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More "Vacillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in her place would do the like. The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy; and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation of Jesus as "God manifest ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... in irresolute perplexity: "What do you say?" urged Laramie. Vacillating, Stone let down the hammer to talk it over. It went up again almost instantly. There may in that last brief instant have flashed across his muddled consciousness a realization of his fatal mistake; perhaps he saw in the ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... eaten little. In the evening he returned to his cell in a state of exhaustion:[539] the same night, or the next day, he sent in his first submission,[540] which was forwarded on the instant to the queen. It was no sooner gone than he recalled it, and then vacillating again, he drew a second, in slightly altered words, which he signed and did not recall. There had been a struggle in which the weaker nature had prevailed, and the orthodox leaders made haste to improve their triumph. The first step being ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... imagination saw her conduct in its worst light: vacillating, feeble, deserting the man she loved at the moment she had led him to expect triumph; dismissing her faithful servant without his reward. Then, in a flash, came the other side of the picture—the mother of a grown-up son—a wounded soldier dependent on her love—seeking her personal happiness ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... Poor foolish monarch, vacillating, vain, Decaying victim of a race of kings, Swift Destiny shook out her purple wings And caught him in their shadow; not again Could furtive plotting smear another stain Across his tarnished honour. Smoulderings Of sacrificial fires burst their rings And blotted out in smoke his lost domain. ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... have its part in those later chapters of the life of the vacillating king which led up to the tragic finish at Whitehall. On 10 January, 1642, King Charles journeyed from London to Hampton and arrived here for the last time as a free king. The inevitable breaking-point had come, and hence he set forth to the early scenes of civil war. ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... lead a better life, to sin no more. What was the result of these periodical repentances? At the first temptation I forgot my remorse and good resolutions. I am weak and mean-spirited, and you are not firm enough to govern my vacillating nature. While my intentions are good, my actions are villainous. The disproportion between my extravagant desires, and the means of gratifying them, is too great for me to endure any longer. Who knows to what fearful lengths my unfortunate disposition may lead me? However, I will ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... combination of inconsistencies,—through a tricky and vacillating Ministry and a bitter, factional Parliament, greatly encouraged the idea of any ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... the same religion, nor the father who had led his child into distress by holding before her her sinful condition, could offer any genuine comfort. Miss Earle has summarized with briefness and force the results of such training: "A frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father sadly wrote, 'God has delivered ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... in any other leading pursuit of life, if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal to-morrow what it has enacted to-day. Fitful profits, however high, if threatened with a ruinous reduction by a vacillating policy on the part of Government, will scarcely tempt him to trust the money which he has acquired by a life of labor upon the uncertain adventure. I therefore, in the spirit of conciliation, and influenced by no other desire than to rescue the great interests ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... magnificent surplus for his private account; but at the last his heart failed him, and he made out another bill more modest in its extortions. He had brought them both along, though, one in each pocket, vacillating between them as he thought first of the Merrick millions and then of the righteous anger he might incur. By the time Uncle John came out to him, smiling and cordial, he had not thoroughly made up his mind ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... had had uncomfortable suspicions on that head himself, I imagined; but such was his inexperience, and such were the lady's powers of attraction, and her skill in bringing them to bear upon his young imagination, that they had not disturbed him long; and I believe the only effectual causes of the vacillating indecision that had preserved him hitherto from making an actual declaration of love, was the consideration of her connections, and especially of her mother, whom he could not abide. Had they lived at a distance, he might have surmounted the objection, but within two ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... who condemned the vacillating conduct of his allies, had already passed from Africa into Sicily, where he spent the following winter. In the early part of the year 1271, he set sail for Acre, where he landed at the head of only one thousand men; but so high was his reputation among the Latins of Palestine, that ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the poet to set our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the Duck-billed Platypus A sad example sets for us. From him we learn how indecision Of character provokes derision. This vacillating beast, you see, Could not decide which he would be— Fish, flesh or fowl—and chose all three. The scientists were sorely vexed, To classify him so perplexed Their brains that they with rage at bay Called ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... policy of reconstruction in the South as weak and vacillating—a civil and military failure. As the army advances, the South should be held as conquered soil, its civilization torn up by the roots, the property of the Southern white people confiscated and given to the negroes. The ballot must be taken from the whites and given ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... and eyed me for a moment as steadily as his vacillating glance would permit him, then he ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... Louis in a degree he had never before known. He also had dignity and a precision such as his parents and kinsmen had despaired of seeing in one so physically and mentally vacillating. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... fun and flirtation, society and sunshine; if all that does not realize 'a dream of fair women,' well, then, I know nothing about them," were the first words that greeted Lady Mary's ear. Lady Mary Bloxam was no weak vacillating woman—a woman, on the contrary, wont to carry her point, and who contrived to have her own way, perhaps, rather more than most people; but she saw at once that it would be hopeless to stem the tide upon this occasion. With all her guests on a lovely ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... these opinions with great indignation; and when he completed the last arrangement for the division, by carrying with his own hands a trout of a large size, and placing it on four different piles in succession, as his vacillating ideas of justice required, gave ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... was he right in abandoning Stafford? should he also have sacrificed wife, faith, and crown? If yes, then was he wholly in the wrong; if no, he was partly—for once at least—in the right. Vices, other than duplicity, he had none, as we use the word. He was vague, vacillating, obstinate, unable to lead or to be led; superstitious, heedful of omens; unsympathetic and reserved where he did not love; intolerant of opposition to his will. But he was a good husband, a good father, a good churchman—no man so good ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... political interest the small intelligent class acquiesce in the autocracy. The autocracy imposes force on the people to crush out their inherited mores, and to force on them western institutions. The policy is, moreover, vacillating. At one time the party which favored westernizing has prevailed at court; at another time the old Russian or pan-Slavic party. There is internal discord and repression. The ultimate result of such an attempt to control mores by force is an interesting ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that his eyes filled with tears at this caress. Then she stood for a moment looking at the sleeping Madame Babette, and stooped down and softly kissed her on the forehead. Pierre dreaded lest his mother should awake (for by this time the wayward, vacillating boy must have been quite on Virginie's side), but the brandy she had drunk made her slumber heavily. Virginie went. Pierre's heart beat fast. He was sure his cousin would try to intercept her; but how, he could not imagine. He longed to run out and see ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a "damned vacillating state." The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far from that happy ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... better," she thought; and she astonished the family more and more by a stateliness utterly unlike herself. Mr. Stanhope sincerely regretted that he had not broken away, in spite of the others; but in order not to seem vacillating he resolved to stay till the following morning, even though he departed burdened with the thought that he had spoiled the day for one of the family. Things had now gone so far that leaving might only ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... out against him resolutely, I felt myself beginning to yield. When a man has once taken their fancy, what helplessly weak creatures women are! I saw through his vacillating weakness—and yet I trusted him, with both eyes open. My looking-glass is opposite to me while I write. It shows me a contemptible Helena. I lied, and said ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... a nation so that all that admits of precision shall not be smothered by that which is confused; so that what is exact shall not be obscured by what is vague, and so that its firm resolves shall not be shaken by vacillating and ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... another chair, and his right elbow on the table, was smoking a large cigar, while his companion was still eating. The dogs—half-a-dozen of various kinds were moving lazily in and out, taking attitudes of brief attention—gave a vacillating preference first to one gentleman, then to the other; being dogs in such good circumstances that they could play at hunger, and liked to be served with delicacies which they declined to put in their mouths; all except Fetch, the beautiful liver-colored water-spaniel, which sat with ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... that of reduction. There is formed a clear bead which, with a certain degree of saturation, is clear when cold, but appears milk-white when overcharged, and of an opal, enamel appearance, when heated intermittingly, or with a vacillating flame, that changes frequently from the oxidating to the reducing flame. Baryta and its compounds produce the same ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error. He resembles a child destitute of experience, full of ideal notions: a dangerous leaven mixes itself with all his knowledge: it is of necessity obscure, it is vacillating and false:—He takes the tone of his ideas on the authority of others, who are themselves in error, or else have an interest in deceiving him. To remove this Cimmerian darkness, these barriers to the improvement of his condition; ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... that they were not (like the letters of Pliny, and Seneca, and Madame de Svign) written to be published. We see in them Cicero as he was. We behold him in his strength and in his weakness—the bold advocate, and yet timid and vacillating statesman, the fond husband, the affectionate father, the kind ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... act in whatever way may be necessary, You had better go forth, and if anything occurs, give notice to the proper authorities. We have not now such a lord mayor as we had during the season of the plague. The firm and courageous Sir John Lawrence is but ill succeeded by the weak and vacillating Sir Thomas Bludworth. Still, the latter may be equal to this emergency, and if anything happens, you ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad work of nature, mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleams of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smouldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Charles Fleetwood was son-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, and for a time Lord-Deputy of Ireland. He was mainly instrumental in the resignation of Richard Cromwell, but so weak and vacillating that he lost favour with all parties. His name was excepted from the general amnesty, and it was only with great difficulty that, owing to the influence of Lord Litchfield, he escaped with his life. He died in obscurity at ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... interminable bickerings. There was constant quarreling between the factions within the English church, and between the Protestants and the Catholics, complicated by the discontent of the people and at times the nobles because of the autocratic, vacillating policy of the King. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... to be done? There was no train back to London for four hours. He dare not telegraph, and if he did, could he trust to his strange patron's wise conduct under the first shock of this news to his present vacillating purpose? He could ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thick underlips, hanging in sensual inertia; their eyes, calm as those of cattle, reflecting in their tranquil light indifference for everything that did not directly concern their own well-being. The Austrians, nervous, restless, vacillating with the fever of insanity, riding on theatrical chargers, in dark landscapes, bounded by the snowy crests of the Guadarrama, as sad, cold and crystallized as the soul of the nation; the Bourbons, peaceful, adipose, resting—surfeited—on their huge calves, without any other thought ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... when the feeble, vacillating monarch and his imperious consort were dragged back—a pair of humiliated prisoners— to the capital from which they had tried ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... came slowly to a recognition of Lincoln's true quality. Motley, watching events from Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and associate upon the North American Review, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the editors of the North American showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in yielding to the spell of a new political ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... were comparatively small. It was gained by the defeat of Pompey's cavalry by a fourth line of the best soldiers of Caesar, which was kept in reserve. Pompey, on the defeat of his cavalry, upon whom he had based his hopes, lost heart and fled. He fled to the sea,—uncertain, vacillating, and discouraged,—and sailed for Egypt, relying on the friendship of the young king; but was murdered treacherously before he set foot upon the land. His fate was most tragical. His fall ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... his personal character. It had at first been liberal and just; it became arbitrary and even treacherous. His personal timidity made him at once harsh and vacillating. The heads of the great families, whom he had invited to a banquet, were seized and condemned to death on a charge of conspiracy. But a sudden terror of the possible consequences of his action caused him to relent, and he released ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... large elderly man, dressed like a farmer, with an exaggerated straw hat shading a face that gripped my attention at once, was looking down at me. It was the face of a born commander; it struck me that I should like to have it cast in bronze to look at whenever a vacillating mood ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... in regions that were directly under the eye of Europe. Isolated, insecure, and eternally suspicious of Germany, she could not afford to be drawn into European quarrels. This is in a large degree the explanation of her vacillating action in ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... frontiersman was always ready for a fight, and just now he especially wanted a fight with England. He resented the insults that his country had suffered at the hands of the English authorities and had little patience with the vacillating policy so long pursued by Congress and the Madison Administration. Other grievances came closer home. For two years the West had been disturbed by Indian wars and intrigues for which the English officers ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... noblest born aristocrat; while the man who had squandered away his patrimony, sought to restore himself from his fallen position in society, by assuming principles of patriotism which in his heart he despised. Moreover, the conduct of their rulers, which had been too frequently vacillating and manifestly corrupt, taught the great body of the people to look upon them with suspicion and distrust. Talk they as loud as they might of honesty of intention, of unimpeachable integrity, and of pure patriotism, the people nevertheless would not now believe them. Hence, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... recent times. In the Illyrian peninsula, and on the banks of the Danube, the country people, still feeling the influence of Roman civilization, celebrated feasts of flowers in spring and summer, under the name of rousalia. In the sixth century, when the Slavs were vacillating between the influence of the past and the present, the celebration of the Pentecost was mixed up with that of the half-pagan, half-barbarous rousalia. Southern Russians believe in supernatural female beings, called Rusalky, who bring prosperity to the fields ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... glass, the toast was, "Success to grey hairs, but bad luck to White-locks!" On the whole, the Rev. E. Neale's account seems to be quite impartial; and most persons, after reading the evidence of the general's extremely vacillating conduct, will be inclined to agree with him in awarding this unfortunate officer the title of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice, the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a prison ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Francis Bernard was hardly a faithful representative of the proud imperial power for which he acted. He was a bad Governor, but he was not so bad as the cause he was obliged to uphold. He was arbitrary, but he was not so arbitrary as his instructions. He was vacillating, but he was not so vacillating as the Ministers. When he gave the conciliatory reply to the June town-meeting, it was judged that he lowered the national standard, and it seriously damaged him at Court; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... designing, even a little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad sketch made by nature and mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleam of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smoldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... grew jealous, and, being a high-spirited young man, released Lady Emily from her engagement. I was mad with love; and this conduct, honorable and manly as it was in him, occasioned an explanation between me and Lady Emily, in which, weak and vacillating as I was, in the frenzy of the moment I disclosed, avowed my passion, and—but why proceed? We loved each other, not 'wisely, but too well.' My brother sought and obtained a foreign lucrative appointment, and left the country ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... which will not be conquered. When he believed himself to be acting rightly, he overcame all obstacles. I have seen Jack, when doubtful whether what he was about to do were right or wrong, as timid and vacillating as a little girl; and I honour ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... found that the Ohio black walnut is prone to hybridize with butternut trees in its vicinity and others have told me of its hybridizing with English walnut trees near it, which shows it to be almost as vacillating in character as our Japanese walnuts or heartnuts. Ohio black walnuts, when planted, usually produce vigorous stocks, many of which show hybridity of some sort. If one examines the nuts of the Ohio and ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... her blustering ministers, whom he regarded as just as likely to serve Philip as the Tudor Queen if it came to a matter of deciding between Popery and Protestantism. He received their instructions in a courtly way, but there are striking evidences that he was ever on the watch for their vacillating pranks, and he always dashed out of port as soon as he had received the usual hesitating permission. Once out of reach, he brushed aside imperial instructions if they stood in the way of his own definite plan of serving ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... to the peace and quiet of the city. The leading men of the convention—King, Cutler, Hahn, and others —have been political agitators, and are bad men. I regret to say that the course of Governor Wells has been vacillating, and that during the late trouble he has shown very little ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... its currents flow strong and free, muscle, bone and brain grow in symmetry and power, and there is cunning to devise and the strong right arm to execute. But if it be thin and poor, and its circulation feeble and uncertain, the will flags, the mind is weak and vacillating, the muscles grow puny, and the man becomes an unresisting prey to disease and circumstance. If it escape through a wound, strength ebbs with it, until at length life itself flows out with the unchecked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... the wing, and left London about the same time. The parting with Lady Holberton was melancholy; she was much depressed, and the physicians had recommended the waters of Wiesbaden. Mr. T—— was also preparing for an excursion to Germany; and he was suspected of vacillating in his Butlerite views, brought over by Lady Holberton's tears ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... temporarily occupying) and concentrate on matters in hand. What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so? But I knew in my heart that the matter was already decided. I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street, and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the papers. But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had me in its grip. Annoyed, and with a sense of chagrin, I hurried to ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... written to you before in: but my Letter must wait till I return to Woodbridge, where your Address is on record. I have thought several times of writing to you since this Year began; but I have been in a muddle—leaving my old Markethill Lodgings, and vacillating between my own rather lonely Chateau, and this Place, where some Nieces are. I had wished to tell you what I know of our dear Donne: who Mowbray says gets on still. I suppose he will never be so strong again. Laurence wrote me that he had met him in the Streets, looking thinner ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... century by Christianity or Infidelity. The irresolution of Robespierre lost to us the victory of the first passage of arms, equally as decisive as Lafayette in 1830, and Lamartine in 1848, being Liberals, lost in each case the social Republic by their vacillating policy. The true Freethinkers of that age were the Girondists. With their heroic death, the last barrier to despotism disappeared; the Consulate became the only logical path for gilded chains and empire. With the ostracism ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... precipices, He might possibly escape them: For the fate the most fastidious, For the impulse the most powerful. Even the planets most malicious Only make free will incline, But can force not human wishes. And thus 'twist these different causes Vacillating and unfixed, I a remedy have thought of Which will with new wonder fill you. I to-morrow morning purpose, Without letting it be hinted That he is my son, and therefore Your true King, at once to fix him As King Sigismund (for the name Still he ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... has reached the shady side of threescore years and ten must remember many Lord-Lieutenants—the pompously visible symbols of much vacillating misdirection. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... talking with him, he frequently changes his weight from one foot to the other. He is suggesting that he has little confidence in his own judgment, that he is not sure of his own thoughts. Take the lead strongly with such a man. Do his thinking for him. It is up to you to bring his vacillating mind to definite conclusions, following your lead. First make it clear to him that your proposal is really to his interest. Then proceed with a manner of absolute assurance, as if you did not question his doing what you wish. With your skillful salesmanship ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... was vacillating with more of weakness than would have been expected from a man who had generally been so firm in the affairs of his life. He had been quite clear about George Hotspur, when those inquiries of his were first made, ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... those cherished plums in the leech basin, Bob being within arm's length of them; for another, Master Cheese liked his ease better than walking. He cast some imploring glances at Jan, but they produced no effect, so he had to get his hat. Vacillating between the toll that might be taken of the plums if he left them, and the damage to his hair if he took them, he finally decided on the latter course. Emptying the plums into his hat, he put it on his head. Jan was looking over what ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... strength and temper of his weapons. For a critical antagonist, Edwards is admirable, his use of language being far from precise and consistent, and his definitions and statements, through his extreme wariness, being vague and vacillating enough to allow abundant material for comment. Of these advantages Mr. Hazard knows how to avail himself, and shows not a little acuteness in exposing the untenable positions and the inconsequent reasoning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... two years since opinion had opened the breaches against the monarchy, yet it had already accomplished immense results. The weak and vacillating spirit of the government had convoked the Assembly of Notables, whilst public spirit had placed its grasp on power and convoked the States General. The States General being established, the nation had ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Shaw, "has discovered the new will—the will that turns inward upon the brain instead of passing out through hand or tongue. Wilson has this new will; the White House corroborates the results of the laboratory. To Roosevelt, Wilson seems weak and vacillating; but that is because T. R. knows nothing about the new will. T. R. has a primitive mind, but one of the most advanced type. In the T. R. brain, so to speak, will means set teeth, clenched ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... brought the Prussian armies to the frontier; a majority of the clergy had identified themselves with the reaction, were breaking down the revolution among the people, and were producing a reversionary tendency to absolutism. The king was vacillating and timid, but the queen had all the spirit and courage of her mother, Maria Theresa. It is very evident from Madame Roland's memoirs and letters, that these two women felt that they were in actual ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... seemed to himself, that he was able by an effort of attention to fix the vision for a longer and a longer time, and when they waxed faint and nearly vanished, he had the power of recalling them into light and substance, until at last their vacillating indistinctness became less and less, and they assumed a permanent ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... which a line actually waited for the shock of another line charging with the bayonets. Even then the Russians gave way before the moral and not before the physical impulse. They were already disconcerted, wavering, worried, hesitant, vacillating, when the blow fell. They waited long enough to receive bayonet thrusts, even blows with the rifle (in the back, as at ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... and exiled to San Blas, to be eventually delivered to the Mexican authorities. There they were held in prison for some months, but being at last released through the efforts of an American lawyer, most of them returned to California rather better off than before their arrest. It is typical of the vacillating Californian policy of the day that, on their return, Graham and his riflemen were at once made use of by one of the revolutionary parties as a reinforcement ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... insisted that a State had no right to secede, but that the United States had no power to coerce a State which should secede. A majority of his cabinet were southern men, three of them zealous secessionists. His most intimate friends in Congress were southerners. These surrounded the vacillating Chief Magistrate, and paralyzed what little energy was in him, meanwhile taking advantage of his inaction to launch the Confederacy. Now and then, spurred on by loyal old General Scott and by the Union members of his cabinet, the President tried to ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... after a three months' reign, xxii. 10-12, was succeeded by the rapacious Jehoiakim (608-597), who cared nothing for the warning words of Jeremiah (xxxvi.), and his successor Jehoiachin, who was exiled to Babylon after a three months' reign, was followed by the weak and vacillating Zedekiah, who reigned from 597 to 586, when Jerusalem was taken and the monarchy perished. The priests and prophets were no more faithful to their high office than the kings. The prophets were superficial men who ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... of Mademoiselle de Roannez was not a happy one. After vacillating for some time between the cloister and the world—obeying the guidance of Pascal, either directly or through Madame Périer, and even passing through her novitiate at Port Royal with “extraordinary fervour”—she was persuaded to marry and become the Duchesse de la Feuillade. But ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... and devotedly attached. The effect of this blow he never thoroughly got over, but gradually became in every respect an altered man. From one of unflinching energy and firm determination, he degenerated into a desponding, weak, and vacillating imbecile; and lingered on in a mental aberration for some two years, when he died. During the period of his distraction it is not surprising that his practice rapidly declined, and ultimately became completely destroyed; hence, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... punished, but would be neither conciliated nor tamed into submission. To make matters worse, Blois was given up, and Pontoise was substituted for it! This latter town being close to Paris, the chastisement became ridiculous, showed the vacillating weakness of the Regent, and encouraged the Parliament to laugh at him. One thing was, however, well done. The resolution taken to banish the Parliament was kept so secret that that assembly had not the slightest knowledge ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... always call on me. I will always come. Don't be afraid. And when you are unhappy, write to me. I shall understand. You are not hard, you are not heartless. You are tender and sensitive. Only your armor is made of flint. You are not changeable and vacillating. They didn't know. You are brave and conscientious." With some such words as these last did I write to Ruth before I slept that night. I believed in her as I never had before. I ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... undecided, vacillating. Then he shuddered, wheeled his horse, and sent him scampering over the ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... who had fought heroically with their mouths inveighing with bitter invective against the weak and vacillating policy of the President in temporizing with the South were busy packing their goods and chattels to fly at ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... responsible for most of the terrible excesses of the French Revolution, by insisting that troops should be called to restrain the Assembly, and that Necker should be banished. Louis showed the same vacillating spirit now that he had displayed in yielding to the Assembly, and assented. The noble officers had lately shown themselves untrustworthy, and the men in the ranks refused to obey when called to fight against the people. The baser social elements of the whole ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... very easy to understand." Hist then conveyed the ideas of Hetty, in the best manner she could, to the attentive Indians, who heard her words with some such surprise as an American of our own times would be apt to betray at a suggestion that the great modern but vacillating ruler of things human, public opinion, might be wrong. One or two of their number, however, having met with missionaries, said a few words in explanation, and then the group gave all its attention to the communications that were to follow. Before Hetty ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... gantlet of many dangers in their travel by night Northward. Her attempts to mollify and render her slaves contented were more than counterbalanced by the threats and severity of her son, who was too vacillating to adopt a fixed ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... glaze of continuous dissipation had once settled as if to stay, were not as she remembered them. Instead, they were bright and clear, and lay deep in their sockets. The lips, now beardless, were no longer thick and repulsive. She marveled. This was not the vacillating, whiskey-willed man she had known for so long; here was a determined character, swelling with force, fierce in the resources of a belated integrity of purpose. No longer the careless, handsome youth, nor the honorless man, but a power! ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... she married. It was, of course, a failure. Her vacillating nature was such that she could not be absolutely true to the man to whom she had given her life, and, after several bitter experiences, she had the horror of seeing him kill himself in front of her. There was a momentary spasm of grief, a ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... the charge of his relative, Madame de Bouthillier. Frontenac fell in love with her. Madame de Bouthillier opposed the match, and told La Grange that he might do better for his daughter than to marry her to a man who, say what he might, had but twenty thousand francs a year. La Grange was weak and vacillating: sometimes he listened to his prudent kinswoman, and sometimes to the eager suitor; treated him as a son-in-law, carried love messages from him to his daughter, and ended by refusing him her hand, and ordering her to renounce him on pain of being immured in a convent. Neither ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... vacillating creature is man before a pretty woman like Alice Johnson. Twenty-four hours ago, and the doctor would have scoffed at the idea that he should tarry longer than a week or two at the farthest in that dull by-place, where the people were only half civilized; but now the tables were turned as ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... do?" As he asked this question, he approached her and put his arm round her waist. This he did in momentary vacillating mercy,—not because of the charm of the thing to himself, but through his own inability not to give her some ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a man," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... accumulated; both Spaniards and Germans rioted on its treasures without restraint. They spared neither church nor palace, but defiled the most sacred places. The very ring was removed from the hand of Pope Julius as he lay within his tomb. Clement VII, the reigning Pope, was too feeble and vacillating to save himself, though it would have been quite possible. He was made a prisoner of war, for political motives inspired the Emperor ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... A vacillating gleam, thrown from the shop-window of a shoemaker, suddenly illuminated from the waist down the figure of the woman who was before the young man. Ah! surely, she alone had that swaying figure; she alone knew ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... no octaves to his vibration. A few nights before we were at the Play in which were allusions to the Bourbons, and couplets without end of the most fulsome, disgusting compliments to the Duc de Berri, &c. These (shame upon the trifling, vacillating, mutable crew!) were received with loud applause by the majority of the pit. I did observe, however, that in that pit did sit a frowning, solemn, silent nucleus, but a nucleus of this description can never be large; a ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... press, is a man of great influence. No person has more power than himself. He instructs tens of thousands, and leads them to virtue, to honor, to happiness. No man will have more to answer for than the conductor of a corrupt and vacillating press. ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... truth! What a melancholy mistake, moreover, to suppose that, could it be enjoyed in that perfection with which the imaginations of men love to cheat their judgments, it is the great good of life! One hour spent in humble veneration for the Being that gave it, in common with all of earth, its vacillating and uncertain existence, is of more account than ages passed in its service; and he who fancies that in worshipping liberty, he answers the great end of his existence, hugs a delusion quite as weak, and infinitely more dangerous, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Bearing all down in thy precipitancy— And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows And mine is living blood: thou dost His will, The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know, Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall Linger with vacillating obedience, Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to— Since the good mother holds me still a child! Good mother is bad mother unto me! A worse were better; yet no worse would I. Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... the young man, certainly, for he was strong and industrious, while the abbe was aged and weak; besides, his mind was too vacillating to allow him to carry out ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... we especially notice Cranmer, remarkable for the candor and the coolness of perception with which the character of its benevolent and gifted, but inconsistent and vacillating subject, is discussed:—Cromwell, which gives a completer, more authentic, and less prejudiced account of the eventful life of the great Puritan leader than is to be found in any other publication known to us:—Crusades, a complete picture in little of those great fitful blazes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Genoa, Venice, and Rome, in stirring up the great Italian confederacy, which eventually broke the power of King Charles; and his representations had tended, as much as any other cause, to alarm the jealousy of Sforza, to fix the vacillating politics of Alexander, and to quicken the cautious and dilatory movements of Venice. He had shown equal vigor in action; and contributed mainly to the success of the war by his operations on the side of Roussillon, and still more in Calabria. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... next season. This done, they were to send out a small independent war party against the enemy. Their final determination left us in some embarrassment. Should we go to La Bonte's Camp, it was not impossible that the other villages would prove as vacillating and indecisive as The Whirlwinds, and that no assembly whatever would take place. Our old companion Reynal had conceived a liking for us, or rather for our biscuit and coffee, and for the occasional small presents which we made him. He was very anxious that we should ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... immediate ruler of nearly 130,000,000 semi-savages, his lightest word their supreme law, while the chiefs of the robber hordes of Central Asia acknowledge him their official head. Such tremendous power in the hands of a weak-minded, vacillating monarch like Nicholas II—descended from Catherine the Courtesan, and having in his veins the blood of cranks—may well cause western Europe to lie awake. Bonaparte declared that in a hundred years the continent would ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... thyself earnestly away from sin; for I tell you of a truth, by whatever temptation a man is assailed, if he turns not from it heartily, but stands in it vacillating, he has no wholehearted desire to leave his sins by God's will, and without doubt the evil spirit is close upon him, who may make him ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... counsels, if followed on the instant, might have shaken even the wise and patriot Bruce. Yet they were so devoted to their sovereign, they idolized him alike as a warrior and a man too deeply, to allow that to the weak and vacillating conduct of Edward they owed the preservation of their country. It was easy to perceive by the springy step, the flashing eye, the ringing, tone with which that magic name, the Bruce, was spoken, how deeply it was written on the heart; the joy it was to recall his deeds, and feel it was through ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... brother have passed to the other side, is to make the poem appeal to our emotions with an intensity which the beautiful lines alone could not effect. Ichabod we read once, but when we know the meaning of its spiritual name and remember that it is Whittier's indignant rebuke of Webster for his vacillating policy in the slavery agitation, we read it again with a renewed and more vivid interest. Many things, however, are so universal that one cares not whether they were written by a Hindoo or an American, whether they are full of personal experience or drawn with the fervor of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... place it was possible also to effect a junction by rail with General French. Thirdly, a victory gained in the centre of the disaffected districts would have been a feather in the cap of the General, for it must have drawn to him such waverers whose vacillating loyalty was daily growing dangerous. The melancholy reverse was, therefore, from many points of view to be regretted. Perhaps, however, it achieved one object. It forced those at home to realise the necessity for sending more than sprinklings of troops to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... ribald fool!" The words leaped from the lips of Ralph Bastin, in a tone of command that literally awed the interrupter. The effect, too, upon the hesitating, vacillating mass of people was, for the moment at least, to arouse their sympathy with Ralph, and a little ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... goodness did not invite imitation; she did not appear half as agreeable as the Faulkners. Caroline turned away from the recollection of her, was all night and all the morning distressed, undecided, and vacillating; then came Lady Julia's affection, her lover pressing his suit, she hardly knew what she had said, but she found her consent was assumed, both families were rejoicing in it, she found herself considered to be engaged, and she returned home bewildered at all that had passed, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... but he had forfeited her confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home. Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... appearance was grave and even noble, well becoming one who held an high office in the state; and it was not save after long and intimate conversation with him upon topics of pressing and personal interest, that a stranger could have discovered something vacillating and uncertain in his resolutions; an infirmity of purpose, arising from a cautious and timid disposition, which, as he was conscious of its internal influence on his mind, he was, from pride as well as policy, most anxious to conceal from others. He listened with great apparent composure ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... themselves in the hostile country till the end of the war, notwithstanding the inefficiency of their generals, the great reverses they sustained in the field, the skill and perseverance of the enemy they were contending with, and the weak and vacillating character of the cabinet ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... brilliant position. It is true, he was yet very young, being only about nineteen years of age, and by birth he was second to Clarence, Clarence being his older brother. But Clarence had been so wavering and vacillating, having changed sides so often in the great quarrels, that no confidence was placed in him now on either side. Richard, on the other hand, had steadily adhered to his brother Edward's cause. He had shared all his brother's reverses, ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there came to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had a good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness since the choice had been made had done much to render the first year in Chicago agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... disprove the high estimate that had been placed upon his military ability; but after studying the orders and dispatches of Johnston I am compelled to materially modify my views of that officer's qualifications as a soldier. My judgment now is that he was vacillating and undecided in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... ever the excuse of a weak, vacillating mind. Opportunities! Every life is full of them. Every lesson in school or college is an opportunity. Every examination is a chance in life. Every patient is an opportunity. Every newspaper article is an opportunity. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... excommunication and the scalping knife if they should return to their allegiance, and with starvation if they obeyed the commands of their heartless superiors at Quebec, they were girt about on all sides with pain and peril. Vacillating, unable to think boldly for themselves, they were doubtless much to blame, but their miseries were infinitely more than they deserved. The punishments that fell upon them fell upon the wrong shoulders. The English, who treated ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... downfall of Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only begins ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Government, they were absolutely terrified by this act of 'boycotting' (the slang word then current for such acts of abstention). Their counsels became wild and vacillating to the last degree: one hour they were for giving way for the present till they could hatch another plot; the next they all but sent an order for the arrest in the lump of all the workmen's committees; the next they were on the point of ordering their ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... night that ensued, when he descended into the pit, horrified at what he supposed he had done, at one moment ridden with remorse, at another raging against his own feebleness, his lack of courage, his wretched, vacillating spirit. But morning had come, and with it the knowledge that he had failed, and the baser assurance that he was not even remotely suspected. His own escape had been no less miraculous than that ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 1813. Its success was complete; two editions were speedily circulated, and the fame of the author was established. With the exception of the Eclectic Review, every periodical accorded its warmest approbation to the performance; and vacillating friends, who began to doubt the Shepherd's power of sustaining the character he had assumed as a poet and a man of letters, ceased to entertain their misgivings, and accorded the warmest tributes to his genius. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... what it be, Plato perceived an idea, immortal, eternal, indestructible, and incorruptible, which existed in the bosom of the Eternal, and of which all that comes under our observation is only the vacillating and troubled reflection, and which supports, animates, and for a time preserves everything that we can perceive. Hence, all philosophy consists in having some knowledge of these Ideas. How is it possible to attain such knowledge? By raising the mind from the particular to the ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... girl, your vacillating 'yes' has rendered me the impersonation of that oppressive sentiment, of which your beauty and excellence have become the mocking reality. Alas, alas! that bearded men,"—Tom's face was covered with hair—"Alas, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... refuse to have anything to do with it. At last it became evident to the government that, in the circumstances, the commission could not accomplish any good, and it was therefore abandoned. The Czar and his advisers were desperate and vacillating. One day they would adopt a conciliatory attitude toward the workers, and the next day follow it up with fresh ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... together more closely the king and his parliament. He believed that the royal difficulties would be removed if a policy were adopted with which the people could heartily sympathize, and if the king placed himself at the head of his parliament and led them on. But his advice was neglected by the vacillating and peace-loving monarch, his proffered proclamation was put aside, and a weak, featureless production substituted in its place. Nevertheless the new parliament seemed at first more responsive than might have been looked for. A double subsidy was granted, which was expressly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... planned to go into the hills late in the fall, visit Slingerland's old camp, and then try to locate the gold buried by Horn. For the present Larry meant to return to Benton, and Neale, though vacillating as to his own movements, decided to keep an eye on ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... "While Otis was fitful, vacillating and morbid, Samuel Adams was persistent, undeviating, and sanity itself. While Samuel Adams never abated by a hair his opposition to the British policy, James Otis, who at the outset had given the watch-word to the ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return. His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December, 1817, he had written from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... prove correct, as in that case we should be compelled to touch somewhere to renew our stock; and I felt that if in such a case I failed to secure the arrest of the whole party for piracy I should richly deserve to remain their tool, exposed to the countless vacillating and dangerous humours of a gang of ruffians who had deliberately thrown off every restraint ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... few people with torches began to travel up and down the ice, a lit circle travelling along with them over the snow. A gigantic moon rose, meanwhile, over the trees and the kirk on the promontory, among perturbed and vacillating clouds. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... In his writings he at first indicated this manner which gave so individual an impress to his virtuosity by the term tempo rubato: stolen, broken time—a measure at once supple, abrupt, and languid, vacillating like the flame under the breath which agitates it, like the corn in a field swayed by the soft pressure of a warm air, like the top of trees bent hither and thither by ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... keep abreast with the more perfect science of modern times; and, finally, the generals, men for the most part not above mediocrity, consumed by petty rivalries, some of them of an ignorance beyond all belief, and at their head the Emperor, an ailing, vacillating man, deceiving himself and everyone with whom he had dealings in that desperate venture on which they were embarking, into which they were all rushing blindfold, with no preparation worthy of the name, with the panic and confusion ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... boards from about his shoulders, and, following her, laid them against the wall at the side of the basement-steps, and sat down heavily beside her. He was a sickly-looking man, sandy-haired, with a depressed and shifty expression of face—not vicious, but weak and vacillating. Baubie seemed to have the upper hand altogether: every gesture showed it. She opened the paper that was wrapped about her fragment of rank yellow cheese, laid it down on the step between them, and then produced, in their order of precedence, the pie, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... which a Frenchman would have called fights, with the cobbler, though the conferences always ended by his producing his ration and supping and smoking there. He coaxed his cousin to show him the token, vacillating between hope of impossible news from a wife he had every reason to believe dead, and indignation at being made the sport of Owen's stubbornness. Learning in the Fur Company's office that Owen had received news from the old ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... It flooded Tracy's demoralized soul with waters of refreshment. These were the darlingest words the poor vacillating young apostate had ever heard—for they whitewashed his shame for him, and that is a good service to have when you can't get the best of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Our vacillating governor having at last consented to another chase after the rebels, under the leadership of a certain Spanish colonel, a body of volunteers—myself among the number—join the troops on the appointed day and march ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... remained silent, looking fixedly at each other. Now that they had said the things of greatest urgency, present interests became more absorbing. More immediate things, unspoken, seemed to well up in their timid and vacillating eyes, before escaping in the form of words. They did not dare to talk like lovers here. Every minute the cloud of witnesses seemed increasing around them. The woman with the dogs and the red wig was passing with greater frequency, shortening her turns through the square in order to ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was not sure of his own way? With all his knowledge of the literature and the literary history of the Elizabethan period, he seemed to lack the power of putting himself in sympathy with Shakespeare as he wrote. Hence the crudity and incongruity of his text, his vacillating opinions, and the weakness and ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... all you have to do is to remain quiet at the hospital." Mr Harding still made no reply, but looked meekly into his son-in-law's face. The archdeacon thought he knew his father-in-law, but he was mistaken; he thought that he had already talked over a vacillating man to resign his promise. "Come," said he, "promise Susan to give up this ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... matter. The experience of the American Army authorities should teach us a much-needed lesson. The American program to maintain the sexual health of the men went much further than any English proposal, straight and without sentiment to the main cause of the disease, in a way that should shame our vacillating methods. ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the king not only as crowned and by right, but by the approval and consent of the clergy and people of Scotland. A few months afterwards James, the Steward of Scotland, whose course had ever been vacillating, died, and his son Walter, a loyal Scotsman, succeeded him. He afterwards married the king's daughter Marjory, and became the founder of the royal ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... the other was connected with the French party through his brother-in-law, King Charles, and with the Burgundian party through his father-in-law, the Duke of Lorraine. No wonder the fealty of the townsfolk was somewhat vacillating; downtrodden by men-at-arms, forever taken and retaken, red caps and white caps alternately ran the danger of being cast into the river. The Burgundians set fire to the houses, pillaged the churches, chastised the most notable burgesses; then ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the hour was midnight; the theme was a bit of feminine gossip by wireless mythology. Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island. The lights of the great Garden were out; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in postures so strange that beside them the writhing figures ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... the Turkish retainers of the court mutinied, plundered the wazir's palace, and even opened negotiations with Moizz. Hoseyn, the nephew of the Ikshid, attempted to restore public order, but after three months of vacillating and unpopular government he returned to his own province in Palestine to make terms with the Karmatis. Famine, the result of the exceptionally low Nile of 967, added to the misery of the country; plague, as usual, followed in the steps of famine; over six hundred thousand people died ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... it without ample cause that he was restless and disturbed; within the last three days he had by his own instability of purpose, and vacillating tastes and temper brought himself down from as enviable a position as well can be imagined, to one ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... enemy with weapons equal to its own. The force of the impulse to dissolution is rendered equal to the will to oppose it; and being cumulative, subdues the will-power and triumphs at last. On the other hand, it may happen that an apparently weak and vacillating will-power residing in a weak and undeveloped physical frame, may be so reinforced by some unsatisfied desire—the Ichcha (wish)—as it is called by the Indian Occultists (for instance, a mother's heart-yearning to remain and support her ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... a smile at Patty, entirely unmoved by this criticism; for she knew that she was vacillating and sometimes undecided, as compared to Patty's quick-witted grasp of a ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same—that is the Chopin rubato." Elsewhere, "a tempo agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing, and vacillating as the fluctuating breath by which it is agitated." Chopin was more commonplace in his definition: "Supposing," he explained, "that a piece lasts a given number of minutes; it may take just so long to perform the whole, but ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... D'Aubigne, "the reformed church was recognised and established by the State—a triumph similar to that of Christianity when under Constantine the religion of the Crucified One ascended the throne of the Caesars." In spite of the vacillating policy of the King and Parliament, and their repeated attempts to impose the order of bishops on the Church, the reformation proceeded steadily, and a great advance was reached by the National Covenant ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... effected, Christianity should have drawn the obvious conclusion from its fundamental principle and acknowledged love, which united the hostile elements. Protestantism did so, half-heartedly. Luther's vacillating attitude towards sexuality is typical of this indecision. At heart he could not justify sexuality; he regarded it, in the same way as did the Fathers of the Church, as an evil with which one had to make terms. His sanction ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... again the old battle—the hardest conflict of all—the battle with vacillation. To contend with a stubborn will is a simple problem of force against force. But to contend with a weak and vacillating will is fighting ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... authorities. There they were held in prison for some months, but being at last released through the efforts of an American lawyer, most of them returned to California rather better off than before their arrest. It is typical of the vacillating Californian policy of the day that, on their return, Graham and his riflemen were at once made use of by one of the revolutionary parties as a ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... deeply moved by this outburst of anger and suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his feelings vacillating between doubt ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... description. He received in exchange a reinforcement of the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers of the Irish army. Avaux and De Rosen were both sent back to France by James; and thus, with but few officers, badly-equipped troops, and his own miserable and vacillating counsel, he commenced the war which ended so gloriously or so disastrously, according to the different opinions of the actors in the fatal drama. In July, 1690, some of James' party were defeated by the Williamites at Cavan, and several of his best officers ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... this time was vacillating with more of weakness than would have been expected from a man who had generally been so firm in the affairs of his life. He had been quite clear about George Hotspur, when those inquiries of his were first made, and when his mind had first accepted the notion ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... old battle—the hardest conflict of all—the battle with vacillation. To contend with a stubborn will is a simple problem of force against force. But to contend with a weak and vacillating will is ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... the end. He never committed himself to a position of the security of which he was not sure; and he carried this spirit of caution to such an extremity that many of the early years of his reign present a succession of timid and vacillating movements, that more nearly resemble the subterfuges of a coward than the crafty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... ANTONIO DE, a vacillating ecclesiastic, born in Dalmatia; was educated by the Jesuits; taught mathematics in Padua; wrote a treatise in which an explanation was for the first time given of the phenomenon of the rainbow; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... room, with a quiet submission to circumstances which became him admirably. Now, as always, it was impossible not to compare him advantageously with his vacillating brother. Oscar turned round at the window, apparently with the idea of following Nugent out. At the first step he checked himself. There was a last effort still left to make. Reverend Finch's "moral weight" had not been thrown ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... never to give over the struggle until success is attained, no matter how difficult may be the obstacles to be surmounted. Such an effort will rarely be unsuccessful. One of the greatest impediments to recovery from diseases of this class is the vacillating dispositions of nearly all patients suffering from disorders of this character. Make up your mind what course of treatment to pursue, then adhere to it rigidly until it has received a thorough trial. Do not despair ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Marduk-belusate, "a vacillating king, incapable of directing his own affairs," came out to meet him, but although repulsed and driven within the town, he defended his position with such spirit that Shalmaneser was at length obliged to draw ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... who has reached the shady side of threescore years and ten must remember many Lord-Lieutenants—the pompously visible symbols of much vacillating misdirection. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... few lines Dr. Kuyper draws a conventional picture of British policy with regard to the Boers, making it out to be ever greedy of power. The contrary is the truth. A vacillating and timid policy has been England's great mistake in South Africa; it is this very vacillation that has brought about the ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... the puppy to beg, right in sight of them on the grass. They think I'm an earless freak, maybe. She told him that dear Peggy was growing into such a strong, splendid woman; that she'd been talking to her, and she thought the child would be able to give up her weak, vacillating lover with hardly a pang, because she realized that he was unworthy of her; that Peg had said she couldn't marry a man she didn't admire—and wasn't that noble of her? Noble, your grandmother—to give up a perfect lady like Harry Goward, when she's got a real man up her sleeve! ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... Parliament would be punished, but would be neither conciliated nor tamed into submission. To make matters worse, Blois was given up, and Pontoise was substituted for it! This latter town being close to Paris, the chastisement became ridiculous, showed the vacillating weakness of the Regent, and encouraged the Parliament to laugh at him. One thing was, however, well done. The resolution taken to banish the Parliament was kept so secret that that assembly had not the slightest knowledge ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... seven millions. Is it probable that these capitalists will be as ready to venture their money in the state banks, as in one chartered by the general government? Would they even venture it again in a national bank, after we had shown so vacillating a policy? We establish a bank of that description in 1791—we put it down in 1811, as unconstitutional—we charter another, five years afterwards, 1816, and discontinue that in 1836. Assuredly, after this experience, they would prefer ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... and vacillating words and stammering tongue, our bravest men to-day say freedom to woman, what can we hope when the millions educated in despotism, ignorant of the philosophy of true government, religion and social life, shall be our judges and rulers? As you go down in the scale of manhood, the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... consumed by deep-rooted conviction that Sandy Morley owed him a great deal and that he was conferring a mighty honour upon the young man by accepting his hospitality. No doubt arose as to his right in sharing Sandy's home, but as time went on he did, as all weak and vacillating natures do, resent young Morley's strength of character, simplicity and capacity for winning to himself that which Lans felt belonged to him by inherent justice. It had been one thing to know that his Uncle Levi Markham had taken another young man and set him on his feet, but quite another ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... is lacking from this book, a quality which makes another story on the same theme, "Le Procurateur de Judee," one of the greatest short stories in any language. Mary's sins are quickly passed over and we come almost immediately to her conversion. Herod Antipas, with his "fan-shaped beard" and vacillating Pilate, quite comparable to a modern politician, are the most human and best-realized characters in a book which should have been greater than it is. "Mary Magdalen" is dedicated to ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the fate the most fastidious, For the impulse the most powerful. Even the planets most malicious Only make free will incline, But can force not human wishes. And thus 'twist these different causes Vacillating and unfixed, I a remedy have thought of Which will with new wonder fill you. I to-morrow morning purpose, Without letting it be hinted That he is my son, and therefore Your true King, at once to fix him As King Sigismund (for the name Still he bears that first was given ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... home, flakes of snow, the first of the season, were whirling through the gray dusk noiselessly, ceaselessly, always falling, yet never seeming to fall, rather to restlessly pervade the air with a vacillating alienation from all the laws of gravitation. Elusive fascinations of thought were liberated with the shining crystalline aerial pulsation; some mysterious attraction dwelt down long vistas amongst the bare trees; their fine fibrous grace of branch and twig was accented by the snow, ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... might understand this somewhat vacillating position on the whole to favor democracy, but only a few pages further on Kautsky explains his reasons for opposing the initiative and referendum, and we see that when the point of action arrives, his democratic ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... affairs. This is proper, when the husband allows it; and he ought to do so, when his wife is capable of managing these things; but when the inclinations of his Eve run perversely, when he is conscious that he has reason on his side, and she only folly, and yet he is vacillating and yielding, he is unmanly and inconsistent; he sacrifices future happiness to present peace. Every woman, it must be granted, is not a sensible one; and "there is nothing," as Lord Burleigh observed to his son, "more fulsome than a she foole." If Socrates had properly controlled his Xantippe before ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... vaguely conscious of an addition to the landscape in the shape of a man who was passing down the road with a pack on his back like the tramping "prospectors" she had often seen at Heavy Tree Hill. That memory apparently settled her vacillating mind; she determined she would NOT go to the dance. But as she was turning away from the window a second figure, a horseman, appeared in another direction by a cross-road, a shorter cut through her domain. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... fortunate for Elizabeth that of the two necessary figure-heads for any conspiracy, Mary and Norfolk, one was more than half-believed even by her own party to be stained by the grossest crimes, while the other was nerveless and vacillating. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... maintain Malietoa Laupepa by arms, and had declared finally against Mataafa. Right or wrong, it was at least a decision, and therefore welcome. It may not be best—it was something. No honest friend to Samoa can pretend anything but relief that the three Powers should at last break their vacillating silence. It is of a piece with their whole policy in the islands that they should have hung in stays for upwards of two years—of a piece with their almost uniform ill-fortune that, eight days before their purpose was declared, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return. His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December, 1817, he had written from ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... required it of him. It is a plot of all the Swedish wellwishers, all the anti-imperialists of this court, believe me. They wish to place the Electoral Prince at their head, and hope by this means to bring it about that the weak and vacillating Elector shall secede from the Emperor and ally himself with the Swedes. They teased and goaded the Elector, until he even sent his Chamberlain von Schlieben to The Hague in order to fetch the Prince, and the latter has but to-day returned from his ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... splendid hierarchy,—an Atheistic society, but still Catholic and One.[67] The change, in this respect, between the opinions which prevailed, respectively, at the era of the first and that of the second Revolution, is at once striking and instructive. It shows how variable and vacillating is the wretched creed of Infidelity, and how the firm maintenance of truth will eventually compel the homage, even where it may not succeed in carrying the convictions, of speculative minds. That Religion in all its successive forms, from ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... withdrawal, and that such intention she certainly would never utter. Of her character he understood much,—but not quite all. He was not aware of the depth of her feeling. But Mr Whittlestaff he did not understand at all. Of all those vacillating softnesses he knew nothing,—or of those moments spent with the poet, in which he was wont to fight against the poet's pretences, and of those other moments spent with Mrs Baggett, in which he would listen to, and always finally reject, those invitations to manly strength which she ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... a sad, vacillating condition, between the two great attractions to which he was exposed. Myrtle looked so immensely handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to meeting, for she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton was going to be the preacher, that the young poet was on the point of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... body on the floor, the crack of a bony joint, breathing, another crack, and then—was it my own excited imagination—or the disturbing influence of the atmosphere—or the uncertain twilight of the chamber that produced before me, in the stygian darkness of the recess, the vacillating and indistinct outline of something luminous, and horrid? I would gladly have risked futurity to have looked elsewhere—I could not. My eyes were fixed—I was compelled to gaze steadily ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... it is necessary to make a psychological study of them, and to consider their peculiar temperament. They are keenly appreciative of kindness, but, like children, they will impose upon a weak or vacillating person. A blending of gentleness and firmness is the only effective method. The fundamental point in all my dealings with them has been always to mean just what I say and to have things done exactly as ordered. For instance, if I tell an Eskimo that if he does a certain thing properly ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... routine, too confident of victory to keep abreast with the more perfect science of modern times; and, finally, the generals, men for the most part not above mediocrity, consumed by petty rivalries, some of them of an ignorance beyond all belief, and at their head the Emperor, an ailing, vacillating man, deceiving himself and everyone with whom he had dealings in that desperate venture on which they were embarking, into which they were all rushing blindfold, with no preparation worthy of the name, with the panic and confusion ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... expression; but although each well-strung muscle indicated physical prowess, there was an uncertain expression in his glance and in the play of his features, which suggested a yielding and somewhat vacillating character; while the younger, lacking the full physical development, and somewhat of the engaging expression of his brother, had that calm and steady bearing which indicated present and ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... conduct, her own greatness, she would not have dreamed of having an opinion of her own. She would have consulted the Doctor, and simply have done as he directed. But all this was for her child, and in a vague, vacillating way she felt that for her child she ought to be ready ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... effort of attention to fix the vision for a longer and a longer time, and when they waxed faint and nearly vanished, he had the power of recalling them into light and substance, until at last their vacillating indistinctness became less and less, and they assumed a permanent ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Valley. Thus the weary column toiled along until it reached the spot where it expected to be joined by Colonel Smith's battalion, about fifty miles up Ham's Fork. The very next day snow fell to the depth of more than a foot. Disheartened, vacillating, and perplexed, Colonel Alexander called another council of war, and, acting on its judgment, resolved to retrace his steps. An express reached him that same day, from Colonel Smith, by which he was informed of the approach of Colonel Albert S. Johnston, of the Second Cavalry, who had been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... strength, while at the same time philandering with ideas and projects of human amelioration. Bismarck and Cavour seized the opportunity of making extremely useful for Germany and Italy the irrelevant and vacillating idealism and the timid absolutism of the third Napoleon. Great Britain has occupied in this respect a better situation than has the Continental Powers. Her insular security made her more independent of the menaces and complications of foreign politics, and left her free ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... of state. He opened an office in the Calle San Juan de Lateran, and was authorized to establish agencies in the Southern States.* But the indecision and weakness of Maximilian prevented his taking full advantage of the opportunity then offered to strengthen the empire. The delay caused by a vacillating policy discouraged the would-be colonists, and before long the ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... The Dutch believe themselves,—and not without reason,—capable of great things, they were moved by an ambition to seize the power which they believed,—and the retrocession fostered that belief,—was falling from England's feeble and vacillating grasp. "Long before the present trouble" says a Member of the British Parliament well acquainted with South African affairs, "I visited every town in South Africa of any importance, and was brought into close contact ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... but my Letter must wait till I return to Woodbridge, where your Address is on record. I have thought several times of writing to you since this Year began; but I have been in a muddle—leaving my old Markethill Lodgings, and vacillating between my own rather lonely Chateau, and this Place, where some Nieces are. I had wished to tell you what I know of our dear Donne: who Mowbray says gets on still. I suppose he will never be so strong ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... past he had been swept almost unresistingly down the darkening and deepening current of his sin. Whenever he made some feeble, vacillating effort to reduce his allowance of the drug, he became so wretched, irritable, and unnatural in manner that his family were full of perplexed wonder and solicitude. To hide his weakness from his wife ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... and de la Motte. On the side of their opponents, called Mazarins, were the Cardinal Mazarin himself, the Prince de Conde, Marechal de Grammont, and the Duc de Chatillon, while the Duc d'Orleans, a vacillating man, wavered between the two parties. The successes of the rival powers were alternate for a long time; eventually the frondeurs were defeated, and De Retz escaping into Lorraine, Mazarin returned to Paris triumphant in February 1653.—H. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... at Verona some element in the Austrian councils of war which we don't understand, but which gives to their operations in this present phase of the campaign just as uncertain and as vacillating a character as it possessed during the campaign of 1859. On Friday they are still beyond the Mincio, and on Saturday their small fleet on the Lake of Garda steams up to Desenzano, and opens fire against this defenceless city and her railway station, whilst two battalions ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... am a good deal picked up, but yet not quite a Samson, being still groggy afoot and vague in the head. My chess, for instance, which is usually a pretty strong game, and defies all rivalry aboard, is vacillating, devoid of resource and observation, and hitherto not covered with customary laurels. As for work, it is impossible. We shall be in the saddle before long, no doubt, and the pen once more couched. You must not expect a letter under these circumstances, but be very thankful for a note. Once at Samoa, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will be a stable heart. Our fixedness and stability are not natural immobility, but communicated steadfastness. There must be, first, the consolation of Christ before there can be the calmness of a settled heart. We all know how vacillating, how driven to and fro by gusts of passion and winds of doctrine and forces of earth our resolutions and spirits are. But thistledown glued to a firm surface will be firm, and any light thing lashed to a solid one will be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... This vacillating Thing, you see, Could not decide which he would be, Fish, Flesh or Fowl, and chose all three. The scientists were sorely vexed To classify him; so perplexed Their brains, that they, with Rage at bay, Call him a horrid name one day,— A name that baffles, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... ways the leading spirit of the Girondists, who were also known as Brissotins. Vergniaud certainly was far superior to him in oratory, but Brissot was quick, eager, impetuous, and a man of wide knowledge. But he was at the same time vacillating, and not qualified to struggle against the fierce energies roused by the events of the Revolution. His party fell before the Mountain; sentence of arrest was passed against the leading members of it on the 2nd of June 1793. Brissot attempted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... indefensible and what must be fought for to the death; they mistook subordinate or unimportant points for the key of their position: in their compromises or in their resistance they wanted the guidance of clear and adequate principles, and they were vacillating and ineffective. But stronger and far-seeing minds perceived the need of a broad and intelligible basis on which to maintain the cause of the Church. For the air was full of new ideas; the temper of the time was bold and enterprising. It was felt by men ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... ridiculous, and defeat the ends of justice. The people are rude and uncivilized; their oppressors crafty and bold, who have no hesitation about lying, and bringing others to lie for them. Oaths are a farce to them. The aggrieved are timid, vacillating, and simple, and cannot readily procure even necessary evidence; for their witnesses are afraid to speak. Under these circumstances, I look at the leading features of the case, the probability, the characters, the position of parties, and determine according to my judgment. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... that the Ohio black walnut is prone to hybridize with butternut trees in its vicinity and others have told me of its hybridizing with English walnut trees near it, which shows it to be almost as vacillating in character as our Japanese walnuts or heartnuts. Ohio black walnuts, when planted, usually produce vigorous stocks, many of which show hybridity of some sort. If one examines the nuts of the Ohio and finds them dwarfed or deformed, he may be sure that they have been pollinized ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... something of accounts, a little designing, even a little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad work of nature, mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleams of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smouldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes, and we called ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... occupying) and concentrate on matters in hand. What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so? But I knew in my heart that the matter was already decided. I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street, and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the papers. But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had me in its grip. Annoyed, and with a sense of chagrin, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... removed if a policy were adopted with which the people could heartily sympathize, and if the king placed himself at the head of his parliament and led them on. But his advice was neglected by the vacillating and peace-loving monarch, his proffered proclamation was put aside, and a weak, featureless production substituted in its place. Nevertheless the new parliament seemed at first more responsive than might have been looked for. A double ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... arms. A good deal of attention has been excited by a letter from Mr. Bartholomew Szemere, one of Kossuth's former friends, and even a minister in the Hungarian revolutionary cabinet, charging him with cowardice, weakness, and a fatally irresolute and vacillating policy in the administration of affairs. Szemere also denies that Kossuth has any just right to call himself the Governor of Hungary, or even the leader of the Hungarian people. On the other hand, Mr. Vukovitch, who was also a minister in the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... exercise of this same right, she is remanded to the State, by the unanimous decision of the nine judges on the bench, that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one." Such vacillating interpretations of constitutional law must unsettle our faith in judicial authority, and undermine the liberties of the whole people. Seeing by these decisions of the courts that the theory of our government, the Declaration of Independence, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... be always present, that at every hour it falls asleep, or wanders, through want of having all its principles present. Feeling does not act thus; it acts in a moment, and is always ready to act. We must then put our faith in feeling; otherwise it will be always vacillating. ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... laid them against the wall at the side of the basement-steps, and sat down heavily beside her. He was a sickly-looking man, sandy-haired, with a depressed and shifty expression of face—not vicious, but weak and vacillating. Baubie seemed to have the upper hand altogether: every gesture showed it. She opened the paper that was wrapped about her fragment of rank yellow cheese, laid it down on the step between them, and then produced, in their order ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... entrance hall, dark and deserted, and, hurrying down its length, fumbled with the knob and pulled open the street door. Dazzling sunlight, a blast of warm air and the confused clatter of the sidewalk engulfed her. She stood vacillating in the doorway, thinly panoplied for the struggle of existence. Her body was splendid, it is true, but her spirit was small. Despite the sunlight and warmth she was trembling. And yet, for years she had gone down into this street confident of herself, mingling on equal terms with its wayfarers, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... sending his army flying terror-stricken back upon Armagh. This feat established him as the hero of the North. No army which Sussex could again gather together could be induced to risk the fate of its predecessor. The deputy was a poor soldier, feeble and vacillating in the field. He was no match for his fiery assailant; and after an attempt to get over the difficulty by suborning one Neil Grey to make away with the too successful Shane, he was reduced to the necessity of coming to terms. An agreement was entered into ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... Sir Henry, whose vacillating state of mind was turned by a word to any new subject that was suggested,—"Seat of learning and loyalty! these rude soldiers are unfit inmates for thy learned halls and poetical bowers; but thy pure and brilliant lamp shall defy the foul breath ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon, being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... religion depends upon the earnestness and continuousness of our own efforts. But there is a worse force than these external distractions working to draw us away, one that we carry within, in our own vacillating wills and wayward hearts and treacherous affections and passions that usually lie dormant, but wake up sometimes at the most inopportune periods. Unless we keep a very tight hand upon ourselves, certainly these ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... sixth, a vacillating, staggering, decrepit creature with wildish white beard and eyes, who had been arrested—incredibly enough—for "rape." With him his son, a pleasant youth quiet of demeanour, inquisitive of nature, with whom we sometimes conversed on the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... is the scorn of the gentle. "He who wrote it does not seem to me to understand his trade very well; he ought to put himself to school," writes she, and proceeds with analysis so convincing and exhortation so invigorating that even the vacillating Gregory must have been magnetized afresh with power to resolve. One feels in the letter that Catherine is as near impatience with him and with the situation as is permitted to a saint. Gregory must have felt the sting in her words when ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... and of well-regulated society. Passion predominated above reason, and received its impulse solely from casual circumstances. It was, in fact, accidental, whether it should operate amiably or malignantly; and the felicity of one half of the human species depended upon the precarious and ever vacillating humour of the other. Virtue was scarcely seen upon the earth, except at occasional and often distant visitations, or as she shed a fitful and flickering light into the retreats of systematic philosophy. Woman was at the mercy of every wind—to-day ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... whom James most resembled was, we think, Claudius Caesar. Both had the same feeble vacillating temper, the same childishness, the same coarseness, the same poltroonery. Both were men of learning; bath wrote and spoke, not, indeed, well, but still in a manner in which it seems almost incredible that men so foolish ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... This done, they were to send out a small independent war party against the enemy. Their final determination left us in some embarrassment. Should we go to La Bonte's Camp, it was not impossible that the other villages would prove as vacillating and indecisive as The Whirlwinds, and that no assembly whatever would take place. Our old companion Reynal had conceived a liking for us, or rather for our biscuit and coffee, and for the occasional small presents which we made him. He was very anxious that ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... for political reasons, the coffee houses should be closed. His argument was much the same as that advanced more than a hundred years later by Charles II of England, namely, that they were hotbeds of sedition. Kuprili was a military dictator, with nothing of Charles's vacillating nature; and although, like Charles, he later rescinded his edict, he enforced it, while it was effective, in no uncertain fashion. Kuprili was no petty tyrant. For a first violation of the order, cudgeling was the punishment; ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... itself into one or the other of these two principles—strict obedience, rigidly enforced by punishment; or a vacillating policy of petting and scolding, leading to moral confusion—there could be little hesitation in deciding which would be apt to give better results in the formation of character. The old way, if somewhat crude and summary, has proved itself capable ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... trouble, a consuming flame, a burning passion; love which wastes itself like rain-drops upon the hot sand; love which is a longing, not a sacrifice; love which says "Wilt thou be mine," not love which says, "I must be thine." It is a most selfish, vacillating love. And this is the love which poets sing and in which young men and maidens believe; a fire which burns up and down, yet does not warm, and leaves nothing behind but smoke and ashes. All of us at some period ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... Trevison's eyes, but his age, his vacillating will, his guilt, could not combat the overpowering force and virility of this volcanic youth, and his gaze ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... no more. What was the result of these periodical repentances? At the first temptation I forgot my remorse and good resolutions. I am weak and mean-spirited, and you are not firm enough to govern my vacillating nature. While my intentions are good, my actions are villainous. The disproportion between my extravagant desires, and the means of gratifying them, is too great for me to endure any longer. Who knows to what fearful lengths my unfortunate disposition ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... the masculine and practical display of the energetic hate of its object, while on the contrary she, whose beauty of person was now to him a thing without price, acknowledged no other feeling than contempt for the vacillating character of her associate. In this only did they agree that each looked upon each in the light of a being sunk in crime—steeped in dishonor—and while the love of the one was turned to almost loathing at the thought, the other merely wondered how one so feeble ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... license obtained, but "Pea Green Hayne" took a solemn vow that nothing should separate him from the object of his affections. Believing that all was safe, Miss Foote now threw up her engagement and disposed of her theatrical wardrobe, but the weak-minded, vacillating creature, who could not summon up resolution either to have or to leave her, let matters go on to the very day, and again failed to put in an appearance. Some preliminary letters having passed between the parties, Maria then issued a writ, and recovered ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... an effort to eat. Therese then saw what a terrible shock her aunt had received. The legs of the old lady had become so ponderous that she required a stick to assist her to drag herself into the dining-room, and there she thought the walls were vacillating around her. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... spirit), that the former is slowly and silently transformed into a more or less approximate image of the latter. The stronger personality leads the weaker on by paths which the weaker knows not, upward he leads him, though his steps be slow and vacillating. Humility, in the Christian sense, means this fealty to the higher. It doesn't mean self-abasement, self-depreciation, as it has been understood to mean, by both the Romish and the Protestant Church. Pride, in the Christian sense, is the closing of the doors ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... know why, but he had no longer any doubt. He knew that he would win Robin, he knew that he would win Mary; up to that day he had been uncertain, vacillating, miserable—but now he had no longer any hesitation. The work of his life was to fit Robin for his due succession, and, please God, he would do it with all his heart and soul and strength; there was to be no false sentiment, no shifting of difficult ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... the verge of submission could have kept the peace, it would have been kept. But conciliation, without firmness, will not impress barbarians. The Maoris were far too acute to be impressed by the well-meaning, vacillating Governor. They set to work, instead, to impress him. They invited him to a huge banquet near Auckland, and danced a war-dance before their guest with the deliberate intention of overawing him. Indeed, the spectacle of fifteen hundred warriors, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... the Napoleonic Period.*—By reason of the vacillating policies of her sovereign, Frederick William III., the successive defeats of her armies at Jena, Auerstaedt, and elsewhere, and the loss, by the treaty of Tilsit in 1807, of half of her territory, Prussia realized ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... proud imperial power for which he acted. He was a bad Governor, but he was not so bad as the cause he was obliged to uphold. He was arbitrary, but he was not so arbitrary as his instructions. He was vacillating, but he was not so vacillating as the Ministers. When he gave the conciliatory reply to the June town-meeting, it was judged that he lowered the national standard, and it seriously damaged him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... twenty thousand troops to aid Napoleon against Russia, and which during the retreat from Moscow went over bodily to the enemy; this Prussia whose vacillating king simpered with delight at a kind word from Napoleon, and shivered with dismay at a harsh one; this army with its officers as haughty as they were incapable, and its men only prevented from wholesale desertion by severe punishment, an army rotten at the core, with a coat ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... spectator being given, a question arises with regard to the range of vision which, in his capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists mar the effect of their work—and among these Thackeray is notable—by adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating. Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through everything. At another time he will startle the reader ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... other leading pursuit of life, if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal to-morrow what it has enacted to-day. Fitful profits, however high, if threatened with a ruinous reduction by a vacillating policy on the part of Government, will scarcely tempt him to trust the money which he has acquired by a life of labor upon the uncertain adventure. I therefore, in the spirit of conciliation, and influenced by no other desire than to rescue the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... fellow," said Nicholas, rousing himself, when I stated my difficulty, "don't you see that the vacillating policy of England has driven us to war in spite of ourselves? She would not join the rest of Europe in compelling Turkey to effect reforms which she—Turkey—had promised to make, so that nothing else was left for us but to ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... scoundrels; excellent! well, the boy—his great-aunt, you understand!—refuses to leave her. Says she likes to have him read to her! Preposterous! I insisted, Elizabeth Beadle insisted, with tears in her eyes; tears, sir! I mean my dear! Boy immovable; Gibraltar vacillating beside him; tottering, sir, on its foundations. I had to come away and leave him, perfectly happy, reading Tennyson to Elizabeth Beadle. Ask somebody else to coerce a boy like that; Thomas Ferrers is not the man for it. ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... of a critic? And does an extravagance or an error here and there lie validly against the saying of it? I think not. I could be a professor if I would and show you slips enough—certain ponderous nothings in the Ibsen essays, already mentioned; a too easy bemusement at the hands of Shaw; a vacillating over Wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus-pocus of the mystics, particularly Maeterlinck. On the side of painting, I am told, there are even worse aberrations; I know too little about painting to judge for myself. But the list, made complete, would still not be over-long, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... mutable, variable, inconstant, unstable, unsteadfast, reversible, alterable, revocable, mobile, convertible, transmutable, commutable, kaleidoscopic, transformable, impermanent; volatile, fickle, mercurial, protean, irresolute, capricious, vacillating, fitful, inconstant, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Charles came back to London from France on October 20th, the Cabinet was still vacillating as to its ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... were, some from sincere conviction and some from policy, adherents of Calvinism. Thus the Protestants in France became a political party, as well as a religious body, and a party with anti-monarchical tendencies. Anthony of Bourbon, a weak and vacillating person, had married Jeanne d'Albret, the heiress of Bearn and Navarre, a heroic woman and an earnest Protestant, the mother of Henry IV. His brother Louis, Prince of Conde, a brave, impetuous soldier, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... with great indignation; and when he completed the last arrangement for the division, by carrying with his own hands a trout of a large size, and placing it on four different piles in succession, as his vacillating ideas of justice required, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... obsession—their weakness. They are thorough Frenchmen and their critical sense must be unbridled. They love their ideas and their systems. They would doubtless not hesitate to advise Foch. Personally, if I were Foch, I should turn a deaf ear. But if I were a timid, vacillating, pessimistic spirit, still in doubt as to the final outcome, I should most certainly seat myself at a neighbouring table and listen to their conversation that I might come away imbued with a little of their ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... suite maintained a profound silence, which struck us as very singular; but then we did not know that a new ruler was on his way to Australia, and that the home government had got most heartily tired of the vacillating policy of Mr. Latrobe, and that the several gentlemen who surrounded him were aware of it, and were all ready to pay court to the rising star, as soon as he set ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... become excessive. At a certain moment, he loses self-control. His observing coolness escapes; something in his brain explodes, and carries everything far, far away. Hazard and accident have a good share in Monsieur de Balzac's best production. He has his own manner, but vacillating, fidgety, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... and passed her hand over his hair. He told me that his eyes filled with tears at this caress. Then she stood for a moment looking at the sleeping Madame Babette, and stooped down and softly kissed her on the forehead. Pierre dreaded lest his mother should awake (for by this time the wayward, vacillating boy must have been quite on Virginie's side), but the brandy she had drunk made her slumber heavily. Virginie went. Pierre's heart beat fast. He was sure his cousin would try to intercept her; but how, he could not imagine. ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... 272. With vacillating, but steadily prevailing effort, the Florentines maintained this life and character for full half ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... searchingly, though it was too dark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he told himself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head and heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy was quicker, but vacillating. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... all down in thy precipitancy— And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows And mine is living blood: thou dost His will, The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know, Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall Linger with vacillating obedience, Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to— Since the good mother holds me still a child! Good mother is bad mother unto me! A worse were better; yet no worse would I. Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force To weary ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... himself was a man less gifted than Phineas Finn, and therefore hardly capable of understanding the exaggerated feelings of the man who had recently been tried for his life. Lord Chiltern was affectionate, tender-hearted, and true;—but there were no vacillating fibres in his composition. The balance which regulated his conduct was firmly set, and went well. The clock never stopped, and wanted but little looking after. But the works were somewhat rough, and the seconds were not scored. He had, however, been quite ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... estimate that had been placed upon his military ability; but after studying the orders and dispatches of Johnston I am compelled to materially modify my views of that officer's qualifications as a soldier. My judgment now is that he was vacillating and undecided ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Marigny. I took the central alley, walking parallel with them, and then crossed over for the purpose of getting nearer to them. The night was dark, and the grass deadened the sound of my steps. They had stopped under the vacillating light of a gas jet and appeared to be both bending over a paper held by Mademoiselle Stangerson, reading something which deeply interested them. I stopped ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... pourtray the bright ornaments of the party. She has endeavoured to show that it was composed, as well as most other political combinations, of materials differing in value—some pure, some base, some noble, some mean and vacillating. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... the presentation of the doctrine will be faulty and cold and lifeless, or weak and vacillating, or harsh and sharp and severe. With the experience, the preaching of the doctrine will be with great joy and assurance, and will be strong and searching, but at the same time ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... given to solicitude and doubt. There were certain misgivings, in the frequent glances that he turned on the unyielding countenance of Ishmael, which might have betrayed how little of their former confidence and good understanding existed between them. His looks appeared to be vacillating between hope and fear. At times, his countenance lighted with the gleamings of a sordid joy, as he bent his look on the tent which contained his recovered prisoner, and then, again, the impression seemed unaccountably ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... men available for service in the field, and even this number was subsequently diminished by the vacillating Charles to forty-five hundred. ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... touched by some sense of that great and gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye; that the man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himself up for an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out a hand, and then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysed will recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power to say, 'Thou oughtest,' but no power to enforce the execution of its decrees, and the heart turning away from the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Roannez was not a happy one. After vacillating for some time between the cloister and the world—obeying the guidance of Pascal, either directly or through Madame Périer, and even passing through her novitiate at Port Royal with “extraordinary fervour”—she was persuaded to marry and ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... prevail. Notwithstanding the fact that Moses had learned much from the Egyptians, he seems not to have risen above a very gross conception of a deity. His god was by turns angry, jealous, revengeful, vacillating, and weak. He was in fact the embodiment of human passions and desires. We have seen that the third person in the ancient Trinity had, in Egypt, India, and Persia, come to be recognized in place of the three principles ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... statesmen, and it gives a confidence and energy to the public service which in times of difficulty and danger are of supreme importance. In such times a mistaken decision is usually a less evil than timid, vacillating, or procrastinated action, and a wise Minister will go far to defend his subordinates if they have acted promptly and with substantial justice in the way they believed to be best, even though they may have made considerable ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... I begin to live, and to be king of myself. Elect whom you choose. For me, who am so well, it were madness to return to court." Another Polish king, who succeeded this philosophic monarchical porter, when they placed the sceptre in his hand, exclaimed—"I had rather tug at an oar!" The vacillating fortunes of the Polish monarchy present several of these anecdotes; their monarchs appear to have frequently been philosophers; and, as the world is made, an excellent philosopher proves but an ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... far to avoid—the flag of Great Britain. The Boers had occupied Natal from within, but England had previously done the same by sea, and a small colony of Englishmen had settled at Port Natal, now known as Durban. The home Government, however, had acted in a vacillating way, and it was only the conquest of Natal by the Boers which caused them to claim it as a British colony. At the same time they asserted the unwelcome doctrine that a British subject could not at will throw off his allegiance, and that, go where they might, the wandering farmers ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hesitated whether to go himself at the head of a strong body of men and openly to take her, or to employ some sort of device. It was not that he himself feared the anathema of the church; but he knew Prince John to be weak and vacillating, at one time ready to defy the thunder of the pope, the next cringing before the spiritual authority. He therefore determined to employ some of his men to burst into the convent and carry off the heiress, arranging that he himself, with some of his men-at-arms, should come upon them ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... straight-forward, and not perverted by his essentially false position. Enigma and mist seem to be his element; and when I find his high satisfaction at all personal recognition and bowing before his individuality, I almost doubt whether, if one wished to draw the character of a vain and vacillating pretender, it would be possible to draw anything more to the purpose than this. His general rule (before a certain date) is, to be cautious in public, but bold in private to the favoured few. I cannot think that ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... loopholes sunk in the walls, admitted a light which must be that of evening, for crimson bars at intervals rested on the flags of the pavement. What a terrible silence! Yet, yonder, at the far end of that passage there might be a doorway of escape! The Jew's vacillating hope was tenacious, for it was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... of Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only begins to shape ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... Squire made many changes in his residence, vacillating between his house in Cambridge and the house at Folking. His books were at Cambridge, and he could not have them brought back; and yet he felt that he ought to evince his constancy to his son, his conviction of his son's innocence, by remaining at Folking. And he was aware, too, ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... of your most successful concert performances in Bonn, all of which unite in giving you due praise for your excellent conducting. At the beginning of January concert affairs here, which have hitherto been in a vacillating and fluctuating condition, owing to various local circumstances, will take a more settled turn; I will send you the complete programme shortly. By today's post you will receive the "Songs and Sayings" from the last ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... there was nothing left for them but to submit to the inevitable, and those who desired to oppose the Bill to the last and force the creation of Peers. The view of the latter section, led by Lord Halsbury, was an expression of the wide-spread impatience and annoyance with Mr. Balfour's weak and vacillating leadership. All the counting of heads and the guesses as to how each Peer would behave afforded much material for sensational press paragraphs and rather frivolous speculation and intrigue. The ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... other miseries I thought of that were common in my country. There were those we love. Some who are woven into our lives and affections by the kinship of blood; who grow up weak and vacillating, and are won away, sometimes through vice, to estrangement. Our hearts ache not the less painfully that they have ceased to be worthy of a throb; or that they have been weak enough to become estranged, to ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... to have disowned an article of that creed for which he had so bravely contended, and on which he fully relied; and the upright mind of the Clerk in Office would have secured him from being guilty of wrong and robbery, though his weak and vacillating intellect could not preserve him from infidelity and profaneness. Their melancholy is nearly alike, but not its consequences. Jachin retained hia belief, and though he hated life, he could never be induced to quit it voluntarily; but Abel was driven ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... which the beautiful lines alone could not effect. Ichabod we read once, but when we know the meaning of its spiritual name and remember that it is Whittier's indignant rebuke of Webster for his vacillating policy in the slavery agitation, we read it again with a renewed and more vivid interest. Many things, however, are so universal that one cares not whether they were written by a Hindoo or an American, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... we are now writing Filippo Strozzi was a victim to the policy of the Medici, so vacillating in its means, so fixed and inflexible in its object. After sharing the misfortunes and the captivity of Clement VII. when the latter, surprised by the Colonna, took refuge in the Castle of Saint-Angelo, Strozzi ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... listen to the urgent reasons why he should hold Lookout Mountain to protect his supply line. "Rosecrans," he said, "who is sometimes as obstinate and inaccessible to reason as at others he is irresolute, vacillating, and inconclusive, rejected all their arguments, and the mountain was given up." [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. i. p. 215.] Picturing the starvation of the horses and mules and the danger ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Pilate, the Roman governor, that he might confirm their sentence and execute the cruel penalty of crucifixion. The trial before Pilate developed into a disgraceful contest between the murderous and determined Jewish rulers and the weak and vacillating Roman governor, who was at last compelled to act contrary to his conscience and his desire and to submit his will to that of the subjects ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
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