"Undistinguishable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stretches away for miles—flat, sad-coloured, and monotonous, fissured in every direction by channels of dark-tinted water, in which the very fish take the same sad colour. This tract is almost without trace of habitation, save where, at distant intervals, utter destitution has raised a mud-hovel, undistinguishable from the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... continues; and the Indians have taken advantage of this permission to intermarry with the negroes, until there is not one pure-blooded descendant of the original stock remaining, and its physiognomy and complexion are in most cases undistinguishable in the combination ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... landscape was utterly blotted out; simultaneously the wind died away, and a death-like silence stole over sea and shore. The faint clang, high overhead, of unseen brent, the nearer call of invisible plover, the lap and wash of undistinguishable waters, and the monotonous roll of the vanished ocean, were the only sounds. As night deepened, the far-off booming of the fog-bell on the headland at intervals stirred the ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... what we were talking about," said Mrs. Travers, altering slowly her position so as to confront d'Alcacer whose face was almost undistinguishable. "Oh, well, then, we talked about opera, the realities and illusions of the stage, of dresses, of people's names, and things of ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... dingy parapet above which it was death to put one's head, the grey free sky, the only thing free along that awful row of parallel ditches that stretched from the Belgian coast to Switzerland, the clay-covered, shapeless figures of men, their fellows, almost undistinguishable ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... passing along in the night, under the fir-trees, conveyed at most a romantic idea of grief and tribulation. They were put in a huge pen, midway between Big and Little Five Forks, for the night, the officers sharing the same fare with the soldiers, from whom, indeed, they were undistinguishable. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... from its proper place in the sea by the violence of the surf, and fairly stranded. Dr. Emslie obligingly submitted to my inspection his set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens of Pterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen on the previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of the nodular matrices in which they lie, from my old acquaintance the Cephalaspians of Cromarty. The animal matter ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... first gaze. His mode of uttering English betrayed him for a foreigner. He was a native of Poland. Before uttering a syllable, the interesting stranger walked to a corner of the room, turned himself to the wall, and muttered a few undistinguishable words. He then bowed lowly to the company, and took a chair, grinning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air is full of undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of Dreadful Night; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy as a daylight ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... "bowler hat" (as they say in London), a ready-made four-in-hand tie, and a small pearl scarf-pin. "No more fuzzy hair for me, no red tie, no dandruff," he had said on his return from Paris. "Right here we melt into the undistinguishable ocean of the millions, unless we can be distinguished by reason of our sculpture." He always included Julia, his wife, in this way (although she never "modelled a lick"), for she wrote all his letters, made out all his checks, and took charge of him generally. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... nothing at all, as if a little and nothing at all were nearly or entirely alike. That state also is liable to seditions which is composed of different nations, till their differences are blended together and undistinguishable; for as a city cannot be composed of every multitude, so neither can it in every given time; for which reason all those republics which have hitherto been originally composed of different people or afterwards admitted their neighbours to the freedom of their city, have ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... cramming out her head, her mouth stuffed with Banbury cakes, adding her shrill affetuoso—whilst the odd-looking man in the white hat, seated behind, is blue from terror, and with chattering teeth, mumbles undistinguishable sentences of furious driving and prosecution. Surely such moments half redeem our miseries! What bitter thought can ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... way, and shook the water out of sunny calm. Katahdin to the North, a fair blue pyramid, lifted higher and stooped forward more imminent, yet still so many leagues away that his features were undefined, and the gray of his scalp undistinguishable from the green of his beard of forest. Every mile, however, as we slid drowsily over the hot lake, proved more and more that we were not befooled,—Iglesias by memory, and I by anticipation. Katahdin lost nothing by approach, as some of the grandees ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... of Gibbon, or at least the unfair impression produced by these two memorable chapters, consists in confounding together, in one undistinguishable mass, the origin and apostolic propagation of the Christian religion with its later progress. The main question, the divine origin of the religion, is dexterously eluded or speciously conceded; his plan enables him to commence his account, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... payment, undisguised by any joy of passionate surrender. But whereas in the outgrowth of feudalism, in the chivalry of the middle ages, this system formed the great incentive to martial daring, whereas when idealized in Beatrice it became almost undistinguishable from the ferveurs of religion, we find it with Tasso sinking into a weak and mawkish sensuality. More than any other sentimentalist Tasso justified his title by 'fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... us all, had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of all true philosophers. Who were these shams and make- believe men? They were, in fact, people that had been dead for centuries, but that, for reasons best known to themselves, had returned to this upper earth, walked about amongst us, and were undistinguishable, except by the most learned of necromancers, from authentic men of flesh and blood. I mention this for the sake of illustrating the fact, of which the reader will find a singular instance in the foot note attached, that the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... peculiarly and symmetrically disposed), so common in English cats, are never seen in those of India." Dr. D. Short has assured Mr. Blyth[92] that at Hansi hybrids between the common cat and F. ornata (or torquata) occur, "and that many of the domestic cats of that part of India were undistinguishable from the wild F. ornata." Azara states, but only on the authority of the inhabitants, that in Paraguay the cat has crossed with two native species. From these several cases we see that in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, the common cat, which lives a freer life than most other ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... part the body is perfectly smooth, and of a lead colour. It tapers off towards the tail, which is flat, horizontal, and semicircular, without any appearance of hind-limbs. The head is in reality small, and the neck undistinguishable; though it has an enormous mouth, with fleshy lips like those of a huge cow, with an ugly countenance. On the lips are stiff bristles, while a few hairs only are scattered over the body. Just behind the head are two powerful ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... three or four feet high, grows in great luxuriance in the streets of Tette, and so does the senna plant. The leaves are undistinguishable from those imported in England. A small amount of first-rate cotton is cultivated by the native population for the manufacture of a coarse cloth. A neighbouring tribe raises the sugar- cane, and makes a little sugar; but they use most primitive wooden rollers, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... extent, the fingers of his shrunken, bony hands dancing nervously on the coverlet. A week's growth of stubble blackened the lower part of his face. Without a moment's pause he mumbled and muttered with astonishing rapidity, but for the most part the words were undistinguishable. It was, indeed, not the same Bennett, Lloyd had last seen. The great body was collapsed upon itself; the skin of the face was like dry, brown parchment, and behind it the big, massive bones stood out in great knobs and ridges. It needed but a glance to know that here was a man dangerously ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... eve of the New Year. The snow-storm continued in unabated violence, and the weather was so gray that the lines of earth and sky were blended and utterly undistinguishable. A little after the hour of noon, Zulma Sarpy knelt in the little church of Pointe-aux-Trembles. Beside her there were only a few worshippers—some old men mumbling their rosaries, and some women crouched on their heels before the shrine. A solitary lamp ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... a white-silk pill, soft to the touch and glutinous. Its size is that of an average cherry. An observant eye will notice, running horizontally around the middle, a fold which a needle is able to raise without breaking it. This hem, generally undistinguishable from the rest of the surface, is none other than the edge of the circular mat, drawn over the lower hemisphere. The other hemisphere, through which the youngsters will go out, is less well fortified: its only wrapper ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... it. If the thought and will are good the deeds and works are good; but if the thought and will are evil the deeds and works are evil, although in outward form they appear alike. A thousand men may act alike, that is, may do like deeds, so alike in outward form as to be almost undistinguishable, and yet each one regarded in itself be different, because from an unlike will. [2] For example, when one acts honestly and justly with a companion, one person may do it for the purpose of appearing to be honest and just out of regard to himself and his own honor; another ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of manufacturing towns are apt to grow petty Plutocracies, in which after wealth, ignorance and assumption are the principal qualifications. Brass turns up its nose at iron, and both look down upon tin, although half an hour in the world's fire make all so black as to be undistinguishable. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... designed with reference to a painted window placed behind it: it is hardly necessary to say that it is greatly benefitted by the general reduction of the glare of light, which rendered the outlines of much of the statuary and more delicate ornaments undistinguishable at a distance, but still more by the transmission through it of glimpses of the most beautiful colours, which change with every movement, however slight, in the position of the eye, and whose very indistinctness and transitory character contributes ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... suddenly came to a dead halt. I was next to him, and coming up as close as I could, I found that one step further would have precipitated the adventurous guide into an abyss, the bottom and sides of which were undistinguishable; after gazing for a moment into this apparently insurmountable obstacle to our further progress, I could just perceive a narrow ledge about sixteen feet below me, that the eye could trace for a few yards only, beyond which it was lost in the ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... southeast, showing the houses of the Eagle clan built against its base, the caverns of Yakka hanutsh opening along a semicircle terminating in a sharp point of massive rocks. In that promontory the port-holes of some of the dwellings of the Cottonwood people were visible. Beyond, all detail became undistinguishable through the distance, for the north side of the Rito turned into a dim yellowish ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... was on the rack. The chief had gradually dropped his voice as he explained his plan, until at length it became so low, that undistinguishable sounds alone reached the ear of the excited officer. For a moment he despaired of making himself fully master of the important secret; but in the course of the deliberation that ensued, the blanks left unsupplied in the discourse of the leader were abundantly filled ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... sound of the closing of an external door in their immediate neighbourhood reached Elfride's ears. It came from the further side of the wing containing the illuminated room. She then discerned, by the aid of the dusky departing light, a figure, whose sex was undistinguishable, walking down the gravelled path by the parterre towards the river. The figure grew fainter, and vanished ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... since the firing ceased had changed suddenly into hand-clappings, and the cries, though still undistinguishable, were of a different sound. Clay saw that the Americans on the balconies of the club and of the theatre had thrown themselves far over the railings and were all looking in the same direction and waving their hats and ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... i. 420) they had also written in concert. 'Their humour and their talents were well adapted to what they had undertaken; and Beaumont and Fletcher present what is probably the only parallel instance of literary co-operation so complete, that the portions written by the respective parties are undistinguishable.' Southey's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of human hands. And still more did it resemble some splendid palace, whose gilded cupolas and towering minarets are built of materials collected from every quarter of the world, only to collapse in undistinguishable ruin when the Ficus religiosa has lodged its destructive roots in the foundation on which they rest. Thus does this great ruler furnish another instance of the familiar but everneeded lesson, that countries may be over-governed. ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... wild and high moorlands, at whose feet hath stood for ages the royal and ducal capital of the county palatine of Lancaster, once rose a strong border defence called Raven Castle. Its site only remains. This noble and castellated fortress now lies an almost undistinguishable heap on the barren moor; the sheep browse above it, and the herdsman makes his pillow where warriors and dames once met in chivalric pomp, and the chieftain held his feudal ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... race profess different creeds, these creeds do influence one another and tend to approximate. This is specially remarkable in India, where Islam, in theory the uncompromising opponent of image worship and polytheism, is sometimes in practice undistinguishable from the lower superstitions of Hinduism. In the middle ages Buddhism and Hinduism converged until they coincided so completely that Buddhism disappeared. In China it often needs an expert to distinguish the manifestations of Taoism and Buddhism: in Japan ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... and generous, who could not possibly change his spots. He had failed utterly to acquire the American idiom, and his attempts at cowboy slang were often amusing—especially to Redfield, who prided himself on being quite undistinguishable ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... taken up in that Church to give his body admission into the cold earth—now his bed of rest—were again by the mason's art so levelled and firmed as they had been formerly, and his place of burial undistinguishable to ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... upon primitive notice and speculation; for man is led to his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplation of outward phenomena. Now, in the material world, when individual forms perish, each sensible component relapses into its original element and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Our exhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it: the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground and vegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... assumes the right to be a gentleman, the costumes and badges of trade are studiously avoided. Even the tailor is undistinguishable in the mass of his "fellow-citizens." The land of character-dresses lies farther to the ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... alongside of a real one. One might really have been excused for fancying him of a different race of beings from Monsieur Boulederouloue, the shapelessness of whose huge unwieldy frame was happily rendered undistinguishable by an extravagantly full suit of the Louis Quatorze fashion. An enormous full-bottomed wig of the same period surmounted and flanked his full moon face of pasty whiteness, most like the battered and colourless visage of an old wax doll, in which a transverse slit ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... Mildred's thoughts grew disjointed. ... 'Alfred, I have thought it all over. I cannot marry you. ... Do not reproach me,' she said between dreaming and waking; and as the purple space of sky between the trees grew paler, she heard the first birds. Then dream and reality grew undistinguishable, and listening to the carolling of a thrush she saw a melancholy face, and then a dejected figure pass ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... like the snowflake detached by the breath of air from the mountain-top, which, as it rushes down, gains size, and strength, and impetus, till it has swollen to the mighty and irresistible avalanche that overwhelms garden, and field, and village, in a chaos of undistinguishable death. ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... air from the mountain-top, which, as it rushes down, gains size and strength and impetus, till it has swollen to the mighty and irresistible avalanche that overwhelms garden and field and village in a chaos of undistinguishable death. ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... corps had been swept to instant death by the unpitying rock, without having afforded the slightest obstacle to its fearful progress. In one place lay a disembowelled steed panting its last; mangled in a confused and unintelligible mass lay beside him another, the limbs of his rider in many places undistinguishable from his own. One poor wretch, whom he assisted to extricate from beneath the body of his struggling horse, cried to him for water, and died in the prayer. Fortunately for the few who survived the catastrophe—among whom was their gallant but unfortunate young leader—they ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... concealed her slender nest. As if blown from heaven, descended round her path the showers of the painted butterflies, to feed, sleep, or die—undisturbed by her—upon the wild flowers—with wings, when motionless, undistinguishable from the blossoms. And well she loved the brown, busy, blameless bees, come thither for the honey-dews from a hundred cots sprinkled all over the parish, and all high over-head sailing away at evening, laden and wearied, to their straw-roofed skeps ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... even less. Faust does not appear to have disclosed the secret of how they were produced, and probably let it be supposed that they were manuscript; for the aim of the first printers was to make their books equal in beauty to the finest manuscripts, and as far as possible undistinguishable from them, to which end the large capitals and decorations were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... women, whose forms will in a few short weeks be unrecognisable, whose whitened bones will be crushed and kicked aside by the future explorer, who may perchance penetrate the labyrinths, and whose dust will finally be mixed up and undistinguishable from that of the bones and skulls taken from ancient cemeteries and graveyards with which this terrible Golgotha ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... undoubtedly, an inhabitant of Thrace as late as the expedition of Xerxes, whose camels they attacked; and the 'Nemaean lion,' and the other lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having been killed by Hercules and the heroes, may have been the last remaining specimens of that Felis spelaea (undistinguishable, according to some, from the African lion), whose bones are found in the gravels and the caverns of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng, And gentle wishes long subdued, 75 Subdued ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... their burthens is large in proportion to its weight. Instead of being borne on the head, they are carried in a way that forms a complete bushy background, against which the shrouded form of the woman is undistinguishable a few hundred yards away. Instead of keeping a straightforward course, the women seem to be doing an unnecessary amount of erratic wandering about over the road, which, until quite near, gives them the queer appearance of animated clumps of brush dodging about ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... moment Tommy was once more confronting bare wooden panels, and the voices within had sunk once more to a mere undistinguishable murmur. Tommy became restive. The conversation he had overheard had stimulated his curiosity. He felt that, by hook or by crook, ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... an early morning of her own, A blending of the mist and sea and sun Into an undistinguishable one, And Saint Sophia, from her ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... powers of the midnight are impotent against these invaders from beyond the mighty salt-water! Here, huddled together in confused, hopeless misery and ruin, lie, fettered and prostrate, even priest as well as potentate, undistinguishable victims of crude, unblenching violence, with its climax of nefarious sacrilege. We, common mortals, therefore, can hope for no deliverance from, or even succour in, the woful plight thus dismally contrived for us ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... passed, but there was a solid sheet of rain descending on them, undistinguishable from the foam that rushed over them as they went down, down, down. Vera was silenced; and Hubert, drenched and nearly beaten out of life, almost welcomed every downward plunge as the last, tried to commend his spirit, and ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads. The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village, taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming perhaps of banquets, as the starved usually ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... a point where the heat and dust have become intolerable, the monotonous expanse of wild oats on either side illimitable, and the distant horizon apparently remoter than ever, it suddenly slips between a stunted thicket or hedge of "scrub oaks," which until that moment had been undistinguishable above the long, misty, quivering level of the grain. The thicket rising gradually in height, but with a regular slope whose gradient had been determined by centuries of western trade winds, presently ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... proceeded as before. We now came to a track, which, had I been alone, I could not have followed, as it was generally, to my eyes, altogether undistinguishable; yet Don Jose and Isoro traced it without difficulty. It now led us along the edge of a precipice, where, it seemed to me, so narrow was the space between the cliff on one side and the fearful gulf on the other, that ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... it was the immensity of space made visible—almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost undistinguishable, the mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... view Agni, like other powers, rose to the rank of a Supreme God.[222] He is said to have stretched out heaven and earth—naturally, because without his light heaven and earth would have been invisible and undistinguishable. The next poet says that Agni held heaven aloft by his light, that he kept the two worlds asunder; and in the end Agni is said to be the progenitor and father of heaven and earth, and the maker of all that flies, or walks, or stands, or moves ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... years," answered the professor, in the strongly German-accented English which he prided himself upon being undistinguishable from the genuine British accent, but which it is not necessary to inflict further upon the reader. "Rather over six years. How time flies when a man is busy! Yet during those six years I have done scarcely ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and intervening lawns, to which the eye sees no limit, and in whose walks it seems as if the whole population of London might lose itself. North of Hyde Park, after passing a few streets, you reach the great square of Regent's Park, where, as you stand at one boundary the other is almost undistinguishable in the dull London atmosphere. North of this park rises Primrose Hill, a bare, grassy eminence, which I hear has been purchased for a public ground and will be planted with trees. All round these immense inclosures, presses the densest population of the civilized world. Within, such ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... tribe, or with their heads fastened to doorways, and their flanks extending across the street, affording just space enough for the passenger to slide behind their heels; a busy, jostling crowd of people hurrying to and fro, with no definite current, but streaming over any portion of the undistinguishable carriage-way and foot-way,—all combine to make Genoese pedestrianism a work only less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... entirely palled from view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad panorama of mountain ranges and deserts. Not even upon the staff of the flag—for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. For a whole hour the weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. How the people were wrought up! The superstition grew apace that this was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dome, as if about to float from it, hovered an aerial ship, with two round balls suspended above it. Again one little point was taken, for I felt that this was not the culmination of my vision; and now two figures appeared, manifestly human, but their features and dress as yet undistinguishable. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... all indisputably been embedded with the shells. I compared the plaited rush, the COTTON string, and Indian corn, at the house of an antiquary, with similar objects, taken from the Huacas or burial-grounds of the ancient Peruvians, and they were undistinguishable; it should be observed that the Peruvians used string only of cotton. The small quantity of sand or gravel with the shells, the absence of large stones, the width and thickness of the bed, and the time ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... over Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not attempt to join Mr. Taller in his simple division of students into LAW, DIVINITY, and MEDICAL. Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands over their follies; and, like Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in Love for Love) ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Marseillese remain inarticulate, undistinguishable in feature; a blackbrowed Mass, full of grim fire, who wend there, in the hot sultry weather: very singular to contemplate. They wend; amid the infinitude of doubt and dim peril; they not doubtful: Fate and Feudal Europe, having decided, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... some of these, as red marl and red sandstone, for example, may occur at once at the top, bottom, and middle of the entire sedimentary series; exhibiting in each position so perfect an identity of mineral aspect as to be undistinguishable. Such exact repetitions, however, of the same mixtures of sediment have not often been produced, at distant periods, in precisely the same parts of the globe; and even where this has happened, we are seldom in any danger of confounding together the monuments of remote ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... whate'er he likes; And who dares doubt that Friedland will appear A mighty Prince to his last dying hour? Well now, what then? Duke Friedland is as others, A fire-new Noble, whom the war hath raised To price and currency, a Jonah's gourd, An over-night creation of court-favor, Which with an undistinguishable ease Makes Baron or ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... worked away with the fury of despair, fully believing that ere long the ship would be sent to the bottom. The noise he made prevented our hearing what was going forward on deck; indeed, all sounds were undistinguishable by this time. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... powerful that his struggles to keep awake became harder and harder. In vain he sat erect, resolved not to yield. The moment afterwards his head inclined to one side; the lights began to swim before his eyes; the voice of the preacher subsided into a low and undistinguishable hum. Paul's head sank upon the cushion, his bundle, which had been his constant companion during the day, fell softly to the floor, and he fell into ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare phenomenon—life, and individuality, after death. They are more noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... of surface were arbitrarily cut down or built up and covered with leaves and pine-straw to disguise the fact, and whenever a tree or anything worth preserving stood in the way here came the loaded barrow and the barrowist, like a piece of artillery sweeping into action, and a fill undistinguishable from nature soon brought the path around the obstacle on what had been its lower side, to meander on at its unvarying rate of rise or fall as though nothing—except the trees and wild flowers—had happened since the vast freshets of the post-glacial period ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... a variety of irrational noises. And he was near to her. Also he realized that he had never known how close akin were fear and joy, so close the two could mingle thus, and be quite undistinguishable. And then repentance ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... there came another of dim, undistinguishable hordes that tore down the crescents and slaughtered the ministers of the strange faith, and gave the ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... English way of getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every possible advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race, language, birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double personality ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... flowers for the occasion; and the festival was concluded by a dramatic representation of events in the life of Buddha, illustrated by scenery and costumes, with figures of elephants and stags, so delicately coloured as to be undistinguishable from nature.[1] ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... become almost thick in its intensity, even the houses were undistinguishable in the gloom. The two men stumbled as they walked, loose stones detached themselves under their feet and their heelless sandals slid in the mud. Once the Caesar lost his foothold altogether; but for his convulsive hold on the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... noises pervaded the apartment through this momentous space of time. One was the sharp panting of the two combatants, so similar in each as to be undistinguishable; the other was the stroke of their heels and toes, as they smote the floor at every contortion ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... from place, signifying only its existence, not location: and when one can find out, and frame in his mind, clearly and distinctly the place of the universe, he will be able to tell us whether it moves or stands still in the undistinguishable inane of infinite space: though it be true that the word place has sometimes a more confused sense, and stands for that space which anybody takes up; and so the universe is in a place. The idea, therefore, of place we have by the same means that we get the idea of space, (whereof this is but ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... other passage the clauses and phrases follow in their natural order, but they are united by the simplest kind of connective device in an undistinguishable stream over which the reader is driven with a steady swell and fall, sometimes made breathlessly rapid by the succession of its uniformly measured word-groups, but delicately modulated here and there to provide restful pauses in the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... would be more appropriate for a widow. When the guard announced the next stop as Bleecker Street, however, it occurred to Morris that the manufacturers of quadruple plate were producing some very artistic effects in knives, forks and spoons, which in appearance were undistinguishable from sterling silver; and the train was leaving Spring Street when Morris bethought himself of a certain bonbonniere that had cost Mrs. Perlmutter precisely four dollars at a dry-goods store. He distinctly recalled examining the trade-mark, ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... familiarly known in the colony as "sugar bags," (sugar bag meaning, aboriginice, anything sweet), and require some experience and proficiency to detect and secure the aperture by which the bees enter the trees, being undistinguishable to an unpractised eye. The quantity of honey is sometimes very large, amounting to several quarts. Enough was found on one occasion to more than satisfy the whole party. Its flavor differs from that of European honey almost as much as the bee does ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... appears, wheels and disappears, and you note, as it were by flashes, the characteristics of face and figure that mark the Louisianaises in the perfection of the new-blown flower. You see that blondes are not impossible; there, indeed, are two sisters who might be undistinguishable twins but that one has blue eyes and golden hair. You note the exquisite pencilling of their eyebrows, here and there some heavier and more velvety, where a less vivacious expression betrays a share of Spanish blood. As ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... is situated on a piece of table-land, surrounded by dense forest growths, and itself covered with low jungle. There is the appearance of a ditch, in the form of a cross, at the intersecting angles of which are tall mounds of ruin, of which the original form is now undistinguishable beyond the fact that the basements, constructed of large stones, indicate that the structures were square. The natives can not be induced to go near this place, although it abounds in wild pigeons, which they are extremely fond ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... out his hands to the Xan'thians, and conjuring them to have pity on themselves and their city; but, insensible to his expostulations, they rushed into the flames with desperate obstinacy, and the whole soon became a heap of undistinguishable ruin. 14. At this horrid spectacle Brutus melted into tears, offering a reward to every soldier who should bring him a Ly'cian alive. The number of those whom it was possible to save from their own fury amounted to no more than one hundred and fifty. 15. Some writers, however, affirm that the ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... manner, that we could almost say we feel or see it: But, except the mind be disordered by disease or madness, they never can arrive at such a pitch of vivacity, as to render these perceptions altogether undistinguishable. All the colours of poetry, however splendid, can never paint natural objects in such a manner as to make the description be taken for a real landskip. The most lively thought is still inferior ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... nor are the different parts| of the things to be confounded with each other. Suppose that, as we pass our hand over a table, all the sensations of touch and movement which we experience fused into an undistinguishable mass. Would we have any notion of size or shape? It is because our experiences of touch and movement do not fuse, but remain distinguishable from each other, and we are conscious of them as arranged, as constituting a system, that we can distinguish between this part of a thing and that, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... close, dark body of men, on the further side was another force, mostly of horsemen, with what seemed like waggons and baggage horses in the rear. They had what by its colours seemed to be the English banner, the others had several undistinguishable standards. Puffs of smoke broke from the windows of ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... can, then, do as I please. On the other hand, Infinite Knowledge must know, and have known from all eternity, what I shall do now, and at every moment of my future being: and for Omnipotence to know from all eternity what will be, is, in our human sense, practically undistinguishable from the thought that the Power has predestined the same; and man cannot of course alter that. Here, then, by separate lines of thought, we are brought to two opposite and irreconcilable conclusions. It is so always. We cannot ourselves imagine how a fixed set of laws and rules can ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... other. Neither tree, hill, nor wood intercepted the rushing gale, to change the dull monotony of its gloomy tone. The Ythan, indeed, darted by, swollen and turbid from continued storms, threatening to overflow the barren plain it watered, but its voice was undistinguishable amidst the louder wail of wind and ocean. Pine-trees, dark, ragged, and stunted, and scattered so widely apart that each one seemed monarch of some thirty acres, were the only traces of vegetation for miles round. Nor were human habitations more abundant; indeed, few dwellings, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... city and State, who should turn out and repulse the enemy, should they attempt to march this way; and likewise, to bind the property of all such persons to make good the damages which that of the Whigs might sustain. In the undistinguishable mode of conducting a war, we frequently make reprisals at sea, on the vessels of persons in England, who are friends to our cause compared with the resident Tories ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... old trees groaning in the wind, the troubled lake," and the still more troubled sisters. As may be supposed, she very soon grew weary of the walk. The bleak wind pierced her to the soul; her silk slippers and lace flounces became undistinguishable masses of mud; her dogs chased the sheep, and were, in their turn, pursued by the "nowts," as the ladies termed the steers. One sister expatiated on the great blessing of having a peat moss at their ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... discovered Mrs Speaker's place of abode in Sydney, and averred her children ran about so untended as to be undistinguishable from aboriginals, and that her housekeeping was sending her husband to perdition; and such is the texture of human nature unearthed at political crises, that some even went so far as to suggest that she was a weakness of Walker's, and sneered at the ladies' candidate ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... emerging from the wood into the highroad when a buggy dashed past him, containing a man and a woman. The woman wore a thick veil; the man was almost undistinguishable from dust. The glimpse was momentary, but dislike has a keen eye, and in that glimpse Mr. Hamlin recognized Van Loo. The situation was equally clear. The bent heads and averted faces, the dust collected in the heedlessness of ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... stalactite, And in mid-darkness lit a rainbow's blaze, Wherein the absolute Reason, Power, and Love, That erst could move Mainly in me but toil and weariness, Renounced their deadening might, Renounced their undistinguishable stress Of withering white, And did with gladdest hues my spirit caress, Nothing of Heaven in thee ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... especially to those of the party who, like myself, saw an eastern city and its picturesque and curious bazaars for the first time. From Cairo the route lay across the desert for ninety miles, the road being merely a cutting in the sand, quite undistinguishable at night. The journey was performed in a conveyance closely resembling a bathing-machine, which accommodated six people, and was drawn by four mules. My five fellow-travellers were all cadets, only one of whom (Colonel John Stewart, of Ardvorlich, Perthshire) is now alive. The transit ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... much to which his own experience can afford little if any clue.'[5] Mr. Galton had to warn the unimaginative psychologist in this way, because he was about to unfold his discovery of the faculty which presents numbers to some minds as visualised coloured numerals, 'so vivid as to be undistinguishable from reality, except by the aid of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... shapes disappear, and as the features of the field grow undistinguishable the comparative quiet is broken by gay notes from guitars and castanets in the direction of the city, and other sounds of popular rejoicing at Wellington's victory. People come dancing out from the town, and the merry-making continues till ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... prostituted festivities of heathen gods, she was "educated in the Jews' religion;" and, from infancy to maturer years, had been taught to sing the praises of the great I AM! Nor did she merely mingle her undistinguishable notes of joy with her country-women and her nation; but, from the ardour of her zeal, and the general superiority of her character, she took the lead in these devotional raptures. Her early advantages, and her pious connexions, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... several other shields on the tomb, but all are now undistinguishable except one; which appears to be a bend impaling a saltire, as far as I can make it out: the colours are wholly obliterated. The head of the figure has not a coif on it, as I should have anticipated; but a cap fitting very close, and a bag ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... thoughtfully [14] the vessel's deck In some far region, here, while o'er my head, At every impulse of the moving breeze, The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound, [B] Alone I tread this path;—for aught I know, 105 Timing my steps to thine; and, with a store Of undistinguishable sympathies, Mingling most earnest wishes for the day When we, and others whom we love, shall meet A second time, in Grasmere's ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... cathedral-door A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor Kneel to repeat his pater-noster o'er; Far off the noises of the world retreat; The loud vociferations of the street Become an undistinguishable roar. So, as I enter here from day to day, And leave my burden at this minster-gate, Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, The tumult of the time disconsolate To inarticulate murmurs dies away, While the eternal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... buried seven inches. A similar change took place in a field covered with flints, where in thirty years the turf was compact without any stones. A pathway formed of loose-set flagstones was similarly buried by worms, and became undistinguishable from the rest of the lawn. And these are but a few of the evidences of the wonderful action of worms, collected by the activity of Charles ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... remain together and behind the litter bearers, that I would rather leave my body with our dead comrades in the rocks than to leave behind any of our wounded men. But we had proceeded but a short distance when the lines crumbled and became mixed up, in fact, an undistinguishable mob. Under these circumstances, and relying on undisciplined troops, our position was critical in the extreme. One shot would have precipitated a stampede. Wheaton, Ross and Miller were somewhere mixed up among the troops, but Bellinger and I stuck to the litter bearers and kept as ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... low-roofed building with small arched windows, through which the sun's rays streamed upon a plain tablet on the opposite wall, which had once recorded names, now as undistinguishable on its worn surface, as were the bones beneath, from the dust into which they had resolved. The impressive service of the Church of England was spoken—not merely READ—by a grey- headed minister, and the responses ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... clustering all over their transparent substance, wriggling worm-like forms of such elusive matter that the smallest exposure to the sun melted them, and they were not. Lower down, vast pale shadows creep sluggishly along, happily undistinguishable as yet, but adding a half-familiar flavour to the strange, faint ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle |
