|
|
|
More "Undercurrent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the eye could reach, a thin stream of white and pink and blue, a tumbling river of curls and caps and bare legs, were the children. A babble of shrill cries, of chattering laughter, of fretful screams, an undercurrent of remonstrance, of soothing patience, of angry threatening, marked their slow progress up and down the walk; in the clear spaces of the little park they trotted freely after hoops and balls, rolled and ran over the green, and hid, shouting, ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... hope on an argument which I had already used in the case of my mother, namely, that if M. Termonde had really been concerned in the assassination of my father, he had dreaded my aunt's penetration beyond all things. Their relations had been formal, with an undercurrent of enmity on her part which had assuredly not escaped a man so astute as he. If he were guilty, would he not have feared that my aunt would have confided her thoughts to me on her death-bed? The attitude that ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... with the boy and laid a hand on Cassy's shoulder, for there was an undercurrent to the conversation which boded no good. The very first words uttered had plunged Abel Baragar and his son's wife into the midst of the difficulty which she had hoped might, after ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... city Cortes moved alert and silent, courteous to all, every nerve as sensitive to new impressions as a leaf to the wind. He knew that strong as the priesthood of the fierce gods undoubtedly was, there was surely an undercurrent of rebellion against their cruelty and their unlimited power. In a fruitless attempt to keep the Spaniards out of the city by the aid of the gods, three hundred little children had been sacrificed. If Cortes failed to conquer, by peaceful means or otherwise, nothing was ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... superficial discussion, with its scarcely felt undercurrent of tragic reminiscence, had lasted through the swift sunset, and already dusk was beginning to throw its long shadows over the gaily dressed figures that streamed up ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... no water so treacherous and deceitful as you'll find in some of those billabongs. A man starts to ride across a place where he thinks the water is just over the grass, and blunders into a deep channel—that wasn't there before—with a steady undercurrent with the whole weight of the Darling River funnelled into it; and if he can't swim and his horse isn't used to it—or sometimes if he can swim—it's a case with him, and the Darling River cod hold an inquest on him, if they have time, before he's buried deep in Darling River mud for ever. ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... following, and for the rest she hardly missed expressing in any of her letters her regret that he was not with her, and enjoying her varied life. Often in the letter there was a flower, or a piece of wild thyme, which betrayed an undercurrent of feeling beneath the shallowness of the words, and once she sent him her photograph with the words "Loulou to her dearest Wilhelm." So he gathered from her frivolous letters much that was unspoken, and through signs and indications believed ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it—and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived. "The fear of divine anger", says Prof. Jastrow, "runs as an undercurrent through the entire religious literature of Babylonia and Assyria." In the words of Tabi-utul-Enlil, King ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Nan's ultimate unfolding was a matter of absorbing interest. Her own small triumphs as a singer paled into insignificance beside the riot of her visions for Nan's future. Nevertheless, she was sometimes conscious of an undercurrent of foreboding. Something was lacking. Had the gods, giving so much, withheld the two best gifts ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... trouble us in America very little, and we smile cynically at the not altogether untruthful portraits of "Potash and Pearlmutter," and their vermin-like business methods. There is an undercurrent of feeling in America, that the virile blood is still there which will stop at nothing to throw off oppression, whether from the Jew or from any one else. If we are pinched too hard financially, if confiscation by the government or by individuals goes too far, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... kind of material this suave, cynical, reserved man could have produced—in other words, what was his undercurrent. I interrogated. To my surprise and consternation I had found at last the author ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... owlishly after her. Though Francis Madigan rarely ate anything that was prepared for the family dinner, she could remember the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... hard, with the aid of the hotel porter, to make head or tail out of the narrative as recounted by the hirer of camels—a woebegone tale in which the undercurrent was a dismal foreboding as to the fate of the priceless quadruped; the fate of an Englishman seemingly being of small account when compared to that of the snarling, unpleasant brute who represented the native's entire fortune—at least so he said. "Yes, the nobleman had hired ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... Euripides; and Dionysus Omophagus—the eater of raw flesh, must be added to the golden image of Dionysus Meilichius—the honey-sweet, if the old tradition in its completeness is to be, in spite of that sophism, our closing impression; if we are to catch, in its fulness, that deep undercurrent of horror which runs below, all through [79] this masque of spring, and realise the spectacle of that wild chase, in which Dionysus is ultimately both ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... returns required in various articles for household and personal use, are perfect models for a man of business. And this may be remarked throughout his whole career, that no pressure of events nor multiplicity of cares prevented a clear, steadfast, undercurrent of attention to domestic affairs, and the interest and well-being of all dependent ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... speaking of Flanders. From the time of Charles the Fifth the most severe laws were enacted to put down the outrages, but there was an undercurrent of sympathy with the outrage-monger which kept the system alive until 1840. Then the Government took the matter in hand, and treated outrage-mongering as what it is—an act of war; and quartered troops on the inhabitants and stamped the disease out in a few years. Of course I could not, and would ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... as it seemed to me with an undercurrent of emotion in her voice; "I did not misunderstand him. He meant what he said, and I would have forced the truth from him, whatever happened. I was determined to make him show me what he felt. That London season was sometimes terrible to me. I seemed to myself ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... goal a deep undercurrent of excitement kept all the passengers feverishly occupied. They watched the distant globe grow larger, glowing through its atmosphere more and more clearly as a great disk of white light, its outline ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... the churchyard, lost for a brief space in meditation. The solemn strains of the organ which the schoolmistress was still playing, floated softly out from the church to the perfumed air, and the grave melodious murmur made an undercurrent of harmony to the clear bright warbling of a skylark, which, beating its wings against the sunbeams, rose ever higher ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the convention was finally defeated by a majority of eighteen hundred in a total vote of eleven thousand six hundred and twelve. While this result effectually decided that Illinois would remain a free State, the propagandism and reorganization left a deep and tenacious undercurrent of pro-slavery opinion that for many years manifested itself in vehement and intolerant outcries against "abolitionism," which on one occasion caused the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy for persisting in his right to print ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... our lives. For it is underneath the multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious efforts, born of reason, and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial stand-point, seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled and nurtured with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice, branching out into our specific choices of certain directions and aims among all opposite directions and aims, and which, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... occurred to the hunters that day, save that little Tolly Trevor was amazed—we might almost say petrified—by the splendour and precision of the trapper's shooting, besides which he was deeply impressed with the undercurrent of what we may style grave fun, coupled with calm enthusiasm, which characterised the man, and the utter absence of self-assertion ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... to his taste. The House had been very hot against bribery,—and certain members of the existing Government, when the late Bill had been passed, had expressed themselves with almost burning indignation against the crime. But, through it all, there had been a slight undercurrent of ridicule attaching itself to the question of which only they who were behind the scenes were conscious. The House was bound to let the outside world know that all corrupt practices at elections were held to be abominable by the House; but Members of the House, as individuals, ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... excitement of Norway may lose me some marks in term's order. Not many I dare say." Again, "When you are excited reports go bad. I have been shouting rather, kicking up a shine. Once there was a small fight which was twigged. Norway is a serious matter." There was an undercurrent of nervousness, discernible only to her eyes. She could not account for it till she had him home, and they were on the edge of adventure. It was lest he should be seasick and disgrace himself in the esteem of young Nugent, who, as a naval officer, was of course sea-proof. "I expect Nugent likes ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... I had spent in vainly trying to overcome the love and hatred which consumed me. However occupied I was with the pressing affairs of my almost over-filled life I was conscious of an undercurrent of despair—the despair that I had felt when Eve told me ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... pestering consciousness that all was not so well with him as observers might guess. But he resolutely put this away each time it threatened to overwhelm him. He would cross no bridge until he came to it. He even combated this undercurrent of sanity by wording part of an interview with himself some day to ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... that portion of a kingdom must ever be to its rulers—were treated with disdain and contumely; but beneath all the workings of his government (or rather the government of his minister, for the son of Marie de Medicis was a monarch only in name), may be traced the undercurrent of popular indignation and discontent, which, gradually swelling and rising during the two succeeding reigns, finally overthrew with its giant waves the last frail barrier which still upreared itself ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... later he makes amends. But I take it that it was Mr. LOCKE'S idea to present a very ordinary decent sort with the common man's prejudices and frank distrust of subtleties. A sinister mystery of love, death and blackmail runs, a turbid undercurrent, through the story. The publisher's pathetic apology for the drab grey paper on which, in the interests of War Economy, the book is printed, makes one wonder how the other publishers who still issue books in black ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... proved beyond a doubt by the observations of arctic explorers, who have seen immense icebergs drifting rapidly northward against a strong current. This apparent anomaly could only be accounted for by the fact that a powerful undercurrent carried them northward; and as at least seven times more of these bergs must have been under than above water, we can easily understand how the under-current, acting on the larger mass of each berg, had power to ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the bed of which is quicksand, a flour-barrel, perforated with small holes, should be used as a curb, to prevent the sand from caving in. The barrel must be forced down as the sand is removed; and when, as is often the case, there is an undercurrent through the sand, the well will be continually filled ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... went to the opera, and afterwards, our plans made out, we walked to the house of the insulted and virtuous lady. She received us with great dignity, but yet there was an agreeable undercurrent in her voice and manner which I thought ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... enough no one minds, the Village least of all; humour is their strong point. But they are quite subtle souls with all their child-like peculiarities; there is, in their acceptance of ridicule, a shrewd undercurrent suggestive of the "Virginian's" now classic warning: "When you call me that, smile!" Hence a novel written not long ago and purporting to be a mirror of the Village—Village life and Village ideals, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... characteristic traits that distinguish us in common, and at the same time also distinguish us from all other peoples—more than anything else, does this mutual spirit of destructiveness, called into play by the sight of a stove-pipe hat, prove the existence of a strong, resistless undercurrent of sympathy that is carrying the most distant outposts of Anglo-Saxony merrily down the stream of time together, to some particular end; perchance a glorious end, perchance an ignominious end, but certainly to an end that will not wear a ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... dogma. Those who dared and suffered were no doubt but a few of those who really shared in the heretical view; the testimony of orthodox writers is all in support of this surmise. Equally clear is the fact that while the religious authorities were thus rigorous a steadily deepening undercurrent of opinion made for 'Latitude.' How far this Latitude might properly go was a troublesome question, but at any rate some were willing to advocate what ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... far lighter than she had feared it would be. There was a strong undercurrent of excitement in her heart, flushing her cheeks and sparkling in her eyes; yet never for one moment was she even tempted to forget that he was now vowed to God. It seemed to her as if she talked with him in the spirit of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... distance, and men woke to the disheartening fact that, though power had been transferred from the aristocracy to the middle class, the poor were as badly off as ever. The visible effects of that disillusionment were Chartism, rioting, and agrarian crime, and there was a deep undercurrent of sullen anger which seldom found expression. As late as the General Election of 1868 an old man in the duke-ridden borough of Woodstock declined to vote for the Liberal candidate expressly on the ground ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... high places under the old regime must be and remain enemies of the revolution, so that their employment is a definite source of danger. Glebov is a trade union representative, and his speech was a clear indication of the non-political undercurrent towards the left which may shake the Bolshevik position and will most certainly come into violent conflict with any definitely bourgeois government that may be ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... reality it was at your very feet," she said with a bright look into his eyes. For some unaccountable reason, Genevra resented that look and speech. Perhaps it was because she felt the rift of an undercurrent. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... sister had grown more unlike other people than ever since she had last seen her. She seemed to be in a perpetual brown study, which was compatible, however, with a curious watchfulness which struck Cicely particularly. She was always aware of any undercurrent in the room—of anyone going in or out—of persons passing in the road. At lunch she scarcely opened her lips, but Cicely was all the time conscious of being observed. After luncheon Bridget got up abruptly, and said she was going down to ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rule, deficient in oxygen. The "North Sea" water, of 34 to 35 pro mille salinity, does not appear at the surface in the Skagerrak, except as a strip along part of the coast of Jutland, but it is always found as an undercurrent overlying the oceanic water. It enters into all the deep coast channels, and into the Christiania fjord, but it is not always found in the deep channels of the Kattegat. The principal time of inflow of North Sea water is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... took a seat, and, stooping over and crossing her arms on her knees, she looked down on the floor, and appeared to fall into a sort of reverie. Her great gloomy eyes and her dark face seemed to work with some undercurrent of feeling; she sighed deeply, and ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... good. We examined the room many times that night; both of us. In the end there was nothing, only the weirdness and uncertainty and the magnetic undercurrent which we could feel, but could not fathom. When we called in the dog she stepped to the portieres and commenced her vigil. She crouched slightly behind the curtains, alert, ready, waiting, at her post of honour. From that moment she never left the spot except under compulsion. We could ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... minutes before midnight the sounds became more sullen, and beneath the general uproar another note, one of those in distress, began, as it were, like an undercurrent to this pandemonium. The cause we had not long to seek, for presently flames began to shoot up, a sight we were by now well accustomed to, though not in this purely trading quarter of the city. The ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... sense of freedom amongst them all, of the undercurrent of darkness among them all. Yet here, at home, Ursula resented it. It became distasteful to her. And she knew that if they understood the real relationship between her and Skrebensky, her parents, her father in particular, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... days and better weather are making a real difference to the gloom of things, and though there is a universal undercurrent of feeling that enormous sacrifices will have to be made, it seems to be shaping for a step farther on, and an ultimate return to sanity and peace. It is such a vast upheaval when you are in the middle of it, ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... trait of character, he shewed in an address to medical students at a distribution of prizes. After congratulating the victors he confessed to "an undercurrent of sympathy for those who have not been successful, for those valiant knights who have been overthrown in their tourney, and have not made their appearance in public." After recounting an early failure of his own, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... be, by some ovarian congestion, for she felt that on the left side there was a network of sexual nerves, and retroversion of the uterus was detected some years later. Her life was strenuous with many duties, but no occupation could be pursued without this undercurrent of sexual hyperaesthesia involving perpetual self-control. This continued more or less acutely for many years, when menstruation suddenly stopped altogether, much before the usual period of the climacteric. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... inner consciousness—the psyche—that has never yet been brought to bear upon life and its questions. Besides which there is a super-sensuous reason. Often I have argued with myself that such and such a course was the right one to follow, while in the intervals of thinking about it an undercurrent of unconscious impulse has desired me to do the reverse or to remain inactive. Sometimes it has happened that the supersensuous reasoning has been correct, and the most faultless argument wrong. I presume this supersensuous reasoning, preceeding independently in the mind, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... race becomes a dizzy madness of blurred, whirling, raging waters. Then there is the leap, the plunge, the shattering anger of inland seas hurling their strength over the sheer precipice in resistless force. Then the foaming whirlpool below, and the shadowy gorge, and the undercurrent eddying away in the swift-flowing waters of the river coming out on Lake Ontario. On one side are the Canadian forts, on the other the American, slab-walled all of them, with scarcely a stone foundation except in bastions used as powder magazines. Fort Erie ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... tossing heave of jaunty banners, and gleaming castle turrets, and all the brilliancies and colors that Manuel had known and loved anywhere, save only the clear red and white of Suskind's face, seemed to be passing incoherently through the still waters, like bright broken wreckage which an undercurrent was sweeping away. ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... exciting adventures, into which is woven a charming love theme, and its undercurrent of fun furnish a dashing detective story which a motor-mad world will thoroughly ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providential escapes from accidents which threatened his life—"judgments mixed with mercy" he terms them,—which made him feel that he was not utterly forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... and bold, and at least in form wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and mystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of science and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be secretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems to animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies. He is eloquent, and to a public rather sick of the half-education it has received and eager for some inspiriting novelty he seems more eloquent than he is. He uses the French language (and little else ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... already started from Allahabad, and boasted how easily they would eat up the Feringhees. It seemed, however, to Bathurst that a good deal of this confidence was assumed, and that among some, at least, there was an undercurrent of doubt and uneasiness, though they talked as loudly and boldly ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... him, with a seriousness equal to his own as she answered, "I promise." And inwardly the sense of some unknown undercurrent that might grow into a rushing torrent made ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... these peaceful resorts, where cultivated, scholarly men, and women of fine sensibilities, could find rest from the struggles of the outside world. The sisters, who managed this large establishment, seemed happy in the midst of their severe and multifarious duties. Of the undercurrent of their lives I could not judge, but on the surface all seemed smooth and satisfactory. They evidently took great pleasure in the society of each other. Every evening, from six to eight, they all sat in the gardens in a circle together, sewing, knitting, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Thus ran the undercurrent of his thoughts as he tried to decide whether he had better shatter that self-contained keep-your-distance attitude of hers with plain questions. He would have to right-about-face on the whole situation to do it, and he was not sure that this was wise just then. ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... modify the climatic conditions of every zone. The ocean of air is a vast maelstrom, boiling up always under the influence of the sun's heat at the equator, and flowing as an upper current towards either pole, while an undercurrent from the poles, which becomes the trade-winds, flows towards the equator to supply ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... which compose it. Even the addition of many new ones has produced no jarring. They move in their respective orbits in perfect harmony with the central head and with each other. But there is still an undercurrent at work by which, if not seasonably checked, the worst apprehensions of our antifederal patriots will be realized, and not only will the State authorities be overshadowed by the great increase of power in the executive ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... of the two substances. They did not say, "You don't like melted lead?.... Ah! no, of course, you wouldn't; you are probably the kind of person who would prefer beer.... It is no good asking you even to imagine the curious undercurrent of psychological pleasure felt by a refined person under the seeming shock of melted lead." Even tyrants when they tried to be popular, tried to give the people pleasure; they did not try to overawe ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... sinister undercurrent of antagonism against the Quirt could not whip her emotions into feeling that she was doing anything more than live the restricted, sordid little life of a poorly equipped ranch. She had ridden once with Frank Johnson to look through a bunch of cattle, but it had been ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... terms with a great many members of Congress, and there was an undercurrent of suspicion in some quarters that she was one of that detested class known as "lobbyists;" but what belle could escape slander in such a city? Fairminded people declined to condemn her on mere suspicion, and so the injurious talk made no very damaging ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... many in his lifetime as a coarse, hard, practical man, full of prejudices, there was yet a strong undercurrent of poetry in his nature; and, while he declaimed against sentiment, there were few men more thoroughly imbued with sentiment of the best kind. He had the tenderest regard for the character of woman. He respected her purity ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... closed upon the mother's broad back, and the hum of excitement at the departure subsided into the normal undercurrent of whispering between the pupils. Pencils scratched laboriously over rough manila pads as their owners copied the questions from the board. The boy two seats ahead of John took a wad of chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it on the ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... responded to her implicit inquiry as to whether anything was wrong—her eyes had strayed involuntarily to the clock—by pointing her attention to a paragraph in the morning paper. His manner was more solemn than usual; it betrayed an undercurrent of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... was as much puzzled by their caller as was her mother, without accounting for his oddities on any argument of dullness. Indeed, she could see how he played with them: that there flowed an undercurrent of irony in his replies. Moreover, while by his manner he had pedestaled and prayed to her as to a goddess, when they were alone and before her mother came, Dorothy now observed that Richard carried himself in a manner easy and masterful, and as one who knows much in the presence of ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... mistaken desire to advise induced him to take the course he did. But those who know France best tell us that the Imperial opinion is far from being the index of the popular opinion, on any subject; and every evidence induces the conclusion that there is a strong undercurrent of sympathy ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... been right when he said the place was stiff with birds. A deep fringe of birds was constantly moving in and about and around the billabong; and the perpetual clatter of the plovers and waders formed an undercurrent to ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... parti-coloured, parti-speeched, crackling and sputtering under the hot sun like a dish of fritters over a kitchen fire. Tony, agape, shouldered his way through the press, aware at once that, spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the gesticulation, there was no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to horse-play, as in such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of facetious suavity which seemed to include everybody in the circumference of one huge joke. In such an air the sense of strangeness soon wore off, and Tony was beginning ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... neutral. They believed strongly that each of the small nations of the Balkan region as well as all of the small nations that had been absorbed but had not been digested by Austria, should cut itself from the leading strings held by the large European powers. There was a distinct undercurrent, for a federation resembling that of the United States of America between these peoples. This was expressed most clearly by M. Jonesco, leader of the Liberal party of Roumania and generally recognized as the ablest statesman of ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... a circus," said Mrs. Owen, quite oblivious of the undercurrent of her niece's thoughts. "When they had a vaudeville show last winter she did the best stunts of any of 'em. You didn't mention those Jewesses that I had such a row to get in? Smart girls. One of 'em is the fastest typewriter in town; she's a credit to Jerusalem, that ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... of women listening to my inspiring verses ... visits as honoured guest to the homes of great popular leaders like Roosevelt ... dignity and rides in parlour cars, instead of dusty, dirty box cars ... interviews of weight and speeches of consequence ... and the newspapers would drop their undercurrent of levity when I was written about in them, and treat ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... experiences into sparkling little sentences and epigrams which made Frances feel as if she were listening to one of the witty people in clever books. But under all her sparkling wit there was a strongly felt undercurrent of true womanly sympathy and kind-heartedness which won affection as speedily as her brilliance won admiration. Frances listened and laughed and enjoyed. Once she found time to think that she would have missed a great deal if she had not come to Bay Shore Farm that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... scene is autobiographic, he having attended such an occasion at Carroll Beckwith's studio, in New York. In technique, this scene is comparable with the one of similar gaiety in "Lord and Lady Algy"—both having an undercurrent of serious strain. The tragedy motive is relieved at almost calculated times by comedy, which shows that Fitch held to the old dramatic theory of comic relief. Often this was irritating, discounting the mood he was trying ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... somewhere else, and that he saw another face as he mixed his colors, and not that of the siren before him. Or it may have been that, as he looked into the eyes of the Countess, he saw too deeply into the whirlpool of passion and pain which made up the undercurrent in ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... spirit, gayly and happily, revealing but little of herself, and holding a slight reserve in her manner which seemed to him quite delightful and maidenly. Then, all too suddenly, he was gone again, but in his heart he carried a memory of her that made a continual undercurrent in his thoughts. ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... it left leg foremost; this is unbecoming in a great officer at the President's levee. Now, because he is so unfortunate as not to be so good a dancer as he is a worthy officer, he must be removed." These rhetorical flourishes, which are significant of the undercurrent of sentiment, hardly do justice to the general quality of the debate which was marked by legal acuteness on both sides. Madison pressed home the sensible argument that the President could not be held to responsibility ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... humiliated at myself that I could not give a swift, unqualified assent to my own question. A "good man" Dicky certainly was, and I was in the "shelter of his love" at present. But "safe" with Dicky I was afraid I could never be. Mingled always with my love for him, my trust in him, was a tiny undercurrent of uncertainty as to the stability of ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... done. Mitch had broken into eczema, and Mrs. Constantine had overruled her at a committee meeting. With a flood of disconnected talk she had overwhelmed Maggie until the girl felt as though her head had been thrust into a bag of flour. Through it all there had been an undercurrent of complaint ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... poor—sometimes they were upon the verge of despair—yet through all there was an undercurrent of happiness that nothing could destroy—they had each other and even at the worst they still dreamed the dream of the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, even though the heartsease blossom drooped ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... man waded in and dived down into the deep undercurrent of causes, that strange deep that underlays ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... temperament an undercurrent of ambition so strong as to cause her to receive their advances toward tender acquaintance with a freezing coldness, while at the same time it rendered her positively unhappy. She felt superior to her condition, and she longed to rise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... cheerfulness; in fact, I believe he will because that is what he wants to do, and that is the work that he loves: The platform he likes for the two hours that he is on it, but all the rest of the time it grinds him, and he says he is ashamed of what he is doing. Still, in spite of this sad undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip. People are so nice, and with people Mr. Clemens seems cheerful. Then the ocean trips are a great rest ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... floes, acted strongly upon by the gale, and opposed by the smaller floe, was slowly but irresistibly swinging round, and in its sweep it had come into contact with a very large berg, which, influenced apparently by some undercurrent, was with equally irresistible force actually making its way to windward in the teeth of the gale. The result was a scene of wild chaos and confusion and destruction compared with which that upon which they had just looked was as nothing. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... from the cruel distinctions based on sex. Though our State laws have been essentially changed, and positions in the schools, professions, and world of work secured to woman, unthought of thirty years ago, yet the undercurrent of popular thought, as seen in our social habits, theological dogmas, and political theories, still reflects the same customs, creeds, and codes that degrade women in the effete civilizations of the old world. Educated in the best schools to logical reasoning, trained to liberal thought in politics, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... who learn languages, as so many people do nowadays, by visual images, there will always be an undercurrent toward saying "COP." The mind plunges hopelessly through that tangle to the elements of a speech ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... table and having her, whether consciously or unconsciously, arrogate the entire conversation, interests and viewpoint to herself. Of course, there are some teachers who can still recall with sufficient vividness their own school-girl life to feel keenly the undercurrent of restraint which an older person almost invariably starts when thrown with a group of younger ones, and who possesses the power and tact to overcome it and enter the girl-world. But these are the exceptions rather than the rule, ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... full weeks or a month. Thus to imprisonment was added the gall and wormwood of total dependence upon others; the unthinkable prospect of parting with Paul, with the Border itself—with everything that had hitherto made life worth living; and, worse than all, the undercurrent of striving to ignore that veiled danger, which he refused to name, even in his thoughts, and which lay like a millstone upon ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... her eye fell upon an instrument which aroused in her an excited interest. It was very like the headpiece used by operators of telephones, and she hastened to adjust it. In a moment it was as though she were in the library. She could hear Locke's earnest laugh and in it Zita could detect an undercurrent of tenderness. Her lips compressed and her eyes hardened as she listened. Locke was speaking about a letter and it seemed to be something important. Zita was ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his 'Elia,' the character of the writer co-operates in an undercurrent to make the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest sense either the gayety or the tenderness of a particular passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind, whether native and original, or impressed gradually by the accidents of situation; whether ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and talked intermittently then; they were close enough together to be silent when they chose. And all the while the undercurrent of Dr. Parkman's ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... Servia. It absolutely unified Servia and Bulgaria. Why then the completely changed attitude of Servia and Bulgaria after their mutual successes against the Turk? Presently I shall show you the vast undercurrent forces forever moving ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... don't you think? ... And now this movement; isn't it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there's a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. You see it, of course.... And all the while this undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, eager sentiment ... and here, I think, is the best part of it, the very essence of passion, the voluptuousness that is a veritable anguish.... These long, slow rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Chonita had a dream. She dreamed that she awoke without a soul. The sense of vacancy was awful, yet there was a singular undercurrent consciousness that no soul ever had been within her,—that it existed, but was ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... look at him, he was conscious, through some subtle undercurrent of feeling, that her spirit was drenched with the young summer, with the pulsing of life of the June forest and the scent of wild grape and honeysuckle which filled the air. Her face was lifted to the fluted leaves of a sycamore, from which the song ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... beaten, and every evening came home discouraged and disgusted. The Chamber was making the position of the ministers perfectly untenable—all sorts of violent and useless propositions were discussed, and there was an undercurrent of jealousy and intrigue everywhere. One day, just before Christmas, about the 20th, W. and his chef de cabinet, Comte de P., started for the house, after breakfast—W. expecting to be beaten by a coalition vote of the extreme Left, Bonapartists and Legitimists. It was an insane policy on the part ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... to the "Monograph on Lake Neusiedl," in which may be read a description of the phenomenon. In the last years Lake Neusiedl had been drained, and where it had joined the lakes of the Hansag, a stout dam had been built. When the waters of the Hansag chain rose, the muddy undercurrent threw up great mounds of earth, like enormous excrescences on a diseased body. One of these huge mounds burst open at the top and emitted a black, slimy mud that inundated the surrounding morass for a ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... sharp trot, the last leisurely uphill canter, on the bordering, leaf-strewn grass of the winding road, where the white walls and gray roof of the little house showed among the trees, that all the undercurrent seemed to center in a knot of suffocating ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and every mandate issued from the teacher's desk. The spirit of insubordination to which the entire school had been subjected that winter made good soil for Sadie's tares. For the most part the dissatisfaction was a subtle thing, an undercurrent of which Elizabeth was aware, but upon which she could lay no finger of rebuke, but at times it was more traceable, and then, to the young teacher's surprise, Jake Ransom had ways of dealing with the offenders ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... the Legalists had advocated and which fitted well into the absolutistic, totalitarian system of the Ch'in, had been attacked by the feudal nobility at that time and was attacked by the new gentry of the Han time. Legalist thinking remained an important undercurrent for many centuries to come, but application of the equalitarian principle was from now on ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... to do," he whispered to me, in confidence, "is to give him one for his tete, as we say in cribbage. But suppose I must speak him fair." Did his best in that direction though undercurrent of observation in lengthy paper he read decidedly set in direction of making TATE out as a cantankerous wrong-headed person who, proposing to bestow some L160,000 in way of free gift, expected to have his wishes consulted ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... was shocked and distressed by the sudden and horrible disaster; and yet as an undercurrent to these first natural thoughts, there ran presently a distinct notion that he would have felt the grievousness of it more keenly had Madeleine perished in that cruel manner and her sister survived ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... heads of the house, while Victor had lifted up his voice in vigorous protest against the intruder. However, until Victor's rebellion, the second night, there had been no open outbreak, although there was an undercurrent of antagonism between Mrs. Pennypoker and the children, which threatened an explosion at any moment. It was a new experience for Howard and Allie to have their fun and laughter repressed, and they were far from being ready to submit to it with ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... century, when curiosity about things human was an ever stronger undercurrent in England, pilgrimages were particularly popular. In 1434, Henry VI. granted licences to 2433 pilgrims to the shrine of St James of Compostella alone.[2] The numbers were so large that the control of their transportation became a coveted business enterprise. "Pilgrims ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... parted at the Gare du Nord, Cora was left with the impression that, whatever might be the undercurrent, John Derringham was strong enough to face his fate, and not give anyone the satisfaction of knowing whether in it he found ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... to appreciate his conduct therein, I entreat thee, O candid reader (not that any reader ever is candid), to remember that he is brimful of new ideas, which, met by a deep and hostile undercurrent of old ideas, become more provocatively billowy ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Baron thought that no Ministry could stand the force of such an undercurrent influence, that all the good that was to be derived from pacifying the Queen's mind at the change had been gained, and that the danger which we were liable to, and which threatened him in particular, could only be averted by his own straightforward decision with the Queen. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... always beating down through the crust towards the first fire of life, of death and of eternity. Read where you will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all. If you would label his a religion of ethics or of morals, he shames you at the outset, "for ethics is but a reflection of a divine personality." All the religions this world has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one or another holy person; "as soon as ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... he feels the hush and solitude of the great forest, and, whether he will or not, all his musings are in some way cast upon that huge background of the night. Unless he is an old camper-out, there will be an undercurrent of dread or half fear. My companion said he could not help but feel all the time that there ought to be a sentinel out there pacing up and down. One seems to require less sleep in the woods, as if the ground and the untempered air rested and refreshed him sooner. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... common word among the constituents of New England Senators after 1840, and even Northwestern States threatened disruption of the Union as late as 1859 if the national policy should continue to run counter to their interests. There was, however, a strong undercurrent of devotion to the idea of nationality in both North and South[12] in 1860, and when South Carolina proceeded with her long-contemplated scheme of secession early in November of that year, Jefferson Davis, who had formerly talked freely of ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... character and pagan in others, taking an active part in every event, ruling by wit and beauty, wisdom and courage; an age of thoughtless gaiety and morbid fanaticism, and of laughter and tears, still rough and savage, yet with an undercurrent of subtle grace and exquisite politeness; an age in which the extremes of elegance and cruelty were blended, in which the most glaring scepticism and intense superstitions were everywhere evident; an age which was religious as well as debauched ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... supplied with mythical monsters, singing flowers, and blooming women. Strange scarlet and mulberry threads form the woof of these tapestries, threads pulled with great labour from all the art of the past. There is, in much of his work, an undercurrent of subtle sensuous erotic poison; in one of her stories Edna Kenton tells us that chartreuse jaune and bananas form such a poison. There is a suggestion of chartreuse jaune and bananas in much of the work of ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... penetrating. Even as the cheery lay of the Otocompsa bulbuls forms the dominant note of the bird chorus in our southern hill stations, so does the less melodious but not less cheerful call of the flycatcher-warblers run as an undercurrent through the melody of the feathered ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... whom we write was unusually romantic, for her romance consisted of a deep undercurrent of powerful but quiet enthusiasm, with a pretty strong surface-flow of common-sense. Her husband was a man of noble mind and commanding presence—a magnificent representative John Bull, with the polish of a courtier and the principles of a Christian; ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... boy heard the same muffled hoofs and voices die away towards the front. He began to dress himself mechanically, almost vacantly, yet conscious always of a vague undercurrent of thrilling excitement. When he had finished he waited almost breathlessly, feeling the same beating of his heart that he had felt when he was following the vanished train the day before. At last he could stand the suspense ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... "The undercurrent of restrained emotion in this little scene went out to that crowd, which represented the wealth, beauty and chivalry of France. I suppose that some of them thought it a bit of good acting. These people love the drama as no others love it. I suspect that many of the friends ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... the appreciation of Jewish Legends, it is the Rabbinic writers that should form the point of departure, and not the pseudepigrapha. The former represent the main stream of Jewish thought and feeling, the latter only an undercurrent. If the Synagogue cast out the pseudepigrapha, and the Church adopted them with a great show of favor, these respective attitudes were not determined arbitrarily or by chance. The pseudepigrapha originated in circles that harbored the germs from which Christianity developed later on. ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... Senators after 1840, and even Northwestern States threatened disruption of the Union as late as 1859 if the national policy should continue to run counter to their interests. There was, however, a strong undercurrent of devotion to the idea of nationality in both North and South[12] in 1860, and when South Carolina proceeded with her long-contemplated scheme of secession early in November of that year, Jefferson Davis, who had formerly talked freely of that "last remedy" of minority ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... newspapers had more than enough 'copy' to keep them busy. The narrow escape of the King from assassination, followed by his excommunication from the Church, worked a curious effect on the minds of the populace, who were somewhat bewildered and uncertain as to the possible undercurrent of political meaning flowing beneath the conjunction of these two events; and their feelings were intensified by the announcement that the youth who had attempted the monarch's life,— being proved as suffering from hereditary brain disease,—had received a free pardon, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... in home life—this "I must"—just the thing which makes it akin to our Lord's life? Is there not in that Holiest Life a continual undercurrent of "I must"? His earthly life was a course of obedience, not a succession of self-willed efforts; its keynote was, "Wist ye not that I must be ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... when another month was gone these were the changes it had wrought. The four so strangely bound together by ties of suffering and sin went on their way, to the world's eye, blessed with every gracious gift, but below the tranquil surface rolled that undercurrent whose mysterious tides ebb and flow in human hearts unfettered by race or rank or time. Gilbert was a good actor, but, though he curbed his fitful temper, smoothed his mien, and sweetened his manner, his wife soon felt the vanity of hoping to recover ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... and crofters were hard at work hauling up spars and barrels as fast as they were tossed ashore. None of them had seen any bodies, however, and they explained to us that only such things as could float had any chance of coming ashore, for the undercurrent was so strong that whatever was beneath the surface must infallibly ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... professional workers, especially those who are united in "Bohemian life" by artistic or literary interests. But while such sexually anarchistic women are not common in America, there is reason for fearing that, unless some unexpected check comes to this undercurrent towards sexual freedom, it may be found ten or twenty years hence that a surprisingly large number, but never a majority, of unmarried young women have fallen into the sexual promiscuity that is so common among unmarried men of ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... Dec. 31—An undercurrent of irritation is evident over the American note on interference with American commerce; a new decoration, the Military Cross, has ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... brought forth the company preserves; fruit cake was unearthed from the big stone crock in the dining-room closet; and, as a final touch to the feast, Jane beat up a foamy omelet and a prune whip. In their enjoyment they were like a group of children, an undercurrent of delight in the forbidden tinging ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... under the cool, ironical questioning with its undercurrent of keen contempt. Each word stung like the flick of a lash on bare flesh. But she forced herself ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... something like a shiver at the reflection of the lanthorn in a far-stretching mirror of intense blackness which lay smooth and undisturbed, save in one part away to his left, where it was blurred and dimmed, rising and falling as if moved by some undercurrent. ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... so that every sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, opens a way down to the heart, and leads us to the very centre of life. Hence there is in every word set down by the Imagination an awful undercurrent of meaning—an evidence and shadow upon it of the deep places out ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... was the sign of recovering health. Kind nature put that district to sleep while she operated on the disquieted lower functions. I looked on my later self as one observes the mossy bearded substances travelling blind along the undercurrent of the stream, clinging to this and that, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... source of attraction would have alone procured me the attention I have found, I would hope it may partly have arisen from their simple, unaffected appeal to those quiet, domestic, secluded feelings, which endear the still undercurrent of existence—in short, to my being content to make the best I could of the homely and confined materials to which my situation has given me access, without affecting scholarship, or aiming at romantic embellishment. There is nothing like simple truth and nature, after all; and he who is satisfied ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... he went to work as a section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like one compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all sides of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life went on that did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns, inhabited only by farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was being developed. Men worked hard but were much in the open air and had time to think. Their minds reached out toward the solution of the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... constitute a far deeper and more abiding charm than statuesque beauty, are equally absent from an impersonation which in its earlier phases is almost distressingly labored. While the actress is entertaining her guests with improvised comedy, moreover, no undercurrent of emotion, no suggestion of suppressed anxiety is perceptible. It is not till this double role, which demands a degree of finesse evidently beyond Miss Anderson's range, is exchanged for the ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... for Saratoga. The change was eminently beneficial, and before they reached Canada Irene seemed perfectly restored. But her father was not satisfied. Her unwonted taciturnity annoyed and puzzled him; he knew that beneath the calm surface some strong undercurrent rolled swiftly, and he racked his brain to discover what had rendered her so reserved. Louisa's joyous, elastic spirits probably heightened the effect of her companion's gravity, and the contrast daily presented could ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... brawny seamen were grouped in clusters around the great guns. The creole soldiers came of a race whose habit it has ever been to take all phases of life joyously; but that morning their gayety was tempered by a dark undercurrent of fierce anxiety. They had more at stake than any other men on the field. They were fighting for their homes; they were fighting for their wives and their daughters. They well knew that the men they were to face were very brave ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... religion, even though imbedded in the corruption, or alloyed with the pride, of the world, betoken His original agency, and His long-suffering presence. Even where there is habitual rebellion against Him, or profound far-spreading social depravity, still the undercurrent, or the heroic outburst, of natural virtue, as well as the yearnings of the heart after what it has not, and its presentiment of its true remedies, are to be ascribed to the Author of all good. Anticipations or reminiscences of His glory haunt the mind of the self-sufficient sage, and of the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... another grand sight presented itself. The northern and larger of the two floes, acted strongly upon by the gale, and opposed by the smaller floe, was slowly but irresistibly swinging round, and in its sweep it had come into contact with a very large berg, which, influenced apparently by some undercurrent, was with equally irresistible force actually making its way to windward in the teeth of the gale. The result was a scene of wild chaos and confusion and destruction compared with which that upon which they had just looked was as nothing. The berg simply tore ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown yourself in. The undercurrent is terribly strong, and if you once get down into it you are all right. An obelisk marks the spot where two men have already been drowned, while bathing there; and the steps of the obelisk are generally used as a diving-board ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... severe to the point of grimness. He is right because it is ein altes Liedchen, and Heine's handling of it is also kept outwardly cold. But Marston has rendered the song into music of the richest harmony and fullest pathos. He is right, also, because he has interpreted the undercurrent ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... few fans stirred imperceptibly an atmosphere supercharged with radiations from so many human bodies added to the natural heat of a summer's evening; there were no other sounds or movements of any consequence. Sally became uncomfortably susceptible to the undercurrent of high nervous tension, conscious of a slight dew on her hands and forehead, and surprisingly conscious of the sonorous thumping of her heart. Unaccountably, nobody else ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... not so clear. The waves created patches of foam, and long submarine plants swayed gently in the undercurrent. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... undercurrent of longing to see Nancy flowed on and on. Bert wanted nothing else—just Nancy. He had been spending the summer with a friend, at the friend's uptown house, but now he thought he would go out to the Venables, and show some interest in his newly-papered ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... intervals of leisure, in a little knot of relations and friends, he delighted in quiet conversation, through which occasionally ran an undercurrent of pleasantry, not unmixed with caustic wit. At his table he was the least heard among the company, and so far from being the hero of his own tale, I never heard him voluntarily refer to any of the great actions of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... clear for his start. "The First Lord of the Treasury;" so spoke the Speaker—almost softly—and, in a moment, when he had realized what had taken place, the Old Man was upright, and the Liberal and Irish members were on their feet, waving their hats, cheering themselves hoarse. And yet an undercurrent and audible note of anxiety ran through all the enthusiasm. The honeymoon of Home Rule is over, and, curiously enough, the very sense of a great victory after a long struggle has always about it a solemnity too sad ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... alone in the direction of Yeobright's place of work. He was busily chopping away at the furze, a long row of faggots which stretched downward from his position representing the labour of the day. He did not observe her approach, and she stood close to him, and heard his undercurrent of song. It shocked her. To see him there, a poor afflicted man, earning money by the sweat of his brow, had at first moved her to tears; but to hear him sing and not at all rebel against an occupation which, however satisfactory ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the Balkan region as well as all of the small nations that had been absorbed but had not been digested by Austria, should cut itself from the leading strings held by the large European powers. There was a distinct undercurrent, for a federation resembling that of the United States of America between these peoples. This was expressed most clearly by M. Jonesco, leader of the Liberal party of Roumania and generally recognized as the ablest statesman of middle ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... feelings, and protest that death is not to be feared but welcomed—as the passage from a troublous existence to everlasting peace. In most of the poetry of the time, religion, if at all noticeable, is a mere undercurrent; but whenever it rises to the surface, it reflects ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... desperate. I realized how everything depended on God's touch. And without any planning a habit of continual praying formed itself. I could be engaged in conversation, thinking intently into something needing great care, and yet there was an undercurrent of prayer constantly. I shall never cease to be grateful for that trying experience, because in it this new habit of a praying bent ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... nineteenth century, her only equal being Mrs. Browning. Besides the brief poems in Sing-Song, Miss Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and "Uphill" please young people of a contemplative mood. While there is an undercurrent of sadness in much of her work, it is a natural accompaniment of her themes and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... between the different members which compose it. Even the addition of many new ones has produced no jarring. They move in their respective orbits in perfect harmony with the central head and with each other. But there is still an undercurrent at work by which, if not seasonably checked, the worst apprehensions of our antifederal patriots will be realized, and not only will the State authorities be overshadowed by the great increase of power in the executive department of the General Government, but the character of that ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... Nature's Lullaby The Spirit of Freedom Is Born of the Mountains The Valley of the San Miguel To Mother Huberta Suggested by a Mountain Eagle The Silvery San Juan As the Shifting Sands of the Desert Missed If I Have Lived Before The Darker Side The Miner Life's Undercurrent They Cannot See the Wreaths We Place Mother—Alpha and Omega Empty Are the Mother's Arms In Deo Fides Shall Love, as the Bridal Wreath, Wither and Die Shall Our Memories Live When the Sod Rolls Above Us ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... each note is heard clearly. The tempo of the first movement, which begins after a grand pause, is allegro con brio, and the first subject is given out in a sparkling cascade of sound. But, despite the buoyancy of the music, there is an unmistakable undercurrent of melancholy in the playing. The audience doesn't ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... have nothing to say?" Westerling's frown deepened. There was an undercurrent of urgency in his tone. This mild culprit, waiting for the wheels of justice to roll over him without a protest, gave him no light as to a policy that should apply to other cases. He resented, too, any suggestion of readiness ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... sitting. She was very white, and the powder on her face gave her an added and unnatural pallor. As the people cheered her husband and herself she raised her head slightly and seemed to be trying to catch any sound of dissent in their greeting, or some possible undercurrent of disfavor, but the welcome appeared to be both genuine and hearty, until a second shout smothered it completely as the figure of old General Rojas, the Vice-President, and the most dearly loved by the common people, came ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... alone in the churchyard, lost for a brief space in meditation. The solemn strains of the organ which the schoolmistress was still playing, floated softly out from the church to the perfumed air, and the grave melodious murmur made an undercurrent of harmony to the clear bright warbling of a skylark, which, beating its wings against the sunbeams, rose ever higher and higher ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... at him, with a seriousness equal to his own as she answered, "I promise." And inwardly the sense of some unknown undercurrent that might grow into a rushing torrent made ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... excellent terms with a great many members of Congress, and there was an undercurrent of suspicion in some quarters that she was one of that detested class known as "lobbyists;" but what belle could escape slander in such a city? Fairminded people declined to condemn her on mere suspicion, and so the injurious talk made no very damaging headway. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I felt an undercurrent of anxiety lest I might sustain spiritual loss by my sudden accession to great wealth, and continued to ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... dwell so long on one topic, or to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly guessed that Mr. Gryce's egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring constant nurture from without. Miss Bart had the gift of following an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be sailing on the surface of conversation; and in this case her mental excursion took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Percy Gryce's future as combined with her own. The Gryces were from Albany, and but lately introduced to the metropolis, where the mother and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... sink a well in a stream the bed of which is quicksand, a flour-barrel, perforated with small holes, should be used as a curb, to prevent the sand from caving in. The barrel must be forced down as the sand is removed; and when, as is often the case, there is an undercurrent through the sand, the well will be continually filled ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... for the rest of the party, but she would have preferred originating the suggestion. Besides, the conversation had begun to interest her; and she liked being amused too well not to be sorry for its being cut short abruptly. She thought Major Keene talked epigrammatically; and the undercurrent of irony that ran through all he said was not so obtrusive as to ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... tickling, accompanied, it may be, by some ovarian congestion, for she felt that on the left side there was a network of sexual nerves, and retroversion of the uterus was detected some years later. Her life was strenuous with many duties, but no occupation could be pursued without this undercurrent of sexual hyperaesthesia involving perpetual self-control. This continued more or less acutely for many years, when menstruation suddenly stopped altogether, much before the usual period of the climacteric. At the same time the sexual excitement ceased, and she became ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... tolerably well together. We managed to put up with your shortcomings and you managed to put up with ours, which at times may have been considerable of a strain on both sides. Still we've done it. But it seems to me here of late there's been a kind of an undercurrent of discontent stirrin' amongst your people—and no logical reason fur it either, so fur as I kin see. Yet there ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... used in the case of my mother, namely, that if M. Termonde had really been concerned in the assassination of my father, he had dreaded my aunt's penetration beyond all things. Their relations had been formal, with an undercurrent of enmity on her part which had assuredly not escaped a man so astute as he. If he were guilty, would he not have feared that my aunt would have confided her thoughts to me on her death-bed? The attitude that he should assume towards me, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... happily, revealing but little of herself, and holding a slight reserve in her manner which seemed to him quite delightful and maidenly. Then, all too suddenly, he was gone again, but in his heart he carried a memory of her that made a continual undercurrent in his thoughts. ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... that I had spent in vainly trying to overcome the love and hatred which consumed me. However occupied I was with the pressing affairs of my almost over-filled life I was conscious of an undercurrent of despair—the despair that I had felt when Eve told me ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... only to be thwarted by a still more capricious octave descent. This time, however, after a dramatic pause, we are rewarded with a clear-cut, periodic melody beginning in measure 66, against which the rhythm of the first theme keeps up a gentle undercurrent. Some interesting modulations develop into a series of descending octaves which, accompanied by sf chords, lead to the closing portion. This brilliant passage accentuates the dominant key of the second theme. After a short tranquillo phrase ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... comic songs there is ever in them something of the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to furnish full gratification ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... efficiency." Also the best authorities, and even the government investigators themselves, are urging a speedy return to private ownership and operation at the earliest possible moment after the war. The same undercurrent of feeling, or rather conviction, is rapidly spreading among our own people in ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... the undercurrent of talk which she starts is the beginning of a rapid series of incidents which force the problem of the past up to the threshold of Richard Livingstone's consciousness. There would then be two ways of facing his difficulties, and he takes the braver. Confronted ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... and returned to the doorway, while Dundee again consulted his watch, mentally subtracting the minutes which had been wasted upon this interruption, from the time he had marked upon his memory as the moment at which Drake had interfered. But an undercurrent of skepticism nagged at his mind. Why had Drake chosen to walk? And why had it taken him from 5:10 to approximately 5:33 to walk a mile or less? The average walker, and especially one accustomed to ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... sharply witty and with some depth of heart. The fancy-dress party scene is autobiographic, he having attended such an occasion at Carroll Beckwith's studio, in New York. In technique, this scene is comparable with the one of similar gaiety in "Lord and Lady Algy"—both having an undercurrent of serious strain. The tragedy motive is relieved at almost calculated times by comedy, which shows that Fitch held to the old dramatic theory of comic relief. Often this was irritating, discounting the mood he was trying to maintain. He was not as ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... into the path of the Forward. All of them did not obey the same impulsion, and it was not uncommon to encounter some of the highest masses drifting in an opposite direction, seized at their base by an undercurrent. ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... the voice was, gently as the words were spoken, Tunis sensed an undercurrent of firmness and determination in the girl's character that he had not ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... soberly that afternoon. Touched as she was by what Mrs. Snow had said, there was yet an undercurrent of sadness in it all. She was thinking of Aunt Polly—Aunt Polly who played the game now so seldom; and she was wondering if she herself always played ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... conclusion. Always, while writing—whatever might be the subject of my story—I have been influenced by an undercurrent of effort and desire to direct the minds and affections of my readers towards ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... criminal. Increase of education and scientific skill not only confers superior facilities for the successful perpetration of crime, but also for its concealment. The revelations of the newspapers, from week to week, but too plainly indicate an undercurrent of vice and iniquity, whose depth ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... that her gaiety rippled over an undercurrent of pain, Stephen bent forward and touched her hand with an ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... guarded, but it was so plainly his last word to her; Llewellyn Stanhope was proclaiming the departure of his people in ten days' time upon every blank wall. So he gave himself a little latitude, he let in an undercurrent of gentle reminiscence, of serious assurance as to the difference she had made. And when he had finally bade her begone to the light and fulness of her own life and fastened up his letter, he deliberately ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... some sullen undercurrent of intense feeling drove these eddying foam bells of flattery into the stream of conversation; or was her reply merely a chance ricochet shot, more accurately ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... notice of him—I got more and more light-hearted; which was natural enough, seeing that what I was doing in itself interested me and so made the time pass quickly, and that I had also a great swelling undercurrent of hope as I thought of what my slow-going work would bring me to in ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... ever before. Protests of princes, actions of legislative assemblies, [5] protests sometimes of bishops, [6] the failing allegiance of men of affairs, the increasing condemnation and ridicule from laymen and scholars—all signs of a strong undercurrent of public opinion—seemed to have no effect on those responsible for the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... ourselves, and of realising its forward movement as the ultimate determining factor in all true healthful mental action, it will become second nature to us to have all our plans, down to the apparently most trivial, so floating upon the undercurrent of this Universal Intelligence that a great harmony will come into our lives, every discordant manifestation will disappear, and we shall find ourselves more and more controlling all things into ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... had settled into a steady drizzle when McDowell left the Shack at two o'clock. Keith watched the iron man, as his tall, gray figure faded away into the mist down the slope, with a curious undercurrent of emotion. Before the inspector had come up as his guest he had, he thought, definitely decided his future action. He would go west on his furlough, write McDowell that he had decided not to reenlist, ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... known his fate at once. But who knows when Noel fell in love? She was—one supposes—just ready for that sensation. For the last two years she had been at one of those high-class finishing establishments where, in spite of the healthy curriculum, perhaps because of it, there is ever an undercurrent of interest in the opposing sex; and not even the gravest efforts to eliminate instinct are quite successful. The disappearance of every young male thing into the maw of the military machine put a premium on instinct. The ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pellet, very stubborn and indissoluble, there in his heart ... the knowledge that, alighting, at the end he would have to face that little black smudge; that he would have to meet Dolly's cheerful greeting with its subtle, plaintive undercurrent, and the faint ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... Ewbert said, "Oh, yes," as if he recognized it, and went on from it upon the line of thought which it suggested. He was aware of talking rationally and forcibly; but in the subjective undercurrent paralleling his objective thought he was holding discourse with himself to an effect wholly different from ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... decide," said Gwendolen, walking to the writing-table and seating herself. All the while there was a busy undercurrent in her, like the thought of a man who keeps up a dialogue while he is considering how he can slip away. Why should she not let him come? It bound her to nothing. He had been to Leubronn after her: of course he meant a direct unmistakable renewal of the suit which before had been only implied. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... he told Polly, an undercurrent of complaint at the unfairness of things in his tale. And ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... it was Mr. LOCKE'S idea to present a very ordinary decent sort with the common man's prejudices and frank distrust of subtleties. A sinister mystery of love, death and blackmail runs, a turbid undercurrent, through the story. The publisher's pathetic apology for the drab grey paper on which, in the interests of War Economy, the book is printed, makes one wonder how the other publishers who still issue books in black and white ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... said, with a superficial archness which did not half cover an undercurrent of reproach, 'do you know, I think you might have told me voluntarily about that past—of kisses and betrothing—without giving me so much uneasiness and trouble. Was that the tomb you alluded to as having ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... you ridiculous creature, why won't you take us seriously?" laughed Julia, but her voice still held an undercurrent of wistfulness. "Does the fact that we are twins have ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... that had already started from Allahabad, and boasted how easily they would eat up the Feringhees. It seemed, however, to Bathurst that a good deal of this confidence was assumed, and that among some, at least, there was an undercurrent of doubt and uneasiness, though they talked as loudly and boldly as ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... with hungry German officers and men; every hotel room was occupied, and provision shops speedily sold out the stores on their shelves. The Germans paid in cash for everything ordered, and preserved a careful attitude of nonaggression toward the citizens. But subconsciously there ran an undercurrent of dread insecurity. At the outset a German officer was said to have been struck by a sniper's bullet. Somewhat conspicuously the wounded officer was borne on a litter through the streets, followed by the dead body of his assailant. Very promptly a news curtain was drawn down around the city, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... when the play was deepest and while long-inherited family manors passed out of the hands of their owners. The recent French victory at Fontenoy still rankled in the heart of every Englishman. Within, the country seethed with an undercurrent of unrest and dissatisfaction. It was said that there were those who boasted quietly among themselves over their wine that the sun would yet rise some day on a Stuart England, that there were desperate men still willing to risk their lives in blind loyalty or in the gambler's spirit for the race ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... bottom. Beranger guided his pony to a winding path that led down the steep side of the valley, already hearing the cadence of a loud, chanting voice, throwing out its sounds over the assembly, whence arose assenting hums over an undercurrent of sobs, as though the excitable French assembly were ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of his mind there ran an undercurrent of thought, or as of some one talking, to the effect that the Pope's old method of remaining as a prisoner in the Vatican was a foolish and unhumble pose. (He supposed he must have read it all somewhere in history.) Surely even Catholics used to talk like that! They used ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... look for this, and to receive it with an answering glance from his own dark eyes, full of a strange light and power. She, watching him more keenly than her father could, was conscious of something that altogether escaped him, a sort of undercurrent of suppressed excitement which never rose to the surface, and revealed itself in none of his mannerisms or his tone. But it was there, and she felt it—felt it more than ever when their eyes met, and hers were forced to droop before the steady fire in his, which more than once ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the song," explained Lancelot; "a sort of undercurrent of emotion that brings out the full pathos of the words. Note the elegant and novel harmonies." He played another bar or ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... a new experience to her to contrast him with Hugh, and to learn to analyze the new feeling which suffused her being,—that deep, undercurrent which lies beneath all surface ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river. His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... The proof of an undercurrent of water, due to the presence of the high range of mountains, becomes more apparent as the traveller advances into the interior; though the soil is still sandy and barren, and little vegetation can ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... week of it in New York—copying out instructions, taking notes of marriages and intermarriages in 1690, and writing each day a long, pleading letter to Bessie. There was a double strain upon me: all the arrangements for my client's claims, and in an undercurrent the arguments to overcome Bessie's decision, went on in my brain side ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... was meditating. It was a mighty unpleasant business. But he was getting tired of conflict. There was an undercurrent in the lives of both that made him shrink from going deep into any domestic difference. It was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... an introduction seemed to be imminent, the American effaced himself. Other men in the hotel were not like that—they rather sought the great man's company. She wondered if Bower had noticed it. Despite his candid, almost generous, disclaimer of motive, there was an undercurrent of hostility in his words that suggested a feeling of pique. She climbed the rocky path in silence until ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... almost lost in the viewports when a sort of upswept tempo began to run through the ship, an undercurrent of increased activity. Cargo was checked, inventoried and strapped in. Ringg was given four extra men to help him, made an extra tour of the ship, and came back buzzing like a frantic cricket. Bart's computers told him they were forging toward the sidereal location assigned for the first of the ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... as though in jest, held an undercurrent of meaning for Diana that sent the colour flying up under her clear skin. There was a bitter taunt in them that none knew better ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... may be thrown; his vast strength, his redundant health, had a power of themselves—a moral as well as physical power. He naturally possessed high animal spirits, beneath the surface of which, however, at times, there was visible a certain undercurrent of malignity and scorn. He had evidently received a superior education, and could command at will the manner of a man not unfamiliar with a politer class of society. From the first hour that Philip had seen him on ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... train, through all the other contending thoughts in Mrs. Lidcote's mind there ran the warm undercurrent of what Franklin Ide had wanted to say ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... the receding waves for their lives. Tite's first thought was to secure the boat, and seizing hold of the line he made a desperate effort to gain the beach, and was successful, as were two of the men. The others were too weak to make much of a resistance, and were carried away by the undercurrent, and nothing ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... asked the young man, shrugging his shoulders with careless indifference. "Rapid undercurrent, you know. A good many ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... regarded by many in his lifetime as a coarse, hard, practical man, full of prejudices, there was yet a strong undercurrent of poetry in his nature; and, while he declaimed against sentiment, there were few men more thoroughly imbued with sentiment of the best kind. He had the tenderest regard for the character of woman. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... and women and crystallized her experiences into sparkling little sentences and epigrams which made Frances feel as if she were listening to one of the witty people in clever books. But under all her sparkling wit there was a strongly felt undercurrent of true womanly sympathy and kind-heartedness which won affection as speedily as her brilliance won admiration. Frances listened and laughed and enjoyed. Once she found time to think that she would have missed a great deal if she had not come to Bay Shore Farm that day. Surely talking ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... "An undercurrent of sympathy with the struggles of the poor, and an ability to describe their feelings, eminently characteristic of Dickens, are marked features in Mr. ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... The wearing of it would have added so much to her pleasure. However, the thought of it, and of the new dress that was to be sent up in the morning, ran through her mind all that afternoon, like a happy undercurrent. She said so once, when Phil asked her what she was smiling about ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... himself upon his adventure, was a certain pestering consciousness that all was not so well with him as observers might guess. But he resolutely put this away each time it threatened to overwhelm him. He would cross no bridge until he came to it. He even combated this undercurrent of sanity by wording part of an interview with himself some day to appear ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... A forced conversation of a curiously impersonal sort dragged from course to course. Absolute strangers would have exhibited less restraint; for the ghost of an old comradeship made the fourth at the feast and prated to them in exiguous voice of paths that had diverged. Drake noticed, besides, an undercurrent of antagonism between Conway and Mallinson. He inquired what each had been ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... of the wind and the sea and the clean light of the forenoon, there was a sadness about the place, and an undercurrent of uneasy silence that the rustling of the leaves and the noise of the surf only seemed to accentuate. It was like the silence that falls about a table when the guests have left it, and the chairs are empty ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... Wheeler had rushed past into the house. Miss Rosetta composedly stepped into the cab and drove to the station. She fairly bridled with triumph; and underneath the triumph ran a queer undercurrent of satisfaction over the fact that Charlotte had spoken to her at last. Miss Rosetta would not look at this satisfaction, or give it a name, but ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to detect that curious undercurrent of meaning in his voice which I had noticed in the course of our brief exchange of remarks in the hall. I glanced up and met his eye. He was looking at me in a way that struck me as curious. There was something in those bright brown eyes of his which had the effect of making me vaguely uneasy. Something ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... is always looking for trouble when the elephant is around, so he can be pulled out!" returned Danvers, in the same strain; yet with the undercurrent of affection that always crept into his tone when speaking ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... there was yet time, the radical remedy, Reform, patiently turning, when that was refused, to palliatives like mutual free trade in 1785 and the Catholic franchise in 1793; and meanwhile, with an undercurrent of cool scepticism, preparing the ground for the only alternative to Reform, short of a revolutionary separation of the two countries, legislative Union, and remorselessly pushing that Union through by the only available ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... month. Thus to imprisonment was added the gall and wormwood of total dependence upon others; the unthinkable prospect of parting with Paul, with the Border itself—with everything that had hitherto made life worth living; and, worse than all, the undercurrent of striving to ignore that veiled danger, which he refused to name, even in his thoughts, and which lay like ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... ever since she had last seen her. She seemed to be in a perpetual brown study, which was compatible, however, with a curious watchfulness which struck Cicely particularly. She was always aware of any undercurrent in the room—of anyone going in or out—of persons passing in the road. At lunch she scarcely opened her lips, but Cicely was all the time conscious of being observed. After luncheon Bridget got up abruptly, and said she was going down to Grasmere ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her." And a propos of Miss Mayjar, an evangelical lady who is a little too apt to talk of her visits to sick women and the state of their souls, we are told that the model clergyman is "not one to disallow, through the super crust, the undercurrent toward good in the subject, or the positive benefits, nevertheless, to the object." We imagine the double-refined accent and protrusion of chin which are feebly represented by the italics in this lady's sentences! We abstain from quoting any of her oracular doctrinal ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... she cried out in her heart for God to punish old Gordon's sin from generation to generation—meaning that young Gordon should suffer for the sins of his father. Yet through her torture and the burning anger of her prayer ran a silent undercurrent, a voiceless call for mercy upon her and upon all she loved, her father ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... massacre, called by the world religious, was, in the French cabinet, considered merely as political; one of those revolting state expedients which a pretended instant necessity has too often inflicted on that part of a nation which, like the undercurrent, subterraneously works its way, and runs counter to the great stream, till the critical moment arrives when one or ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... interested in their own clothes and appearances. This may be just a male's view of the story, but it seems like it to me, for there doesn't seem to be nearly as much life as you find in the same author's Pixie books. Well, I suppose that's not true: there is a subtle undercurrent of old love affairs revived that runs right to the very last page—and that is one of Mrs Vaizey's greatest skills. If you haven't done so, do read the little biography we have written of her, as it will ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... The little willows by the lake-side turned apricot; the rink was very cold and only just refrozen. It was a small gray square surrounded by color. Winn was quite alone in the silence and the light and the tingling bitter air. There was something in him that burned like a secret undercurrent of fire. Had he played the game? What about that dumb weight on his lips when he had tried to tell Claire on the Schatz Alp about Estelle? He couldn't get it out then; but had he tried again later? Had he concealed his marriage? Why should he tell her anything? She wouldn't care, she was so young. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... matter was settled, but there was an undercurrent in Mark's mind on which he had not entered, namely, that his presence at home might make all the difference in that reformation in his uncle's habits which Alice had inaugurated, and left in the hands of others. With him at hand, there was much more chance of Gregorio's ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Gauguin's lead in abandoning representation both of these two groups of advance are lacking in spiritual meaning. Their aim becomes more and more decorative, with an undercurrent of suggestion of simplified form. Anyone who has studied Gauguin will be aware of the intense spiritual value of his work. The man is a preacher and a psychologist, universal by his very unorthodoxy, fundamental because he goes deeper than civilization. In his disciples this great element ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... to her grandparents, however, the undercurrent of anxiety about the old people, which was a ruling motive in her ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... the element of pleasure prevails in a man, and the slight undercurrent of pain makes him tingle, and causes a gentle irritation; or again, the excessive infusion of pleasure creates an excitement in him,—he even leaps for joy, he assumes all sorts of attitudes, he changes all manner of colours, he gasps ...
— Philebus • Plato
... a sense of freedom amongst them all, of the undercurrent of darkness among them all. Yet here, at home, Ursula resented it. It became distasteful to her. And she knew that if they understood the real relationship between her and Skrebensky, her parents, her father in particular, would go mad with rage. So subtly, she seemed to be like ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... sides moves toward the equator to preserve equilibrium. Thus an extensive circulation is carried on. The air that moves from the equator in the upper atmosphere, gradually sinking to the surface of the earth, finally ceases to move toward the poles, and returns as an undercurrent to the equator, where it again rises ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... weak little Reverend has already got on this town," he went on. "He's a sly one. Preaching ain't in it with the undercurrent he's let loose here. It's just sapping the foundations of society. It's setting free a lot of good stuff, but it's striking Tate ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... much to complain about, being kindly treated, according to savage ideas of kindness. But although, during those three days, the inhabitants of the village seemed to go about their business pretty much as usual, there appeared to be an undercurrent of subdued excitement, coupled with a condition of eager expectancy, which was plain to both Earle and Dick, and which somehow produced in both a considerable amount of apprehension as to their ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... like to do," he whispered to me, in confidence, "is to give him one for his tete, as we say in cribbage. But suppose I must speak him fair." Did his best in that direction though undercurrent of observation in lengthy paper he read decidedly set in direction of making TATE out as a cantankerous wrong-headed person who, proposing to bestow some L160,000 in way of free gift, expected to have his wishes consulted in such matter of detail as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... the original volume chiefly follow Empedocles, with the batch later called "Faded Leaves" to introduce them. It is, perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name "Marguerite" does not appear in A Farewell; though nobody who marked as well as read, could fail to ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... friendship, but sailors and passengers were full of their own affairs, and took no notice of him. For two days past there had been much whispering amongst the crew and the men under contract to work the ship that had been left crewless in Australian waters. Done detected an undercurrent of excitement, and noticed many guarded consultations. That there was some conspiracy afloat he was convinced, but the plotting was conducted in so cheerful—even hilarious—a spirit that ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... adventitious source of attraction would have alone procured me the attention I have found, I would hope it may partly have arisen from their simple, unaffected appeal to those quiet, domestic, secluded feelings, which endear the still undercurrent of existence—in short, to my being content to make the best I could of the homely and confined materials to which my situation has given me access, without affecting scholarship, or aiming at romantic embellishment. There is nothing like simple truth ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... Here were a wife and four little children depending upon this man for their lives. What would become of his family if justice was meted out to him? Soon there developed an undercurrent of opinion that it was probably better to waive punishment than to endanger the lives of the family; but the council would not be swerved from its resolution. At sundown of the third day the criminal was hanged in ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... her mind was made up as to the disposal of every dollar of her vast property, made it easy for me to master each detail and make careful note of every wish. But this did not prevent the ebb and flow within me of an undercurrent of thought full of question and uneasiness. What had been the real purport of the scene to which I had just been made a surprised witness? The few, but certainly unusual, facts which had been given me in ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... after the last sharp trot, the last leisurely uphill canter, on the bordering, leaf-strewn grass of the winding road, where the white walls and gray roof of the little house showed among the trees, that all the undercurrent seemed to center in a knot of suffocating expectancy ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Mackenzie embarked with them. Barely had they pushed out when the canoe was caught by a sucking undercurrent which the paddlers could not stem—a terrific rip told them that the canoe had struck—the rapids whirled her sideways and away she went down-stream—the men jumped out, but the current carried them to such deep water that they were clinging ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... when the seeds of hereditary consumption developed themselves. As a young man he was lively and joyous, always ready for frolic, and with a great fund of humor, especially in caricature. Students of human character know how consistent these traits are with a deep undercurrent of melancholy, which colors the whole life when the ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... depth of heart. The fancy-dress party scene is autobiographic, he having attended such an occasion at Carroll Beckwith's studio, in New York. In technique, this scene is comparable with the one of similar gaiety in "Lord and Lady Algy"—both having an undercurrent of serious strain. The tragedy motive is relieved at almost calculated times by comedy, which shows that Fitch held to the old dramatic theory of comic relief. Often this was irritating, discounting the mood he was trying to maintain. He was not as skilful in the use of these ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... wish she had more time and I wish I had more time and that she and I might become such friends as you and I are. I can't tell you, dear, how much I think of you. It seems to me that you're running a sort of undercurrent in ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... young man, shrugging his shoulders with careless indifference. "Rapid undercurrent, you know. A good ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... deadly undercurrent flowing far beneath the surface neither he nor others dreamed, till, one day, a woman's face—cold, cruel, false, but beautiful, bewitchingly, entrancingly beautiful,—came between us, and from that hour all semblance of friendship was at an end. With me it was ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... best of which are too long to quote, are founded on scriptural themes, but his blank verse is not biblical either in mood or manner. It is the undercurrent rather than the surface of his verse which moves with a strong religious conviction. Abercrombie's images are daring and brilliant; his lines, sometimes too closely packed, glow with a dazzling intensity that is ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... country of the Athabasca. The Barrens were the one thing that called to him now— the one thing to which he dared respond. He would keep his promise to Isobel and visit Scottie's grave. At least he tried to make himself believe that he was keeping a promise. But deep in him there was an undercurrent of feeling which he could not explain. It was as if there were a spirit with him at times, walking at his side, and hovering about his campfire at nights, and when he gave himself up to the right mood ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... From the top shelf in the pantry they brought forth the company preserves; fruit cake was unearthed from the big stone crock in the dining-room closet; and, as a final touch to the feast, Jane beat up a foamy omelet and a prune whip. In their enjoyment they were like a group of children, an undercurrent of delight in the ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... a seat, and, stooping over and crossing her arms on her knees, she looked down on the floor, and appeared to fall into a sort of reverie. Her great gloomy eyes and her dark face seemed to work with some undercurrent of feeling; she sighed ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... do, they have an impractical sound, an unreality for us. So one hears, as if in a speaking-tube from a long distance, the words that Schaudinn and Hoffmann, on April 19, 1905, discovered the germ that causes syphilis, not realizing that the fact contained in those few brief words can alter the undercurrent of human history, and may, within the lives of our children and our children's children, remake the destiny of man on the earth. A great spirit lives in the work of men like Metchnikoff and Roux and Maisonneuve, who made possible the ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... clouds so bright against the intense blue, Ashurst, on his silver-wedding day, longed for—he knew not what. Maladjusted to life—man's organism! One's mode of life might be high and scrupulous, but there was always an, undercurrent of greediness, a hankering, and sense of waste. Did women have it too? Who could tell? And yet, men who gave vent to their appetites for novelty, their riotous longings for new adventures, new risks, new pleasures, these suffered, no doubt, from the reverse side of starvation, from surfeit. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... must be added to the golden image of Dionysus Meilichius—the honey-sweet, if the old tradition in its completeness is to be, in spite of that sophism, our closing impression; if we are to catch, in its fulness, that deep undercurrent of horror which runs below, all through [79] this masque of spring, and realise the spectacle of that wild chase, in which Dionysus is ultimately both ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... and distressed by the sudden and horrible disaster; and yet as an undercurrent to these first natural thoughts, there ran presently a distinct notion that he would have felt the grievousness of it more keenly had Madeleine perished in that cruel manner and her sister survived to bring the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... second attempt is now made, this time in A minor, only to be thwarted by a still more capricious octave descent. This time, however, after a dramatic pause, we are rewarded with a clear-cut, periodic melody beginning in measure 66, against which the rhythm of the first theme keeps up a gentle undercurrent. Some interesting modulations develop into a series of descending octaves which, accompanied by sf chords, lead to the closing portion. This brilliant passage accentuates the dominant key of the second theme. After a short tranquillo phrase and some free imitations ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... glaring, the afternoons dusty and windy, and under all the day's duties and pleasures—the meeting of neighbors, the children's confidences, her busy coming and going up and down the village streets—ran a sick undercurrent of disappointment and heartache. She went to the post-office twice, in that first long day, for the arriving mail, and Miss Potter, pleased at these glimpses of the lady from the Hall, chatted blithely as she pushed ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... the conventional freedom of riper years is struggling to birth, and its efforts are sometimes ludicrous to an unsympathetic observer. In Lewis Carroll's mental attitude during this critical period there was always a calm dignity which saved him from these absurdities, an undercurrent of consciousness that what seemed so great to him was ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... all throughout arable agriculture—from the hoeing to the threshing—a troop are wanted one day, scarcely anybody the next. There is, of course, a steady undercurrent of continuous work for a certain fixed number of hands; but over and above this are the periodical calls for extra labour, which of recent years, from the high wages paid, have been so profitable to the labourers. But when the agriculturist draws in his investments, when he retrenches ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... our system presents no appearance of discord between the different members which compose it. Even the addition of many new ones has produced no jarring. They move in their respective orbits in perfect harmony with the central head and with each other. But there is still an undercurrent at work by which, if not seasonably checked, the worst apprehensions of our antifederal patriots will be realized, and not only will the State authorities be overshadowed by the great increase of power in the executive department of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... the surface to indicate more than the customary familiarity of young people thrown together for a time, and yet no one could fail to realize the undercurrent of emotion below the gaiety of the daily ripple of amusement ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... "onto" the situation, for the whole secret of the man's sudden rise lay in his capacity for knowing and keeping track of every current and undercurrent of life in each department. With Miss Stein at their head, her five assistants would not put the energy of one into disposing of the hated stock, therefore Meggison had sent an "extra." He had chosen a new girl because she would not ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... storyteller. She had seen much of men and women, and crystalized her experiences into witty little sentences and epigrams which made her hearers feel as if they were listening to one of the people in clever books. But under all her sparkle there was a strongly felt undercurrent of true, womanly sympathy and kindheartedness which won affection as easily as her brilliancy won admiration. Nor did she monopolize the conversation. She could draw others out as skillfully and fully as she could talk herself, and ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... moreover, that an undercurrent of circumstance existed which did not even ripple the surface of that apparently facetious brutality hurled ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... Though Francis Madigan rarely ate anything that was prepared for the family dinner, she could remember the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the strong undercurrent of the Greek spirit rife in Florence was bearing him irresistibly on to his mission as leader of all that is beautiful, joyous, and noble in classical art. Fra Bartolommeo could not fail to be distressed by these tendencies in his disciple. Raphael came to ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... thrown; his vast strength, his redundant health, had a power of themselves—a moral as well as physical power. He naturally possessed high animal spirits, beneath the surface of which, however, at times, there was visible a certain undercurrent of malignity and scorn. He had evidently received a superior education, and could command at will the manner of a man not unfamiliar with a politer class of society. From the first hour that Philip had seen him on the top of the coach on ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... told Polly, an undercurrent of complaint at the unfairness of things in his tale. And she ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... of energy, full of the joy of being alive, but there was usually an undercurrent of sadness to all this. While on the road I would feel homesick for New York, and at the same time I would feel that I had no home anywhere, that my mother was dead and I was all ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... aware of the undercurrent of sadness in her voice. "I didn't know that there was ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... the people of Brussels, whenever a strong wind carries the booming of heavy guns miles in from the front, think that French and English are going to recapture the city? Any day that we can hear the guns faintly, we know that there is an undercurrent of nervous expectancy running through the whole city. It goes down alleys and avenues and fills the cafes. You can see Belgians standing together, whispering. Twice they actually set the date ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... either. Happy and blithesome, the Farmers were, at heart, earnestly devoted to purposes held sacred. They were inspired by high ideals. Noble conceptions and beautiful beliefs found expression in fitting phrase. Rippling mirth flowed in an undercurrent of serious, sincere faith and hope ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... shiver at the reflection of the lanthorn in a far-stretching mirror of intense blackness which lay smooth and undisturbed, save in one part away to his left, where it was blurred and dimmed, rising and falling as if moved by some undercurrent. ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... do believe in you. You are making an odd yet vivid impression on me. I believe you will face danger just as you did Mr. Lanniere, in a half-nonchalant and a half-satirical mood, while all the time there will be an undercurrent of downright earnestness and heroism in you, which you will hide as if you were ashamed ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... daily humiliation of spirit from the cruel distinctions based on sex. Though our State laws have been essentially changed, and positions in the schools, professions, and world of work secured to woman, unthought of thirty years ago, yet the undercurrent of popular thought, as seen in our social habits, theological dogmas, and political theories, still reflects the same customs, creeds, and codes that degrade women in the effete civilizations of the old world. Educated in the best schools to logical reasoning, trained to liberal ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... began to inspire confidence among the people. Most of the great men in the realm, intimidated by the threats or allured by the promises of Krumpen, had sworn allegiance to the king of Denmark. But the chief castles were still held by the patriots, and throughout the land there was a strong undercurrent of feeling against the Danes. In most parts the people were only waiting to see which way the wind was going to blow, and for the time being it seemed likely to blow in favor of the Swedes. The regent's widow used every effort to rouse the people from their lethargy, ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... talk reached her which was puzzling. When she strove to follow it up, her acquaintances adroitly changed the subject. She was baffled on every side. The three local newspapers upheld the court. She read them carefully, and was more at sea than ever. There was a disturbing undercurrent of alarm and unrest that caused her to feel insecure, as though standing on ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... novelty that the hostesses of Red Gap thereafter slavishly copied, and with the advent of the coffee ensued a noticeable relaxation. People began to visit one another's tables and there was a blithe undercurrent of praise for my efforts to smarten ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... superficial archness which did not half cover an undercurrent of reproach, 'do you know, I think you might have told me voluntarily about that past—of kisses and betrothing—without giving me so much uneasiness and trouble. Was that the tomb you alluded to as having sat ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... perilous night trip down the flooded river—not to rescue a "poor family," but to call on that comica—that "chorus girl"—as dona Bernarda called Leonora in a furious burst of scorn. Stormy scenes occurred that were to leave a strong undercurrent of bitterness and fear in Rafael's character. Dona Bernarda's harshness of disposition broke the young man's spirit, making him realize with what good reason he had always feared his mother. That uncompromising ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... flow of blood had stopped, for he felt the encrustation of it beginning on his cheeks. There was a tremendous noise all around him, and he traced this to the swaying of tree-tops in the gale. But there was an undercurrent of deeper sound—water surely, water churning among rocks. It was a stream—the Garple of course—and then he remembered where he ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... prosperity of the present and still greater promise for the future Alan sensed the undercurrent of unrest and suspicion in Nome. After waiting and hoping through another long winter, with their best men fighting for Alaska's salvation at Washington, word was traveling from mouth to mouth, from settlement to settlement, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... misfortunes were met by a sombre but unalterable determination to carry the war to a successful conclusion and to spare no sacrifices which could lead to that end. Amid the humiliation of our reverses there was a certain undercurrent of satisfaction that the deeds of our foemen should at least have made the contention that the strong was wantonly attacking the weak an absurd one. Under the stimulus of defeat the opposition to the war sensibly decreased. It had become too absurd even for the most unreasonable platform ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and his voice grew more intense, as if behind it there was an undercurrent of broken sobs, "Elsa, what is the matter? You are not going to turn your back on me, are you? Look at me, Elsa! look at me! You wouldn't do it, would you . . . you wouldn't do it? . . . The Lord forgive me, but I love you, Elsa . . . I love you fit ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as a section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like one compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all sides of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life went on that did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns, inhabited only by farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was being developed. Men worked hard but were much in the open air and had time to think. Their ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... many comic songs there is ever in them something of the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to furnish ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... guilt is mine. I'll come to you and confess," Jane replied, lightly; but she felt the undercurrent of her words. ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... a fight of men-at-arms in the Middle Ages,—derived from the graphic description of Froissart, in whose narrative there always runs an undercurrent of sly humor when portraying the military extravagances of the age. And it is impossible to avoid the contagion; for who can picture in any more serious style a hurly-burly of huge, iron-clad, suffocating, perspiring warriors, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... give a swift, unqualified assent to my own question. A "good man" Dicky certainly was, and I was in the "shelter of his love" at present. But "safe" with Dicky I was afraid I could never be. Mingled always with my love for him, my trust in him, was a tiny undercurrent of uncertainty as to the stability of my ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... danger which must arise on the accession of James. He had been active amongst those who were firmly determined to struggle against the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism in England, but he had lent himself to no underhand plots against the King, and, although conscious that there existed an undercurrent of intrigue in favour of the Duke of Monmouth, neither he nor those with whom he was associated had expected Monmouth's landing. It was natural, perhaps, that men like Wildman and Danvers should believe that such ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... sometimes seemed desperate. I realized how everything depended on God's touch. And without any planning a habit of continual praying formed itself. I could be engaged in conversation, thinking intently into something needing great care, and yet there was an undercurrent of prayer constantly. I shall never cease to be grateful for that trying experience, because in it this new habit of a praying ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... room. 'I am in it too,' she plainly said, curling herself up on the chair Daddy had just vacated, but resigning herself placidly enough to his scanty lap when he came back again and began to read. Her deep purring, while he stroked her absent-mindedly, became an undercurrent in the sound of his voice, then presently ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... the hearts of men, during that hot weather of '57. Men waited for the threatened wrath to come and writhed and held their tongues. And while they waited in sullen Asiatic patience, through the restless silence and the smell—the suffocating, spice-fed, filth-begotten smell of India—there ran an undercurrent of even deeper mystery than India had ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... didn't disturb you," a small voice was chirping; and innocent and conventional as the remark surely was, Jimmy was certain of an undercurrent of mischief in it. He glanced up to protest, but two baby-blue eyes fixed upon him in apparent wonderment, made him certain that anything he could say would seem rude or ridiculous; so, as usual when in a plight, he looked to Alfred ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... upon his life-work as "a writer of books." He translated Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," for which he received L180. I do not see the transcendent excellence of this novel, except in its original and forcible criticism, and its undercurrent of philosophy; but it is nevertheless famous. These two works gave Carlyle some literary reputation among scholars, but ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... lovely, lovely! No girl could have been quite unmoved to feel that all those soft lights were glowing in her honour, those masses of flowers blooming, all that warmth and perfume of elegance and luxury wafted as incense to her nostrils. And the undercurrent of suppressed excitement, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... slowly over with the boy and laid a hand on Cassy's shoulder, for there was an undercurrent to the conversation which boded no good. The very first words uttered had plunged Abel Baragar and his son's wife into the midst of the difficulty which she had hoped might, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... or rank of the two bents of mind there has ever been, and probably forever will be, great difference of opinion. Even in this intensely "practical" age there is an undercurrent of feeling that the narrowly "practical" individual is not the final ideal, and the innermost conviction of many is the same as that of the poet who declares that "a dreamer lives forever, but a thinker dies in ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... very naive, fatuous quality to this strange ruler. Or at least, Don and I thought so now. As the details of his plot against our Earth world unfolded to us, what we could do to circumvent him ran like an undercurrent across the background of our consciousness. He knew nothing, or almost nothing of our Earth weapons. What conditions would govern this unprecedented warfare into which he was plunging—of all that he ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... had seen much of men and women and crystallized her experiences into sparkling little sentences and epigrams which made Frances feel as if she were listening to one of the witty people in clever books. But under all her sparkling wit there was a strongly felt undercurrent of true womanly sympathy and kind-heartedness which won affection as speedily as her brilliance won admiration. Frances listened and laughed and enjoyed. Once she found time to think that she would have missed a great deal if she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... shops speedily sold out the stores on their shelves. The Germans at first paid in cash for everything ordered, and preserved an attitude of nonaggression toward the citizens. But subconsciously there ran an undercurrent of dread insecurity. At the outset a German officer was said to have been struck by a sniper's bullet. Somewhat conspicuously the wounded officer was borne on a litter through the streets, followed by the dead body of his assailant. Very promptly a news curtain ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... help you." Kate was trembling, but she kept talking gayly. She was praying that nothing very serious would happen. There was an undercurrent of sombreness in the ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... pathetic scenes, and deepening their pathos. For in his hands tragedy and comedy are not made up of different elements, but of the same elements standing in different places and relations: what is background in the one becomes foreground in the other; what is an undercurrent in the one becomes an uppercurrent in the other; the effect of the whole depending almost, perhaps altogether, as much on what is not directly seen as on what is. So that with him the pitiful and the ludicrous, the sublime and the droll, are ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... happiness lies through a religious discipline of the feelings, and protest that death is not to be feared but welcomed—as the passage from a troublous existence to everlasting peace. In most of the poetry of the time, religion, if at all noticeable, is a mere undercurrent; but whenever it rises to the surface, it reflects ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the blood electrified them both, and revealed the burning undercurrent running between them from the hearts of each. The light that showed how near they were to one another was kindled at the barrier dividing them. It remained as good as a secret, unchallenged until they ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... three full weeks or a month. Thus to imprisonment was added the gall and wormwood of total dependence upon others; the unthinkable prospect of parting with Paul, with the Border itself—with everything that had hitherto made life worth living; and, worse than all, the undercurrent of striving to ignore that veiled danger, which he refused to name, even in his thoughts, and which lay like a millstone upon ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... there was an undercurrent of criticism against the dispersion of British forces and dissipation of British energy, and the briefest history of it cannot avoid a certain amount of discursiveness. The reason, if not the justification, is the same in both cases; for happily or unhappily the British Empire is scattered all ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... tendencies, a fact which gave his mind a moralistic rather than a truly religious and Scriptural bent. Even during the early years of the Reformation when he was carried away with admiration for Luther and his work, the humanistic undercurrent did not disappear altogether. January 22, 1525, he wrote to Camerarius: "Ego mihi conscius sum, non ullam ob causam unquam tetheologekenai, nisi at mores meos emendarem. I am conscious of the fact that I have never ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... delight in every entertainment. He went everywhere, where he felt sure of seeing her, and could he have removed Teddy Mahr from the obviously reserved place at Dorothy's side, he could have enjoyed those moments without the undercurrent of his troubled fears. That Mahr was rebelliously angry at the situation was evident. Gard had seen the look in his eyes on more than one occasion, and it boded evil to someone. What had he meant when he spoke of his son's probable absence of a year or more ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... listen. The poor soul was inefficient, and he knew it: beneath all her flow of speech ran an undercurrent of wrath against the new learning and all its works. Poverty—sheer terror of a dwindling cupboard and the workhouse to follow—drove her to plead with that which she hated worse than the plague. He heard, and ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the train, through all the other contending thoughts in Mrs. Lidcote's mind there ran the warm undercurrent of what Franklin Ide had ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... pieces that held together from some unknown cause. Presently they were carried down toward a large berg that seemed to be aground, for the loose ice was passing it swiftly. This was not the case, however. An undercurrent, far down in the depths of the sea, was acting on this berg, and preventing it from travelling with the ice that floated with the stream at the surface. In its passing, the mass of ice that held them struck one of the projecting ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... silence the knight un-helms, and, sticking the spear into the ground, kneels before it, and remains lost in devotional contemplation. The "Spear" and "Grail" motives mingle together in the full tide of orchestral sounds carrying on the emotional undercurrent of the drama. The knight is soon recognized by both as the ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... he had hitherto written. It talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words which "a certain poet sang" ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Act of this year, and numerous prosecutions bore witness to the continued prevalence of sedition, the province has been free from the murderous outrages and dacoities which have been so lamentable a feature of the unrest in Bengal and in the Deccan. None the less there is still a very strong undercurrent of anti-British feeling. It has partly been fostered in the large cities by Bengalee immigrants who have come into the Punjab in considerable numbers, and thanks to their higher education have acquired great influence at the Bar ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. This brooding captain, Ahab (for Melville also broods, though with characteristic difference), and his ivory leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew of all races and temperaments—the civilized, the barbarous, and the savage—in ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Hawaii, has an extreme beauty altogether its own, which wins one's love, though it does not startle one into admiration like that of the Hawaiian gulches. Is it because that, though the magic of novelty is over it, there is a perpetual undercurrent of home resemblance? The dash of its musical waters might be in Cumberland; its swelling uplands, with their clumps of trees, might be in Kent; and then again, steep, broken, wooded ridges, with glades of grass, suggest the Val Moutiers; and ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... would do it?" she inquired, an undercurrent of wonder in her question, some recollection of ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... of the United States Secret Service, had come over from Liverpool via Dover on a blind quest after an elusive spy. There had been a sort of undercurrent of rumor, with many extravagant trappings, that a mysterious agent of the Kaiser was on his way to Europe with secrets of a most important character. Some stories had it that he was intimately related ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... his play of wit and humor, there was an undercurrent of agony. So great were his kindness, gentleness, tenderness of heart, that he could not live in this cruel world, especially in the period when the times were so much out of joint, without being a man of sorrows. The present ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... the same trait of character, he shewed in an address to medical students at a distribution of prizes. After congratulating the victors he confessed to "an undercurrent of sympathy for those who have not been successful, for those valiant knights who have been overthrown in their tourney, and have not made their appearance in public." After recounting an early failure of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... themselves have been defrauded and despoiled. They speak of these things only among themselves, and not openly; but those who have been in the country, and have gained their confidence, know that there is a strong undercurrent of feeling against Scotland and Scotsmen.... They conceive that they have a claim even as things are, to dwell on the land, and that a proprietor has no right to remove them from his estate." I was ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... followed this good beginning. Years not untouched by trouble and trials, but with an undercurrent of good. Barmettle never became a congenial home, but Jacinth as she grew older lost her extreme dislike to it, in the happiness of being all together, and knowing that not only was her father satisfied with his work, but that many opportunities for helping others were open to herself and Frances, ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
