"Unformed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which succeeded very well and filled him with triumph. From her place in the kitchen Mornin could hear during every meal the sound of conversation of the most animated description. Tom's big, kind voice rambling cheerily and replied to by the soft and unformed murmuring of the child. He was never tired of her, never ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that which was not human? whence the pathos of those eyes, hardly up to the dog's in intelligence, yet omnipotent over the father's heart? God was there. The misery was that the devil was there too. Thence came the crying and tears. "Rescue the divine; send the devil to the deep," was the unformed prayer ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... my dear Madam, was taller than your sex usually are, her figure slight, and still unformed to a certain degree, but promising perfection. Her hair was very dark, her features regular and handsome, her complexion very pale, and her skin fair as the snow. As she stood in silence, she reminded you of a classical ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... the masses, the most influential element in their character, is the religious element. It is as instinctive and elemental as the law of self-preservation. It informs the whole intellect and personality of the people. And he who would greatly influence the people by uttering their unformed thoughts must have this great and unanalyzable ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... began again,—a harplike intermingling of soft sounds. Zoe Le Baron's hands were very girlish. Everything about her was unformed. Even her mind was so. But all promised a full completion. The voice, the shoulders, the smile, the words, the lips, the arms, the whole mind and body, ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... world. He believed still in democracy, but he was realising more and more that democracy had yet to discover its method. It had to take hold of the consciences of men, it had to equip itself with still unformed organisations. Endless years of patient thinking, of experimenting, of discussion lay before mankind ere this great idea could become reality, and right, the proven right thing, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... elders), but he had bought a package of gum and he was chewing absorbedly. Plainly the lad was excited over the great existence which he saw opening close ahead. Roger glanced at the boy's broad shoulders, noticed the eager lines of his jaw, looked down at his enormous hands, unformed as yet, ungainly; but in them was a hungriness that caused a glow in Roger's breast. One more of the family ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... scarcely doubt that this law of commensurability has largely influenced the present distribution of the asteroids. But its effects must have been produced while they were still in an unformed, perhaps a nebular condition. In a system giving room for considerable modification through disturbance, the recurrence of conjunctions with a dominating mass at the same orbital point need not involve instability.[1026] On the whole, the correspondence of facts with ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... imagination, to the remote era when men's theories of things were yet unformed; and conceiving to ourselves the conquering chief as dimly figured in ancient myths, and poems, and ruins; we may see that all rules of conduct whatever spring from his will. Alike legislator and judge, all quarrels among his subjects ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... sense to do it, and Boyle is not a born fool. Well, why did not Boyle do it? The more I thought of it the more I suspected there was some mistake in the murder, so to speak. Somebody had taken somebody there to throw him in, and yet he was not thrown in. I had already an ugly, unformed idea of some substitution or reversal of parts; then I stooped to turn the bookstand myself, by accident, and I instantly knew everything, for I saw the two cups revolve once more, like ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... and there had been pasted on, tiny bunches of flowers and leaves all of which had lost their color, and many of which had fallen off. The album had belonged to Dora's mother, and the verses were all written in unformed, childish characters. There were also some drawings, and among these one of a small house and a well, with a man standing near it, particularly attracted Hunne's attention, and he took the book in his own hands, ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... Superintendent arrived at the Fort he was surprised to find no one to meet him. This had an appearance of carelessness or mismanagement that unfavorably impressed the Superintendent as to the business capacity of his missionary. He was too experienced a traveller, however, in the remote and unformed districts of the West, to be at all disconcerted at almost ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... touch was very gentle and reverent, for he was a man who knew the value of essentials; his brain was keen enough to go down to them and judge of them, undeterred and unhindered and undeceived by externals, by fictitious emblems. He saw here that he was in the presence of a tender, youthful, unformed mind of complete innocence, and the abhorrent surroundings affected that essential not ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... drama, seen in the writings of Rotrou and others, might be supposed to make for freedom. It encouraged romantic inventions and ambitious extravagances of style. Much that is rude and unformed is united with a curiosity for points and laboured ingenuity in the dramatic work of Scudery, Du Ryer, Tristan l'Hermite. A greater dramatist than these showed how Spanish romance could coalesce with French tragedy in a drama which marks an epoch—the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... (and some librarians even have said it) that for unformed readers to read a bad book is better than to read none at all. I do not believe it. You might as well say that it is better for one to swallow poison than not to swallow any thing at all. I hold that library providers are as much bound to furnish wholesome ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... attraction she had corresponding qualifications to fill the home with helpful counsel and sustaining sympathy, when he comes to find that, instead of a wife, he has married a plaything, and that his children are being committed to the care of a helpless, unformed companion, rather than to the guidance of ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... beans are turned on to a tray to dry in the sun. They are still sticky, but of a brown, mahogany colour. Among them are pieces of fibre and other "trash," as well as small, undersized beans, or "balloons," as the nearly empty shell of an unformed bean is called. While a man shovels the beans into a heap, a group of women, with skirts kilted high, tread round the sides of the heap, separating the beans that still hold together. Then the beans are passed on to be spread in layers on trays in the full heat of the tropical sun, the temperature ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... grass. Everything about him was clean. A lovely stillness pervaded the river and the woods. He lay on his belly and gazed down over the river out of sleep-heavy eyes into hazy distances. Half formed thoughts passed like visions through his mind. He dreamed, but his dreams were unformed and vaporous. For hours the half dead, half alive state into which he had got, persisted. He did not sleep but lay in a land between sleeping and waking. Pictures formed in his mind. The clouds that floated in the sky above the river took on strange, grotesque shapes. They began to move. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... her languor all gone, her interest aroused. Something was rising in her mind; not a sun of hope ah! no—but nebula, obscure, unformed, indistinct, yet with possible suns of hope, worlds of happiness, within it. What did her grandfather mean? Had he heard something ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... violence, there was no knowing what he might do, when stimulated by the frenzy that lurks in the seductive draught. Peena knew the difficulty, with which an Indian foregoes revenge, and her apprehensions were the more excited by the attachment she felt for the two white men. Fears, vague and unformed had before floated through her mind, but they now assumed consistency, and she determined to take such precautions until the departure of her kinsman as should prevent harm either to himself or others. With this view, the moment ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... her critically,—at her thin sallow little face with the intense eyes burning like flame under her well-marked black eyebrows,—at her drooping angular arms and unformed figure, tapering into the scraggy, long black-stockinged legs which ended in a pair of large buckled shoes that covered feet of a decidedly flat- iron model,—then ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... progress from everlasting to everlasting, was all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have poetically ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... great, too high, too good, she thinks, for her,—poor, trivial, ignorant coquette,—poor, childish, trifling Virginie! Has he not commanded armies? she thinks,—is he not eloquent in the senate? and yet, what interest he has taken in her, a poor, unformed, ignorant creature!—she never tried to improve herself till since she knew him. And he is so considerate, too,—so respectful, so thoughtful and kind, so manly and honorable, and has such a tender friendship ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... empty. I went back into the outer room; my eye wandered from the shattered whiskey bottle, which was still on the floor, to the table littered with Mrs. Temple's letters. And there, in the midst of them, lay a note addressed with my name in a big, unformed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... conduct, duties to the Heavenly Father, to parents and teacher. Their notes lingered in my ears for a great many years, and I can still hum some of them. We drew plain figures, blocks, cones, the sides and roofs of buildings and outlines of trees. In penmanship I made no progress, and it was always unformed and illiterate until I was a man, and took it in hand without a teacher. My two years' detention from school did not seem to put me into classes below me in age. I could read and spell very well. There were other longer or shorter periods when my education was entirely ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... records the verdict of later days on a decision which recommended itself at the time: that is, to the person who formed it. A man and woman are attracted towards each other, though she is young and unformed; he, old in years and in experience; and he is, or seems to be, on the point of offering her his hand. But caution checks the impulse. They drift asunder. He forms a connection with an opera-dancer. She makes a loveless marriage. Ten years later they meet again; and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... fourteen, a dear little creature, with awkward limbs, and a face so wonderfully changeful in expression, that it could not fail to be by turns pretty and repellent. She always had beautiful eyes; all her other features were unformed, and might grow charming or exactly the reverse. When her work engrossed her attention, she bit her protruded tongue, and her raven-black hair, usually remarkably smooth, often became so oddly dishevelled, that she looked like a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... altogether unexpected event distracted Lesbia's mind all through the last act of the Demi-monde. She hardly knew what the actors were talking about. Mary, her younger sister! Mary, a good looking girl enough, but by no means a beauty, and with manners utterly unformed. That Mary should be engaged to be married, while she, Lesbia, was still free, seemed ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... sons in a family, like monks in a convent, may remain children till they have reached middle age; but the elder, should their father die prematurely, are suddenly ripened into manhood, when they are almost boys. Charles had left Oxford a clever unformed youth; he returned ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... in her room sat down, staring in a sudden panic. She needed to search out a certain faded picture. It was almost with a sob that she noted the thin shoulders, the unformed jaw, the eye betokening pride rather than vigour, the brow indicative of petulance as much as sternness. Mary Ellen laid the picture to her cheek, saying again and again that she loved it still. Poor girl, she did not yet know that this was but the maternal ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... nation," we may gratefully recognize the merciful guidance and blessing of the Lord, Who has "hastened it in his time." In 1784, we see one single bishop of our communion, and one only, outside the realm of Great Britain and Ireland; and him with an unformed diocese and a future on which rested more clouds than sunshine. In 1884 time would fail him who should undertake to read the roll of regions occupied and churches organized. An American statesman once said, in ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... each one sees what in his bosom burns. Open alike, as yet, to weeping and to laughter, They still admire the flights, they still enjoy the show; Him who is formed, can nothing suit thereafter; The yet unformed with thanks ...
— Faust • Goethe
... year 1900, however, English scientists, working in the Roman Campagna, demonstrated conclusively that which had been vaguely suggested before, namely, that the cause of malaria is a parasite composed of little more than an unformed mass of protoplasm, not floating in the air at all, but transmitted only by the bite of a mosquito. By a series of most interesting experiments, conducted by them and by other scientists in other parts of the world, it has been definitely proved that when a mosquito ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... In his ascetic face, in his large, light-blue eyes, in his extraordinary air of abstraction and aloofness from mundane things, there was something that fascinated and repelled; and with a wondering interest the boy studied these things, trying in his unformed way to reconcile them with his ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... contains the more wonderful facts, or promises the more brilliant discoveries, and which is in the higher and which in an inferior rank; but simply which out of all provides the most robust and invigorating discipline for the unformed mind. And I conceive it is as little disrespectful to Lord Bacon to prefer the Classics in this point of view to the sciences which have grown out of his philosophy as it would be disrespectful to St. Thomas in the middle ages to have hindered ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... and says: "Very well; how do they account for the origin of man, and in general the development of the organic out of the inorganic? Would they assume that the original man as such, no matter how rough and unformed, but still a man, sprang immediately out of the inorganic, out of the sea or the slime of the Nile? They would hardly venture to say that; then they must know that there is only the choice between miracle, the divine hand of the Creator, and Darwin." What an alternative; the Creator or Darwin! In ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... resuming the work of the Empire and continuing its tradition. They are a permanent reproach to our mediocrity, a continual incitement to grandeur and beauty. Of course, the Roman architecture could not have had on Augustin, this still unformed young African, the same effect as it has to-day on a Frenchman or a man from Northern Europe. But it is certain that it formed, without his knowledge, his thought and his power of sensation, and extended for him the lessons of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... now, that Germany's best blood was to be shed in a stream flowing westward. A time was beginning for Wilhelm of powerful but very painful impressions, not, it is true, to be compared with those which the battlefields of 1866 had made on him when an unformed youth. The war unveiled to him the foundations of human nature ordinarily buried under a covering of culture, and his reason, marveled over the reconciliation of such antitheses. On the one hand one saw the wildest struggle ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... such a long letter to Mr. Bond, in her childish, unformed way. She told him every little thing concerning their own household, and the Flins', and Pat's misfortunes, and their ejectment from, and reinstalment in, their attic home; and she dwelt a great while upon Mrs. Flin's metamorphosis, and upon her own new abode with ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... states. His genius, even then, was interested in using these groups for progressive ends, such as he had in view. He was a super-man who sees empires of progress and achievement for the race through the haze of the unformed future, and who takes the responsibility of carving that future out and of forcing history into the segment that his creative imagination has opened. He would guide and make ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... point. You wish me, I imagine, to act the same part with the lady as you have done with the gentleman. I am to step in, I suppose, as the confidential counsellor on all subjects of sweet May. I am to preserve her from a youth whose passions are so impetuous and whose principles are so unformed.' ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... little girl whom Blythe had not before observed. The child lay on a bright shawl, her head against the woman's knee, her dark Italian eyes gazing straight up into the luminous blue of the sky. There was a curiously high-bred look in the pale features, young and unformed as they were, and Blythe wondered how such a child as that came to belong to the stout, middle-aged woman who did not herself seem altogether out of ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... of the sciences, the inventor or at least the re-inventor of the inductive method, and the father of all discovery since his time. These notions have been held firmly, while more special ones concerning his system and himself have been, for the most part, vague or unformed. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... it." Man is thus aggrandised in the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it—an invisible hand is suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation, Providence ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... consider it, we must own that this subject during the Saxon times is extremely dark. One thing, however, is, I think, clear from the whole tenor of their government, and even from the tenor of the Norman Constitution long after: that their Witenagemotes or Parliaments were unformed, and that the rights by which the members held their seats were far from being exactly ascertained. The Judicia Civitatis Londoniae afford a tolerable insight into the Saxon method of making and executing laws. First, the king called together his bishops, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... were simple enough, written in a roundish, unformed hand and badly phrased. Her first two or three showed a shy pleasure in the use of the word "dear," and I remember being first puzzled and then, when I understood, delighted, because she had written "Willie ASTHORE" under my name. "Asthore," I gathered, meant "darling." But ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... marriage-feast is re-performed as Christ attends the wedding of our souls to truth, that union which cannot by man be put asunder. As this takes place the water turns to wine; that within our mental make-up which before was unformed, unstable, in a condition of flux and change, becomes vivified with creative power, and bubbles and sparkles with newness of life and inspiration, refreshing and stimulating the soul with higher emotions and desires, imparting to the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... she smiled and her lips were parted sweetly; and always unformed tears would gloze ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the memory of his mother's tenderness. The father, though less sympathetic, was proud of his son's precocity, and apparently injudicious in stimulating the unformed intellect. The boy was almost a dwarf in size. When sixteen he grew ahead,[202] and was so feeble that he could scarcely drag himself upstairs. Attempts to teach him dancing failed from the extreme weakness of his knees.[203] He showed ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... same trick of smiling with her eyes when there was no mirth lurking in the corners of her full lips, the same full-throated little laugh that carried the faintest hint of mockery in its thrill. Year by year her slim body lost its unformed boyishness in a new soft roundness which her long outgrown skirt and too scant little waist failed completely to conceal. And the hillsfolk were given to shaking their heads over her now, just as the generation before had done, for to cap it all—the last straw upon the back of their toleration—Dryad ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... distorted their bodies, fashioned them into ludicrous, grotesque, or hideous monstrosities for king and populace to laugh at, and then resold them. Soft, immature faces were made into animal likenesses; tender, unformed bodies were put into wicker forms or porcelain vases and allowed to grow; then when they had become things of compressed flesh and twisted bone, the wicker was cut, the vase was broken, leaving a man in the shape of a bottle or ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... to artificiality on the one hand and inadequacy of thought on the other, to which the conditions of its birth and growth exposed Roman literature, were aggravated to an almost incredible extent by the absurd system of education to which the unformed mind of the young Roman was subjected. It will be seen that what Greece gave with the right hand she took away ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... fashion to deride woman's influence over woman, to laugh at female friendship, to look with scorn on all those who profess it; but perhaps the world at large little knows the effect of this influence,—how often the unformed character of a young, timid, and gentle girl may be influenced for good or evil by the power of an intimate female friend. There is always to me a doubt of the warmth, the strength, and purity of her feelings, when a young girl merges into womanhood, passing over the threshold ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... coffin on her bosom. Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy." John Sterling, in a like spirit, said:- "Periodicals and novels are to all in this generation, but more especially to those whose minds are still unformed and in the process of formation, a new and more effectual substitute for the plagues of Egypt, vermin that corrupt the wholesome ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... a mistake at the outset. Instead of rushing up with a bayonet-charge upon Sherman's camp, and routing his unformed brigades in an instant, as he might have done, he unlimbered ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... and crafts of the backwoodsman fitted them very well for the work they had to do. I should say that the education of the colored race in America should be fundamental. I have not much confidence in an ornamental top-dressing of philosophy, theology, and classic learning upon the foundation of an unformed and unstable mental and moral condition. Somehow, character must be built up, and character depends upon industry, upon thrift, upon morals, upon correct ethical perceptions. To have control of one's powers, to have skill in labor, so that work ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... greater portion of the graduates, had left for their homes, or to pay visits to friends before joining their ships at the end of their month's leave, though some still lingered, their plans as yet unformed. ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for Mr. Wayne—you know how one feels to one's first lover. She is a sweet, kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited son. Do you want this persistent, cruel ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... other more than re-kindled. The first ten minutes had its awkwardness and its emotion. Twelve years were gone since they had parted, and each presented a somewhat different person from what the other had imagined. Twelve years had changed Anne from the blooming, silent, unformed girl of fifteen, to the elegant little woman of seven-and-twenty, with every beauty except bloom, and with manners as consciously right as they were invariably gentle; and twelve years had transformed the fine-looking, well-grown Miss Hamilton, in all the glow ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... you ever saw on the banks of the river, or rather rivulet, about a mile from this place. Mrs. Cameron is a very good, simple-hearted woman. As to Lily, I can praise her beauty only with safe conscience, for as yet she is a mere child—her mind quite unformed." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... that the traces of the dying superstition would have been numerous in Anglo-Saxon literature. And if we had the domestic writings that were produced in the first Christian ardour, such an expectation might have been partially fulfilled. But in any case we should not expect too much from early and unformed literature. It is the mature fruit of long cultivation to produce a literature that reflects the present. Almost all early literature is conventional, because the spontaneous is not esteemed and is not preserved. But whatever might have happened under ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... "Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they've been insulting their Heaven-sent King and master . . . ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the chest upon the table. My speech was yet unformed, and perhaps upon the delicate and intellectual faces before me, there dwelt, with the transient influence of a passing thought, a smile of sympathy or amusement. Then a young being at the head of the table exclaimed ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... branching masses, streams, sprays, filaments, and curved spiral wreaths project outward from the parent mass, and become gradually lost in the surrounding space. This object remained for long a profound mystery; no telescope was capable of resolving it, nor was it known what this 'unformed fiery mist, the chaotic material of future suns,' was, until the spectroscope revealed that it consists of a stupendous mass of incandescent gases—nitrogen, hydrogen, and other elementary substances, occupying a region of space believed by some to equal in extent the whole stellar ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... between Farragut and Mr. Folsom did not end with this separation. The latter survived to the end of the civil war, and was thus privileged to follow the successful and great career of the admiral to whom, while yet an unformed boy, he had thoughtfully extended a helping hand. As late as 1865 letters passed between the two, showing that both cherished warm recollections of that early association; Mr. Folsom dating his, as though careful to make the ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... to her, murmuring: "It is done—it is done! Don't cry, my little Jesus, my little goldfish...." But his intermittent outcry continues. It is as though this wretched, unformed, and unconscious mass had a presentiment of a whole life of sorrow awaiting, him, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... exercised on Castilian versification in other respects, as in the prolonged repetition of the rhyme, for example, which is wholly borrowed from the Spanish Arabs; whose superior cultivation naturally affected the unformed literature of their neighbors, and through no channel more ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... regular features, for a girl of fifteen, with dark hair and eyes—the "Merrick eyes," her mother proudly declared—and a complexion denoting perfect health and colored with the rosy tints of youth. Her figure was a bit slim and unformed, and her shoulders stooped a little more than was desirable; but in Cloverton Elizabeth had the reputation of being "a pretty girl," and a sullen and unresponsive ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... initio, is 'practised to a great extent.' And really, it is in some respects an awful exhibition, to a reflecting mind. It is as it were a visible exposition of the source of life. You see the pulse of existence throbbing in the yet unformed mass, which assumes, day after day, the image of its kind; until at length the little creature knocks for admittance into this breathing world; steps forth from the shell in which it had been so long ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... same time stimulate the appearance of such angelic visions. Ultimately this would lead to the vast drama of celestial hallucinations described for us in the accounts of many ecstatic visions. They do not only occur in modern religions, but in those of the old heathen, and in the rude and unformed beliefs of savages. The ethnography of the most savage peoples of our time teaches us that the origin of very many myths is to be found in normal and abnormal hallucinations, and in the luminous visions which conform to their mental conditions. ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... no substance without a form, an unformed substance not being any thing, 66. There is not any good or truth which is not in a substance as in its subject, 66. Every idea of man's, however sublimated, is substantial, that is, affixed to substance, 66. Material things derive their origin from things substantial, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... go about it in an entirely different way. She had counted upon an impassioned plea for himself, not this terse, cold-blooded, almost unemotional summing up of the situation. For an instant she was at a loss. It was hard to look into his honest eyes. A queer, unformed doubt began to torment her, a doubt that grew into a question later on: was he still in ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Coast he had established a reputation as a gaily original newspaper writer. Thus far, however, he had absolutely no literary standing, nor is there any evidence that he had literary ambitions; his work was unformed, uncultivated—all of which seems strange, now, when we realize that somewhere behind lay the substance of immortality. Rudyard Kipling at twenty-eight ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dissolution of the Roman Empire, when society was resolved into its original elements,—when barbarism on the one hand, and superstition on the other, made the Middle Ages funereal, dismal, violent, despairing. But commerce, arts, and literature had introduced a new era,—still unformed, a vast chaos of conflicting forces, and yet redeemed by reviving intelligence and restless daring. The one thing which society needed in that transition period was a strong government in the hands of kings, to restore law ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... him not only immoderately fascinating in his appeal to her own imperious youth, but the most interesting life partner that a romantic maiden with secret intellectual promptings could demand. Her brilliant long eyes melted and flashed, her soft unformed mouth wore a constant ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... liberty, like intelligence, is naturally an undetermined, unformed faculty, which gets its value and character later from external impressions,—a faculty, therefore, which is negative at the beginning, but which gradually defines and outlines itself by exercise,—I mean, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... poetry with the world open before him; the rules of the ancients were yet known to few; but publick judgment was unformed; he had no example of such fame as might force him upon imitation, nor criticks of such authority as might restrain his extravagance: He therefore indulged his natural disposition, and his disposition, as Rhymer ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... of poignant despair, an unformed, inarticulate sense of calamity, seemed to run from end to end of the line. What had happened? Those in the rear, unable to read the placard, surged forward, a sense of bitter disappointment ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... matters over with Michael Ireton, who had allowed him to unburden his full heart. His ideas and plans were quite unformed. All that he was now certain of was the fact that he would never settle down to any profession or career which would mean only the furthering of his own ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... pleasant future with a tremulous joy, she stood beside her chosen one at the altar, how little did she dream of the shadows and darkness that were to fall upon her path! And alas! how little does many a careless girl, who gives herself away, thoughtlessly, to a young man of unformed character, dream of the sorrow too deep for tears that awaits her. Surely this were anguish enough,—and surely it called for the sustaining sympathy of friends. But the friend of her early years, the sister in whose arms, in the days of ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... and phrases to describe the sparkling waters of Lake Memphremagog, the wooded western shore in the distance. The few boats floating on the surface of the water looked unreal. The faint soft beat of a distant motor equally false. Jimmy hardly breathed; he had a vague unformed desire to hold this scene, to prolong it. There was a silence that was almost painful. ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... unformed lips now trembling frankly against the tears he tried so furiously to resist, Edwin charged with lowered head from the room, sobs escaping ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... clouds are few, and of their wonted texture; The Sun will rise upon the Earth's last day As on the fourth day of creation, when God said unto him, "Shine!" and he broke forth Into the dawn, which lighted not the yet Unformed forefather of mankind—but roused Before the human orison the earlier 290 Made and far sweeter voices of the birds, Which in the open firmament of heaven Have wings like angels, and like them salute Heaven first each day before the Adamites: Their matins ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... and crystals, the innumerable trees and herbs that cover the face of the earth like a mantle, and all the animal host of creatures great and small that dwell on the land or dart through the air or people the waters,—that all these had arisen by natural laws from a primitive unformed material was known to the Greeks, was developed by the Romans, and even received the approval of early Christian Fathers, who wrote long before the idea had been invented that the naive legends of the Old Testament were an authoritative and literal account of the origin of the world. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... turned away he noticed, lying almost at his feet, a little bunch of violets, dropped as the flowers had been removed from the coffin. Attached by a bit of white ribbon to their stalks was a tiny square of notepaper, and on this was written in the careful but unformed hand ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... over those nearest to the closed market-house. Above them in the air the bell was still clanging; but before them was a door fast shut and locked; no one to speak and tell them why they were summoned—where they ought to be. They were at the heart of the mystery, and it was a silent blank! Their unformed dread took shape at the cry from the outside of the crowd, from where men were still coming down the eastern side of Bridge Street. 'The gang! the gang!' shrieked out some one. 'The gang are upon us! Help! help!' ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the rendezvous of some of the worst characters of the west; fights were frequent on the then unformed streets. ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... remember, as a lad, looking at complicated machinery with a shrinking uneasiness which, of course, I did not understand; I remember the sort of disturbed contemptuousness with which, in my time of "examinations," I dismissed "science papers." It is intelligible enough to me, now, that unformed fear: the ground of my antipathy has grown clear enough. I hate and fear "science" because of my conviction that, for long to come if not for ever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... more were they linked to him in a connection of absolute dependence. Csar it was who provided their daily food, Csar who provided their pleasures and relaxations. He chartered the fleets which brought grain to the Tiber—he bespoke the Sardinian granaries whilst yet unformed—and the harvests of the Nile whilst yet unsown. Not the connection between a mother and her unborn infant is more intimate and vital, than that which subsisted between the mighty populace of the Roman capital and their paternal emperor. They drew their nutriment from him; they lived and were happy ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Lady Belamour, turning towards a stout, clumsy, short girl, her intensely red cheeks and huge black eyes staring out of her powder, while the extreme costliness of her crimson satin dress, and profusion of her rubies were ridiculous on the unformed person of a creature scarcely fifteen. If she had been any one else she would have been a hideous spectacle in the eyes of the exquisitely tasteful Lady Belamour, who, detecting the expression in her son's eye, whispered behind her fan, "We will soon set all that right;" ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is my class of eager, warm, generous young natures who are to have the opportunity of trying to paint you. They are mere beginners; their art is still unformed. But you may believe that they will put their best into what they are about to undertake; the loyalty of the hand, the respect of the eye, the tenderness of their memories, consecration to their art, their dreams and hopes of future success. ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... industriously on his farm, though he never lost his predilection for hunting. A-lee-lah became almost as skilful at her needle as she was at weaving baskets and wampum. Her talk, with its slightly foreign arrangement, was as pretty as the unformed utterance of a little child. Her taste for music improved. She never attained to Italian embroidery of sound, still less to German intonations of intellect; but the rude, monotonous Indian chants gave place to the melodies of Scotland, Ireland, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... affairs of the kingdom had now some repose, though it was not to be a long one, the Infant caused them to arm a little ship, which he gave to Antam Gonsalvez, his chamberlain, a young captain, only charging him to load a cargo of skins and oil. For because his age was so unformed, and his authority of needs so slight, he laid all the lighter his commands upon him and looked for ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Skinner, to whose church he was in the habit of carrying me. He died when I was very young, but not before my mind was impressed in favour of Episcopacy.... I readily confess, that in respect to Church Government, my principles were sufficiently vague and unformed; for to this important subject my attention was never particularly drawn till I came to this country, when my venerated friend, the late Dr. Stewart, of Kingston, urged me to enter the Church, and as I had never yet communicated, that excellent person, whom I loved ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... friendship? She was then a wild, untrained girl, and had not reduced her contempt for established institutions to fixed principles. Godwin, the son of a Dissenting clergyman, was studying to be one himself, and his opinions of the rights of man were still unformed. Neither had developed the ideas and doctrines which afterwards were the bond of sympathy between them. One thing is certain: while they might have benefited had they married twenty years earlier than they did, the world would have lost. Godwin, under ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... in an unformed way, which is more to the purpose," Mrs. Chudleigh rejoined. "I heard the old woman abusing the manager because one of her ridiculous pets is missing. But this is of no consequence. You were going to tell me about your ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... {and} less anger. The Gods above call this second-rate thunder; it he assumes, and he enters the house of Agenor. Her mortal body could not endure[64] the aethereal shock, and she was burned amid her nuptial presents. The infant, as yet unformed, is taken out of the womb of his mother, and prematurely (if we can believe it) is inserted in the thigh of the father, and completes the time that he should have spent in the womb. His aunt, Ino, nurses him ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... romantic and spent long hours of her young life in girlish reveries and dreams. Of course that isn't the way Kittie said it, but if I should tell this story in her crude, unformed fashion, you wouldn't read very far. What Kittie really said was that Josephine used to "moon around the grounds a lot and bawl, and even try to write poetry." I understand Josephine's nature, so I will go on and ...
— Different Girls • Various
... genius and scholarship. Their dissemination among ourselves is especially important, because our ideas of what is requisite to form a gentleman are essentially vague, crude, unformed, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... out it was a mistake—our marriage—for you. I wasn't half clever enough. I was only an ignorant, silly, unformed girl, and you were so different. Oh, I tried my hardest to improve. I wanted to prove to you that I wasn't quite such a little fool as you thought me. I wanted to show you I had a soul—Mr. Herrick said I had, and I tried to make myself more companionable to you—oh, ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... open in a bleat of protest, the Master's hand had returned him to the warm dugs. Again came the harsh, suspicious nose of the foster about Finn's tail, and this time a low growl followed the resentful sniff, and blind, helpless, unformed little jelly that Finn was, instinct made him wriggle fearfully from under that cold nose. The language in which bitches speak to the very young among puppies is simplicity itself. The Master, human though he was, had not failed to catch the sense of this observation ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... to see what else I had caught; and turning over the net, found a few of the same fish I had taken before, and some others of a flat-tish make, and one little lump of flesh unformed; which last, by all I could make of it, seemed to be either a spawn or young one of ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... Her mind had been aging rapidly in those long periods of unbroken reflection. To develop a human being, leave him or her alone most of the time; it is too much company, too little time to digest and assimilate, that keep us thoughtless and unformed until life is half over. She astonished him by suddenly announcing ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... unseen deterioration of mind and character was revealed to the country on the 7th of March, 1850. What a downfall was there! That shameful speech reads worse in 1867 than it did in 1850, and still exerts perverting power over timid and unformed minds. It was the very time for him to have broken finally with the "irreconcilable" faction, who, after having made President Tyler snub Daniel Webster from his dearly loved office of Secretary of State, had consummated the scheme which gave us Texas ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... add $30,000 to his estimated expense and still clear a hundred thousand dollars on this crop. When he thought of it as he rode along the water ditches in the early evening, he grew fairly dizzy with hope. But then on the other side: the unformed menace—Reedy ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... continued Mrs. Ellsworthy in her letter, "is as yet unformed. She has high aspirations and generous impulses—if she is well managed, and if you don't spoil her, Primrose, she will probably develop into a very noble woman. I ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... an etymological dictionary he meditated, I went into explanations with him of an easy process for simplifying the study of the Anglo-Saxon, and lessening the terrors and difficulties presented by it's rude alphabet, and unformed orthography. But this is a subject beyond the bounds of a letter, as it was beyond the bounds of a report to the legislature. Mr. Crofts died, I believe, before any progress was made in the work he ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson |
