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More "Inexplicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doors, not only of her own house, but of Scaurnose and Portlossie as well, be shut against them. But through it all reigned a calm regard and fearlessness of the future which, to Lizzy's roused and apprehensive imagination, was strangely inexplicable. Annie Mair seemed possessed of some hidden and upholding assurance that raised her above the fear of man or what he could do to her. The girl concluded it must be the knowledge of God, and prayed more earnestly that night than she had prayed since the night on ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... I liked him, and had found him a pleasant companion, but had it not been for the strange and unpleasant dream which had somehow gifted him with an artificial importance in my mind, I should have cherished few regrets at his sudden flitting. As it was, I had a curious sense of uneasiness, and an inexplicable impression that in some undefined way I had done him an injustice, or been careless of his interests, though in reality I was very sure I had done ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... with the inspired tactlessness of children in emphasizing and exaggerating what she had wished could be passed over unnoticed, a gesture of hers as inexplicable to her as to them. Oh well, the best thing, of course, was to carry it off matter-of-factly, turn the leaf back, and let them see it. And then refute them by insisting on the literal truth of what ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... while of great authority, and its forfeiture, of late years, of power in the theatre. We all know Shakespeare's opinion of "the groundlings," and how he held them to be, "for the most part, capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise." The great dramatist's contemporaries entertained similar views on this head. They are to be found speaking with supreme contempt of the audience occupying the yard; describing them as "fools," and "scarecrows," ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... spite of himself he felt a Chance had come. Again that strange sixth sense of his, the inexplicable instinct, that only the born speculator knows, warned him. Every now and then during the course of his business career, this intuition came to him, this flair, this intangible, vague premonition, this presentiment that he must ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... be. Perhaps they were such that he never could satisfy them. Perhaps Judith recognized this. Of course, she recognized it!—as a bitter memory of her picture of marriage in Lost Chief returned to him. With a groan he bowed his head against the smooth trunk of an aspen. How utterly inexplicable women were! How bitter and how beautiful was ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... Aunt read a book upon Eugenics. I don't know how it happened. It was one of those inexplicable events for which no one can account. It made a deep impression. She has studied me ever since with a view to scientific matrimony. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... was as much puzzled as I was how to account for this burst of enthusiasm, for, taking no part in politics, and all his family being attached to the legitimate cause, this demonstration of regard appears more inexplicable. It seems, however, to establish one fact, and that is, that though the monarch has fallen into disrepute with the people, the aristocracy have not, and this alone proves how totally different are the feelings of those who have effected the present revolution with those of the persons who were ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... proved entirely groundless. By some inexplicable means, the two waifs, thrown thus strangely upon the protection of Widow Hardyng, managed to exist without either the aid or sympathy of the rest of the town. And Clemence, as the days grew cooler, rallied, and became ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... of Belgian violinists of to-day is Eugene Ysaye, who possesses that magnetism which charms alike the musician and the amateur, because of his perfect musical expression. He possesses the inexplicable and inexpressible something which takes cold judgment off its feet and leads ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... lesson. Buddhism has no prejudices against those who confess another faith. The Buddhists have founded no Inquisition; they have combined the zeal which converted kingdoms with a toleration almost inexplicable to our Western experience. Only one religious war has darkened their peaceful history during twenty-three centuries,—that which took place in Thibet, but of which we know little. A Siamese told Crawford that he believed all the religions of the world to ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and forms connexions, be sure he will snap them abruptly asunder. Let him sink out of sight as Private Scholar (Privatisirender), living by the grace of God in some European capital, you may next find him as Hadjee in the neighbourhood of Mecca. It is an inexplicable Phantasmagoria, capricious, quick-changing; as if our Traveller, instead of limbs and high-ways, had transported himself by some wishing-carpet, or Fortunatus' Hat. The whole, too, imparted emblematically, in dim multifarious tokens (as that collection of Street-Advertisements); ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... broken into and usurped by the changing of values, shapes, and appearance of things within it. The old familiar forms are transfigured and tampered with, our mistaken or incomplete idea of persons is revealed, and a host of new and inexplicable forms appear; with the result that we are literally bewildered, and instead of regarding things with reference to their influence upon us, we see things as they are in themselves—when we can see at all—and feel what ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... above a large inhabited city being slightly warmer—i. e., thinner—than the atmosphere of the surrounding country, a plane drops a little on entering the rarefied area, precisely as a ship sinks a little in fresh water. Hence the phenomena of "jolt" and your "inexplicable collisions" with factory chimneys. In air, as on earth, it is safest ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... as clear to me as the day, that Jesus Christ used the terms eating and drinking only in a spiritual manner; and (as I now understand them) as referring to that faith, which, while it is living and active in our hearts, unites us to him in an inexplicable manner, and clothes us in his merits at the same time that it purifies and sanctifies our views, our sentiments, and our desires. After having thus discovered my error, I found myself more than ever inclined to persevere in my reading, and to ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... its charms; and he had truly loved Adam de Gourdon; but the soft tones and refined accents were like a note of home to him; and though he had never seen the Princess before—she having been sent to the Court of St. Louis during the troubles—yet the whole of the interview gave him an inexplicable sense of being again among kindred and friends. He told himself that it was base, resolved that he would show himself determined to cast in his lot with his exiled brethren, and made up his mind to maintain a dignified silence during these two days, and at the ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... coursed through his brain, but he realized that to attempt a long explanation by signals was not only out of the question, but could not fail to attract the attention of passengers on board the Ganges. This he did not desire to do. Quick as lightning, he decided that by some inexplicable means the Scotland Yard detective had reached Marseilles full of the knowledge that Dubois and the diamonds were en route to Sicily, and had also learnt that he, Brett, and the others ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... toward the right, I suddenly noticed the lights of a distant ship darting about in a curious curve. Instantly afterward, another member of the squadron, nearer by, behaved in the same inexplicable manner. Then two or three of the floating cars seemed to be violently drawn from their courses and hurried rapidly in the direction of the flagship. Immediately I perceived a small object, luridly flaming, which seemed to move with ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... antennae into the ripe fruit or perhaps into some carrion lying near. The bassoon-like sound never ceases a single instant and tells the listener how innumerable are the populations of insects which live and generate their sort under the shade of their jungle retreat. Other inexplicable noises—far off crashes, mysterious sounds that chill one's veins, howls that make one shiver—for a sole moment break the noon-day silence. What is their origin? ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... the Registeries to have their origin recorded if they could recall it. Indeed many spirits fail utterly to remember their former condition, and happen, as we might say, upon Mars, unexplained and inexplicable. They even are without speech and learn the Martian language as ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... matter of history, which they foreshadowed and symbolized; but, on the other hand, the hieroglyphics which occupy the tablet's posterior portion,—the hieroglyphics that symbolize events still future,—are invincibly difficult and inexplicable. I have read several works on prophecy produced in the last age, in which the writers were bold enough to quit the clue with which history furnishes the student of fulfilled prophecy, and, with the prophecies yet unfulfilled as their guide, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... oratorical poses and a deal of elocutionary voice-play, ere he was finished. I fairly rolled with enjoyment of the wonderful wit and humour of the crowd at the back, which, unless it be put down as the critical faculty, is an inexplicable phenomenon. Not one of the interrupters, if drafted on to the hustings, could have given a lucid or intelligent statement of his views, or indication that he was furnished with any, and yet not one slip on the part of a candidate, one inconsistent point, personal mannerism or peccadillo, but was ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... be compared to the capillary tubes of madrepores, or to the roads made by insects in the barks of trees. After so many turnings and windings, your head swims, a vertigo seizes you, and you wonder if you are not a mollusk in an immense shell. I do not speak of the mysterious corners, of inexplicable coecums, low doors opening no one knows whither, dark stairways descending into profound depths; for I could never finish talking of this architecture, which you seem to walk through as if ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... then, that when Rome annexed Ravenna it was a city of the Umbri, and we may dismiss Pliny's statement[1] that it was a Sabine city altogether for it is both improbable and inexplicable. ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... spent among the Battas, at first all alone and afterward with my wife, were so hard that it makes me shudder even now when I think of them. Often it seemed as if we were not only encompassed by hostile men, but also by hostile powers of darkness; for often an inexplicable, unutterable fear would come over us, so that we had to get up at night, and go on our knees to pray or read the Word of God, in order to ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... mastered all his powers of dissimulation, and the nature of Gomez Arias seemed, in a few moments, to have undergone a total and inexplicable revolution. His joyous attendants were surprised at these unwonted signs of consternation; and the sounds of pleasure and triumph suddenly ceased. A deadly spell seemed to have been suddenly cast over the scene, and every one remained in a state of terrible suspense. At length Gomez Arias, ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Judith silent. There had been no acting in her agitation, but all had fairly proceeded from sudden and uncontrollable alarm—an alarm that she found almost as inexplicable to herself, as it proved to be to her companions. Wiping away the traces of tears, however, she smiled again, and was soon able to join in the laugh at her ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the hills straighten underneath her. You must have noticed something of the same kind in riding a bicycle; if you are running down one hill and see another rising in front, the other one looks terrifically steep, but as you get on to it, it flattens out in an inexplicable way; it is the change in our own position that accounts for ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... shouted out "Man the cat-fall," I could not divine, till I saw that some of the crew were securing the stock of the anchor by means of a tackle to a stout beam, which projected over the bows of the ship. "Over to the fish," next shouted out the officer, an order at first equally inexplicable to me, till I saw the flukes of the anchor hauled up close to the bows—fished, as ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... centre of all things and the universe created for the sake of this place. It is enough to point to the similar change due to modern theories of evolution. The impassable barriers of thought are broken down. Instead of the verbal explanation, which made every plant and animal an ultimate and inexplicable fact, we now see in each a movement in an indefinite series of complex processes, stretching back further than the eye can reach into the indefinite past. If we are sometimes stunned by the sense of inconceivable vastness, we feel, at least, that no intellectual ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... gate, reached down and took the flower, kissing it as he was told, with lips that trembled on the velvet leaves. It was one of the 'old French damask' roses—and its rich scent, so soft and full of inexplicable ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... springs, were widely famed. Lewis the Fourteenth had been born there, had, when a young man, held his court there, had added several stately pavilions to the mansion of Francis, and had completed the terrace of Henry. Soon, however, the magnificent King conceived an inexplicable disgust for his birthplace. He quitted Saint Germains for Versailles, and expended sums almost fabulous in the vain attempt to create a paradise on a spot singularly sterile and unwholesome, all sand or mud, without wood, without water, and without ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was very good to her in those days. As for Robin Drummond, he thought of women with a chivalrous tenderness somewhat strange considering that the Dowager was his mother. To him they were something delicate, mysterious, inexplicable. If he had had a sister he would have adored her. Not having one, he lavished on Nelly the feeling he would have given a sister; and hitherto he had been content with the ardour of his feelings. What could a man wish for sweeter and prettier beside his hearth than little Nelly? He ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... the days of the smuggler known as "Rob Roy of the West," a piratical band buried on the coast of South Devon a quantity of treasure which was, of course, abandoned by them in the usual inexplicable way. Some time afterwards its whereabouts was discovered by three countrymen, who visited the spot one night and divided the spoil between them, Giles taking treasure to the value of L800, Jasper L500 worth, and Timothy L300 worth. In returning they had to cross the river Axe at a point where ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... De Maistre has expounded the Protestant confession of faith, and shown what astounding gaps it leaves as an interpretation of the dealings of God with man. 'By virtue of a terrible anathema,' he supposes the Protestant to say, 'inexplicable no doubt, but much less inexplicable than incontestable, the human race lost all its rights. Plunged in mortal darkness, it was ignorant of all, since it was ignorant of God; and, being ignorant of him, it could not pray to him, so that it was spiritually dead without being able to ask for life. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... then is heard again. "This is not from fatigue in the sense organ," but apparently represents "a natural rhythm in consciousness or attention," which interferes with the accuracy of attention. What a suggestive fact this is! Have we not all at times, felt an inexplicable difficulty in listening and attending to certain speakers, which may perhaps be explained by a difference between the rhythm of our own consciousness, and that of the voice of the speaker. In Association of Ideas the time that it takes for one idea to suggest another ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... Noah's Arks grouped upon a billiard table.... Our hats would have held millions.... And most strange is the roar of the city as it comes surging into the welkin as though the whole metropolis cheered you with one voice.... Yet none beyond the ordinary passengers are to be seen. The noise is as inexplicable as the murmur in the air at hot ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... note the drift of psychological straws that indicated the sudden sharp turn of the wind, and the presage of storm in the air. He was thinking only of the illusive, desirable, maddening quality of the girl that walked beside him, filled with inexplicable forebodings for a friend, whom he knew to be invulnerable to misfortune. Certain phrases of Dick's were ringing in his ears to the exclusion of ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... intellectual with which it is joined? But how do we know that Beauty is limited to such exclusive relation? This brings us to the great problem; so simple and easy of solution in all other cases, yet so intricate and apparently inexplicable in man. In other things, it would be felt absurd to make it a question, whether referring to form, color, or sound. A single instance will suffice. Let us suppose, then, an unfamiliar object, whose habits, disposition, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... communication, my dearest child, is indeed astonishing; that an acknowledged daughter and heiress of Sir John Belmont should be at Bristol, and still my Evelina bear the name of Anville, is to me inexplicable; yet the mystery of the letter to Lady Howard prepared me to expect something extraordinary upon Sir ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... significance for our view of the vital processes in the plant; it proves beyond doubt that these processes are in no way of a purely mechanical nature, but that there is something underlying all this, a hitherto inexplicable something, which we call "life." In all vital activities, physical and chemical processes certainly do occur; they do not, however, take place spontaneously but are made use of by the vital element of the plant to produce an effect that is desirable ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... as his character was composed of that mixture of simplicity, bordering on silliness, and shrewd sagacity in the ordinary affairs of life, which is often observed in people of Scotland. Though common, the character is nearly inexplicable to the analyst; for the individual seems conscious of the weaker part of his character, but he appears to love it, and often makes it subservient to the stronger elements of his mind, by using ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... lose my way unless I kept close to him. As a matter of fact, neither Fred nor I knew London well, but I resented being treated like an infant, and if Dennison only looked after us out of kindness, I did not see why he should do it at the top of his voice. I had an inexplicable feeling that it was the duty of every one to know something about London, and although I should not have recognized Piccadilly Circus when I saw it, I was quite prepared to put that down to the fog; for if Dennison had not taken so ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... independently of fees, literary or legal, a secured income of about a thousand a year. He probably thought, and was right in thinking, that the book trade was going to 'look up' to a degree previously unknown; he seems throughout to have been under one of those inexplicable attractions towards the Ballantynes which now and then exist, as Hobbes says, 'in the greater towards the meaner, but not contrary'; and perhaps there was another cause which has not been usually allowed for enough. Good Christian ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... down-town to the office. "Object, matrimony!" If the woman saw it she would only laugh. It was all a decent woman could do. And certainly the woman of the past night's adventure was of high degree, educated; and doubtless the spirit which had prompted the song was as inexplicable to her this morning as it had been to him last night. He had lost none of the desire to meet her, but reason made it plain to him that a meeting could not possibly be arranged through any personal column in the newspaper. He would cancel ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... to make good our rush for shelter—leaving the natives who were endeavouring to storm the poop evidently much astonished at our sudden and inexplicable retreat—when the two carronades barked out simultaneously; and the terrific hubbub of shouts and yells down in the waist ceased as though by magic, to be succeeded the next instant by surely the most dreadful outburst ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... to die? Beholding ourselves vanquished by sinful means and banished to the woods, even then, thou of the Vrishni race, I thought that Suyodhana deserved death at my hands. What thou, however, O Krishna, wishest to do for thy friends is scarcely strange, although it seems inexplicable how the object in view is capable of being effected by either mildness or its reverse. Or, if thou deemest their immediate destruction to be preferable, let it be effected soon without further deliberation. Surely, thou knowest how Draupadi was insulted in the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... point has been felt emphatically by the very greatest dramatists; and this fact offers, of course, an explanation of the otherwise inexplicable negligence of such authors as Shakespeare and Moliere in the matter of publishing their plays. These supreme playwrights wanted people to see their pieces in the theatre rather than to read them in the closet. In his own lifetime, Shakespeare, who was very scrupulous about the publication of ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... "Beyond, above, or exceeding that which is NORMAL; extraordinary, inexplicable perhaps, but NOT supernatural." Now, the term "normal" means: "Conforming to a certain standard, rule, or type"; hence, anything that is "supernormal" is something that is ABOVE THE USUAL PATTERN, RULE, ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... the course of life that we are driven by some inexplicable fatality to suffer those very afflictions we dread the most. We are told of persons who trembled for a lifetime at the horrid anticipation of being one day mad; it was the shadow of the judgement that was creeping ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... end of summer various kinds of foreign birds hasten, impelled by an inexplicable instinct, from unknown regions, and across immense oceans, to gather the profuse grains of this island; and the brilliancy of their expanded plumage forms a contrast to the trees embrowned by the sun. Such, among others, are various kinds of paroquets, the blue pigeon, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... at such times, is very apt to run into story-telling, among those who have any stores of memory, or are possessed of inventive faculties, and often turns upon such inexplicable incidents as might well bewilder the imaginations of simple country folks. My uncle gave us an account of a lad not long before in his employ, who laughed at the idea of supernatural appearances, and was indeed afraid of nothing. ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... a heavy business; many were accused of complicity, and Rafael was really very sorry. I had to hold beds of justice - literally - seated in my bed and surrounded by lying Samoans seated on the floor; and there were many picturesque and still inexplicable passages. It is hard to reach the truth ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chastised, l. 434. The origin of the smile has generally been ascribed to inexplicable instinct, but may be deduced from our early associations of actions and ideas. In the act of sucking, the lips of the infant are closed round the nipple of its mother, till it has filled its stomach, and the pleasure of digesting this grateful food ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... lines in decasyllabic couplets—not eighty-three lines of blank verse, as for some inexplicable reason Masson asserts ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... most indispensable in every stage of the civilized condition. There were no mills, no stores, no regular supplies of clothing, salt, sugar, and the luxuries of tea and coffee. But all these dangers and difficulties notwithstanding, under the influence of an inexplicable propensity, families in the old settlements used to comfort and abundance, were constantly arriving to encounter all these dangers and privations. They began to spread over the extensive and fertile country in every direction—presenting such numerous ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... Sciences, had told her the day before of a comet which some day might meet the earth, envelop it with its flaming hair, imbue animals and plants with unknown poisons, and make all men die in a frenzy of laughter. She expected that this, or something else, would happen next month. It was not inexplicable that she wished to go. But that her desire to go should contain a vague joy, that she should feel the charm of what she was to ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Slone's declaration roused in her. She tried to control her temper so she could think. Two emotions contended within her—one of intense annoyance at the thought of embarrassment surely to follow Slone's action, and the other a vague, disturbing element, all sweet and furious and inexplicable. She must try to dissuade him from approaching ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... about her wider than that of other beings; whoever entered it felt the compelling influence of, as it were, a vortex of dazzling light and all consuming thoughts. Forced to struggle against this inexplicable power, Wilfrid only prevailed after strong efforts; but when he reached and passed the inclosing wall of the courtyard, he regained his freedom of will, walked rapidly towards the parsonage, and was soon beneath the high wooden arch which formed a sort of peristyle ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... Catherine, have you ever thought, wifie, what a business it will be for us if I can't make friends with that man? Here we are at his gates—all our people in his power; the comfort, at any rate, of our social life depending on him. And what a strange, unmanageable, inexplicable being!' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... later in the afternoon Margaret was down among the rose-bushes, where Lawrence had joined her, after Rose had executed that inexplicable feminine manoeuvre of denying herself to oppose ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... rash courage that came to me at this awful moment will ever be to me an inexplicable mystery. Though shivering with fear, and my forehead wet with an unholy dew, I resolved to advance. Twenty questions leaped to my lips: What are you? What do you want? Why do you listen and watch? Why do you come into my room? But none of them ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the moral law brings before us a fact absolutely inexplicable from any of the data of the world of sense. And the entire range of our theoretical use of reason indicates a pure world of understanding, which even positively determines it, and enables us to know ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... captain displays a very respectable degree of knowledge on a considerable variety of subjects. Agriculture, geology, natural history, the resources of Spain, and the best mode of applying them, political intrigues and changes, the strange and apparently inexplicable ups and downs of public men, are all touched upon in turn: and if the earlier portion of his work is worthy of a member of the learned societies to which he belongs, the latter part is no less creditable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... floating and multicolored mist; it is shifting, fugitive, intangible, atmospheric. Its beauty is not the beauty that issues from clear and transparent designs, from a lucid and outspoken style: it is a remote and inexplicable beauty, a beauty shot through with mystery and strangeness, baffling, incalculable. It is unexpected and subtle in accent, wayward and fantastic in rhythm. Harmonically it obeys no known law—consonances, dissonances, ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... I think, do themselves justice. As everybody who has anything to do with the law well knows, the path of the law is strewn with examples of open and shut cases which, somehow, were not; of unanswerable charges which, in the event, were completely answered; of inexplicable conduct which was fully explained; of fixed and unalterable determinations that, by discussion, suffered a change. Nor are those with any knowledge of human nature who pause to think for a moment likely to underestimate the feelings of resentment of those who find that a decision against them ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... who, loving life, had been laid away there, having died soldier-like for a cause they had only dimly understood. And the crosses now rise up, mute, eloquent testimony to the cost of this strange, inexplicable war ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... the laws of that part of nature which we call human nature, and to use these laws, as fast as discovered, for solving the problems presented by the human individual or group. For him, even the most capricious conduct has its causes, even the most inexplicable has its explanation—if only the cause can be unearthed, which he does not pretend he can always actually accomplish, since causes in the mental realm are often very complex. No one can be a psychologist ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... from Fledra Vandecar to her husband in Albany. It was written after the woman had paced her room for several hours in inexplicable disquietude and unrest. ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... died in the fortieth year of the wandering. Here is a skip of thirty-eight years in the history, without an indication of anything having happened meantime. On the supposition that this is a continuous history written by the man who was a chief actor in it, such a gap is inexplicable. There is a reasonable way of accounting for it, as we shall see, but it cannot be accounted for on the theory that the book in its present form came from ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... the house a beautiful and inexplicable creature walked across our path. I stopped irresistibly fascinated, gazing at it. John waited patiently, smoking his cigarette. He is a modern farmer. After ten minutes he said: "Are you going to stand there looking at that chicken all day? ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... of the more gentle and beneficent forces. This probably accounts for the friendly look. Some of the inner slopes and plateaus seemed like familiar ground to me: I must have played upon them when a school-boy. Bright Angel Creek, for some inexplicable reason, recalled a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, as we looked down upon it from nearly four thousand feet above, looked like the brown meadow where we played ball in the old school-days, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... turning round, to find that some artist had exercised his ingenuity in painting a Goat in Jack Boots. At first I conceived this must be intended as a satire on our old debauchees, many of whom hide their spindled shanks in the tasselled hessian. These proving inexplicable to my shallow understanding, I pursued my walk, and observed against a strong newbuilt house—'A Hole in the Wall;' and not far from the Fleet Prison, I perceived, with some surprise, 'A Friend at Hand.' Over a house kept by Nic. Coward, I saw 'The Fighting Cocks;' and at a crimping rendezvous, remarked, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles out in a slaughter-yard and a few detached houses of milkmen. The cemetery is delicately put behind us, under a hill. There is ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... they embitter my existence, that I voluntarily placed myself under the treatment of an expert in mental pathology. For a considerable period of time I was under his constant supervision, but the visitations were as inexplicable to him ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... more days of this inexplicable content. Then came the thunder-storm. It was, perhaps, the thunder-storm that really deserves the blame for Missy's climactic athletic catastrophe. No lightning-bolt struck, yet that thunder-storm indubitably played its part in Missy's athletic destiny. It was the causation of renewed ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... "is obliged to admit an inexplicable force, which acts upon his elementary forces." Power and Liberty, p. 28 (Eng. ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... of wild and whirling thoughts rushed over his brain at once. He had strolled without a thought into the very scene of his happy rambles with the beloved, the faithless, the lost Melanie. Carried away by a rush of inexplicable feelings, he walked swiftly onward through the dim wild-wood path toward the Devil's Drinking Cup. He came in sight of it—a woman sat by its brink, who started to her feet at the sound ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys—they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy—were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in love with her—every one at Bellomont had supposed them to be engaged, and her dismissal of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gryce incident chimed too well with Selden's mood not to be instantly adopted by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once seemed the obvious solution. If rejection there had been—and he wondered now that he ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... making poor play with his braxy ham. "Could Bethune be mistaken in this extraordinary Baron?" And he patched together in his mind Mungo's laughter with the Baron's history as briefly known to him, and the inexplicable signal and ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... they were getting what they had paid for, with an introduction to a beauty and heiress thrown in. But apropos of this latter boon, it is dawning upon me that Rachel Guest is receiving more attention than Monny. This strikes me as inexplicable. There are more men than women in our party, all young except Sir John Biddell, General Harlow, and Mills of Manchester, a soft, fat sort of fellow whose first name you can never remember. It occurred to me on ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... surprised that Mr. Alwynn, with whom he had been so open, should be so cold and unsympathetic in manner. The alteration and alienation of friends is certainly one of the saddest and most inexplicable experiences of ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of her brother's chamber. My uncle had been previously roused by the noise, and instantly flew to the window. He also imagined what he saw to be fire. The loud and vehement shrieks which succeeded the first explosion, seemed to be an invocation of succour. The incident was inexplicable; but he could not fail to perceive the propriety of hastening to the spot. He was unbolting the door, when his sister's voice was heard on the outside conjuring him ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... to imagine that the career of the human race is something like this. There is a fast-growing conviction that man has been sent out, from the first, to fulfil some inexplicable purpose, and that he holds a Divine commission to perform a wonderful work on the earth. It would seem as if his marvellous brain were the bundle of mystic scrolls on which it is written, and within which its terms are hid,—and as if his imperishable soul ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... consider the great extent of country that intervenes between Ungava and the plains of the "far west," it seems quite inexplicable that the grisly bear should be found in so insulated a situation, and none in the intermediate country: the fact of their being here, however, does not admit of a doubt, for I have traded and sent to England several of their skins. The information ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... arranged. For two years Louis and Laura Holden picked their way slowly through this field; stumped at one point for several months because the machine was strictly a personal proposition. Recorded by one of them, the playback was clear to that one, but to the other it was wild gibberish—an inexplicable tangle of noise and colored shapes, odors and tastes both pleasant and nasty, and mingled sensations. It was five years after their marriage before they found success by engraving information in the brain by sitting, connected to the machine, and reading ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... whom although to know be life, and joy to make mention of His Name; yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him. And our safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess without confession that His glory is inexplicable; His greatness above our capacity and reach. He is above, and we upon earth: therefore it behoveth our words ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... cared all the time—cared still! It was written in the lines of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut mouth. Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married life, despite his inexplicable friendship for Adrienne, despite all that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger understanding which had come to her, that through it all he had loved her. With an absolute certainty of conviction, she knew that ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... fain would the evil city reflect itself in my calm soul, its commerce take up a place within the temple of my being. I had left God's handiwork and come to the man-made town. I had left the inexplicable and come to the realm of the explained. In the holy temple were arcades of shops; through its precincts hurried the trams; the pictures of trade were displayed; men were building hoardings in my soul and posting notices of idol-worship, and hurrying throngs were reading books of the rites ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... come when you do call for them?—An angel-influence, tangible, visible, audible, which would make Jordan the easiest of all roads to travel by thy side. Peerless Jim! crowning triumph of Darwinian Evolution from the inert mineral, through countless hairy and uninviting types! how precious the inexplicable vital spark which, nevertheless, robs thy sculptured form of all cash Gallery-value; and how easy to read in that gentle personality a satisfying comment on the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... extreme. We are always disposed to dwell on such of their elements as are explicable and can in some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, non-moral, and non-intellectual, and which render most of our attempted explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to be practically misleading. Among such incomplete explanations Wordsworth's essays must certainly be ranked. It would not be safe for any man to believe ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... with me at the school. I have a life-drawing "on the wall," a composition sketch, and a "concours" study in oil. That I have not burst to atoms with pride is a miracle inexplicable. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Miriam he felt caught up and glorified, in some delightful and inexplicable way that brought with it—peace. The power of all these strange and glowing thoughts poured their full tide into his own rather arid and thirsty world, frightening him with their terrific force. But the mere utterance of that delightful name—in the way Skale uttered it—brought confidence ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... on, after a few minutes' pause, "presents an enigma which at present I cannot hope to solve. The fact that she received her husband back again, knowing what he was and what he was capable of, is inexplicable to me. The woman herself is a mystery. I do not know what lies behind her extraordinary immobility. Feeling she must have, and courage, or she would never have dared to have ridded herself of the scourge of her life. But beyond ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her escape. She got out, Heaven alone knows how, to see her child, which she had heard was ill. But the ground she must have covered in the time! She was absolutely dead beat when she was taken. And she was not in her prison clothes. That is so inexplicable. How she got others she alone knows. Some one must have befriended her, and given them to her—some one very poor, for she was miserably clad, and the extraordinary thing is that though she was traced to the deserted ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... that comparison that Crebillon explained to me a thing almost inexplicable, for taste and feeling alone can account for a thing which is subject ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... egg; for, as they continued to gaze a while, the whole lot, as if taking their cue from it, commenced imitating the movement, some with a gentle, others a more violent motion! Murtagh sprang back affrighted, and stood with his red hair on end, gazing at the odd and inexplicable phenomenon. The others were as much puzzled as he—all except the Malay, who at a glance understood the ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... our danger and our defencelessness, our hearts would not leap up at their coming, as men in a beleaguered town do when the guns of the relieving force are heard booming from afar. Often God's delays seem to us inexplicable, and our prayers to have no more effect than if they were spoken to a sleeping Baal. But such delays are merciful. They help us to the consciousness of our need. They let us feel the presence of the sorrow. They give opportunity of proving the weakness of all other supports. They test and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... now, Bas," came a quiet voice that chilled the hearer with an inexplicable rigour, "I reckon ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... unoccupied tract of land, which the people of the neighborhood called the "plain," a small but very bright light was seen describing the most capricious evolutions. It moved here and there without any apparent aim, tracing the most inexplicable zigzags, sometimes sinking to the earth, sometimes rising to a height of four or five feet, at others remaining quite motionless, and the next second flying off like a ball. In spite of the place ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... easy-going nature could smooth many a rough place. He was now entirely without companionship, resenting from the outset both the ill-natured attacks and the playful personal allusions through which boys so often begin, and with time knit ever more firmly, their inexplicable friendships. To the taunts about Corsica which began immediately he answered coldly, "I hope one day to be in a position to give Corsica her liberty." Entering on a certain occasion a room in which unknown to him there hung a portrait of the hated Choiseul, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Anna had become a wild Kafir, for though she went about her work in silence, her face bore an expression which seemed to speak louder than her mouth could have done. She was clearly engaged in serious thought. The mistress tried to dismiss from her mind the inexplicable attitude of her servant, but the frowning look on Anna's face made the attempts unsuccessful. The fact that when Anna went home, the previous night, she was happiness personified, did not decrease ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Jose and the inexplicable Rand came slashing and clubbing a path of their own to the beleaguered Scot—the Brazilians cutting straight ahead with deadly surety, the painted Peruvian chopping and thrusting with a fixed grin, Rand swinging ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... feared, they called their hosts over the Potomac and prepared for battle. McClellan had previously arranged his strategic plans, and these undoubtedly would have resulted differently but for the inexplicable surrender of Harper's Ferry, leaving our army with little hope of cutting off the retreat ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... most of the physiological characteristics of species, and I not only think that they are competent to account for them, but I think that they account for many things which otherwise remain wholly unaccountable and inexplicable, and I may say incomprehensible. For a full exposition of the grounds on which this conviction is based, I must refer you to Mr. Darwin's work; all that I can do now is to illustrate what I have said by two or three cases ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... affecting a coolness that I was far from truly possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... murder of Sir Lucien Pyne and the flight or abduction of Mrs. Monte Irvin as mere minor incidents in a case wherein Sin Sin Wa figured as the chief culprit. Nothing had acted so powerfully to bring about this conviction in the mind of the Chief Inspector as the inexplicable disappearance of the Chinaman under circumstances which had apparently precluded such ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... from that height many strange things about the flood that appear inexplicable from below are perfectly plain. How so many houses happened to be so queerly twisted, for instance, as if the water had a whirling instead of a straight motion, was ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... fail," said he. "I know it. It's written in your face." He looked at her. She was not looking at him, but with eyes gazing straight ahead was revealing that latent, inexplicable power which, when it appeared at the surface, so strongly dominated and subordinated her beauty and her sex. He shut his teeth together hard and ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... was leaving?" I asked, hoping for a second or two that the Foreign Secretary had confided to her something of his secret—guessing ours, perhaps, and that my unexpected, inexplicable absence might injure ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... friends met at Eden's club, and after lunching they had an hour's conversation in the smoking-room. But their characters of the previous evening now seemed to be reversed—Eden talked and the other listened. An inexplicable change had come over the loquacious man of letters; he listened and seemed to be on his guard, drinking little, and saying nothing about his plans and prospects. "Damn the fellow, I can't make him out at all," thought Eden, vexed ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Curiosity is often an inexplicable thing, even to the curious, and certainly Dolores would have been hard put to it to explain why she felt any curiosity about the new arrival and the man who had so patiently awaited him. But she did feel curious, and mingled with her curiosity was a vague sense of something like compassion, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... be seen as I reached Room 15. The connecting door was closed and locked, and no sound came from behind it. I turned to arrange the books, to keep from a bad habit of thinking over the inexplicable. But there was nothing exciting enough, in the statutes or reports of court decisions or text-books, to cover up the questions against which I had been beating in vain ever since I ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... proverbial for wariness and vigilance, should have been approached by any merely human enemy so nigh as to render fire-arms unnecessary to his destruction. But that a human enemy had effected the slaughter, inexplicable as it seemed, he had no doubt; and he began straightway to search among the leaves strewn over the ground, for the marks of his foot-steps; not questioning that, if he could find and follow them for a little ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... mated often clings beyond reason to an unworthy mate. Many an inexplicable marriage, many a fantastic loyalty of a good woman to a bad man has its origin where it is least expected, in the sex attachment. Demureness of appearance, refinement of manner, noble ideals are not at all inconsistent with powerful sex ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be an amorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would be distressing to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrifying, as all that is alive but inexplicable must be. No more conscious purpose shows in our existence than is seen in the coral polyp. We just go on increasing and forming more cells. Overlooking our wilderness of tiles in the rain—we get more than a fair share of rain, or else the sad quality ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... celebrate the positively good things, we can live them, we can create them, but we cannot philosophize about them. To the anaesthetic intellect we could not convey the meaning of joy. A creature that could reason but not feel would never know the value of life, for what is ultimate is in itself inexplicable. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of the European army with their horses, their guns, bright swords and helmets of steel, a metal to them unknown; their weird and mysterious music—the whole formed to the Aztec populace an inexplicable wonder, combined with those foreigners who had arrived from the distant East, "revealing their celestial origin in their fair complexions." Many of the Aztec citizens betrayed keen hatred of the Tlascalans who marched with the Spaniards ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... performer. When death ensues from many diseases, the organization remains, for without this concession our anatomical knowledge must be very imperfect. Thus the nature of life, whether it be developed in the vegetable creation, or display its admirable complications in the higher animals, is inexplicable on any of the principles that regulate our philosophy, and can only be referred to the contrivance and disposition of infinite wisdom: yet the vehicle in which these stupendous operations are conducted owns a material basis: even the confused ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... mystery. More than once this sudden change had struck me; and if by chance I met them in retired places, instead of receiving me cordially as had always been their custom, they seemed as if trying to avoid me. At last, weary of this inexplicable mystery, I took F—— aside, and asked him what this strange conduct meant. 'You have forestalled me, my dear friend,' said he. 'I was on the point of making an important disclosure; I trust you will not accuse me of want of confidence, but swear to me before I ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... rights; and that from the introduction of Jews, no danger was to be dreaded either to the constitution or to Christianity. To refuse the bill, it was said, after admitting Catholics, would be an absurd and inexplicable contradiction. On a division the motion for introducing the bill was carried by a majority of one hundred and fifteen against ninety-seven. Before the second reading came on several petitions were presented ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Moreover, I would rather talk about California than any other spot on earth. I'd rather write about California than any other spot on earth. Is it possible that any Californian Chamber of Commerce has to pay a press agent? Incredible! Inexplicable! I wonder that local millionaires don't bid their entire fortune for the privilege. Now what has Willie ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... said Jacqueline, when Elsie told her she must go. It was not, indeed, inexplicable that she should prefer the many voices to the one,—excitement and company, rather than quiet, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... and letters to the magistrates and everywhere these words, repeated so often, were only received with a painful incredulity. The fact was that, besides the singular character which Peytel's appearance, attitude, and talk had worn ever since the event, there was in his narrative an inexplicable enigma; its contradictions and impossibilities were such, that calm persons were revolted at it, and that even friendship itself ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... morning that the Emden, with a dummy fourth funnel and flying the British ensign, in some inexplicable fashion sneaked past the French torpedo boat Mosquet, which was on patrol duty outside, and entered the outer harbor of Penang. Across the channel leading to the inner harbor lay the Russian cruiser Jemtchug. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... practice of medicine to observe how many of these mothers fail to heed the advice. We have personally tried to find an explanation for this astonishing carelessness, and have come to the conclusion that it is not due to intentional forgetfulness, but rather to an inexplicable failure to appreciate that the physician means ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... still searching for a physical explanation, went to Mr. Hesketh, the Municipal Electrician of Folkestone, a man of high education and intelligence, who went out to the scene of the affair and saw enough to convince himself that the phenomena were perfectly genuine and inexplicable by ordinary laws. A Canadian soldier who was billeted upon Mr. Rolfe, heard an account of the happenings from his host, and after announcing his conviction that the latter had "bats in his belfry" proceeded to the dugout, where his experiences were ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the cool evening air after the dance, and gazed out over the crowd and the still-advancing carriages. She seemed not to have understood the Count's great achievement; at least he could only hear her whisper the inexplicable ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... a single further engagement. The ha'pence are due to an avuncular relative who has a quite inexplicable penchant ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... common mouse, the rat, or the cat, and the horse is very rare. It is the same with the kitchen-middings and the caves occupied in Neolithic times. The disappearance of the horse, so numerous in earlier epochs, is general, and this would be inexplicable if history did not solve the mystery. The Bible, which gives us such complete details of the pastoral life of the Hebrews, speaks for the first time of the horse after the exodus from Egypt of the children of Israel, and in Egypt itself the horse is not represented in ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... it was under Slavery—when the children of the white slave-owner, in Lincoln's words, "romped freely with the little negroes." They are visible above all in acts of unnatural cruelty committed from time to time against members of the dreaded race. These things are inexplicable to those who do not know the story of the ordeal which the South endured, and cannot guess at the secret panic with which white men contemplate ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... Errington, while a sudden and inexplicable thrill of indignation fired his blood and sent it in a wave of color up to his ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... place under the dwarf pine. Mr. Powys had brought her back to Brookfield, where she heard that Wilfrid had been seen; and now her heart was in contest with an inexplicable puzzle: "He was here, and did not come to me!" Since that night when they had walked home from Ipley Green, she had not suffered a moment of longing. Her senses had lain as under a charm, with heart at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the blanket of snow. For a full minute he stood well outside the danger line, sniffing the air, and listening. He saw the rabbit, and his jaws closed with a hungry click. He moved a step nearer. Still he was suspicious—for some strange and inexplicable reason he sensed danger. Anxiously he sought for it with his nose, his eyes, and his ears. And all about him there was a great silence and a great peace. His jaws clicked again. He whined softly. What was it stirring him? Where was the danger he could ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... politicians, we have all known, possess this power of ignoring their own decease. Judaism has been dead these eighteen hundred years; yet here are Jew synagogues in New York and Boston. Were the like true of individuals, it might explain to us some lives which seem inexplicable on any other hypothesis. I think, for example, of some editors, who are evidently post-dating their decease; and when these go on writing leading articles, and being sweet upon "our brethren of the South," one does not say, "Disloyal," but only, "So long ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the floor impatiently with his foot, saying, "Such a change is positively inexplicable." And he looked at Saint-Aignan, who had also remarked La Valliere's peculiar lethargy, as well as the ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... domesticated productions. Further, what we call varieties cannot really be distinguished from species in the long run, a fact which we can clearly understand if species once existed as varieties, and thus originated. But the facts are utterly inexplicable if ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... and the additional remark which he throws in, as it were casually,—'He made the stars also,' cannot but move us to admiration. How childlike the simplicity of the soul which could so venture to deal with the inexplicable and tremendous problem of the Universe! How self-centred and sure the faith which could so arrange the work of Infinite and Eternal forces to suit its own limited intelligence! It is easy and natural to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... "nymphs and demi-gods." But the wealth, the learning, and the elegance of former times, which planted "groves of Academe" at Murano, have passed away, and the fair pleasure-gardens are now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest cabbage and potato patches. It is a poor, dreary little town, with an inexplicable charm in its decay. The city arms are still displayed upon the public buildings (for Murano was ruled, independently of Venice, by its own council); and the heraldic cock, with a snake in its beak, has yet a lusty and haughty air amid the ruin ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... it was just on that account that I considered the rupture by Austria, after she had received such a document, inexplicable. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... An inexplicable anxiety, a tormenting uneasiness, came over him; he had hardly strength and recollection sufficient to enable him to accompany Corilla, who was discussing in verse the question, "Which Rome was the happiest, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the first time, did Alphonse begin to understand that the scene in the counting-house had been more than a passing outburst of passion; but this only made the affair more inexplicable. ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... outrages her in a manner which appears inexplicable, she seeks and finds excuses for him. She is so innocent that not only she cannot believe herself suspected, but she cannot conceive the existence ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... inexplicable remarks, Miss Wilkeson dropped her fan, uttered a slight but sharp scream, and fell back in her chair, like a withered flower on ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... to the conduct of the K——, it is inexplicable. He is praising Lord Liverpool on all occasions, but sending invitations to nothing but the Opposition. The communications on the subject of Bloomfield are now carried on by the Duke of Wellington. How this is to end no one guesses, as to the provision that is to be made ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... knew, Margaret—I began to realise, I say, that not even you could ever make me forget that fact. And I was very properly miserable. It is extremely queer," Mr. Kennaston continued, after an interval of meditation, "but falling in love appears to be the one utterly inexplicable, utterly reasonless thing one ever does in one's life. You can usually think of some more or less plausible palliation for embezzlement, say, or for robbing a cathedral or even for committing suicide—but no man can ever explain how he happened to fall in love. He simply ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... that, in some inexplicable, subtly mysterious fashion, there was a kind of affinity between ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... wretched man again, either alive or dead." That he had died some violent death was generally surmised, for a great stain of blood shaped like a human form was found on the floor of the room, and despite all efforts the mark could never be washed out. Ever since this inexplicable occurrence, the house has been haunted, and at midnight a ghostly troop of horses are occasionally heard, creating so much noise as to ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... an account of the unknown's strange visit; and, inexplicable to himself, Mortimer connected it in some ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and rowing with all its might, scuds along, like a galley in miniature, and often escapes its more cumbrous pursuer. Sometimes, however, all will not do, the Trochus nears and nears, and escape appears impossible; but when the little animal, with inexplicable ingenuity, suddenly and secretly extricates itself from its tortuous and fragile dwelling, the Trochus immediately turns to other prey. The Nautilus then returns to tenant and repair its little bark; but it too often happens, that before he can ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... this the first time during his stay in Africa that this gloomy atmosphere seemed to envelop him. In fact, he was the subject of frequent attacks of melancholia which the many friends that he had made had found inexplicable. ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... For some inexplicable reason, he felt miserably tongue-tied, and was content to write a message to the Chief Commissioner of Police, London, asking that a skilled detective should be sent ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... example, that mind could not have grown up in a universe which previously contained nothing mental, and one ground for this belief is that matter is too dissimilar from mind to have been able to cause it. Or, more particularly, what are termed the nobler parts of our nature are supposed to be inexplicable, unless the universe always contained something at least equally noble which could cause them. All such views seem to depend upon assuming some unduly simplified law of causality; for, in any legitimate ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... every-thing to fear if you persist in your hostility, and nothing to gain by taking the side of those whom you call your friends. They might more justly be termed your dupes, for your disinterestedness would be inexplicable, were it sincere. It must therefore ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... both agony and revenge. Christine understood, at last, why the Kafirs hated to go about the land after dark, averring that the afflicted bushes threatened and chased them. She began herself to experience an inexplicable feeling of relief, as though at the overcoming of an enemy, when a great spire of smoke betokened the final uprooting and burning of a clump of bush. For fire was the ultimate element used to transform the pest from a ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... listened with deep attention. I was extremely anxious to hear if this strange and inexplicable sound was likely to be renewed! A whole quarter of an hour elapsed in painful expectation. Deep and solemn silence reigned in the tunnel. So still that I could hear the beatings of my own heart! I waited, waited with a strange ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... or sense-given qualities: as visible, tangible, audible, and so forth. These qualities are plainly 'subjective'; they vary from man to man, and from moment to moment: they cannot be measured or fixed; and must be regarded as a product in some inexplicable way of the action of matter upon mind; unreal or, at any rate, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... been seen to attempt biting each other except in play; and the keepers are convinced that they do not draw back their ears, like horses and dogs, when feeling savage. The following statement, therefore, by Sir S. Baker[34] is inexplicable, namely, that a rhinoceros, which he shot in North Africa, "had no ears; they had been bitten off close to the head by another of the same species while fighting; and this mutilation is by no ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... continuously united within a recent period than the islands separated by deeper channels, we can understand how it is that a relation exists between the depth of the sea separating two mammalian faunas, and the degree of their affinity—a relation which is quite inexplicable on the theory of independent acts ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... her; and—strange consciousness, softly dawning!—that some one loved her—deeply, dearly, as in all the days since she was born she had never been loved before. That even now some one might be thinking of her—of her alone, as his first object in the world. The sensation was new, inexplicable, but pleasant nevertheless. It made her feel—what the desolate orphan girl rarely had felt—a sort of tenderness for, and honouring of, herself. As she dressed, she once looked wistfully, even pensively, in ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... was acquiring a painful experience. Du Meresq's conduct seemed inexplicable and provoking as she pondered indignantly on her walk at the Humber, and mentally ejaculated with Miss Squeers, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the mark. Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no truth in them at all. And yet I think that if they were true, they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable: China. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... completely exonerated the Jews, according to their law, in crucifying one, who 'being a man,' 'made himself God!' But, in the Christian, rather than in the 'Socinian', or 'Pharisaic' view, all these objections vanish, and harmony succeeds to inexplicable confusion. If Socinians hesitate in ascribing 'unrighteousness' to Christ, the inevitable result of their principles, they tremble, as well they might, at their avowed creed, and virtually renounce what they profess ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Wilfred had offered Hugh the faintest shadow of comfort; but in some manner inexplicable to him, Hugh seemed ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... of himself when he came upstairs again for his most ungrateful, inexplicable conduct towards you; and I lectured him well; and upon asking him to 'promise never to behave ill to you again,' he kissed my hands and wagged his tail most emphatically. It altogether amounted to an oath, I think. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Treaty in the ceded districts. The English have got all they wanted from Brunai, but I think it can scarcely be said that they have done very much for it in return. I remember that the late Sultan thought it an inexplicable thing that we could not assist him to recover a debt due to him by one of the British Coal Companies which tried their luck in Borneo. Moreover, even the cession to their good and noble friend Sir JAMES BROOKE of the Brunai Province of Sarawak has been ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... considered in their connection they are not charges, but pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... writings, and letters to the magistrates and everywhere these words, repeated so often, were only received with a painful incredulity. The fact was that, besides the singular character which Peytel's appearance, attitude, and talk had worn ever since the event, there was in his narrative an inexplicable enigma; its contradictions and impossibilities were such, that calm persons were revolted at it, and that even friendship itself refused ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... too, the girl was not at all pretty, in fact I am told positively ugly... and such an invalid... and queer. But she seems to have had some good qualities. She must have had some good qualities or it's quite inexplicable.... She had no money either and he wouldn't have considered her money.... But it's always difficult to ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... again, and the Lascar proved even more fascinating. He was a daredevil type, as Lascars have the reputation of being, but he was gentle and affectionate toward the Lass, who, for some inexplicable reason, scorned his advances. ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... time, and forms connexions, be sure he will snap them abruptly asunder. Let him sink out of sight as Private Scholar (Privatisirender), living by the grace of God in some European capital, you may next find him as Hadjee in the neighbourhood of Mecca. It is an inexplicable Phantasmagoria, capricious, quick-changing; as if our Traveller, instead of limbs and high-ways, had transported himself by some wishing-carpet, or Fortunatus' Hat. The whole, too, imparted emblematically, in dim multifarious tokens (as that ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. The over-long, thin, tawny moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence; the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way, misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the looking-glass. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... {64} The at first inexplicable sleep of Ulysses (bk. xiii. 79, etc.) is here, as also in viii. 445, being obviously prepared. The writer evidently attached the utmost importance to it. Those who know that the harbour which did duty ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... another, following instincts that urged them to find out something about life—in spite of the most earnest discouragement.... None of them believed for a moment that the school was preparing them for life. Most of them regarded it as a long inexplicable passage of blank, grey occupations through which they had to ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... a physical force, if vitality be a specific energy, then, it seems to me, many things fall into line—many phenomena, hitherto inexplicable, become at once intelligible. ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... first moment brought to her mind that of which she never thought before. At the first moment she hazily recalled that new, wonderful world of feeling and thought which had been opened to her by that charming young man who loved her, and whom she loved, and then his inexplicable cruelty and the long chain of humiliation and suffering which followed as the direct result of that enchanting bliss, and it pained her. But being unable to account for it all, she did the customary thing ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... Roman mind was the slave of precedent, and was more than satisfied with partially understanding and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left. The Arabians looked more widely about them; but the Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how little they believed that they really knew. The vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... mention has been made. There is matter, indeed, for most painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.[4] At the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh in ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... perishing, he threw the whole of it upon the shrub—Louisa did the same. It was, as it were, a sacred bond between them—an indissoluble tie. I am convinced that many of my readers have frequently felt a lively and almost inexplicable pleasure in watering a flower dried up by the scorching sun, and, in seeing it revive, have felt as if benefited themselves. What pleasure, then, it must have given to Desclieux and Louisa to see their plant raise ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... man like him. For some reason, as yet inexplicable to her, he brought into her troubled consciousness a feeling of cold calm, a refreshing influence that might be compared to the sweep of a cool and unexpected breeze in the middle of a ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... turned into a rage of abusive jealousy. Raven's kindness was different. It was not in any degree personal to her. She knew he would have been as merciful to a squirrel caught in a trap. And the scars of his own mental sufferings and restraints had done something to him, something inexplicable that made him wonderful in her eyes. He seemed, too, all-powerful. He was that miraculous combination of the human guide and heavenly helper, with the wisdom to understand earthly trouble and the power to administer what remedy ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... that her brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion. They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She discovered that she had put forks for the soup—that in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was a large kitchen spoon of iron, a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in, looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, 'If I tried as hard for ten minutes to ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... hair prematurely gray, but by clouding his once brilliant eyes with thoughtfulness, marked his aspect with premature old age and melancholy. The baronet's entrance into town life had been celebrated for his graceful vivacity; he was the animating spirit of every party, till an inexplicable metamorphosis suddenly took place. Soon after his return from abroad, he had married Miss Beaufort (a woman whom he loved to adoration), When, strange to say, excess of happiness seemed to change his nature and give his character ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the denial to these structures of any individually reproductive energy, you are forced to accept the inexplicable (and why expect it to be otherwise than inexplicable?) fact, of the formation of a series of bodies having very similar aspects, qualities, and chemical relations to other substances, which yet have no connection whatever with each other, and are governed, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... champagne-glasses, the table grew silent—the guests felt the apathy of digestion. The Dreamer looked at them, one after the other, and all the faces had satiated, blase expressions which disturbed and disquieted him. A sentiment, obscure, inexplicable, but so bitter! protested even from the depth of his soul against that repast; and when they rose at last from the table, he repeated softly and ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... had not the country been one sheet of ice, which rendered progression both difficult and dangerous. Each person of whom I enquired the distance told me more than the one before, until I thought that a Bosnian 'saht' (hour) was a more inexplicable measure than a German 'stunde' or a Scottish 'mile and a bittoch.' At length, however, the lights of Brod proclaimed our approach to the Turkish town of that name. On the left bank of the Save stands Austrian Brod, which, like all the Slavonic towns near ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... the mind forever brooding on melancholy themes, and having no relief; sometimes an evil conscience very busy; imagine a prisoner covering up his head in the bedclothes and looking out from time to time, with a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that always sits upon his bed, or stands (if a thing can be said to stand, that never walks as men do) in the same corner of his cell. The more I think of it, the more certain I feel that not a few ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... ruminated over his strange experience. Toward noon the pieces of the puzzle began to fit slowly together in his mind. But the partial answer at which he arrived seemed too fantastic for belief. Could it be possible that when he had stopped at the roadside stand he had blundered, in some inexplicable ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... moral and intellectual with which it is joined? But how do we know that Beauty is limited to such exclusive relation? This brings us to the great problem; so simple and easy of solution in all other cases, yet so intricate and apparently inexplicable in man. In other things, it would be felt absurd to make it a question, whether referring to form, color, or sound. A single instance will suffice. Let us suppose, then, an unfamiliar object, whose habits, disposition, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... he went down-town to the office. "Object, matrimony!" If the woman saw it she would only laugh. It was all a decent woman could do. And certainly the woman of the past night's adventure was of high degree, educated; and doubtless the spirit which had prompted the song was as inexplicable to her this morning as it had been to him last night. He had lost none of the desire to meet her, but reason made it plain to him that a meeting could not possibly be arranged through any personal column in the newspaper. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... genuinely confused by this sudden inexplicable, yet perfectly polite piece of what she still felt to be in the nature of 'interference' and 'presumption.' "I have had no fault ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... in such numbers as to attract the attention of the troops on board the Nina. That vessel steamed up to the city in great haste, and communicated the startling intelligence that Fort Sumter, in some inexplicable manner, had been fully re-enforced.[7] The chagrin of the authorities was intense. Messengers were at once dispatched to all parts of the city, to ring the ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... with me; I shall not misjudge you in any case," an inexplicable something was moving her to know what remained to ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... therein, is one who, for the last decade and a half, has mostly lived in the ephemeromorphic world, and who, in diving into the "beginnings of life," has so far lost his way that the all-glorious end of it is as much an inexplicable mystery to him now, as when he was more successfully expounding pathological anatomy and ruthlessly hacking away at anatomical subjects over the dissecting-slab of the London University College. Had he spent less time over this dissecting-slab, and more in studying the marvellous manifestations of ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... movement of an ageing man he picked up the letter and went upstairs again. In some subtle way the room seemed changed. He had a sudden inexplicable sensation of nervousness and depression. Shaking it off with an effort, he opened the envelope in his hand with an odd reluctance—the feeling that he was prying into something which was no concern of ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... a person. Beth gave it up. The whole affair was inexplicable—his attitude towards Searle at the station, his abduction of herself and the maid, and this trailing of the pair of them across these terrible places, for no ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... Ham's peculiar system. But this was no trifling incident, it was a tremendous outrage and a delightful mystery; for the boys as they stood there presented to the amazed classes a strange and amazing spectacle, and were clothed in an original and, so far as the children were concerned, an inexplicable disguise. Fighting and tumbling about under the school house, Haddon and McKnight had gathered much mud, but more cobwebs. In fact, they had wiped up so many webs that they were covered from head to foot in ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... a bit of it—with reasonable care. Nothing at sea is dangerous—except the inexplicable recklessness of navigators. There's always plenty of sea-room—if they care to take it. Collisions and icebergs, to be sure, are dangers that can't be avoided at times, especially if there's fog about. But I've been enough at sea in my time to know this much at least—that no coast in ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... its existence in the light of his own infirmity, to which he still yields from time to time, as he has always done. He professes to find there a law which would account for a great many facts of human experience otherwise inexplicable. He does not attempt to define this occult preservative principle, but he offers himself and the Social Union as proofs of its existence; and he argues that if they can only last long enough they will finally be established in a virtue and prosperity as great as those of Mr. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... return if he has not seen the Cumberland lakes and the Scottish Highlands. But I have relations in Scotland besides;—the old lady sitting by Mrs. Rennie in black MOIRE (is it that you call it?) is a sort of aunt of mine, and is connected in some inexplicable way with the Rennies. Your Scotch cousinships are an absolute mystery to me; it is a pity I cannot understand them, for I am indebted to them for a great deal of hospitality and kindness, of which this is one of the most agreeable instances;"—and Mr. Brandon ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... on the pavement in front of the theatre melted away with unexampled rapidity, in fact, seemed almost to waver and disappear as if the mise en scene had changed in some inexplicable way. ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... with which he threw himself into the work and the natural executive ability which he displayed soon marked him as a coming man in diplomatic circles. But the speculations of his friends concerning his future career were destined to be rudely shattered by one of those inexplicable tricks of fate which, in the twinkling of an eye, so often change the lives ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... that it is no use crying over spilt milk or even over spilt blood, but the maxim does not hold when the men whose decision seems inexplicable are in a position to repeat it on a grander scale. The temper of the Boers as early as June left no doubt in any South African mind that if equality of rights and British supremacy were to be secured it would ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... got to be not only a confidant, but a favourite, to Mulford's great surprise. A less inviting subject for tete-a-tetes and confidential dialogues, thought the young man, could not well exist; but so it was; woman's caprices are inexplicable; and not only Rose and her aunt, but even the captious and somewhat distrustful Biddy, manifested on all occasions not only friendship, but kindness and ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminated in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory; among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by what Newman ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... conduct on being left to himself, was rather inexplicable. He opened the closet, counted the teaspoons, weighed the sugar-tongs, closely inspected a silver milk-pot to ascertain that it was of the genuine metal, and, having satisfied his curiosity on these points, put ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... the evidence that had been gradually accumulating of the presence of large glaciers in Central America during the glacial period, and these, once admitted, afforded me a solution of many phenomena that had before been inexplicable. The immense ridges of boulder clay between San Rafael and Yales, the long hog-backed hills near Tablason, the great transported boulders two leagues beyond Libertad on the Juigalpa road, and the scarcity of alluvial gold in the valleys of Santo Domingo, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... temperance, that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... and the letter had brought definite results. They had lifted Stuart out of his place in the past and drawn him into the present. He had not been guilty of desertion, but was, like herself, the victim of a hideous and inexplicable mistake. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... this concession our anatomical knowledge must be very imperfect. Thus the nature of life, whether it be developed in the vegetable creation, or display its admirable complications in the higher animals, is inexplicable on any of the principles that regulate our philosophy, and can only be referred to the contrivance and disposition of infinite wisdom: yet the vehicle in which these stupendous operations are conducted owns a material basis: even the confused mass that composes ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... Dampier—" Senator Burton turned, and looking down into her agitated face, spoke gently and kindly—"though I quite admit to you these people's conduct must seem inexplicable, I feel sure you are wronging the Poulains. They are very worthy, respectable folk—I've known them long enough to vouch for that fact. This extraordinary misunderstanding, this mistake—for it must be either a misunderstanding or a mistake on some one's part—will ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Honduras, and it had been the stronghold of the revolutionists. The moral effect of the fact that Garcia held it, had been of the greatest possible benefit. As Garcia's force consisted of 2,000 men and six pieces of artillery, it was inexplicable to Laguerre how without a fight he had ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... blood—for to me she seems to belong more to death and its awful accessories, than to life and its natural reality. How in the devil's name could she have known that I locked that obstinate and undutiful girl up. This is altogether inexplicable, upon principles affecting only the ordinary powers of common humanity. Then she affirmed, prophesied, or what you will, that Lucy and Dunroe will be married—willingly and happily! That certainly is strange, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... travel-stained and dusty as millers, therefore our personal appearance had not impressed him favourably; he was in a thread-bare long black cloth habit that combined the cloak, dressing-gown, and frock-coat in a manner inexplicable, and known only to Turks. This garment was trimmed in the front edges with rather mangy-looking fox-skin: loose pegtop trousers of greasy-looking cloth, dirty and threadbare, completed the costume of the great curiosity ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... are two of the things often said about Washington which need, if I mistake not, to be unsaid: first, that he was a solitary and inexplicable phenomenon of greatness; and second, that he was ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... went on, "to make one objection: Has it not ever been held that the fear evinced by savage nations in the presence of mighty natural phenomena, and other inexplicable foreboding events, is the germ from which a higher feeling, a purer disposition, should gradually ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a low tone with the priest. From him he learned more of the evil name of this man whom they followed. His house at Shalford was a den of profligacy and vice. No woman could cross that threshold and depart unstained. In some strange fashion, inexplicable and yet common, the man, with all his evil soul and his twisted body, had yet some strange fascination for women, some mastery over them which compelled them to his will. Again and again he had brought ruin to a household, again and again his adroit tongue and his cunning wit had in some ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... its usual hour; there was a tang of joyousness in the air, and everybody's heart and mind, strangely enough, seemed to be in festal attire, although nobody was outwardly conscious of it. It was all the more inexplicable because Saint Margaret's had gone to bed miserable, and events naturally pointed toward depression: Margaret MacLean's coming departure, the abandoning of Ward C, the House Surgeon's resignation, and Michael's ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... more capricious, more inexplicable, more wayward, than fashion. It is true that, taken as a whole, there is a certain conformity in the rules it prescribes. For instance, as the crinoline diminishes in size and the area which petticoats ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... has no knowledge of yielding. Sometimes even her love for Blake seemed to lose itself in this obstinacy, and her tenderness towards her child seemed the only womanly sentiment left in her; but more often her love for her husband mounted high and unmixed above the other feelings as the tremendous, inexplicable passion ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... a pinch; "but have you, my son, the requisite qualities for that science, as well as the tastes? Are you capable of intrigue? Can you say one thing and mean another? Are you aware of the immense consequence of a look or a bow? Can you live like a spider, in the centre of an inexplicable net—inexplicable as well as dangerous—to all but the weaver? That, my son, is the art of politics; that is ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there is resentment against the mystery of the Cross which does not exist against any other inexplicable fact in the world. It is not strange that the ministers of Satan, appearing as the apostles of Christ and ministers of righteousness, should fortify their lies and hypocrisies by contending for every ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... edition (1733), the fac-simile of the epigram and epistle of Lascar prefixed to the edition of the Anthology, 1496, and the Disquisition concerning the ancient editions of Quintilian (both of which were in the first edition of 1719), is absolutely inexplicable. Maittaire was sharply attacked for this absurdity, in the "Catalogus Auctorum," of the "Annus Tertius Saecularis Inv. Art. Typog.," Harlem, 1741, 8vo., p. 11. "Rara certe Librum augendi methodus! (exclaims the author) Satis patet auctorem hoc eo fecisse concilio, ut et primae et secundae Libri ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... first it was all nonsense. My father had told me so a score of times. But having been reared in the superstitious Galloway of the ancient days—well, there are certain chills and creeps for which a man is not responsible, inexplicable twitchings of the hairy scalp of his head, maybe even to the breaking of a cold sweat over his body, which do not depend upon belief. I kept saying to myself, "There is nothing! I do not believe a word of it! 'Tis naught but old wives' fables!" But, all the same, I took ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... went up to his bent face for a minute and hid it, but I did not speak. There was so much of strange grief in his simple movement that I felt words would be out of place. It was not my dogged, inexplicable "hand" who was sitting before me in the bright moonlight on the baby's grave; it was a man with a hidden history of some tragic sorrow long kept secret in his homely breast,—perhaps a history very few of us could read aright. I would not question him, though ...
— "Surly Tim" - A Lancashire Story • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... among the Battas, at first all alone and afterward with my wife, were so hard that it makes me shudder even now when I think of them. Often it seemed as if we were not only encompassed by hostile men, but also by hostile powers of darkness; for often an inexplicable, unutterable fear would come over us, so that we had to get up at night, and go on our knees to pray or read the Word of God, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... the supposed mendicant, with an inexplicable smile. "Keep it,—keep all your wealth,—until I demand it all, or none! My message had no such end in view. You are beautiful, they tell me; and I desired to ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends. For example, it is true that it is possible to fall out of a window, and that some care must be exercised when one is near a window, but it is inexplicable why the anxiety in the corresponding phobia is so great, and why it follows its victims to an extent so much greater than is warranted by its origin. The same explanation, then, which applies to the phobia applies also to the dream of anxiety. In both cases the anxiety ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... by this inexplicable piece of news that she heard nothing more of what the man said. Why on earth had Freddy come to Cairo? Margaret knew that he had business which was to have kept him four more days at least in Luxor. Her first thought was that he had heard something about Michael, but she ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... by. An inexplicable noise sounded from beyond the door. It seemed as if some people were bringing a bulky piece of furniture upstairs and knocking against the walls as they did so. Suddenly I understood, as I heard Marguerite begin to sob; it was ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... spectacle of Burma in those days, with the country seething with strife, and the monks going about their business calmly as ever, begging their bread from door to door, preaching of peace, not war, of kindness, not hatred, of pity, not revenge, was to most foreigners quite inexplicable. They could not understand it. I remember a friend of mine with whom I went through many experiences speaking of it with scorn. He was a cavalry officer, 'the model of a light cavalry officer'; he had with him a squadron of his regiment, and we were trying to ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... without exposing the guilt of the oppressors—it endeavors to prevent any other association agitating the subject. Hence between colonization and abolition societies there is no affinity of feeling or action; and hence arises the cause, inexplicable to many, why they cannot pursue their ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... loudly at the door of her brother's chamber. My uncle had been previously roused by the noise, and instantly flew to the window. He also imagined what he saw to be fire. The loud and vehement shrieks which succeeded the first explosion, seemed to be an invocation of succour. The incident was inexplicable; but he could not fail to perceive the propriety of hastening to the spot. He was unbolting the door, when his sister's voice was heard on the outside conjuring ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... not understand myself. I do not understand my doubts nor can I analyze my fears. When I saw the carriage drive off, followed by the wagon with its inexplicable big box, I thought I should certainly regain my former serenity. But I am more uneasy than ever. I cannot rest, and keep going over and over in my mind the few words that passed between us in their short stay under my roof. It is her face that haunts me. ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... consider the line where flesh ends and the nail begins contains the invisible and inexplicable mystery of the constant transformation of a fluid into horn, we must confess that nothing is impossible in the marvelous modifications of ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... some forbidden object, unwittingly, in the first instance, she began to sigh; and with each sigh came such a warm gush of feeling from the heart as did not fail to create a crowd of sensations altogether new and unaccountable. On his part the feeling was not less ardent, though less inexplicable, at least to himself, and a few more glances fixed them desperately and unalterably in love. Hopeless though it might be, yet did the lovers find a sad and mournful solace in their regrets, the only sentiment ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... internal. You must cleanse first the inner man of the heart, and you will be surprised at the reflection of your own face then, it will change into such a mysterious winsomeness! Never mind Mr. Bond's actions—they can not lie at your door, but take care that your own are as free from taint as your inexplicable neighbor's. It is not for you to see the hidden motives that govern those about you; the best way for you is to think favorably of every body, and you have no idea how much peace and comfort it will ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... I not know before, when I was young, in the days when my beautiful blue-eyed but cruel and remorseless mother and sisters made my life an inexplicable grief and torment! It might have lifted the black shadows from my youth by explaining the reason of their persecutions—it might have taken the edge from my sufferings by showing that I was not personally to blame, also that nothing could ever obviate it, that I but wasted ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... itself at last, but even then he did not let her go. He held her pressed to him, and she lay against his breast trembling but wholly passive, overcome by an inexplicable longing to hide, ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... this time that Mr. Humphrey Crewe was transformed, by one of those subtle and inexplicable changes which occur in American politics, into the Honourable Humphrey Crewe. And, as interesting bits of news about important people are bound to leak out, it became known in Leith that he had subscribed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that nothing can exceed the grandeur of the sight, when a numerous body of cattle are under its influence. Old nags, broken by age and fatigue, who have been deserted on account of their weakness, appear as wild and fresh as young colts. As soon as they are seized with that inexplicable dread which forces them to fly, they appear to regain in a moment all the powers of their youth; with head and tail erect, and eyes glaring with fear, they rush madly on in a straight line; the earth trembles under their feet; nothing can stop them—trees, abysses, lakes, rivers, or mountains—they ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... seems very inexplicable. I have seen much of it, but do not know what to make of it. There is doubtless something morbid in it. It is often carried to such extremes, and managed so artfully, that multitudes are deceived by it. I know of some very beautiful natures that pass in the world for rough and coarse. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... opinion on politics, and all the sentiments of the English gentleman, at a small expense of vital energy. Also, he may be obstinate or persistent at the same low rate, and may even show sudden impulses which have a false air of daemonic strength because they seem inexplicable, though perhaps their secret lies merely in the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in—good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Dion had fought with an old love of which he began to be angrily ashamed, with a love which was now his greatest enemy, a thing contemptible, inexplicable. In the pavilion that morning it had suddenly risen up before him strong, intense, passionate. It seemed irresistible. But he was almost furiously resolved not merely to resist it, but to ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... surely at present an inexplicable rapport (all the more piquant from its contradictoriness) between that deceas'd author and our United States of America—no matter whether it lasts or not[13] As we Westerners assume definite shape, and result in formations ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the sublime and the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir. Hence, appreciation is inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the courage to proclaim it or not. Just why it has not been written into the course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the educational process. It is far from clear why the superintendent permits teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that arithmetic is their final destination, or why he fails to take the tax-payers into his confidence ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... course, for "Meine Reisen" and the puerile abbreviation as well as the reasons assigned for it, were intended to be a Sterne-like jest, apitiful one. Why Goedeke should suggest "Meine Randglossen" is quite inexplicable, since Gchhausen himself in the very first chapter indicates the real title. Beneath the enigmatical title stands an alleged quotation from Shandy: "Ein Autor borgt, bettelt und stiehlt so stark von dem andern, dass bey meiner Seele! die Originalitt fast so rar geworden ist als die ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... which one cannot get hold of,' he remarked to himself, 'becomes truly terrific in such hands. Now there is young Bradford,he picked up out those chestnuts solely and exclusively for the heiress of Chickaree,and in some inexplicable way she has made him hand over to Molly Seaton. Not a cent but what her brothers may give her. And how Tom Porter comes to be walking off with Miss May, nobody will ever know but the sorceress herself. She will none of him,nor of anybody else. ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... some inexplicable, subtly mysterious fashion, there was a kind of affinity between Mr Gladstone ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... moment all Limoges rang with this inexplicable affair,—inexplicable because no one knew the secret of it, namely, the immensity of the dowry. Had that dowry been known Veronique could have chosen a husband where she pleased; but even so, she might have ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... vanquished by sinful means and banished to the woods, even then, thou of the Vrishni race, I thought that Suyodhana deserved death at my hands. What thou, however, O Krishna, wishest to do for thy friends is scarcely strange, although it seems inexplicable how the object in view is capable of being effected by either mildness or its reverse. Or, if thou deemest their immediate destruction to be preferable, let it be effected soon without further deliberation. Surely, thou knowest how Draupadi ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... patent of wines was revoked, though not without a nominal compensation being made. To complete his ruin, it was contrived to involve him in a charge of treason. Most writers have concurred in speaking of this passage of history as inexplicable; it is the opinion of the last historian of Raleigh, Mr. Tytler, that he has found sufficient evidence for regarding the whole plot as a device of Cecil, and he has supported this opinion by cogent arguments. Lord Cobham, a violent and ambitious but weak ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... stroll out of the waiting-room and leave her abandoned, like some undesirable kitten, in the corner? The idea was ludicrous: she must be taken care of. Had she thrust herself upon him, enticed him, challenged him? Assuredly not; moved by some completely inexplicable influence, utterly alien to himself, his birth, his training, he had deliberately and persistently questioned her, prolonged a trifling encounter unjustifiably, whirled her away, literally; and now that he had found no suitable place of deposit it was incredible that he should ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... from a lucid point; others of the cometic shape, with a seeming nucleus in the centre, or like cloudy stars surrounded with a nebulous atmosphere; a different sort, again, contain a nebulosity of the milky kind, like that wonderful, inexplicable phenomenon about Theta Orionis; while others shine with a fainter, mottled kind of light, which denotes their being resolvable ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... beyond his trance; and had faced smiling toward his earthly comrades, imagining he was to return to them; unaware that somehow his emergence was not in the ordinary course of nature; that in it was an accent of the inexplicable, something which the others caught and at which they trembled; though they knew not why. And he, so beautifully at peace, and yet thrilled as never before by the vision of the murdered Duncan at the end of life's fitful fever—what was his real feeling, his ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... which in his youth he had given only to the sweetheart he sought for wife. Unacknowledged, perhaps, even unmanifested save in occasional swift and unreasonable petulances, it is still there, making many a heartache, which is none the less bitter that it is inexplicable to itself, and dares not so much as confess ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... added the word "ability" instinctively and without explanation. And he decided that, in order to have any satisfactory speech with her, he must come upon her alone, away from the house. Then he could force her to hear to the finish what he wanted to say; in the open they might escape from the inexplicable inhibition that lay upon her expression of feeling, of desire. It would be necessary, at the same time, to avoid the notice of anyone who would warn her of his presence. This precluded his waiting at the familiar ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... done so well that we hope he will try his hand on some of the other Latin hymns. He cannot expect to satisfy those who have been penetrated by the almost inexplicable charm of the originals; but by rendering them in their own metres, and with so large a transfusion of their spirit as characterizes his present attempt, he will be doing a real service to the lovers of that kind of religious poetry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... become convinced how ignorant we are of the extent to which all sorts of structures are serviceable to each species. But that characters supervening during maturity in one species should appear so regularly, as you state to be the case, in succeeding species, seems to me very surprising and inexplicable. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... fact that the currents did not run in the direction in which, according to all sound reasoning, they ought to run. This part of the speech was not perfectly lucid, though, as I understood our unfortunate captain, the laws of nature, owing to some inexplicable influence, had departed, in some way or other, from their ordinary workings, expressly to wreck the John. If this were not the meaning of what he said, I did not understand ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... ice-chest, rolled his ulster round the dreadful glistening mass, closed the chest again, and walked quietly away. I have no doubt that to this day the disappearance of that waxy liver is one of the most inexplicable mysteries in the career of ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... in a manner which appears inexplicable, she seeks and finds excuses for him. She is so innocent that not only she cannot believe herself suspected, but she cannot conceive the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... always detect them by their glance, which is unlike that of any other human being, though something resembling it is often seen in the ruder type of the rural American. I believe myself that there is something in the gypsy eye which is inexplicable, and which enables its possessor to see farther through that strange mill-stone, the human soul, than I can explain. Any one who has ever seen an old fortune-teller of "the people" keeping some simple-minded maiden by the hand, while she holds her by her glittering eye, like the Ancient ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... knew now where he stood. Nor was his immediate departure from England altogether unpleasant to him. His political career was shattered—friends and enemies were alike cold to him. Such an act of cowardice as his, such pitiful shrinking back at the last fateful moment, was inexplicable and revolting. Even Letheringham was barely civil. It was certain that his place in the Cabinet would be intolerable. He yearned for escape from it all, and the means of escape were now at hand. In after years he knew very well that the shadow of his broken ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... seeing this blood and imagine that they have some dreadful disease. If they have no friend to whom they can speak freely they sometimes do very injudicious things in their efforts to remove that which to them seems so strange and inexplicable. I have known of girls who washed their clothes in cold water and put them on wet, and so took cold and perhaps checked the menstrual flow, and as a consequence were injured for life, or may even have died years after as a result of this ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... best fellow in the world. It was Mrs. Saunders who elucidated the last details of a certain episode of Kenneth's early life for Susan. Emily had spoken of it, and Ella had once or twice alluded to it, but from them Susan only gathered that Kenneth, in some inexplicable and outrageous way, had been actually arrested for something that was not in the least his fault, and held as a witness in a murder case. He had been but twenty-two years old at the time, and, as his sisters indignantly agreed, it had ruined his life for years following, and Ken ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... knowledge of the past does not imply that the past is exerting any efficiency. If a distinction is made between an efficiency and an entity, then the reason why efficiency started at any particular time and ceased at another would be inexplicable. Once you admit that there is no difference between efficiency and the entity, you at once find that there is no time at all and the efficiency, the entity and the moment are all one and the same. When we remember a thing of the past we do not know it as existing ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... also about the gloomy shingle hill range extending from the north-east to the south-west. The black underlying rock where exposed to the air shows numberless holes corroded in it, as by the action of moving salt water. An inexplicable isolated hill stands in the centre of the valley, which here is not perfectly flat, but in a gentle incline, higher at its south-western extremity than at ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to see a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I could have such a fellow whipp'd for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... Wehrgeld, as among the Vedic, Iranic, and Teutonic peoples. The Iroquois, like all Indians, was a great gambler, staking all his property[3] (like the Teutons and Hindus). In religion "A mysterious and inexplicable power resides in inanimate things ... Lakes, rivers, and waterfalls [as conspicuously in India] are sometimes the dwelling-place of spirits; but more frequently they are themselves living beings, to be propitiated by prayers and ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... discussion has, therefore, great significance for our view of the vital processes in the plant; it proves beyond doubt that these processes are in no way of a purely mechanical nature, but that there is something underlying all this, a hitherto inexplicable something, which we call "life." In all vital activities, physical and chemical processes certainly do occur; they do not, however, take place spontaneously but are made use of by the vital element of the plant to produce an effect that is desirable or necessary ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... accompanying herself on the ukulele, she suggested his weird "Cowboy's Lament." In some inexplicable way of love, she had come to like her husband's one song. Because he sang it, she liked its inanity and monotonousness; and most of all, it seemed to her, she loved his hopeless and adorable flatting of every note. She could even sing with him, flatting as accurately and deliciously ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... information arrived belatedly at the British headquarters it seemed like a death warrant. The right of the line had already been exposed for more than half-a-day. It was inexplicable that it had not already been attacked. It was unbelievable that the attack would not fall the next moment. But how would it be delivered and where, and what force would the enemy bring to it? Was von Kluck lulling the British into a false sense of security by ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... the tramping of dusty and hungry miles, adds to the interest to the man that cannot fail in some significant way to set a glamor upon the poet. Poetry is made out of experience—the experience of dreams, of action, of desires and hopes baffled on the inexplicable sea of circumstance; in these latter the dream is as the spirit, and the man whose art becomes an expression of all he has realized in living, his experiences become something more than art, they are the subtle rendering reality ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... unrolled wide and expansive under the black cropped moustache. How curious it was that this was a human being! What Brangwen thought himself to be, how meaningless it was, confronted with the reality of him. Birkin could see only a strange, inexplicable, almost patternless collection of passions and desires and suppressions and traditions and mechanical ideas, all cast unfused and disunited into this slender, bright-faced man of nearly fifty, who was as unresolved now as he was at twenty, and as uncreated. How could he be the parent of Ursula, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... governments of confusion will drift towards war, with a spacious impulse and a final vehemence quite out of comparison greater than the warlike impulses of former times, is a remarkable but by no means inexplicable thing. A tone of public expression, jealous and patriotic to the danger-point, is an unavoidable condition under which democratic governments exist. To be patriotically quarrelsome is imperative upon the party machines that will come to dominate the democratic countries. They will not possess ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... salutary precautions for maintaining the men in health and strength to do their work, it is obvious that the observance of these abstinences or taboos after the work is done, that is, when the game is killed and the fish caught, must be wholly superfluous, absurd, and inexplicable. But as I shall now show, these taboos often continue to be enforced or even increased in stringency after the death of the animals, in other words, after the hunter or fisher has accomplished his object ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... consisted in the publication which it made with reference to the new ideals in operatic representation which came in with the new movement. No doubt to a large portion of the audience, still judging by the old standards, much of it must have been inexplicable, much of it (especially the singing of Herr Schott) little short of monstrous. To a smaller portion, familiar with the opera, the language of its book and the spirit of the play, as well as the music, it came as a vivid realization of the purposes of the poet-composer. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... This word has not been used before, but is probably meant for the same bird formerly called Aparath. These names of birds in Newfoundland are inexplicable.—E.] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... just as a heavy blow sounded upon the canvas of the tent. I started, but my condition did not permit me to rise; again the same kind of blow sounded upon the canvas; I thought for a moment of crying out and requesting assistance, but an inexplicable something chained my tongue, and now I heard a whisper on the outside of the tent. 'He does not move, bebee,' said a voice which I knew. 'I should not wonder if it has done for him already; however, strike again with your ran'; and then there was another blow, after ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... it in all races is but a proof that Man is the creation of a Power that intends him for a far wider range of existence than he sees before him. There are many things affirmed by man's consciousness that he cannot really or logically explain. Yet it is a narrow reasoning that bids us reject the inexplicable." ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... the evidence, although it is of a purely circumstantial nature, points to an innocent man as the culprit. I feel very keenly annoyed with Coverly, for not only is he involving both of you in a most unsavory case but he is also hindering the work of justice. In fact by his inexplicable silence he is, although no doubt unconsciously, affording the murderer time to elude ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... a sudden full stop in her surprise. This cousinly greeting from the village reprobate was as exciting and as inexplicable as ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... am apprehensive for her safety, in meeting at such a time and place, one who had something of the manner of a desperado, and whose message was of a character so inexplicable." ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... under their bit of raw skin covering. Mother Nature had taken the child home, that was all, and was breathing new lusty life into it, out of the bare ground and open sky, the sun and wind, and the breasts of these her children; but its father saw in the change only another inexplicable miracle of God. Nor does he seem to have seen that it was the child and its mother who had been a protection and shield to the whole crew and saved them through this their ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... was based, the tragedy at the heart of it, worked like 'a worm i' the bud.' The first check to his artistic career—the 'hanging' incident and its sequel—produced an effect of shock and disintegration out of all proportion to its apparent cause—inexplicable indeed to ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ask, wherefore my heart Falters, oppressed with unknown needs? Why some inexplicable smart All movement of my life impedes? Alas! in living Nature's stead, Where God His human creature set, In smoke and mould the fleshless dead And bones ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... were approaching the sea, for they had wheeled with the regularity of cavalry, and had returned back in as straight a line as they had advanced. The guanacos have one singular habit, which is to me quite inexplicable; namely, that on successive days they drop their dung in the same defined heap. I saw one of these heaps which was eight feet in diameter, and was composed of a large quantity. This habit, according to M. A. d'Orbigny, is common ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... never hope to command his regiment now: let him get what satisfaction he could out of commanding his wife! She would have preferred a form of sacrifice which looked less like fear, but there was little sentiment in Bernard, and love must not pick and choose. For it was love still, the old inexplicable fascination: in the middle of one of his tirades, when he was at his most wayward, she would lose herself in the contemplation of some small physical trait, the scar of a burn on his wrist or the tiny trefoil-shaped birthmark on his temple, as if that summed up for her the essence ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... could not divine, till I saw that some of the crew were securing the stock of the anchor by means of a tackle to a stout beam, which projected over the bows of the ship. "Over to the fish," next shouted out the officer, an order at first equally inexplicable to me, till I saw the flukes of the anchor hauled up close to the ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... I will not obtrude these thoughts on you, best and dearest of friends. I ought not to have made to you the allusions to my private position which I have done, but it seemed to me the only way to explain my conduct, otherwise inexplicable." ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... you precious child," said Mrs. Anderson, suddenly, in a voice of the tenderest authority. She held out her arms and Charlotte fled to them. Mrs. Anderson looked over the girl's head at her son with the oddest and most inexplicable reproach. "You go up and see if the heat is turned on in that little room out of mine," she commanded, "and then you go into the kitchen and see if you can't find the milk, and set some on the stove to warm. You ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... definite end of all education. When the child ceased to wonder before the veil of appearances, the battle of orthodoxy with speculation was over, and Miss Priscilla felt that she could rest on her victory. With Susan she had failed, because the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell was one of those inexplicable variations from ancestral stock over which the naturalists were still waging their merry war; but Virginia, with a line of earnest theologians and of saintly self-effacing women at her back, offered as little resistance as some exquisite plastic ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the fate of her earthly lover, as his wife. In a moment of deepest despair about the state of his country, the fairy queen appears to him and purposely destroys his faith in her by deeds of the most cruel and inexplicable nature. Driven mad by a thousand fears, Arindal begins to imagine that all the time he has been dealing with a wicked sorceress, and tries to escape the fatal spell by pronouncing a curse upon Ada. Wild ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... And how then? How will the young ones help their mother out of the scrape? How will they get out themselves: for I suppose they don't leave the nest till they are pretty well grown? Come! good shikaree; let us have no more circumlocution about the matter, but explain all these apparently inexplicable circumstances." ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... of hatred will not bring bloody and shameful fruits, it will be only because it will clash with our Russian indifference to life and will disappear in it; it will split against the Chinese wall, behind which our still inexplicable ...
— The Shield • Various
... exclude slavery. And I have argued and said that for men who did intend that the people of the Territory should have the right to exclude slavery absolutely and unconditionally, the voting down of Chase's amendment is wholly inexplicable. It is a puzzle—a riddle. But I have said that with men who did look forward to such a decision, or who had it in contemplation, that such a decision of the Supreme Court would or might be made, the voting down of that amendment would be perfectly ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... without interest to those of us who are but beginners in these studies, and a clear comprehension of its mysteries may often be of the greatest importance to us, not only by enabling us to understand many of the phenomena of the seance-room, of haunted houses, etc., which would otherwise be inexplicable, but also to guard ourselves ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... find it in their heart to state that incurable insanity should not be ground for divorce is inexplicable to me; but as it is well known that partial insanity even is not, and I know of an instance of a man who went twice into an asylum and came back twice to his wife, the poor woman bearing him on each occasion another child. Even this is not a ground for divorce. The Cruelty ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... We believe in it because we find it so. Millions on millions of observations concur in exhibiting this uniformity. And the longer our observation of Nature goes on, the greater do we find the extent of it. Things that once seemed irregular are now known to be regular. Things that seemed inexplicable on this hypothesis are now explained. Every day seems to add not merely to the instances but to the wide-ranging classes of phenomena that come under the rule. We had reason long ago to hold that the quantity ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... Dunsack recalled that he had promised himself to throw away the remainder of the opium on this and succeeding nights. In view of that his movements were inexplicable: he got out from a locked chest the yen tsiang, a heavy tube of dark wood inlaid with silver ideograms and diminutive earthen cup at one end. Then he produced a small brass lamp, brushes, long needles, and a metal rod. Taking off his clothes, and in the somber black folds of ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... long remained inexplicable afforded some distraction to my thoughts for a few days. At first I had refused to go and take possession ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... "There is something perfectly inexplicable in the case," I observed, "and it would require sifting. Your husband, I hope has ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... cruise—Kitchell, the turtle hunt, the finding of the derelict, the dead captain, the squall, and the awful sight of the sinking bark, Moran at the wheel, the grewsome business of the shark-fishing, and last of all that inexplicable lifting and quivering of the schooner. He told himself that now he would probably never know the ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... always uncomfortable. As Jack proceeded with his narrative, Dick and Tom looked nervously about them. Even the boys' two elders looked grave. The presence of a man on the island was almost inexplicable. But Jack's story was so circumstantial that there was no room to suppose that he might be mistaken. Besides, he had the bit of canvas to show, the scrap that he had taken from ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... his seat and came close to her. He leaned upon his stick heavily, and looked at her with eyes full of that same strange, inexplicable tenderness and compassion. Her eyes seemed fascinated by his, and in her mind there arose a strange bewilderment, an expectation of ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... admirers in abundance, Morgana: more than have often fallen to the lot of the most attractive young women. And love is such a capricious thing, that to be the subject of it is no proof of superior merit. There are inexplicable affinities of sympathy, that make up an ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... Arbuthnot, it is in the library of our college. Farewell! I shall come no more to this dingle—to come would be of no utility; I shall go and labour elsewhere, though . . . how you came to know my name, is a fact quite inexplicable—farewell to you both.' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... would wish to inculcate; and he considers the surface of the earth, in its present state, as being the same with that which had subsisted while those stones had been transported. Now, upon that supposition, the appearances are inexplicable; for, How transport those materials, for example, across the lake of Geneva? But there is no occasion to have recourse to any extraordinary cause for this explanation; it must appear that all the intervening hollows, plains, and valleys, had been worn away by means of the natural operations of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... back doors should have been affected rather than our front doors, for example, is inexplicable—unless it was because Francis built the machine in his kitchen. In any event, when they did become nodal areas, they manifested themselves on Sirius XXI, and the dogs in the immediate vicinity associated them with the doorways of their departed masters and ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
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