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More "Nebulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no notion of chemical evolution helps us out. It has been a favourite thought with some that the origin of the first living thing was the result of chemical evolution. As the result of physical forces there was produced, from the original nebulous mass, a more and more complicated system until the world was formed. Then chemical phenomena became more and more complicated until, with the production of more and more complicated compounds, protoplasm was finally produced. A few years ago, under the impulse ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... zodiacal light which I have several times remarked within the tropics, in the space of a few minutes. Mairan asserts, that in France it is common enough to see the zodiacal light, in the months of February and March, mingling with a kind of Aurora Borealis, which he calls 'undecided,' and the nebulous matter of which spreads itself all around the horizon, or appears toward the west. I very much doubt, whether, in the observations I have been describing, there was any mixture of these two species of light. The variations in intensity took place at considerable altitudes; ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... seemed to come suddenly, bursting out of the east in a white glare, without the pearly tints and soft gray lights that mark our northern day births. Then the white glare changed to red, to a crimson glow that painted the world with its glory, and dying, left little nebulous masses floating in the azure, tinted with ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... thought of that, also? Dared she tread on this nebulous fairy-ground? Dared she lead Corrie to set foot there, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only through his own brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, formally the most nebulous person in the Trinity, and now become its sole survivor as it has always been its real Unity, can help him in any way. And so, if the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man's intentional and well-considered contrivance. Conviction ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... for that matter," he added. "Anyhow," he went on to explain, "the power's all on your side now; and I'll show you how little the doing will hurt you as soon as I can have a quiet chat with your husband." He branched off again into technicalities, nebulous projections of capital and interest, taxes and rents, from which she finally extracted, and clung to, the central fact that if the "deal went through" it would mean a commission of forty thousand dollars to Marvell's ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... valuable as those we might learn in regions superior to chance. If we let our gaze travel beyond the creatures that are possessed of a glimmer of intellect and consciousness, beyond the protozoa even, which are the first nebulous representatives of the dawning animal kingdom, we find, as has been abundantly proved by the experiments of Mr. H. J. Carter, the celebrated microscopist, that the very lowest embryos, such as the myxomycetes, manifest a will and desires and preferences; and that infusoria, which apparently ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... thing, is possible. What it is now, it was in the beginning; and what it will be, it is now. Granting the hypothesis of evolution, there can be no quarrel with the view that the crude beginnings of things, matter in its most nebulous state, contains potentially all the rich variety of both natural ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... with the tragedies of real life is that they are never clear-cut. It takes art to weave a selvage about them or fit them into a frame. But in reality they're as ragged and nebulous as wind-clouds. The days drag on into weeks, and the weeks into months, and life on the surface seems to be running on, the same as before. There's the same superficial play of all the superficial old forces, but in the depths are dangers and uglinesses and sullen bombs ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... exactly what had happened and repeated the words that Natalie spoke, he was much interested in his own nebulous way, and said that it was delightful to meet with an example of a good Christian, such as my wife had been, who actually saw something of Heaven before she had gone there. His own faith was, he thanked God, fairly robust, but still an undoubted occurrence of the sort acted as a refreshment, "like ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... rare opportunity when the work of a great writer can be traced back to its first nebulous conception, as we trace the design of a pictorial artist to the first drawing that he made for his subject. Although we cannot witness the development of the plot of this romance in Hawthorne's mind, it is much to see in what manner the different elements of which it is ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... low down and glittering swiftly nearer, were two little patches of nebulous light. And then two more, and then a glow of swiftly driving shapes. Presently he could count them. There were four and twenty. The first fleet of aeroplanes had come! Beyond appeared a ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... of Chemistry. We have seen that heat lies at the basis of chemical as well as of physical changes. By the loss of heat, or perhaps by the change of potential into kinetic energy, in a nebulous parent mass, planets were formed, capable of supporting living organisms. Heat changes solids to liquids, and liquids to gases; it resolves compounds, or it aids chemical union. In every chemical combination heat is developed; in every ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... to write not wisely but too much, piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release. As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of what he proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts—stories "unavailable" for one reason or another—he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the centre. The closer we are connected with the centre, the nearer we are to those whom we call dead. Our communion with them is spiritual, because 'God is spirit' and they are in Him. But the {71} spiritual is not the unsubstantial, the nebulous, the gaseous; it is the personal—to my mind the awful—reality. The more truly we understand persons, the more we shall find they ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... clairvoyant vision discloses the interesting phenomena concerned with the human aura, or psychic atmosphere which surrounds the human body for a space of several feet, assuming an egg-shaped form. A writer says on this point: "The trained clairvoyant vision sees the human aura as a nebulous hazy substance, like a luminous cloud, surrounding the person for two or three feet on each side of his body, becoming more dense near the body, and gradually becoming less dense as it extends away from the body. It has a phosphorescent ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... beach, a riband around the flowing hair of the sea, Where gleam the foam-flowers garlanded in multitudinous nebulous rings: Here, on the frontier of many worlds and the billow-rocked cradle of eternal sleep, No sound, no music, no silence that a wounded ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... circle grew nebulous, and Colwyn was fast falling asleep through sheer weariness, when a slight sharp sound, like that made by turning a key in a lock, brought him back to wide-eyed wakefulness. He sat up in bed, listening with strained ears, feeling for the box of matches at ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... seemed to strike at him with a nebulous hostility as he went. He had a vague sense of intrusion, of being in a forbidden place. The blood was no longer hot in his veins. He even shivered in the warmth of the summer night as he followed the winding ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... appeal. She takes two hundred and odd pages of peculiarly eye-racking type to convert the Elstone family to Catholicism without indicating in any way how or why her solemn puppets are inspired to change their beliefs. Now and again a completely nebulous cleric happens along to perform the necessary function of receiving a moribund neophyte into the Church; otherwise the conversion appears to take place as it were by spontaneous combustion and not as the result of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to pack into ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... deeds is not distinctly recognized and is not made the basis of the distinction between the two classes. The world is seen to be full of Powers that make for weal or for woe—a conception that contains the germ of all the later development but is at first nebulous. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... my beaver—proud as Scipio!. . . —You hear me?—I forbid you succor me!— One, two three! Porter, open wide the doors! (The porter opens the doors; a view of old Paris in the moonlight is seen): Ah!. . .Paris wrapped in night! half nebulous: The moonlight streams o'er the blue-shadowed roofs; A lovely frame for this wild battle-scene; Beneath the vapor's floating scarves, the Seine Trembles, mysterious, like a magic mirror, And, shortly, you shall see ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... thrilled the star-dust through, In nebulous masses whirled, Until, globed like a drop of dew, Shone out a new-made world. The one life on the ocean shore, Through primal ooze and slime, Crept slowly on from less to more Along the ways of time. The one ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine, These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... of London, but as you drive through the town, now and then there is a glimpse of a greenish mist afar off between the houses. The green mist thickens in one spot almost at the horizon; or is it the dark nebulous sails of a vessel? Then the foam suddenly appears close at hand—a white streak seems to run from house to house, reflecting the sunlight: and ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... bauble to match the prevailing colours of their costumes," the while they suffered real pangs at the sight of an "alarming sacrifice" at twenty-nine and six. The one was almost within their grasp; the other floated in the nebulous atmosphere of ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... folded her hands in her lap, and thought, not bitterly, not listlessly, but deeply. She wanted to consider all cheerfully now; she tried to do so. She was musing among those flying perceptions, those nebulous facts of a new life, experienced for the first time; she was now not herself as she had been; another woman was born; and she was feeling carefully along the unfamiliar paths which she must tread. She was not glad ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... plump, shining hand on the table beside him. The sweet mellowness which had been Mr. Walker's aim for years, lay on his soul. The world grew more misty and golden every moment, and in this sunkissed, nebulous haze, his fancy roamed free, released from sordid cares—by Mr. Walker's potent spell. It was a good world—a good world of true friends, no enemies, no contradiction of sinners or other disagreeable people, nothing but ease, praise, power, success, glorious old world, ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... call these things to mind does one's heart good. It seems as if nothing need be despaired of, as if words of hope need never be empty words.' A well-known economist tried to ease the public conscience, and to neutralize the resistance of the unfortunate Irish landlord, by a nebulous scheme for buying up the landlords' rights, but what the supply of money is to be, and who is to supply it, are questions to which the answers vary every hour. A separate Parliament is to be accompanied by a system of guarantees, and Professor Rogers ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... from historical records. Continuing such inquiries, you might discover, after consulting thirteen Acts and Regulations, what was the actual state of things. People, of course, really learnt such points by practice and conversation, though their knowledge would probably be in a nebulous condition. The whole system was put upon a clear footing in an Act of thirty-eight sections, prepared by Mr. Cockerell, which was passed on February ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... terrible idea which had been growing in my brain, shaping itself out of a nebulous mass of reminiscences of what had just occurred at the studio, was now stinging me to madness. Wilderspin's extreme dejection, the strange way in which he had seemed inclined to evade answering my question as to the safety of Winifred, the look of pity on his face as at last he answered ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... had a portfolio of plans for a Welfare Building which he had drawn exactly according to Mary's suggestions. As long as the idea had been a nebulous one—drawn only in fancy and coloured with nothing stronger than conversation, she had liked it immensely; but seeing now precisely how the building would look—how the space would be divided, she ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... the new situation. President Lincoln had applied this principle to absolute contraband, such as powder, shells, rifles, and other munitions of war. Great Britain now proceeded to apply it to that nebulous class of commodities known as "conditional contraband," the chief of which was foodstuffs. If the United States, while a war was pending, could evolve the idea of "ultimate destination" and apply it to absolute contraband, could not Great ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... to the most strained situations. Such embarrassment as was shown was on Mrs. Trenor's side, and manifested itself in the mingling of exaggerated warmth with imperceptible reservations. Her loudly affirmed pleasure at seeing Miss Bart took the form of a nebulous generalization, which included neither enquiries as to her future nor the expression of a definite wish to see her again. Lily, well-versed in the language of these omissions, knew that they were equally intelligible to the other members of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Cicada is forced to labour for long gloomy years in the darkness before it can emerge from the soil. At the moment when it issues from the earth the larva, soiled with mire, "resembles a sewer-man; its eyes are whitish, nebulous, squinting, blind." Then "it clings to some twig, it splits down the back, rejects its discarded skin, drier than horny parchment, and becomes the Cigale, which is at first of a ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... necessary for stoping purposes with modern wide intervals between levels, and still be in blocks too large to warrant an assumption of continuity of values to their centers (Fig. 1). As to the third class of "possible" ore, it conveys an impression of tangibility to a nebulous hazard, and should never be used in connection with positive tonnages. This part of the mine's value comes under extension of the deposit a long distance beyond openings, which is a speculation and cannot be defined in absolute tons without exhaustive explanation ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... square shadow of the shed roof, and set his feet comfortably upon the dashboard while he waited. He was not aware of any very lively curiosity concerning the young woman for whom he was waiting. That he had formed some nebulous hypothesis of vulgarity was evidenced by his whimsical hope that her prevailing atmosphere would not be musk; aggressive perfumery of some sort seemed inevitable. He found himself wondering what ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... brilliant, but unequal, and often somewhat nebulous Essay on Method, is worth reading over, were it only as an exercitation, and to impress on the mind the meaning and value of method. Method is the road by which you reach, or hope to reach, a certain end; it is a process. It is the best ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... tinge of romance and historic grandeur over the realities of the scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a scent of cigar smoke, clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way of visible emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale. Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were wofully disturbed by the rattling of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey punch, which Mr. Thomas Waite was mingling for a customer. Nor did it add to the picturesque appearance of the panelled walls that the slate of the Brookline stage ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... seems final—but it is only on the surface. It arises from taking a too narrow view of what Evolution is. It takes evolution in zoology for Evolution as a whole. Evolution began, let us say, with some primeval nebulous mass in which lay potentially all future worlds. Under the evolutionary hand, the amorphous cloud broke up, condensed, took definite shape, and in the line of true development assumed a gradually increasing complexity. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the "Jerry-builder" had no being. But where, among them all, might be found such another parlour as this at Dapplemere, with its low, raftered ceiling, its great, carved mantel, its panelled walls whence old portraits looked down at one like dream faces, from dim, and nebulous backgrounds. And where might be found two such bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, quick-footed, deft-handed Phyllises as the two buxom maids who flitted here and there, obedient to their mistress's word, or gesture. And, lastly, where, in all this wide world, could there ever be found just such another ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... perhaps more than in most, the task attempted in the present volume is mainly of a tentative and preliminary character. There is here little scope yet for the presentation of definite scientific results. However it may be in the physical universe, in the cosmos of science our knowledge must be nebulous before it constellates into definitely measurable shapes, and nothing is gained by attempting to anticipate the evolutionary process. Thus it is that here, for the most part, we have to content ourselves at present with the task of mapping out the field in broad and general outlines, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is "in their tails"—they have stings, and there lies their scorpion power. De Quincey's vigor is evenly and equally diffused through his whole being. It is not a partial palpitation, but a deep, steady glow. His insight hangs over us and the world like a nebulous star, seeing us, but, in part, remaining unseen. In fact, his deepest thoughts have never been disclosed. Like Burke, he has not "hung his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at." He has profound reticence as well as power, and he has modesty as well as reticence. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... as the night was senescent, And the star-dials hinted of morn, At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent Arose with a duplicate horn— Astarte's be-diamonded crescent, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Napoleonic idea has become, it will be convenient before going further to determine its special characteristics exactly, but that is no easy matter. The moment we approach it in a critical spirit, it begins to grow nebulous and very difficult to define. We can dimly make out four distinct ideas mingled in the current notion. First, there is the idea of making war not merely with a professional standing army, but with the whole armed nation—a conception ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... More nebulous were the memories of those early mornings when she had paused in the midst of getting breakfast to sniff in the clover-laden air and think how wonderful it would be if only she needn't stay in the hot, stuffy kitchen but could be free to call Bill and go picnicking or loaf deliciously under ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... they had left Penang,—another unheeded background for her arch, innocent, appealing face,—and forged down the Strait of Malacca in a flood of nebulous moonlight. It was the last night out from Singapore. That veiled brightness, as they leaned on the rail, showed her brown hair fluttering dimly, her face pale, half real, half magical, her eyes dark and undefined ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... looked up gravely; there was a slight hesitation, almost an embarrassment, in his manner. "I don't exactly know how to put it," he began. "I don't want you chaps to imagine anything wrong; it was all very nebulous and indefinite, you understand—Mrs. Whitney was a wonderful woman. I wouldn't mention the matter at all if it wasn't necessary for the point of my story; in fact, it is the point of my story. But ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... simple, David. The earth was once a nebulous mass. It cooled, and as it cooled it shrank. At length a thin crust of solid matter formed upon its outer surface—a sort of shell; but within it was partially molten matter and highly expanded gases. As it continued to cool, what happened? Centrifugal force hurled the particles of ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that must inevitably lie among strangers in a strange land. To what end? What did she want of life, anyway? She had to admit that she could not say fully and explicitly what she wanted. When she left out her material wants, there was nothing but a nebulous craving for—what? Love, she assumed. And she could not define love, except as some incomprehensible transport of emotion which irresistibly drew a man and a woman together, a divine fire kindled in two hearts. It was not a thing she could vouch ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the somewhat nebulous subleaders in the rebellion was Van Rensburg, sometimes called "Prophet" Lichtenberg, from the place where he lived. During the Boer War he had predicted a remarkable victory for the Boers, which had resulted in ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... manifested itself, to which the hitherto errant atoms became obedient: these atoms combined together chemically according to their affinities, formed themselves into molecules, and composed those nebulous masses with which the depths of the heavens are strewed. These masses became immediately endued with a rotary motion around their own central point. This center, formed of indefinite molecules, began to revolve around its own axis during its gradual condensation; then, following the ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... blind to the trend of events. After the fall of Tsingtao and the subsequent complications with Japan, which so greatly served to increase the complexities of a nebulous situation, certain lines of thought insensibly developed. That the influential classes in China should have desired that Germany should by some means rehabilitate herself in Europe and so be placed in a position to chastise a nation that for ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... sometimes lingers after the stars go out, threw a trembling, nebulous radiance over sand and cove. I heard the seething currents under the breakers' softened thunder—louder than I ever heard it. Then, as I closed my window, lingering for a last look at the crawling tide, I saw a man standing, ankle-deep, ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... days, the Tower has no rival among places and prisons, its origin, like that of the Iliad, that of the Sphinx, that of the Newton Stone, being lost in the nebulous ages, long before our definite history took shape. Old writers date it from the days of Caesar; a legend taken up by Shakespeare and the poets in favor of which the name of Caesar's tower remains in popular use to this very day. A Roman wall can even yet be traced near some parts of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... ponderous flicker. Moment by moment, the acceleration of time continued; so that, at nights now, I saw the moon, only as a swaying trail of palish fire, that varied from a mere line of light to a nebulous path, and then dwindled ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... Rutter, it will remain in the beautiful and nebulous realms of thought, unless——" He paused and drained his beer ostentatiously, though all the while his eyes never ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... to inflamed eyes. It always aggravates. When the inflammation is in a scrofulous person, especially in infants, it assumes a purulent character, and may leave the cornea in clouded (nebulous) condition, and the sight more or less obliterated. For this condition use Conium first, and apply it in tinct., half water, to the ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... had, was away fighting Northern battles. This was a dreadful thing, and Mas'r Andersen was a traitor to somebody,—so much Flor knew,—it might be the Government, it might be the South, it might be Miss Agatha; her ideas were nebulous. Whatever it was, Mas'r Rob and his gun were on the other side, and woe be to Mas'r Andersen when they met! Mas'r Rob and his friends were beating back the men that meant to take away Flor and all her kind to freeze and starve; 'twas very good of him, Flor thought, and there ceased consideration. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Vienna and without declaring his love. Or was he a rejected suitor? History is dumb. He never saw his Gladowska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The lady was married in 1832—preferring a solid certainty to nebulous genius- -to Joseph Grabowski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin must have heard of the attachment ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Ramsey's handsome face with a quiver of unutterable bliss. She took his arm, and followed her mother and Dr. Ellridge. When they were out in the frosty air, under a low sky sparkling with multitudinous stars traversed by its mysterious nebulous highway of the gods, this poor little morsel of a mortal, engrossed with her poor little troubles, answered a remark of George's concerning the weather in a trembling voice. Then she began to weep unreservedly. George with a quick glance around, drew her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of making his hero older still—say ninety; of creating a sort of intermediary being between man and spirit, who should have in his eyes the nebulous depths of the fast approaching things of eternity. And the girl should have in her blood that mysterious inclination towards old men, not unusual in her sex, which is the truest mark of real feminine nobility, and by which the woman is differentiated from the female. Carlino had in his ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... I had been and he became quite alert and enthusiastic. He showed me why I should not have been alarmed, because ghosts, he said, were scientific facts. He then explained to me at length how the gases from the dead arise and form a nebulous vapor or a vaporous nebula. It sounded very simple and plausible when he told me, but I can't seem to remember it. Fortunately I have it all ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... of which has become a species with the attributes which distinguish it to-day. The precursor is the deus ex machina of evolution. When the difficulty becomes altogether too importunate, quick, a precursor, to fill up the gaps, quick, an imaginary creature, the nebulous plaything of the mind! This is seeking to lighten the darkness with a still deeper obscurity; to illumine the day by piling cloud upon cloud. Precursors are easier to find than sound arguments. Nevertheless, let us put the precursor of the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... us to take a firm hold of ourselves and to get a grip upon our impressions, they will remain vague and nebulous without presenting to us characters of sufficient definiteness to enable us to direct them readily ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... nucleus is very bright. It is accompanied with a great luminosity, and the nucleus has changed its position therein; that is, on the 29th August, the nucleus was like a minute star near the centre of the nebulous envelope; on the 2nd September it appeared in the n. f. quarter, and latterly it has been ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... thinks, of myriads of suns, clustered like our galaxy into an isolated system—mere islands of matter in an infinite ocean of space. So distant from our universe are these now universes of Herschel's discovery that their light reaches us only as a dim, nebulous glow, in most cases invisible to the unaided eye. About a hundred of these nebulae were known when Herschel began his studies. Before the close of the century he had discovered about two thousand ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... it," she cried. He looked at her incredulously. There was nothing but a nebulous mass of blue. "Well, I have seen it," she protested, "two or three times. To-day it is ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... the great Comet of 1858, was first noticed on the 2d June as a faint nebulous spot. For three months it remained quite inconspicuous, and even at the end of August was scarcely visible to the naked eye. In September it grew rapidly, and by the middle of October the tail extended no less than 40 degrees, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... upon our shaven head, he plants the foamy bunch of fibres full in our face. The world vanishes; sight, hearing, smell, taste (unless we open our mouth), and breathing, are cut off; we have become nebulous. Although our eyes are shut, we seem to see a blank whiteness; and, feeling nothing but a soft fleeciness, we doubt whether we be not the Olympian cloud which visited lo. But the cloud clears away before strangulation begins, and the velvety ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... daily to the busy offices in the Athenian Building. A brief vacation had served to convince him of the folly that lay in indulging a parcel of incoherent prejudices at the expense of even that somewhat nebulous thing popularly called a "career." Dr. Lindsay made flattering offers; the work promised to be light, with sufficient opportunity for whatever hospital practice he cared to take; and the new aspect of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... arranged on some kind of system; but it is only by the help of fanciful analogies that we can treat the mass as a definite object. Such phrases may give hints and suggestions concerning the method of the novelist; the whole affair is too nebulous for more. Even if a critic's memory were infallible, as it can never be, still it would be impossible for him to give a really scientific account of the structure of the simplest book, since in the last resort he cannot lay ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... at last achieved civilization. The fiat of Omnipotent power could have created the world in a perfected form for the use of man, but instead of so doing, Infinite Wisdom allowed slow-acting causes, working through infinite years, to develop the globe from a nebulous mass. Man could, indeed, have been created a civilized being, but instead of this, his starting-point was certainly very low. He was granted capacities in virtue of which he has risen. We are not to say what the end shall be, but we think it yet ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... pointed with her arm in a certain direction, but as the points of the compass had no existence for Mrs. Rexford's newly immigrated intelligence, and as all parts of Canada, near and remote, seemed very much in the same place in her nebulous vision of geography, the little information the girl had given was of no interest to her and she took little note ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the clouds, become the fashion, the aspect of the heavens by daylight will be as delightful and artistic as are the walls of our hoardings and Railway-stations. The anthem of "The Heavens are Telling" will have to be adapted for large towns. Perhaps pictures may be projected on the nebulous back-ground. If so, some of our best Artists may not object to taking a good sum, and then having their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... of a kingly line. He wanted to call out and beg to be taken down. But he did not. He controlled himself, he knew not why, save that he was possessed by a nebulous awareness that Skipper must be considered as a god should be considered, and that this was no time to obtrude himself on Skipper. His heart was torn with desire, although he made no sound, and he continued only to yearn over the companion combing and to listen ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... the Count's return, and for a long time sat doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice that there were some quaint little specks floating in the rays of the moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way. I watched them with a sense of soothing, and a sort of calm stole over me. I leaned back in the embrasure in a more comfortable position, so that I could enjoy ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... saw far enough to note a score of societies which seemed quite independent of each other. The smartest was the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest was the sporting world, also unknown to him except through the talk of his acquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of nebulous societies. His lawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented legal circles where one still sat over the wine and told anecdotes of the bench and bar; but he himself never set eyes on a judge except when his father took him to call on old Lord Lyndhurst, where they found old ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... mystery of its entangled gorges and cliffs. From every point we could see the Navajo Mountain and at least we knew what there was at the foot of its majestic northern slope. I climbed far above camp and crossing over a promontory looked down upon the nebulous region to the eastward that we were to fathom, and it seemed to me one of the most interesting sights I had ever beheld. The night was so cold that ice formed in our kettles, for our altitude in feet above sea was in the ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... this one idea, with devouring force, but still in a very nebulous and hazy form, Guy began walking towards the Strand and the Embankment, at the hot top of his speed, to get the notes back—at Montague Nevitt's chambers. He had walked with fiery zeal in that wrong direction for ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... man for whom Pierre hunted? What was McGurk? Not even the description of Wilbur had proved very enlightening. Her thought of him was vague, nebulous, and taking many forms. Sometimes he was tall and dark and stern. Again he was short and heavy and somewhat deformed of body. But always he was everywhere ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... were delightful, but they remained in the nebulous region of words, and Disraeli had determined to give his blandishments a more significant solidity. He deliberately encouraged those high views of her own position which had always been native to Victoria's mind and had ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... could not but be thankful that she failed of striking resemblance to the portraits of these admirable ancestors, nevertheless it seemed to me that, had I not known definitely of their place in her family history, I might almost have sensed them hovering behind her: a background, nebulous and shadowy, out of which she ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... animals, and the great quantity of stores to be dealt with. The third duty, involving the much disputed matter of contraband, etc., was, and is always likely to be, a difficult one, owing to the rather nebulous state of International Law on questions which were likely to, and did arise, and to the many interests, belligerent and neutral, which might be involved. It was further complicated by the fact that the enemy possessed no seaport and no carrying trade of his own, so that all goods ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... rode in column of sections, I fell to the rear and, coming up behind, struck with all my might at that slightly nebulous figure, with its faint vagueness of outline and hint ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... Light"; and "God is Spirit." The form of the sentences teaches us that these three qualities belong so intimately to the nature of God that they usher us into His immediate presence. We need not try to get behind them, or to rise above them into some more nebulous region in our search for the Absolute. Love, Light, and Spirit are for us names of God Himself. And observe that St. John does not, in applying these semi-abstract words to God, attenuate in the slightest degree His personality. God is Love, but He also exercises ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... transports were to be seen. The watery, lowering daylight faded: the unseen sun set: the brief day ended. And the wind went down with the sun. But through the thick darkness the turbulent wind appeared to grow luminous with tossing wraiths; and all the world seemed to dissolve into a nebulous, hell-driven ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... gladly permitted Lady Sara's influence, realising—with the priceless knowledge of a spirit made reasonable through pain—that the girl was romantic and the Prince incurably old. His flaxen wig heightened the tone of a complexion much ravaged by gout and its antidotes. His nebulous eyes with twitching lids were not improved by the gold-rimmed glasses which magnified their insignificance. He possessed a striking nose and chin, but, as these features were more characteristic than delightful, they offered his wife no occasions ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... twenty-five," did so because she still carried the slender graces of seventeen. The organ swelled as if to welcome her; as she took her seat a ray of sunlight, that would have been cruel and searching to any other complexion, drifted across the faint pink of her cheeks, and nestling in her nebulous hair became itself transfigured. A few stained-glass Virtues on the windows did not come out of this effulgence as triumphantly, and it was small wonder that the devotional eyes of the worshipers wandered from them to the face ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... candid reader as to whether this sort of thing is not too nebulous and tenuous for the uninitiated mind to discuss. "An orderly development"—but of nobody knows what nor in what direction—"a prophesy," an intangible "inspiration"; these may be very fine, but where are we, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... we may have the ordering, shall be permitted, as with wisdom we may also permit men or cities, to gather themselves into companies, or constellate themselves into clusters, but not to fuse themselves into mere masses of nebulous aggregation. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Natur," we say, "da Gott die Menschen schuf hinein"—that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick man's dream! Away with it. Away with all of them! ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... are known to astronomers, the majority of which are very remote. Many of them contain thousands of stars compressed into a very small space, and others are so distant that the largest telescopes are incapable of resolving their nebulous appearance into ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... always preceded by the formation in the horizon of a sort of nebulous veil, which slowly ascends to a height of 4 deg., 6 deg., 8 deg., and even to 10 deg.. It is towards the magnetic meridian of the place that the sky, at first pure, begins to get brownish. Through this obscure segment, the color of which passes from brown to violet, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... my motive existed somewhere in that nebulous fore-life where both men and books have their impalpable beginning; for even you cannot have forgotten that when a certain passionately enterprising young editor asked you for a novel to be printed in his journal, ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... narrow defile, a path cut in the dried-up bed of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of Urdoz and Oleron, and at last rising over their unequal ridges, turns their nebulous peak into a new country which has also its mountains and its depths, and, quitting France, descends into Spain. Never has the hoof of the mule left its trace in these windings; man himself can with difficulty stand upright there, even with the hempen boots which can not slip, and ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... and obtained the name of "Poet Squab." His portraits show a shrewd, but rather sluggish face, with long gray hair floating down his cheeks, not unlike Coleridge, but without his dreamy eye, like a nebulous star. His conversation was less sprightly than solid. Sometimes men suspected that he had "sold all his thoughts to his booksellers." His manners are by his friends pronounced "modest;" and the word modest has since been amiably ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... portraits of these admirable ancestors, nevertheless it seemed to me that, had I not known definitely of their place in her family history, I might almost have sensed them hovering behind her: a background, nebulous and shadowy, out of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... yards in length, and perhaps twenty in perpendicular diameter. Carl's torch was concealed in the niche, and Cudjo's was nowhere visible; yet the whole interior was luminous with a dim and silvery halo. A narrow corridor ran round the sides, and resembled a dark ring swimming in nebulous light, midway between the upper and nether hemispheres of the wondrous hollow globe. Within this horizontal rim, floor there was none; and they stood upon its brink; and, looking up, they saw the marvellous vault all sparkling with stars and beaming with pale, pendent, taper, crystalline flames, ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... up to that great city of Paris, where the meetings of one single day sufficed to fill his brain; and this need of motion made him wander about till the black night had fallen, through the frozen mud of the streets, beneath the gas-lamps, which, lighted up one by one, showed like nebulous stars amidst the fog. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... emotion stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... very probably, a long "Entwickelungsgeschichte" out of a nebular blastema. Who knows how far that amount of likeness among sets of minerals, in virtue of which they are now grouped into families and orders, may not be the expression of the common conditions to which that particular patch of nebulous fog, which may have been constituted by their atoms, and of which they may be, in the strictest sense, the descendants, ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... restrictive line of Patience for the true cause of conceiving the accompanying collection of words, balderdash or what you will, some even asseverating with the eruditeness of an Aristole that it was a nebulous idea, an embryonic form of thought hibernating within the cavities of my sinciput's inner apex, the remnants of that wild phantasmagoric dream of "vicious, vulpine labyrinths of hell," partly expounded in my ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... Superficial notions of our sin, which so many of us have, are contented with superficial remedies for it. But let a man get a glimpse of his own real self, and I think that he will wish for something a great deal more solid to grip hold of, than nebulous talk of the kind that I have been describing. If once we feel ourselves to be struggling in the black flood of that awful river, we shall want a firmer hold upon the bank than is given to us by some rootless tree or other. We must clutch something that will stand ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of her united life. Educational facilities, inclusive of schools, libraries, and museums; railroads, telegraph and telephone service, electric lighting and electric trams,—all the ways and means of the modern mechanism of life are, inevitably, in a nebulous state in Italy. The political situation is extremely interesting at the present time. That the "Blacks" and the "Whites" are diametrically opposed to each other is in the nature of history rather than that of contemporary record or of prophecy; ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... recorder's office, Keith went home. In the relief from pressure, the triumph, and the exaltation, his instinct carried him to the actual background of his life—his genuine but preoccupied affection for Nan. The constraint, that had been so real to her, had never been anything but nebulous ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... be ascertained from historical records. Continuing such inquiries, you might discover, after consulting thirteen Acts and Regulations, what was the actual state of things. People, of course, really learnt such points by practice and conversation, though their knowledge would probably be in a nebulous condition. The whole system was put upon a clear footing in an Act of thirty-eight sections, prepared by Mr. Cockerell, which was passed on February ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... future that all shafts of which we may have the ordering, shall be permitted, as with wisdom we may also permit men or cities, to gather themselves into companies, or constellate themselves into clusters, but not to fuse themselves into mere masses of nebulous aggregation. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the east in a white glare, without the pearly tints and soft gray lights that mark our northern day births. Then the white glare changed to red, to a crimson glow that painted the world with its glory, and dying, left little nebulous masses floating in the azure, tinted with ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... They had said little. The hours had been absorbed in action. Their words had always been of explanation, of reassurance, of anxious planning. Of the future, the future after safety had been achieved, they had said nothing. It had all been uncertain, nebulous, vague.... ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... beliefs of the unreasoning multitude. The philosophers unquestionably represent the reflective spirit, the speculative thought, of the educated classes of Greek society. Turning to the writings of the philosophers, we may therefore reasonably expect that, instead of the dim, undefined, and nebulous form in which the religious sentiment revealed itself amongst the unreflecting portions of the Greek populations, we shall find their theological ideas distinctly and articulately expressed, and that we shall consequently be able to determine their ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... observed whose heads, instead of being nebulous, have presented the appearance of stars, with which, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... have been largely exhausted. By virtue of motions prevailing within the original nebular structure, or because of inrushing materials which strike the central masses, not centrally but obliquely, low rotations of the condensed nebulous masses will occur. Stupendous quantities of heat will be generated in the building-up process. This heat will radiate rapidly into space because the gaseous masses are highly rarefied and their radiating surfaces are large in proportion to the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... body, penetrates to the depths of thought, and paralyzes mind as well as blood! Cold—the sinister demon who grazes the universe with his damp wing, and breathes pestilence on bewildered nations! Cold, tarnishing everything, unrolling its gray and nebulous veil over the sky's rich tints, the waters' reflections, the hearts of flowers, and the cheeks of maidens! Cold, that casts its white winding-sheet over fields and woods and lakes, even over the fur and feathers of animals! Cold, that discolors ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... had left the trees and a few dying gleams were coloring the tops of the tall houses on Carey street, on the east side of the Square, the Ghost showed itself at the window the children had pointed out. It was a figure nebulous and hazy, but undeniably pink. It appeared right at the window, and after standing still for a moment began to wave its long arms with fantastic gestures, and to make other movements which the children interpreted as beckoning to them. Then it evaporated, but in another moment reappeared and ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release. As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of what he proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts—stories "unavailable" for one reason or another—he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Basque country appeared, at that moment, like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses. Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to have grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour, one knew not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past centuries was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is called the Pyrenees, one ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... silly old writing ... I think you might come out with me just this afternoon. It isn't often that I ask anything of you...." He did not believe that she had ever really finished "The Stone House." She pretended that she had—"the end was simply perfect," but she was vague, nebulous. He found the marker in her copy, some fifty ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... situations. Such embarrassment as was shown was on Mrs. Trenor's side, and manifested itself in the mingling of exaggerated warmth with imperceptible reservations. Her loudly affirmed pleasure at seeing Miss Bart took the form of a nebulous generalization, which included neither enquiries as to her future nor the expression of a definite wish to see her again. Lily, well-versed in the language of these omissions, knew that they were equally intelligible to the other ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... moved nor changed its regular deep breathing, and La Mothe slipped past noiselessly, seeking anew for the promised signal. And midway to the well of the stairs, where faint murmurings told of sleepless life even in ill-lit, ill-guarded Amboise, he found it—a nebulous dusky cross, broader than long, stretching its shadowy arms upon the flags, and at his first low tap on the panel the door was softly opened and as softly ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... every story, Shine with far-off nebulous glory! Round her in that luminous cloud Stars obedient press and crowd, She the centre of all gazing, She the sun her planets dazing! In her eyes' victorious lightning Some are paling, some are brightening: ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... what I heard to the reader would be impossible; so chaotic was most of it that it left no impression on my own memory. All I can do is to tell him what fragments stuck, and what nebulous classification I involved. The letters ran from A to G, and my best continuous chance came when Bhme, reading rapidly from a paper, I think, went through the letters, backwards, from G, adding remarks to each; thus: 'G. . . completed.' 'F.. . bad. . . 1.3 (metres?).. .2.5 (kilometres?).' 'E ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... "But we're not getting anywhere, Bob, my boy. You're simply wasting your breath. Just what nebulous idea for the acquisition of this desert land have you floating around in that red head of yours? ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... dropping occasionally the ash of his cigarette on the tray, he, too, was pondering. But his German strain did not make it so easy for him as for Fitzgerald to give concrete form to his thought. The star, as he saw it, had a nebulous appearance. ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... Frankish myth is the hoard, the fatal treasure which works never-ending mischief. It is said to represent the metal veins of the subterranean Region of Gloom. There, as is stated in an Eddic record, Dark Elves (Nibelungs, or nebulous Sons of the Night) are digging and working, melting and forging the ore in their smithies, producing charmful rings that remind us of the diadems which bind the brows of rulers; golden ornaments and sharp weapons; all of which confer great power upon their owner. When Siegfried slays the Dragon, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... was void. That nebulous light had been extinguished. That feeble thrill had vibrated itself into quiescence. Many lustra had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The worm had food no more. The sense of being had at length utterly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hundred and odd pages of peculiarly eye-racking type to convert the Elstone family to Catholicism without indicating in any way how or why her solemn puppets are inspired to change their beliefs. Now and again a completely nebulous cleric happens along to perform the necessary function of receiving a moribund neophyte into the Church; otherwise the conversion appears to take place as it were by spontaneous combustion and not as the result of any visible proselytising ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... the night was senescent, And the star-dials hinted of morn, At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent Arose with a duplicate horn— Astarte's be-diamonded crescent, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... nebulous thoughts floating through his brain began to solidify into a tangible idea, and the man unconsciously started forward. After walking a few steps he broke into a run, for the idea had grown clearer. It continued to grow ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... commanded the darkness away? While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the nickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... pyramid and topples over the edge. Seizing us by the crown-tuft of hair upon our shaven head, he plants the foamy bunch of fibres full in our face. The world vanishes; sight, hearing, smell, taste (unless we open our mouth), and breathing, are cut off; we have become nebulous. Although our eyes are shut, we seem to see a blank whiteness; and, feeling nothing but a soft fleeciness, we doubt whether we be not the Olympian cloud which visited lo. But the cloud clears away before strangulation begins, and the velvety ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... imagination, to throw a tinge of romance and historic grandeur over the realities of the scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a scent of cigar smoke, clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way of visible emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale. Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were wofully disturbed by the rattling of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey punch, which Mr. Thomas Waite was mingling for a customer. Nor did it add to the picturesque appearance of the panelled walls that the slate of the Brookline ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... came into the house, still nebulous, and as he passed the open door of the library he heard a man's voice, not ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... breath, and who can report all that passed between the tempter and the tempted? Or who can be sure that the craftiness of the guest was greater than the cunning of the host? The nebulous emanations of Burr's mind were rounding into a definite world of purpose. He invoked the aid of the Hon. John Smith to set the new planet revolving. Conspiracy was planned in the woods and fields of a quiet farm in the valley ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... character among the somewhat nebulous subleaders in the rebellion was Van Rensburg, sometimes called "Prophet" Lichtenberg, from the place where he lived. During the Boer War he had predicted a remarkable victory for the Boers, which had ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... that is an indefinite phrase. What do you mean by it?' I will tell you what the Bible means by it. It means Jesus Christ. All the nebulous splendours of that firmament are gathered together into one blazing sun. It is a vague direction to tell a man to shoot up, into an empty heaven. It is not a vague direction to tell him to seek the 'things above'; for they are all gathered ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... wailing, plaintive, nebulous, and pathetic are but a few. Why—why try to tie a label to something which slips from the fingers even as they close about it? Why try to describe that which cannot be described? There is, or was, ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... details, but from the nature of his questions you might have thought he was examining you through me for a licence to preach. I did not try to deceive him in regard to your views, but my own impression of them is so nebulous that the very vagueness of my replies increased his alarm. Nor did I protest at the abuse he heaped upon your absent head. For I know how wickedly and unscrupulously you acted in the felony of my love, and there ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... farther advanced than if you were frightened by avowals which our fathers insisted should worry the women. Avowals absolutely useless in themselves, and which always incumber a passion with several nebulous days. They retard its progress. Bear this well in mind, Marquis: A woman is much better persuaded that she is loved by what she guesses than ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... Louis clubwomen's "holy of holies." They have a club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in self-culture. As a group their consciousness of the city's industrial problems is still nebulous. The high light in which Mrs. Knefler's work must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of self-culture women, with a few—only a few—rash daughters shivering around preparatory to taking their first cold ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... glare. The nebula is exceedingly faint, and we can be satisfied if we see it simply as a hazy spot, although with much larger telescopes it has appeared at least half a degree broad. Tempel saw several centers of condensation in it, and traced three or four broad nebulous streams, one of which decidedly ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... gilt gaselier spread out its branches, and on this gaselier as many as three gas-jets burned furiously at once. In the intense illumination the faces of the boarders could be distinctly seen. They sat, as it were, transfigured, in a nebulous whorl or glory of yellow light. It fell on the high collars, the quite remarkably high collars of the young gentlemen, and on those gay, those positively hilarious blouses which the young ladies at Mrs. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... hazy, nebulous, in fact. He was not quite sure as to his next move. It seemed useless to attempt to flee from Storch's shelter. He had no money and scarcely strength enough to tackle any job that would be open to him. Even if he elected to become a strike ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... she smiled sadly to herself. She folded her hands in her lap, and thought, not bitterly, not listlessly, but deeply. She wanted to consider all cheerfully now; she tried to do so. She was musing among those flying perceptions, those nebulous facts of a new life, experienced for the first time; she was now not herself as she had been; another woman was born; and she was feeling carefully along the unfamiliar paths which she must tread. She was not glad that these words ran through her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ears of the battered ivory head all her sorrows all her hopes and all her ambitions, for even in the face of hopelessness, in the clutches of the dread authority from which there was no escape, little Meriem yet cherished hopes and ambitions. It is true that her ambitions were rather nebulous in form, consisting chiefly of a desire to escape with Geeka to some remote and unknown spot where there were no Sheiks, no Mabunus—where El Adrea could find no entrance, and where she might play all day surrounded only by flowers ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... comet of 1858 was one of the celestial spectacles of modern times. It was first observed on June 2nd of that year by Donati, whose name the comet has subsequently borne; it was then merely a faint nebulous spot, and for about three months it pursued its way across the heavens without giving any indications of the splendour which it was so soon to attain. The comet had hardly become visible to the unaided eye at the end of August, and was ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... would ever be taken for a fool, but who showed by the very actions of his body as well as by the play of his face, that he lacked firmness of purpose. He certainly was no fool. He had read much, and, though he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his readings certain nebulous lights, begotten by other men's thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects. It cannot be said of him that he did much thinking for himself;—but he thought that he thought. He believed of himself that he ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... year I was usually oftener "with" them. She also wrote that she feared a real estrangement had set in between Mr. Gravener and her sweet young friend—a state of things but half satisfactory to her so long as the advantage resulting to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage itself from the merely nebulous state. She intimated that her sweet young friend was, if anything, a trifle too reserved; she also intimated that there might now be an opening for another clever young man. There never was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesise, and of course the question can't come up to-day. These are ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... a formal parapet at the end of the basin of water, sixty feet from the fountain, is a colossal figure symbolic of the setting sun, Helios, the great orb having thrown off the nebulous mass that subsequently resolved ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... Nebulous flames in crystal cages Leered as if with discontent at city movement, murk, and grime, And as waiting some procession of great ghosts from bygone ages ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... she had chosen Eleonora da Toscana because she believed there was good luck in it. Once, long before the world knew of her, she had returned home from Italy unexpectedly. "Molly, here's Nora, from Tuscany!" her delighted father had cried: who at that time had a nebulous idea that Tuscany was somewhere in Ireland because it had a Celtic ring to it. Being filled with love of Italy, its tongue, its history, its physical beauty, she naively translated "Nora from Tuscany" into ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... of harmony in the architecture, were all characteristic of the feudal manors of which Brittany was proud; perhaps justly proud, for they maintained upon that Gaelic ground a species of monumental history of the nebulous period which preceded the establishment of the ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... stupefied. For a while he seemed to himself to be turning over in his mind something he had heard read from a book, with a nebulous notion of being somehow concerned in it. The thought of his father cleared his brain. He ran to the dead body, kissed its lips as he had once kissed the forehead of another, and falling on his knees ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... That his thirty-three nebulous birds had become forty before they took flight, Anthony never knew. A man whose sole assets are a Sealyham, a very few clothes, and twenty-two shillings and sixpence, does not, as ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... in hours of ebbed vitality, the shapes of fear and doubt grew clearer and more positive; they loomed huge out there among the apple-trees, where the drip-drip of the rain made music. But his thoughts were still nebulous, not amounting to resolve. It was no moment for resolves—with the boy lying up there between the tides of chance; and goodness knew what happening to Tod and Sheila. The air grew sharper; he withdrew to the hearth, where a wood fire still burned, gray ash, red glow, scent oozing from it. And ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... development to designate a definite sequence of ideas, i.e., in a logical order. "Metamorphosis, says Hegel, belongs to the Idea as such since its variation alone is development. Rational speculation must get rid of such nebulous concepts as the evolution of the more highly developed animal organisms from ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... to 'do something,' in a vague and uncertain way, for the people. Nobody dared to say that it would be first of all necessary to make the people discontented, because this would have been considered as flying in the face of Providence; and there was, besides, a sort of nebulous hope, not strong enough for a theory, that by dint of long gazing upon vases and tapestry everybody would in time acquire a true feeling for art, and begin to crave for culture. Many very beautiful things have, from time to time, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... something was wrong. He would not have gone so far as to say that he had the pip—it was more a vague sense of discomfort. And, searching for first causes as he made his way upstairs, he came to the conclusion that the person responsible for this nebulous depression was his wife, Lucille. It seemed to Archie that at breakfast that morning Lucille's manner had been subtly rummy. Nothing you could put your ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... freedom was no nebulous figure, aureoled with shining rhetoric, blowing her own trumpet, but Free Trade, Free Speech, Free Education. He did not rail against the Church as the enemy, but he did not count on it as a friend. His Millennium was earthly, human; his philosophy ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... exercised over the living; he had delegated his functions in this respect to a goddess, Maritsakro, for whom the poorer inhabitants of the left bank entertained a persistent devotion. She was a kind of Isis or hospitable Hathor, whose subjects in the other world adapted themselves to the nebulous and dreary existence provided for their disembodied "doubles." The Osirian and solar doctrines were afterwards blended together in this local mythology, and from the XIth dynasty onwards the Theban nobility had adopted, along with the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... exiles, and it was in his nature to feel the relation as a strong chain, nay, to feel his imagination moving without repugnance in the direction of Mordecai's desires. With all his latent objection to schemes only definite in their generality and nebulous in detail—in the poise of his sentiments he felt at one with this man who had made a visionary selection of him: the lines of what may be called their emotional theory touched. He had not the Jewish consciousness, but he had a yearning, grown the stronger for the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... stars hitherto unknown and inaccessible to all our means of mensuration; it has penetrated distances so great, that luminous and necessarily immense bodies present themselves to us only like nebulous ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... may rejoice in its crescent beam. We are often tempted to question the reality of faith in ourselves and others, by reason of the unbelief and disbelief which co-exist with it. But why should we do so? May there not be an inner heart and centre of true trust, with a nebulous environment of doubt, through which the nucleus shall gradually send its attracting and consolidating power, and turn it, too, into firm substance? May there not be a germ, infinitesimal, yet with a real life throbbing in its microscopic minuteness, and destined ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the prodigious scale upon which the mechanism of the Universe was constructed, and Laplace had already enunciated the theory according to which the cosmic bodies were originally formed in obedience to the law of gravitation by the condensation of rotating nebulous spheres. And there were those who used these discoveries of astronomy to cast doubts upon the likelihood that the Divine attention would be concentrated upon the concerns of so tiny a speck as this ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... upon the personal unpopularity of Wilson on the Atlantic seaboard and the normal Republican vote in the industrial centers of the Middle West. His foreign policy, east of the Mississippi, was generally looked upon as anaemic and nebulous. He had permitted, so the Republicans contended, the honor of the country to be stained and Americans to be destroyed, without effective action. His early opposition to preparedness and the half-hearted measures ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... what the zodiacal light appears to be, we proceed to consider what it is. Some inquirers—arguing from the 'nebular theory,' which assumes the formation of the several planets, one after another, from nebulous matter—have supposed the zodiacal light to be a remnant of that matter yet unconcentrated. In this view, it may be a nebula, brightest in the centre, as is the case with most, and fainter towards the margin. According to Humboldt, 'we may with great probability ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... steadfast as before they arrived. But later, half an hour or so, it began to fade. Fissures or cracks crossed it diagonally through which a few stars were seen, and gradually it became thin and nebulous until it looked like the Milky Way, and at last vanished, leaving no visible monument of any sort ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... divinely a Christmas party is something, but it is not everything. The disengaging of the erotic motive is everything, is the only touchstone. If while that is being done we are soothed into a trance, a nebulous delirium of the nerves, then we know the novelist to be a supreme novelist. If we retain consciousness, he is not supreme, and to be less than supreme in art is to not exist.... Dickens disengages the erotic motive through two figures, Mr. Winkle, a sportman, and Miss Arabella, "a young lady with ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... It seemed nebulous: it did not seem to say anything about the difficulty in hand—how non-existent matter can propagate illusions. I said, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this sentence no limitation of time, so there is room here for astronomical ages, cycle upon cycle. There was time enough in that beginning for the present system of planets to be arranged from a single nebulous mass. In it we have a picture of matter in a crude condition, without fixedness of form, surrounded with darkness. Then comes the commencement of the great work of preparing our planet for the home of man, by the spirit of God moving over the chaos. There ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... the circle grew nebulous, and Colwyn was fast falling asleep through sheer weariness, when a slight sharp sound, like that made by turning a key in a lock, brought him back to wide-eyed wakefulness. He sat up in bed, listening with strained ears, feeling ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... star, other generations being long extinct or no others yet come into being; or, perhaps, a faint nebulous wreath of aggregating matter somewhere solitary in the heavens; or no sign of matter beyond our system, either because ungathered or long passed ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... potent entities, must pass from the formative, nebulous condition into a crystallized state by, and through some form of externalization of ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... was necessary considerably to extend that doctrine in order to meet the necessities of the new situation. President Lincoln had applied this principle to absolute contraband, such as powder, shells, rifles, and other munitions of war. Great Britain now proceeded to apply it to that nebulous class of commodities known as "conditional contraband," the chief of which was foodstuffs. If the United States, while a war was pending, could evolve the idea of "ultimate destination" and apply it to absolute contraband, could not Great Britain, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... plan of salvation," Jesus of Nazareth was to her but the vague shadow of something that was more than a man, yet no man at all. I had nearly said that what He came to reveal had become to her yet more vague from her nebulous notion of Him who was its revelation. Her religion was, as a matter of course, as dusky and uncertain, as the object-center of it was obscure and unrealized. Since her father's death and her comparative isolation, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... interesting phenomena concerned with the human aura, or psychic atmosphere which surrounds the human body for a space of several feet, assuming an egg-shaped form. A writer says on this point: "The trained clairvoyant vision sees the human aura as a nebulous hazy substance, like a luminous cloud, surrounding the person for two or three feet on each side of his body, becoming more dense near the body, and gradually becoming less dense as it extends away from the body. ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... "immanent in humanity," and of the political constitution "invented" exclusively in the interests of "order?" Is not the only difference that the "materialist" transforms the Utopian programme of the "idealist," into something even more Utopian, more nebulous, more absurd? ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... and one by one, Out of the ether, were worlds created; Star and planet and sea and sun, All in the nebulous Nothing waited Till the Nameless One Who has many a name Called them to being ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... visualise old New York as hard as I have tried. But I will wager that, like myself, you have been unable to conjure up more than a nebulous and tenuous vision,—a modern New York's shadow, the ghostly skeleton of our city as it appears today. For instance, when you have thought of old Washington Square, you have probably thought of it pretty much as it is now, only of course with an old-time atmosphere. The whole Village, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... days shabbily away in Manchester House, busy with housework drudgery. Since the collapse of Throttle-Ha'penny, James Houghton had become so stingy that it was like an inflammation in him. A silver sixpence had a pale and celestial radiance which he could not forego, a nebulous whiteness which made him feel he had heaven in his hold. How then could he let it go. Even a brown penny seemed alive and pulsing with mysterious blood, potent, magical. He loved the flock of his busy pennies, in the shop, as if ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... (opacity) 426[obs3]; nebulosity &c. (dimness) 422. V. bubble, boil, foam, froth, mantle, sparkle, guggle[obs3], gurgle; effervesce, ferment, fizzle. Adj. bubbling &c. v.; frothy, nappy[obs3], effervescent, sparkling, mousseux[French: frothy], up. cloudy &c. n.; thunderheaded[obs3]; vaporous, nebulous, overcast. Phr. "the lowring element scowls o'er the darkened landscip" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... daughter out from the worldly advantages enjoyed to the full by the rest of her kindred? Dolly had no particular religious ideas; the subject didn't interest her; and besides, she thought the New Testament talked about rich and poor in much the same unpractical nebulous way that mamma herself did—in fact, she regarded it with some veiled contempt as a rather sentimental radical publication. But, she considered, for all that, that it was probably true enough as far as the facts and the theology went; and she couldn't understand why a person like mamma should ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... picture is crossed with nebulous black streaks. These were originally present in all the pictures. I have omitted them in all but this, lest they might obscure the details of the reduced copies. It has been explained to me (although in the myth it is expressly stated only in one case, ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... responsible for all his uncertainties. He saw her just then as a Circe. He was a man, swung to an ebb and flow of mood by influences outwardly as nebulous as moon-mists. Just now the influence of Loraine Haswell was at ebb-tide. Tomorrow it might run again to flood, but Paul Burton obeyed the prompting of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... their axes, their times of rotation on their axes, their specific gravities, and their physical constitutions; we see what a high degree of heterogeneity the solar system exhibits, when compared with the almost complete homogeneity of the nebulous mass out of which it is supposed to ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... This nebulous mass was absolutely stirless, . . it appeared as though it had been thrown, a ponderous weight, into the vault of heaven, and having fallen, there purposed to remain. Ever and anon beamy threads of lightning played through it luridly, veining it with ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... conscience doth make cowards of us all." In fact, forgery, and nothing else than forgery, seems to be the easiest as well as the most feasible explanation of these remarks, which, were it not for this theory, would, instead of being very clear, be quite nebulous. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... you. I will be near you always." Here was another inspiration. For three years or more he had been thinking of her as dead. Or rather he had thought of her in that nebulous, undefined fashion in which we consider the dead; the slumberous people who forget everything, who see nothing; who, if they exist at all, are like stones upon the beach rolled to and fro blind and senseless, not of their own desire, but by the waves of a fearful fate that itself is ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine, These that we feel in the blood ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... its fixed position, and the Great and the Little Bear, dipping toward the ocean wave, but not yet dipping in it, pursue their nightly revolutions. Long after sunset, and long before sunrise, night after night, the faint, nebulous gleam of the zodiacal lights stretches up toward the zenith. The shortness of the twilight frequently leaves the fugacious planet, Mercury, so seldom seen at the north, in distinct view. While Venus not merely casts a shadow in a clear ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the stars were of tolerably uniform size and brilliancy, and that the difference in apparent brightness was the result, and therefore a measure of their distances, he proceeded to apply the same process to the star clusters, which, even in a fair telescope, present only the appearance of faint nebulous spots of light, but are resolved into clusters of stars by more powerful instruments. In many cases, he found that a certain proportion existed between the telescopic power by which a cluster was first rendered visible, and that required for its resolution, ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... do the morning journals, reeking with unkempt facts, roll in upon the peaceful thought of the soul! How like savage hordes from some remote star, some nebulous chaos, that has never yet been recognized in the cosmical world, do they trample upon the organic and divine growths of culture, laying waste the well-ordered and fairly adorned fields of the mind, demolishing the intellectual highways ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... now gliding along with wonderful celerity, and the nucleus is very bright. It is accompanied with a great luminosity, and the nucleus has changed its position therein; that is, on the 29th August, the nucleus was like a minute star near the centre of the nebulous envelope; on the 2nd September it appeared in the n. f. quarter, and latterly it has been in the ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... unseen sun set: the brief day ended. And the wind went down with the sun. But through the thick darkness the turbulent wind appeared to grow luminous with tossing wraiths; and all the world seemed to dissolve into a nebulous, hell-driven thing, ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... fibrous membrane is enlarged, globous or flattened, irregularly thinned, particularly at the periphery, where it may be as thin as tissue paper, nebulous because of the stretching of its fibers principally, but in some degree (differing in different cases) to edema of the epithelial layer. Fissures occur in ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... only a few pious souls crouched behind the pillars, or pouring forth their last fervent aspirations before some favorite altar or saintly shrine. Soon all have left, and the silence of the abandoned sanctuary shrouds the fabric in greater solemnity. The aromatic incense still floats in nebulous veils around the tabernacle. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the silence seemed to strike at him with a nebulous hostility as he went. He had a vague sense of intrusion, of being in a forbidden place. The blood was no longer hot in his veins. He even shivered in the warmth of the summer night as he followed the winding walk ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... held no intercourse with the outer world for several decades, nor does her friendship seem to have been sought by any oversea nation. In the closing year of the thirteenth century, merchantmen flying the Yuan flag are reported to have arrived, but the record is nebulous, and the same may be said of a passing reference that, in 1341, Japanese vessels were sent to China to procure articles manufactured there. We reach more solid ground a year later (1342), when the Ashikaga chief, Takauji, being engaged in building the temple Tenryu-ji, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the ground and opened his mouth to speak. But his knees grew weak and he quivered all over like one who beholds the god. The abstract nebulous romance of his pilgrimage had been crystallized, in a flash, into the concrete. "Ay," ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... filling my own home—our home—with laughter and with the music of her voice! Again and again she rose to my enthralled vision, and ever she was Youth and Love, the vision crowned with the wonder of her nebulous, brown-gold hair as she gazed at me out of her sweet, clear eyes in which I seemed still to read unfathomable ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... explain, "the power's all on your side now; and I'll show you how little the doing will hurt you as soon as I can have a quiet chat with your husband." He branched off again into technicalities, nebulous projections of capital and interest, taxes and rents, from which she finally extracted, and clung to, the central fact that if the "deal went through" it would mean a commission of forty thousand dollars to ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... astral sight. The human aura, as all students of occultism know, is that peculiar emanation of astral vibrations that extends from each living human being, surrounding him in an egg-shaped form for a distance of two to three feet on all sides. This peculiar nebulous envelope is not visible to the physical sight, and may be discerned only by means of the astral senses. It, however, may be dimly "felt" by many persons coming into the presence of other persons, and constitutes a personal ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... over his cabin, he would sit alone with a sense of security he had never felt before. On such occasions he was apt to leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for what might not come to him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond? Perhaps even SHE,—for this strange solitary was not insane nor visionary. He was never in spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping or waking, pacing the beach or crouching over his driftwood ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... and journals devoted to historical studies been so numerous. All times and tribes are searched for memorials; the remote corners of modern, medieval and ancient periods are brought under scrutiny; and going beyond these again, the semi-historic eras of tradition and the nebulous gleams from pre-historic milleniums[TN-1] are diligently scanned, that their uncertain story may be prefaced to that registered in ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... deeper sense lies hidden, as a symbol which it is the poet's business to penetrate and illumine. It also moved away from the clear images, precise contours, and firm lines by which the Parnassiens had given such an effect of plasticity to their verse, and sought rather vague, shadowy, and nebulous impressions and the charm of music and melody (cf. VERLAINE'S poem, Art potique, p. 288). This is in general the direction taken by the latest generation of poets, symbolists, decadents, or however otherwise they are styled, for whom VERLAINE'S ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... all, is not this a somewhat vague and nebulous conception of "The Church". If it is to go into all the world, how, from a business point of view, is this world-wide mission, in all its grandeur, to be accomplished? The answer is seen in our ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... flooded with afternoon sunshine. Palmerston drove into the square shadow of the shed roof, and set his feet comfortably upon the dashboard while he waited. He was not aware of any very lively curiosity concerning the young woman for whom he was waiting. That he had formed some nebulous hypothesis of vulgarity was evidenced by his whimsical hope that her prevailing atmosphere would not be musk; aggressive perfumery of some sort seemed inevitable. He found himself wondering what trait ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... cold to inflamed eyes. It always aggravates. When the inflammation is in a scrofulous person, especially in infants, it assumes a purulent character, and may leave the cornea in clouded (nebulous) condition, and the sight more or less obliterated. For this condition use Conium first, and apply it in tinct., half water, to the eyes ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... 40,000 miles in diameter, and of that class termed nebulous, having no tail, and probably no solid nucleus. The point where the comet's centre crosses the plane of the ecliptic is within and very near the curve which the earth describes,—so very near, that the outskirts of the nebulous matter of the comet might possibly, at some future visit, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... the man for whom Pierre hunted? What was McGurk? Not even the description of Wilbur had proved very enlightening. Her thought of him was vague, nebulous, and taking many forms. Sometimes he was tall and dark and stern. Again he was short and heavy and somewhat deformed of body. But always he was everywhere ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... backward and forward in a warning, funereal manner, as though protesting against some appalling fate. That she was in possession of my apartment, if not my house, I instinctively realized. She sat bolt upright, firm and strong as a Hindoo idol on its altar; a nebulous glare invested her head with a halo, through which bristling hair-pins stuck out in all directions, like lightning-rods with fitfully luminous points. The crystal wall of spectacles that bridged her nose seemed ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... the U.E. Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the Premier of Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the minority as all ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... It was a nebulous but suggestive remark that the newspaper occupies the borderland between literature and common sense. Literature it certainly is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often too erratic and variable to be credited with the balance-wheel of sense; but it must ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... texts. Hugh said that it seemed to him to be practically certain that no one of them was infallibly in the right, and that the truth probably lay in certain wide religious ideas which underlay all forms of Christian faith. Maitland rejected this with scorn as a dangerous and nebulous kind of religion—"nerveless and flabby, without bone or sinew." They then diverged on to a wider ground, and Hugh tried to defend his theory that God called souls to Himself by an infinite variety ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... realize that, in striving after brevity and conciseness—to keep the size of my statement within the limits of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, generously elastic though it is—I have left the argument in a rather nebulous form. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... lights of Bordeaux when it was quite dark, a nebulous haze against black; of that I am reasonably sure. But certainly our fall took place in the cold, uncertain light of early dawn. I am, at least, equally sure of that. And Mimizan, near where we dropped, is fifty miles from Bordeaux, whose harbour ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... first, but still yellow. Finally, on the far horizon a range of chalk-topped hills gleams white, even in dull weather, as though it were lightened with perpetual sunshine; and here and there on the dazzling whiteness of its lower slopes some plaster-like, nebulous patches represent far-off villages which lie too remote for the eye to discern their details. Indeed, only when the sunlight touches a steeple to gold does one realise that each such patch is a human settlement. Finally, all is wrapped in an immensity of silence which ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... gilded deep horizons. I rejoiced In yielding to all amorous influence And multiple impulsion of the flesh, To feel within my being surge and sway The force that all the stars acknowledge too. Amid the nebulous humanity Where I an atom crawled and cleaved and sundered, I saw a million motions, but one law; And from the city's splendor to my eyes The vapors passed and there was nought but Love, A ferment turbulent, intensely fair, Where Beauty beckoned and ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... until at a certain height the smoke remains stationary, and hangs in clouds above the houses. Looking from some great elevation, such as the tower of Ivan Veliki in the Kremlin, you see these clouds beneath you, agitated like waves, and forming a kind of nebulous sea, which is, however, soon taken up ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... policeman the streets were deserted. It was a little cold and raw for the time of year, and a fog like a pink blanket was creeping in from the sea. Down in the Steine the big arc-lights gleamed here and there like nebulous blue globes; it was hardly possible to see across the road. In the half-shadow behind Steel the statue of the First Gentleman in Europe glowed gigantic, ghost-like in ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... grass, seemed an inviting place to rest. The Maimed Man continued until he had reached the farther belt of trees, and then he turned about and faced the sinking sun, that by now was changing itself into a nebulous radiance on the horizon. The forest stretched in gentle billows as far as ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... matter necessary for world-making; and till the spectroscopic discoveries of the composite nature of gaseous nebulae, they were claimed as specimens of worlds in process of formation. La Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire would be a cool bath. In no other way could he dissipate the world's substance into sufficient thinness for his vortices. But Spencer saw that this tremendous heat would ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... best describe the passage of day and night, at this period, as a sort of gigantic, ponderous flicker. Moment by moment, the acceleration of time continued; so that, at nights now, I saw the moon, only as a swaying trail of palish fire, that varied from a mere line of light to a nebulous path, and then ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... regret for all she was surrendering, thinking only of her gain, of being clothed upon with a garment showing ever some new fold of surprising beauty and wonder. If she had remained in the Father's house—like the elder brother in the Parable—then would all that He had have been hers, in nebulous simplicity. But now, holding her revels apart, she seems to sing her own song, and to dream her own beautiful dream, wandering, with a motion wholly her own, among the gardens of cosmic order and loveliness. She glories in her many veils, which, though they hide from her both her source ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... between levels, and still be in blocks too large to warrant an assumption of continuity of values to their centers (Fig. 1). As to the third class of "possible" ore, it conveys an impression of tangibility to a nebulous hazard, and should never be used in connection with positive tonnages. This part of the mine's value comes under extension of the deposit a long distance beyond openings, which is a speculation and cannot be defined in absolute ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... my 'fatal secret.' The subplot developing within my mind is still nebulous with me,—you would lose all interest, as would I, if you knew what was going to happen. But the time has passed, and now we can go to the theatre. I bought the tickets by messenger this afternoon. I will let you do the talking to the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... with the essay on the Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in full. The essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... march I ran into a rather nebulous, middle-aged sort of a gentleman soldier who was sitting on the curb looking moodily at a manhole as if he would like to ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... care-free. A career seemed a far-off, nebulous thing that one need not fret over. It was very pleasant to be walking up over the hills in the moonlight and sunset with Gavin at her side carrying flowers for her. She felt it would be beautiful to be able to always stroll ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... was rather of the familiar and chatty order, with no tendency to the essay style. She touched upon the recent discoveries in chemistry or the discovery of gold in California, of the nebulae, more and more of which she thought might be resolved, and yet that there might exist nebulous matters, such as compose the tails of comets, of the satellites, of the planets, the last of which she thought had other uses than as subordinates. She spoke with disapprobation of Dr. Whewell's attempt to prove that our planet ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... of a call those stones had for him! Did they mean anything to Hawksley aside from their intrinsic value? But for the nebulous idea, originally, that the emeralds were mixed up somewhere in this adventure, Cutty knew that he would have sent Hawksley to a hospital, left him to his fate, and never known ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... criminal on the scaffold, general forgiveness of sinners and the abolition of hell, was rejected by Schiller, who later characterized the song as a 'bad poem'. The 'Song to Joy' sprang from noble sentiment and has the genuine lyric afflatus; but its author had not yet emerged from that nebulous youthful sentimentalism according to which joy, sympathy, love, friendship, virtue, happiness, God, were all very much the same thing. And the thought is a trifle incoherent. If the good Spirit above the stars is to pardon everybody, what becomes of the incentive to a militant life? Why should ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Watz,—brought in his morning coffee, and after dressing with a great running commentary of grunts and groans, he sat down to drink a mouthful of the reviving decoction. But his brain was still in a whirl, and the scenes of a few hours ago passed rapidly, but in nebulous form, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
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