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More "Inscrutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... things he only admired her the more fervently. That she would succeed he never for a moment doubted; though what it was that she might be aiming at, and what it was that her success might involve, were inscrutable mysteries. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... is determined by his motives, if it is not the other way about; in any case, a man's motives are for the most part inscrutable and can only be deduced from conduct, while the world usually makes the mistake of explaining conduct by attributing its own motives. Tried, then, by the standard of conduct, the only one available, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... "this is the most imposing and subtle of the systems of ontology yet known in the history of philosophy." This inscrutable Being is the only real existence, all else being illusion projected by ignorance. This doctrine of identity or nonduality (advaitha) lies at the foundation of all their religious thinking. This ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... rector looked at her sadly, almost severely. "There, Miss Brent, we touch on inscrutable things, and human reason must ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... beautiful the young mother looked! Peerless, indeed, with her eyes full of an inscrutable graciousness she ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... it will steal surely from all these, and on the morrow be a colorless ghost in the distant past. Its constancy will secure our immortality. The grandeur of the year may be the strength of our character; and as the East receives it, we may enter the inscrutable future reverently and with ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... plucked her gaze home again like a tame bird who should have meditated flight. Possibilities crowded on her; she hung over the future and grew dizzy; the image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with the inscrutable half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a chasm. "I wonder, will I have met my fate?" she thought, and her ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... once sent for, made a minute search, assisted by the peasants, but discovered nothing. In the same way, the examining-magistrates, after a close inquiry lasting for several days, found no clue capable of throwing the least light upon this inscrutable tragedy. On the contrary, the investigations only led to ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... friendship, not to say love, was wildly impossible between us! But her presence had had a strange influence upon me, and in her presence I must resist, and at the same time analyse that influence! The seemingly inscrutable in her I would fain penetrate: to understand something of her mode of being would be to look into marvels such as imagination could never have suggested! In this I was too daring: a man must not, for knowledge, of his own will encounter temptation! On the other hand, I had reinstated ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... seemed peopled by tiny folk, living out their timid, inscrutable lives around him. A water-rat, passing bright-eyed upon his lawful occasion, paused on the border of the stream to consider the stranger, and was lost to view. A stagnant pool among some reeds caught the reflection of the sunset and changed on ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... some inscrutable reason, was about to call upon Mr. Saunderson. But when the cab ahead, having passed the park, continued on past the lane in which the house was situated, he began to search for some other solution to the problem ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... ordained it should be, and its ways are dark and intricate, beyond my comprehension, for surely it is against all the rules one can conceive of justice that a virtuous action should be thus rewarded. Perhaps you will say that His ways are inscrutable, and, that as we have neither the power, nor have we the right to attempt to read them, so we should not venture to cavil at His ordinances, but humbly believe that the ultimate result will be for our benefit. I believe it is so, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... startled at hearing in English the phrase of Spanish courtesy so familiar to her ears; but Mr. Montfort's face was inscrutable, as he brought forward a chair, and handed her to it as ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... routine of English education is more than once broken by tours upon the Continent. When the boy leaves Eton in 1827, his father pronounces him "a good, though not, perhaps, first-rate scholar in the Latin and Greek languages." As certain Latin verses referred to are, for some inscrutable reason, omitted in this American edition, the reader has no means of deciding whether it is the modest reserve of the parent which pronounces them "good, without being excellent," or the fond partiality of the father which discovers them to be "good" at all. In any case, we must consider ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... through the infinite realms of starry space, and fathoms the inscrutable depths of the minutest life, finding nowhere any limit, but everywhere law, which is the immediate expression of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... into the dining-room hastily at last, but the expression of her face was impassive and inscrutable. She was received in solemn silence, broken at first only by the long formal grace which Mr. Baron never omitted and never varied. In her rebellious mood the girl thought, "What a queer God it would be if he were pleased with this old cut-and-dried form of words! All the time uncle's ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... so great a secret. And yet it almost seemed as if the young lord knew of her desperate act; 'twas written on his face, she saw the pain upon it; and yet, how could it be? These thoughts flashed through Katherine's brain, and she tried to move from him, but an inscrutable presence held her, and she felt she must not leave him, perhaps forever, with that face so full of pain, and she spoke out a word she had never used before and one which touched his Lordship as nothing else ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... each, and which refused to fill that office when its turn had not come, those two dogs, I say, advanced farther than Dingo into that domain of intelligence reserved for man. Besides, we are in the presence of an inscrutable fact. Of all the letters of that alphabet, Dingo has only chosen these two: S and V. The others it does not even seem to know. Therefore we must conclude that, for a reason which escapes us, its attention has been especially ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... shocked, but it made no difference in his feelings. Perhaps there was more of the brotherly character in them than he thought. For a moment they looked at each other, and he thought he made this discovery—while she met his eyes with that look which she did not know was inscrutable, which she feared was full of self-betrayal. "I believe," she said, bending her head, "that ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... were spellbound; then all the emotions of the mind and heart portrayed themselves on the circle of faces. Madame's face alone was inscrutable. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... hand to her. She gave him hers with a firm warm grasp. He might have taken courage from this, but her composure and her inscrutable smile daunted him. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... constructions are too easy-going, too conjectural, too much dominated by prepossessions and the 'will to interpret.' The alleged sources or determinants for this dream may or may not have played the parts you assign to them; the mystery of the matter must remain inscrutable. But what your methods, so plausible in effect, certainly do show is how easy it may be to confabulate an explanation that goes no deeper than a phrenological reading of cranial bumps or than a seance in the cabinet of a palmist. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... There's a queer woman, Will. The inscrutable ways of Providence were not in it with hers. She hated me, but she wouldn't let go of me; seemed to be her idea that shaking one man was enough and she wouldn't let me make her a widow a second time. By George, I couldn't shake her—I had ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... attracted. As he had been in love with marrying rather than with her, so she had been in love with being loved rather than with him. She would have accepted almost any pleasant young man, provided he had had the supreme merit of caring for her. But the inscrutable fate which rules these matters, decreed that it was not to be. No ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... the good faith of the two castaways, which had been long floating vaguely in my mind. From the first I had rather doubted the account they gave of themselves. And Kidd! I had never much liked him; he had a hard inscrutable face, and unless I greatly misjudged him was capable of bolder enterprises than petty larceny. He was just the man to steal secretly away and return with a horde of unscrupulous treasure-seekers, for he knew now that there were diamonds in the neighborhood, and he must have heard that we had ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... of the join of the sliding door; nor, indeed, could we hit upon the secret, now utterly lost, that worked it, though we tried for an hour or more. It is certainly a marvellous bit of mechanism, characteristic, in its massive and yet inscrutable simplicity, of the age which produced it; and I doubt if the world has such another ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... men of the party are soon soundly slumbering; but the women, depressed with the thoughts that they are leaving their home and loved friends and neighbors, perhaps forever, their hearts filled with forebodings of danger and misfortune, cast only wakeful eyes upon the darkened plain or up to the inscrutable stars that are shining with marvelous brightness in the azure firmament. Far into the night they wake and watch, silently weeping until nature is exhausted, and a sleep, troubled with ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... the carman were not the only portraitures this model showed. Two very little girls were watching the rising grain-sacks, each with her arm round the other. The miller may have been looking at them affectionately from the window; but really he was so very unimpressive—quite inscrutable! Dave inquired about these little girls, after professing a satisfaction he only partly felt about the arrangements for receiving the raw material ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... to John Flint of this parish, forswore herself; whereupon the ground opened, and she sunk over head, March 23, and being found dead, she was buried, March 25.' Thus fully confirming the facts, as stated by Bunyan. Solemn providences, intended, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, for wise purposes, must not be always called 'divine judgments.' A ship is lost, and the good with the bad, sink together; a missionary is murdered; a pious Malay is martyred; still no one can suppose that these are instances of divine vengeance. But when the atrocious bishop ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... we heard soft footsteps, and looking up we were surprised to see Captain Rudstone standing within a yard of us. There was a peculiar gleam in his eyes, and a half-amused, half-mocking expression lurked on his inscrutable features. His glance swept about the room, then settled keenly ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... head in shame. She has not seen fit to return, or to give information of her whereabouts. I have tried to serve my God all my days," said the Reverend Saunders; "I do not know why this should have been visited upon me. But His ways are inscrutable. His ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... an hour after their prisoners had been removed La Boulaye paced the narrow limits of the kitchen with face inscrutable and busy mind. He recalled what Suzanne had said touching her betrothal to Ombreval, whom she looked to meet at Treves. This miserable individual, then, was the man for whose sake she had duped him. But Ombreval at least was in Caron's power, and ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... firmness than our neighbours, but even in order to do this, we ought not to blind ourselves at the moment of its approach. It seems too probable that it is decreed by Providence that a stop should be put (for reasons probably inscrutable to us) to the progress of arts and civilization among us. It is a melancholy reflection to be born to the commencement of such a scene, and to be called to bear a principal share in it, but I trust we may hope that our strength may be proportioned ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... etiquette of His worship; that they thought of Him as having rights over them because they had come into His territory, which He would exact, or punish them for omitting. In a word, their notion of God was that of a jealous, capricious tyrant, whose ways were inscrutable to them, in whose territory they found themselves without their will, and who needed to be propitiated if they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... music, the inscrutable relation between the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gate by inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance from a poet before 'Abt Vogler'. This is of a higher order of composition, quite nobler, than the merely fretful ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... it that any of us resist such drawing, and make the wretched choice of perishing without, rather than find safety within? The deepest reason is an alienated heart, a rebellious will. But the reason for alienation and rebellion lie among the inscrutable mysteries of our awful being. All sin is irrational. The fact is plain, the temptations are obvious; excuses there are in plenty, but reasons there are none. Still we may touch for a moment on some of the causes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... elements of The White Rook (CHAPMAN AND HALL) may be summarised in the picturesque argot of Army Ordnance somewhat as follows: Chinamen, inscrutable, complete with mysterious drugs, one; wives, misunderstood, Mark I, one; husbands, unsympathetic (for purposes of assassination only), one; ingenues, Mark II, one; heroes, one; squires, brutal, one; murders of sorts, three; ditto, attempted, several. ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... only when he was at his very worst. Deep down within him he was aware that, while the breath of life and his inscrutable genius were together in him, he could not, ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... daughter did not answer, and the mother stood still and looked at her, with perhaps an inscrutable bit of pride and delight behind her hard ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... was that no one was ever again ostracised at Athens, but Hyperbolus was the last, as Hipparchus of Cholargus, who was some relation to the despot of that name, was the first. Thus the ways of fortune are inscrutable, and beyond our finding out. If Nikias had undergone the trial of ostracism with Alkibiades, he would either have driven him into banishment, and governed Athens well and wisely during his absence, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... model of deportment, Turveydrop the elder, whose relations to the young people, whom he so superbly patronizes by being dependent on them for everything, touch delightfully some subtle points of truth; the inscrutable Tulkinghorn, and the immortal Bucket; all these, and especially the last, have been added by this book to the list of people more intimately and permanently known to us than the scores of actual familiar acquaintance whom we see around ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... he came back beside the bed, and once more looked down upon the young man who lay there. His face was veiled, inscrutable. It ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... inscrutable artifice, Toby withdrew to purchase the viands he had spoken of, for ready money, at Mrs. Chickenstalker's; and presently came back, pretending he had not been able to find them, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... mystery and transparency, its bounded lawlessness, its love of earth and its echoes of the sky. In winter our brook had a new charm: it ran beneath a roof of ice, often mounded with snow; its voice sounding cheerful as ever in those inscrutable caverns, as if it discoursed secret wonders of fairy-land, and carried treasures of the elves and gnomes. Zero, with his utmost rigors, could not still its speech for a day or fix his grip upon those elastic limbs. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... continent, finishing his scientific studies under a famous German chemist named Glaser. But the terrible secret of the agua tofana and of the poudre de succession, Exili learned from Beatrice Spara, a Sicilian, with whom he had a liaison, one of those inscrutable beings of the gentle sex whose lust for pleasure or power is only equalled by the atrocities they are willing to perpetrate upon all who stand in the way of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Donna Faustina. Her face was pale and her eyes flashed angrily. She, too, had heard Flavia's stage whisper and was even more annoyed than her mother. Gouache went his way toward his lodging in the company of the surgeon, pondering on the inscrutable mysteries of the Roman household of which he had been vouchsafed a glimpse. He was in pain from his head and shoulder, but insisted that the walk would do him good and refused the cab which his companion had brought. A broken collar-bone is not a dangerous matter, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... more than ever struck by the old adage that the ways of Providence are inscrutable, and past finding the right berth. We had gone out to the back part of the car, and stood in our stocking feet on the cold zinc floor for a couple or three minutes, looking out upon the beautiful Michigan landscape ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... the hall that evening she ran upstairs and brought down the framed photograph wrapped lovingly in a white silk scarf. Mr. Donovan surveyed it with inscrutable eyes. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... then lifted from it a morocco case, evidently a miniature. She returned to her chair and seated herself again, swaying her body gently to and fro as if confirming some difficult resolution, but with the same inscrutable expression upon her face. Still holding the case in her hands unopened, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... continuous meditation. And when interrupted by the interposition of night, or by the superposition of the paternal hickory, he would resume the meditation, next day, precisely where he left off, going on, and on, and on, in one profound and inscrutable think. It was a common remark in the neighbourhood that "If Tony Rollo didn't let up, he'd think his ridiculous white head off!" And on divers occasions when the old man's hickory had fallen upon that fleecy globe with unusual ardour, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... dark riddles of the inscrutable Power which rules over life that the good man can go under like that, while the ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... altered and her attitude remained as implacable as the day she had sworn vengeance upon it, the bearing of the town had changed considerably. With cold inscrutable eyes she had watched open hostility and active enmity become indifference. Engrossed in its own troubles, Prouty had forgotten her, save when one of her rare visits reminded it of her existence. The comments upon such occasions were mostly of a humorous nature, pertaining to the ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... curiosity would have led him to ask for an explanation; and by practicing on that curiosity, she might have had him at her mercy. As it was, she set her cunning against his, and the fool proved a match for her. Noel Vanstone, to whom all large-minded motives under heaven were inscrutable mysteries, saw the small-minded motive at the bottom of his housekeeper's conduct with as instantaneous a penetration as if he had been a man of the highest ability. Mrs. Lecount left him for the night, foiled, and knowing she was foiled—left him, with the tigerish side of her uppermost, and a ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... computation, and at distances of which imagination herself can form no distinct conception;—the influence of all these upon the globe which we inhabit, and upon the condition of man, its dying and deathless inhabitant, is great and mysterious, and, in the search for final causes, to a great degree inscrutable to his finite and limited faculties. The extent to which they are discoverable is and must remain unknown; but, to the vigilance of a sleepless eye, to the toil of a tireless hand, and to the meditations of a thinking, combining, and analyzing mind, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... awful thing it was, with the dead lying in the chamber above, to wrestle with the unbelief of the living. But it seemed as if the spirit of her mother had passed into her spirit, giving her strength to speak with words not her own. What if, in the inscrutable purposes of Heaven, this hour of death was to be to him an ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... life is the eye! What a fine and inscrutable essence! He that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him; He that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother, He that smiled at the bosom, the babe that smiles in its slumber, Even to him it exists. It moves, and stirs in ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Gothic tapestries more than any other existing pictures take us back to that epoch of our lives when we lived in romance, when the Sleeping Beauty hid in just such towers, when the prince rode such a horse and appeared an elegant young knight. The inscrutable mystery of those folk of other days is like the inscrutable mystery of that childhood time, the Mediaeval time of the imagination, and those of us who remember its joys gaze silent and happy in the tapestry room of the Ducal ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... all those who hold that the Australian race was degraded before it came in contact with whites, is, "Who is he and what are his qualifications for serving as a witness in this matter?" He is, or was, a simple-minded settler, kindly no doubt, who for some inscrutable reason was allowed to contribute a paper to the Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (Vol. XXXIII.). His qualifications for appearing as an expert in Australian anthropology may be inferred from various remarks in his paper. He naively tells ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... child with the fear that is adoration. When she dropped her eyes before her god's searching glance, she did it in reverence. She hid her faith from the world, but in her heart she believed that she was blessed above all women. In secret, she worshipped the inscrutable wonder that had used her as the instrument of his incarnation. Perhaps ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... We swallowed him whole, however; we hung upon his lips and proclaimed his genius on the house- tops. The women were all dying to sit to him for their portraits and be made immortal, like Leonardo's Joconde. We decided that his manner was a good deal like Leonardo's—mysterious, and inscrutable, and fascinating. Mysterious it certainly was; mystery was the beginning and the end of it. The months passed by, and the miracle hung fire; our master never produced his masterpiece. He passed hours in the galleries and churches, posturing, musing, and gazing; he talked more than ever about the ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... of that slow, inflexible race. He would make love philosophically, Gaunt sneered. A made man. His thoughts and soul, inscrutable as they were, were as much the accretion of generations of culture and reserve as was the chalk in his bones or the glowless courage in his slow blood. It was like coming in contact with summer water ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... face could display at will a Japanese liveliness of expression or become a mask of Indian gravity, surveyed the speaker with inscrutable eyes. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... stared at me with inscrutable stolidity as we shook hands, and at once handed me over to a tall, ungainly man whom he addressed as Ernest, but whose surname I never learned. Ernest in turn introduced me, with a shy and clumsy courtesy, to the two ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... impression it gave the beholder of invincible calm and self-mastery, with a certain mysterious hint of power and a promise of unswervingness. His gaze held no suggestion of concealment; yet for the deeper thoughts that move the spirit of man, to those who knew him well his mild blue eyes remained inscrutable, while his courtesy to all made one forget that his words were few, and that of himself he had ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. To which may be added that the doubts and ignorance of those who take upon them to expound the designs of nature and her internal progressions, and the many false prognostics of their art, ought to give us to understand that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown; there is great uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she either promises or threatens. Old age excepted, which is an indubitable sign of the approach of death, in all other accidents I see few signs ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... on with the inscrutable calm for which Macchiavelli was presently to find him so remarkable. Aware as he was of the French protection which Florence enjoyed and could invoke, he perceived how vain must ultimately prove Vitelli's efforts, saw, perhaps, in ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... sequences which unite them, as antecedent and consequent, are termed laws. The laws of phenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature and their ultimate causes, efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us.[247] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... lbs. Twelve shots. Octagon barrel. Stock and forearm crudely checkered by some former owner. For some inscrutable reason, the manufacture of this excellent weapon was discontinued long ago, but for the sort of hunting to be found in this State, it is much superior to the later small-bore, high-velocity arms now sold. Roosevelt carried a rifle of this ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... lustre, the air lay dead as in a room, and yet all the isle sounded as under a strong shower, the eaves thickly pattering, the lofty palms dripping at larger intervals and with a louder note. In this bold nocturnal light the interior of the houses lay inscrutable, one lump of blackness, save when the moon glinted under the roof, and made a belt of silver, and drew the slanting shadows of the pillars on the floor. Nowhere in all the town was any lamp or ember; not a creature stirred; I thought I was alone to be awake; but the police were ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... awaked a peal Of frenzied bells along the vacant ways Of thy poor earthly heart; waked thee to steal, Like dawn distraught upon unhappy days, To prove nought, nothing? Was it Time's large voice Out of the inscrutable future whispered so? Or but the horror of a little noise Earth wakes at dead of night? Or does Love know When his sweet wings weary and droop, and even In sleep cries audibly a shrill remorse? Or, haply, was it I who out of dream Stole but a little where shadows course, Called back ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... rage. The sight of Lucille standing by Mr. Sabin's side, her hand lightly resting upon his, her dark eyes full of inscrutable tenderness, maddened him. He was flouted and ignored. He was carried away by a storm of passion. He tore a sheet of paper from his pocket book, and unlocking a small gold case at the end of his watch chain, shook from it a pencil ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... unauthorized discrimination, and keeping back the communications he deemed least important. This sudden conjecture carried the novelist straight to his library, where he found Vyse bending over the writing-table with his usual inscrutable pale smile. But once there, Betton hardly knew how to frame his question, and blundered into an enquiry for a ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... moment had arrived for Jella[vc]i['c] to found at last an independent Yugoslav dominion. On December 20, 1848, he wrote to him: "An inscrutable destiny has placed you, O illustrious Ban, at the head of the Southern Slavs. You have preserved their throne, their destiny for the Habsburgs.... A grand mission is yours; from it may arise a new formation ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... sovereign's stern ideal. No seeming failure of his policies could shake his belief in their fundamental excellence. That whatever he did was done for the greater glory of God, that success or failure depended upon the inscrutable will of the Almighty and not upon himself, were his guiding convictions, which he transmitted to his Spanish successors. Not only was Philip a man of principles and ideals, but he was possessed of a boundless capacity for work and an indomitable will. He preferred ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... silent memorial to her, for life, of his chastising love. She left her fatherless flock in the family pew, and went with her nursling, not merely to give it to God, but to receive for it the seal of his covenant, bowing submissively to his inscrutable appointment, and imploring the God of Abraham to be still her God, and the God of this her seed. That scene had not failed to make deep impressions upon the other children; and now it was proposed ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... down and all around him that he was weighing every chance of safety, but though he often gazed across the raging surf to where he could see my dark figure upon the beach, his self-respect or some other reason forbade him from imploring my help in any way. He stood, dark, silent, and inscrutable, looking down on the black sea, and waiting for whatever fortune ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fellow. You surprise me, my boy ... [CATHERINE enters and goes to the piano, running her hands softly over the keys—playing no melody in particular. PETER sits in his big chair at the table and picks up his pipe. FREDERIK, with an inscrutable face, now strikes a match and holds it to his uncle's pipe. PETER thoughtfully takes one or two puffs; then speaking so as not to be heard by CATHERINE.] Frederik, I want to think that after I'm gone, everything will be the same here ... just as ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... all goes well, and the recompense for the trouble is in every way great. There is rather an alarming breakdown at Newcastle, in respect of all the bills having been, in some inscrutable way, lost on the road. I have resolved to send Berry there, with full powers to do all manner of ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... bent an inscrutable look upon Clarissa and then bidding her remain until his return, hastily left the room. But though he was gone, Clarissa sat gloating upon the mental picture of his manly beauty. He seemed taller than before, for the stoop he had worn in the afternoon ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... first glance into Italian history the student recoils as from a chaos of inscrutable confusion. To fix the moment of transition from ancient to modern civilization seems impossible. There is no formation of a new people, as in the case of Germany or France or England, to serve as starting-point. Differ as the Italian races do in their original type; Gauls, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... him with curiosity. He was inscrutable, this quiet, alert, efficient-looking man. Take, for instance, his present manner, half self-assured, half respectfully apologetic—what grade ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... German influence as manifested in the commercial tyranny of the Hansa League. His utter failure was due, partly to the vices of an undisciplined temperament, and partly to the extraordinary difficulties of the most inscrutable period of European history, when the shrewdest heads were at fault and irreparable blunders belonged to the order of the day. That period was the period of the Reformation, which profoundly affected the politics of Scandinavia. Christian II. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... any rate, for that hour, with an intensity that it was promptly to lose in the poverty and patchiness of rehearsal; he could see its life reflected, in a way that was sweet to him, in the stillness of the little semi-circle of attentive and inscrutable, of water-proofed and muddy-booted, actors. Miss Violet Grey was the auditor he had most to say to, and he tried on the spot, across the shabby stage, to let her have the soul of her part. Her attitude was graceful, ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... him with a long, slow inscrutable look, as he stood before her negligently, the water standing in ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... hour this craver after some hope and comfort went down, and then John renewed the conversation which was on the apparent cruelty of children being born to live a short time and then leave Earth by the inscrutable ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Dave, whose face was inscrutable, and then the bladder seemed to be motionless, and as if Tom's "bob" was all imagination. Once more it seemed to move slightly, but it was nothing more than the ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... nowadays these magnates are lords of the City from ten till four, and of the West End and the suburbs for the remainder of the twenty-four hours, and they would in the ordinary course of things invite you to dinner at eight o'clock or so. What inscrutable law, then, compels them to hold their state dinners at the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... communicating with each other in the most unexpected manner, so that the whole interior is a perfect labyrinth of galleries, cells, hiding-places, and rooms on different stages. This is just the sort of tower which seemed fitted for that inscrutable tyrant, Louis XI.; who wrote upon one of the windows, with a diamond, these words: "O la grande Folie!" alluding, it was believed, to what he considered his weakness, in having abandoned ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... General rode through the disorder, quietly directing the incompetent militia officers in their tasks of collecting their men; and behind him, splendidly horsed and caparisoned, cantered the tall Oneida, known as Thomas Spencer the Interpreter, calm, composed, inscrutable eyes fixed on ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... advertisements from wine merchants and a statement of his account with his outfitter were consigned in turns into the fire. The last envelope, in the unknown hand, he scrutinised for a moment before opening. The postmark was local, the caligraphy illiterate. He opened the letter and read it with an inscrutable face. Then, with a quick movement as of disgust, he crumpled it up and threw it into the flames. It was anonymous, and was a threat, couched in lurid and ensanguined terms, ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... virtues of our lamented friend and fellow-citizen, the late Chief Magistrate of the Union, whose friendship and confidence you possessed many years. We saw the tear fall from your eye and mingle with the tears of the nation when the inscrutable will of Heaven removed him ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... which has been made in the last two hundred years, towards solving the same problem. The origin of evil, the ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more comfortable theology, it is probably because we are less logical than they. It is perhaps because we have forgotten or refused to look at some things at which they ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... mind our changing?" Margaret said. She found Eleanor's manner quite inscrutable. After her first passionate exclamation that it was impossible she seemed to accept Margaret's decision without any argument whatever, and yet the latter felt that the matter was by no ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... quiet family restaurant, but the young girl was too perturbed in mind to enjoy the few courses ordered. With self-reproach she recognized the truth that she was engaged in the rather unusual occupation of becoming acquainted with her father. He sat before her, with his face, generally stern and inscrutable, softened by a desire to be companionable and sympathetic. According to his belief she now had "a mood," and after a day or two of quiet retirement from the world she would relapse into her old enjoyment of social attention, which would be all the deeper ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... make him deeply uncomfortable. His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis, but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Providence are inscrutable," Simon Orts considered; "and if Providence has in verity elected to chasten your Lordship, doubtless it shall be, as anciently in the case of Job the Patriarch, repaid by a recompense, by a thousandfold recompense." And after ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... door. Red-headed Jimmie, Mrs. Murphy's nephew, did the hard jobs, such as splitting wood and lifting coal from the bin; and in the intervals between tending the fallen giant and waiting on the customers, Tony's wife sat in her accustomed chair, knitting fiercely, with an inscrutable smile about ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... and laid her head on his breast. No one gave her any heed except as the Cousin girl walked by her several times, watching her with inscrutable eyes. The Shawnees were impatient to try ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... hand to bind up my gashed palm when something grunted a "huff-huff" beside us. Le Borgne was there with a queer look on his inscrutable face. ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... talk to his travelling companion, but was somehow unable to find words. Panawe glanced at him with an inscrutable smile—stern, yet enchanting and half feminine. He then broke the silence, but, strangely enough, Maskull could not make out whether he was singing or speaking. From his lips issued a slow musical recitative, exactly like a bewitching adagio from a low toned ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... songs. It was certainly not classical music, but it was amusing; and, as everybody joined in the choruses, the company consisted entirely of performers, with no audience except the cows in the adjacent pasture. Even Mrs. Vernon was singing, though with an inscrutable look in her grey eyes hardly suggestive ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... He gave the Adjutant a quick glance; but the man's face was inscrutable. Captain Hallam was a disciplinarian where discipline was needed, but he knew the value of ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... but a moment longer. His cheek, as ever, was bulging round his everlasting cigar. Was his tongue therein as well? Lanyard never knew; the man's eyes remained inscrutable for all the kindly shrewdness that glimmered amid their ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... a full, perfect oval, with features of faultless regularity, and the large, full eyes were of tawny hazel, darkened into inscrutable gloom in the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... space, since photographs show that nearly the whole constellation is interwoven with faintly luminous coils. To behold the entry of the great nebula into the field even of a small telescope is a startling experience which never loses its novelty. As shown by the photographs, it is an inscrutable chaos of perfectly amazing extent, where spiral bands, radiating streaks, dense masses, and dark yawning gaps are strangely intermingled without apparent order. In one place four conspicuous little stars, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... inhabited by Daulat Ras, the Indian. He is a quiet, inscrutable fellow, as most of those Indians are. He is well up in his work, though his Greek is his weak subject. He is ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and never deviated one hair's-breadth from the path he had marked out, but only acted with double prudence after each victory, and with double courage after each defeat. His cheek grew pale with joy; when he hated most, he smiled; in all the emotions of his life, however strong, he was inscrutable. He had sworn to sit on the throne of Naples, and long had believed himself the rightful heir, as being nearest of kin to Robert of all his nephews. To him the hand of Joan would have been given, had not the old king in his latter days conceived the plan ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... perhaps," he says, presently, still speaking with the same slow and ruminating sadness in his tone. "The inscrutable God alone knows why He permits his creatures to mar all their seventy years by one short ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... musicians had not yet taken possession of their corner, and sofas and chairs were but sparsely occupied by some couple of dozen specimens of that portion of the fair sex who in outward seeming not attractive, for dancing purposes, to the frivolous male, yet for some inscrutable reason always put in the earliest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... England he had left was the England of mail- coaches. In Italy, he had learnt to travel by carriage, after the fashion of the country; but these new whizzing locomotives, with their time-tables, and their precision, and their inscrutable mysteries of shunts and junctions, were quite too much for his simple, childish, old- world habits. He had a knack of getting out too soon or too late, which often led him into great confusion. Once, when he wanted to go to Chichester, he found himself landed at Portsmouth, and only discovered ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... practical moralists than were the Virginians two hundred years before. But the time had to come, in the course of human events, when negro slavery was to cease in America; and those whose business interests, or sentimental prejudices, were opposed to it, added the chorus of their disapproval to the inscrutable movements of a Power above all prejudices. Negro slavery, as an overt institution, is no more in these States; but he would be a bold or a blind man who should maintain that slavery, both black and white, has no existence among us to-day. Meanwhile ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... stone is rolled away, and the rising sunshine of the Easter morning pours into it, we have a visible symbol of the life and immortality which Jesus Christ then brought to light by His Gospel. The buried grave speaks of the inscrutable mystery that wrapped the future: the open sepulchre proclaims the risen Lord of life, and the sunlight certainty of future blessedness which we owe to Him. Death is solitary no more, though it be lonely as far as human companionship ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... could pretend to ignorance of this world of emotion. About his knowledge let it be enough to say that what he had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased, and was without intolerable memories; broken to the realities of sex, he was still troubled by its inscrutable history. He went through life full of a strange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terror of certain feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faith that something remained in him to be called ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... immeasurable loneliness, it was the solitary sign of an inhabited world. And the only sound was the wind, as it sang through the taut wires in the unspeakable sadness of minor chords. A camel caravan came by, soft-footed, silent and inscrutable. I waited till it passed out to the mysteries of the desert beyond the ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... into the clear night peopled the emptiness of the sky. They glittered, as if alive above the sea; they surrounded the running ship on all sides; more intense than the eyes of a staring crowd, and as inscrutable as ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... Even the smallest ones gave me a panic when I went over them. I could hit any kind of a stone, no matter how small, if I tried to miss it; and of course at first I couldn't help trying to do that. It is but natural. It is part of the ass that is put in us all, for some inscrutable reason. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The mystery, however, did not end here. Kate observed that, as before, much of their conversation was held aloof from her, or in such enigmatical phrases and whisperings, as rendered the substance of it perfectly inscrutable to her. She observed, besides, that two of them were frequently absent from the kiln where they lived; but that one always remained at home to make certain that she should not follow or dog them to the haunt they frequented. This precaution on their part was uniform. As it ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... sprinkles it freely over the invalid chair, places the can under the table, lifts the paraffin lamp from the table, and is just about to smash it over the invalid chair when there is the sound of a chair falling over in the sun-room. His face inscrutable, he looks towards it. He carries the lamp stealthily to the desk, puts it down, looks round, picks a chair from near the table, and stands at the sun-room door with the chair ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... through the stern battle of life, under some slight shock, or even mental disappointment, would sink into a decline, gradually waste away, and die. What could be done in such a case, except to bow in submission to the inscrutable ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... smiled dutifully. Victoria sat silent. Her silence checked Mrs. Penfold's flow, and brought her back, bewildered to realities; to the sad remembrance of Lydia's astonishing and inscrutable behaviour. Whereupon her manner and conversation became so dishevelled, in her effort to propitiate Lady Tatham without betraying either herself or Lydia, that the situation ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a recurrent shade of her former hauteur of manner, mingled with just the faintest suggestion of irony and impatience? The fact is that I was at that moment as far from being able to comprehend this lovely but inscrutable woman as when I met her for the first time in the saloon of the City of Cawnpore: her moods were as changeable as the weather: there were occasions when her manner toward me was almost as warm and genial and sympathetic as ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... willing to sanction any schemes of benevolence. The "Colonization Society may be a part of the grand system of the Ruler of the Universe, to provide for the transfer of negroes to their mother country. Their introduction into this land may have been one of the inscrutable ways of Providence to confer blessings upon that race—it may have been decreed that they shall be the means of conveying to the minds of their benighted countrymen, the blessing of religious and civil liberty. But I fear there is little ground to believe the means have yet been created to effect ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... demandi. Inquiry demando. Inquisition inkvizicio. Inquisitive sciama. Inquisitor inkvizitoro. Inroad ekokupo. Insalubrious malsaniga. Insane freneza. Insanity frenezeco. Insatiable nesatigebla. Inscribe enskribi. Inscription surskribo. Inscrutable nesercxebla. Insect insekto. Insecure dangxera. Insensible sensenta. Insert enmeti. Insert (print) enpresi. Insertion enpresajxo. Inseparable sendisigxa. Inside interne. Inside out returnite. Insidious insida. Insight elsciado. Insignificant ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... attentive as a dog's uncovered and revealing her alertness for his presence; at Caroline sitting with a strained composure in her armchair by the stove. She met his eyes quite firmly with a look of inscrutable fear, and defiance of ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... (1810) and Alfred the Great (1812), inspired by patriotic grief for Austria humiliated by Napoleon, are Shakespearean in many scenes, but are in their general disposition strongly influenced by Schiller's Robbers and Maid of Orleans. In all three of these pieces, the constant reference to inscrutable fate proves that Grillparzer is a disciple of Schiller and a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Mind and Will, proves diverse in texture, and difficult of interpretation?—Shall I grow rebellious against the message, because the history of it is hid in the long night of ages; say rather, in the counsels of GOD'S inscrutable will? or shall I be incredulous that it comes from Heaven, because I see the fingers of a Man's hand writing upon the plaister of the wall? or shall I despise those parts of it of which I cannot detect the medicinal value? As there are riddles ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... rash promises; she gazed at him with inscrutable eyes; then nodding toward a figure striding swiftly over the common, she said: ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... in the twilight wandered, sorely vexed? Ye instruments, forsooth, ye mock at me,— With wheel, and cog, and ring, and cylinder; To nature's portals ye should be the key; Cunning your wards, and yet the bolts ye fail to stir. Inscrutable in broadest light, To be unveil'd by force she doth refuse, What she reveals not to thy mental sight, Thou wilt not wrest me from her with levers and with screws. Old useless furnitures, yet stand ye here, Because my sire ye ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... feet away, another mind, inscrutable to hers, was violently employed upon its own problem. In this wild darkness the wall of Chantilly had bid him go on alone; it left him first without guide, second without shelter. He drove into the path of a rough and bitter ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... "how shall Africa be redeemed?" has been unsolved, although earnestly sought for by the civil and religious powers of Europe; but in every instance it has been in vain, and the cloud of her wretchedness blackened on each failure. Mysterious and inscrutable are the ways of Providence to accomplish her restoration, lift her from the jaws of death, bind her as a jewel to the throne of righteousness, and give her a place among the civilized nations of mankind. God in his pity, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... is seldom given, and inverted commas are conspicuous by their absence. It can hardly be imagined that all this poetry is by the writer of the book. In one instance he quotes a well-known verse by ASHBY-STERRY, without acknowledgment, in which, for some inscrutable reason, he has introduced a rugged final line which effectually mars the harmony ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... the need. He was greatly tempted to go away at once to diminish his sufferings, but conquered this weakness. The next evening he passed at the chateau of M. des Rameures; and though his heart was bleeding, he piqued himself on presenting an unclouded brow and an inscrutable smile to Madame de Tecle. He announced the brief absence he intended, and ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... idly shifted a piece of paper over the notes on his blotting-pad. His face was inscrutable. She could not tell whether her statement had startled him or not. For all the change in his expression she might have merely remarked that the weather was fine. Had it been any one else he would have said that before the day was out he expected a dozen or more people to ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... with his back to the western glow. His face was more than half concealed by one end of his turban. He made no advance, but stood like a brazen image, motionless, inscrutable, seeming scarcely ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... listened quietly with her face turned from him, and now met his eyes with an inscrutable expression in hers. "Have I not ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... now under consideration, I shall not write to you on that subject, more especially as it is quite uncertain how the present papers will be conveyed. Nor shall I pretend to unravel to you the designs of the enemy. They are very inscrutable. The printers know as much as I do about them; therefore I send a few of the last prints of Dunlap, which, with the Boston papers, must decide you ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... like a business paper - a good one, S'ENTEND; but there is no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night: there are no harmonics, there is scarce harmony to his music; and in Henley - all of these; a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition. The First London Voluntary knocked me wholly. - Ever ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Euphrates. This city was already very ancient when the gods were moved in their hearts to ordain a great deluge, all of them, their father Anu, their councillor the warlike Bel, their throne-bearer Ninib, their leader Ennugi. The lord of inscrutable wisdom, the god Ea, was with them and imparted to me their decision. 'Listen,' he said, 'and attend! Man of Surippak, son of Ubaratutu,[BF] go out of thy house and build thee a ship. They are willed to destroy the seed of life; but thou preserve it and bring ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... alien where she was. Elinor Doyle was a perpetual enigma to her; now and then she thought she had penetrated behind the gentle mask that was Elinor's face, only to find beyond it something inscrutable. There was a dead line in Elinor's life across which Lily never stepped. Whatever Elinor's battles were, she fought them alone, and Lily had begun to realize that ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... moment of their meeting. He sometimes told himself with a wry face that if the fellow had behaved like a beast he would have found him easier to cultivate. At least, he would have had something to work upon, a creature of flesh and blood, instead of this inscrutable statue ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... is he. Your son-in-law! The ways of Providence are inscrutable. Was he heavily struck by ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... the blame for this lies in about the same quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with powerful forces ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... girl's own theory was that all the dragging there might be would be upward, and moreover administered by herself, she could look at her aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye. ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... Solomon's temple, and in a manner so pointed, and yet labored, as to cause the youngest of us to flame with indignation. Happily, however, it was lost upon Jack: I do not think he even heard it. His handsome, colorless face, albeit a trifle worn and thoughtful, was inscrutable. Only once, during the singing of a hymn, at a certain note in the contralto's voice, there crept into his dark eyes a look of wistful tenderness, so yearning and yet so hopeless, that those who were watching ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... I stood in the doorway leading to the bedroom. I could feel the perspiration on my forehead and at the back of my neck. I fronted the inscrutable white face of Lord Clarenceux, the lover of Rosetta Rosa; I met its awful eyes: dark, invidious, fateful. Ah, those eyes! Even in my terror I could read in them all the history and the characteristics of Lord Clarenceux. They ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... their obituary memorials days, weeks, even months, before their fate took the public by surprise. That cylinder bureau was in harmony with the secrecy in which this remarkable man shrouded the productions of his brain. In his literary life Mivers had no "I," there he was ever the inscrutable, mysterious "We." He was only "I" when you met him in the ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... look, full of things inscrutable, and lowered her lashes in silence. She was evidently striving to overcome ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... as literature. For this purpose, it is well to turn from Lintier's pages to those of the honest writers of whom Dupont is the type, and then back again to Lintier. All evoke, through intense emotion, most moving and most tragic sensations, but Lintier, gifted with some inscrutable magic, evokes them in the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... a vain thing: that the mantle of dignity in which he wrapped himself successfully cloaked his sense of injury. Iff smiled a meaningless smile up at the inscrutable skies. And the moonlit miles slipped beneath the wheels like a torrent ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... ought to follow faith, and not precede it nor impair it. For faith and love excel here most of all, and work in hidden ways in, this most holy and transcendent sacrament. The eternal and immeasurable God of infinite power does great and inscrutable things in heaven and in earth, and there is no finding out of His wonderful works. If the works of God were such that they could easily be seized by human reason, they would not deserve to be called ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... dramatic effect of the innocent, the weak, the unwarlike, welcoming among them, without fear, because without guilt, those ancient snaky-haired sisters, emblems of all that is most terrible and most inscrutable, in the destiny of nations, of families, and ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-pot), some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him—as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious,—into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes,—inscrutable cavities of the earth;—or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a river's side under some bank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no interest—but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Ignorance," before the coming of Mohammed, knew little and cared less about those spiritual qualities that look beyond the physical; not questioning, as did Mohammed, what lies beyond this vale of strife, whose only exit is the dark and inscrutable face ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... priests are particularly careful to obliterate the marks of our heathen feet on their beautiful floor of golden sand. Inside are eight figures of the good Buddha, alternately standing and sitting, depicted with that calm, inscrutable countenance so remarkable in the image of this deity wherever this religion prevails. Before each figure is a small altar, littered with flowers, the most conspicuous blossom being the lotus lily, the symbol ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... chamber. More silent than ever, more benignly silent, did the hush about him seem to Dion; more profound were his peace and serenity. He and the child had surely withdrawn a little farther from all that was not intended, but that, for some inscrutable reason, had come to be. His winged sandals had carried him still farther away. As Dion looked at him he ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a philosopher, Ida. I've held communion with the Unfathomable, and watched the exfoliation of the Inscrutable; and, you know, these things are altogether beyond the orbit of the girl-mind. Now clear off, like a good fellow, and let me read ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... always eager, which is generally obstinate, which is often wrong, which rules Ministers more than they know themselves, which overpowers them much more than the public believe, which is irresponsible because it is inscrutable, which cannot be prevented because it cannot be seen. The benefits of a good monarch are almost invaluable, but the evils of a bad ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... do nothing but lie and read, or talk of what he would do, when he recovered his health. Cheap claret having lost its inspiring force, the poor fellow had turned to more potent beverages, and would ere now have sunk into inscrutable deeps but for Miss Bonnicastle, who interested herself in his welfare. Olga, after losing sight of him for nearly two years, by chance discovered his whereabouts and his circumstances, and twice in the past week had paid ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... an unknown man. Better were it that mere earthly historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for omniscience than for human science, and aiming only at some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will be a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret—or at most, in reverent faith, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all History and ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... over the bravery of our nineteen hundred, who fought against a force more than twice their number, with all the advantage of position and knowledge of the country. All our battles have proven that our men can fight, and, though Providence seems to have been against us thus far, for reasons most inscrutable, we will not waver in our determination to dare or die in the contest. Our chief difficulties are not in the rank and file of the army, but in the general management of the forces, and we trust that ere long right men will be found to take ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... two ladies and the anxious countenance of the elder, who regarded her with a look of inscrutable alarm and terror, the poor girl at once knew that Pen's mother was before her; there was a resemblance between the widow's haggard eyes and Arthur's as he tossed in his bed in fever. Fanny looked wistfully at Mrs. Pendennis and at Laura afterward; there was no more expression ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I am parted from all my kit at present. Having had no saddle, I have been used to put it on the transport waggon of our sub-division, but this went with the other section for some inscrutable reason, or rather didn't go, for it was wrecked by a train when crossing the line. I heard vaguely that the contents were saved and sent on with the right section, but am quite prepared to find it is lost. Not that I miss it much. One wants very ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... With a muttered ejaculation, expressive of annoyance, he sprang to the door and endeavoured to open it; but it was fast, and, as he listened, he heard the sounds of hastily retreating footsteps in the passage outside. And in that same moment the truth flashed upon him that, for some inscrutable reason, he was trapped and ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the dark riddles of the inscrutable Power which rules over life that the good man can go under like that, while the evil ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... in undis—we should be glad to dwell, but we are not reviewing the "Rise of the Dutch Republic," and in Mr. Motley's present volumes the hero of toleration appears no longer. His antagonist, however,—the Philip whom God for some inscrutable purpose permitted to afflict Europe during a reign of forty-two years,—accompanies us nearly to the end of the present work, dying just in time for the historian to sum up the case against him, and pronounce final ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... soberly down upon the quiet face of the dead. Some new dignity had touched the smooth forehead, and the closed eyes, a little inscrutable smile hovered over the sweet, firmly closed mouth. Susan's eyes moved from the face to the locked ivory fingers, lying so lightly,—yet with how terrible a weight!—upon spotless white satin and lace. Virginia had put the ivory-bound prayer-book and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... supposed wife to John Flint of this parish, forswore herself; whereupon the ground opened, and she sunk over head, March 23, and being found dead, she was buried, March 25.' Thus fully confirming the facts, as stated by Bunyan. Solemn providences, intended, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, for wise purposes, must not be always called 'divine judgments.' A ship is lost, and the good with the bad, sink together; a missionary is murdered; a pious Malay is martyred; still no ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... so. There was never the slightest pomp or pride about him. "A small, insignificant Irishman," so some one has described him. Is he small? I dare say he is, but one never notices it. One notices only the long face still further lengthened by a beard, the domed forehead, the bright eyes, very inscrutable usually, very sympathetic when he chooses to make them so; and when he speaks, a soft voice, quiet and even-toned but often indistinct. Not given to demonstrativeness, he appears the same under all conditions—silent when depressed, silent too when cheerful; he may smile, ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... convey us warnings, which would only be understood if we were guilty, that we were playing an idle and perilous game, and had better desist. But in one respect we had had the advantage, and that was in the version Davies had given of his stranding on the Hohenhrn. Inscrutable as our questioner was, he let it appear not only that the incident was new to him, but that he conjectured at its sinister significance. A little cross-examination on detail would have been fatal to Davies's version; but that was where our ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... arid countenance revealed no emotion. He was accustomed to understanding his clients a trifle better than they understood themselves, and inscrutable though Mr. Gunning's original motive in buying the mare had been, he had during this interview yielded to treatment and followed a ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... that any of us resist such drawing, and make the wretched choice of perishing without, rather than find safety within? The deepest reason is an alienated heart, a rebellious will. But the reason for alienation and rebellion lie among the inscrutable mysteries of our awful being. All sin is irrational. The fact is plain, the temptations are obvious; excuses there are in plenty, but reasons there are none. Still we may touch for a moment on some of the causes which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... could not fail to understand. She bridled a little, wrapping herself closer in her soft shawl as in an impenetrable husk of reserve, and began nervously buttering toast. The whole thing was very odd; but then the ways of Audrey were inscrutable. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... imperative that the walls of the Abbaye should appear inscrutable, of great thickness, and yet subtilized by the mists of coming night. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... did not try to underbid each other, and they were perfectly good-humored; as soon as he had made his choice, the rejected multitude returned to their places on the curbstone, pursuing the successful aspirant with inscrutable jokes as he drove off, while the horses went on munching the contents of their leathern head-bags, and tossing them into the air to shake down the lurking ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... window the snowy ridges of the mountain, inscrutable, caught and held his eye; a ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... of the form and whiteness of a shoulder, the supple fulness of the arm's muscle, the brightness of eyes increased by kohl! Scent is burning on silver dishes, and through the fumes appear the subdued colours of embroidered stuffs and the inscrutable traceries of bronze lamps. Or, maybe, the scene passes on a terrace overlooking a dark river. Behind the domes and minarets a yellow moon dreams like an odalisque, her hand on the circle of her breast; and through the torrid silence of the garden, through the odour of over-ripe fruit ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... greatly tempted to go away at once to diminish his sufferings, but conquered this weakness. The next evening he passed at the chateau of M. des Rameures; and though his heart was bleeding, he piqued himself on presenting an unclouded brow and an inscrutable smile to Madame de Tecle. He announced the brief absence he ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... in St. James's Park On every day from dawn to dark Pursue, inscrutable of mien, A fixed unvarying routine. Whatever be the wind or weather They spend their time in peace together, And plainly nothing can upset ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... from the choral celebration of the god Dionysus. But the new spirit imported by the genius of Aeschylus into the early drama was religious in a profounder meaning of the term. The sadness of human lot, the power and mysterious dealings of the gods, their terrible and inscrutable wrath and jealousy (aga and pthonos), their certain vengeance upon sinners, all the more fearful it delayed.—-Such are the poet's constant themes, delivered with strange solemnity and impressiveness in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was regarding William Pressley with rather an inscrutable look. But his estimate and understanding were fairer than Ruth's, for the reason that he could come nearer to giving the young man his due. He knew that William Pressley was honest and sincere in his vanity and conceit, and was assured that these traits ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... and various questions, all of great interest to the county; but it did not say one word of the Duke of Omnium, though every one knew what the duke was supposed to be doing in the matter. He was, as it were, a great Llama, shut up in a holy of holies, inscrutable, invisible, inexorable,—not to be seen by men's eyes or heard by their ears, hardly to be mentioned by ordinary men at such periods as these without an inward quaking. But, nevertheless, it was he who was supposed to rule them. Euphemism required ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... implicas lacertis, my Elinor? Nay," George added, a faint smile illumining his wan but noble features, "why speak to thee in the accents of the Roman poet, which thou comprehendest not? Bright One, there be other things in Life, in Nature, in this Inscrutable Labyrinth, this Heart on which thou leanest, which are equally unintelligible to thee! Yes, my pretty one, what is the Unintelligible but the Ideal? what is the Ideal but the Beautiful? what the Beautiful but the Eternal? And the Spirit of Man that would commune with these ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... much of an answer to my mind, which in some inscrutable way seemed to be at this moment groping among fragments of thoughts that had come unbidden from the forgotten past. I felt helpless in the presence of the Captain; I could not presume to press his good-nature. Perhaps he saw my thought, for he added: "A man is distinct from ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... instanced Rosebery; the Aliens Act; Tariff Reform, in spite of Chamberlain's galvanizing efforts. Of Campbell-Bannerman, then alive and well, he said that all his work was done for him by his subordinates: "he had only to read novels, prepare jokes, look inscrutable and fatherly." ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the infinite realms of starry space, and fathoms the inscrutable depths of the minutest life, finding nowhere any limit, but everywhere law, which is the immediate expression ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... in the doorway leading to the bedroom. I could feel the perspiration on my forehead and at the back of my neck. I fronted the inscrutable white face of Lord Clarenceux, the lover of Rosetta Rosa; I met its awful eyes: dark, invidious, fateful. Ah, those eyes! Even in my terror I could read in them all the history and the characteristics ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... Bengal Virden, who had begun to look upon Miss Peckham—that was her name—with extreme disapproval from the moment of their introduction. Bengal was a girl whose every feeling was written plainly upon her face; she could not mask her emotions under an inscrutable countenance. Her dislike of Miss Peckham was so evident that Migwan and Gladys had expected an outbreak before this; but Bengal had merely stood scowling while the beds were being moved about. With ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... schemes of benevolence. The "Colonization Society may be a part of the grand system of the Ruler of the Universe, to provide for the transfer of negroes to their mother country. Their introduction into this land may have been one of the inscrutable ways of Providence to confer blessings upon that race—it may have been decreed that they shall be the means of conveying to the minds of their benighted countrymen, the blessing of religious and civil liberty. But I fear ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... having further learnt, that on the tolling of the midnight bell at my own gate, or at the citadel, a chosen minister of vengeance passed to pilot the accused, I went, and you, through paths most dangerous and inscrutable, have brought me to the spot where justice reigns; if so, give the first proof of justice, trial. By that I am prepared to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... (for I did not feel well enough to undergo some twenty or thirty hours' sea-sickness in the packet that offered the Saturday after my arrival,) I took a morbid and eager pleasure in awaiting the visits and observing the motions of those inscrutable beings. Sainsbury and his son were amused, but not surprised, at the anxiety I evinced to obtain a nearer insight into Maunsell's history. My curiosity and vigilance were, however, fruitless. The Pair performed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... his attention. Animal spirits themselves are too often but a counterbalance to the most thoughtful melancholy; and one fit of jaundice or hypochondria might have enabled the poet to see more visions of the unknown and the inscrutable in a single day, than perhaps ever entered the imagination of the elegant Latin scholar, or ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... aloof, leaning on a stout cane, looking on with an inscrutable expression on his dry old face. He noted everything; he saw Rose talking to Barney; he saw his son William eating cherries with Rebecca Thayer out of one basket; but his expression never changed. The predominant trait ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... By some inscrutable turn of affairs, lady Feng begins to feel the pangs of jealousy. Pao-y experiences joy, beyond all his expectations, when P'ing Erh (receives a slap from lady Feng) and has to adjust ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... men's manner and men's necessity. How intermittent is our good Jocelin; marking down, without eye to us, what he finds interesting! How much in Jocelin, as in all History, and indeed in all Nature, is at once inscrutable and certain; so dim, yet so indubitable; exciting us to endless considerations. For King Lackland was there, verily he; and did leave these tredecim sterlingii, if nothing more, and did live and look in one way or the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... fair-haired "Find" are still in doubt, but this signifies little. Child-life is always a miracle more inscrutable than the resurrection ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... dear," said Mrs. Linden, gently, "the unrestrained indulgence of grief is always wrong. Have you never thought how selfish it was to wish your mother back again, as I have so often heard you? God's ways are inscrutable. But though his children cannot always see what is best for themselves, He never errs. Your mother was a good woman, a faithful wife, and loving parent, but a life of uninterrupted prosperity had left her a stranger to the peace that cometh only from obedience to the ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... however, elapsed, when, rising also from his seat with a hasty exclamation of surprise, he threw down the volume and followed her into the room where she sat pensively meditating over thoughts and feelings as vague and inscrutable to her mind, as they were clear and familiar to her heart. With a degree of warm impetuosity, even exaggerated beyond his usual manner, which bore at all times this characteristic, he approached her, and, seizing her hand passionately ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... about the mildness of that particular October! A sublime tranquillity reigned over the scene. A liveried keeper was locking the gate of the garden in the middle of the Square as if potentates had just quitted it and rendered it for ever sacred. And between the sacred shadowed grove and the inscrutable fronts of the stately houses there flitted automobiles of the silent and expensive kind, driven by chauffeurs in pale grey or dark purple, who reclined as they steered, and who were supported on their left sides by footmen who reclined as they ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... individual's development as the specializing medium of the Universal Spirit will depend entirely upon his own conception of his relation to it. So long as he only regards it as an arbitrary power, a sort of slave owner, he will find himself in the position of a slave driven by an inscrutable force, he knows not whither or for what purpose. He may worship such a God, but his worship is only the worship of fear and ignorance, and there is no personal interest in the matter except to escape some dreaded punishment. Such a worshipper would gladly escape from his divinity, and his worship, ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... that chair, Eugene. (She indicates the easy chair. He fetches it silently, even with something like cold strength, and places it next Morell, a little behind him. She sits down. He goes to the sofa and sits there, still silent and inscrutable. When they are all settled she begins, throwing a spell of quietness on them by her calm, sane, tender tone.) You remember what you told me about yourself, Eugene: how nobody has cared for you since your old nurse died: how those clever, fashionable sisters ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... face to face with the sheer difficulty of living on at all. He even concluded in a kind of lethargy that if nothing had occurred, no 'change,' he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet Lawford, in his best visitor's room, deciding between inscrutable life and just—death. He supposed he was tired out. His thoughts hadn't even the energy to complete themselves. None cared ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... apparatus? No man can answer this question: it is wrapped in deep mystery. Why be offended, then, because the way of salvation revealed in the Bible has like mysteries—mysteries concerning not your duty, but God's secret and inscrutable methods of acting? ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... decisive resolve, oppresses even the hearts of heroes, appeared now for a moment to overshadow the great mind of Gustavus Adolphus. "If we decide upon battle," said he, "the stake will be nothing less than a crown and two electorates. Fortune is changeable, and the inscrutable decrees of Heaven may, for our sins, give the victory to our enemies. My kingdom, it is true, even after the loss of my life and my army, would still have a hope left. Far removed from the scene of action, defended by a powerful fleet, a well-guarded frontier, and a warlike ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... The smile on Randerson's face was inscrutable. And now the pallor left Masten's cheeks and was succeeded by a color that burned. For he now was convinced and frightened. He heard Randerson speaking to Hagar, and so gentle was his voice that it startled him, so great was the contrast between it and the ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... paper—a good one, s'entend; but there is no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night: there are no harmonics, there is scarce harmony to his music; and in Henley—all of these; a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition. The First London Voluntary knocked me wholly.—Ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this reason that Franklin ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Providence," said he, "are indeed inscrutable, else why should there be such things in the world as lobsters, gutta-percha, ballet-dancers, and Englishmen? These four objects, and some others—notably water, tram-cars, and warts—I can find no necessity for in nature; but there must be some reason for such, or else they could not have arrived ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... great deal too good for me," says Beatrix, dropping her head on her beautiful breast,—"so are you all, all!" And when she looked up again, as she did in a moment, and after a sigh, her eyes, as they gazed at her cousin, wore that melancholy and inscrutable look which 'twas always ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... rose, and as he turned (the doctor noted) he bent an inscrutable look of pain on Nora. He sat down at the piano and struck a wild, sad chord. Instantly it became as if the people in the room were the instrument upon which he played,—as if the throbbing human hearts around him were directly ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... the interior of the empire, to take supreme command of the active forces, and to share with the army the fatigue of war, and to safeguard with it Russian soil from attempts of the enemy. The ways of Providence are inscrutable, but my duty and my desire determine me in my resolution for the good of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... spectator, arose and joined him. Orde looked at his new companion a little curiously. He was a very slender young man, taut-muscled, taut-nerved, but impassive in demeanour. He possessed a shrewd, thin face, steel-gray, inscrutable eyes behind glasses. His costume was quite simply an old gray suit of business clothes and a gray felt hat. At the moment he held in his mouth an unlighted and ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... upon each cheek a festal rose, she stood before the duke's plaisant, inscrutable, as was her fashion, the scarf about her shoulders just stirring from the effects of the dance, and her lips ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... With this inscrutable artifice, Toby withdrew to purchase the viands he had spoken of, for ready money, at Mrs. Chickenstalker's; and presently came back, pretending he had not been able to find them, at first, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... been on the point of falling asleep again. She got up and opened the window, and once more the air acted as a restorative. She watched the activities of the street with a distant interest. They, too, seemed dreamlike and unreal. People were hurrying up and down on mysterious errands. An inscrutable cat picked its way daintily across the road. At the door of the apartment house an ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... head the very slightest, as if she understood, as if she were grateful; then letting her eyes rest on his with an inscrutable look, she spoke softly to the horse and rode away, with Donald and Bess clamouring joyously after her, as if they had found the proceedings ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... only to die. It was a terrible ordeal for him to stand along and realize that he was only a man facing eternity. But that was what gave him strength to endure. Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... He was a horrid desperado; and like a wild Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to run amuck at heaven and earth. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... guardians. When she had taken the gift, she suddenly feigned death, and fell like one lifeless. Her servants asked the reason why she fell so suddenly; and she declared that the refuge of the sons of Harald was inscrutable; for their wondrous might qualified even the most awful effects of her spells. Thus she was content with a slight benefit, and could not bear to await a greater reward at the king's hands. After this Ragnar, finding that the belief concerning himself and ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... girl paused and greeted the official. Still the Chinese Minister regarded her gravely with his inscrutable Oriental eyes that seemed to look her through and through. He seemed always about to ask ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... he again began, and again the pipe was laid down, for Robinson was much honoured. "I come here hot from a scene of domestic woe, which has robbed me of all political discretion, and made the paper duty to me an inscrutable mystery. The worthy Geese here assembled see before them a man who has been terribly injured; one in whose mangled breast Fate has fixed her sharpest dagger, and poisoned the blade before she fixed it." "No—no—no." "Hear—hear—hear." "Yes, my Grand; she ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... the Esbekiyeh Gardens, cigar in mouth and hands in pockets, looking on the scene and behaving in it as if the whole place were but a reflex of Earl's Court Exhibition. History affects the cheap tripper not at all; he regards the Pyramids as "good building" merely, and the inscrutable Sphinx itself as a fine target for empty soda-water bottles, while perhaps his chiefest regret is that the granite whereof the ancient monster is hewn is too hard for him to inscribe his distinguished name thereon. It is true that there is a punishment inflicted on any person or persons ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... was leaving, Sam called out, "Say, Yan, if you want to stay there to dinner it'll be all right—we'll know why you hain't turned up." Then he stuck his tongue in his cheek, closed one eye and went to the barn with his usual expression of inscrutable melancholy. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Spaniard had scarcely altered, except perhaps that the pallid scar had a bit more shine about it. His eyes moved around the cabin, darting often at the pistol, halting upon the knob of the forecastle-door in the fear that others might be concealed there; inscrutable black brilliants, these eyes, and to the woman at the wheel the cabin was evil from their purgatorial restlessness.... Suddenly ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus with Medusa's head, has it not in truth turned ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... theory there is an inscrutable element which in the heyday of that theory goes unexamined. Behind the appearances there is a Fate, there are Guardian Spirits, or Mandates to a Chosen People, a Divine Monarchy, a Vice-Regent of Heaven, or a ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. It applies to objects and situations, often in a very vague way; but it is ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... doorway. He was serene and calm as ever. Neither the discovery of the plot by the abstraction of the messenger's letter, nor Ruth's strange conduct—of which he had heard from Lord Gervase—had sufficed to ruffle, outwardly at least, the inscrutable serenity of his air and manner. He paused to make his bow, then advanced into the room, with a passing glance at Richard still spurred and booted ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... down to the dingle, A coppice in arabesque gleams Whose traceries melt and commingle, Like ghost trees in moon-fretted streams, As the tremulous glamour sweeps o'er it And skirts the inscrutable sky; Then, Fairyland flitting before it, The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I am not concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy; the moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe that this unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produce some fine artistic effects. I can believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although I am not prepared to say at what loss of other qualities. It is clear that such a writer will not allow the public ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... that none can discern. He was always near nowadays, on the fringe of their lives, just beyond the radius of their preoccupations, the silent witness of this strange love affair, in the humble station that Allah, for some inscrutable reason, had ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... added that the doubts and ignorance of those who take upon them to expound the designs of nature and her internal progressions, and the many false prognostics of their art, ought to give us to understand that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown; there is great uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she either promises or threatens. Old age excepted, which is an indubitable sign of the approach of death, in all other accidents I see few signs of the future, whereon we may ground our divination. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... rationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable. His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis, but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... forty-one years ago: is it necessary to search out what somebody or other,—not improbably a jealous adherent of Macready, 'the only organizer of theatrical victories', chose to say on the subject? If the characters are 'abhorrent' and 'inscrutable'—and the language conformable,—they were so when Dickens pronounced upon them, and will be so whenever the critic pleases to re-consider them—which, if he ever has an opportunity of doing, apart from the printed copy, I can assure you is through no motion ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is, that the method in which God answers the prayers of His people may be, in many respects, mysterious or even inscrutable; but no objection to "the efficacy of prayer," which is founded on our ignorance of His infinite resources, can have any weight, especially when there are several hypothetical solutions, any one of which is ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... with inscrutable stolidity as we shook hands, and at once handed me over to a tall, ungainly man whom he addressed as Ernest, but whose surname I never learned. Ernest in turn introduced me, with a shy and clumsy courtesy, to the two remaining ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... return, or to give information of her whereabouts. I have tried to serve my God all my days," said the Reverend Saunders; "I do not know why this should have been visited upon me. But His ways are inscrutable. His ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... soak the earth on that day—and the formidable artillery that had swept the plateau of Austerlitz, the vales of Marengo, the cemetery of Eylau, was rendered useless for the time being because up in the inscrutable kingdom of the sky a cloud had chosen to burst—or had burst by the will of God—and water soaked the soft, spongy soil of Belgium and the wheels of artillery wagons sank axle-deep ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... magnifying of what then was going on. "Just as" to quote Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr. Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable, it will some day be larger than an elephant...so we know and reverently acknowledge that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... bronze-skinned creature shining in the sun! What a past the little glass bits had at their command, and what a more magnificent past hung yet behind them! Who would value a diamond, the product of any laboratory, were such a possibility, so much as that one which, by its own unknown and inscrutable process, defying philosopher and jeweller, has imprisoned the sunshine that moss or leaf or flower sucked in, ages since, and set its crystals in the darkness of the earth,—a drop of dew eternalized? What tree of swift and sudden springing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... manner changed. After all that I had seen I had expected that she would take the earliest opportunity of claiming the man she believed to be her old-world lover, but this, for some reason of her own, which was at the time quite inscrutable to me, she did not do. All that she did was to attend to his wants quietly, and with a humility which was in striking contrast with her former imperious bearing, addressing him always in a tone of something very like respect, and keeping him ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... buried her face in her hands; the princess had knelt again and prayed; the king leaned his head against the back of the chair, pale as a corpse, and with his eyes closed. Napoleon alone stood erect; his face was calm and inscrutable; his glances were turned toward the windows, and he seemed to listen eagerly ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... explanation which has a seeming feasibility, science substitutes an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, then leaves us in the presence of the avowedly inexplicable. The truth must grow ever clearer—the truth that there is an inscrutable existence everywhere manifested to which the man of science can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in the presence ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... powerful Deity, dwelling, according to common belief, above the human circle; or, as others define her, she is a substantial protection, presiding over the particular destinies of individuals, and feigned by the ancient theologians to be the daughter of Justice, looking down from a certain inscrutable eternity upon all ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... was such a thorough Chinaman of the good old stamp. A wealthy man, sir, a very wealthy man. The family are clients of mine, and they have just rung me up, asking me to cast a horoscope to ascertain the wishes of the stars with regard to the date of burial of our poor friend. How inscrutable are the decrees of the heavenly bodies! They may recommend the immediate interment of our friend: on the other hand, they may wish it deferred for two, five, ten, or even twenty years, in which case our friend would be one of the fortunate tenants ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... real thing, and there are several others whose names escape me; but, speaking for myself alone, I wish to say that this is about as far as I can go at this writing. I must admit that I have never been held spellbound and enthralled for hours on a stretch by a contemplation of the inscrutable smile on Mona Lisa. To me she seems merely a lady smiling about something—simply that and ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... last two months, Patrick's face seemed to have grown more waxen, worn a little finer, and now, as he sat quietly watching the slender figure on the opposite side of the hearth, it wore a curious, inscrutable expression, as though he were mentally balancing the pros and cons of some ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... interview soon took place in the middle of the road, and Almira reentered the room with the expression of one who had penetrated the inscrutable and solved the riddle of the Sphinx. She had been vouch-safed one of those gleams of light in darkness which ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doesna lie! And he is not a hypocrite either. If your father was half as—" She stopped abruptly, her face going red when she saw Tom sitting on his horse beyond the shoulder of rock, regarding her with that inscrutable smile which never had failed to make her squirm mentally and wonder what he thought of her. She stood up, trembling ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... "He's dead!" awaked a peal Of frenzied bells along the vacant ways Of thy poor earthly heart; waked thee to steal, Like dawn distraught upon unhappy days, To prove nought, nothing? Was it Time's large voice Out of the inscrutable future whispered so? Or but the horror of a little noise Earth wakes at dead of night? Or does Love know When his sweet wings weary and droop, and even In sleep cries audibly a shrill remorse? Or, haply, was it I who out of dream Stole but a little where shadows course, Called ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... Amaryllis' brain; she felt how limited had been all her thoughts and standpoints in life. She had been willing to drift on without speculation as to the goal to be reached. Indeed, even now, had she any definite goal? She looked at the Russian's strong, rugged face, his inscrutable eyes narrowed and gazing ahead—of what was he thinking? Not stupid, ordinary ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... and deftly shaking her foot at him. Midnight and morning merging into one. Sunday, to Richmond, probably, with Poppy and some others. Monday, up the river with Himself. Not for worlds, that is to say, not for any amount of Poppies, would he have broken his appointment with that brilliant and yet inscrutable companion who is so eternally fascinating at twenty-three. Monday was indistinct but luminous, a restless, shimmering background for ideas. Ideas! They swarmed like motes in the blue air; they loomed, they floated, vague, and somewhat supernaturally ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... deep it was, and if any overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth, clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old despair. So slight, however, was the track of these gloomy ideas, that I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood of wild ducks, which were floating on the river, and anon took flight, leaving each ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whose words rang so hollow in his ear, but he could see no sign of guile or satire on the face of the Secretary of War. On the contrary, it bore every appearance of earnestness, and he became convinced that the appearance was just. Then he cast one swift glance at the inscrutable Mr. Sefton, who still sat in the shadow and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a war or a revolution. The periods of the strengthening and weakening of the warlike excitement of the European nations represent a wave strikingly regular in its periodicity, flowing incessantly, as if propelled onward by some fixed inscrutable law. This same mysterious law seems also to connect these events with the astronomical wave or cycle, which governs the periodicity of solar spots. The periods when the European powers have shown the most ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... indebted to your thoughtfulness, sahib," said the old man, with something of mockery in his tone. Gerrard would have given much to know what was passing behind those inscrutable eyes. Was that long curved dagger, with the handle of which the Sirdar's fingers were continually playing, destined to be sheathed in his heart at the moment that an attack was made upon the camp from without? It almost looked like it, and yet why had the old ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... evidence their existence by their effects, are perfectly inscrutable in their nature; they elude all our powers of observation. The transcendental object which forms the basis of phenomena, and, in connection with it, the reason why our sensibility possesses this rather than ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... barbarian—which needs only a due admixture of pride, ambition, and selfishness, to be a perfect ideal of the devil. Amongst men of such stamp are found the greatest scourges and devastators of the world—those elect scoundrels whom Providence, in its inscrutable designs, permits to fulfil their mission of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... that if not "on with the new love," he was, at any rate, satisfactorily "off with the old," Blake drove his spanking ponies off to Tarrong, while Ellen Harriott went about her household work with a face as inscrutable and calm as though no stone had ruffled ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... of three successive crews from the stout ship "Laughing Lass" in mid-Pacific, is a mystery weird and inscrutable. In the solution, there is a story of the most exciting ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... Westminster Abbey,—his object, an eager pilgrimage to the newly tenanted grave of his hero, and in the Miscellany he pays a double tribute. In the prose we hear sonorous things about meridian splendour, premature extinction, and inscrutable wisdom; about falling, like his great master Pitt, a victim to his proud and exalted station; about being firm in principle and conciliatory in action, the friend of improvement and the enemy of innovation. Nor are the versified reflections in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... punishment of Mattioli were well known to European diplomatists and readers of books. Casal, moreover, at this time was openly ceded to Louis XIV., and Mattioli could not have told the world more than it already knew. But, for some inscrutable reason, the secret which Dauger knew, or was suspected of knowing, became more and more a source of anxiety to Louvois and Louis. What can he have known? The charges against his master, Roux de Marsilly, had been publicly proclaimed. Twelve years had passed since ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... had suddenly been shown the real Silas—or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... that quality from his admirable self, and De Chaucombe was an original thinker, who did not purchase ready-made ideas from other people. Barkeworth invariably agreed with the last speaker in public, but kept his private views an inscrutable mystery; while all that could be said of Gernet's notions was that he had "un ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... gentleman in a suit of linen 'ducks,' whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... women were scanning his face, holding their breaths, but Mrs. Papineau had the lamp and held it so as to cast some light on Hugo. The doctor's expression, however, was quite inscrutable. ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... all over by the bites of mosquitoes and flies, and we smothered ourselves under blankets to get rid of them. At times we fished, and one evening, after we had passed the expanse of water at the mouth of the Ohio, Nick pulled a hideous thing from the inscrutable yellow depths,—a slimy, scaleless catfish. He came up like a log, and must have weighed seventy pounds. Xavier and his men and myself made two good meals of him, but Nick ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... marry these ill-agreeing words—the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may harken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about, in quest of what ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... marked consideration by a civilian and a stranger. This was a man of the middle age; he had a face of a mulberry colour, round black eyes, comical tufted eyebrows, and a protuberant forehead, and was dressed in clothes of a Quakerish cut. In spite of his plainness, he had that inscrutable air of a man well-to-do in his affairs. I conceived he had been some while observing me from a distance, for a sparrow sat betwixt us quite unalarmed on the breech of a piece of cannon. So soon as our eyes met, he drew near and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quite believe that the One you had waited for had really come?" His voice was low and tinged with some inscrutable meaning. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... flourishing financial state of his republic, which, it was called to mind, was next door to bankrupt when England declared its independence in 1884. If such articles were translated and read out to that wily old President, as he sipped his coffee on his stoep, with his bland and inscrutable smile, it must have added zest to his evening pipe. I read in Mr. Seymour Fort's "Life of Dr. Jameson" that the Raid cost the Chartered Company L75,000 worth of material, most of which passed into the hands of the Boer Government, while the confiscated arms at Johannesburg amounted ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... implicitly in Mr. Pallinson's gray powders when their little ones' digestive organs had been impaired by injudicious diet, and confided in Mr. Pallinson's carefully-expressed opinion as the fiat of an inscrutable power. ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the ground around Kenilworth, when Custance granted a second interview to her cousin Isabel. There was more news for her by that time. Edward had been once more pardoned, and was again in his usual place at Court. How this inscrutable man procured his pardon, and what sum he paid for it, in cash or service, is among the mysteries of the medieval "back-stairs." He had to be forgiven for more than Custance knew. Among his other political speculations, he had been making love to the Queen; a fact which, though there can be little ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... to talk to his travelling companion, but was somehow unable to find words. Panawe glanced at him with an inscrutable smile—stern, yet enchanting and half feminine. He then broke the silence, but, strangely enough, Maskull could not make out whether he was singing or speaking. From his lips issued a slow musical recitative, exactly like a bewitching adagio from a low toned ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... coach announced the departure of Preston's high and illustrious ruler and his learned clerk: one to dream of swords, knights, and drawing-rooms; the other to soar through those mystic regions, sublime and incomprehensible—the awful, inscrutable forms, fictions, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... deals exclusively with their relations, consequences, or sequences. It can never tell us what a thing really and intrinsically is, but only why it has become so; it can only, in other words, refer us to one inscrutable as the ground and explanation of another inscrutable." "A science," says Schopenhauer, "anybody can learn, one perhaps with more, another with less trouble; but from art each receives only so much as he brings, yet latent within him.... Art has not, like science, to do merely with the reasoning ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... with him, we read to him, we watched with him, we blessed his miserable sleeps, and met his more wretched awakings. In the presumption of our pity, we would cleanse that white, in the world's eye, which God had, for inscrutable purposes, ordained should seem to the last murky as hell. We would paint visibly upon him the outward and visible sign of sin washed away, and mercy found. That that intended triumph may not have helped to add or to retain one feather's ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... in his book of fate, he bent his keen gray eyes on mine and proceeded to relate in all its minute particulars what was then the most singular event of my life. It was one which I had no purpose to disclose till the general unfolding of all secrets, nor would it be a much stranger instance of inscrutable knowledge or fortunate conjecture if the beggar were to meet me in the street today and repeat word for word the page ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
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