wall, and there are no doors and windows, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... we are told, "it might have heightened his affection. But, seeing her otherwise so perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more intolerable, with every moment of their united lives." And then, we have some further bewildering explanation about "his honourable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of." Call you this "pure and lofty love," when a woman is admired much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... latter part of the eighteenth century literary production, thanks largely to the tremendous increase of education and of newspapers and magazines, has steadily grown, until now it has reached bewildering volume and complexity, in which the old principles are partly merged together and the new tendencies, for contemporary observers, at least, scarcely stand out with decisive distinctness. Most significant to-day, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... forms engaged in a wrestling bout. Round and round they spun with the same bewildering swiftness, leaning far to one side, as though about to fall, and all the time whirling with such speed on the one spiral leg that it seemed unable to keep pace with ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... faintly to their ears. Even above all the noise of their working engine they could make it out. To any one who came from the interior of the country it might have seemed a bewildering sound, and have called up strange fancies connected with marine monsters that were said to have once inhabited these waters near ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... foully abused. I read in the morning's paper, young gentlemen, a pitiful story of a woman trying to throw herself from the bridge. You may recall one like it in Hood's "Bridge of Sighs." The report was headed: "To hide her shame." "Her shame?" Why, gentlemen, at that very moment, in bright and bewildering rooms, the arms of Lothario and Lovelace were encircling your sisters' waists in the intoxicating waltz. These men go unwhipped of an epithet. They are even enticed and flattered by the mothers of the girls. ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... come over us as we contemplate a world in which chance is so often stronger than wisdom; in which desert and reward are so widely separated; in which living beings succeed each other in such a vast and bewildering redundance—eating, killing, suffering, and dying for no useful discoverable purpose,—all these things belong to the normal lot or to the inevitable setting of human life. Nor can it be said that science, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Macedonian army conquered the East and his successors for several generations ruled over western Asia, when Macedonians and Greeks alike flocked into the newly-opened world and Graeco-Macedonian cities were planted in bewildering numbers throughout its length and breadth. Most of these cities sprang up full-grown; not seldom their first citizens were the discharged Macedonian soldiery of the armies of Alexander and his successors. The ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... almost to live in it. To be there is an end in itself. Warmoes Straat, parallel with Damrak on the other side of the Bourse, behind the Bible Hotel, is famous for its gigantic restaurant—the hugest in Europe, I believe—the Krasnapolsky, a palace of bewildering mirrors, and for concert halls and other accessories of the gayer life. But this book is no place in which to enlarge upon the natural history of Warmoes Straat and its ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... whether it would not be too late, but when I heard his personalities I felt there was no choice but to go on. My great object was to show the conservative party how their leader was hoodwinking and bewildering them, and this I have the happiness of believing that in some degree I effected; for while among some there was great heat and a disposition to interrupt me when they could, I could see in the faces and demeanour of others quite ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... have the grace to be civil, at least,' she said, with a bewildering smile, which vanished, however, when she seated herself on the battered old office-stool; all her anxiety and troubled concern made her face grave to sadness ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... invisible, threw out its little glow-worm glimmer. Soon there were numberless lights all over the country, on all the shores of the bay, from top to bottom of the mountains; myriads of glowing fires shone out in the darkness, conveying the impression of a vast capital, rising up around us in one bewildering amphitheater. Beneath, in the silent waters, another town, also illuminated, seemed to descend into the depths of the abyss. The night was balmy, pure, delicious; the atmosphere laden with the perfume of flowers came wafted to us from the mountains. From the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... discussed in the presence of everybody, and any one who disapproves of any of these objects, or of the way in which it is proposed to obtain it, has an opportunity to declare his opinions. Under this form of government people are not so liable to bewildering delusions as under other forms. I refer especially to the delusion that "the Government" is a sort of mysterious power, possessed of a magic inexhaustible fund of wealth, and able to do all manner of things for the benefit of "the People." Some ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... very much as a person might be supposed to do who had dropped from the moon. Everything around them was so strange and bewildering, for not one of them had ever before been on board a ship, and Bill had never even seen one. Having not been much accustomed to the appearance of trees, he had some idea that the masts grew out of the deck, that ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... shop, whilst she still found herself hopelessly bewildered, with a number of snap-shot photographs before her, still staring at a long piece of string, smothered from end to end in a series of knots, as bewildering, as irritating, as puzzling as the man who had lately ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... Still more bewildering was the behavior of Ellaphine. As soon as he heard of his good fortune he hurried to tell her about it. Her mother answered the door-bell and congratulated him on his good luck. When he asked for Ellar, her mother ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... steps, and jostled through the Customs, and said "Rien a declarer" to the officials, who peeped inside their bags to find tea or tobacco, and had their luggage duly chalked, and showed their passports once more, and finally, after a bewildering half-hour of bustle and hustle, found themselves, with all their belongings intact, safely in the train for Paris. Irene had caught brief glimpses of the child whom she named "Little Flaxen," whose mother, ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... bewildering region that thus opens to the view. But one conclusion is to beware of seeming certainties, to keep the windows of the mind open to the light; not to be over-anxious about the little part we have to play in the great pageant, but to advance, step by ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson |
