"Vagueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that better world, then indeed would our emotions reach their highest possible climax; then indeed should we hear and see and feel, not with the bodily senses, but with the senses of the soul; then would there be no vagueness, no sadness in the feeling as now, but clear and well defined would be our knowledge, comprehending all spiritual things. Then would our heaven be here on earth, and we should desire no other. Wisely has a great and merciful God thrown an impenetrable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... This majestic vagueness staggered old Crusty at first, but he recovered his equilibrium, and said, "Why, yes, now I think of it, you are right; he has travelled farther than most of us, for about two centuries ago he visited that bourn whence ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... waited for Barlasch, who seemed to be going in the wrong direction with an odd vagueness in his movements. Louis ran towards him with Desiree at ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... more explicit. In the first place, how did you get this absurd notion that you are going to die into your head? Secondly, what is the nature of the obligation you wish to put upon me? It is quite clear that I can't accept a trust about which I know nothing, and I think that for undiluted vagueness your words deserve a medal. Let us begin at the beginning, which is a very good place to begin at. Now, why should you, who are going to Paris, as far as I know, simply as a common sightseer, have any reason ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... feel grateful for the increased candor, brevity and explicitness of their replies, when boiled down into the rhyming form, bringing out new beauties which were not apparent in the original nebulous condition of vagueness in which some of them disclaim opposition to immortality, while their only immortality is ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... The vagueness of the ca had a dreadful quality in it that made you see trees and mangled bodies. "We had to hold the crest of Douaumont under a terrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope when the Germans tried to fortify them. Our ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... underworld than that of Vergil, and the picture is not clearly conceived, but its very vagueness is impressive. The poet gives us, as it were, the scene for the enactment of some dim dream of terror. He is equally at home in describing the happy calm of Elysium. Though the picture lacks originality, it has no ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Harrow House was a long, grave man, one of the last to hold out against the anti-whisker crusade. He had expressionless hazel eyes, and a general air of being present in body but absent in spirit. Mothers who visited the school to introduce their sons put his vagueness down to activity of mind. 'That busy brain,' they thought, 'is never at rest. Even while he is talking to us some abstruse point in the ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... took his fee, and shuffled off to his carriage. And this was all that Mrs. Sheldon could tell Diana, or Nancy Woolper, both of whom questioned her closely about her interview with the doctor. To Diana and to Valentine there was hope to be gathered from the very vagueness of the physician's opinion. If there had been anything serious the matter, the medical adviser must needs have spoken more seriously. He came again and again. He found the pulse a little weaker, the patient a little ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... if we are to have an intelligently directed anti-war campaign, that we should make a clear, sound classification of these half-hearted people, these people who do not want war, but who permit it. Their indecisions, their vagueness, these are the really effective barriers to our desire ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... and of ignorance. Many people will know nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... But the vagueness and uncertainty of the doctrinal speculations of infidelity, and the looseness and immorality of its rules of life, are not the only objections to it. Its tendency, wherever it has been introduced in the history of our world, has been ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... a perceptible lack of virility, a fluctuating vagueness of outline about the characterisation of some of his men. In his treatment of crowds, in his description of a mob, personified as 'some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment,' he can have few rivals. In tracing the influence of women over ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... with the tide of innocent women and law-abiding men, once more one of themselves, and not even a magnet for morbid curiosity! That would come soon enough; the present was all the more to be enjoyed; and even the vagueness of the immediate future, even the lack of definite plans, had a glamor of their own in eyes that were yet to have their fill of street lamps and shop windows and omnibuses ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in Shelley's greatest lyrics. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... this setting out. But few words were spoken; the vagueness of the unknown impressed us, but the new and strange situation excited us, and rendered us insensible to its dangers. The landscape around was fantastic. But few outlines were distinguishable. Great ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... designed to remedy such a condition by forbidding the states to abridge the privileges of citizens, or to deprive persons of life, liberty or property. Were the very vague phrases of the Amendment merely in keeping with the vagueness of many of the other grants of power in the Constitution, or were they designedly expressed in such a way as to accomplish something more than the protection ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... measure—such, soon enough, as things went with him, became the inference with which his old obsession had to reckon: and this it was not helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest itself, almost no margin left. Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... heart and hope as soon as he got beyond the sight of his native hills; and who usually got cheated in every bargain he made. Perhaps it is because I see myself in him that Hiram always seemed nearer to me than any of the rest. I have at times his vagueness, his indefiniteness, his irresolution, and his want of ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... new spring bonnet of Mrs. Demorest and settled upon it during the singing of the hymn. Perhaps that was the reason why a few eyes were curiously directed in that direction, and that even the minister himself strayed from the precise path of doctrine to allude with ecclesiastical vagueness to certain shining examples of the Christian virtues that were "again in our midst." The shrewd face and white eyelashes of Ezekiel Corwin, junior partner in the firm of Dilworth & Dusenberry, of San Francisco, were momentarily raised towards the choir, and then relapsed ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... including biography, politics and geography, is the great defect of Indian literature. Not only are there few historical treatises[107] but even historical allusions are rare and this curious vagueness is not peculiar to any age or district. It is as noticeable among the Dravidians of the south as among the speakers of Aryan languages in the north. It prevails from Vedic times until the Mohammedan conquest, which produced chronicles though ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... was so much of vagueness in theory and practice as to the sovereignty, there was nothing criminal on the part of Maurice if he was ambitious of obtaining the sovereignty himself. He was not seeking to compass it by base ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in this unvaried and monotonous routine, seemed in reality a long period; recent occurrences began to assume the vagueness of things that had happened years ago. I remember particularly, that, in looking back at the dreadful scenes of the mutiny, and our subsequent sufferings at sea, the whole seemed unreal, and more like a horrible dream, than an actual part of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... long ago. She was only nineteen, but she looked at men and women with those discerning grey eyes, in which there seemed to lurk a quiet light like the light of stars, and saw right through them. She was woman enough—despite the apparent inconsequence of the schoolroom, which still lent a vagueness to her thoughts and movements—to fall an easy victim to the appeal of helplessness. Years, it would appear, are of no account in certain feminine instincts. Miriam had probably been woman enough at ten years of age to fly to the rescue ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... person or of other persons, real or fictitious, to reproduce synthetically in a combination of thoughts, feelings, similes, and sounds. In his verses words do not breed words, nor figures beget figures unto lyric breadth and vagueness. When Bjrnson was moved to make a poem, he was so filled with the end, the occasion, the cause, the mood to be reproduced, that he was impatient of any but the most significant words and left much to suggestion. Often the words seem to be in one another's way, and they are not related with ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the atheist, on the other side, detesting plush, more than once accosted with leaflets, shifted irritably. He abhorred vagueness— the Christian religion, for example, and old Dean Parker's pronouncements. Dean Parker wrote books and Fraser utterly destroyed them by force of logic and left his children unbaptized—his wife did it secretly in the washing basin—but ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... some extent how it would have been, by the present state of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain. The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest vagueness. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... sat on the hillside together that evening the winds were low and the air was misty with light. The huge sunbrowned slope on which we were sitting was sprinkled over with rare spokes of grass; it ran down into the vagueness underneath where dimly the village could be seen veiled by its tresses of lazy smoke. Beyond was a bluer shade and a deeper depth, out of which, mountain beyond mountain, the sacred heights of Himalay rose up through star-sprinkled zones ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... observing that the very candour of the prisoner, in not taking advantage of his youthful appearance to deceive the jury, ought to be a strong argument in his favour. Mr Trevor then continued to address the jury upon the vagueness of the evidence, and, as he proceeded, observed—"Now, gentlemen of the jury, if this case had been offered to me to give an opinion upon, I should, without any previous knowledge of the prisoner, have just come to the following conclusion—I should have said (and your intelligence and ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... our task, not merely to show what these principles are, but to point out how they have been discovered by our predecessors. We shall trace the growth of these ideas from their first vague beginnings. We shall see how vagueness of thought gave way to precision; how a general truth, once grasped and formulated, was found to be a stepping-stone to other truths. We shall see that there are no isolated facts, no isolated principles, in nature; ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... all; but it came with a painful shock upon the feelings of Mr. Markland. Its very vagueness made it the more frightful to him; and his heart imagined ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... the time thought highly of this performance. I remember one fellow saying that Number 2 seemed to have caught the spirit of Mr Browning without his vagueness, which ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... privilege, where there already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new- coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system, which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with a directing minority composed of exceptional men on the one hand, and a majority composed of directed men on the other. But in the minds of many socialistic thinkers the simplicity of the situation is obscured by the vagueness of the ideas which they associate with the phrase "the state." For them these ideas are like a fog, into which private capitalism disappears, and in which the forces represented by it lose all definite ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... quite clear that what hinders a true understanding of anything is vagueness; and it is by this process of asking questions that vagueness is to be dispelled: for, in the first place, it removes one great vagueness, or indistinctness, which is very apt to beset the minds of many; namely, the not clearly ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... her own lengthened; and she wanted also to take that mysterious packet known as her "work" to her Aunt Fulda's sitting room, where the ladies usually spent the morning, so as to be with them, but she knew that Diavolo would scorn her if she did; and the outcome of all this vagueness of intention was a fit of excessive irritability. She wanted sympathy, but without being aware of the fact herself, and the way she set about obtaining it was by being excessively disagreeable to ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... elements, as in the former an image of the combination of two surfaces. Between fire and earth, the two extremes, he remarks that there are introduced, not one, but two elements, air and water, which are compared to the two mean proportionals between two cube numbers. The vagueness of his language does not allow us to determine whether anything more than this was ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... 'one'—possibly not accidental (George Eliot): 'It's a desperately vexatious thing that, after all one's reflections and quiet determinations, we should be ruled by moods that one can't calculate on beforehand.' By the use of 'we' here, a more pointed reference is suggested, while the vagueness actually remains. ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Joel Rae. He was loved like Brigham, but not feared. He preached like Brigham submission to the divine will as interpreted by the priesthood, but he was more extravagant than Brigham in his promises of blessings in store for them. He never resorted to vagueness in his pictures of what the Lord was about to do for them. He was literal and circumstantial to a degree that made Brigham and the older men in authority sometimes writhe in public and chide him in private. They were appalled at the sweeping ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... This was purposeful vagueness and Miss Falconer's crayon snapped. She made a sound of annoyance, then began gathering her sketching things tidily together. Presently, "He's rather an agreeable person, that young American, ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The House of the Seven Gables," is the scornful young radical; and both he and Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do anything directly ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... The vagueness of the expression will serve excellently as a definition of his condition; at the same time it plunged the child addressed into doubt. Presently ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... inquired the way from a farm-laborer whom I had met on the road, and he had answered me with a curiosity but thinly veiled. His directions had been characterized by that rustic vagueness which assumes in the inquirer an intimate knowledge of local landmarks. But nevertheless I believed I had come aright. I gathered from its name that Friar's Park was in part at least a former monastic building, and certainly the cracked bell spoke with the voice of ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why;—from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... an extent, however, both of facts and localities, and ideas—philosophic or imaginative, in the text of Ossian, was possible, has scarcely hitherto been believed by any one; it has certainly never been attempted. A sort of vagueness in many of his descriptions ill-understood, and a similarity in poetic figures that might be indiscriminately applied; and an occasional apparent conflict or confusion of details seem to have deterred almost all readers from ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... of the Gaelic ballads. True to the vehemence and tendencies of the Celtic people, and representing equally their vagueness and extravagance during slavish times, they nevertheless remain locked from the middle and upper classes generally, and from the peasantry of more than half Ireland, in an unknown language. Many of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... and Sankara (c. 800). We know the doctrines of these teachers, for many of their works have come down to us, but when we enquire what was their political importance, or the scope and extent of the movement which they championed we are conscious (as so often) of the extraordinary vagueness of Indian records even when the subject might appeal to religious and philosophic minds.[269] Kumarila is said to have been a Brahman of Bihar who abjured Buddhism for Hinduism and raged with the ardour of a proselyte against his ancient faith. Tradition[270] represents him as instigating ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... that, now the first excitement of setting out was over, and the two women-folk left to themselves in the solitude of a compartment, Natalie might have begun to reflect with some tremor of the heart on the very vagueness of the task she had undertaken. But she was not permitted to do so. The necessity of driving away her mother's forebodings prevented her indulging in any of her own. She was forced to be careless, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... they mean. Chesterton used to believe that they mean Liberalism, being led astray by the sound of the first word, but he soon realized his error. Let a man say "I believe in Liberty" and only the vagueness of the statement preserves it from the funniness of a Higher Thinker's affirmation, "I believe in Beauty." A man has to feel Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for they are not in the nature of facts. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... commerce and industry, have always been the guardians and patrons of art. And who more worthy of patronage than William Shakespear? Also she said that men of such enormous wealth as his owed something to their national tradition. "You have to pay your footing, Sir Isaac," she said with impressive vagueness. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and pronunciation; objects as yet almost totally neglected by his countrymen, and respecting which, down to a much later period, no approach to system or uniformity prevailed, but, on the contrary, a vagueness, a rudeness and an ignorance disgraceful to a ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the Edinburgh even mentioned "Paracelsus"; the Athenaeum admitted that it had talent, but admonished the poet that "Writers would do well to remember that though it is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of Shelley, we love him—not because of these characteristics, but in spite of them." The one gleam of consolation to the young poet in all this general neglect or unfavorable comment was that of ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... New Testament, we find that modern critical research only brings out more clearly than ever the extraordinary vagueness and uncertainty which enshroud every detail of the narrative. From the article on "Chronology" we learn that everything in the Gospels is too uncertain to be accepted as historical fact. There are numerous questions which it is "wholly impossible to decide". We do not know when ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... propriety of delivering one upon "boys." He doesn't know anything about boys, and is therefore entirely unprejudiced. He was never a boy himself-has always been just as old as he is now; though the peculiar vagueness of his memory previously to the time of building the pyramid of Cheops, and his indistinct impressions as to the personal appearance of Job, lead to the suspicion that his faculties at that time were partially undeveloped. He regards himself as the only lecturer extant who can do justice to ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... from her vagueness and turned towards him. "Lady Evesham was Italian, was she? That accounts for his appearance, doesn't it? That air of the old Roman patrician about him; ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... redeemed. While he deals with abstract thought or moral truth his handling is tight, pedantic, and disagreeably hard. But when he comes to describe his epic personages and his embodied visions, all is power, and vagueness, and grandeur. His imagination, escaped from the narrow prison of his thought, rises like a vapour, and, taking shape before his ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the later stage, and had none in the earlier. A development or a difference in language implies a development or difference in thought. If the being or spirit worshipped has come to be designated by a proper name, he has lost much of the vagueness that characterises a nameless spirit, and he has come to be much more definite and much more personal. Indeed, a change much more sinister, from the religious point of view, is wrought, when the transition from ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... meeting this argument is the extreme vagueness of its principal term. The words 'Home Rule' are in their signification so vague, at any rate as employed by Ministerialists, that they cover governments of totally different descriptions. Hungary, Norway, a State of the American Union, a Province of the Canadian Dominion, the Dominion ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... her eyes to distinguish the size or form of the land. The end of the island which they were approaching was still thickly wooded, and the drooping branches added still more vagueness to the outline. Only as they came nearer a small clearing was dimly distinguishable, where a kind of promontory ran out into the river, and on the point of land a ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... power of such an object to become the medium of thought and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole, might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow world in which ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... In addition to the vagueness which this want of any defined object so unsatisfactorily threw round the enterprise before him, he had also a sort of ominous presentiment—natural, perhaps, to one of his temperament under such ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... more than I could bear, and returning to the ship bade farewell to Nauplius and resumed the voyage. Very soon we seemed quite close to the Isle of Dreams, though there was a certain dimness and vagueness about its outline; but it had something dreamlike in its very nature; for as we approached it receded, and seemed to get further and further off. At last we reached it and sailed into Slumber, the port, close to the ivory gates where ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... creature to be considered a human being. In all such cases, the meaning of the general name is so far unsettled and vague; mankind have not come to any positive agreement about the matter. When we come to treat of Classification, we shall have occasion to show under what conditions this vagueness may exist without practical inconvenience; and cases will appear in which the ends of language are better promoted by it than by complete precision; in order that, in natural history for instance, individuals ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... indicative of a growing desire for finish, which, in any art, is a great virtue. No doubt smoothness is often confounded with, and mistaken for finish; but you might have a mirror-like polish on the surface of a statue, for instance, and yet the marble be full of inanity, or vagueness, or even vulgarity of result—irrespective altogether of its idea. The influence of Italian poetry reviving once more in the country, roused such men as Wyat and Surrey to polish the sound of their verses; but smoothness, I repeat, is not melody, and where the attention paid ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... scientific descriptive psychology. Regular psychograms, in which the probability of a particular kind of behavior is to be determined in an exact percentage calculation, are to replace the traditional vagueness, as soon as a sufficient number of reliable answers ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... so great as that which may be introduced. Of course, much depends upon the selection of a spot with capabilities. What is said in respect to the 'detecting and bringing into practice those nice relations of size, proportion and color,' is a mere vagueness of speech, which may mean much, or little, or nothing, and which guides in no degree. That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles,' is a proposition better ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... as in science so in faith, reason were everything, our position would hardly be tenable, for then there should be no vagueness but clear vision. But the will enters for something in our act of faith. If everything we believe were as luminous as "two and two are four," a special act of the will would be utterly uncalled for. We must be able, free ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... answers. We say not that the answers were always satisfactory, nor are now inquiring whether any of them were so; we merely maintain that the objections in question are not the novelties they affect to be. We say this to obviate an advantage which the very vagueness of much modern opposition to Christianity would obtain, from the notion that some prodigious arguments have been discovered which the intellect of a Pascal or a Butler was not comprehensive enough to anticipate, and which no Clarke or Paley would have been logician enough to refute. We affirm, without ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... in question, it is proposed that he shall study arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and dialectic. Thus in each case mathematics is the first advance in knowledge, and dialectic the nearest to perfection. Most of Plato's examples are drawn from mathematics. This science replaces the variety and vagueness of the forms of experience with clear, unitary, definite, and eternal natures, such as the number and the geometrical figure. Thus certain individual things are approximately triangular, but subject to alteration, and indefinitely many. On ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... proceeds with the usual declaration, that all of life is mysterious. Can he have been a Unitarian preacher for twenty years, and not have known that Unitarians object to mystery only when it is used by Trinitarians as a cover for obscurity and vagueness ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... short, they are meant to be read as though they were an after-thought of James Thomson's. Their author, therefore, has rightly imparted to them the curiously blended flavour of 'romantic melancholy and slippered mirth,' of dreamlike vagueness and smiling hyperbole, which forms the distinctive mark of Thomson's poem; and thus the Poet and the Philosopher-Friend of Wordsworth's stanzas, like Thomson's companion sketches of the splenetic Solitary, the 'bard more fat than ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... scarcely seen. A more careful study shewed me that every mark is to be taken as the representative of what Mr. Dawes actually saw. The consistency of the views is perfectly wonderful, when compared with the vagueness and inconsistency observable in nearly all other views. And this consistency is not shown by mere resemblance, which might have been an effect rather of memory (unconsciously exerted) than observation. ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... on the very highest level, there was a great deal in it that thrilled this young man and woman sitting next to each other, and already vaguely inclined towards each other in that first chapter of mutual attraction which is, perhaps, in its vagueness and irresponsibility, the most delightful of all. Dick would have laughed at the idea of feeling himself somehow mixed up with the lover on the stage, who was not only a good actor, but a much handsomer fellow than he was; but Chatty had no such feeling, and with a blush ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... England so well as she, or who has the peculiar genius so to profit by the knowledge. Already there have been scenes in 'The Minister's Wooing' that, in their lowness of tone and quiet truth, contrast as charmingly with the humid vagueness of the modern school of novel-writers as 'The Vicar of Wakefield' itself, and we are greatly mistaken if it do not prove to be the most characteristic of Mrs. Stowe's works, and therefore that on which her fame ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... that appalled the savage from without, we erect always more hard and logical images.... All brute material, animate and inanimate, of earth, becomes an organism to confront the soul. Formerly the soul as a simple figure, like a ballet, faced the environing vagueness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... this, divided into compartments or cubicles where were many patients in the familiar blue overalls, most of whom rose and stood at attention as we entered. Tall, soldierly figures they seemed, and yet with an indefinable something in their looks—a vagueness of gaze, a loose-lipped, too-ready smile, a vacancy of expression. Some there were who scowled sullenly enough, others who sat crouched apart, solitary souls, who, I learned, felt themselves outcast; others again ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... Woods to the Rocky Mountains.[45] Ever since the negotiators of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 had inserted a geographical impossibility by declaring that the boundary should extend due west from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, there had existed a vagueness as to where the actual line should be drawn.[46] In 1806 the British traders thought it would be run from the lake to the source of the river;[47] and as late as 1818 Benjamin O'Fallon wrote from Prairie du Chien that Robert Dickson "is directed to build a fort on the highest ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... dying Agathon Geyer and to bear him the first child of a better time, Beatus, the fortunate. Sultry sensuality and outrageous bombast characterize the work, the action of which is not clearly set forth, but floats in a sea of nebulous somnambulistic vagueness. Visionary representation and mythical creation are indeed the program which Wassermann lays out for himself in a theoretical treatise, The Art of Narrative. Ernst von Wolzogen, the discoverer of Wassermann, and a critic who has perhaps contributed ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... defined, the food, clothing, and other articles set aside for the consumption of the labourer, together with the materials and instruments of production. This definition appears to us peculiarly liable to misapprehension; and much vagueness and some narrow views have, we conceive, occasionally resulted from its being interpreted with too mechanical an adherence to the literal meaning of ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... remedying habits of confusion in manner, awkward bearing, vagueness in thought, and lack of precision in utterance, is to recognize your faults. If you are serenely unconscious of them, no one—least of all yourself—can help you. But once diagnose your own weaknesses, and you can overcome them by doing ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... could not formulate it in words, or even enumerate its phases by any system of analysis, but there were moments when her mind surged with feelings which she knew that she had never felt before, and she caught herself framing visions whose very vagueness of outline swelled before her like the shadows of a portent. At times, too, through these mists there flashed illuminations which startled her, and made her innocent heart shrink as if they were presentiments ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... which she had devoted all her resources since the beginning of the march. She, too, had begun to doubt. Here, in the desert, the buried treasure was an intangible thing. In England, the promises of the Greek's dying message were satisfying by their very vagueness. In Africa, face to face with the tremendous solitude, they became unbelievable, a dim fable akin to the legends of vanished islands and those mysterious races to be found only in unknown lands, which have tickled the imaginations of mankind, ever since the dawn of human intelligence. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... to have arisen from a vagueness in the use of the word induction; which is sometimes employed to designate the process of investigation and of collecting facts, sometimes the deducing an inference from those facts. The former of these processes (viz. that of observation and experiment) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... a certain wooden horse with a sharp spine were the ready instruments of correction. Proclamations were made either from the pulpit or read at the church-door after Mass. Royal edicts and ordinances of the Conseil Superieur prescribed the duties of citizens, and stated without vagueness the penalties which would overtake breakers of the law. Yet in spite of this apparent harshness, the laws were administered in so patriarchal a spirit as to justify the observation: "It requires great interest for a man ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the charm of a new and lovely beauty. At one end the street ended in a towering mass of stone; that doubtless was the cathedral. At the right, the narrow houses dipped suddenly; their roof-lines were lost in vagueness. Between the slit made by the street a deep, vast chasm opened; it was the night filling the great width of sky, and the mists that shrouded the hill, rising out of the sleeping earth. There was only one single line of light; a long deep glow was banding the horizon; ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... a little—you are right, it gives a softness, a vagueness, a—it is very funny, that little pot of blue. How ugly it must be! How things lead on one to another! Once one's hair is powdered, one must have a little pearl powder on one's face in order not to look as yellow as an orange; and one's cheeks ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... have allowed herself to get into an equivocal position with such a man—"really not a gentleman," as she complained to Justin, and he had answered with the vague remark that you could never tell about a girl; even in its vagueness the reply was condemning. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... Jackson in 1828, and his authorship of the "South Carolina Exposition" in the same year. Falsehood and truth are strangely interwoven in almost every sentence of his later writings; and there is also that vagueness in them which comes of a superfluity of words. He says, that for the strict-constructionist party to have presented a candidate openly and fully identified with their opinions would have been to court defeat; ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... adding his gracious greeting to the greetings of the others asks where he has been this long time. "Far, far from here I wandered," Tannhaeuser replies, with a vagueness mysteriously pregnant, "where I found neither peace nor rest. Inquire not! I have not come to contend with you. Forgive the past and let ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... captivated by his rare theatrical air of confidence; when it seems as an outside thought striking us, that he may not be altogether deceived in the present instance; when suddenly an expectation of the thing desired is born and swims in a credible featureless vagueness on a misty scene: and when we are being kissed and the blood is warmed. In fine, here as everywhere along our history, when the sensations are spirited up to drown the mind, we become drift-matter ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "The Cenci" as the best tragedy of modern times. Writing concerning it, Shelley said: 'I have been cautious to avoid the introducing faults of youthful composition; diffuseness, a profusion of inapplicable imagery, vagueness, generality, and, as Hamlet says, "words, words".' There is nothing that is not purely dramatic throughout; and the character of Beatrice, proceeding, from vehement struggle, to horror, to deadly resolution, and lastly ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... follows Aeschylus reaches the pinnacle of tragic power. Cassandra advances to the palace, but starts back in horror as a series of visions of growing vividness comes before her eyes. These find utterance in language of blended sanity and madness, creating a terror whose very vagueness increases its intensity. First she sees Atreus' cruel murder of his brother's children; then follows the sight of Clytemnestra's treacherous smile and of Agamemnon in the bath, hand after hand reaching at him; quickly she sees the net cast about him, the murderess' blow. In a flash she foresees ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... extensive factual record is set is complex, implicating a number of constitutional doctrines, including the constitutional limitations on Congress's spending clause power, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, and subsidiary to these issues, the First Amendment doctrines of prior restraint, vagueness, and overbreadth. There are a number of potential entry points into the analysis, but the most logical is the spending clause jurisprudence in which the seminal case is South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987). Dole outlines four categories of constraints ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... woke with a start to the consciousness that something unpleasant had happened. Almost immediately that vagueness gave way to irritating clearness. She got up and peeped into Catherine's room. She was sleeping, but the swollen cheek left no room for hope that the whole episode was a nightmare. Hannah dressed quietly, frowning the while at her unconsidered ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... view of Jerusalem.—Few, I think, however careless, have looked for the first time on this scene, without some feelings of solemn awe. We read the accounts of all that passed within or around these walls with something of the vagueness that always veils the history of times that have gone by two thousand years ago; but however soon the feeling may wear off or be cast away, it is impossible, with the very spot before you where your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... of education which is new, so far as I know, and which I hope and believe to be true and important. Comprehensively, so as to include everything that must be included, and yet without undue vagueness, I would define education as the provision of an environment. We may amplify this proposition, and say that it is the provision of a fit environment for the young and foolish by the elderly and wise. It has really scarcely anything in the world to do with my trying ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... next moment a volley was fired from somewhere, a cloud of white smoke was coiling in front of the window at which Roma stood, and women and children in the vagueness ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... metaphysics who wish to exalt their own pursuit at the expense of the 'special' sciences, and students of natural science who are accustomed to pride themselves on the contrast between the finality and definiteness of their own results and the vagueness and dubiousness of the conclusion of the metaphysicians. But I must avow my own conviction that the only distinction we can make is one of convenience, and it may help to make my peace with both parties if I explain where I take this distinction ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... is some further confusion: Christian philosophers have tried to personify this 'soul of the universe,' for God, they say, thinks and feels and knows. They try to get a personality without form or bounds or dimentions, but it all ends in vagueness and confusion. As for me, and I think I am not so different from other men,—for me to be able to think of God, I must have some image of Him. I cannot think of love or good, or power or glory in the abstract. ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... can be prompted by nature, without going to the length of "vision," still less of ecstasy. But the stress now lies on the words—"a grade between the symbolical type and the mystic type." Kingsley evidently realised the insufficiency of symbolism to meet his demands, while he shrank from the vagueness of what was called Mysticism. Objects for him had a meaning in their own right, and he was casting about for a fitting term to express this fact. He also distinctly states that to him, "Everything seems to be full of God's reflex." Once grant that Nature Mysticism, as denned ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... "part of the vagueness of the scheme—if it is a scheme—is that it takes half a lifetime to find it out. Before that, we are always either telling ourselves that we are not going to do any harm, or that we are under the ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the tories seems to me totally ineffectual; it will only embitter their minds and add virus to their venom. They can, and will, always be supplied with fresh arms by the enemy. That of seizing the most dangerous will, I apprehend, from the vagueness of the instruction, be attended with some bad consequences, and can answer no good one. It opens so wide a door for partiality and prejudice to the different congresses and committees on the continent, that much discord and animosity will probably ensue; it being next to impossible ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... at sea. And she prided herself on a lack of that vagueness generally attributed to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Rupe wouldn't REALLY hurt Herman. A sudden dislike of Rupe and Rupe's ways rose within him, as he looked at the big boy overwhelming the little darky with that ferocious scowl. Penrod, all at once, felt sorry about something indefinable; and, with equal vagueness, he felt foolish. "Come on, Rupe," he suggested, feebly, "let Herman go, and let's us make our billies out of ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... regular system of laws which, however unjust they may be, recognize their character as accountable beings. When it is inferred from the fact that the slave is called the property of his master, that he is thereby degraded from his rank as a human being, the argument rests on the vagueness of the term property. Property is the right of possession and use, and must of necessity vary according to the nature of the objects to which it attaches. A man has property in his wife, in his children, in his ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... fund,[212] and spoke with the highest authority upon facts and figures. Price argued in 1780[213] that the population of England had diminished by one-fourth since the revolution of 1688. A sharp controversy followed upon the few ascertainable data. The vagueness of the results shows curiously how much economists had to argue in the dark. Malthus observes in his first edition that he had been convinced by reading Price that population was restrained by 'vice and misery,' as results, not of political institutions, but of 'our own creation.'[214] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... he was well convinced the Allies would not consent, for circumstances were now changed. Besides, what could be meant by the reasonable equivalent from England? Is it astonishing that this obscurity and vagueness should have banished all confidence on the part of the Plenipotentiaries of the Allied powers? Three days after the sitting of the 10th of March they declared they could not even enter into a discussion ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... methods have died away. The study has passed from the metaphysical into an historical stage. Grammar is no longer confused with language, nor the anatomy of words and sentences with their life and use. Figures of speech, by which the vagueness of theories is often concealed, have been stripped off; and we see language more as it truly was. The immensity of the subject is gradually revealed to us, and the reign of law becomes apparent. Yet the law is but partially seen; the traces of it are often lost ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... up,' Edwin lived in an ecstasy of contemplation. I say with deliberateness an 'ecstasy.' He had seen houses go up before; he knew that houses were constructed brick by brick, beam by beam, lath by lath, tile by tile; he knew that they did not build themselves. And yet, in the vagueness of his mind, he had never imaginatively realised that a house was made with hands, and hands that could err. With its exact perpendiculars and horizontals, its geometric regularities, and its Chinese preciseness of fitting, a house had always seemed to him—again in the vagueness of his mind—as ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... dragged helter-skelter from his laboratory, was in wildest disarray, and his eyes were still a little vague, as he followed Brenton up the stairs to the nursery. Across the threshold of the nursery, however, the vagueness vanished; the eyes grew keen as sharp-pointed bits of steel, yet strangely gentle, while he sat down beside the crib and laid one mammoth brown hand above the scrawny little claw. Then, for just a minute, the keen ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Hymns to Night exhale a delicate melancholy, moving in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than experienced. Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above life. In his Spiritual Poems we feel a simple, passionate intensity of adoration, a yearning sympathy for the hopeless and the heavy-laden; in their ardent assurance of love, peace, and rest, they ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to say is vigorous and virile. He is not for dealing in the vagueness of dissatisfaction, but endeavours to make his ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... outward advantage. They taught the art of disputation, and sought systematic methods of proof. They thus prepared the way for a more perfect philosophy than that taught by the Ionians, the Pythagoreans, or the Eleatics, since they showed the vagueness of such inquiries, conjectural rather than scientific. They had no doctrines in common. They were the barristers of their age, paid to make the "worse appear the better reason;" yet not teachers of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Mizpeh, the long line of Judean, Samarian, and Galilean summits, Olivet, and Ebal, and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the northward, growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys between them and rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the azure vagueness of the highlands round ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... faintly pencilled on the furthest skyline. Shadowy phantoms of dim heights framed the verge to east and west. Alan Merrick drank it in with profound satisfaction. After those sharp and clear-cut Italian outlines, hard as lapis lazuli, the mysterious vagueness, the pregnant suggestiveness, of our English scenery strikes the imagination; and Alan was fresh home from an early summer tour among the Peruginesque solidities of the Umbrian Apennines. "How beautiful it all is, after all," he said, turning to his ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... that she was suspicious of failures and of intermissions; that she wondered; that she peered and pried. Milly would, if she could, have stuck her fingers into what she called the machinery of the thing. Its vagueness baffled and even annoyed her, for her mind was limited; it loved and was at home with limits; it desired above all things precise ideas, names, phrases, anything that ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... mother and that we are together in the Better Land. She has been separated considerably from me of late,—I have had to be journeying about on business,—therefore it will not come so hard to her, and though children do not forget, the sorrow softens and has a tender vagueness from ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... confident expectations that things would come round and be all square," says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression and perhaps of meaning too. "But I was disappointed. They never did. And when it came to creditors making rows at the office and to people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And of any new ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... excluded from His attributes. But if Evil be a separate and independent existence, how would it fare with His prerogative of Unity and Supremacy? To meet this dilemma, it remained only to fall back on something more or less akin to the vagueness of antiquity; to make a virtual confession of ignorance, to deny the ultimate reality of evil, like Plato and Aristotle, or, with Speusippus, the eternity of its antithetical existence, to surmise that it is only one of those ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... me a more definite idea of its whereabouts I might possibly make the attempt," I answered, with intentional vagueness; for though I no more believed in the objective existence of the Golden Volcano than in Aladdin's lamp, I did not wish to hurt the old man's feelings by an avowal of ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... Works; where, he had told himself optimistically, he was but finding a temporary competence. What, when he should be free to follow his inclination, he'd do, Lee never particularized; it was in the clouds nebulous and bright, and accompanied by music. His dream left him imperceptibly, its vagueness killed partly by the superior reality of pig iron and ore and partly because he never had anyone with whom to talk it over; he could find no sympathy to ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... long as he may have meant what we choose to think he did, reasoning backward from the assumed fulfilment! But perhaps there may be detected in Mr. Masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a latitude. How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a broom (or besom, to ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... in the few cases where the interest of the tale could be better served by imparting information than by withholding it. He had a full artistic appreciation of the impressiveness of the unknown. For, in stories of this kind, the vagueness of the reader's knowledge adds to the effect upon his mind, because, while he sees that mighty agencies are at work in perilous situations, his very ignorance of their exact nature deepens the feeling of awe they are of themselves calculated to produce. The wise reticence of Cooper in this ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... if to herself, "But I do think God might have made me remember before!" which remark Eleanor judged it best to ignore. Then she kissed Maggie, and the child clung to her affectionately. But still Eleanor could not feel satisfied; there was a dreamy vagueness about the little girl, a want, it seemed to Eleanor, of realising her fault to the full, which puzzled and perplexed her. Still Maggie was restored to favour, and in a day or two seemed much the same as usual, even flying into a ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous terms, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else: it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. Charles Lamb, with his infinite tact, attempting ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... then that went to wreck? That is a thing more easy to ask than to answer. At least, for my own part, I complain that some vagueness hangs over all the accounts of the nebular hypothesis. However, in this place a brief sketch ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... vagueness and uncertainty prevails in politics as well as in science. In the order of nature means are simple, the end is grand and marvelous; here in science as in government, the means are stupendous, the end is mean. ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... South—or somewhere," answered Mrs. Piper, radiating that divine vagueness that helps to lift beauty out ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... dark, mute under torture. He was alive—that niggard concession was made to Allan Gerard, whose rich fullness of vigor and dominant presence last night had seemed the one firm reality in a world of pleasant vagueness. Weak, conscious of nothing but what her inward vision showed, she lay in her chair; questioning ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... sources, their interest could not have been as the interest of these; in which everything comprised in the successive stages of a most attractive career is written with unexampled candour and truthfulness, and set forth in definite pictures of what he saw and stood in the midst of, unblurred by vagueness or reserve. Of the charge of obtruding myself to which their publication has exposed me, I can only say that I studied nothing so hard as to suppress my own personality, and have to regret my ill success where I supposed I had even too perfectly succeeded. But we have all ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... form, though tall, was not firm-knit and muscular; the lower limbs were too thin, the body had too much flesh, the delicate hands betrayed the sickly paleness of feeble health; there was a dreamy vagueness in the clear soft blue eyes, and a listless absence of all energy in the habitual bend, the slow, heavy, sauntering tread,—all about that benevolent aspect, that soft voice, that resigned mien, and gentle manner, spoke the exquisite, unresisting goodness, which ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and sent home in disgrace; but her dream, and the glimpse she had caught of her uncle and the observant stranger, who, as she saw, still maintained his position, suggested worse consequences, whose very vagueness made them all ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... prescribed our somehow profiting by the fact. This kindled in us the spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt to record, so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present memory, into vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect was of the common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for Tuscany, of the uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest for Etruscan tombs in shadeless wastes yielded to its own temerity. There comes ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... exactly the same as with the Indian business. If you remember, they said, "had he been a civil engineer we could have sent him out at once;" and I called on a chap here, a C.E., called Bantry, who asked me if I knew anything about surveying; I said I did, rejoicing inwardly at the vagueness of the question, but he soon stopped generalizing, and asked had I ever done any practical surveying—in fact, could I take charge of a survey-staff, to go out west or elsewhere. I said I felt certain I could do so, but to his direct question was obliged ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic occupation of the land leads to oscillations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within. Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed boundaries; hence, the vagueness as to the extent of tribal domains among all savage peoples, and the conflicting land claims which are the abiding source of war. Owing to these overlapping boundaries—border districts claimed but not occupied—the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... election law or precedents offer no correction of returns in fraudulent amendment elections. In twenty-three states Contest on election returns probably possible. In eight states recount of votes made. A court procedure and expensive. Punishment for bribery. Relation to Contest. Ohio cases. Vagueness of election laws protects corruption. Ignorant vote used by corrupt. Form of ballot often helps corruption. Only 13 states have headless ballots. Form of Suffrage amendment ballots in recent years aided in defeat of measure. ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... character—all my fears had been of malicious natives and tigers; they now, however, changed, and I was confronted with a dread of what I could not understand and could not analyse—of something that suggested an appearance, alarming on account of its very vagueness. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... he be not himself the age transfigured ... and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour and this one of the sixty ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... mauresque, the same adjective is used with something of the vagueness to be noticed in connection with India and Turkey (p. 52). Shakespeare uses the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... had illustrated the fatal weakness of the Congress as an organ of government, and the Articles merely embodied the vagueness of the American people in regard to any real regime. The Congress has been much derided for its shortcomings and its blunders, although in truth not so much the Congress, as those who made it, was to blame. They had refused, in their timidity, to give it power to exercise control. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... that "Ghosts" simplifies almost to excruciation. If "John Gabriel Borkmann" is but a pennyworth of effect as to a character we can imagine much more amply presented, and if "Hedda Gabler" makes an appeal enfeebled by remarkable vagueness, there is by the nature of the case no catching the convinced, or call him the deluded, spectator or reader in the act of a mistake. He is to be caught at the worst in the act of attention, of the very greatest attention, and that is all, as a precious preliminary at least, that the playwright ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... opinion of the Government is getting a little passee) and, perhaps naturally, met with little approval. Mr. ASQUITH, while admitting that something of the kind might be required, took exception to the vagueness of its drafting. "What is 'substantial'?" he inquired. "Ask them another!" Mr. WILL THORNE joyfully interjected. "What is 'substantial'?" repeated the EX-PREMIER; whereupon the Coalition with one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... most of the colours and pigments of this class have been assigned to other denominations—puce, murrey, morelle, chocolate, columbine, pavonazzo, &c., being variously ranked among reds, browns, and purples. This vagueness also accounts for pigments having been ranged under heads not suited to the names they bear, and explains why Brown Ochre has been classed among the yellows, Italian Pink among the same, Brown Pink among the ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... contrary, while you lived together these recollections would be wearisome, common-place to him; when you had separated, indeed, mellowed by distance, and the comparative vagueness with which your absence would invest them, they would become the objects of his muse, and he would insult you by making the public the confidant of all ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... blood; but I was dreaming — Dreaming that I believed. The Voice I heard When I left you behind me in the north, — To wait there and to wonder and grow old Of loneliness, — told only what was best, And with a saving vagueness, I should know Till I knew more. And had I known even then — After grim years of search and suffering, So many of them to end as they began — After my sickening doubts and estimations Of plans abandoned ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... laughed. It was a queer laugh. There was incredulity, uncertainty, a sense of vagueness in it; it suggested ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... seems to have been carefully concealed," I said. "I recollect having detected in her a strange vagueness of manner, but it never occurred to me that she was mentally weak. In the days immediately preceding the tragedy I certainly saw but little of her. She was out ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... is as the cloud that floats in radiant space," murmured the poet. "The very vagueness of form permits the eye to clothe it in the ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... late Mr. Atkinson has been twice alluded to in this note. I take the opportunity of saying that Mr. Ney Elias, a most competent judge, who has travelled across the region in question whilst admitting, as every one must, Atkinson's vagueness and sometimes very careless statements, is not at all disposed to discredit the truth ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Socialist that I know of has attempted to draw the exact line between activities to be wholly absorbed by the State and those which would be left to private enterprise. No wise Socialist I think—if there are wise Socialists—would attempt to draw such a line at present. There is a certain vagueness in the Socialists' presentation ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... gazed vacantly about her with an air of indifference. She seemed scarcely to realize that through the yellow vagueness the eyes of a hundred persons were centered on her ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... Florence party is breaking up, you see. He has printed a few copies of his poems, and is likely to publish them if he meets with encouragement in England, I suppose. They are full of imagery, encompassed with poetical atmosphere, and very melodious. On the other hand, there is vagueness and too much personification. It's the smell of a rose rather than a rose—very sweet, notwithstanding. His poems are far superior to Charles Tennyson's, bear in mind. As for the poet, we quite ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... talking of indifferent matters. Johnny, surrounded by his own prosperity, asked with a show of interest, and without condescension, about my progress in the law, and I was replying with the cautious vagueness of one whose practice is not yet all he hopes it will be. During this time I had noticed, through the maze of gilt lettering, a limousine standing just round the corner. Its curtains were drawn: "an odd circumstance," I had commented ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... Her eyes were large, and full of liquid night—a night throbbing with the light of invisible stars. Her hair seemed raven-black, and in quantity profuse. The expression of her face, however, generally partook more of vagueness than any other characteristic. Lady Hilton called her Lady Alice; and she never addressed Lady Hilton but ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of being. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... character, Tristan, the Mastersingers and the Valkyrie, we find the utmost distinctness combined with perfect freedom and expressiveness. Even as early as the Second Act of Siegfried the freedom threatens to degenerate into sloppiness—or, to put it rather more mildly, at least into vagueness. Perhaps he felt this himself; for certainly at the end of the act we are discussing, and often in the Dusk of the Gods, he gives us straightforward song. At best his song-recitative is sublime; at ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... mentally an equal compliment to circumstance and to the girl herself. Capacity was there, it could be freely trusted; observation would have but to sow its generous seed. "A superior woman"—the idea had harsh associations, but he watched it imaging itself in the vagueness of the future with ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Such vagueness and uncertainty, if not positive misunderstanding with regard to source, are characteristic of many romances. It is not difficult to find explanations for this. The writer may, as was suggested before, be reproducing a story which he has only heard or which he has read ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... he had taken in it, recoiling from so unworthy a position with natural reaction. To have been in love at all at his age struck him as humiliation enough; but to have been in love with that sort of woman came very near mental malady. He said "that sort of woman," because the vagueness of the term gave scope to the bitterness of resentment with which he tried to overwhelm her. It enabled him to create some such paradise of pain as that into which the souls of Othello and Desdemona might have gone together. Had he been a Moor of Venice he would doubtless have smothered her ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... much of the absence of mention of the Esk, and says "it is AFTER they are in England that the false reports are spread." {139a} But the ballad does not say so—read it! All passes with judicious vagueness. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... of old Dutch painting to represent to you this quality of direct painting. First of all notice a basis of perfect drawing,—a knowledge, exactness, and precision which admits of no fumbling, no vagueness, but only of a concise and direct recognition of structure. Note that this drawing is as characteristic of the brush-work as of the drawing which is under it. Observe that the handling of the whole ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst |
