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More "Incoherent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eleventh year of her age she was attacked with a fever, and among other symptoms vomited for twenty days. Then she became speechless and so continued for twenty-four days. Then she talked, but her speech was raving and incoherent. Finally she lost all power of motion and of sensibility in the parts below the head and could not swallow. From thenceforth she could not be persuaded to take food. Six months afterwards she regained the use of her limbs, but the ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... was from Alicia, and it was dated at Denver, three days gone. It was not very explicit; on the contrary, it was rather incoherent. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... chariot would be thrown off the track, so to speak, by the stupidity of those thrice accursed musicians. Each time, Marija would emit a howl and fly at them, shaking her fists in their faces, stamping upon the floor, purple and incoherent with rage. In vain the frightened Tamoszius would attempt to speak, to plead the limitations of the flesh; in vain would the puffing and breathless ponas Jokubas insist, in vain would Teta Elzbieta implore. "Szalin!" Marija would scream. "Palauk! isz kelio! What are ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... and shivering into the rooty thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where, without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to divert attention from the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so much ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... face purple, and with blood streaming from his nostrils, had sunk into a chair. He rose now, and his first words were incoherent, raging gasps. ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased with a start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it was, and what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid flesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... was haunted by painful, incoherent dreams. With the curious freakishness of a disordered mind, he was beset by a vision of the dark, ferret face of Victor Gagnon. The trader seemed to be hovering threateningly over his rude couch, and, behind him, less distinct, but always recognizable, was the fair Aim-sa. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... opened window, had guttered into coffin handles and shrouds, and, choked by their long black wicks for want of snuffing, gave out a smoky yellow light. One of the young men might possibly have been in a maudlin state, for he had his arm round the neck of his next neighbour. Another was making an incoherent speech to which nobody was listening. Some of their faces were red, some were sallow; some were sleepy, some wide awake. The only one among them who appeared in his usual frame of mind was Festus, whose huge, burly form rose at the head of the table, enjoying with a serene and triumphant ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... from the houses, and a large proportion of the inhabitants and guests appear on the road in various degrees of intoxication. Some of these vow eternal affection to their friends, or with flaccid gestures and in incoherent tones harangue invisible audiences; others stagger about aimlessly in besotted self-contentment, till they drop down in a state of complete unconsciousness. There they will lie tranquilly till they are picked up by their less intoxicated friends, or more probably till they awake ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... joy, and this time woke Dolly, who thought it was a calamity, and wept. Fully five minutes of incoherent rejoicing followed, and then details might be rounded off. The fireman had to stand by his engine on the night-shift in an hour's time, but he saw his way to a ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... ear to von Kerber's settlement with the cocher. The latter was now volubly indignant in the assessment of damages to his vehicle, hoping to obtain a louis as compensation. When he was given a hundred francs his gratitude became almost incoherent. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... be impossible to convey to my reader, by description, an adequate conception of the scene that followed my landing on the beach, as we stood embracing each other indiscriminately in our dripping garments, and giving utterance to incoherent rhapsodies, mingled with wild shouts. It can be more easily imagined than described, so I will draw a curtain over this part of my history, and carry the reader forward over ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... his hopeless position overcame the wretched man, and his skill began to leave him. He became thick and confused of speech; his periods tripped; his thought moved backward. Then his supple tongue failed him utterly, and, in cries and incoherent groans, he pleaded for the right ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, by Keats. I choose this rather than the Endymion, because the latter work (which a modern critic has classed with the Faery Queen!), although undoubtedly there blows through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The poem of Isabella, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous words and images: almost in every stanza there occurs one of those vivid and picturesque turns ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... musical, vigorous, and peculiar, and hardly in any part can he be justly charged with prolonging an echo. He is not one of the many mocking-birds that infest the groves at the foot of Parnassus. Though portions of his songs be wild, fitful, and incoherent, they gush with the force and feeling of a heart loyal to its intuitions, and thus many strains captivate and keep the tuneful ear. Yet such charming lines make conspicuous the want of that high appreciation of form and proportion without which any felicity of touch in the treatment of details ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... engine and the sighing of the trees, which bent down at the approach, he murmured incoherent words. The recollection of the two lovers clasped in each other's arms made him cry aloud with jealousy. He wanted to be revenged. For the first time in his life, the longing, the feverish craving to kill set ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... of our new surroundings, the strangeness of our sudden removal from America, the long distances travelled, awoke in me new thoughts and I readily surrendered myself at times to the incoherent struggles of my nature, to find someone, something, more responsive to my young feelings than essays on magnetism, and a man, father though he was, immersed in demonstrations and problems. It was then that this distant picture in the days of the fragrant ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the individual thus addressed, returning Harry's gripe and stare with interest, "is it possible? no—it cannot—Harry Somerville, my old, dear, unexpected friend!"—and pouring out broken sentences, abrupt ejaculations, and incoherent questions, to which neither vouchsafed replies, the two friends gazed at and walked round each other, shook hands, partially embraced, and committed sundry other extravagances, utterly unconscious of or indifferent ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the main, their feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae. But the two great—the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... indisposed, but is better, thanks to a draught "composed of laudanum, nitre and other savoury drugs." When their letters do not arrive promptly they are in despair. "Stage after stage without a line!" complains Theodosia the mother, in one feverishly incoherent note. And Theodosia the daughter, even at nine years old, had her ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... outworn—to exchange for this a preciousness of quality as against mere rude bulk. It desired to introduce depth of purpose in the place of chaotic moral disorder, originality in place of a frenzied and incoherent eccentricity, and to found a solid structure upon a ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... a few spoonfuls of tea down her throat, feeding her like a child: and, when she had taken it, she tried to thank her, but choked in the middle, and, flinging her arm round Jael's neck, burst into a passion of weeping, and incoherent cries of love, and pity, and despair. "Oh, my darling! so great! so noble! so brave! so gentle! And I have destroyed us both! he forgave me as soon as he SAW me! So terrible, so gentle! What will be the next calamity? Ah, Jael! ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... side of this campaign. Men who have not learned the elementary principles of the science of political economy, who have not mastered the definitions, as we say, in geometry, could say nothing intelligible to the finite understanding. The speeches were as "incoherent" as the New York World proved the platform to be. They all contained doctrines, however, in perpendicular antagonism to the financial doctrines of the St. Louis convention. When the inflationists learn what money is—what its office, its function is—they may ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... made happy. The disagreements of the two preceding nights were like bad dreams, which they were anxious to forget, or at least to avoid thinking of. Her painful, unreasonable treatment of him, the evening before, had not been touched on between them; after his incoherent attempts to justify himself, after his bitter self-reproaches, when she lay sobbing in his arms, they had both, with one accord, been silent. Neither of them felt any desire for open-hearted explanations; they were careful not to stir up the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... not arranged in consistent chronological order, nor is it supplied with an index. The work, printed seventy-three years ago, is not within easy reach of every reader; and of those who have access to it not all are patient enough to read steadily through so large a mass of somewhat incoherent matter. Should any such readers be tempted to examine the record closely, it is hoped that this sketch will do something to make their task easier. An attempt is made here to picture the man as he was, full of fortitude, yet not exempt from human ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... followed he was very incoherent; but it seems that the Blackfaces departed, leaving him with his wife and children nearly frightened to death, and with the top of ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... the letter and slowly read it through. It was a rambling, incoherent epistle, full of smudges where words had been scratched out and rewritten, but a pitiful appeal nevertheless. Jedediah Cahoon had evidently had a hard time since the day when, after declaring his intention never to return until "loaded ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... cried, "You are a prosperous and affected pseudo-litterateur!" and all the mummies spoke sepulchrally the word of derision, which is "Tee-Hee": and many said also, "The scavenger has never meddled with us, and we never heard of you," and there was much other incoherent foolishness. ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... that he was Pete's friend would almost substantiate that. Had not the papers said that Peter Annersley was a hired gunman of The Spider's? And although this man had not given his name, she knew that he was The Spider of Pete's incoherent mutterings. And The Spider, glancing about the room, gazed curiously at the metal oxygen tank and then at the ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... is a pained listener of this incoherent talk of his son. "I am afraid,—I am afraid," he murmurs to himself, "that he has no clear views of the great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... standing-place, even in the abyss: and that is the belief, intuitive, inspired, due neither to reasoning nor to study, that the billows are God's billows; and that though we go down to hell, He is there also;— the belief that not we, but He, is educating us; that these seemingly fantastic and incoherent miseries, storm following earthquake, and earthquake fire, as if the caprice of all the demons were let loose against us, have in His Mind a spiritual coherence, an organic unity and purpose (though we see it ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... plainly to me that an effort was being made to disturb, if not destroy, my reason. I began to find my ideas becoming incoherent in spite of hugest effort. I called my friend, and said to him, through set teeth, but as coolly ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... "She says she won't stay with me; she says——" He threw out his hands agitatedly. "It wasn't my fault; I swear to you that it wasn't my fault, Sangster. Things were going swimmingly, and then the letter came—and that finished it." He was incoherent—stammering; but Sangster ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... presented the volume, folded her hands, as I always require her to do, and commenced the repetition of that short thing by Chenier, 'La Jeune Captive.' If you had heard the manner in which she went through this, and in which she uttered a few incoherent comments when she had done, you would have known what I meant by the phrase 'unsettled hurry.' One would have thought Chenier was more moving than all Racine and all Corneille. You, brother, who have so much sagacity, will discern that this disproportionate preference argues an ill-regulated ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... fool, and the trapper who was wily enough to ensnare him had achieved something notable. Augustus, when he realized that his fate was sealed, and his night's lodging settled, wisely made the best of things, and listened, with a languorous air of complete comprehension, to the incoherent babble concerning pigs and heroes, moles and bonfires, which served Harold for a self-sung lullaby. Yet it may be doubted whether Augustus was one of those rare ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... South-west Bay and frantically waving a lighted torch in his hand, under the influence of such violent excitement that when we dropped work, and ran to him to learn what was the matter, we found him to all intents and purposes incoherent for the moment. ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... some incoherent threat, in which such words as "downright robbery" and "justice" could be distinguished, and then abruptly walked back into the street, slamming ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... on the ground, and burying her face in her arms, rocked herself to and fro. Dr. Bryant had listened to her rambling, incoherent language, like one in a dream, till the name of Mary passed her lips, and then his head sank upon his chest, and he groaned in the anguish of ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... summing up his conclusions. He seemed to have a sort of provincial dread of showing himself too much impressed. Claudia's own sensations were too complex, too overwhelming, to be readily classified. Lacking the craftsman's instinct to steady her, she felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent impressions. One point she consciously avoided, and that was the comparison of her husband's work with what they were daily seeing. Art, she inwardly argued, was too various, too complex, dependent on too many inter-relations of feeling and environment, to allow of its being ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... appears to suggest some fanciful and sorrowful notion; but in other cases an effort of any kind excites weeping, independently of any sorrowful idea. Patients suffering from acute mania likewise have paroxysms of violent crying or blubbering, in the midst of their incoherent ravings. We must not, however, lay too much stress on the copious shedding of tears by the insane, as being due to the lack of all restraint; for certain brain-diseases, as hemiplegia, brain-wasting, and senile decay, have a special tendency to induce weeping. Weeping is common ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... world!" she added hysterically. "If you've interfered between any one and his duty in this world, where it seems as if hardly any one had any duty, you've done a very unwarrantable thing." She was aware from his stare that her words were incoherent, if not from the words themselves, but she hurried on: "I am going with him. He was here last night, and I told him I would. I will go with the Savors, and we will keep the child together; and if they will take me, I shall go to work in the mills; and I shall not care ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... matter of surprise that, notwithstanding his sprightly wit, he never exposed by his raillery those vague, incoherent, and noisy discourses, those rash censures, ignorant decisions, coarse jests, and all that empty jingle of words which at Babylon went by the name of conversation. He had learned, in the first book of Zoroaster, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... getting well on in the afternoon, I suppose, that Tom Jecks' fever came to a height. He muttered, and then began to talk angrily, but in an incoherent way, and his voice grew so loud that at last I roused myself and went up to the look-out, to watch ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... The lady writes upon scraps of paper, which she tears, and throws under the table. Copies of ten of these rambling papers; and of a letter to him most affectingly incoherent. He attempts farther to extenuate his villany. Tries to resume his usual levity; and forms a scheme to decoy the people at Hampstead to the infamous woman's in town. The ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... that inconstancy and want of changing from one place to another, that desire to read useless and frivolous books, novels, weeklies and magazines, which for the most part enervate the mind by their futilities, trouble and darken it by a multitude of incoherent images and contradictory thoughts, and poison the heart by foul and filthy images that will constantly torment ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... doctor. "Our historians divide the entire revolutionary epoch—from the close of the war, or the beginning of the seventies, to the establishment of the present order early in the twentieth century—into two periods, the incoherent and the rational. The first of these is the period of which we have been talking, and with which Storiot deals with in the paragraphs I have read—the period with which you were, for the most part, contemporary. ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... things, the bloom of which has not been rubbed away by the rough touch of the world. It is only when that shyness is prolonged beyond the appropriate years, when it leaves a well-grown and hard-featured man gasping and incoherent, jerky and ungracious, that it is a painful and disconcerting deformity. The only real shadow of early shyness is the quite disproportionate amount of unhappiness that conscious gaucherie brings with it. Two incidents connected ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... neither liked or esteemed her. She would shorten her visit at Clarendon Park—make it as short as his heart could desire,—she would never be the cause of any disagreement—poor, dear, kind Cecilia! She would write directly to Mrs. Collingwood." At the close of these last incoherent sentences, Helen was awe-struck by the absolute composed immovability and silence of Lady Davenant. Helen stood ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... seemed to behold once more the multitudes of Palestine, the landscapes of England, the dainty splendours of France, and the tranquil homes of Germany. Gradually, however, his reflections became less incoherent, and the meaning of the vision appeared to evolve itself before him, in inductions fraught at once with reproach and consolation. Coupling together the truths enunciated by the Voice of his unseen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Code's hard, strong hands closed upon his arms in a grip that brought a bellow of pain. In deadly fear of his life, he babbled protests, apologies, and pleadings in an incoherent medley that would have satisfied the most toughened ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... Herbert Spencer's principle, that development proceeds from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, is certainly true of the religions of the world; but his other principle, that development proceeds from the incoherent to the coherent, does not apply. Incoherency and moral chaos mark the trend of all man-made faiths. The universal tendency to deterioration is well summed up ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the dramas from which these grand things have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion, huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His imagination partook of the incompleteness of his intellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for expression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... incoherent speech, he tried to force a smile; but Marsa, taking no notice of him, turned slowly to the doctor, who had not removed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... hand her hurriedly to her carriage,—a magnificent state-carriage. He had invited some twenty people, former friends of his, to a great wedding- breakfast; but he seemed to have forgotten them. And once in his carriage, alone with Mrs. Brian, M. Elgin, and the young countess, he broke forth in incoherent imprecations and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... with a confused memory of having listened to a great deal of incoherent conversation from Jellicoe, and a painfully vivid recollection of handing over the bulk of his worldly wealth to him. The thought depressed him, though it seemed to please Jellicoe, for the latter carolled in a gay undertone as he dressed, till Psmith, who had a sensitive ear, asked as a favour ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... possible that she had never, even in her heyday, been otherwise than moderately plain. Now, at the age of fifty-one and a half, she was a faithful creature with a thin, pendulous nose, a pale, hysteric eye, a tendency to cold in the head and chilblains in the autumn of the year, and a somewhat incoherent and occasionally frenzied turn of mind. Argument could never at any time have had much effect upon her nature, and as she grew towards maturity its power over her most markedly decreased. This fact ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... to Rome I saw similar inconsistencies in their behavior. They never so much as entered Fidentia, but marched round it, acquiescent to the gentle suggestion of a trembling and incoherent alderman, quaking with fear and barely able to enunciate some disjointed sentences. At Parma they emptied two ergastula and never so much as approached the others, repeating this inconsistency at Mutina and Bononia. Outside of Faventia something, I never learned what, enraged ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... who had obeyed the knight and risen, bowed respectfully; and Helen, uttering some incoherent words of thanks, to hide her agitation turned away. The hermit exclaimed, "Again, my son, I beseech ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... addressed immediately to themselves. But though the author gain this advantage, and thereby compel the reader to think of the personages of the novel and not of the writer, yet the practice, especially pushed to the extent we have noticed, is a principal cause of the flimsiness and incoherent texture of which his greatest admirers are compelled to complain. Few can wish his success more sincerely than we do, and yet without more attention on his own part, we have great doubts of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... business letters which are written should never be written at all, and of the other half so many are incomplete or incoherent that a transaction which could be finished and filed away in two letters frequently requires six ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the student's monotonous and secluded life. Enclosed in this letter were bills of a large amount, contracted at college, of whose existence the father was perfectly unconscious. No reference was made to these, save in the postscript, most incoherent in expression, and written evidently with an unsteady hand. He begged his father to forgive him for having forgotten—the word forgotten was partially erased, and neglected substituted in its place—ah! Louis, Louis, you should have ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... their gripping weight, and I can see the zigzags of the candle held by a kneeling man whose other arm engirdles the mutilated maniac, who shouts so fiercely that he wakes up the sleepers and dispels the drowsiness of the rest. On all sides they turn towards him; half rising, they listen to the incoherent lamentations which end by dying in the dark. At the same moment, in another corner, two prostrate wounded, crucified on the ground, so curse each other that one of them has to be removed before the frantic ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... forcing an imitation of incoherent laughter, 'I am but trifling with you. I am not mad. I sought but to rouse some passion in you—either of fear or of anger. But, alas! I have not sufficient power over you even for that. Sit down. I have something to relate. When I ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... spectator as Bert it presented itself as a series of incidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively incoherent. He never had a sense of any plain issue joined, of any point struggled for and won or lost. He saw tremendous things happen and in the end his world darkened ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... a soft clear evening, and we loitered, speculating upon the possible meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences which I had just been reading. We had nearly a mile to walk before reaching the road that passes the schloss in front, and by that time the moon was shining brilliantly. At the drawbridge we met Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, who had come out, without their ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... press and kiss her hand; then press and kiss, and so on to her lips and cheeks: then talk as much as you can about hearts, darts, flames, nectar, and ambrosia—the more incoherent the better. ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... intention, to follow this author, through all the mazes and windings of his reasoning upon this subject, which (in truth) seem such incoherent shreds, that it is impossible to tie them together; and therefore, what I purpose is, to answer such objections to the Test, as are advanced either by this author, or any other which have any appearance of reason, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... soon be over with him: Poor, poor fellow! He has given me some hints of what he wanted to say; but all incoherent, interrupted by dying ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... poor psychologist. But Le Mansel's pride was too subtle to strike one at once. It had no concrete shape, but seemed to embrace remote phantasms. And yet it influenced all his feelings and gave to his ideas, uncouth and incoherent though they ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... they set to, and the monarch falls under the terrible arm of the man whom he has injured. He dies, uttering a few incoherent words of repentance, and Carpezan, leaning upon his murderous mace, utters a heartbroken soliloquy over the royal corpse. The Turkish warriors have gathered meanwhile: the dreadful day is their own. Yonder stands the dark Vizier, surrounded by his Janissaries, whose bows and swords are tired ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in jail, and glad to be in a solitary cell because he was handwriting a full confession. The knowledge of what Clarens had done during his few hours of freedom had scared the hypno-tech into almost incoherent co-operation. ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... had walked some little distance across the plain to meet and welcome the expected guest. She stood quietly waiting while her husband stammered over his incoherent sentences, and ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... and she was clasped to his heart!—a real woman and no dream, no vision. What the wind could only faintly shadow forth upon her cheek, sprang into life under the touch of his fevered lips, and color flooded them like a wave. Laughing, crying, sobbing, she clung to him, kissed him with little incoherent murmurs, gazed at him, wept over him, kissed him again. All the troubles of the intervening days of sadness and privation faded away from her like a disused chrysalis, and she sparkled with life and love like a butterfly ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... amazed, and was also exceedingly terrified at this communication. He trembled and turned pale, then looked wild and excited, and began to make inquiries in an incoherent and distracted manner. Calpurnia called in Cleopatra to confirm her story. Cleopatra did confirm it, of course, in the fullest and most unqualified manner. The effect which was produced upon the mind of the emperor ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... by storm, and are unspeakably relieved when the assembly is over. As company is held in fashionable society now, the talk is not tenaciously kept to important themes, for ends of conviction, culture, light, or joy, but is a hodge-podge of trifles, an incoherent succession of unconsidered remarks. Each one speaks with his neighbor, regardless of all the rest of the guests, as if it were an evil to be silent, or an absurdity to expect that anybody could say any thing worth ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... is a Failing that has its Root in Nature, but is not worth laughing at, till it has received the finishing strokes of Art. A man thro' natural Defects may do abundance of incoherent foolish Actions, yet deserves compassion and Advice rather than derision. But to see Men spending their Fortunes, as well as lives, in a Course of regular Folly, and with an industrious as well as expensive idleness ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... impulse, urged him to strangle with his own hands the woman he had loved so dearly, had at one time adored on his knees. The count rushed out of the room with gestures of desperation, muttering incoherent words; and as he shewed plain signs of mental aberration, his father, Charles of Artois, took him away, and they went that same evening to their palace of St. Agatha, and there prepared a defence in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the other room. I have no notion how long he talked, or what about. Whiskey and soda-water became the order of the hour. I scarcely touched it, but he drank copiously, and before eleven I left him incoherent. And the last train for Esher was the ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... a letter from Strasburg, from Berlin, Munich—letters about once a fortnight. From Bella also came an occasional note, a pretty contrast to the incoherent enthusiasm of her husband's compositions. Midway in September she announced their departure from ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... true poet in the first rank in English literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments of their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... listen to him all a summer afternoon, is that he gives, unconsciously, a perfect exhibition of a perfect process, a great mind in motion. His mind is too full, too crowded, too ratiocinative, for easy and frugal utterance. Sometimes, unless one is an acute listener, he is almost incoherent in his zeal to express all the phases and facets of the thought that flashes upon him. And yet, if one could (unknown to him) have a stenographer behind the arras to take it all down, so that his argument ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the door, Mad Sal having just before left him; but the information she had given had been in such incoherent language, that not till Harry and his friend arrived did he comprehend what ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... in at the usual hour, and was surprised and alarmed to find her young mistress still in bed, with cheeks burning and eyes sparkling with fever, and talking in a wild, incoherent manner. ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... into a chair, and in an agitated, nearly incoherent manner, related the circumstances that led to the arrest of Thurston Willcoxen for the murder of ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... as the trembling man was murmuring his incoherent thanks. Owen waved his hand; Cytherea smiled back to him as if it were unknown to her that ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... you must own her behaviour has warranted them—has it not been in this particular incoherent ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... cried, "Indios!" and what followed of his speech was only incoherent savage babblings. He would have darted alone into the thick of the band had not Franklin and Curly caught him each by ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... not be strong enough to return to her duties for a year or more. If some member of her family could come out to take care of her, it would relieve the school authorities of great anxiety. There was also a letter from a fellow teacher, and a rather incoherent one from Caroline herself. After Claude finished reading them, Mr. Royce pushed a box of cigars toward him and began to ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... his eyes flashing, his hat cocked over his ear, and addressing the most respectable people with unheard-of rudeness, he attempted to force his way past the sentry, and thrust himself, for what purpose God only knows, into the presence of the Sovereign. During his incoherent ejaculations, the following words were distinguished: 'bravery, Vendome column, fidelity, the dial-plate of time, the tablets of history.' When he was arrested by one of the detective watch, and taken before the police commissioner of the Tuilleries section, he was recognized as the ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... cultivated woman was now the great object of Hagar's life; and, fearing lest by some inadvertent word or action the secret should be disclosed, she wished to live by herself, where naught but the winds of heaven could listen to the incoherent whisperings which made her fellow-servants ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... measure of the author's progress in his craft during the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister Carrie," at bottom, is no more than a first sketch, a rough piling up of observations and ideas, disordered and often incoherent. In the midst of the story, as I have said, the author forgets it, and starts off upon another. In "Jennie Gerhardt" there is no such flaccidity of structure, no such vacillation in aim, no such proliferation of episode. Considering ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... a few hours shade would be needed. Then with the rest he scrambled to the Nile for water and brought it back. As he poured it down Feversham's throat, Feversham seemed for a moment to recognise him. But it was only for a moment, and the incoherent tale of his adventures began again. Thus, after five years, and for the first time since Trench had dined as Feversham's guest in the high rooms overlooking St. James's Park, the two men met in the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... upper part of her deadly pale face, through which her wild sparkling black eyes, protruding from their sockets, glanced and glared with the fire of a maniac's, while her blue lips kept gibbering an incoherent prayer one moment, and the next imploring mercy, as if she had still been in the hands of those who knew not the name; and anon, a low hysterical laugh made our very blood freeze in our bosoms, which soon ended in a long dismal yell, as she rolled off the couch upon the hard deck, and ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... She murmured an incoherent expression, and tried to smile; saying, with a fitful aversion of her face, 'I am only frightened. Put me down, do ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... It was with a slight shock, then, that he realized how completely she had grown up. He remembered her in so many phases of childhood and little girlhood, ranging up from a time when her speech was incoherent, and she had sat on his knee and played with his watch, to the more recent occasions when he had met her riding in the Park with her brother; and she had waved her little whip to him, looking particularly slim and pretty ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... These incoherent cries came from her lips while Modeste, in alarm, picked up the newspaper and adjusted her silver spectacles upon her nose to read the paragraph. "Monsieur Fred wounded! Holy Virgin! His poor mother! That is a new trouble fallen on her, to be sure. ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... general term for the land along the edge of a water course; it may also denote a raised portion of the bed of a river, lake, or ocean; as, the Banks of Newfoundland. A beach is a strip or expanse of incoherent wave-worn sand, which is often pebbly or full of boulders; we speak of the beach of a lake or ocean; a beach is sometimes found in the bend of a river. Strand is a more poetic term for a wave-washed shore, especially as a place for landing ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... anecdotes, however, of this splendid man, often trivial, often incoherent, often unauthenticated, there is one which strikes us as both true and interesting; and we are grateful to Mr Gillman for preserving it. We find it introduced, and partially authenticated, by the following sentence from Coleridge himself:—"From eight to fourteen I was a playless day-dreamer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... With an incoherent exclamation and eyes afire the Russian sat forward. Unconsciously the others imitated his action. Only the man in evening dress made ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... came Julia's mother and Nell, in the light carriage; and kisses, and tears, and little laughy sobs, and words that ran out with little freshets of tears, and unanswered questions, and unasked answers, broken and incoherent; yet all were happy, and all thankful and grateful to their Father in Heaven; and blessings and thanks—many of them ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... like a child. Seeing the Major so well advanced, and no retreat possible, I made a fair wind of a foul one, keeping his glass full, pushing him with toasts; and sooner than I could have dared to hope, he became drowsy and incoherent. With the wrong-headedness of all such sots, he would not be persuaded to lie down upon one of the mattresses until I had stretched myself upon another. But the comedy was soon over; soon he slept the sleep of the just, and snored like a military music; and I might get up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... keeping him with her, talked of herself, pouring out an incoherent story of misfortune: how she had fainted on the stage one night and incurred the ill-will of the director; how the company went on and left her without friends and without money; how matters had gone from bad to worse until she couldn't stand it any longer. She painted a picture ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... less incoherent, it appeared that on coming out on the bit of common above the wood, as she and Clarence were halting on the brow of the hill to admire the view, they heard a call for help, and hurrying down in the direction whence it proceeded they saw a stunted ash-tree, beneath which were a ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of similar caliber, was the leading spirit in the New Haven settlement, assisted by the Reverend Mr. Davenport; many of the colonists were Second-Adventists, and they called the Bible their Statute-Book. The date of their establishment was 1638. The incoherent population of Rhode Island caused it to be excluded from the federation; but Williams, journeying to London, obtained a patent from the exiled but now powerful Vane, and took as the motto of his government, "Amor Vincet Omnia." New ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... international arrangements concerning Post Offices, shipping, banking, codes, sanctions of law, criminal research, and the rest, on which so much of our civilized life depends. This world State is unorganized, incoherent. It has neither a centre nor a capital, nor a meeting place. The shipowners gather in Paris, the world's bankers in Madrid or Berne, and what is in effect some vital piece of world regulation is devised in the smoking ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... too great for her already overstrained intellect. A giddiness seized upon her; every thing seemed to whirl before her eyes; she gasped some incoherent words, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... intervals between his tears since he was married were never long. At these words Shaphan lifted his face from his hands and dashed some tears from his eyelids. He will tell us now, the brethren said to themselves, but he only uttered a few incoherent words, and his face ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether he too wasn't a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that should restore the authority of the established church—by incoherent missioning—without any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any clear hope for anything in particular arising out of such activities. The bishop's hand went seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... This was my broad-browed, frank-faced, golden-haired, bright, smiling, incoherent, inconsistent, inconsequential, light-hearted, hilarious Jack—the Jack who was once the joy of every company, rollicking, reckless, and without a care. To this complexion had he come at last. Oh, what a moral ruin was here, my countrymen! ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... abasement, and he wrote a long, incoherent letter to her, telling her that he had resolved that he would not go into the Army. "Because I'm a coward, Mary. I've thought the thing over from beginning to end, thought about it until I became dizzy with thinking, and this is the end of it all: I'm a coward. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... acquired reappears, it is followed by the thought which accompanied it when it was acquired. In a conversation a traitor is spoken of. Someone asks what was the value of a piece of silver in ancient times. This appears incoherent; really it is a natural and simple association of ideas in which there are few intermediate steps. The person who listened as the traitor was mentioned thought of Judas, who was the first traitor of whom he had heard, and of the thirty pieces ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... of their mirth was tossing on a bed of sickness. Disease, which had been slowly sapping the foundations of his strength, burned in every vein; his eyes rolled and flashed in delirium; his lips, usually so silent, muttered wild and incoherent words. In his days of health, poor Duhobret had his dreams, as all artists, rich or poor, will sometimes have. He had thought that the fruit of many years' labor, disposed of to advantage, might procure him enough to live, in an economical way, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... which we shut our eyes to because it does not interest us, or which we evade by denying the second order in its turn—that is, at bottom, by re-establishing the first. How can we speak, then, of an incoherent diversity which an understanding organizes? It is no use for us to say that no one supposes this incoherence to be realized or realizable: when we speak of it, we believe we are thinking of it; now, in analyzing the idea actually present, we find, as we said before, only ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Grecian art, accomplished in the medieval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful but incoherent facade of the Brood-huis, now the last earthly resting-place of the two distinguished victims, while grouped around these principal buildings rose the fantastic palaces of the Archers, Mariners, and of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... then grinned faintly, and nodded at Russell as the latter lifted his hat in salutation. Alice uttered an incoherent syllable of exclamation, and, as she began to walk faster, she bit her lip hard, not in order to look wistful, this time, but to help her keep tears of anger ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... again sent me back and forth in that awful tramp from wall to wall. I perceived that the strain of that horrible haunted silence was driving me mad. There was no escape, no hope, no peace. Again and again did I break from incoherent ravings to sink upon my knees, beseeching God for mercy. Yet I arose without rest, without peace. At last I sank weakly down against the wall and lay trembling in every limb, staring ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... place," she began timidly, and then continuing with a nervous incoherent rush of words, "he will be simply delighted that you've really come, because he said you were the only person he would consent to see at all—the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he doesn't know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He pretends with me that it's just a nervous ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... me the most incoherent of all systems, but to Christianity I feel no objection but its want ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... up and down the room, he frankly unfolded his troubles—the approaching marriage of his mother (this was no news), and, in an agitated and incoherent manner, his desperate predicament with regard ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... down on his knees and murmured some incoherent words of thanksgiving. Surely his virtue in restoring his wife to life had been rewarded! But, as if the impulse struck uneasily on his conscience, he quickly rose, brushed the dust from his trousers and set himself to think of his next movements. He could not start for London for some hours; and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was condemned almost as universally as his Iago was praised. For once I find myself with the majority. He screamed and ranted and raved—lost his voice, was slow where he should have been swift, incoherent where he should have been strong. I could not bear to see him in the part. It was painful to me. Yet night after night he achieved in the speech to the Senate one of the most superb and beautiful bits of acting of his life. It was wonderful. He spoke ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... seat, it was the wife that took the office of consoler. She took his trembling hand, and kissed it, and put it round her neck: she called him her John—her dear John—her old man—her kind old man; she poured out a hundred words of incoherent love and tenderness; her faithful voice and simple caresses wrought this sad heart up to an inexpressible delight and anguish, and cheered and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... been accustomed to wear had been removed whilst I slept, and in their stead, suits of the very deepest mourning appeared. I dressed myself in one of these, and upon asking Servilius and his wife the meaning of this change, was answered by Andrea with so wild a burst of grief, and incoherent lamentation, that I durst inquire no further. After they had gone forth to their daily employment I also quitted the cottage for a stroll, and detected a woman pointing me out to her children as "a poor, little boy, who had probably lost both his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... I could understand the incoherent statement which she addressed to me, she had been the object of admiration (while visiting Maplesworth) of two gentlemen, who both desired to marry her. Hesitating between them and perfectly inexperienced in such ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... wearing a tailor-made dress that fitted her to perfection, and on her head she had a large hat, from under which tiny tendrils of dark hair had escaped; her skin was of the whiteness of rose petals except where the blood flushed, her eyes had the look of wet violets in spring. My lips murmured incoherent thanks and welcome. I could not force my mind away from the waiting ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... They could see the Fairfields clearly now, but not being within hearing distance, they could only express their welcome by frantic wavings of hands, handkerchiefs, and flags. But at last the gangplank was put in place, and at last the Fairfields crossed it, and then an enthusiastic and somewhat incoherent ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... suspense, became dangerously ill. When she recovered, her parents were more indulgent to her, and were gratified by finding her former passionate resistance replaced by sulky obedience. Five years elapsed, and Elinor began to write fiction. The beginning of a novel, and many incoherent verses imitated from Lara, were discovered by her mother, and burnt by her father. This outrage she never forgave. She was unable to make her resentment felt, for she no longer cared to break glass and china. She feared even to remonstrate lest she should humiliate herself by ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... that he must not at any cost see de Spain, Nan stepped quickly into the hall and faced the messenger. "I was over at the doctor's office just now," continued her visitor evenly, "he asked me to bring this down for your uncle." She took the package with an incoherent acknowledgment. Without letting her eyes meet his, she was conscious of how fresh and clean and strong he looked, dressed in a livelier manner than usual—a partly cowboy effect, with a broader Stetson and a gayer tie than he ordinarily affected. De Spain kept on speaking: "The telephone ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... gleaned more from his continual droppings than he himself brought home;—nay, made stately corn-ricks therewith, while the reaper himself was still seen only with a strutting armful of newly-cut sheaves. But I should misinform you grossly if I left you to infer that his collections were a heap of incoherent 'miscellanea'. No! the very contrary. Their variety, conjoined with the too great coherency, the too great both desire and power of referring them in systematic, nay, genetic subordination, was that which rendered his schemes gigantic and impracticable, as an author, and his conversation ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... that early training that a good many of us have never yet been able to work up much enthusiasm over the Old Masters. Mind you, we have no quarrel with those who become incoherent and babbling with joy in the presence of an Old Master, but—doggone 'em!—they insist on quarreling with us because we think differently. We fail to see anything ravishingly beautiful in a faded, blistered, cracked, ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... added the further misery of scanty means. For a few months later an advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the Daily Post, showing that Fielding was already eagerly pushing forward the publication of the Miscellanies, that incoherent collection which is itself proof enough that necessity alone had called it into being. "The publication of these Volumes," he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's indisposition last Winter, and a train ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... monkey, and squeezed it to his breast, and kissed it— yes, he actually kissed its nose in the height of his glee, and continued to utter incoherent exclamations, and to perpetrate incongruous absurdities, until long after they had descended the river and left the muddy Portuguese and ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... was a bare hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that seeped through by some instant's freak of transmission was a fragment of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... with an introverted expression—"recueillement d'esprit," he thought to himself, bitterly. Brushing her hair in passing lightly with his lips, he left the room and presently the house. When she discovered that he had gone without again seeing her, she flew to the telephone and held a long incoherent talk with some one she not infrequently called "Ben, dear," to whom she confided certain undefined fears about her husband and her future. A suggestion of a trip to Europe from the other end of the telephone met with her unbounded ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... stunned and terrified to do anything but drop on his knees and utter incoherent entreaties and ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... such rebellious behaviour, he replied that it was only a trial to see whether destiny had intended him to become an Emperor or to remain a cobbler. On the next day he was shot as a conspirator. I saw the unfortunate man in the Palais Royal; his eyes looked wild, and his words were often incoherent. He was certainly a subject more deserving a place in a madhouse than ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... sudden burst of impulsiveness, Mysie flung her arms round the neck of the older woman, pouring out her young heart and all its troubles in an incoherent ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... tobacco-smoke, tar, and some acrid odor. Facing Gavrilo at another table sat a drunken man in the dress of a sailor, with a red beard, all over coal-dust and tar. Hiccupping every minute, he was droning a song all made up of broken and incoherent words, strangely sibilant and guttural sounds. He was ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... but I suspect one of the ruffians was known to this wretched woman; her incoherent words implied that she recognized in him an ancient enemy; but her frail remains of intellect, were, for a time, quite unsettled by the terror of the scene; she fled from me to her chamber in dismay, and at daybreak I left the cottage without ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... a long letter to Laura, an incoherent, passionate letter, pouring out his love as he could not do in her presence, and warning her as plainly as he dared of the dangers that surrounded her, and the risks she ran of compromising herself ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... my repose to myself in security, and not to inflict a set of crude and incoherent dreams upon my readers. In the meantime, when I revived, I revived in earnest, and in the course of that month carried on my work with unabated ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... threw herself on the grass beside Marty, who forthwith began showing her the magazine and telling her in a rather incoherent way about mission work in general and their band in particular. She told how many belonged to the band, what they did at the meetings, how much money they had, and what they were going to do with it; how this ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... exactly twenty-three yearn ago." Brandon started back, his lips grew white, he clenched his hands with a convulsive spasm; and while all his features seemed distorted with an earnest yet fearful intensity of expectation, he poured forth a volley of questions, so incoherent and so irrelevant that he was immediately called to order by his learned brother on the opposite side. Nothing further could be extracted from the witness. The pawnbroker was resummoned: he appeared somewhat disconcerted by an appeal to his memory so far ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who had been at Mr. and Mrs. Birtwell's party, and who drove up in a carriage just as the general and Mrs. Abercrombie, white with snow, came to the door. They entered together, the lady expressing surprise at their appearance, at which the general growled some incoherent sentences and strode away from them and up the stairs, Mrs. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... worried him with that extraordinary story of Alexandre turning up once more, being welcomed by Constance, and introduced by her into the establishment. Plain as was the greater part of the letter, it contained some singularly incoherent passages, and darted from one point to another with incomprehensible suddenness. Mathieu had read it three times, indulging on each occasion in fresh hypotheses of a gloomier and gloomier nature; for the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the following intended brochure. But I answered, Really, Mr. Judgment, (better or worse, as occasion may register your Agnomen,) you must not weigh trifles in gold-assaying scales; be not so particular as to the polish of a thumb-nail; endure a little incoherent pastime; count not the several stems of hay, straw, stubble—but suffer them to be pitch-forked en masse, and unconsidered: it is their privilege, in common with that of certain others—lightnesses that froth upon the surface of society. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... infallible, she is continually making mistakes. She gropes and hesitates. She does not know precisely what she wants. She begins by making stupendous blunders. She first peoples the world with uncouth and incoherent monsters, not one of which is capable of living; these all disappear. Gradually she acquires, at the cost of the life which she creates, an experience that is the cruel fruit of the immeasurable suffering which she unfeelingly inflicts. ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... he was a clergyman, and indeed his appearance, when undergoing the examination of the Captain of the Watch, was anything but clerical. His face was covered with blood, his clothes soiled and disordered, his hat crushed, and his manner wild and incoherent. It is more than probable that, had the Captain known who he was, he would ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... softly. It was a good thing he didn't drop me over the edge." Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situation explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him. While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... voluminous autobiography of "Honest George" can doubt the man's utter truthfulness; and though, in his multitudinous letters, he but rarely rises far above the incoherent commonplaces of a street preacher, there can be no question of his power as a speaker, nor any doubt as to the dignity and attractiveness of his personality, or of his possession of a large amount of practical ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... so incoherent, did his speech seem that for a time Clark almost feared lest his friend's reason might have been affected. But he only stood looking at Lewis, ready to be of such aid as ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... skepticisms steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning. Farewell. Don't write a word about the book. That would be robbing me of my miserly delight. I am heartily sorry I ever wrote ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... me, taking no notice at first of my consternation and wildness, [what they had given me made me incoherent and wild:] All goes well, said he, my dear!—A ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... must be continuous, but somewhere through the cloud lies the sunshine and the land of peace—the final period of intellectual belief. Out of the chaos comes order; ideas that but recently appeared confused, incoherent, and meaningless assume their true perspective. It is found that all the strands of the old conventional faith have not been snapped in the turmoil; and these, re-knit and strengthened with the new and full knowledge of experience and investigation, form the cable that secures that strange holy ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... house sat in a corner looking upon him with dread. I addressed him, but he would scarcely return an answer. At last he commenced discoursing with great volubility in Gypsy and Latin. I did not understand much of what he said. His words were wild and incoherent, but he repeatedly threatened some person. The last bottle was now exhausted: he demanded more. I told him in a gentle manner that he had drunk enough. He looked on the ground for some time, then slowly, and somewhat hesitatingly, drew his sword and laid it on ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... an altercation between Martinuzzi and Isabella, carried on with much vigour on both sides. The lady accuses the gentleman of inebriation, and he owns the soft impeachment, fully bearing it out by several incoherent speeches. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... crushed and stunned under the animal, and came to his senses he knows not how long after, only to lose them again from pain and loss of blood. A dim sense, as of people groaning round about him, a wild incoherent thought or two for her who occupied so much of his heart now, and that here his career, and his hopes, and misfortunes were ended, he remembers in the course of these hours. When he woke up, it was with a pang of extreme pain, his breastplate was taken off, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... absorption of motion and the disintegration of matter. The law of evolution, in its complete development, then runs: "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." This is inductively supported by illustrations from every region of nature and all departments of mental and social life; and, further, shown deducible from ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Of course, a large part of the fun of this game lies in the witty incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects. But the incorporation must be witty, or you may soon convert the whole thing into an incoherent muddle of half-good ideas. ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... and I'm afraid utterly incurable. He keeps on telling everybody"—and the doctor lowered his voice confidentially—"he tells everybody that two people have taken is yacht. His account of how he lost it is quite incoherent." ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... living through a brief new chapter of their history. The wonderful thing had come to them. It was amazing—almost unrealizable! A new glamor enveloped the merest trifles. They spoke in halting sentences, they were at times almost incoherent. The marvel of ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... night," said Hamilton, "just as I was going to bed, and knocked me up." He was almost incoherent in his joy. "He offered me three thousand five hundred pounds for my shares, and I took it ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... re-entered the house he found three entirely strange young women with pink faces, demonstrative manners and emphatic mourning, engaged in an incoherent conversation with Mrs. Johnson. All three kissed him with great gusto after the ancient English fashion. "These are your cousins Larkins," said Mrs. Johnson; "that's Annie (unexpected hug and smack), that's Miriam (resolute hug and smack), and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... latter seem like an atom of dust imbedded in the great Shamo desert. The eye of the astronomer, who thinks he also knows of the existence of such systems, has never rested upon them, has never caught of them, even that spectral glimpse, fanciful and hazy as the incoherent vision in a slumbering mind that he has occasionally had of other systems, and yet he verily believes he has gauged INFINITUDE! And yet these immeasurably distant worlds are brought as clear and near to the spiritual eye of the astral astronomer as a neighbouring bed of daisies ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... here yesterday. Alas! he has "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," for though sometimes uttering brilliant thoughts, they are "like angel visits, few and far between;" and total silence, or half-incoherent ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... eleven o'clock he was so much worse that it was found necessary to muffle the stable knocker. At half-past, or thereabouts, he was heard talking to himself about the horse and Topping's family, and to add some incoherent expressions which are supposed to have been either a foreboding of his approaching dissolution or some wishes relative to the disposal of his little property, consisting chiefly of half-pence which he had buried in different parts of the ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... of all that he was seeing, of the bridge of islands that seemed to be stretching towards the south-west and leading him to the region of untold wealth, was evidently very stimulating and exciting to Columbus. His Journal is almost incoherent where he attempts to set down all he has got to say. Let us listen to him for ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... teens, her pale and sunken face showing marks of refinement and of former beauty. She carried in her arms a child of about a year's age, and she dropped it upon the sofa and sank down beside it, half fainting from exhaustion. The young clergyman's anxious inquiries having succeeded in eliciting but incoherent replies, he had left the room to procure some nourishment for the exhausted woman; it was upon his return that the discovery of the romance alluded to was made, for the woman had disappeared in the darkness and storm, and the baby was still lying ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... reflection, "what interest can this M. de Monte Cristo or M. Zaccone,—son of a shipowner of Malta, discoverer of a mine in Thessaly, now visiting Paris for the first time,—what interest, I say, can he take in discovering a gloomy, mysterious, and useless fact like this? However, among all the incoherent details given to me by the Abbe Busoni and by Lord Wilmore, by that friend and that enemy, one thing appears certain and clear in my opinion—that in no period, in no case, in no circumstance, could there have been any ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... ordered the boy, in disgust. But instead of obeying, the man grovelled and weltered about in the snow, all the while emitting an incoherent, whimpering wail. Connie reached down to snatch the man to his feet, when suddenly he started back in horror. For the wailing suddenly ceased, and in his ears, high and shrill, sounded a peal of maniacal laughter. The eyes of the man met his own in a wild glare, while peal ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... the post of secretary of the treasury was the most important of all. Everything pertaining to the finances of the country was in confusion, and needed a skillful hand in re-arranging and systematizing the inharmonious and incoherent fiscal machinery, so as to ascertain the actual resources of the treasury, and to adopt measures for restoring the credit of the country upon a basis of perfect solvency. "My endeavors," Washington wrote before he assumed the office of chief magistrate, "shall be unremittingly exerted, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... reached her from Warkworth, a wild and incoherent letter, written at night in a little room of a squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux. Her telegram had reached him, and for him, as for her, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... multiple and ever-changing needs. It is not the work of logic, but of history, and the young reasoner shrugs his shoulders at the sight of this old building, whose site is arbitrary, whose architecture is incoherent, and whose inconveniences are obvious. . . . The majority of young people, above all those who have their way to make, are more or less Jacobin on leaving college. . . . Jacobinism is born of social ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... races and your expensive company," he growled, after a few incoherent sniffs and snarls; "but I don't lose my half of the horse. No, no! I'm not paid till the money's been handed over. Twenty-five dollars, remember!—and soon, that I don't lose the use of it too long. As for your money ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... may, indeed, divide them into two groups; some are clear in outline, are consistent, relatively logical, resembling a definite historical relation; others are vague, multiform, incoherent, contradictory; their characters change into one another, the tales are mixed and are imperceptible ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... short Problem, and contrived Tables by which any one without knowing a Word of Grammar or Sense, may, to his great Comfort, be able to compose or rather to erect Latin Verses. His Tables are a kind of Poetical Logarithms, which being divided into several Squares, and all inscribed with so many incoherent Words, appear to the Eye somewhat like a Fortune-telling Screen. What a Joy must it be to the unlearned Operator to find that these Words, being carefully collected and writ down in Order according to the Problem, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... family; for the handwriting was his daughter's, and the signature at the foot of the paper was hers too. With heaving breast and tearful eyes he handed the letter to his sister, whose emotion was almost as distressing as his own as she read the following strange and almost incoherent words:— ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... leaving us two alone. Nor did Marie speak again, unless it were in distressed incoherent protests, till, an hour later, I delivered her into the charge of the Mother Superior at the convent by the side of the bay. And the old lady bade me wait till she saw Marie comfortably bestowed, and then she returned to me and we walked side ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... out the whole story from his mother's excited and incoherent speech, and translated it, Felipe groaned aloud, "Too late! Too late!" He too felt, as Aunt Ri had, that Ramona never could have survived the shock of seeing her husband murdered. "Too late! Too late!" he cried, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... your life? In God's name, what manner of woman are you, and where did you learn to use the sword? Had you no thought of me?" I was somewhat incoherent. ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... defended by the advocate Gerhauer and by Berger. They began with the self-created daughter of Marshal Schwerin; and, to conceal the iniquitous proceedings of the late court- martial, it was thought proper that she should appear insane, and return incoherent answers to the questions put by the examiners. Trenck insisted that a more severe inquiry should be instituted; but they affirmed that she had been conducted out of the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... before he again opened his eyes he could not tell. The shooting throes were still there but he could endure them now and even think in an incoherent fashion. He gazed around. The light grudgingly admitted by a small port-hole revealed a bare prison-like cell. Realization of what it all meant, his being there, swept over him, and, in a semi-delirious frenzy, he tugged at his fastenings. He did not succeed in releasing himself; he only increased ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... here, Frank—and oh, Frank, I'm in such trouble!" And in a curiously jumbled and half-incoherent manner ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... tender as she recalled words spoken in days gone by, when, her heart thrilling with a young girl's first dream of love, she had leaned upon Charles Hunting's arm, and listened to that sweetest music of earth, all the more enchanting when broken and incoherent; and Hunting, with all his coolness and precision in Wall Street, had been excessively nervous and unhappy in his phraseology upon one occasion, and tremblingly glad to get any terms from the girl who seemed a child beside him. Annie would not permit an engagement to take place. Hunting was a distant ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... that night had made him deaf to some explanation of his partner's, or, more terrible, if he had shown some "low" and incredible intimation of taking his partner's extravagant bet as REAL and binding. In this distress he wrote to Uncle Jim an appealing and apologetic letter, albeit somewhat incoherent and inaccurate, and bristling with misspelling, camp slang, and old partnership jibes. But to this elaborate epistle he received only Uncle Jim's repeated assurances of his own bright prospects, and his hopes that ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... had heard the loud sobs of the queen in the adjoining room, hastened to console or weep with her. Louisa did not hear her come; she was still absorbed in grief; only incoherent lamentations fell from her lips, and her tears fell on the letter lying in her lap. Madame von Berg knelt, and implored her with the eloquence of devotedness and affection to let her share her queen's grief—to tell her what ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... of Katte or Schlubhut. The fall of the traitor to fact, of the French monarchy, of the windbags of the first Republic, of Charles I., is improved for our edification, but then the other lesson, the failure of heroes like Cromwell, remains isolated and incoherent, with no place in a morally regulated universe. If the strength of Prussia now proves that Frederick had a right to seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist assume, from ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... dropped his fiddle, and got down his gun before the girls could calm the children enough to tell their story, which they did in a somewhat incoherent manner. "Down in the holler, coastin', we heard a growl," began Sol, with his eyes as big as saucers. "I see him fust lookin' over the wall," roared Seth, eager to get his share ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... unexpected appearance of Sal Rawlins had turned the great tide of public feeling in favour of the prisoner, and many who had been loudest in their denunciations of Fitzgerald, were now more than half convinced of his innocence. Pious clergymen talked in an incoherent way about the finger of God and the innocent not suffering unjustly, which was a case of counting unhatched chickens, as the verdict had yet ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... smiles or the head-shakings which men sure that they are right bestow upon him who is marching straight to madness. He even went to open his mind to the bishop, but the latter understood no more than others his vague, incoherent plans, filled with ideas impossible to realize and possibly subversive.[2] It was thus that in spite of himself Francis was led to ask nothing of men, but to raise himself by prayer to intuitive knowledge of the divine will. The doors of houses and of hearts were alike closing upon him, but the ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... round to the door of the house and dismounted, after he had with some difficulty found a man to hold their horses. From the heavy brick porch they looked across the superb river to the raw and incoherent ugliness of the city, idealised into dreamy beauty by the atmosphere, and the soft background of purple hills behind. Opposite them, with its crude "thus saith the law" stamped on white dome and ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... me if I am a little incoherent," she implored. "To-day I have had a shock. You, too, have read the news? You must know that the Count von Hern is dead—killed in the railway ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said the young man, and Billy's heart went out to him. "Oh, I beg pardon, but you—he—I—" So many things occurred to him to say at one and the same time that he emitted a snort of warring and incoherent syllables. Finally, with supreme control, "Do you know that your 'gentleman of rank' couldn't set foot in a ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... choking for breath, then shouted out: "Go and find your man, then. I don't want you, I don't want you. I wouldn't have you at a gift. A man! Not if you went down on your hands and knees——" He was walking away as he spoke, shouting over his shoulder, almost incoherent with the rage engendered by that sudden stab in his tenderest spot. Just before he was beyond ear-shot, he paused a second and called out: "There'll be no going back. You needn't think it. I shall pay the first instalment of a ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the only true poet in the first rank in English literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments of their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... find extravagance, confusion, huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His imagination partook of the incompleteness of his intellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... were only three men in the world so far as they were concerned. These three constituted society. Beresford, his mind still wandering with incoherent mutterings, was a non-voting member. He, Tom Morse, must be judge and jury. He must, if the prisoner were convicted, play a much more horrible role. In the silence of the cold sub-Arctic night he fought the battle out while automatically he waited ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... was in an incoherent rage. The lieutenant was contracting his eyebrows in a scowl and clenching his fists in frustration. In a voice, soaring into the falsetto, the Swami demanded that he be sent back to Brooklyn where he was appreciated. The lieutenant had orders to stay with the Swami, but he didn't ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... union between Oriental and a corrupt Grecian art, accomplished in the mediaeval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful but incoherent facade of the Brood-huis, now the last earthly resting place of the two distinguished victims; while grouped around these principal buildings rose the fantastic palaces of the Archers, Mariners, and other guilds, with their festooned walls and toppling gables bedizened profusely ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of an indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but leaves everything to his army of Indian servants. No, he does look after the bill—to be just to him—and the tourist cannot do better than follow his example. I was told by a resident that the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dream, which began quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing, terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him, fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pillar of our little porch. My sister spoke to her, and then saw she must be exhausted or ill. She told her to come in, and managed to get her into the dining-room where there is a sofa. She said a few incoherent things after lying down and then fainted. My sister called me, and I went for our old doctor. He came back with me, said it was collapse, and heart weakness—perhaps after influenza—and that we must on no account move her except on to a bed in the dining-room till he had watched her a ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... no others. There is only Nora," she said, recovering herself a little. "I let her go to church to-night. I am not usually afraid. Why should I be? Perhaps I am not very well." As she uttered these incoherent sentences she sank into a chair and he took ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... the sound of voices. Thinking only that he must not at any cost see de Spain, Nan stepped quickly into the hall and faced the messenger. "I was over at the doctor's office just now," continued her visitor evenly, "he asked me to bring this down for your uncle." She took the package with an incoherent acknowledgment. Without letting her eyes meet his, she was conscious of how fresh and clean and strong he looked, dressed in a livelier manner than usual—a partly cowboy effect, with a broader Stetson and a gayer tie than he ordinarily affected. De Spain kept on speaking: ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... she was guilty of somewhat incoherent chatter, Damaris sprang up and swung away along the terrace, through the clear tonic radiance, buoyant as ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Methuselahs would not be able to compass it. Yet for centuries this has been accepted as the orthodox exposition of the Classic. Lo Chung-fan does not express himself too strongly when he says that such language is altogether incoherent. The author would only be 'imposing on himself and others.' 9. The orthodox doctrine of China concerning the connexion between intelligence and virtue is most seriously erroneous, but I will not lay to the charge of the ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... impatient of even a spiritual connection. But the Revolution was an outward, visible sign of an organic growth which it accelerated, but did not produce; and the patriotic outcries of the generation were incoherent expressions of a profounder life which had been growing, scarcely heeded, until wakened by this event. The centripetal force of nationality was at work, and it is possible now, even from our near station, to discover ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... things he had said before, as might be easily tested by talking to him. The chaplain resolved to try the experiment, and obtaining access to the madman conversed with him for an hour or more, during the whole of which time he never uttered a word that was incoherent or absurd, but, on the contrary, spoke so rationally that the chaplain was compelled to believe him to be sane. Among other things, he said the governor was against him, not to lose the presents his ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Charleston north to the Virginia Capes. A coastal passenger ship off Hatteras sent out a frantic radio distress call. The apparitions of men had suddenly been seen in mid-air directly in the ship's course. The message was incoherent; the vessel's wireless operator was locked in his room at the transmitter, wildly describing ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... of my natural enemies, or, shall I say, my natural prey. Briefly, Watson, I am in the midst of a very remarkable inquiry, and I have hoped to find a clue in the incoherent ramblings of these sots, as I have done before now. Had I been recognised in that den my life would not have been worth an hour's purchase; for I have used it before now for my own purposes, and the rascally ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the most abject astonishment. His eyes stuck out, his jaw dropped. No other emotion seemed yet to have dawned in him. He stared from Lucy to Pan and back again. A slow dull red began to creep into his cheeks. He ejaculated something incoherent. His amaze swiftly grew into horror. He had caught his fiancee in the arms of another man. Black ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... rose from her seat to greet her, in the hearty Hawaiian way, arms about, lips on lips, faces eloquent and bodies no less eloquent with sincereness and frank excessiveness of emotion. And it was "Sister Bella," and "Sister Martha," back and forth, intermingled with almost incoherent inquiries about each other, and about Uncle This and Brother That and Aunt Some One Else, until, the first tremulousness of meeting over, eyes moist with tenderness of love, they sat gazing at each other across their teacups. Apparently, they had not seen nor embraced for years. In truth, two months ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... had yet issued from the press. The erudition and the industry displayed in the gathering together of these vast masses of information, and in their verification by experiment, are indeed amazing; and, in turning over his pages, it is impossible to stifle regret that Cardan's confused method and incoherent system should have rendered his work comparatively useless for the spread of true knowledge, and qualified it only for a place among the ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... with his eye the sonorous youth whom the claret punch made loquacious, or smash with lemon squeezer the obstreperous, or hurl gutterward the cantankerous without a wrinkle coming to his white lawn tie, when he stood before woman he was voiceless, incoherent, stuttering, buried beneath a hot avalanche of bashfulness and misery. What then was he before Katherine? A trembler, with no word to say for himself, a stone without blarney, the dumbest lover that ever babbled of the weather in the presence ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... ever louder rose the throaty voices, faster and faster passed the cups and dippers. Ben and Mundy had their arms about each other. In the wagon the Lark had slipped down, and now lay upon his back, staring at the dim, swirling stars and babbling incoherent nothings. ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... difficult from several causes: (1) It is not pointed, nor even the Teshdied added; (2) I could not bring Golin's with me, and the dictionaries which I have are very imperfect; (3) the writer has most arbitrarily changed the details of Robinson's story, and makes it often incoherent and stupidly impossible; so that neither does the original help me much, nor can I rest on internal congruity to help ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... of the country, however, railroad building had comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the railroad map of the forties indicates that railroad building in this early period was incoherent and haphazard. Practically everywhere the railroad was an individual enterprise; the builders had no further conception of it than as a line connecting two given points usually a short distance apart. The roads ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... ill, for the shock had brought on an attack of brain fever, and during her wild ramblings and half incoherent talk her nurses heard a good deal of how Mrs. Maple had been deceived and robbed by her trusted shop-woman, but no word about the watches found in her ...
— Kate's Ordeal • Emma Leslie
... and the 3d division pursued that on the right bank; the 1st, that had felt the enemy's claws at Beaumont, was flying in disorder across the country, no one knew where. Of the 7th corps, that had not seen a battle, all that remained were those scattered, incoherent fragments, lost among lanes and by-roads, running ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... and incoherent phrases stirred the young girl's heart with intense pain and anxiety. She had known for almost a year that she loved the young rector; she had believed that he cared for her, and without allowing herself to form any definite thoughts of the future, she had lived in a blissful consciousness ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... state-carriage. He had invited some twenty people, former friends of his, to a great wedding- breakfast; but he seemed to have forgotten them. And once in his carriage, alone with Mrs. Brian, M. Elgin, and the young countess, he broke forth in incoherent imprecations and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... an hour. He was as obstinate as a mule and as incoherent as running water. I could grasp him nowhere. It was like groping in a well for a lighted torch. No doubt he had formed in his own mind some obscure, incalculable intrigue, but no reason can guess the plans which are made by ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... make all sorts of incoherent exclamations; 'This is a wonderful business! What dust has fallen upon our heads? Where shall I go? ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... never heard before in Rubbleford, poured from his lips. "Devotional beauty," "Fra Angelico's angels," "Giotto and the cherubs," "Enough to bring the divine Raphael down from heaven to paint her." Such were a few fragments of the mad gentleman's incoherent mutterings, as they reached his neighbors' ears. The amusement they yielded was soon wrought to its climax by a joke from an attorney's clerk, who suggested that this queer man, with the rosy face, must certainly be the long-lost father of the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... right of property recently put forth by M. Wolowski, your colleague at the Conservatory. With this view, I had commenced to collect the documents necessary for each of his lectures, but, soon perceiving that the ideas of the professor were incoherent, that his arguments contradicted each other, that one affirmation was sure to be overthrown by another, and that in M. Wolowski's lucubrations the good was always mingled with the bad, and being by nature a little suspicious, it suddenly occurred to me that M. Wolowski ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... He seemed incoherent, and they left him again for a little while. When they came back he had his story all ready, which imposed upon them just so far as it was for their interest. Their business on this coast was not precisely ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... paper, and wafering it to the instep of his shoe when he went up to his class. Unhappily for his scheme, he was so placed that he dared not expose his foot so as to allow him to avail himself of this delectable assistance, and consequently, after much looking on the floor for inspiration, and much incoherent muttering, was passed over, and the order of things being thereby disturbed, of course no one could say the missing lines until the head boy was applied to, and the lower half of the class was turned down, with the exception of Louis, who, standing on this occasion ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... anticipations, and his hair is thin. He is awkwardly built, and watches the trial earnestly, as if striving to catch between the links of evidence vistas of a life insured. This man has a simple and pleading face, and there is something genial in his great, incoherent countenance. He is said to have cleared the stage for Booth's escape, but this is indifferently testified to. He had often been asked by Booth to take a drink at the nearest bar. Persons who drink assure me that ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... said I, forcing an imitation of incoherent laughter, 'I am but trifling with you. I am not mad. I sought but to rouse some passion in you—either of fear or of anger. But, alas! I have not sufficient power over you even for that. Sit down. I have something to relate. When I have ended, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... theoretic has been very rare: the problems of nature and morals have attracted the reasoners, and the description and creation of beauty have absorbed the artists; between the two reflection upon aesthetic experience has remained abortive or incoherent. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... prime minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,—or somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing they could,—to make their rhetorical point,—and then bow themselves politely ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... afternoon, while she shrank piteously from each cry of "'Fraid cat! 'Fraid cat!" Or that bully might throw pieces of chalk at her or pelt her with snowballs in the winter time until she broke into incoherent sobs. Then he, John Fletcher, would show that Sid where he got off at. He'd punch his face in, ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... above incoherent words to convey to the reader even a faint idea of the agonized wildness with which they were spoken; the impression of unutterable misery they gave to those who listened to them, and marked their reflection in ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... whole world. It was very strange. She tried to tell Mother something of what was in her mind, but, though Mother listened in a sympathetic silence, it was evident that she could make nothing out of the incoherent account. Sylvia thought that she would try to tell Father, the next chance she had. Even at seven, although she loved her mother passionately and jealously, she was aware that her father's mind was more like her own. He understood some things that Mother didn't, although Mother was always, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lay back exhausted against Miss Barnet's engulfing arms. Her passion ebbed suddenly and her words came scant, incoherent, and full of breath. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... probably been settled in Ho Nan just as long as the Western ruling races had been in Assyria and Egypt respectively, for imagining that they, the sole recorders of events amongst surrounding inferiors, were the world; and that the incoherent tribes rushing aimlessly from all sides to attack them, were the unreclaimed fringe ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... petty accident he was, and knew therewith the greatness of his desire. And suddenly his littleness was intolerable, his aspiration was intolerable, and there came to him an irresistible impulse to pray. And he prayed. He prayed vague, incoherent, contradictory things, his soul strained up through time and space and all the fleeting multitudinous confusion of being, towards something—he scarcely knew what—towards something that could ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... fear you will think, the wild and incoherent, manner in which I have noticed the sale of the Bibliotheca Westiana had nearly driven from my recollection that, in the preceding, the same, and subsequent, year, there was sold by auction a very curious and extraordinary ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... madness seemed to pervade the church, the noise of a crowd in a state of frenzy, a tempest of sobs and stifled cries. It passed through them like gusts of wind which bow the trees in a forest, and the priest, paralyzed by emotion, stammered out incoherent prayers, without finding words, prayers of the soul, when ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... a durable peace or a solid League of Nations as long as Russia continued to be a prey to anarchy. But even with the prizes and penalties before their eyes to entice and spur them, they proved unequal to the task of devising an intelligent policy. Fitful and incoherent, their efforts were either incapable of being realized or, when feasible, were mischievous. Thus, by degrees, they hardened the great Slav nation against ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
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