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More "Obscurity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flutes and bass flutes)—The history of ancient music, and especially that relative to the "tibiae," "pipes" or "flutes," is replete with obscurity. It is not agreed what are the meanings of the respective terms, but in the present Translation the following theory has been adopted: The words "dextrae" and "sinistrae" denote the kind of flute, the former being {treble}, the latter {bass} flutes, or, ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... clear, it would have less charms for the ignorant, who are pleased only with obscurity, terrors, fables, prodigies, and things incredible. Romances, silly stories, and the tales of ghosts and wizards, are more pleasing to vulgar minds than ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... read, and been greatly impressed by, Spencer's "First Principles." "Our thoughts," he says, "were full of the great unsolved problem of the origin of life—a problem which Darwin's 'Origin of Species' left in as much obscurity as ever—and we looked to Spencer as the one man living who could give us some clue to it. His wonderful exposition of the fundamental laws and conditions, actions and interactions of the material universe ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... they might be? The Doctor in his kindly wrath,—for he is very wroth,—mentions this name and the other. What does it matter? Obscurity itself becomes mystery, and mystery of course produces curiosity. It was bound to be so. It is not they who are in fault, but we. If you are different from others, of course ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... constant pair needed any ring to remind them of their wedded duty. It is strange that the origin of the wedding ring is lost in obscurity. The "fyancel," or wedding ring, is doubtless of Roman origin, and was originally given at the betrothal as a pledge of the engagement. Juvenal says that at the commencement of the Christian era a man placed a ring on the finger of the lady whom he betrothed. In olden times ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... brilliant leadership of Lee and Jackson, repeatedly defeated the armies of the North. Then the economic strength of New England and the West began to tell. An unknown officer by the name of Grant arose from obscurity and became the Charles Martel of the great slave war. Without interruption he hammered his mighty blows upon the crumbling defences of the South. Early in the year 1863, President Lincoln issued ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... sitting as motionless as a statue in the trail behind them, the form of himself and animal clearly outlined in the obscurity. He had not spoken nor stirred since the coming of the girl. The head of the steed was high, but beyond and above it loomed the head and shoulders of the man sitting upright, like an officer of dragoons. The gloom prevented a fair view of his countenance, but Nellie fancied ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... speak what is merely the recollection of conviction which we had some time ago, and to use past feelings over again. Many a day you will feel this; you will long with your whole heart to escape away somewhere into obscurity, and be able to keep your mouth closed for weeks. You will know the meaning of that great text for ministers, "The talk of the lips tendeth only to penury,"—that is, it shallows the ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... up for a family, creature as thou art! God give me patience with thee! I suppose my brother's folly, and his wickedness, together, will, in a little while, occasion a search at the heralds' office, to set out thy wretched obscurity! Provoke me, I desire thou wilt! One hundred guineas will I give thee, to say but thou thinkest thou art married ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... and guardedly, and rather hints at his conclusions than follows them out, would have sufficed to have overthrown many of the positions of the supporters of the system of witchcraft. His work has a strong scholastic tinge, and is not without occasional obscurity; and on these accounts probably produced no very extensive impression at the time. He wrote two other tracts—1. "Discovery of the Dangers of ignorant practisers of Physick in England," 1612, 4to; 2. "Cotta ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... to a Papal lordship over England was never again heard of. But the struggle had brought to the front a man who was destined to give a far wider scope and significance to this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif's earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during the twenty years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed to the mastership of Balliol College in the University ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... fishery. The reader must not conclude that I sacrifice to dull detail, when he finds such benevolent conduct minutely narrated. The advocates of humanity are not yet become too numerous: but those who practise its divine precepts, however humble and unnoticed be their station, ought not to sink into obscurity, unrecorded and unpraised, with the vile monsters who deride misery ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... had no Atticus. Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke were dismissed ministers and doomed to live in exile, the latter for many years, and felt, no doubt, strongly their removal from the glare of public life to obscurity. We hear no complaint from them which can justify some future critic in saying that their wails were unworthy of a woman; but neither of them was capable of telling an Atticus the thoughts of his mind as they rose. What other public man ever had an Atticus to whom, in the sorrows which the ingratitude ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... which is free even from the approbation of our fellow-men, even from the approbation of the best and wisest? The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in secret? The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber? The Godlike lives lived in obscurity?—a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce in the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; women of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would only draw ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... to the first edition of the Pencillings Willis explains that the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence gave a sufficient warrant to his mind that his descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and that therefore he had indulged himself in a freedom of detail and topic only customary in posthumous memoirs. He expresses his astonishment that this particular ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... like a sentimental school-girl," replied Mrs. Fairbanks with a touch of haughty scorn. "Of course if a man is married and duty calls him to a foreign land, he must go. But why should a girl throw away her prospects and condemn herself to a life of obscurity and isolation by attaching herself to a man who chooses to take up some fantastic mission in ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... who didn't deserve it suffered; those whom suffering might have purified went scot free. Some were rich, others were poor; some had high positions, others humble ones; some had the respect of the world from the day they were born, others crept along from birth to death in restriction and obscurity. The contrasts were so cruel that they scorched ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... the door, and having ushered her into the drawing-room announced, "Miss Barbara Walbrook," as if she had been calling on a duchess. From the semi-obscurity of the back drawing-room a small lithe figure came forward a step or two. The small lithe figure was wearing a tea-gown of which so practiced an eye as Miss Walbrook's could not but estimate the provenance and value, while a sweet ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Occasionally she would see two or three things of beauty displayed with art in a large window; but everywhere else excessive quantity produced indifference, disgust, or satiety, according to the mood of the moment. And even in the days of her poverty and obscurity, when her faculties were sharpened into proper appreciation by privation, those congested windows teeming with jewels, with wearing apparel, with all things immoderately, set up a sort of mental dyspepsia that was distressing, and she was glad to turn away to ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... learn that the world had other things to do than pore over dull excerpts from inhuman State papers, we may pity his awakening; but we can never quite forgive the apologetic paragraph with which he relegates Dorothy Osborne's letters to the mouldy obscurity ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... worse than waste. He who kept Moses waiting forty years before He sent him to lead out captive Israel, who withdrew Saul of Tarsus three years into Arabia before he sent him as an apostle to the nations, and who left even His own Son thirty years in obscurity before His manifestation as Messiah—this God is in no hurry to put other servants at work. He says to all impatient souls: "My time is not yet full come, but ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... to have revolutionised Society by bringing to the social horizon people who, but for the riches he placed within reach of their grasping fingers, would never have been able to emerge from their uncultured obscurity. ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... dusky red, which continually grew more vivid, as if brilliant particles were interfused with the gloom. Now, also, the cloud began to roll away from the mountain, while, as it heavily withdrew, one object after another started out of its impenetrable obscurity into sight, with precisely the effect of a new creation, before the indistinctness of the old chaos had been completely swallowed up. As the process went on, they saw the gleaming of water close at their feet, ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Continent. She accompanied him a part of the way to the coast, and took leave of him with many professions of sorrow at the parting, and begged him to come back soon. This he promised to do, but he never returned. He lived some time afterward in comparative neglect and obscurity, and mankind considered the question of the marriage of Elizabeth as ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... appointed a levy of 10,000 foot and 3000 horse to be instantly raised for the defence of the king and kingdom; among whom it behoved the captain again to take the field, for he was now become too popular to be hid in obscurity. ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... he the fair page of creation, and why is he to be continued? This has never been explained; it is one of those dispensations of Providence the design whereof is wrapped in profoundest obscurity. The good young man is perhaps not without excuse for his existence, but society is without excuse for permitting it. At his time of life to be "good" is to insult humanity. Goodness is proper to the aged; it is their sole glory; why should ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... that ever puzzled student. I speak feelingly and with a sense of irritation at the whirls and vortices it used to cause in my poor head when first I entered on this subject in my days of studentship. I know not a single case where its application does not create obscurity—nay doubt. Nor can a case ever occur where any such principle is called for. The general law that the change of motion is proportional to the moving force and takes place in its direction, provided we take care always to regard the reaction of curves, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... great truths which dawn upon the mind are usually attended with a cloud of difficulties, and, but for the habit in question, they would soon be permitted to fade away, and be lost in their original obscurity. Copernicus has, therefore, been justly applauded,(219) not only for conceiving, but for firmly grasping the heliocentric theory of the world, notwithstanding the many formidable objections which it had to encounter in his own mind. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... latterly also Browning, with protests against his obscurity and his occasionally most unmusical English. The inspiration of his brave and optimistic philosophy she felt strongly. She was extremely fond of reading Dante, and she was better acquainted with German and Italian poetry than most cultivated women. But though she read much ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... possibility that neither she nor May Tomalin benefited by Lady Ogram's will had sufficed to make him more than contented with the actual issue of his late complications. He had seen himself overwhelmed with disaster, reduced to the alternative of withdrawing into ignominious obscurity or of again seeking aid from Mrs. Woolstan, aid which might or not be granted, and in any case would only enable him to go through with the contest at Hollingford, a useless effort if he had nothing henceforth to live upon. As it was, he saw Constance and seventy thousand ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... again, the Major notably, strove after importance by airs of previous knowledge and hints of undisclosed details. Even Mrs Trumbler made her cast, declaring that she had always known (the source of the information was left in obscurity) that pride such as Harry Tristram's was the sure precursor of a fall. None of them could compete with Mina Zabriska. To her alone the doors of Blent were open; she held exclusive right of access to its hidden mistress. The fact caused unmeasured indignation, the reason excited ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... possibility with a hope that was passionate in its intensity. She had a morbid dread of separation, albeit the danger she feared seemed to have sunk into obscurity during the weeks that had intervened. If there yet remained unrest in the State, it was below the surface. The Rajah came and went in his usual romantic way, played polo with his British friends, danced and gracefully flattered their wives as ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... felt his heart leap with joy, and he hoped to be now able to penetrate the obscurity which had so long tormented him. With bold and daring pace he ran up the lofty steps, and caught a glimpse of the interior of the edifice, which seemed filled with the roseate colours of morning. He heard the soft voice of the Genius, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... reached Sommers. He learned, chiefly through the newspapers, that Mr. R. G. Carson had emerged from the obscurity of Chicago and had become a celebrity upon the metropolitan stage after "the successful flotation of several specialties." Mr. Brome Porter, he gathered from the same source, had built himself a house in New York, and altogether shaken ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... ninety-nine per cent. of the people he encounters, and unless he has some irrelevant income, he will die childless and his line will perish with him, for all the service he may give to the future of mankind. And as great mental endowments do not, unhappily, necessarily involve a passion for obscurity, contempt and extinction, it is probable that under existing conditions such a man will give his mind to some pursuit less bitterly unremunerative and shameful. It is a stupid superstition that "genius will out" in spite of all discouragement. The fact that great men have risen against crushing ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... shown in the speech delivered before the House of Commons last week by Colonel CHURCHILL. His utterance had the effect of instantly lifting that gallant gentleman from the obscurity of life "somewhere in France" to something approaching notoriety. Surely few soldiers have discovered such a gift of dialectical skill; and the Army must feel proud to learn that it possesses an officer who shows himself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... labored and higher finished than any I had seen in the temples; and I stood in astonishment at the high perfection of the art, and its singular destiny to be devoted to places of such silence and obscurity. In working these galleries, beds of a very fine calcareous clay have occasionally been crossed, and here the lines of the hieroglyphics have been cut with a firmness of touch and a precision, of which marble offers but few examples. The figures have elegance and correctness ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... foliage of tree and vine brought a premature gloaming. Outside fell upon the sward the last rays of the setting sun. In the depths of the shadowy leaves the glow-worms displayed their phosphorescent beauty; the lampyrid beetles plied between gloom and obscurity, impatient for the mirror of night to flaunt therein their illumined finery. In the distance was heard the lusty song of the blowsy yokels, as they clumsily carted homeward the day's gathering. The erudite nightingale threw wide the throttle ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... responsibility for creating this era's movement toward biologically sound agriculture. Howard is still well known to organic gardeners, thanks to promotion by the Rodale organization while Price, McCarrison, and Albrecht have faded into obscurity. Albrecht was chairman of the Soil Department at the University of Missouri during the 1930s. His unwavering investigation of soil fertility as the primary cause of health and disease was considered politically incorrect by the academic establishment and vested interests ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of what he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situation—the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... carefully took another ten steps in the obscurity. She stumbled and then counted the three steps. But at the end of the passage Coupeau had opened a door, without knocking. A brilliant light spread over the tiled floor. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... distinguished astronomers of America, particularly the celebrated Mr. Rittenhouse,) but from similar motives to those which induced the editors to give this calculation the preference,—the ardent desire of drawing modest merit from obscurity, and controverting the long-established illiberal prejudice against ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... that I mean to insinuate that the bible contains no moral truth; so far from this, I conceive it to be replete with moral instruction; that is to say, there are excellent moral maxims in the bible; but respecting these there is neither ambiguity nor obscurity; and probably for this plain reason, because there seems to be no dispute about them. These however are none the more true for being written, and would have been equally true if found in any other book, and at the same time not found ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... in a revolt at Astrachan, the vessels were seized and destroyed, and the captain killed. Thus terminated this enterprise. The master builder, however, remained in Russia, where he lived a long time in obscurity. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of sickly yellow light shone for a moment and was then suddenly blotted out by a rolling mass of vapour. The clouds had closed in again once more. The obscurity ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... covers the steep flank of the mountain of Santa Maria, is one of the thickest I ever saw. The trees are of stupendous height and size. Under their bushy, deep green foliage, there reigns continually a kind of dim daylight, a peculiar sort of obscurity, of which our forests of pines, oaks, and beech-trees, convey no idea. Notwithstanding its elevated temperature, it is difficult to believe that the air can dissolve the quantity of water exhaled from the surface ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... the two slopes curved out of the darkness as if hewn in marble. For the sudden storm, which extended scarcely two miles, had left no trace upon the steep granite face of the high cliffs above; the snow, slipping silently from them, left them still hidden in the obscurity of night. In the vanished landscape the gorge alone stood out, set in a chaos of cloud and storm through ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... into the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly, with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would make. The old Signore gave ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... word is dropped on taking a suffix beginning with a vowel: as, blame able blamable; guide ance guidance; come ing coming; force ible forcible; obscure ity obscurity. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... plenty, to a middling fortune; and this is it, which, by growing habitual, wholly turns the scale with those few landed men, disengaged from employments, who content themselves to live hospitably with plenty of good wine in their own country, rather than in penury and obscurity in another, with bad, or with none ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... hundreds of pounds which the neglect of my works costs me in order to be let alone and not plagued by the people who would come round me if I were known. The probability is that I shall remain after my death as obscure as I am now; if this be so, the obscurity will, no doubt, be merited, and if not, my books will work not only as well without my having been known in my lifetime but a great deal better; my follies and blunders will the better escape notice to the enhancing of the value of anything ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... resolved itself into regular harmonies, which could have been written down in musical notation. At times there was also in the air the sense of breathing. On a dark night, standing at my door, I had the sense of a great heart that beat in the obscurity, of a bosom that rose and fell, of a pulse as regular as a clock. I think that the ear must have recovered a fine sensitiveness, normal to it under normal conditions, but lost or dulled amid the deafening roar of towns. ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... Gipsies, often alleged as a parallel, is a ludicrous evasion of the argument. These few and scattered vagabonds, whose very safety has been obscurity and contempt, have never attracted towards them a thousandth part of the attention, or the hundred thousandth part of the cruelties, which have been directed against the Jews. Had it been otherwise, they would long since have melted away from ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... is also the match of Passion, and of Goodness the match is Darkness. There where Darkness is restrained, Passion is seen to flow. There where Passion is restrained, Goodness is seen to flow. Darkness should be known to have the night (or obscurity) for its essence. It has three characteristics, and is (otherwise) called Delusion. It has unrighteousness (or sin) also for its indication, and it is always present in all sinful acts. This is the nature of Darkness and it appears also as confined with others. Passion is said to have activity ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the babe was born—born where most men die: in obscurity. He was so weak and frail that none but the mother ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... foregoing passage is evidently very corrupt and the meaning is by no means plain, but, in the absence of a parallel version, it is impossible to clear up the obscurity of the text. ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... critics (and many of them are personal friends) fell on Salome with all the vigour of their predecessors twelve years before. Unaware of what was taking place in Germany, they spoke of the play as having been 'dragged from obscurity.' The Official Receiver in Bankruptcy and myself were, however, better informed. And much pleasure has been derived from reading those criticisms, all carefully preserved along with the list of receipts which were simultaneously pouring in from the German performances. To do ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... a very retiring, quiet little man, awed into obscurity by his wife. After a long and persistent effort to interest him in conversation, I was compelled to give it up, and to leave him smiling blankly, with his gaze directed toward the ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... read, several days before, about an Italian laborer who had been crushed by a falling column. To one unaccustomed to death in any form that object, head-on in the obscurity of the compartment, had been a trying sight. He began to wonder if it were really cold ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... the town where he was living in obscurity, and followed his movements." Blaine's reply seemed to be purposely irrelevant. "I could not, however, find where he had been on the night of Mr. Lawton's death. Now that he has come to me voluntarily, we shall discover if the ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... now possessed the room, immaterially modified by the light-struck sky beyond the windows. And in this grateful obscurity Nogam permitted himself the luxury of ceasing to be Nogam. A light suddenly flashed upon his face would have discovered a keen and alert intelligence transfiguring the apathetic mask of every day. Also, it would have rendered Nogam's probable duration ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... crushed by the superior genius of the Prince of Orange. Although he vindicated his martial skill at Gemblours, the victory was fruitless. It was but the solitary sprig of the tiger from his jungle, and after that striking conflict his life was ended in darkness and obscurity. Possessing military genius of a high order, with extraordinary personal bravery, he was the last of the paladins and the crusaders. His accomplishments were also considerable, and he spoke Italian, German, French, and Spanish ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "am I constrained to depart!—Why must I talk in riddles! Perhaps we may never see each other more. Perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to clear up the obscurity that at present I am obliged to preserve. But no, it cannot be. I never was happy but for two poor hours that I enjoyed your smiles, and, drinking in the poison of your charms, I forgot myself. The time too soon arrived for bitter recollection. My mistress calls, ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... of the highly-accomplished horse. The various perils to be encountered in the Beneath Parts. The inexplicable journey performed by this one, and concerning the obscurity of ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... Major Andre, at the expense of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The national song Yankee Doodle was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with John Brown's Body and many other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs about its origin. The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as early ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... knight errant—one as mad and as romantic as the most feather-headed Amadis that ever came out of Gaul; and so he is to make himself a deal of trouble and have himself much laughed at before ever he succeeds in slipping through the fingers of this history to seek obscurity with Dorothy by his side. For all that, it is Richard's due to say that his "R. S." letters attracted polite as well as political attention, and got him much respected and condemned. Also they lodged him high in the esteem ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... turned over Pizarro and his enterprise, with his recommendation, to the Council of the Indies. Yet a year passed, and nothing was done. Pizarro was fast sinking into obscurity, and he would likewise have sunk into despair, if he had been less stout of heart. Then, as Queen Isabella had aided Columbus, so the queen of Charles V. came to the assistance of Pizarro, and caused ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... of my difficulty you see already; it is that I dare not write even in cypher, what would save me all the embarrassment of this letter, and you the uneasiness of its obscurity, till I see you. My dear brother, reflect, if it is not too late, upon the opinions we have held in common, upon the judgment we have formed in common, of the rectitude and integrity of some men, and the utter and absolute want of it in others. ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... than whom no author was ever more superstitious and more credulous, at the same time that he terms this privilege one of the most valuable and most noble rights of the church of Rouen,[96] admits that the origin of it is lost in obscurity. He adduces, however, an historical document, to prove its existence during the reign of the Norman Dukes; and, while he candidly states the difference of opinion among learned men on the subject, some of them treating the story as allegorical, others ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... this article. The professor turns the book over and over,—inspects it from plastron to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the wreck of a large ship that had been lost upon the coast. But this story did not satisfy the inquisitive, because not attended with circumstances necessary to establish its credit; and therefore they suggested that, instead of taking away the obscurity by relating the truth, this story was invented in order to hide it more effectually. This suspicion gained ground the more when it was known that the Dutch East India Company from Batavia had made some attempts to conquer a part of the Southern ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... recognizing the marriage, he should stop the woman from pursuing him. If the case kept Carnac out of public life and himself in, then justice would be done; for it was monstrous that a veteran should be driven into obscurity by a boy. In making his announcement he would be fighting his son as though he was a stranger and not of his own blood and bones. He had no personal connection with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of our Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the miserable abodes of savages, we behold the foundations of cities laid, that, in all probability, will rival the glory of the greatest upon earth. And we view Kentucke situated on the fertile banks of the great Ohio, rising from obscurity to shine with splendor, equal to any other of the stars of the ...
— The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone • John Filson
... Robert Gordon, who is a peaceable man, and goes with the times; while the Kerrs are a powerful family, able to put a strong body in the field, and having many powerful friends and connections throughout the country. It is our obscurity which has so far saved you, for Sir John Kerr would crush you without mercy did he dream that you could ever become formidable; and he is surrounded by ruthless retainers, who would at a word from him take your life; therefore think ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... rickety stairs. By this time, the guard had relighted his lantern and was peering cautiously into the hall, evidently fearing a sword thrust from out the darkness. In this instant's hesitation, Garnet gained the loft above. Here the obscurity was less intense, for the waning moon shining through a broken window into a room at his left, enabled him to see his way more distinctly. There was little time for choice of direction, for even now the soldier had commenced to ascend, and Garnet, not venturing to grope further in the ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... banks of Tiber and slew his brother Remus for leaping over his handiwork. The founding of Rome is enveloped in impenetrable clouds of legend; the building of Cumae is a fact:—here then we obtain a key to Italian history. Rome, whose origin is lost in mists of obscurity, is a flourishing modern capital; Cumae is but a shapeless mass of crumbling ruins, overgrown with ivy and cytizus, and inhabited by lizards and serpents. But both cities, dead Cumae and living Rome, present but passing events in the long slow ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... fancy the imperfect way in which my last note was expressed must have led you into an error, and that you must have applied to Mrs. Arnold the remarks I intended for Miss Martineau. I remember whilst writing about "my hostess" I was sensible to some obscurity in the term; permit me now to explain that it referred to ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... escape from the impending destruction seemed possible—then, at the moment of despair, a 'poor wise man' steps to the front (such the quality there is in wisdom), delivers the city, comes forth from his obscurity, shines for a moment, and, lo! the danger past, is again forgotten, and sinks to the silence whence he came. But this the incident proved to me, that where strength is vain, there wisdom shows its excellence, even ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... the narrative, from which I have quoted so freely, was compiled, not more than sixteen of Dundee's veterans were alive. The author concludes thus,—"And thus was dissolved one of the best companies that ever marched under command! Gentlemen, who, in the midst of all their pressures and obscurity, never forgot they were gentlemen; and whom the sweets of a brave, a just, and honourable conscience, rendered perhaps more happy under those sufferings, than the most prosperous and triumphant in iniquity, since our ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... the Parasol is wrapped in considerable obscurity. Some profound investigators have supposed that large leaves tied to the branching extremities of a bough suggested the first idea of the invention. Others assert that the idea was probably derived from the tent, which remains in form unaltered to ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... avoided. But that any man, placed as Mr Broune was in the world,—blessed with power, with a large income, with influence throughout all the world around him, courted, feted, feared and almost worshipped,—that he should desire to share her fortunes, her misfortunes, her struggles, her poverty and her obscurity, was not within the scope of her imagination. There was a homage in it, of which she did not believe any man to be capable,—and which to her would be the more wonderful as being paid to herself. She thought so badly of men and women generally, and of ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... di Crinola at present lived, and where he was at present a member of the Italian Cabinet, the mother had told her son all that she knew, having throughout the telling of the story unconsciously manifested to him her own desire to remain in obscurity, and to bear the name which had been hers for five-and-twenty years; but at the same time so to manage that he should return to England bearing the title to which by his birth she believed him to be entitled. When in discussing this he explained ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... battery, placed just north of the church, had opened; the cavalry in the meadow could see them—see the whirl of smoke, the cannoneers moving with quick precision amidst obscurity—the flash, the recoil as gun after gun jumped back, ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... the house, the wide folding doors of which stood, as usual, invitingly open. But as he did so, and ere his foot reached the threshold, he was confronted by Carlos, who, emerging suddenly from the obscurity of the entrance hall, levelled a revolver straight at the Spaniard's right eye, so that before that individual could recover from his astonishment, he found himself gazing ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... why Patrick Henry, George Johnston of Fairfax, and John Fleming of Cumberland decided to offer the Stamp Act Resolves is lost in obscurity. Our sources are principally Thomas Jefferson, then a college student at William and Mary, Paul Carrington, a pro-Henry burgess from Charlotte County, and an unknown French traveler who stood with Jefferson at the house chamber doors. ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... the gas was lit here and there where burners were available. Over our heads was no arrangement for lighting. We bent lower in semi-obscurity. In the blending of twilight and gaslight the room became mysterious, a shadowy corridor. Figures grew indistinct, softened and blurred. The exhausted air surrounded the gas jets in ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... besets with a hedge of hatred—that men point at with their fingers, and whom the dogs are ready to bay—this Balthazar is the father of that gallant youth, whose form is so perfect, whose spirit is so noble, and whose life so pure; while I, the last of a line that is lost in the obscurity of time, the wealthiest of my land, and the chosen of my peers, am accursed with an outcast, a common brigand, a murderer, for the sole prop of my decaying house—with this Il Maledetto—this man accursed—for ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... can be found in the compass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few words being also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way; allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary without obscurity: (thus, "his present, and your pains, we thank you for" is better than "we thank you for his present and your pains," because the Dauphin's gift is by courtesy put before the Ambassador's pains; ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a window, the light from with out, feeble as it was, shone upon the winding-sheet and the ghost, outlining the figure, which passed into the obscurity to reappear and vanish again at each succeeding one, Roland, his eyes fixed upon the figure, fearing to lose sight of it if he diverted his gaze from it, dared not look at the path, apparently so easy to the spectre, yet bristling with obstacles for him. He stumbled ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively (and in fact "the spirit" ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... after all, was not destined to spend the remainder of its days in the inglorious obscurity of a garret. Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant-governor of the province, was told of Sir Francis Bernard's design. This gentleman was more familiar with the history of New England than any other man alive. He knew all the adventures and vicissitudes ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only gained him a prison from his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first in the great roll of modern science the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... know not whether any one will blame my conduct because I have made a visit here in secret; but I know, Prince, that I never courted obscurity in things which require light. Were I to undertake anything against you, you should have no cause to remark you were surprised. It would depend upon yourself to guard against it; I would take care to warn you beforehand. Meanwhile let us continue upon ordinary terms, and postpone ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... book that deals with a great number of subjects universal in their scope. The writing is at times too paradoxical, leading to obscurity of thought. There are splendid passages in this book, which is, when all is said, brilliantly original, even if at ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... stream brawled and leaped over little boulders green with the water-stain and lichens. There were quiet pools beside the boulders. As they stood by one they saw the fin of a trout in the obscurity. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... lineage, as that he is no common man. Though possessed of talents and eloquence which would speedily have enabled him to attain to an illustrious position in the state, he has hitherto, and perhaps wisely, contented himself with comparative obscurity, chiefly devoting himself to the study of the arts and of literature, of both of which he is ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... where he received the highest honors of a class brilliant with such names as General Joseph E. Johnston; his seizure of the highest honors of a long apprenticeship in that institution, and his abrupt ascension in the Mexican War from obscurity to fame—all are too firmly stamped in the minds of his admirers to require even an allusion. You are too familiar to need a repetition from my lips of that great mental and spiritual struggle passed, not one night, but many, when, abandoning ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... superfluous niceties, or useless speculations; for they often show some propriety of description, or elegance of allusion, utterly undiscoverable to readers not skilled in oriental botany; and are often of more important use, as they remove some difficulty from narratives, or some obscurity from precepts. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... will probably ask why the chemist does not analyze the substances of the fresh material. The answer is that he doesn't know how. Progress is made every year but the whole subject is yet too much clouded in obscurity to be of any practical application. At present the feeding of mineral substance, like the feeding of protein, can best be learned by experimenting directly with the foods rather than by attempting to go ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... to his surprise, he saw his companion and the light gradually disappear, leaving the tunnel in obscurity. ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... than He had theretofore done. His brethren, as the visiting relatives are called, urged that He seek a broader and more prominent field than Galilee for the display of His powers, arguing that it was inconsistent for any man to keep himself in comparative obscurity when he wanted to be widely known. "Shew thyself to the world," said they. Whatever their motives may have been, these brethren of His did not advize more extended publicity through any zeal for His divine mission; ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... admired it prodigiously; and it is unquestionably full of thought expressed with the power of the highest genius. But, on the other hand, its philosophy, even for a Poet or Idealist, is more than disputable, and it incurs the very worst fault which a Poet can commit, viz. obscurity of idea as well as expression. When the Poet sets himself up for the teacher, he must not forget that the teacher's duty is to be clear; and the higher the mystery he would expound, the more pains he should bestow on the simplicity of the elucidation. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... taken from Washington's letters to his most intimate friends, show how little ambitious he was for the fame of statesmanship, and how honestly and eagerly he yearned for the quiet and obscurity of domestic life. At the same time, they reveal the true motives which led the great patriot to enter upon public employment, namely, a sincere love for his country, and a ready willingness to labor for the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... hair alone, as the focus of observation, was depicted with intensity and distinctness, and her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general, being a blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of heat—oppressive not only from its silence, but from the sense of awful, antique forms, whether of art or nature, that were sitting, closely veiled, in that mysterious obscurity. I shuddered as I felt that if my eyes could pierce that mist, or if it should lift and roll away, I should see upon a silent shore low ranges of lonely hills, or mystic figures and huge temples trampled out of history ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... all he claimed to be by his converts there, and the current of his fortunes as a religious leader was suddenly and entirely changed. He was no longer a madman and an impostor. He had come out of his former obscurity, and now all the details of his daily ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... verses no slightest contemporary record of him exists—is, to say the least, extraordinary. There are cogent arguments then on both sides of the question, and there is very little positive proof on either: so we must be content to leave the matter in some doubt and obscurity. ...
— Waltoniana - Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton • Isaak Walton
... like an impatient horse. "Too slow—too slow for me, to wait and wait, as Wordsworth did, through long years of obscurity, misconception, ridicule. No. What I have, I must have at once; and, if it must be, die like Chatterton—if only, like Chatterton, I can have my little day of success, and make the world confess that another priest of the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... great windows of the Court of Assizes, carefully closed as they were, not a ray of moonlight filtered into the court room. And this obscurity lent an added terror to a silence as profound as the grave, a silence which, with the falling shades of night, assumed possession of the vast hall, where so many criminals had listened to the fatal sentence—the sentence ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... speak of me, Francoise. She knew and loved the Countess Alix de Morainville. I know her; she would repel with scorn the wife of the gardener. I am happy in my obscurity. Let nothing remind ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Ralph; then they surged up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. But he felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his side. A series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his mind; then obscurity settled down on it. "THIS man...THIS man..." was the one fiery point in his darkened consciousness.... "What on earth are you talking about?" ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... London. This lady had gone to bed and stopped there for a month at the end of Sir Henry's year of office, in sheer chagrin that "Othello's occupation" was gone, and her crown of glory set upon another's head, while she must retire to the obscurity of Bayswater. Being threatened with acute melancholia, a specialist had advised a change of air; and Lady Meason had begun once more to blossom like a rose—of the fully developed, cabbage order—in the joy of being "one of the most notable, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... undeviating integrity. Let hair-brained enthusiasts prate in their closets as loudly as they please to the contrary, a young adventurer in any walk of life must take advantage of the events and weaknesses of his fellow-mortals, or be content to munch turnip in a cell amidst want and obscurity." Of course, all this is very outrageous, but altogether what we should expect from such "unimproved mettle, hot and full." He abandoned the law, and was among the first men in America to ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... penury must necessarily pass in obscurity. It is impossible to trace Fenton from year to year, or to discover what means he used for his support. He was awhile secretary to Charles, earl of Orrery in Flanders, and tutor to his young son, who afterwards mentioned him with great esteem and tenderness. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... the pulpit. It was only a man's conscience, or a sense of what was due to his physical well-being, which could convict him of slumbering in such a peaceful retreat. It is said that her late Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent objected to the obscurity of this place of worship, and, to meet her objections, the present little chapel ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... the humiliation of her material failure is forgotten in her pride of a finer success. The shame of commercial and civic obscurity is lost in the light of national recognition. And that self-respect and pride of place, without which neither man nor town can look the world in the face, is saved to her by ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... and render them miserable, there are principles of repulsion between them and us, which can never be overcome.' * * 'Their bodies are free, their minds enslaved. They can neither bless their brethren in servitude, nor rise from their own obscurity, nor add to the purity of our morals, nor to our wealth, nor to our political strength.' * * 'Let us recollect that our fathers have placed them here; and that our prejudices, prejudices too deep to be eradicated while they remain among us, have produced the standard of their ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... else is to make his. He does, indeed, conclude his remarks by advocating some scheme; but it has nothing in the world to do with Vanderbilt. He merely wished to prostrate himself before the mystery of a millionaire. For when we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility. Thus, for instance, when a man is in love with a woman he takes special pleasure in the fact that a woman is unreasonable. Thus, again, the very pious poet, celebrating his Creator, takes pleasure in saying that ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... obscurity, in which he passed his early years; with no advantages of education in the schools of his day, after he entered his teens; under the condition of daily toil for his bread; he had carried on, in spite of all obstacles, the process of self-education ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... that is largely hidden from our eyes, from those eyes which are blinded to the reality of spiritual things. Humility and meekness are the qualities of a hidden life; they do not flaunt themselves before men's eyes. But in their silence and obscurity great souls are growing up, growing to the spiritual status of the saints of God. In our estimate of values we shall do well to lay to heart the utterances of WISDOM: "Then shall the righteous man stand in great boldness ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... only a rabble. It was badly trained, rarely paid, and very cowardly; and the scum of the army of the Delta was the cream of the army of the Soudan. The officers remained for long periods, many all their lives, in the obscurity of the remote provinces. Some had been sent there in disgrace, others in disfavour. Some had been forced to serve out of Egypt by extreme poverty, others were drawn to the Soudan by the hopes of gratifying peculiar tastes. The majority had harems of the women of ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... hospitality. One of the old noblesse, and but little acquainted with the practical management of business affairs, he became embarrassed, and was finally compelled to dispose of his elegant house and furniture, and retire to a life of obscurity and poverty. But the city was growing around it rapidly; in a few more years it would be hemmed in and walled around by streets and houses. Mr. Stillinghast fretted and chafed; then calculated its increased value, and grew almost savage at the idea that he would be ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... twilight or gloom lay under the trees. Presently Dale and Roy, disappeared, going downhill, and likewise Bo. Then Helen's ears suddenly filled with a roar of rapid water. Ranger trotted faster. Soon Helen came to the edge of a great valley, black and gray, so full of obscurity that she could not see across or down into it. But she knew there was a rushing river at the bottom. The sound was deep, continuous, a heavy, murmuring roar, singularly musical. The trail was steep. Helen had not lost all feeling, as she had believed and hoped. Her poor, mistreated body still responded ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... cries and groans and crashing volleys. Shells fell everywhere, bursting along the embankment, splashing them with frozen slush. Trent was frightened. He began to dread the unknown, which lay there crackling and flaming in obscurity. The shock of the cannon sickened him. He could even see the fog light up with a dull orange as the thunder shook the earth. It was near, he felt certain, for the colonel shouted "Forward!" and the first battalion was hastening into ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... the French schools of painting, and especially what has been well called "that meretricious breed which continue to depict the Magdalen with the united attractions of Palestine and the Palais Royal." The large pictures which Gros painted during the Empire were consigned to long obscurity at the Restoration. The lives, too, of many of these cultivators of the arts of peace had a tragic close. Haydon's fate made a deep impression in England, because it was an exceptional case; while, of the modern ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the feelings with which we ought to read the Iliad, if we mean to read it as it deserves; and it explains and sets in the true point of view numberless passages, which the ignorance or frivolity of after-times has charged with obscurity, meanness or error. The Old Testament and the Iliad reflect light mutually on each other; and both in respect of poetry and morals (for the whole of Homer's poetry is a praise of virtue, and every thing in him tends to this point, except that which is ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... that besotted —— to let the opera sink into its native obscurity. I did it in a fit of d——ble good nature long ago, for Hullah, who wrote some very pretty music to it. I just put down for everybody what everybody at the St. James's Theatre wanted to say and do, and that they could say and do best, and I have been most sincerely repentant ever since. The farce ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... training And, certainly, the distinction is not always very easily made; for, though sufficient light on this point may often be derived from the antecedents of the individual, yet it is impossible, occasionally, to remove the obscurity in which it is involved. However this may be, it is a warrantable inference from the results of modern inquiry, that the class of cases is not a small one, where the person commits a criminal act, or falls into vicious habits, with a full knowledge of the nature and consequences of his conduct, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... stays. Mrs. Caldwell, with all her deformities, was just as heroic as she knew how to be. She lived for her children to the extent of denying herself the bare necessaries of life for them; and bore poverty and obscurity of a galling kind without a murmur. She scarcely ever saw a soul to speak to. Uncle James Patten and the Benyon family did not associate much with the townspeople, and were not popular in the county; so that Mrs. Caldwell had very few visitors. Of course it was an advantage to be known ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... unexpected likeness. We can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little gray worm: let the poet or the lover of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the palace, and which, from the heads of the animal being carved in relief around them, had become famous as the receptacles of secret accusations under the name of the Lion's Mouths. Something he dropped into the grinning aperture of the marble, though what, the distance and the obscurity of the gallery prevented Gino from perceiving; and then his form was seen gliding like a phantom down the flight ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... was written the weeping and agony were over, the sleeper had awakened, the eyes saw. It was easy then to sing the heroism of rebellious sorrow. But afterwards, while an issue was still doubtful, while the cry of freedom was rising amid the obscurity, the dust, and uncertainty of actual combat, with how blind a scorn did that great poet of freedom pour upon Irishman and Boer a poison as virulent as he had once poured upon the priests and ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... light on the obscurity of the animal worship of antiquity. This explains the partly humanized types, and the final appearance of a human deity with only animal horns remaining, as representing the form under which the deity was once worshipped. The satyrs, centaurs, and other animal forms are all part of these ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... influence over the entrance to the vagina, and in this way correspond to the lips of the mouth after which they are called. They fulfill, however, one very definite though not obviously important function which is indicated by the mythologic name they have received. There is, indeed, some obscurity in the origin of this term, nymphae, which has not, I believe, been satisfactorily cleared up. It has been stated that the Greek name nymphe has been transferred from the clitoris to the labia minora. Any such transfer could only have taken place when the meaning of the word had been forgotten, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a dive into a deeper obscurity and I lost him until I heard his knock. I was glad that he should have knocked with such decent restraint, but all the effect of it was instantly shattered by the response. For at his first subdued rap, a dog with a penetratingly strident bark set up a ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... of poetry and of prose, originated with the Greeks. Their writings are the fountainhead of the literature of Europe. They prized simplicity: they always had an intense disrelish for obscurity and bombast. The earliest poetry of the Greeks consisted of hymns to the gods. It was lyrical, an outpouring of personal feeling. The lyrical type was followed by the epic, where heroic deeds, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... preeminence. And though one can not immediately measure one's self with men who surpass one through ampler resources, growth in an unexpected quarter brings hope of a like good fortune to others that dwell in obscurity. [Footnote: This may come from a speech of M. Terentius Varro in favor of equalizing the powers of dictator and of master-of-horse.](Mai, p. 194.) 16. Rufus, who obtained equal authority with the dictator, after a defeat by the Carthaginians altered his attitude (for disasters chasten somehow those ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... look after the cattle and the horses, whose subdued stamping and champing gave him a sort of animal pleasure. The blended odors of the hay-mows and of the creatures' breaths came to him with the faint warmth which their bodies diffused through the cold obscurity. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of a stream as clear when we think of the water itself; we speak of it as transparent with reference to the ease with which we see the pebbles at the bottom. Clear is also said of that which comes to the senses without dimness, dulness, obstruction, or obscurity, so that there is no uncertainty as to its exact form, character, or meaning, with something of the brightness or brilliancy implied in the primary meaning of the word clear; as, the outlines of the ship were clear against the sky; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... had full freedom of entrance in the daytime, and special license, on one occasion at least, at a late hour of the night. She went thither with a dark-lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above Shakespeare's grave. If the divine poet really wrote the inscription there, and cared as much about the quiet ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the time we reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away under the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in a hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of them great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such depths of ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... old castles or churches, or ancient buildings, and is quite different from the black of ordinary darkness. Through the open door came just one shaft of sunshine, in which the specks of dust seemed to float and flutter like living things. Overhead the great beams of the roof were lost in dim obscurity; very old and rough they were, and covered with a mass of cobwebs, among which Cicely declared she could see bats hanging head downwards, with folded wings, though Lindsay said it was all ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... one of the leading considerations with the beginner in composition. He must avoid all obscurity and ambiguous phrases. If he write a sentence or phrase and see that a meaning might be inferred from it otherwise than intended, he should re-write it in such a way that there can be no possible doubt. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... remained in South Carolina did not sink into actual obscurity or harmless inactivity ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... over the map of Lombardy. The "Representatives," however, had certainly taken up a general prejudice against him; for he did not reassume his functions at Nice; and seems to have spent some time in obscurity with his own family, who were then in very distressed circumstances, at Marseilles. It was here that he fell in love with Mademoiselle Clery, whom, but for some accident, it appears he would have married. Her sister was shortly afterwards united to his brother Joseph, and she herself became in the ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... the air and shrouded all the surrounding buildings in dull obscurity; while the fountains, rising and falling with an odd and ghostly movement as of gigantic living creatures, were seen dimly white in the midst of the gray gloom. The ceaseless stream of hurrying passers-by lost itself in darkness only a few paces from them. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... been an illusion, he once more opened his eyes, but in the obscurity he could see nothing. Again he shut them closely and listened as before. This time he listened with more success. A sound regularly cadenced was heard. It was such as would be made by a pair of oars cautiously dipped, and was accompanied ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... stumbled forward through the thick obscurity he continued his personal revelations, the present enterprise having roused whatever there was of sentiment slumbering in his soul. At last they came out on a wide bayou; a white mist hung above it, and on the low shore leaf and branch ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... however, slow, burdened with the care of the lame girl, and heavily laden with the fish. The purple shades of twilight soon clouded the scene, deepened by the heavy masses of foliage, which cast a greater degree of obscurity upon their narrow path; for they had now left the oak-flat and entered the gorge of the valley. The utter loneliness of the path, the grotesque shadows of the trees, that stretched in long array across the steep banks on either side, taking, now this, ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... concealing the lower part of his face, and a silk hat pushed down almost over his eyes. I saw his little nervous glance up and down the street, I saw him push past the commissionnaire as though in a hurry to gain the semi-obscurity of the car. I stopped short upon the pavement, motionless for one brief and fatal moment. Then I turned back and hastened to the side of the car. I knocked ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you so ill and unhappy!" and she made a gesture of protest and distress whose strong effect was only intensified by the obscurity. "I had hoped—you led ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... of death and silence there was no invasion—there had been no retreat. A few of the wounded had been brought out, under fire, but the others had been left with the dead for the morning light and succor. For it was known that in that horrible obscurity, riderless horses, frantic with the smell of blood, galloped wildly here and there, or, maddened by wounds, plunged furiously at the intruder; that the wounded soldier, still armed, could not always distinguish friend from foe or from ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... leaves as green as those of our grasses. According to the experiments of Bouguer, light is weakened after a passage of 180 feet in the ratio of 1 to 1477.8. The seaweed of Alegranza consequently presents a new example of plants which vegetate in great obscurity without becoming white. Several germs, enveloped in the bulbs of the lily tribes, the embryo of the malvaceae, of the rhamnoides, of the pistacea, the viscum, and the citrus, the branches of some subterraneous plants; in short, vegetables transported into mines, where the ambient air contains ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... you despise everything that can make you worthy to reign after me. What you call inability, I call rebellion, for you cannot excuse yourself on the ground of the weakness of your mind and the state of your health. We have struggled from obscurity through the toil of war, which has taught other nations to know and respect us, and yet you will not even hear of military exercises. If you do not alter your conduct, know that I shall deprive you of my succession. ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... patience is required to clear up their numerous and obscure allusions. The best extant specimen is the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius; the most characteristic is the Alexandra or Cassandra of Lycophron, the obscurity of which ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is like the veiled sun, which tires the eyes far more than its most brilliant rays. In the semi-obscurity which still enveloped her misfortune, the poor woman's sight was keener than she could have wished. Now she understood and accounted for certain peculiar circumstances in her husband's life, his frequent absences, his restlessness, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... attained that union of miraculously balanced form, sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling with a degree of sheer strength that keeps the expression of the main thought lucid, and the surface of the music, so to speak, calm, when obscurity might have been anticipated, and some roughness and storm and stress excused. "Faith displays her rosy wing" is an absolutely perfect instance of a Handel song. Were not the thing done, one might believe it impossible to express with such simplicity—four ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Majesty's Government." The advice of the Minister Sung, who was suspected of sympathy with the foreigners, was much discredited, and from a position of power and influence he gradually sank into one of obscurity and impotence. This was especially unfortunate at a moment when several foreign powers were endeavoring to obtain a footing at Pekin. The Russian emperor, wishing no doubt to emulate the English, sent, ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... hear this announcement of a girlish mastery of his life's work. She tried to think in what dry words he would have rebuked the levity, but before she could arrange a phrase quite in character, they were in the front of the box, and in the obscurity some one took her hand, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... executed with consummate skill, and the leading ranks of the enemy were broken, thrown into confusion, and forced back on the succeeding squadrons by the impetuous charge. The cry spread that the garrison had made a sally; the obscurity of evening was commencing, the Goths commenced their retreat; and Belisarius and his wearied troops were at last allowed to enter Rome. In this desperate encounter, their respective enemies allowed that Belisarius was the bravest of the Romans, and Wisand of the Goths. The Roman general ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... bottom of the dingle. It was nearly involved in obscurity. To dissipate the feeling of melancholy which came over my mind, I resolved to kindle a fire; and having heaped dry sticks upon my hearth, and added a billet or two, I struck a light and soon produced a blaze. Sitting down, I fixed my eyes upon the blaze, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... traverse, as it is called (that is, a temporary screen of boards), to be drawn along the under part of the anteroom, a few feet from the door, so as to separate the place stained with the blood from the rest of the apartment, and involve it in considerable obscurity. Now this temporary partition still exists, and, by running across and interrupting the plan of the roof and cornices, plainly intimates that it has been intended to serve some temporary purpose, since it disfigures the proportions of the room, interferes ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... portion of our country is veiled in the deepest obscurity. Here we shall have the free-thinking German, the bigoted Roman Catholic, the atheistic Frenchman, and the latitudinarian Yankee, in one grand heterogeneous conglomeration of nations and ideas such as the world has never seen. Whether these ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... studied some of the wild theories propounded in the name of science concerning the history of life on the South American continent. There is, however, one serious criticism to be made on Haseman: the extreme obscurity of his style—an obscurity mixed with occasional bits of scientific pedantry, which makes it difficult to tell whether or not on some points his thought is obscure also. Modern scientists, like modern ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the nave is a brass rule, inlaid diagonally from the north to the south wall. Its original use appears to be clothed in some obscurity, one informative person stating that it is the line of departmental division, and another that it marks the meridian of Paris, which is shown on all French navigation charts. Its real purpose is evidently topographical rather than ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Great Isabella, and adopted in all the churches, the faithful of Toledo still wished to preserve that form of ritual which they had practised for many centuries. Although this portion of Spain's ecclesiastical history is wrapt in great obscurity, and has given rise to many disputes among learned men, yet it is certain that in order to decide between that authority which wished to extinguish those remains of antiquity, and the people who desired to preserve them, recourse was had ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... on the positions which Beautrelet had won for him. He did not move a step forward. Around the individual whom Mlle. de Saint-Veran had taken for Beautrelet, on the eve of the crime, the same mystery reigned as heretofore. The same obscurity also surrounded everything connected with the removal of the four Rubens pictures. What had become of them? And what road had been taken by the motor car in which they were carried ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... Gospel they anticipate "an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away." Are they now clothed in wretched attire?—they may expect to be adorned with "white robes" and "a crown of glory." Are they now in a state of obscurity—their names unknown—their condition mean and despised?—hereafter they shall have a "name better than of sons and daughters;" they shall "shine as the brightness of the firmament," and "as the stars, for ever and ever." Is their condition on earth eminently "the house ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... rolled away, causing the hearer to shudder through his whole being, she seemed to sink into the tomb from which for a brief moment she had risen. As the echoes slowly ceased to vibrate along the vaulted roofs, the church, made luminous by the music, fell suddenly into profound obscurity. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Broune was in the world,—blessed with power, with a large income, with influence throughout all the world around him, courted, feted, feared and almost worshipped,—that he should desire to share her fortunes, her misfortunes, her struggles, her poverty and her obscurity, was not within the scope of her imagination. There was a homage in it, of which she did not believe any man to be capable,—and which to her would be the more wonderful as being paid to herself. She thought so badly of men and women generally, and of Mr Broune and herself as a man and a woman ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... disappointment, he believed that the world had now no charms for him, and that in future his existence would be little better than a long sad bore. He looked back upon his career of gaudy magnificence without regret, and felt like a blase butterfly, who would gladly return to the sober obscurity of the chrysalis. He found that wealth and station, though they might command the admiration of the world, could not insure him happiness; and he thought how readily he would resign all the gifts and glories which Fortune had showered on him for the joyous hope, could he dare to indulge it, of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... At first I did not dare to appear too frequently in the street which was the centre of my interest, but a dangerous fascination led me to become bolder and more adventurous as I became familiar with the surroundings. From under the obscurity of arches and from behind pillars I noted daily who entered the doors of the new firm, and endeavored to get an idea of the amount of business that it transacted. In this respect I was somewhat disappointed, for although customers were by no means lacking, there ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... distinction, or to sanctify ignorance and vice with the name of hereditary authority. He who has most zeal and ability to promote public felicity, let him be the servant of the public. This is the only line of distinction drawn by nature. Leave the bird of night to the obscurity for which nature intended him, and expect only from the eagle to brush the clouds with his wings and look boldly in ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... dear man. What a mess I am in, writing papers which cannot pay their own way! Pauper papers, in fact, which must go to the workhouse for support. Ugh! Has the Caffre War paper shared the same fate? and the Language paper too? Here I have two by me, which I will keep in their native obscurity. One is on the South African Boers and slavery, in which I show that their church is, and always has been, the great bulwark of slavery, cattle-lifting, and Caffre-marauding; and I correct the mistaken views of some writers who describe the Boers as all that is good, and of others ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... into the shoes and boots took to flight at the interruption; and as we were conscious that in the depth of our meditations we might have been rudely staring at the old lady for half an hour without knowing it, we took to flight too, and were soon immersed in the deepest obscurity of the adjacent 'Dials.' ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... chastened, taught wisdom by adversity. The Puritan spirit would reign once more in the land, and an age of penitence and Lenten self-abasement would succeed the orgies of the Restoration; while the light loves of Whitehall, the noble ladies, the impudent actresses, would vanish into obscurity. Angela's loyal young heart was full of faith in the King. She was ready to believe that his sins were the sins of a man whose head had been turned by the sudden change from exile to a throne, from poverty to wealth, from dependence upon his Bourbon cousin and his friends in ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... as I can recollect, the first clergyman of our church who has suffered publick execution for immorality; and I know not whether it would not be more for the interest of religion to bury such an offender in the obscurity of perpetual exile, than to expose him in a cart, and on the gallows, to all who for any reason are enemies ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... every other people has been, and is still esteemed of so vast magnitude, and deep interest, as to have induced, and still to induce them to pour forth funds from their treasuries unsparingly, to aid the historians in removing, if possible, the veil that conceals in dark obscurity ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... under the Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... strength, address and valour; the truth being that he was not at all resigned and would infinitely liefer have been left out of the limelight. The more he was represented as a person of consequence, the less fair his chance to study these others at his leisure, in the comfortable obscurity of their indifference. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... pleaded as an excuse for withholding them altogether. Because men can do so little, they do nothing. It was the servant who had received only one talent that wrapped his lord's money in a napkin, and buried it in useless, unprofitable obscurity. When the multitudes hungered in the wilderness, the disciples hesitated to bring the five barley loaves and two small fishes, asking, "What are they among so many?" They were taught, however, to produce their little all, utterly inadequate as it was to the exigencies of the case, ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... either hand, and Sir Guy deemed it wiser to move at a reasonable pace, for fear of attracting suspicion in a neighborhood already aroused by rumors of the man-hunt which had begun. They could count upon the obscurity ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the soul can be, distinct from the body. As if, forsooth, they could comprehend what it is, when it is in the body,—its conformation, its magnitude, or its position there.... To me, when I consider the nature of the soul, there is far more difficulty and obscurity in forming a conception of what the soul is while in the body,—in a dwelling where it seems so little at home,—than of what it will be when it has escaped into the free atmosphere of heaven, which seems its natural abode".[1] And as the poet seems to us inspired, as the gifts of memory and ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... extinguished, the castle stood there in the semi-obscurity of night like a black, old-world ruin. It stood right in front of the moon which was now climbing up behind its bastions and where its light fell upon two opposite windows which met together in a corner room it shone through them both and lighted up the whole apartment. This room ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... friend, in a tone of deprecation. "The lightest sense of wrong gains undue magnitude the moment we begin to complain. We see almost anything to be of greater importance when from the obscurity of thought we bring it out ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... evident that Burke's mind was at this period turned to authorship, and that his chief quarrel arose from the petty and pragmatical demand of Hamilton, that he should abandon it altogether. Burke soon had ample revenge, if it was to be found in the obscurity into which Hamilton rapidly fell, and the burlesque which alone revived his name from its obscurity. The contrast between the two must have been a lesson to the vanity of the one, as pungent as was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... seaman's dress. I did not much like the look of the forepeak, into which Peter introduced me, telling me that it was to be my house and home for the next few years of my life. I had been accustomed to the dingy obscurity of an Irish cabin, but never had I been, I thought, in a more dark and gloomy ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... a succeeding age, though his first writings attracted considerable attention during the life of Addison, who first raised him from obscurity. He is the greatest, after Dryden, of all the second class poets of his country. His Rape of the Lock, the most original of his poems, established his fame. But his greatest works were the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Dunciad, and his Essay ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... of Cheops, though commenced in 3733 B.C., is not the oldest monument in Egypt; the step pyramid of Sakkara is of earlier date, while the origin of the sphinx is lost in obscurity. The pyramid, however, is of immense size, and leaves an abiding impression upon the minds of everyone who has seen it, or climbed its rugged sides. Figures convey little, I am afraid, but when I tell you that each of its sides was originally 755 feet in ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... members of Parliament, to the cause of the cardinal, and to prejudice them against the queen. All the enemies of Marie Antoinette, the legitimists even, who saw their old rights of nobility encroached upon by the preference given to the Polignacs and other families which had sprung from obscurity; the party of the royal princes and princesses, whom Marie Antoinette had always offended, first because she was an Austrian, and later because she had allowed herself to win the love of the king; the men of the agitation and freedom party, who thundered ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... engine-room, groping among floating and sunken objects, into a remote state-room, the Acheron of the cavernous hold. He was to find by touch a seaman's chest; handle it in that thickening gloom; carry it, push it, move it through that labyrinthine obscurity to a point from which it could be raised. To add immeasurably to the intricacy of this undertaking, there was the need of carrying his life-line and air-hose through all that entanglement and obscurity. Three times in that horror of thick ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity. Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were of a harsh flatness. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... fields enjoys a degree of peace and happiness that those favoured by birth or fortune would envy. Disease visits poor and rich alike; moral suffering is more especially the appanage of the so-called higher classes, and if obscurity and poverty render certain troubles specially severe, wealth and rank play the same role in afflictions of another kind; there is a dark side to every picture. More than this, inequality of condition is one of the fundamental factors of social equilibrium; ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... been quite correct in her surmise that Kenwick was shamming, though this was merely based on general theories. Not only did he see her as she emerged with Geoffry Daymond from the comparative obscurity of the stone lion's neighbourhood, but he had been for some moments furtively watching them both, himself lost to view in the crowd about the band-stand. She would have been surprised indeed if she could have guessed ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... their defence and for the extirpation of heresy, the planting of the Catholic religion, the delivery of our country of infinite murders, wicked and detestable policies by which this kingdom was hitherto governed, nourished in obscurity and ignorance, maintained in barbarity and incivility, and consequently of infinite evils which were too lamentable to be rehearsed. And seeing these are motives most laudable before any men of consideration, and before the Almighty most meritorious, which ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... in thought. During the life of the rector, I had often been told that the law was the road to honour; and when at the university, being eager to secure this said honour to myself, I had laboriously read some of the civilians. I say laboriously, for the task was far from inviting. The obscurity of their terms, the contradictions I thought I discovered, and the voluminous perplexity in which the whole was ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... each other. Indeed, they lived together in Ninth Street, in a boarding-house, there, which had the honor of lodging and partially feeding several other young fellows of like kidney, who have since gone their several ways into fame or into obscurity. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... forward towards her with a stifled, incipient appeal above this bed, which is changing into a tomb. The border of the tragic dress has fallen again, but I cannot remove my eyes from that profound obscurity. I look at Marie, and look at her again; and though I knew her, it seems to me that I ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... rescue for a moment the account of Mr. Cecil's invention from the obscurity into which it has fallen—obscurity which the ingenuity of the ideas embodied in this machine does not merit. It is probable that in addition to the imperfections of his machinery, Mr. Cecil suffered from the difficulty of obtaining ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... acknowledgement seems to have reached its author from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only gained him a prison from his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first in the great roll of modern science ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... notions of ambition being overturned, he was more than once on the point of killing himself, and for a long time was always kept in sight by his friends. He sold out at the end of the campaign. As he had been gentle and polite to his friends, they did not desert him. But he ever afterwards remained in obscurity. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... three that when this faint note, almost like the sigh of the wind among the wet trees, reached their ears, they said nothing, but merely stopped and in the obscurity glanced at one another with eyes of understanding. They listened patiently, and the low, plaintive howl came again and then once more, all from different points of the compass. There had been a time when Henry Ware was deceived for a moment ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... intervals he now had neuritis and a limp to distract his mind; also his former brother-in-law with professions of esteem and respect and a tendency to borrow. And drunk or sober he had the Ariani. But the house that Youth had built in the tinted obscurity of an old New York parlour—no, he didn't have that; and even memory of it were wellnigh gone had not Constance Palliser spoken from the shadows of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... the troubles that existed between Henry IV. and his eldest son and successor, Shakspeare's Prince Hal, is involved in much obscurity. It used to be taken for granted that the poet's Prince was an historical character, but that is no longer the case,—Falstaff's royal associate being now regarded in the same light in which Falstaff himself is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... rapid travelling a great darkness had begun to envelope them, and obscurity so pall-like that even near objects were seen as it were through ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... crowded theaters which had been her earlier experiences. But the dark storm cloud was soon to pass over, and henceforth almost unbroken sunshine was to attend Mary Anderson's career. For her there was to be no heart-breaking period of mean obscurity, no years of dull unrequited toil. She burst as a star upon the theatrical world, and a star she has remained to this day, because, through all her successes, she never for a moment lost sight of the fact that she could only maintain her ground by patient study, ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... the ground-work of these volumes have long been kept in the obscurity of manuscript: my studies of South America, of Syria and Palestine, of Iceland, and of Istria, left me scant time for the labour of preparation. Leisure and opportunity have now offered themselves, and I avail myself of them in the hope that the publication will be found useful to more ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Ammon as related in the Old Testament is not free from obscurity, due to the uncertain date of the various references and to the doubt whether the individual details belong to the particular period to which each is ascribed. (See further MOAB.) From the Assyrian inscriptions we learn that the Ammonite king Ba'sa (Baasha) (son) of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... meditated on the subject, so as to contribute as much as I can to the explanation of this department of Natural Science, which, not without reason, is reputed to be one of its most difficult parts. I recognize myself to be much indebted to those who were the first to begin to dissipate the strange obscurity in which these things were enveloped, and to give us hope that they might be explained by intelligible reasoning. But, on the other hand I am astonished also that even here these have often been willing to offer, as assured and demonstrative, reasonings which were far ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... Spenser is wrapt in a similar obscurity to that which hides from us his great predecessor Chaucer, and his still greater contemporary Shakspere. As in the case of Chaucer, our principal external authorities are a few meagre entries in certain official documents, and such facts as may be gathered from ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... glossily ringletted and monumentally breastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of George Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Ripley and Charles Dana and N. P. Willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative obscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. Bryant, Washington Irving and E. A. Poe—the last-named of whom I cite not so much because he was personally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him) as by reason of that predominant lustre ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... were enshrined in the heart of poor Mrs Leather, and not a few of these—painted by the hand of May—hung on the walls of their little sitting-room, but the word to which she turned her eyes in seasons of profoundest obscurity, and which served her as a sheet-anchor in the midst of the wildest storms, was, "Hope thou in God, for thou shalt yet praise Him." And alongside of that text, whenever she thought of it or chanced to look at it, there invariably flashed another: ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth."—Zech., vi, 5. Now if this were rendered "which go forth to stand," &c., it is plain that these prepositions would express quite opposite relations. Yet, probably from some obscurity in the original, the Greek version has been made to mean, "going forth to stand;" and the Latin, "which go forth, that they may stand;" while the French text conveys nearly the same sense as ours,—"which go forth from ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the familiar proverb about fools and dead men, and observed that there was great obscurity surrounding the real sources of evil in our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... from the obscurity in which for years he has been wrapped and has become a topic of conversation, a link with the past, a popular alien enemy and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various
... man's failures and successes, history is an inspiring thing. Perhaps of the history of no country is this so true as of that of ours. By far the larger part of our great men have started at the very bottom of the ladder, in poverty and obscurity, and have fought their way up round by round against all the forces of society. Nowhere else have inherited wealth and inherited position counted for so little as in America. Again, we have had no wars of greed or ambition, unless the war with Mexico could be so called. We have, at least, had no ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... the circumstances of the two nations, Spain was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quickly lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... and yet, stronger than before, was the certainty that someone was near at hand, that a pair of eyes were regarding him through the obscurity of the night. So strong was the emotion, and so strongly did it recall the emotion of a few nights ago when he had felt the influence of a strange woman's eyes, that he leaped to his feet. On the instant he half expected to see Zoraida ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connexion between its several parts. I am myself as little able to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as these critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my original design, and then leave the reader to judge ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... black, because they were out of the shadow of the ship. The landing boat turned—but there was no sensation of centrifugal force—and they were in a vast obscurity with merely a dim phantom of the planetary surface to be seen. But behind them a blue-white sun shone terribly. Its light was warm—hot—even though it came through ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... upon her sister. Her character was a complex one which I had failed always to analyse, and it seemed just then as though her endeavour was to free her sister of all the responsibilities of her married life. She had made that effort once before, prior to the tragedy, but its motive was hidden in obscurity. ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... the life of the Church, the law of continuous organic development. It shared the vicissitudes of the Church, and had its part in everything which influences the course and mode of her existence. In early times it grew in silence and obscurity, its features were rarely and imperfectly distinguishable; but even then the Popes exerted their authority in all directions, and while the wisdom with which it was exercised was often questioned, the right itself was undisputed. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... observe." And with a courage which did him credit, he, after some time, suppressed his fear, and felt in the pocket of his game-bag for two balls, which, with trembling hands, he slipped into his gun. After this he again looked out, and reconnoitred the movements of the enemy; but so great was the obscurity, that he could discover nothing—unless, indeed, it was a dark mass which walked and jumped hither and thither, rolled, frolicked, and rejoiced in his refreshing bath. The heart of the Parisian was greatly agitated, and beat as if it would split his flannel ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... more interesting and clearer than his theories about it. I once heard him give a combination reading-lecture, and after he had read some of his poems, all of which are free from obscurity, he began to explain his ideas on how poetry should be written. He did this with charming modesty, but his "explanations" were opaque. After he had continued in this vein for some time, he asked the audience which they would prefer to him do ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... again under such conditions made him forget, for the moment, the role she was to play—a part he particularly detested. Truly he was the most fortunate and distinguished of men—to be thus taken by the hand and lifted from nameless obscurity to the most desired position beside a ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... truths by dramatic fictions represented in public. The great and good PILPAY the fabulist, is said to have used that kind of exhibition as a medium for conveying political instruction to a despotic prince, his master, to whom he dared not to utter the dictates of truth, in any other garb. In the obscurity of those remote ages, the evidences of particular facts are too faintly discernible to be relied upon: All that can be assumed as certain, therefore, is that the elementary parts of the dramatic art had then ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... ours; and the citizens of greater states, Athens, even Rome itself, indulged in the same pleasing thought. Our only means of judging of the future is the past. We see that nations have sprung from obscurity, risen to glory, and decayed. Their rise has in general been marked by virtue; their decadence by vice, vanity, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... time, the last hopes of the House of Stuart were now destroyed; the Pretender himself was languishing in Italy, where he shortly after died: and his son, a slave to the vices which seemed hereditary in that family, was consuming his life in an unpitied and ignominious obscurity. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... morning or white, a gloom rested always on the singers' gallery, cast by the tower upon the south side, that stood apart from the main building, connected only by the porch roof, as by an isthmus. And upon eyes used to this comparative obscurity the nave produced the effect of a bright parterre of flowers, especially in those days when all the women wore scarlet cloaks, to scare the French if they should invade. Zeb's gaze, amid the turmoil of sound, hovered around one such cloak, rested on a slim back resolutely turned ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this gross earthly body, the spirituous body which accompanieth it (as its vehicle) must needs go away fouled and incrassated with the vapours and steams thereof, till the soul afterwards by degrees purging itself, this becometh at length a dry splendour, which hath no misty obscurity nor casteth any shadow." Here it will be seen, we lose sight of the specific difference of the two future vehicles—the ethereal is regarded as a sublimation of the aerial. This, however, is opposed to the general consensus of Plato's commentators. Sometimes the ethereal ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... agrarian laws, will be found sufficient for all practical purposes. After all the researches that have been made, the true origin of the Latin people, and even of the Roman city, is involved in impenetrable obscurity; the legendary traditions collected by the historians are, however, the best guides that we can now follow; but it would be absurd to bestow implicit credit on all the accounts they have given, and the editor has, therefore, pointed out the ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... hugely, the candidate must be able to keep up with him; and to have a sponge stomach equal to the absorption of quarts, and even of gallons, is a piece of excellent good fortune for the man who is fool enough to want to go to Congress, instead of enjoying the delights of obscurity. Verily, he has his reward. He who suffers in the gin-mills of New York may recover himself in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2., No. 32, November 5, 1870 • Various
... memorable night in question, there was a good deal of fog driving over the ocean to increase the obscurity. This rendered Daggett doubly cautious, and he actually hauled up close to the wind, heading off well to the westward, in order to avoid running in among the bergs, in greater uncertainty than the circumstances would seem to require. Of course Roswell followed the movement; and when the moon ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... up the narrow stairs from the door, and came into the tubes of galleries all closed from the congregation, and there, sitting down in the obscurity, the preacher passed his ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... fifteen years later when the brethren of the little Community of San Ambrogio gathered in their chapel to sing the requiem over their founder and first General, Father Denfili, who died, old and blind, after twenty years of retirement into obscurity. But there were more than his brethren there. For all those years he had occupied, day after day, the solitude of a little confessional in the chapel. He had had his penitents there, and, in a general way, the brethren ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... alone "Faust" may rank as a great drama; but it is the result of Goethe's broodings on the mystery of human life, shadowed forth in the symbolic parts and elaborated with still greater complexity and still more far-reaching suggestiveness—and, it must be added, with deepening obscurity—in the Second Part, that have given the work its place with "Job," with the "Prometheus Bound," with "The Divine Comedy," and ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... night toward the end of the month, no rain falling now, but the sky sagging low with a weight of cloud. An eye trained to such obscurity could have made out the landscape in looming degrees of darkness, masses rising against levels, the fields a shade lighter than the trees. These were discernible as huddlings and blots and caverned blacknesses ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... in the city, and the streets wind about so much, that it is no easy matter to find the way, especially dark as it then was. Here and there only a light gleamed forth from some artisan's workshop, making the obscurity in other places still more dense. At last I recognised a building I had seen in the morning, and knew that Master Overton's house was not far on one side of it. I hastened on and knocked. A voice told me to come in, and I saw ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... this able analytical chemist, an analysis of the food of the young drones and workers. A comparison of its elements with those of the royal jelly, may throw some light on subjects as yet involved in obscurity. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... first time, she was conscious of an ardent desire to know who her parents had been. Over this question she pondered often and long. She could do nothing more—except pray. And pray she did. She asked that, if it were right and best, the cloud of obscurity might be lifted from her earlier years. And yet, as day by day she persisted in this prayer, she had a feeling that the prayer itself, and the desire from which it proceeded, might, perhaps, constitute a species of disloyalty to the only parents she seemed ever to have known. To this feeling ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... occupied, they lived in the obscurity of an eternal twilight, and could travel only by guess-work. They had no guide save the sun, which in these shadows is never visible. Through the thick foliage overhead its disc could not be seen; nor aught that would enable them to determine its position in the sky, and along ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... himself lying in the dark where somebody was bathing his brows with a damp cloth. His head ached a great deal and he lay for a moment without opening his eyes, aware of soft fingers, the touch of which seemed to soothe the pain immeasurably. He opened his eyes to the semi-obscurity of a small room furnished with the cot on which he lay, a table and two chairs. It was all very comfortable and cozy, but the most agreeable object was the face of Marishka Strahni, not a foot from his own. Through eyes dimmed by pain he thought he ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... inexpressibly delightful yet solemn in my feelings as I gazed into that profound obscurity where the great tree-stems and the wild gigantic foliage nearest to me appeared ghost-like and indistinct, and the deep solitudes of which were peopled, not only with the strange fantastic forms ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... the public. The princes and nobles who had enriched themselves by all kinds of juggles and extortions, escaped unpunished, and retained the greater part of their spoils. Many of the "suddenly rich," who had risen from obscurity to a giddy height of imaginary prosperity, and had indulged in all kinds of vulgar and ridiculous excesses, awoke as out of a dream, in their original poverty, now made more galling and ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... until we have lost or known the dread of losing a love so vast and glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if a man who has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by his own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if by some incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the woman with whom he hoped to know the same felicity makes it clear that it will never be revived for him; if, with the sweetness of divine love still on his lips, he has dealt a deadly wound to her, his wife in truth, whom he forsook for a social chimera,—then he must ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... who spouts forth books as the dolphin at my side does water, may do so. I shall not envy him. But first look at Didymus's ally and panegyrist. There he stands opposite to me. It would have been better for him had the dolphin at his feet taught him silence. Then he might have remained in the obscurity which befits him. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are complex and fascinating because their study leads into many channels and far into the obscurity of the childhood of the human race. A glimpse of them is important in a survey of the influence of artificial light upon the progress of civilization because in these usages the innate and acquired impressiveness of light is encountered. Although many ceremonial ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... completion and confirmation without any great obstacle. The Carlovingian, Charles of Lorraine, vainly attempted to assert his rights; but after some gleams of success, he died in 992, and his descendants fell, if not into obscurity, at least into political insignificance. In vain, again, did certain feudal lords, especially in Southern France, refuse for some time their adhesion to Hugh Capet. One of them, Adalbert, count of Perigord, has remained almost famous for having made to Hugh Capet's ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of our situation, looking back on to the irrevocable and forward to the unknown? If a poet has said, or done, or been any of these things to an appreciable extent, to charge him with obscurity is both ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... tribute which they had engaged to pay the Africans, for the territory which had been ceded to them.(575) This conduct does them no honour, as the settlement was granted them upon condition of their paying a tribute. One would be apt to imagine, that they were desirous of covering the obscurity of their original, by abolishing this proof of it. But they were not successful on this occasion. The Africans had justice on their side, and they prospered accordingly; the war being terminated by the payment ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... cry; although we were in comparative obscurity, the ridges of the Cordilleras seemed ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... He dreamed of becoming a popular barrister, of winning fame and renown, of gaining a name throughout the country as a brilliant lawyer and a pleader of eloquence and power. Like every other young law student he had read of famous lawyers who had risen from obscurity to renown, from poverty to wealth. His career at the University had assured him that he had more than average abilities, while his speeches at the Oxford Union had been received with so much applause that he knew he had the gift of public speech ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... where the metaphysical equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are answered by, the half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that even where our touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not initiated in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only impenetrable obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just indicated that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe his thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know, when they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although, therefore, the praise of friends ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... thence called the hall of Ambassadors. It still bears the traces of past magnificence. The walls are richly stuccoed and decorated with arabesques, the vaulted ceilings of cedar wood, almost lost in obscurity from its height, still gleam with rich gilding and the brilliant tints of the Arabian pencil. On three sides of the saloon are deep windows, cut through the immense thickness of the walls, the balconies of which look down upon ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... honours of royalty? Other kings had been eager to crown their consorts: but Elizabeth had now been married a year and a half; she had borne the king a son to succeed to the throne; and yet she was kept in obscurity, as if ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... there's this difference now,—I've seen in my own home, and I see daily more and more in my own heart, abundance to convince me that the Bible is God's truth. So now, when I meet with a difficulty, I see that the obscurity is not in the Bible but in myself; in ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... prohibiting entry to Courance. Then passed into oblivion Raoul Boismonard du Guesclin, count de Courance. The last descendant of the warlike constable, the only representative of a long line of soldiers and statesmen, closed his life in impenetrable obscurity, and with him one of the great historic families of the realm disappears ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... is certain, in respect of the lot of the decent poor, that a great deal of superfluous pity is often thrown away upon it. Good-natured fine folks, who sometimes stepped out of the sunshine of their riches into a narrow obscurity, were blinded as it were, whilst we could see quite cheerfully and clearly: they stumbled over obstacles which were none to us: they were surprised at the resignation with which we drank small beer, and that we could heartily say grace over ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was sitting as motionless as a statue in the trail behind them, the form of himself and animal clearly outlined in the obscurity. He had not spoken nor stirred since the coming of the girl. The head of the steed was high, but beyond and above it loomed the head and shoulders of the man sitting upright, like an officer of dragoons. The gloom prevented a fair view of his countenance, but Nellie fancied he was of pleasing ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... edifying product of medieval art with which I have been dealing. When I look back upon my own work, and formulate the impression left upon my mind by familiarity with the songs I have translated, the doubt occurs whether some apology be not required for having dragged these forth from antiquarian obscurity. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... brain approached slowly and unwillingly the conclusion that now emerged, monstrous and abominable, from the obscurity. If that be so, he said, she is ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... incredible, which cannot be verified, and are supposed by the Duc de Broglie to be 'interpolations.' Captain Buchan Telfer is less sceptical. The doubtfulness, to put it mildly, of some papers, and the pretty obvious interpolations in others, deepen the obscurity.] ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... if thinking to hide itself from Fate; and the dim green of the surrounding water grew clouded till the calf could hardly see, and had to crowd close to his mother's side. A twist or two of her mighty flukes, like the screw of an ocean liner, drove her clear of this obscurity, and carried her, a moment later, into a packed shoal of ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... that meaningless words have always been the favorite components of verbal charms, whose power, in the opinion of medieval conjurers, was in direct ratio to their obscurity;[38:3] and this fact is well shown in the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... the eye got attempered; and then, like an autumnal haze clearing away from the face of the landscape, and revealing the glories of green meadow, golden field, and wooded mountain, the obscurity that wrapped pillar and aisle gradually brightened up, and the temple around me began to develope into the noblest proportions and the most impressive grandeur. Some hundred and fifty feet over head was suspended the stone roof; and one could ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... better known as the author of "A Treatise of Melancholy," which was first published in 1586. Bales was born in 1547, and many of the incidents of his life have come down to us; for while the lives of poets and philosophers are left in obscurity, the important achievements of a writing-master are detailed by contemporaries with laborious accuracy. Mr D'Israeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature," has not scrupled to devote many pages to Bales's contests ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... pass through my mind as I keep watch while the men are sleeping around me. Still the night continues dark; but as I peep through the obscurity, I fancy that I see against the sky some objects flitting here and there over the rocks. I step cautiously back into the boat, rouse up the men, who seize their arms, and with the oars ready to shove off, if necessary, we wait prepared. The figures approach ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... on and wrapped the country in obscurity, and in the distance, in a meadow, he saw a dark spot on the grass; it was a cow, and so he got over the ditch by the roadside and went up to her without exactly knowing what he was doing. When he got close to her she raised her great head to him, and he thought: "If I only had a jug I could ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Mr. Browning explains the eccentricities of his style; and his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not defend them. He has never blamed his public for accusing him of obscurity or ugliness He has only thought those wrong who taxed him with being wilfully ugly or obscure. He began early to defy public opinion because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he would never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... exercised a marked influence on the style of later poets, not only in this period, but in the Victorian age as well. The rebellious spirit of Shelley had already shown itself at an early age in his poetry, and especially in Queen Mab, printed in 1812. His ethereal fancy, his dreamy obscurity, and his witchery of language, designated him from the first as a master of lyrical poetry; though he wrote longer pieces, his fame rests on the numerous short poems which continued to appear ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... Brodie says: "It has often happened to me to have accumulated a store of facts, but to have been able to proceed no further. Then after an interval of time, I have found the obscurity and confusion to have cleared away: the facts to have settled in their right places, though I have not been sensible of having made ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... to emerge from obscurity, was entrusted with the task of repression. With such a leader action was swift and energetic. Vigorously pounded with ball near the church at St. Roch, the insurgents fled, leaving some hundreds of ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... the sombre Romanesque arcades, and rises, shadowy and pensive, like complete vaulting. The "De Profundis," for instance, curves in on itself like those great groins which form the smoky skeleton of the bays; it is like them slow and dark, extends itself only in obscurity and moves only in the shadow of ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... hand on the stair-rail and ascended to the next floor, passing his daughter's room on tiptoe. Above this, a flight of steps that was little more than a ladder led up into the obscurity of the attics. He climbed these steps, and, entering a lumber-room, where he had to duck his head to avoid striking the sloping roof, felt his way to a shuttered window, with the bolt of which he fumbled for a moment. When at length he drew the shutter ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... extreme variability of the sheep under culture, it is generally supposed that the innumerable domestic breeds have all been derived from the few wild species; but the whole question is involved in obscurity. According to Darwin, sheep have been domesticated from a very ancient period, the remains of a small breed, differing from any now known, having been found in the ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... jocularity saw fit at the time to comment upon what was to me a serious and most painful memory. However, I mention this circumstance only in passing, preferring by my dignified silence to relegate the authors of these screeds to the obscurity which their attitude so richly merits. Suffice it to state that having left Saint Barnabas', within the short scope of one week thereafter I assumed the duties which I have since continued to discharge to the best of my talents, finding in the refined, the cultured and the peaceful ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... minutes the cloud drove down over us with a loud whistling of wind, and the water close to the boat's side ran in short, small seas, every head of it hissing; but to within the range of a biscuit toss all was flying, glistening obscurity, with occasional bursts of denser thicknesses which almost hid one end of the boat from the other. It was about six o'clock in the afternoon, and there might be ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... its way slowly towards the right shore. The young girl watched the unknown man with secret terror. He had carefully turned off the light of his dark lantern. A glimpse could be caught of him in the obscurity, in the bow of the boat, like a spectre. His cowl, which was still lowered, formed a sort of mask; and every time that he spread his arms, upon which hung large black sleeves, as he rowed, one would have said they were two ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... you see, friend, the place in my heart and home has waited empty for you. Win but yonder shy dove to consent, and we shall be of one family and of one mind, and I as happy as any broken-down campaigner in England can be—content to creep to the grave in obscurity, forgotten by the Prince whose father it is my ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... of several of the most distinguished astronomers of America, particularly the celebrated Mr. Rittenhouse,) but from similar motives to those which induced the editors to give this calculation the preference,—the ardent desire of drawing modest merit from obscurity, and controverting the long-established illiberal prejudice ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... young; you have no friends or protectors, save Sir Robert Gordon, who is a peaceable man, and goes with the times; while the Kerrs are a powerful family, able to put a strong body in the field, and having many powerful friends and connections throughout the country. It is our obscurity which has so far saved you, for Sir John Kerr would crush you without mercy did he dream that you could ever become formidable; and he is surrounded by ruthless retainers, who would at a word from him take your life; therefore think not for ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... however, slow, burdened with the care of the lame girl, and laden with the fish. The purple shades of twilight soon clouded the scene, deepened by the heavy masses of foliage, which cast greater obscurity upon their narrow path; for they had now left the oak-flat and entered the gorge of the valley. The utter loneliness of the path, the grotesque shadows of the trees that stretched in long array across the steep banks on either side, taking now this, now that wild and fanciful ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... England?—Did subtilty and genius, and exertions of a numerous sect, save Fenwicke, or Whitbread, or any other of the accused priests?—Were Groves, Pickering, or the other humble wretches who have suffered, safe in their obscurity? There is no condition in life, no degree of talent, no form of principle, which affords protection against an accusation, which levels conditions, confounds characters, renders men's virtues their sins, and rates them as dangerous in proportion as they have influence, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... with occasion was eminently the attribute of the Countess de Saldar. After that dreadful dinner she (since the weaknesses of great generals should not be altogether ignored), did pray for flight and total obscurity, but Caroline could not be left in her hysteric state, and now that she really perceived that Evan was progressing and on the point of sealing his chance, the devoted lady resolved to hold her ground. Besides, there was the pic-nic. The Countess had one dress she had not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... laughter, long, loud, and irrepressible, struck the whole court-room, and before the Judge could lift his half-composed face and take his handkerchief from his mouth, a faint "Keeree" from some unrecognized obscurity of the court-room was followed by a loud "Keerow" from some opposite locality. "The Sheriff will clear the court," said the Judge sternly; but, alas! as the embarrassed and choking officials rushed hither and thither, a soft "Keeree" from the spectators at the window, OUTSIDE ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... iodine and mercury must yield the palm of excellence to the more sober vermilion, being a chameleon colour, subject to the most sudden and opposite changes. And the blues of cobalt, as always tending to greenness and obscurity, cannot rank ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... somewhat neat remark of the Countess's, all those gentlemen would have remained in poverty and obscurity within the walls or in the suburbs ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... which is formed by a plane passing through the vertex perpendicularly to the base, but this could not be expected to make things clearer to a person who was inquiring for the first time into the meaning of the word triangle. But a real violation of the fourth rule may arise, not only from obscurity, but from the employment of ambiguous language or metaphor. To say that 'temperance is a harmony of the soul' or that 'bread is the staff of life,' throws no real light upon the ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... more wearisome than the dull slavery of a governess?—I recognized a separate wrong done me by George Talboys. His father was rich, his sister was living in luxury and respectability, and I, his wife, and the mother of his son, was a slave allied to beggary and obscurity. People pitied me, and I hated them for their pity. I did not love the child, for he had been left a burden upon my hands. The hereditary taint that was in my blood had never until this time showed itself by any one sign or token; ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... caprices are as variable as the hours of their existence, and who are, consequently, not always in agreement with one another. The writings which are the sources whence the Christians have drawn their morality, are not only an abyss of obscurity, but demand continual explications from their masters, the priests, who, in explaining, make them still more obscure, still more contradictory. If these oracles of heaven prescribe to us in one place the virtues truly useful, in another part ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... the road itself, the lamps, and seats, and broken fringe of grass edging the raised footpath of it, was formless and vague, peopled by shapes, dark against darkness, such as the eye itself fearfully produces in straining to penetrate unyielding obscurity. The effect was one of intense isolation, of divorce from humanity and the works and ways of it, so present and overpowering it might well seem that, reaching the far end of that pale bridge, the wayfarer would part company with the things of ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... pleased, live as they pleased, without thought of the opinion of others. Here she could forget the bestial horrors of marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her birth-brand of shame. She and Rod could be poor without shame; they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... men became more complicated and more numerous, as society gradually became more stable and more civilized. Thence the want of civil laws was felt; and the order of legal functionaries soon rose from the obscurity of the tribunals and their dusty chambers, to appear at the court of the monarch, by the side of the feudal barons in their ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... of every language; but as these accessions necessitate in most cases further division of the honors, many names conspicuously identified with modern science fail of their just relative rank, and fade into unmerited obscurity. Thus the earlier workers in science, like Scheele, Liebig, Humboldt, and others of that and later periods, have won imperishable fame, to which we all delight to pay homage, while others of more recent times, whose contributions have perhaps been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... with the energy of the globe, Jack never saw, nor, for that matter, did nine-tenths of the occupants of the chairs. To them its spoken word was the dictum of fate. Success meant debts paid, a balance in the bank, houses, horses, even yachts and estates—failure meant obscurity and suffering. The turn of the roulette wheel or the roll of a cube of ivory they well knew brought the same results, but these turnings they also knew were attended with a certain loss of prestige. Taking a flier in the Street was altogether ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the truth," said he, "it's this last one that gives me my only trouble. I'd marry the widow, settle up some way with Miss Phillips, smother my shame, and pass the remainder of my life in peaceful obscurity, if ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... dreary and unprosperous condition of the race for some time back would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed." The two first American Hathornes had been people of importance and responsibility; but with the third generation the family lapsed into an obscurity from which it emerged in the very person of the writer who begs so gracefully for a turn in its affairs. It is very true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the Introduction to The Scarlet Letter, that from the original point of view such lustre as he might have contrived to confer upon the name would have ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... was vexed and annoyed. Dennis had seemed, in his obscurity, a nice little bit of personal property, that she could use and order about as she pleased. He had been so subservient and eager to do her will, that she had never thought of him otherwise than as ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... vagina, and in this way correspond to the lips of the mouth after which they are called. They fulfill, however, one very definite though not obviously important function which is indicated by the mythologic name they have received. There is, indeed, some obscurity in the origin of this term, nymphae, which has not, I believe, been satisfactorily cleared up. It has been stated that the Greek name nymphe has been transferred from the clitoris to the labia minora. Any such transfer could only ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... this phrase is involved in some obscurity. Jacob, in his Law Dictionary, speaks of it as "from the French," and his definition is verbatim that given in The Termes of the Law (ed. 1598), with a very slight addition. Blackstone (book II cap. ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... list. It is a Mr. Tickle's set that has come to me, for his name is on the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of Bell, Mr. Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I proclaim him here, and if there be anywhere at this day younger Tickles, even down to the merest titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... to save ourselves through the woods, was a miserable comfort. In the mean time the Iroquoits worked lustily, think att every step we weare to give them an assault, but farr deceived, ffor if ever blind wished the Light, we wished them the obscurity of the night, which no sooner approached but we embarqued ourselves without any noise, and went along. It's strang to me that the ennemy did not encounter us. Without question he had store of prisoners and booty. We left the ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... guess work. The defenders of the work had only to lie still and fire with artillery and musketry directly to their front, but the assailants would have had a line to preserve, and would have had to exercise great care lest they should fall foul of each other in the obscurity. If this is a difficult business at all times, how much is the danger and trouble increased when it is attempted with broken-down and partially ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Had she indeed proceeded one step farther, and asserted that parodies might be classed among the most malicious inventions in literature, when they are such as Colman and Lloyd made on Gray, in their odes to "Oblivion and Obscurity," her reading possibly might have supplied the materials ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
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