"Vague" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with all its leaves and branches. True architecture, perhaps, always springs out of vegetal nature, and each zone may have its own edifices as well as plants; in this way oriental architectures might be comprehended—the vague idea of the slender palm and of its bouquet of leaves with the Arabs, and the vague idea of the colossal, prolific, dilated and bristling vegetation ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... enjoyment and appreciation of the most perfect musical performances. How, then, could either the minute incipient stages, or the final perfecting touches of this admirable structure, have been brought about by vague, aimless, and indefinite variations in all conceivable directions of an organ, suitable to enable the rudest savage to minister to his ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... consequently became less frequent;—I was more alone—for Margaretha was not always a companion who could solace me for the absence of one so dearly loved as my Andrea; and repeated fits of deep despondency seized upon my soul. At those times I felt as if some evil—vague and undefinable, but still terrible—were impending over me. Was it my lord's approaching death of which I had a presentiment? I know not! Weeks passed away; the count's visits occurred at intervals growing longer and longer—but his affection toward me had not ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... symptom of bad weather. A survey party from the Rocky Mountains, in a York boat, tarried at our camp, bringing word that the ice-jam was clear in Lesser Slave Lake, which was cheering, but that we need scarcely look for the expected assistance. They also gave a vague account of the murder of a squaw by her husband for cannibalism, which afterwards proved to be groundless, and, with this comforting information, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... the heavily ornate elegance of the great bedroom, which, with its dressing-room and bath, his father had set aside for his use in the Surtaine mansion, he felt in the whole scheme of the thing a vague offense. The air which he had breathed in those spacious halls of trade had left a faintly malodorous reminiscence ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... face as song that sings of home; And filled our hearts with vague, suggestive spells Of pathos, as sad ocean fills its shells With sympathetic ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Galvano gives of this voyage is very vague and inconclusive. We shall find afterwards that the Spaniards found out the means of counteracting the perpetual eastern trade winds of the Pacific within the tropics, by shaping a more northerly course from the Philippine islands, where they established the staple of their ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... The vague telepathic bond that always links identical twins (they "think alike", they say) becomes unbalanced under such conditions. Normally, there is a give-and-take, and each preserves the sense of his own identity, since the two different sets of sense receptors give different ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... questions that the pretty English widow's new friend was asking herself, finding answers thereto which were unsatisfactory, because vague and mysterious. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... discussing the various features of the face and discovering that only a vague relationship to character existed. The thick, moist lower lip is the sensual lip, say the physiognomists, but there are saints with sensual lips and chaste thoughts. Squinty eyes may indicate a shifty character, but more ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... business was with her own duties, and with her own class, whose good and evil she understood by practical experience. So when a live lord made his appearance in her school, she looked at him with vague wonder and admiration, as a being out of some other planet, for whom she had no gauge or measure: she only believed that he had vast powers of doing good unknown to her; and was delighted by seeing him condescend to play with her children. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... was to have no padding, so that most of the members of her circle were types. Still, as she had a perfect passion for entertaining, there remained, of course, a residue; distant elderly connections with well-sounding names (as ballast), and a few vague hangers-on; several rather dull celebrities, some merely pretty and well-dressed women, and a steadily increasing number of good-looking young men. Hyacinth was fond ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... There is nothing to prevent this—no fence, or boom; no mark, even, between what is dangerous and what is not; no division whatever. Persons ignorant of the river may just as likely as not row right into danger. A vague caution on a notice-board may or may not be seen; in either case it gives no directions, and is certainly no protection. Let the matter be argued from whatever point of view, the fact remains that these accidents ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... the secret in, Half spoken by the stealthy eyes, Is there indeed no word to win, No secret, from the vague replies ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... the next morning I read the letters. They were filled with vague, inflated, sentimental descriptions of his inner life and feelings; entirely egotistical, and intermixed with quotations from second-rate philosophers and poets. There was, it must be said, nothing in them offensive to good principle or good feeling, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... while the great, soft flakes continued to drift slowly down, silent—silent—as the grave, and above and beneath and on all sides the same absolute neutrality of tint, vague and soft; yet the reality of the rugged mountain even so obscured and covered, remained; its cliffs and crags below, deadly and ragged, and fearful to look down upon, and skirting its sides the long, weary trail, up which at that ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... eyes and looked him frankly in the face. They were honest brown eyes, a little clouded just now with some reflection of the vague trouble which ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... well to our parents, and are amiable in the family—I don't know—and yet," said Florence, sighing, "I have often had a sort of vague idea of something higher that we might become; yet, really, what more than this is expected of us? what else ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... recalled her to herself, and immediately the countenance changed beyond recognition. Her eyes wandered past him with a look of cold if not defiant reserve; the lips lost all their sweetness. He was chilled with vague distrust, and once again asked himself whether this could be the Eve Madeley whose history he ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... seemed to have a familiar sound. I seem to have run across a few people whose idea of God's world is about on the level of the small boy's. The world is where they live. The rest is a hazy, vague something, or—nothing. It exists for them, if it exists at all ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... beginning of old age. This notion I now repudiated as ridiculous, for I felt as young as I had done ten, fifteen, or twenty years before; and yet the words "forty years" appalled me. The wish to "settle down" then grew into a passion in me. The vague portrait of a woman in the abstract seemed never to be absent from my mind. Coupled with that portrait was a similarly vague image of a window and a table set for dinner. That, somehow, was my symbol of home. Home and woman were one, a complex charm joining them into an inseparable ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... shock to Douglass, for it made definite and very moving the vague dreams which had possessed him in his hours of reflection. His hands clinched, and while his heart beat fast and his breath shortened he said: "Yes, I will win her if I can"; but he was not elated. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... me every luxury that the heart could wish for. I never knew my mother, for she died when I was quite young. My sister was married to you, Herbert, when I was seventeen years of age. My ideas up to that time were very vague regarding the sexes, but I was soon destined ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... and the domestic left the room. She was gone but a short time, when she returned and said that Mrs. Elder wished to see him. Jasper arose and followed her up-stairs. There were some strange misgivings in his heart—some vague, troubled anticipations, that oppressed his feelings. But he had little time for thought ere he was ushered into the chamber of his ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... nerve and courage that he was showing, and knew that he was showing. The old gentleman took pleasure in thinking that although he was about to fail in affairs, he was not going to fail in character. He even began to make vague plans for trying again, and when, after a long dinner, they pushed back their chairs and rose from the table, there was a youthful resiliency in the voice with which he challenged Powers to a game ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... knitting, and I by her side, gazing now on herself, now on her work, with a vague idea that the threads in the skein of my own web of love or of life were passing quick through those noiseless fingers. And, indeed, in every web of romance, the fondest, one of the Parcae is sure to be some matter-of-fact She, Social Destiny, as little akin to romance herself ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... suppress his rising scorn and indignation, the expression of which, he was well aware, would have little availed him. "Brian de Bois-Guilbert," he answered, "replies not, most Reverend Father, to such wild and vague charges. If his honour be impeached, he will defend it with his body, and with that sword which has often ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Constantinople. Her real objection was that with Russia on the Bosphorus the control of the Mediterranean might pass into the hands of the rival who seemed to wish to dispute with her for the mastery of India. Her expressed reasons had some vague declarations about the "chivalry of the Turk." Austria developed her ambition to suzerainty over the Balkan Peninsula mainly on the strength of a claim to be the heir of the old Holy Roman Empire, and as such possessing ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... marriage—and so women marry without Love, believing that it will follow. God help them! That which comes afterwards is not even the ghost of Love, it is only Custom. This was the spirit of Seymour Michael. He had already acquired one or two objects of a vague ambition; and, possessing them, had only learnt to be accustomed to ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... "A vague opinion prevails among men that society is moving onward to its appointed state by what is variously termed the 'force of circumstances,' 'the instinct of the race,' 'the general law of progress,' ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... He had all along been goaded by a vague sense of dishonour. "It's useless crying over spilt milk," exclaimed he, impatiently. "Now would have been the very worst time—just as he wants me to marry some one else. But when ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... clear voice fell silent—and the silence stayed. The vague thrill of a tragedy they could hardly grasp laid a spell upon the children. It made Roy feel as he did in Church, when the deepest notes of the organ quivered through him; and it brought a lump in his throat, which must be manfully swallowed down on account of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... is in effect that congress of sovereignties which good men in the Old World have sought for, but could never attain, and which imparts to America an exemption from the mutable leagues for common action, from the wars, the mutual invasions, and vague aspirations after the balance of power which convulse from time to time the Governments of Europe. Our cooperative action rests in the conditions of permanent confederation prescribed by the Constitution. Our balance of power is in the separate reserved rights of the States ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... though, from one look at that to-let expression of his, that his ideas on any subject would be vague. And this was a bum hunch on Aunty. Out? Why, she was propped up in an easy-chair with a sprained ankle, and had been for three days! And you should have seen the tight-lipped, welcome-to-our-grand-jury-room smile ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... the direct 'rule and governance' of the Wicked One, is most skillfully administered. The supernatural here never becomes grossly palpable:—the thrill is all the deeper for its action being indefinite, and its source vague and distant." ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... So vague and inclusive were these phrases that many important questions immediately sprang from them. What were the privileges and immunities of the citizen? Did those of the citizen of the United States differ from those of the citizen of a state? Was ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... vague fear in Nicholas's mind thus at length and in different workings, because thereby alone can be grasped the master-key to his dealings with the serf system. Toward his toiling millions Nicholas always showed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... sure that the rider fell. The next moment, Colonna's attention was diverted to himself. He was taken prisoner and knew no more of the day's events. The figure of Charles of Burgundy disappears from the view of man. A curtain woven of vague rumour hides the closing scenes of ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... when others would have had no idea whither to turn. All his father's secrets were known to him. He had learnt to read almost imperceptible signs—the forms of icicles, the appearance of the small branches of trees, mists rising far away in the horizon, vague sounds in the air, distant reports, the flight of birds through the foggy atmosphere, a thousand circumstances which are so many words to those who can decipher them. Moreover, tempered by snow like a Damascus blade in the waters of Syria, he had ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... It was the vague, half-formed fear that all the girls had felt, yet none had dared express, and the silence that followed was ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... night passed. My indistinct remembrance prevents my describing all the impressions it made. I can only recall one circumstance. During some lulls of the wind and sea, I fancied I heard several times vague sounds, a sort of fugitive harmony produced by words of command. What was, then, the mystery of this submarine craft, of which the whole world vainly sought an explanation? What kind of beings existed in this strange boat? What mechanical ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... another! But this is no common creature;" and it was with a look of new interest and sympathy on his face that he proceeded with the ceremony,—the other couple, a middle-aged Irishman, with his more than middle-aged bride, standing quietly by, and looking on with a vague sort of wonder in their ugly, impassive faces, as if it struck them oddly ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... [Sohrab has vague suspicions it is his father. Rustum, in ignorance, coldly waives aside all overtures. ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... me, woman, and I should be inclined to become a Christian, but of prophecies and such vague ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... great actors and actresses of the past, with the famous beauties who have stood behind the footlights and the splendid audiences that have sat before them, that it is an admirable nucleus for remembrances to cluster around. It was but a vague spot in memory before, but now it is a bright centre for other images of the past. That one evening seems to make me the possessor of all its traditions from the time when it rose from its ashes, when Byron's poem was written and ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Elevation of the Host the congregation, permeated by a vague impression that the mystery was becoming more sacred, ceased its private conversations, and assumed a certain appearance of reverent devotion. And as the organ fell silent all heads were bowed at the tinkling of ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... been shaken by a long succession of snubs in the quarter under discussion. As for Miss Bouverie, it was her practice to play off one young man against the other by discouraging each in his turn. But this evening she was a different being. She had a vague yet absolute conviction that her fortune was made. She could have sung all her songs to the twain, but for the reflection that Mr. Clarkson himself would hear them too, and report the matter to his wife on ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... originally were, whence they came, how long they have dwelt in their present realm, are questions easier to ask than to answer. Their history does not reach back to their origin, except in vague and doubtful outlines. The time was when that great territory known as China was the home of aboriginal tribes, and the first historical sketch given us of the Chinese represents them as a little horde of wanderers, destitute of houses, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... listened with a vague consciousness, his eyes fixed alternately on the nun with the drooping coif and on the fair, upturned face beside her. At last a word struck him, and made his whole soul to vibrate. Men, women, the great mute throng, pillars, arches, windows of figured ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... this continual dwelling upon foreign associations, bred in me a vague prophetic thought, that I was fated, one day or other, to be a great voyager; and that just as my father used to entertain strange gentlemen over their wine after dinner, I would hereafter be telling my own adventures to an eager auditory. And I have no doubt ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... definition, or logical discrimination, but that, when they hear the word from the mouth of the Lord, the right idea may rise in their minds; that the word may neither be to them a void sound, nor call up either a vague or false notion of what he meant by it. If he says, 'I am the truth,' it must, to say the least, be well to know what he means by the word with whose idea he identifies himself. And at once we may premise that he can mean nothing merely ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... tree is perhaps the most significant symbol in the world: every tree is the Tree of Life in the sense that it is a representation of universal becoming. To say that all things have for their mother prakriti, undifferentiated substance, and for their father purusha, the creative fire, is vague and metaphysical, and conveys little meaning to our image-bred, image-fed minds; on the physical plane we can only learn these transcendental truths by means of symbols, and so to each of us is given ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... he went on peevishly. "We've been trying our utmost to keep it secret. Unless we're quick, there'll be a rush of adventurers from all parts of the world before we can secure the options. Happily the despatch is vague. They don't know all the facts. If they did——" Lowering his voice and looking around cautiously to make sure that the butler had left the room and no one was listening, he continued: "Besides you know what I am to bring back. It couldn't be entrusted to anyone else. Just think—a stone worth ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... have had good lessons from pictures which I have since seen without emotion or remark. A deduction must be made from the opinion which even the wise express of a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing. The child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well as when you told it me yesterday?' Alas! child ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is the might and nobleness of the Christian love to God; that it is no idle emotion or lazy rapture, no vague sentiment, but the root of all practical goodness, of all strenuous effort, of all virtue, and of all praise. That strong tide is meant to drive the busy wheels of life and to bear precious freightage on its bosom; not to flow away in profitless foam. Love is the fruitful mother of bright ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... not on his side. And now he would lose his job on the British Bolshevist (not that that mattered much), and be further discredited, for perpetrating this fraud which had been so unfortunately exposed. He would go under, deeper and deeper under, and so would she. The underworld, that vague and fearful place, would receive them. His generous and trusting love for her had joined with his love of a joke to sink him. Together they would sink, and over their bodies Charles Wilbraham would climb, as on stepping-stones, to higher ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... about an English mile from Zutphen, in the midst of a wide, low, somewhat fenny plain, which, in winter, became so completely a lake, that peasants were not unfrequently drowned in attempting to pass from the city to the village. In summer, the vague expanse of country was fertile and cheerful of aspect. Long rows of poplars marking the straight highways, clumps of pollard willows scattered around the little meres, snug farm-houses, with kitchen-gardens and brilliant flower-patches dotting the level plain, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... companions in unhappiness were left together on the garden bench, with the same thought for a bond of union. They sat for a long time, saying little save vague, unmeaning words, watching the father walk away in his happiness, gesticulating as if he were ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... for the highest mediaeval romance, in which I knew I was lamentably deficient. Even in our most confidential moments I was always aware that I weakly lagged behind this daughter of a gloomily distinguished ancestry, in her frequent incursions into a vague but poetic past. There was something of the dignity of the Spanish chatelaine in the sweetly grave little figure that advanced to accept my specious offering. I think I should have fallen on my ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Nature that they have ceased to be men and become gods, and as such alone can we deal with them. It is also permissible to point out that in the case of Tammuz, Esmun, and Adonis, the title is not a proper name, but a vague appellative, denoting an abstract rather than a concrete origin. Proof of this will be found later. Sir W. Ridgeway overlooks the fact that it is not the tragic death of Attis-Adonis which is of importance for these cults, but their subsequent restoration to life, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... god; in an aristocratic age it assumes the character of a hero; and in a democracy it becomes a multitudinous being, definite in character if the democracy is a real social organism. But where the democracy is only loosely held together by the social order, the national being is vague in character, is a mood too feeble to inspire large masses of men to high policies in times of peace, and in times of war it communicates frenzy, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his revolver there fell upon him ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... to obey, Cork accompanying her reluctantly. In the passage she found a strange woman in a nurse's uniform, and Nick. He came to her instantly, and she felt his arm about her with a vague sensation of relief. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... an impulse to accept his proposal. Whence that impulse sprang I cannot say. Perhaps from the aspect of an adventure that the affair had. Perhaps from the vague idea that by attaching myself to Alresca I should be brought again into contact with Rosetta Rosa. Certainly I admired him immensely. None who knew him could avoid doing so. Already, indeed, I had for him a feeling ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... realised that the man was no passive agent. It was Draconmeyer who, with subtle purpose, was drawing his wife away! Hunterleys sprang to his feet and walked angrily backwards and forwards along the few yards of Terrace, which happened at that moment to be almost deserted. Vague plans of instant revenge upon Draconmeyer floated into his mind. It was simple enough to take the law into his own hands, to thrash him publicly, to make Monte Carlo impossible for him. And then, suddenly, he remembered his duty. They were trusting ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rose up before Burton's eyes. First of all he shivered. Then in some vague, unwholesome sort of manner he began to find the vision attractive. He found himself actually wishing that she were there—a buxom young woman with dyed hair and sidelong glances, a loud voice, and a distinct ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... going on in that closed-up head? When she had been thus two or three hours sitting opposite him, she felt herself getting daft, and longed to rush away and to escape into the open country in order to avoid that mute, eternal companionship and also some vague danger, which she could not define, but of which she had ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... were cut off from the stairway by the closed and bolted door, they remained for a moment speechless with despair. Then Derrick flung himself furiously against the heavy door again and again, with a vague hope that he might thus force it to give way. His efforts were of no avail, and he only exhausted his strength; for the massive framework did not even tremble beneath ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... words the vague thought which had been troubling him in regard to her attitude; and now that he understood what his thought had been he was incensed by what seemed his own disloyalty. And yet, the girl was asking him to make over ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and her children had closed around the wood fire which had been lighted on the hearth at the approach of evening, and Rose was trying by the bad light to continue her darning of stockings, when a loud hasty knocking was heard at the door, and all, in a general vague impression of dread, started and ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... highest order, Harold took his rifle and rambled into the bush in search of game—any kind of game, for at that time he had had no experience whatever of the sport afforded by the woods of tropical Africa, and, having gathered only a few vague ideas from books, he went forth with all the pleasurable excitement and expectation that we may suppose peculiar ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... faith in dreams, the dim sense of another world surrounding this, the belief in communion between the two, these are the parts of him that are based unchangeably in the forest shadows. But those other things, the spiritual passions, the ecstacies, the vague sensing of the terribleness of the creative powers,—to them always he made no response. And the crude philosophizing of the forest theologians, their fiercely simple dualism—God and Satan, thunder and lightning, the eternal war in the heavens, the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... detect. He did not mean by this, that the evil was to go on for ever. Had a wise plan been proposed at first, it might have been half-cured by this time. The present resolution would do no good. It was vague, indefinite, and unintelligible. Such resolutions were only the Slave-merchants' harvests. They would go for more slaves than usual in the interim. He should have advised a system of duties on fresh importations of slaves, progressively increasing to a certain extent; and that the amount ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... fantastic shadows on the bolted door. A tram roared by in the dark, and Lucy felt unaccountably sad, though she had long since dried her eyes. She lifted them to the ceiling, where the griffins and bassoons were colourless and vague, the ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... concerned here with the Dalila of the opera, but Mr. Hale invites us to an excursion which offers a pleasant occupation for a brief while, and we cheerfully go with him. The Biblical Delilah is a vague figure, except in two respects: She is a woman of such charms that she wins the love of Samson, and such guile and cupidity that she plays upon his passion and betrays him to the lords of the Philistines for pay. The Bible knows nothing of her patriotism, nor does the sacred historian ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... exaggerated extent of Great Java in a southern direction, and the animals and houses painted upon the shores, such as have not been any where seen in Terra Australis, it should appear to have been partly formed from vague information, collected, probably, by the early Portuguese navigators, from the eastern nations; and that conjecture has done the rest. It may, at the same time, be admitted, that a part of the west and north-west coasts, where ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... throne, and appears inclined to be quiet. There is another great warrior chief, named Moselekatsee, who revolted from Chaka, and who is much such another character; but our accounts of these people are vague at present, and require time to corroborate their correctness. You will have to act and decide when you arrive there, and must be guided by circumstances. With the caravan you propose to travel with, ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 'Lias, eyeing it. A sort of vague trouble came into his face, and his wrinkled hands lying on his stick began to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sown the beginning of January, and treated as cabbage sown at that time. Some observe the practice of sowing from November until February, but this is a vague method, and not to be ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... disappointed. It seemed such common-place drudgery to drill an untaught child in the alphabet and spelling-book. Her vague idea of "work for Christ" had been of a more exalted nature. But her friend added: "I don't mean that you should not teach her better things also. You could, little by little, teach her a good deal about Christ in the course of your daily lessons. ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... assented to." On this Dr. Parr observes, "Why Dr. Warburton was ever suspected of secret infidelity I know not. What he was inclined to think on subjects of religion, before, perhaps, he had leisure or ability to examine them, depends only upon obscure surmise, or vague report." The words inclined to think seems a periphrase for secret infidelity. Our critic attributes these reports to "an English dunce, whose blunders and calumnies are now happily forgotten, and repeated by a French buffoon, whose morality is not ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... jocose by turns; there was something forced and feverish about her which the children felt but did not comprehend. She was a woman of not very much intelligence, and she had a secret, and she carried it ill, and knew not what to do with it; but they could not tell that. They only felt a vague sense of disturbance and timidity at her ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... turned and walked swiftly toward a neighboring heap of rocks whose shadows swallowed her. Enoch breathed hard for a moment, then followed. He found Diana, a vague heap on a great stone, her face buried in her hands. Enoch sat down beside her and took ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... were hopelessly lost to him, he returned to Leipsic, more than ever determined to find them. It was the only idea he had: to find them—to find them—to find them. His other thoughts were without stimulating power—irresolute, vague, uncertain. This one idea grew and grew until it became an obsession. He could no longer bear the sound of music; so it was no sacrifice to him to give up his profession. He hated the very streets he walked in, for had Elene not walked ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... passage of a transmigrating soul. After the subdued excitement of the past weeks, and especially of the past hour, the very regularity of his movements now lulled him into a passivity only quickened by vague fears. The noiseless leaping forward of the canoe beneath him heightened his sense of breaking with the past and hastening onward into another life. In that life he would be a new creature, free to be a ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... imagined himself in Von Rabbek's drawing-room beside a girl who was like the young lady in lilac and the fair girl in black; then he would close his eyes and see himself with another, entirely unknown girl, whose features were very vague. In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned on her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with his wife, children. ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... connection. Roger went out to talk with Warner, while Aubrey fumed in the back office. He could not sit still, and paced the little room in a fidget of impatience, tearing his watch out of his pocket every few minutes. He felt dull and sick with vague fear. To his mind recurred the spiteful buzz of that voice over the wire—"Gissing Street is not healthy for you." He remembered the scuffle on the Bridge, the whispering in the alley, and the sinister face of the druggist at his prescription counter. The whole series of events ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... became very curious, stirred with a blind unreasoned instinct. In the Bible which he read Sunday afternoons, because his father gave him a quarter for doing so, he came across a great many things that filled him with vague and strange ideas; and one Sunday at church, when the minister was intoning the Litany, he remarked for the first time the words, "all women in the perils ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... that in his puzzle he had been rather vague, and added pleasantly, "You have the courage of truth. That's moral courage. Tom would have explained or denied, or done anything to get out of the scrape, if the Squire had come down on ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... use kicking the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... I suppose, you mean the vegetable and animal creation? I have, however, but a very vague idea of the word organisation, and I have often wished to know more ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... which stands out, on the right, close to the footlights, the trunk of a large oak, with a board nailed to it. A vague, milky, impenetrable light prevails. TYLTYL and MYTYL are at the foot of ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... class and with a general feeling of much injustice in the world. Four years he spent in England seeing the poor driven off the land by the sheep; then we find him in Flanders, married, but still in vague search of the Eldorado; again roaming, he visits Lisbon and Luebeck as a sailor, ever seeking and inquiring. Suddenly a new light bursts upon him in the teaching of Melchior Hofmann [the Anabaptist]; he fills himself with dreams of a glorious kingdom on earth, the rule of justice and of love. Still ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... to hold the hatchet, so she had to collect grass and moss with the young ones. The first tree that was cut down, how often it was anathematized, it seemed determined not to come down. Hot and panting we sat down one after another to rest, and a sort of vague notion kept running in our heads, if one tree is such a trouble, what shall we do having to cut down so many. But Schillie was not to be daunted by a tree; taking a great glassful of porter, she called on us ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... it alone through perturbation And vague disquiet of another star, They named it, till the day of revelation, "The Dark Companion" ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... open to your hand," said I, shaking off the vague apprehension that had seized me, "while I unclose the shutters and see what ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... curving footway of broken shells and coral chips marking the limit of the morning's tide, a vague attempt was made to catalogue the plants which crowd each other on the verge of salt water, and so to make comparison with that part of Australia the features of which provoked Adam Lindsay Gordon to frame an adhesive phrase concerning bright ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... set our affections too strongly upon things below, because they may fail us at any moment, and there is nothing sure but heaven. Still, like most children, they listened to such words carelessly, as to something vague and far away. It was only when they were left, in one short day, without a roof over their heads, that Susy ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... arranged that Phineas and Lord Chiltern were to leave Matching together. Phineas was to remain at his office all October, and in November the general election was to take place. What he had hitherto heard about a future seat was most vague, but he was to meet Ratler and Barrington Erle in London, and it had been understood that Barrington Erle, who was now at Saulsby, was to make some inquiry as to that group of boroughs of which Loughton at this moment formed one. But as Loughton was the smallest of four boroughs, and as one of the ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... is no surer sign of an unmanly and cowardly spirit, than a vague desire for help,—a wish to depend, to lean upon somebody, and enjoy the fruits of the industry of others. There are multitudes of young men who indulge in dreams of help from some quarter, coming in at a convenient moment, to enable them to secure the success in life ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... sinner's state as one of separation, estrangement, alienation, from God, the Christian's state as one in which he walks together with God, because the two have been set 'at one.' Or you have to deal with the following, 'to redeem,' 'Redeemer,' 'redemption.' Lose not yourselves in vague generalities, but fasten on the central point of these, that they imply a 'buying,' and not this merely, but a 'buying back'; and then connect with them, so explained, the whole circle of statements in Scripture which rest ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... that goes forward within its own narrow compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of Florence, which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long flight of angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is given a vague semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen back in sleep, the beautiful lady lies in death, her hands folded across her breast, and a glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With measured tread Dante approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet Love, but, as though ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... a certain way of failing, but I believe a person might make a livelihood by writing verses like these—for music. Another good way is to be very economical in your rhymes, only two to the four lines, and regretfully vague. Thus: ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... and the lion and the lamb meet together in the centre in cordial agreement. But, it appears that the war men in this case were only asses in lions' skins, for in the compromise between antagonistic principles and candidates, the peace men got far the better of the bargain. While there were some vague and glittering generalities in favor of the Union, they were connected with conditions which rendered the destruction of the Union certain, namely, an armistice and cessation of hostilities, accompanied by the false and flagitious declaration, calculated to encourage the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... failed to find any bright side as he turned his affairs over in his mind. He had only a meager stock of money. He had used his modest earnings in settling the debts of the family estate. The outlook for employment was vague—he could not estimate to what extent the hostility of Julius Marston might block his efforts, provided the magnate troubled himself to descend to meddle with the affairs of such an inconspicuous person. His poor little romance with Alma Marston had ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day |
