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More "Vagueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... known. Such a surpassing miracle of soft, dainty curves, such surplusage of beauty in bare throat, speaking eye, sweet mouth, and dimpled cheeks! But Bucky was a lover, and perhaps no fair judge, for in that touch of vagueness, of fairy-land, lent by the moonlight, he found the world almost too beautiful to believe. Did she look NICE? How beggarly words were to ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... is to kill innocent birds and animals,—of the latest fool-flyers in aeroplanes,—in short, no fashionable jabberer of social inanities could have beaten me in what average persons call 'common-sense talk,'—talk which resulted after a while in the usual vagueness of attention accompanied by smothered yawning. I was resolved not to lift the line of thought 'up in the air' in the manner whereof I had often been accused, but to keep it level with the ground. So that when we left Tobermory, where we had anchored for a couple of days, the limits of the yacht ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... towards him and apparently on his own level. It was almost upon him; he involuntarily drew back as the strange phenomenon swept abreast of where he stood, and resolved itself into a dark yet airy bulk, whose vagueness, topped by enormous towers, was yet illuminated by those open squares of light that he had taken for stars, but which he saw now were ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... rushing to and fro, cries of "FEUER! FEUER!" a waiter with scared face hurrying from room to room with the announcement in broken English, "The hotel is on fire!" or, sometimes in his haste and confusion, "The fire is on hotel!" For a moment Erica's heart stood still; the very vagueness of the terror, the uncertainty as to the extent of the danger or the possibility of escape, was paralyzing. Then with the natural instinct of a book lover she hastily picked up two or three volumes from the table and begged her father to come. He made ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... had inquired the way from a farm-laborer whom I had met on the road, and he had answered me with a curiosity but thinly veiled. His directions had been characterized by that rustic vagueness which assumes in the inquirer an intimate knowledge of local landmarks. But nevertheless I believed I had come aright. I gathered from its name that Friar's Park was in part at least a former monastic building, and certainly the cracked bell spoke with ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... further along this route, and sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He delighted in a work of art, both for what it was in itself and for what it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it, as though sustained ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... an order must be definite and must be the expression of a fixed decision. Ambiguity or vagueness indicates either vacillation or the inability ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as "great dramatists,"—as if Shakspeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... that ground was reached his behaviour was noticeably wanting in point. He moved seemingly at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and remained idly agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a bench; after which he walked about again, only again to repeat both the vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was a man either with nothing at all to do or with ever so much to think about; and it was not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make had the effect ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... intensity of the fellow's eyes that held his attention, the possibility of the actual existence of an unknown element that did not fit into that conception of him. They were not the eyes of a mere animal. There was no vagueness in their utter stillness. Rather had they the look of a ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... The vagueness and looseness of the information one receives in answer to that much abused question, "Is he better?" would be ludicrous, if it were not painful. The only sensible answer (in the present state of knowledge about sickness) would be "How can I know? I cannot ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... sleeping beside her dear mother and that we are together in the Better Land. She has been separated considerably from me of late,—I have had to be journeying about on business,—therefore it will not come so hard to her, and though children do not forget, the sorrow softens and has a tender vagueness ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... was not what the times required and what Erasmus could give. It is quite clear why Erasmus could only write in Latin. Moreover, in the vernacular everything would have appeared too direct, too personal, too real, for his taste. He could not do without that thin veil of vagueness, of remoteness, in which everything is wrapped when expressed in Latin. His fastidious mind would have shrunk from the pithy coarseness of a Rabelais, or the rustic violence of ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... disappointment, I have not answered yours, as I wished to do, by return of post. But I am really still as much at a loss how to make my letter worth reading as if I had replied immediately. Allow me, however, to thank you for your last, which has completely done away with the vagueness of the former; I now distinctly understand you, and as to one of your leading points, viz. availing myself of publication through your Society, I may say that if there had been among my papers anything of the kind you wish for, I should have gladly forwarded it to you. But it is not so, nor dare ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... up at him with admiration. He was competent; he had given a vast shape to the vagueness ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... account of this vagueness and uncertainty that some curiously wild theories have been propounded concerning the origin of the South Americans, and more especially of the Incas. Thus, in 1843, George Jones, a writer who had ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... comparison is a matter of antiquity. The ancient Greeks called the insect [Greek: Mantis], the divine, the prophet. The worker in the fields is never slow in perceiving analogies; he will always generously supplement the vagueness of the facts. He has seen, on the sun-burned herbage of the meadows, an insect of commanding appearance, drawn up in majestic attitude. He has noticed its wide, delicate wings of green, trailing behind it like long linen veils; he has seen its ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... argument? I ask how I shall know the intimation of the spiritual faculty, which renders all "external revelation" an impertinence? I am told, with delicious vagueness, that I must gaze on the phenomena of spiritual consciousness; I say I exercise earnest and sincere self-scrutiny, and that I can discern nothing but shadowy forms, most of which do not answer to those which these new spiritualists describe; and then Mr. Newman turns round and says, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... quite clear that what hinders a true understanding of anything is vagueness; and it is by this process of asking questions that vagueness is to be dispelled: for, in the first place, it removes one great vagueness, or indistinctness, which is very apt to beset the minds of many; namely, the not clearly seeing whether they understand a thing or no; and much more, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... glory, their genius, success and happiness, are expended and survive in the few great spirits their fortunate condition produced. The governments of antiquity were great and glorious, because their proletarians were intelligent, thrifty and brave, but the proletarians fade into vagueness, and are great only in the few great names which have been handed down to us. It has been said that a nation expends a hundred years of its vitality in the production of a great man of genius like Socrates, or Bacon, or Toussaint l'Overture, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... Grimpen. Between the two, behind the hill, was the house of the Stapletons. All was sweet and mellow and peaceful in the golden evening light, and yet as I looked at them my soul shared none of the peace of Nature but quivered at the vagueness and the terror of that interview which every instant was bringing nearer. With tingling nerves but a fixed purpose, I sat in the dark recess of the hut and waited with sombre patience for the ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... mystics, and for such poets as Herbert and Vaughan, whose poetry was pious, and their piety poetic. As I have said, he was perhaps too impatient of all obscure thinking, from not considering that on certain subjects, necessarily in their substance, and on the skirts of all subjects, obscurity and vagueness, difficulty and uncertainty, are inherent, and must therefore appear in their treatment. Men who rejoiced in making clear things obscure, and plain things the reverse, he could not abide, and spoke with ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a general vagueness of light. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... immense scope of the work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene; the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... much depends upon the selection of a spot with capabilities. What is said in respect to the 'detecting and bringing into practice those nice relations of size, proportion and color,' is a mere vagueness of speech, which may mean much, or little, or nothing, and which guides in no degree. That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... City four. Every seat (except those for St. George's, Hanover Square) was contested, and there were often as many as six or seven candidates for one division. It was said at the time that "the uncertainty of the issues, the multitude of candidates, and the vagueness of parties made it impossible to tabulate the results with the same accuracy and completeness which are possible in the case of the House of Commons." Some candidates stood professedly as Liberals, and others as Conservatives. The majority, however, declared themselves to be "strictly non-political." ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... a northwesterly direction, signs, rumors, and perhaps instincts, leading him to believe that Livingstone, if found alive, would be discovered somewhere in the region of Lake Tanganyika. It would be impossible to describe the vagueness and mysteriousness of the rumors which float to and fro in an untravelled and savage country, but as the intrepid adventurer pressed on he heard more and more credible reports of the lost white man. His first convincing intimation of his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... said the mother, with the same amiable vagueness. She had some teeth gone, and when she smiled she tried to hide their absence on the side next Ludlow; but as she was always smiling she did not succeed perfectly. She looked doubtfully at her daughter, in the manner of mothers ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... that Christianity is only partially successful in curing the defect of unpunctuality. Both amongst priests and people, unless there happens to be some Englishman at hand with precise ideas about time, there is an extraordinary vagueness as to the hour for service, especially in country districts. Service begins when a sufficient number of people have arrived. The bell is very little guide, because when it has been rung and nobody ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... invincibly attractive. It appeared, upon investigation, we had just time to hail a cab and catch one of the fast trains for Fontainebleau. Beyond the clothes we stood in, all were destitute of what is called (with dainty vagueness) personal effects; and it was earnestly mooted, on the other side, whether we had not time to call upon the way and pack a satchel? But the Stennis boys exclaimed upon our effeminacy. They had come from London, it appeared, a week before with nothing but greatcoats and tooth-brushes. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... seems to have been carefully concealed," I said. "I recollect having detected in her a strange vagueness of manner, but it never occurred to me that she was mentally weak. In the days immediately preceding the tragedy I certainly saw but little of her. She ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... the fact that the beings worshipped have proper names in the later stage, and had none in the earlier. A development or a difference in language implies a development or difference in thought. If the being or spirit worshipped has come to be designated by a proper name, he has lost much of the vagueness that characterises a nameless spirit, and he has come to be much more definite and much more personal. Indeed, a change much more sinister, from the religious point of view, is wrought, when the transition from polydaemonism ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... Observe, again, the ingenious vagueness of the description: an 'arid road' which may mean Siberia, and a 'dark ridge' which may mean ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... sufficient? Will you receive it as the Creed of your Church? Make up your mind, my boy, above all things make up your mind! Have some convictions, some real opinions, some worthy hopes; and be loyal to, and in earnest about, whatever you do pin your faith to, I assure you that vagueness of faith affects people's every-day conduct more than they think. The sort of belief which takes a man to church on Sunday who would be ashamed to look as if he were really praying, or confessing real sins when he gets there, is small help to him when the will ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... helter-skelter from his laboratory, was in wildest disarray, and his eyes were still a little vague, as he followed Brenton up the stairs to the nursery. Across the threshold of the nursery, however, the vagueness vanished; the eyes grew keen as sharp-pointed bits of steel, yet strangely gentle, while he sat down beside the crib and laid one mammoth brown hand above the scrawny little claw. Then, for just a minute, the keen eyes narrowed to a line. A minute afterward, he looked ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... thing worth noting and so the visualization is destroyed. The dependent clause brings up a new visualization, a V2, in the "dust of a small town." The second sentence is V1, until the close when it becomes V2 through the quickening of memories that have been emotional. The vagueness of a village hidden in the mist has appealed to our imagination in the assurance of a something unknown. The next sentence is V1, and so also is the next until in "the shrewd bite as of night air" we get an S2. ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... there was a want of appreciation or a misunderstanding of the position which we held." Sedgwick's entire confidence in Howe's ability to handle his division, upon general instructions of the object to be attained, might account fully for a large part of this apparent vagueness. But Howe does not look at it in this light. His opinion was, that no necessity existed for the Sixth Corps to fall back ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... calmness, told him that he saw nothing, absolutely nothing, upon which the Council could deliberate; that there was vagueness in all he had said. "Explain yourself; reveal the plot which you say ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... which, in any art, is a great virtue. No doubt smoothness is often confounded with, and mistaken for finish; but you might have a mirror-like polish on the surface of a statue, for instance, and yet the marble be full of inanity, or vagueness, or even vulgarity of result—irrespective altogether of its idea. The influence of Italian poetry reviving once more in the country, roused such men as Wyat and Surrey to polish the sound of their verses; but smoothness, I repeat, is not melody, and where the attention paid to ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... suffocating nightmare. Mrs. Talbot was not pleased with her visit, and did not come again. But she wrote several times. The tone of her letters was not, however, pleasant to Irene, who was disturbed by it, and more bewildered than enlightened by the sentiments that were announced with oracular vagueness. These letters were read to Miss Carman, on whom Irene was beginning to lean with increasing confidence. Rose did not fail to expose their weakness or fallacy in such clear light that Irene, though she tried to shut her eyes against the truth presented by Rose, could not help seeing it. ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... statement of the Karika but does not enter into any further explanations. Bhik@su's interpretation fits in well with all that is known of the gu@nas, though it is quite possible that this view might not have been known before, and when the original Sa@mkhya doctrine was formulated there was a real vagueness as to the conception ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... arrears of pay which her husband would receive as soon as the exigencies of the campaign permitted. Instead of these funds, so greatly needed, came the tidings of a Union defeat, with her husband's name down among the missing. Beyond that brief mention, so horrible in its vagueness, she had never heard a word from the one who not only sustained her home, but also her heart. Was he languishing in a Southern prison, or, mortally wounded, had he lingered out some terrible hours on that wild battlefield, a brief description of which had been so dwelt upon ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... had that afternoon. The very ground seemed to have been cut away from under our feet. We had gathered enough from the officers of our Division to know that something very disastrous "somewhere" had occurred. It was the very vagueness of the thing that terrified us. What could have happened? Only something very monstrous could have compelled so general a retirement. We might all of us be prisoners before the evening. That seemed to us, and indeed was afterwards proved in reality, to have been no slender possibility. There ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... still water. I took my stand on the upper deck. Once again I looked across the bay and beheld that wonderful vision of New York floating above a blue haze, a mass of glittering pinnacles and rose-pink walls flaunting snowy pennants of white vapour, and looped to the sombre vagueness of Brooklyn by the long catenary curves of the suspension bridges. As the steamer started I walked aft, that I might not see the dissolution of the phantasy. It may be a weakness; but there is to me, mingled with all perception of beauty, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... there will always seem to me something weird and incomprehensible in those twilight days, an unreality, a vagueness like some dreary, feverish dream. For three months I did not see my face in a mirror. Not that I wanted to, but I mention this just to show how little we ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... dog!" It is, indeed, a miracle of impressionist art. It is not like the dogs that bite. It offers itself alluringly to the biter,—or rather to one who would leisurely absorb it. Even now there is a vagueness of outline that suggests the still vaguer outlines it will have when it comes into the possession of a ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and Thomas Price, who were all present. There is much interesting matter aside from the treaty; Simon Girty makes depositions as to Braddock's defeat and Bouquet's fight; Lewis, Croghan, and others show the utter vagueness and conflict of the Indian titles to Kentucky, etc., etc. Though the Cherokees spoke of the land as a "dark" or "bloody" place or ground, it does not seem that by either of these terms they referred to the actual meaning of the name Kentucky. One or two of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... absence of light immediately produced on his mind, was distrust of the curtained bed—distrust which shaped itself into no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough in its very vagueness, to bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast, and to set him listening intently. No sound stirred in the room but the familiar sound of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now than ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... the time thought highly of this performance. I remember one fellow saying that Number 2 seemed to have caught the spirit of Mr Browning without his vagueness, which ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... drove the mother and child from Ilkeston, picking them up on the road. The child huddled close to him as if for love, the mother sat very still. There was a vagueness, like a soft mist over all of them, and a silence as if their wills were suspended. Only he saw her hands, ungloved, folded in her lap, and he noticed the wedding-ring on her finger. It excluded him: it was a closed circle. It bound her life, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond his power to soar up into those bright regions. I can fancy as the sheets went from him ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... have been told he would, the Chief Character, did it upon lines very recognisably those of the illustrations of sacred books, very correct as to the hair and beard and pictured garment of the Galilean; with every accent of hollow-eyed pallor and inscrutable remoteness, with all the thin vagueness, too, of a popular engraving, the limitations and the depression. Under it one saw the painful inconsistency of the familiar Hamilton Bradley of other presentations, and realised with irritation, which must have ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... their expression meek and timid; the form, though tall, was not firm-knit and muscular; the lower limbs were too thin, the body had too much flesh, the delicate hands betrayed the sickly paleness of feeble health; there was a dreamy vagueness in the clear soft blue eyes, and a listless absence of all energy in the habitual bend, the slow, heavy, sauntering tread,—all about that benevolent aspect, that soft voice, that resigned mien, and gentle manner, spoke the exquisite, unresisting goodness, which provoked the lewd ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... parliamentary government on strictly British principles. He could have obtained little assistance from British statesmen had he been desirous of mastering and applying the principles of responsible government to the dependency. Their opinions and instructions were still distinguished by a perplexing vagueness. They would not believe that a governor of a dependency could occupy exactly the same relation with respect to his responsible advisers and to political parties as is occupied with such admirable results by the sovereign of England. It was considered necessary ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... "It is strange that what one fears in death is the vagueness and the solitude of it—we are afraid of finding ourselves lost in the night. It would be agitating, but not frightful, if we were sure of finding company; and if we were sure of meeting those whom we had loved and lost, death would not frighten us at all. Dying is simple enough, and indeed ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... tops of the boots, managed to protect also the lower half. His features were delicate, and would have been called handsome had they belonged to a proportionately delicate body; in his eyes hovered a dreamy vagueness which seemed to come and vanish, and to flit from one feature to another, suggesting the idea of remoteness, and a feeling of hopeless strangeness to the world and all ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... these again into magnetism and electricity: but gravity refuses to be so converted; being a force maintaining itself under all circumstances, and not capable of disappearing to give place to another. The statement arises from vagueness of thought. If by it be meant that a particle of matter can never be deprived of its weight, the assertion is correct; but the law which affirms the convertibility of natural forces was never intended, in the minds of those who understood it, to affirm that such a conversion ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... struggle if he would hurl back anything—even a broken fragment for men to examine and perchance in it find a germ of some part of truth; conscious at times, of the futility of his effort and its message, conscious of its vagueness, but ever hopeful for it, and confident that its foundation, if not its medium is somewhere near the eventual and "absolute good" the divine truth underlying all life. If Emerson must be dubbed an optimist—then an optimist fighting pessimism, but not wallowing in it; an optimist, who does not ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... its own. This power of such an object to become the medium of thought and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole, might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow world in which he ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... order to dream a man must be asleep, I was pleased at the idea and nodded happily, smiling and blinking in self-congratulation. But that pleasant minute of illusion was my last; for the voice cried in tones too full of animation, too void of dreamy vagueness, too real and actual to let me longer set them down as made ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... in remedying habits of confusion in manner, awkward bearing, vagueness in thought, and lack of precision in utterance, is to recognize your faults. If you are serenely unconscious of them, no one—least of all yourself—can help you. But once diagnose your own weaknesses, and you can overcome them by ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... chair. "Romantic!" Her tone conveyed a very slight uneasiness and vagueness. "I am afraid you must ask some one else about that sort of thing. I did not see much romance, but I saw plenty that was half-barbaric." Here she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of ignorance. Many people will know nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of the play, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Camilla, Tudor, and Ravengar, and the permutations and combinations of these three, which offered apparently insoluble problems to his brain. Nevertheless, there was one assurance which seemed to him to emerge clearly from the note, and to atone for its vagueness—a vagueness, however, perfectly excusable, he reflected, having regard to the conditions in which it was written—namely, that Camilla intended to arrive, as usual, in Department 42 that morning. What significance could be attached ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... passes between us I desire shall be kept a profound secret for the present, since events mature with such a rapidity at this day that it is impossible to keep track of them." The stranger paused and cast a scrutinizing glance at the general, who was surprised and astounded at the vagueness of his speech. Indeed, he began to have a suspicion that the stranger was on an errand of evil, or, perhaps, had come to engage his services in some unholy enterprise, such as poisoning an heir or ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... something of the faithfulness which has marked Mr. Page's pursuit of excellence in the external of his art. He has wrought that which proves his claim to a broader title than that of painter. Were it not for the vagueness which involves the appellation of historical painter, it might be that. Even were we obliged to confine our interest and study to the portraiture which he has executed, we might, in view of its remarkable character, designate it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... was from the first applied with a good deal of vagueness. It was probably originally given to the region opposite Cyprus, from Gabala in the north—now Jebili—to Antaradus (Tortosa) and Marathus (Amrith) towards the south, where the palm-tree was first seen growing in rich abundance. The palm is the numismatic emblem of Aradus,[11] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... briefly sustained, which developed into an appeal and an invocation, ascending, falling, and still higher ascending, till it faded and expired, and then, after a little pause, was revived; then silence, and two chords, defining and clarifying the vagueness of the appeal and the invocation. And then, almost before I was aware of it, there stole forth from under the fingers of Diaz the song of the soul of man, timid, questioning, plaintive, neither sad nor joyous, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... leaf-bud than a flower-bud. There is not necessarily any increase in the number, or any alteration in the position of the buds, but the form and appearance of the latter differ from what is usual. Chloranthy, then, is a more complete form of frondescence. Owing to the vagueness with which the word has been applied by various authors, it becomes very difficult to ascertain whether the recorded instances of chloranthy were really illustrations of what is here meant by that term, or whether they were cases of ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... board were not only willing, but anxious, to settle upon some definite line of action, the vagueness of their powers outlined by the members of the Commission, together with the obstacle presented by the lack of funds, had caused them to be most conservative in action; without the positive assurance of financial aid they were not in a position to decide definitely upon a plan of future work. This ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... few shades employed, and those chosen with judgment and placed with deliberate intention. If they mean something, there is no harm in letting it be seen where they meet: broad masses give breadth: vagueness generally means ignorance. That is, perhaps, why one dislikes it, and ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical science has created for natural objects has something to do with it. Curiosity and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no cultivated ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the vagueness of the sentiments and ideas of too large a portion of the working-class and to the impatience provoked by their wretched condition, may meet with a temporary, unintelligent approval, but their ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought—the vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned her head quickly to him. He took it for a movement of inquiry, but in this he was wrong. A great vagueness enveloped her impressions, but all her energy was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted to take upon herself, in a great exaltation of love and self-sacrifice, which is woman's sublime faculty; altogether on herself, every bit of it, leaving him nothing, not even ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... coming to Dethick if his father turned him out; while Robin himself inclined to a third alternative—the begging of his father to give him a sum of money and be rid of him; after which he proposed, with youthful vagueness, to set off for London and see what ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... of French democracy, that there is always mixed up with it the principle, more or less distinctly avowed, of the community of goods. Perhaps the vagueness we complain of in M. Louis Blanc, is dictated by mere prudence; perhaps there is no vagueness to the eye of a propagandist. One sentiment of French democracy he certainly expresses with sufficient hardihood. It is not often we meet with the principle of intervention between state and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... rain had fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easier to call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools. A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform; I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land. The dark red ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... meditations. An unwonted sense of comfort and well-being filled his body, while his mind was in its happiest vein. His thoughts mingled with the rings of smoke in the subdued light in which all forms and colours assume a pleasing vagueness. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... a perfectly uneventful one, and would have been comfortable enough but for the circumstances under which she made it. The telegram lay upon her lap, and she read it over and over again with increasing alarm as she noticed its careful vagueness, which seemed to her the worst sign of all. She was heartily relieved when she found that she was nearing Muirside: the journey had never seemed so long to her before. It was, indeed, longer than usual, for the railway line ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... I never loved anyone but you," he broke out, roughly and abruptly, able neither to repel nor to plead guilty to the charge she made, but miserably conscious that his one false step might cost him all that he held most dear. To Nan, the very vagueness and—as she deemed it—the irrelevance of his answer constituted an ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... deep rolling flood? Is it the result of natural order and wholesome growth in this vast community? Is it natural effervescence, or is it deadly fermentation? Is India with all its heterogeneous populations—is it moving slowly and steadily to new and undreamt of unity? It is the vagueness of the discontent, which is not universal—it is the vagueness that makes it harder to understand, harder to deal with. Some of them are angry with me. Why? Because I have not been able to give them the moon. I have got no moon, and if I had I would not part with it. I will give the ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... perceptible lack of virility, a fluctuating vagueness of outline about the characterisation of some of his men. In his treatment of crowds, in his description of a mob, personified as 'some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment,' he can have few rivals. In tracing the influence of women over his ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... it a suspension of their engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows, on to the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness. ...
— Different Girls • Various
... and, on glancing at the watch I wore strapped on my wrist, I saw it was two o'clock. A species of nervous dread now laid hold of me, and a thousand and one vague fancies, all the more distressing because of their vagueness, oppressed and disconcerted me. Moreover, I was impressed for the first time with the extraordinary solitude—solitude that seemed to belong to a period far other than the present, and, as I glanced around at the solitary pines and gleaming boulders, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... and the common people, the ugliness is more pleasant and sometimes becomes a kind of prettiness. The eyes are still too small and hardly able to open, but the faces are rounder, browner, more vivacious; and in the women remains a certain vagueness of feature, something childlike which prevails to the very end of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and newly flowering heliotrope. I don't know why I should mention this, except that some scenes impress themselves, for no particular reason, on the memory, while others associated with more important incidents fade into vagueness. I picked a bunch of heliotrope which she ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither domesticity ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... something very disagreeable in seeing that sort of thing in a child of her age," said Miss Minchin, with haughty vagueness. ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... event of importance, and the circumstances are simple historic facts, it is strange that there should be any uncertainty regarding the details of its solemnisation. But there is a certain vagueness about the narratives. One version is so amusing that it deserves a slight consideration.[14] The chronicler relates how Charles VII. felt some uneasiness at the delay in the negotiations. Conscious of the sentiments of the Duchess of Burgundy, ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... good-humored mockery disappeared. For an instant her face changed into something quite different from what they had seen. Mr. Welles could not at all make out the expression which very passingly had flickered across her eyes with a smoke-like vagueness and rapidity. He had the queerest fancy that she looked somehow scared,—but of course ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... It was a queer laugh. There was incredulity, uncertainty, a sense of vagueness in it; it suggested that ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... anatomical study is of course permeated with the suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological species. A biological species is quite obviously a great number of unique individuals which is separable from other biological species only by the fact that an enormous number ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... little at first from its vagueness, though I think my translation hit off its sense very well, but at last he saw ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... geometry, astronomy, and dialectic. Thus in each case mathematics is the first advance in knowledge, and dialectic the nearest to perfection. Most of Plato's examples are drawn from mathematics. This science replaces the variety and vagueness of the forms of experience with clear, unitary, definite, and eternal natures, such as the number and the geometrical figure. Thus certain individual things are approximately triangular, but subject to alteration, and indefinitely ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Vera rustled into her friend's room, with her usual air of vagueness and devotion, and said with a sort of ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... flowering heliotrope. I don't know why I should mention this, except that some scenes impress themselves, for no particular reason, on the memory, while others associated with more important incidents fade into vagueness. I picked a bunch of heliotrope which she pinned ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... several days. It was for this reason that I had been able that evening to sit much later than usual with Madeline on the moon-lit porch. The figure was certainly that of John Hinckman in his ordinary dress, but there was a vagueness and indistinctness about it which presently assured me that it was a ghost. Had the good old man been murdered? and had his spirit come to tell me of the deed, and to confide to me the protection of his dear—? My heart fluttered at what I was about to think, ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... terms, an order must be definite and must be the expression of a fixed decision. Ambiguity or vagueness indicates either a vacillation or the inability to ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... in "The Blithedale Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The House of the Seven Gables," is the scornful young radical; and both he and Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do anything directly to improve the condition ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... the west wind held its breath. The flames crawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose in dun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire and the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a sweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts and overalls, blackened ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... great calmness, told him that he saw nothing, absolutely nothing, upon which the Council could deliberate; that there was vagueness in all he had said. "Explain yourself; reveal the plot which you say you were urged ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... could be imagined. The news I had just heard made it melancholy; but nothing could disturb its character of profound serenity, and the enchanted glory and vagueness of the prospect. ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... say not that the answers were always satisfactory, nor are now inquiring whether any of them were so; we merely maintain that the objections in question are not the novelties they affect to be. We say this to obviate an advantage which the very vagueness of much modern opposition to Christianity would obtain, from the notion that some prodigious arguments have been discovered which the intellect of a Pascal or a Butler was not comprehensive enough to anticipate, and which no Clarke or Paley would ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... cautious word, in this author's mouth; the very cautiousness of it, the vagueness of it, provokes suspicion; it makes one suspect that this frequency was more frequent than the mere common everyday kinds of frequency which one is in the habit of averaging up with the unassuming term "frequent." I think so because they fixed up a bedroom for him in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... materialise, as was only to be expected in view of the vagueness of the proposals. Colombine did some advertising, and Mr Roebuck expressed himself as unwilling to proceed further in the venture. Henson experimented with models to a certain extent, while Stringfellow looked for funds for the construction of a full-sized monoplane. In November of 1843 he suggested ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... must be some kind of postscript to the burial service for the private consolation of the family, let her mind wander. The word 'testament' in the first sentence seemed to make this certain, and the sentence or two that followed had a polysyllabic vagueness which by habit she connected with the offices of religion. The strained look on Aunt Hannah's face drew her attention away from Mr. Tulse and his recital. Her ear had been caught, too, by a low whining ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... reflect these of the highest and most exclusive society. He began the career of honours under Vespasian [41] by obtaining his quaestorship, and, some years later, the aedileship. The dates of both these events are uncertain—another instance of the vagueness with which writers of this time allude to the circumstances of their own lives. We know that at twenty-one he married the daughter of Cn. Julius Agricola, and that he was praetor ten years afterwards. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... horrible moment of suspense to Algernon, as he beheld the hideous visage of the savage so near, and evidently gazing upon him; and thinking himself discovered, he was on the point of coming forth, when a certain vagueness in the look of the Indian, led him to hope he was not yet perceived; and he lay motionless, with his breath suspended. But, alas! his hope was soon changed to despair; for after gazing a moment longer, ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... Gradually out of the mist of her unhappiness the figure of Laura rose in the mirror before her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a general vagueness of light. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... science so in faith, reason were everything, our position would hardly be tenable, for then there should be no vagueness but clear vision. But the will enters for something in our act of faith. If everything we believe were as luminous as "two and two are four," a special act of the will would be utterly uncalled for. We must be able, free to dissent, and this is the reason of the obscurity ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... heaviness that hindered breath; she covered her eyes with her small cold fingers, seeking the dark, mute under torture. He was alive—that niggard concession was made to Allan Gerard, whose rich fullness of vigor and dominant presence last night had seemed the one firm reality in a world of pleasant vagueness. Weak, conscious of nothing but what her inward vision showed, she lay in her chair; questioning no more, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... that, now the first excitement of setting out was over, and the two women-folk left to themselves in the solitude of a compartment, Natalie might have begun to reflect with some tremor of the heart on the very vagueness of the task she had undertaken. But she was not permitted to do so. The necessity of driving away her mother's forebodings prevented her indulging in any of her own. She was forced ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... lack of virility, a fluctuating vagueness of outline about the characterisation of some of his men. In his treatment of crowds, in his description of a mob, personified as 'some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment,' he can have few rivals. In tracing the influence of women over ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT UNSTANDARDIZED.—As with all other discussions of any part or form of Traditional Management, the discussion of the incentive under Traditional Management is vague from the very nature of the subject. "Traditional" stands for vagueness and for variation, for the lack of standardization, for the lack of definiteness in knowledge, in process, in results. The rewards under Traditional Management, as under all types of management, are promotion and pay. It must be an almost unthinkably ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... because of vagueness. Such questions as, Should a practical man read poetry, Are lawyers a useful class in the community, Are the American people deteriorating, furnish excellent material for lively and witty talk, but no one expects them to lead ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... her two or three times, and had only chanced to say a few words to her. He thought of her as a beautiful, proud, imperious girl. It was not her beauty which troubled him, but something else. And the vagueness of his apprehension increased the apprehension itself. The girl's aims were of the noblest, he knew that. She was trying to save his brother Dmitri simply through generosity, though he had already behaved badly to her. Yet, although Alyosha recognized and did justice to all these ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... constituents as nearly as possible, place upon the market a health-food not for the body but for the mind. You follow me now, I am sure? Menti-culture is the craze of the moment. It would become the craze of the million but for a certain vagueness in its principles, a certain lack of appeal to direct energies. We will preach the cause. We will give the public something to buy. We will ask them ten and sixpence a time and they will pay it gladly. What is more, Mr. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... poem to his parents, upon its conclusion, both were much impressed by it, though his father made severe strictures upon its lack of polish, its terminal inconcision, and its vagueness of thought. That he was not more severe was accepted by his son as high praise. The author had, however, little hope of seeing it in print. Mr. Browning was not anxious to provide a publisher with a present. So one day the poet was gratified ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... which leads the thoughts to fasten upon one's own evils so entirely that the mind ceases to recognize, or even to remember, the long-suffering patience and mercy of the Heavenly Father. A more common, but less painful form of this fear is the result of vagueness in one's ideas of the Divine character and attributes. The clear and rational views which Swedenborg has given of the Divine Providence is undoubtedly the reason why religious melancholy is almost never found among the members of the New Church. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... a new and lovely beauty. At one end the street ended in a towering mass of stone; that doubtless was the cathedral. At the right, the narrow houses dipped suddenly; their roof-lines were lost in vagueness. Between the slit made by the street a deep, vast chasm opened; it was the night filling the great width of sky, and the mists that shrouded the hill, rising out of the sleeping earth. There was only one single line of light; a ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... of the spirit, with magic and richness of suggestion." Mr. Colvin then goes on to enforce and illustrate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of things" in classical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light—the "halo"—with which the romantic writer invests his theme. "The romantic manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions, may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... The ambiguity and unsatisfactory vagueness in what I have been attempting to indicate may perhaps be in a measure dissipated by a direct appeal to concrete experience. When one analyses this emotion of love in relation to any actual human object I think it becomes clear that in our attitude ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the younger woman in reply to one of the questions put by the painter during the few minutes when he was still under the influence of the vagueness that the shock had produced in his ideas, "my mother and I heard the noise of your fall on the floor, and we fancied we heard a groan. The silence following on the crash alarmed us, and we hurried up. Finding ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... what made him silent during the meal. He took little part in the conversation except when Mr. and Mrs. Elliott plied him with questions, which he then found himself answering with only unsatisfactory vagueness—answers that he could do nothing, not even when Julia flew tenderly to his rescue, to make any better. Yes, he liked the house, he said gravely. It was a nice old house. And he thought how murky, despite its new coats of cleaning, was that far corner up near the ceiling. No, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the great proposal in Parliament had been rumoured through the land, notwithstanding the instructed reticence or mysterious vagueness of the London newspapers; and, in the interval between the introduction of Sir Christopher Pack's paper and the conversion of the same into the Petition and Advice, with the distinct offer of Kingship in its forefront, there had been wide ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... point. He moved seemingly at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and remained idly agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a bench; after which he walked about again, only again to repeat both the vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was a man either with nothing at all to do or with ever so much to think about; and it was not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make had the effect of causing the burden of proof, in certain ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... those assemblies are of material interests, material prosperity, material projects. Of the moral well-being of the people seldom or never a word is heard; and, whenever a moral question does come up for discussion, the vagueness of the theories advanced and discussed, the indecision of the measures proposed, the want of unity in the views developed, show how unfit are modern legislators for even touching on what concerns the soul of man. The legislators themselves ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... that was thrown upon scientific and philosophical study by the discoveries which are grouped around the terms cells and protoplasm. Cells and protoplasm have become so thoroughly a part of modern biology that we can hardly picture to ourselves the vagueness of knowledge before these facts were recognized. Perhaps a somewhat crude comparison will illustrate the relation which the discovery of cells had to ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... the law religious, fraternal, equalising, industrial, literary, or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty; you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced Utopia, or, which is worse, in the midst of a multitude of Utopias, striving to gain possession of the law, and to impose it upon you; for fraternity and philanthropy ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... me to be relieved of my crass ignorance concerning round-ups, really to have a definite conception of the term instead of the sea of vagueness and conjecture into which I was plunged by the usual description—"Oh, just a whole lot of cattle driven to one place, and those that need it are cut out and frescoed." How many was a whole lot, how were they driven, where were they driven from, what were they cut out ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... doctor, dragged helter-skelter from his laboratory, was in wildest disarray, and his eyes were still a little vague, as he followed Brenton up the stairs to the nursery. Across the threshold of the nursery, however, the vagueness vanished; the eyes grew keen as sharp-pointed bits of steel, yet strangely gentle, while he sat down beside the crib and laid one mammoth brown hand above the scrawny little claw. Then, for just a minute, the keen eyes narrowed ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Christianity is only partially successful in curing the defect of unpunctuality. Both amongst priests and people, unless there happens to be some Englishman at hand with precise ideas about time, there is an extraordinary vagueness as to the hour for service, especially in country districts. Service begins when a sufficient number of people have arrived. The bell is very little guide, because when it has been rung and nobody comes, it is rung again. A few people turn up much too early. A few more ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... talk nearly a week ago, Evelyn had felt herself imperceptibly held at arms' length, and the vagueness of the sensation increased her discomfort tenfold. No word of reproach had passed his lips, nor any further mention of Diamond or the bills; nothing so quickly breeds constraint between two people as conscious avoidance of a subject that is seldom absent from the minds of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... died away. The study has passed from the metaphysical into an historical stage. Grammar is no longer confused with language, nor the anatomy of words and sentences with their life and use. Figures of speech, by which the vagueness of theories is often concealed, have been stripped off; and we see language more as it truly was. The immensity of the subject is gradually revealed to us, and the reign of law becomes apparent. Yet the law is but partially seen; the traces of it ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... or escapes from error by vagueness, and one would swear that Pope had never seen the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... and stood a moment looking out. Rose did not interrupt her. She knew that the house from which the light was shining sheltered a tragedy; she guessed with the vagueness of nineteen that it was a tragedy of passion and sin; but Catherine had not been communicative on the subject, and Rose had for some time past set up a dumb resistance to her sister's most characteristic ways of life and thought, which prevented her now from asking questions. She wished nervously ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... drift with the tide of innocent women and law-abiding men, once more one of themselves, and not even a magnet for morbid curiosity! That would come soon enough; the present was all the more to be enjoyed; and even the vagueness of the immediate future, even the lack of definite plans, had a glamor of their own in eyes that were yet to have their fill of street lamps and shop windows and omnibuses ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Perhaps there is a vagueness and inaccuracy in the description; but that is Raggles's fault. He should have recorded his sensations in ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... assured some way will be opened for our deliverance. While we endure all the horrors of our situation, we know of a surety that our miseries shall soon terminate. Yet a cloud was gathering upon my soul, and objects assumed another hue seen through its wild and chaotic elements. With all the vagueness and uncertainty of a dream, I felt ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... by "tens" is deep-seated, and leads to much vagueness. A few people are "ten or twenty," a "few tens," or perhaps "ever so many tens," and a strictly accurate enumeration is one of the rarest of experiences in China.... An acquaintance told the writer that two men had spent "200 strings ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... the exact line between activities to be wholly absorbed by the State and those which would be left to private enterprise. No wise Socialist I think—if there are wise Socialists—would attempt to draw such a line at present. There is a certain vagueness in the Socialists' presentation of ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... oscillations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within. Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed boundaries; hence, the vagueness as to the extent of tribal domains among all savage peoples, and the conflicting land claims which are the abiding source of war. Owing to these overlapping boundaries—border districts claimed but not occupied—the American ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... a few of us WERE angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be! I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into relief and made a ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... receive as soon as the exigencies of the campaign permitted. Instead of these funds, so greatly needed, came the tidings of a Union defeat, with her husband's name down among the missing. Beyond that brief mention, so horrible in its vagueness, she had never heard a word from the one who not only sustained her home, but also her heart. Was he languishing in a Southern prison, or, mortally wounded, had he lingered out some terrible hours on that wild battlefield, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... people were ably seconded by Joel Rae. He was loved like Brigham, but not feared. He preached like Brigham submission to the divine will as interpreted by the priesthood, but he was more extravagant than Brigham in his promises of blessings in store for them. He never resorted to vagueness in his pictures of what the Lord was about to do for them. He was literal and circumstantial to a degree that made Brigham and the older men in authority sometimes writhe in public and chide him in private. They were appalled at the sweeping ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... everywhere calls her "Sabiyah" the young lady and does not mention her name Halimah the Mild, the Gentle till the cmlxxivth Night. I follow Mr. Payne's example by introducing it earlier into the story, as it avoids vagueness and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... I can find a horse for you to ride. We'll sleep at the Double Diamond, and start from there in the morning. And if I catch you letting a word outa you about this deal, I'll just about have to arrest you for—" He did not quite know what, but the very vagueness of the threat ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... ring; and this high vision of the sea has a phantasmal effect hard to describe, and due to vapory conditions of the atmosphere. There are bright cloudless days when, even as seen from the city, the ocean-verge has a spectral vagueness; but on any day, in any season, that you ascend to a point dominating the sea by a thousand feet, the rim of the visible world takes a ghostliness that startles,—because the prodigious light gives to all near shapes such intense sharpness ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... dismissed and sent home in disgrace; but her dream, and the glimpse she had caught of her uncle and the observant stranger, who, as she saw, still maintained his position, suggested worse consequences, whose very vagueness made them ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Aeschylus reaches the pinnacle of tragic power. Cassandra advances to the palace, but starts back in horror as a series of visions of growing vividness comes before her eyes. These find utterance in language of blended sanity and madness, creating a terror whose very vagueness increases its intensity. First she sees Atreus' cruel murder of his brother's children; then follows the sight of Clytemnestra's treacherous smile and of Agamemnon in the bath, hand after hand reaching ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... subject of my attendance; and, on the first conference with the Marquis of Caermarthen, the Minister for foreign affairs, the distance and disinclination which he betrayed in his conversation, the vagueness and evasions of his answers to us, confirmed me in the belief of their aversion to have any thing to do with us. We delivered him, however, our Projet, Mr. Adams not despairing as much as I did of its effect. We afterwards, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... something apart from direct experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything which can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To regard known things as symbols, according ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... suit so cunningly devised to emphasize her charms, with the flowers slipping from her arms to the dusty rug, she wept at the vagueness of her recollections, the fading away of grief, to which she had once ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... and a plain face was lightened by a pair of exceedingly pleasant, exceedingly alert brown eyes. As soon as she met those eyes Claire felt assured that the kindness of which she had heard was a real thing, and that this woman could be counted upon as a friend. There was, it is true, a slight vagueness in the manner in which she made her greeting, but a murmur of "Mrs Fanshawe" instantly ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... without circle, vista beyond vista, till the imagination was staggered and the mind exhausted. Now here was a scheme for the accumulation of wealth and for laying the foundation of family aggrandisement purely imaginary, romantic—one might almost say, disinterested. The vagueness, the magnitude, the remoteness of the object, the resolute sacrifice of all immediate and gross advantages, clothe it with the privileges of an abstract idea, so that the project has the air of a fiction or of a story in a novel. It was an instance of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the bugle calls and fading echoes, and enjoy the rare and appropriate music. In the second case, the teacher should call attention to the artistic suggestions of loneliness, distance, antiquity, sadness, and vagueness that are suggested by "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago", and by such possible situations of English travellers in remote parts of the world, and should show that these elements are suitable for the circumstances under which the poet sees the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... when the Church itself was divided, in the eleventh century, was torn apart between the two beliefs. The dividing line between the jurisdictions of Rome and Constantinople ran from north to south through Bosnia, but naturally there has always been a certain vagueness about the extent of their respective jurisdictions. In later years the terms Croat and Roman Catholic on the one hand, and Serb and Orthodox on the other, became interchangeable. Hercegovina and eastern Bosnia have always been predominantly ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... the absence of mention of the Esk, and says "it is AFTER they are in England that the false reports are spread." {139a} But the ballad does not say so—read it! All passes with judicious vagueness. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... is the establishment of equality of opportunity accepted as the aim that must underlie all our institutions, even by conservatives like President Taft, but it is agreed that it is a perfectly definite principle. Nobody claims that there is any vagueness about it, as there is said to be about the demand for political, economic, ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... know your shrewd grey eyes are crackling with curiosity and, you want to know what it's all about, whether to scold me or mother me, and will I please omit the entrees and get to the roast mutton. But you dear, dear old aunt, you, there is more vagueness than detail, and I know I'll strain your patience before I've done. But, to relieve your mind, nothing at all has really happened. After all, it's mostly a troublesome state of mind, that I shall doubtless find gone when we ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... wife. The pair seemed to define each other's meaning in spite of the vagueness of ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... and abandoned himself luxuriously to his meditations. An unwonted sense of comfort and well-being filled his body, while his mind was in its happiest vein. His thoughts mingled with the rings of smoke in the subdued light in which all forms and colours assume a pleasing vagueness. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... vagueness, that dreamy spirituality about it, which many of the first critics of Arkansas have objected to in the Murillo school of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... on the other side, detesting plush, more than once accosted with leaflets, shifted irritably. He abhorred vagueness— the Christian religion, for example, and old Dean Parker's pronouncements. Dean Parker wrote books and Fraser utterly destroyed them by force of logic and left his children unbaptized—his wife did it secretly in the washing basin—but Fraser ignored her, and went on ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... a haughty chivalry. The features, if regular, were small; their expression meek and timid; the form, though tall, was not firm-knit and muscular; the lower limbs were too thin, the body had too much flesh, the delicate hands betrayed the sickly paleness of feeble health; there was a dreamy vagueness in the clear soft blue eyes, and a listless absence of all energy in the habitual bend, the slow, heavy, sauntering tread,—all about that benevolent aspect, that soft voice, that resigned mien, and gentle manner, spoke the exquisite, unresisting goodness, which provoked the lewd to taunt, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... impression which the absence of light immediately produced on his mind, was distrust of the curtained bed—distrust which shaped itself into no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough in its very vagueness, to bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast, and to set him listening intently. No sound stirred in the room but the familiar sound of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now than he ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... the title of Moral and Scientific Union. The government approved of it, merely interdicting it from political discussions. This resolution, noble as it was, would probably have been lost, like many others, in the vagueness of German metaphysics; but about that time William, Duke of Brunswick, who had been stripped of his duchy, had retired to his principality of Oels in Silesia. In the bosom of this retreat he is said to have observed the first progress of the Moral Union among the Prussians. ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... like fairy gold, would change to dull slate stones at light of day. She would never be Lady Catheron, never be mistress of this glittering Aladdin's Palace. It grew upon her day after day, this feeling of vagueness, of unreality. She was just adrift upon a shining river, and one of these days she would go stranded ashore on hidden quicksands and foul ground. Something would happen. The days went by like dreams—it was the middle of September. In little more than a fortnight would come the ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... The close connection which in many cases subsisted between Protestants and Roman Catholics, between Gueux and Royalists, and which not unfrequently gave them a common interest, led the latter to avail themselves of the loophole which the vagueness of the laws left open, and in favor of their Protestant friends and associates evaded by subtle distinctions all severity in the discharge of their duties. In their minds it was enough not to be a declared rebel, not one of the Gueux, or at ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... courage born of desperation, flung himself on the step, and climbing into the cart, fell in the straw at the bottom of it, sobbing out that he wanted to go back, go back! The situation had a vagueness; but the farmer, a man of action rather than words, swung his horse round smartly, and they were in the town again by the time Harold had recovered himself sufficiently to furnish some details. As they drove up to the shop, the woman was waiting at the door with the parcel; ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... simply worries and almost exasperates me to hear religious talk from any one. When I hear a sermon I feel an inclination always to say, 'My dear fellow, can't you put your case better?' I want good stuff about Divine and human nature—not this vagueness and platitude. Why don't they tell one something about the optimism of God, even before the spectacle of men's weakness? But, instead, we are told to moan about this vale of tears; we are promised chastisements, disappointments, woes, persecution. A ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... extent, however, both of facts and localities, and ideas—philosophic or imaginative, in the text of Ossian, was possible, has scarcely hitherto been believed by any one; it has certainly never been attempted. A sort of vagueness in many of his descriptions ill-understood, and a similarity in poetic figures that might be indiscriminately applied; and an occasional apparent conflict or confusion of details seem to have deterred almost all readers from the study ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... which, however unjust they may be, recognize their character as accountable beings. When it is inferred from the fact that the slave is called the property of his master, that he is thereby degraded from his rank as a human being, the argument rests on the vagueness of the term property. Property is the right of possession and use, and must of necessity vary according to the nature of the objects to which it attaches. A man has property in his wife, in his ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... warranted, "a completely integrated Army." In the interest of eventually achieving an integrated Army he was willing to settle for less than immediate and total integration, but nevertheless he attacked the board for what he called the vagueness of its recommendations. Progressive and planned integration, he told Secretary Patterson, demanded a clear and explicit policy stating that segregation was outmoded and integration inevitable, and the Army should move firmly and steadily from one ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... having her, at such a time, to think of. Milly's assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her friend was that of not being able to gainsay it without bringing it more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit. Nothing in fact came to the proof between them but that they could thus cling together—except indeed that, as we have indicated, the pledge of protection and support was all the younger woman's ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... point of the reporter's story there is a certain vagueness, but it can be gathered that there was a loud crashing noise at the rear of the house they were in. General Ludlow buttoned his coat closely and sprang for the door. But the reporter clutched him firmly with one hand, while he held the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr. Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... warnings I had received. It sounded to me very bizarre—and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress, like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so callous or so stupid as not to recognize there also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning—because what can be the meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?—arrested one's attention by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of la belle Madame ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... formulate it in words, or even enumerate its phases by any system of analysis, but there were moments when her mind surged with feelings which she knew that she had never felt before, and she caught herself framing visions whose very vagueness of outline swelled before her like the shadows of a portent. At times, too, through these mists there flashed illuminations which startled her, and made her innocent heart shrink as if they were presentiments ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... Such vagueness and uncertainty, if not positive misunderstanding with regard to source, are characteristic of many romances. It is not difficult to find explanations for this. The writer may, as was suggested before, be reproducing a story which he has only heard or which he has read at ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... was a great breath. In its suddenness and its vagueness the listener was unable to distinguish whether it came from a dozen yards down the trail, or a couple of dozen inches from his elbow. His nose, however, assured him that he had not the latter alternative to face; so he waited, his right ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... ocean, that to McKay was the enemy paramount which had awakened him to the stinging vagueness of things out of his ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... childish consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all that adroitly and with the appropriate lightness of heart. The dream, however, has been left for the most part in the usual vagueness of dreams: in their waking hours people have been too busy to furnish it forth with details. What follows is a quaint legend, with detail enough, of such a return of a golden or poetically-gilded age (a denizen of old Greece itself actually finding his way back again among men) as ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... strangeness demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, and sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He delighted in a work of art, both for what it was in itself and for what it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it, as though sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... it all was, it had no mood to suggest. It but accentuated the moods of those who came there, and by its very vagueness and softness reflected the spirits of its visitors. It was impossible to imagine a place more conducive to foster and cherish a man's inclinations; to the lover it would be a place ideal for a honeymoon, to the studious an admirable ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... majestas' in all its dark incomprehensibility had fallen like a weight upon the tavern company, and effectually checked any further conversation. It was one of those successful efforts of Mr. Netlips, which, by its ponderous vagueness and inscrutability, produced an overwhelming effect. There was nothing to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of something in the eyes that redeemed their vagueness. A rushlight seen shining through a night of mist upon a desolate mountain-side might have meant as little or as much to eyes that saw it. Saxham saw it, and it meant much to him. His great chest lifted on a wave of hope as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... consists of the Gaelic ballads. True to the vehemence and tendencies of the Celtic people, and representing equally their vagueness and extravagance during slavish times, they nevertheless remain locked from the middle and upper classes generally, and from the peasantry of more than half Ireland, in an unknown language. Many of them have been translated ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... inherent vagueness of the term, on which no settled understanding was ever had, although England held it to be synonymous with Nova Scotia and France denied that it extended more than 10 leagues from ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the summer days that go by so fast, bringing winter behind them. What the Greeks had striven to attain, that naturalness in sculpture, as though the god were really about to breathe and put out its hand, that wonderful vagueness of Michelangelo akin to nature, by which he attained the same life giving effect, a something more than mere form, bloomed in Luca's work like a new wild flower. Expression, life, the power to express the spirit in marble and terra-cotta, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... our world has seen; Roman triumphs and ovations, Cabiric cymbal-beatings, Royal progresses, Irish funerals: but this of the French Monarchy marching to its bed remained to be seen. Miles long, and of breadth losing itself in vagueness, for all the neighbouring country crowds to see. Slow; stagnating along, like shoreless Lake, yet with a noise like Niagara, like Babel and Bedlam. A splashing and a tramping; a hurrahing, uproaring, musket-volleying;—the truest segment of Chaos ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... street," I answered, with deliberate vagueness. Nancy had suddenly become demure. I did not dare look at her, but I had a most uncomfortable notion that she suspected the plot. Meanwhile we had begun to walk along, all three of us, Tom, obviously ill at ease ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the infallible authority of which is not open to dispute within the church itself; while the liability of them to misinterpretation (as in the case of the Quanta Cura and Syllabus) brings in still another element of vagueness and uncertainty. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... modern painters have not the lightness of touch necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither domesticity nor melodrama, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... to Ethics as it is to Dogmatics; and upon our doctrine of evil depends very largely our interpretation of life in regard to its difficulties and purposes, its trials and triumphs. In the meantime it is enough to remark that considerable vagueness of idea and looseness of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of the life-history of Animals is illustrated by the vagueness of our information as to the age to which they live. Professor Lankester[18] tells us that "the paucity and uncertainty of observations on this class of facts is extreme." The Rabbit is said to reach 10 years, the Dog and Sheep 10-12, the Pig 20, the Horse 30, the Camel 100, the Elephant ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... Hanover Square) was contested, and there were often as many as six or seven candidates for one division. It was said at the time that "the uncertainty of the issues, the multitude of candidates, and the vagueness of parties made it impossible to tabulate the results with the same accuracy and completeness which are possible in the case of the House of Commons." Some candidates stood professedly as Liberals, and others as Conservatives. The majority, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... fact that it satisfies a demand of our being, expression is most important in that it tests the clearness of the applied knowledge. We often think that our impression is clear, only to discover its vagueness when we attempt to express it in some form. People often say that they understand a fact thoroughly, but they cannot exactly express it. Such a statement is usually incorrect. If the impression were clear, the expression under ordinary circumstances would also be clear. ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... euphemisms of "fallen nature" or "corrupt humanity." The boasted discovery of phrenologists, that thought, feeling, and passion reside in this material brain and nerves of ours, has ages ago been anticipated by her simple faith in the letter of Scripture; a faith which puts to shame the irreverent vagueness and fantastic private interpretations of those who make an idol of that very letter which they dare not take literally, because it makes against their ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... he was paying mentally an equal compliment to circumstance and to the girl herself. Capacity was there, it could be freely trusted; observation would have but to sow its generous seed. "A superior woman"—the idea had harsh associations, but he watched it imaging itself in the vagueness of the future with a kind ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... of that body, but which had met with general favour from the people. He then referred to the act of Assembly, and made some explanatory remarks upon it. He ably defended the law from the remarks of his opponent, in regard to its vagueness and insufficiency. On the whole, he regarded it as a good one. It could be effectively put in force, and was calculated to ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... not know exactly what she was talking about, but he made up for vagueness by fervor. "After we are married," he cried, "I'll move mountains ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Orbajosa heard in the twilight vagueness of their morning slumbers the same sonorous clarionet, and they opened their ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... sufficiently important to authorize from him to her, in due process of time, a short perfunctory message regretting his inability to present himself at the appointed hour at Strathorn House. Whether the young girl found in the letter a vagueness warranting a suspicion that John Steele preferred the heavy duties of the city to the light frivolities of the country matters not; suffice it the weeks passed and no further invitations, in the ponderous script of the ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... in the corner, a little—you are right, it gives a softness, a vagueness, a—it is very funny, that little pot of blue. How ugly it must be! How things lead on one to another! Once one's hair is powdered, one must have a little pearl powder on one's face in order not to look as yellow as an orange; and one's cheeks ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... art and the real claims of science to public patronage and protection. True it is that to differentiate between art and science is like drawing distinctions between black and white; and in excuse I must plead the ordinary vagueness and weakness of the public mind, its inability very often to differentiate between things the most opposed, and a very general tendency to attempt to justify the existence of art on the grounds of utility—that is to say, educational influences ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... be doubted that Napoleon meant the limits conceded at Frankfort, to which he was well convinced the Allies would not consent, for circumstances were now changed. Besides, what could be meant by the reasonable equivalent from England? Is it astonishing that this obscurity and vagueness should have banished all confidence on the part of the Plenipotentiaries of the Allied powers? Three days after the sitting of the 10th of March they declared they could not even enter into a discussion of the verbal protocol of the French Minister. They requested ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... lost all their vagueness. Either Miss Cahere had hit the mark with her second shot, or else he was making a mental note of the fact that Mr. Mangles belonged to that amiable body of amateurs, ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... these cases, but, for obvious reasons, it is difficult to give a full and accurate description of any of them. The reader, therefore, must be content to accept my assurance of their genuine nature. One or two, however, may be alluded to with becoming vagueness. Here is an example of a not infrequent kind, when a person arrives at the office having ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... my fears had been of malicious natives and tigers; they now, however, changed, and I was confronted with a dread of what I could not understand and could not analyse—of something that suggested an appearance, alarming on account of its very vagueness. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... Lucia strained her eyes to distinguish the size or form of the land. The end of the island which they were approaching was still thickly wooded, and the drooping branches added still more vagueness to the outline. Only as they came nearer a small clearing was dimly distinguishable, where a kind of promontory ran out into the river, and on the point of land a ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... of the Jewish spiritual movement at a time of great spiritual awakening is meager, the picture of Herod's great buildings, despite occasional confusion and vagueness, is full and valuable. He gives us an excellent description of Caesarea and Sebaste, the two cities which the king established as a compliment to the Roman Emperor, and an account of the Temple and the fortress of Antonia, which ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... that I could bear. Do you not see that by your very vagueness you are exciting my thoughts and hopes? You do ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... different tones— anger and impatience by low,—fear and pain by high notes. (38. Rengger, 'Saugethiere von Paraguay,' s. 49.) The sensations and ideas thus excited in us by music, or expressed by the cadences of oratory, appear from their vagueness, yet depth, like mental reversions to the emotions and thoughts of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... cannot say the strongest, for strong impressions are incompatible with such work as this) left by the masterpiece of Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most astonishing vagueness, fluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In reading it one looks back to that rudely hewn and extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to something quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked as to something distinctly ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... argument out at once. Striding across the square on the following morning, he had bearded Barrett on his own doorstep. Coming back again a few minutes later, he had been strongly of opinion that he had only made matters worse. The man had been vagueness itself. He had not been to be either challenged or browbeaten into anything more definite than a muttered farrago in which the words "Certain things ... Mrs. Barrett ... respectable house ... if the cap ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... the book lay there between her knees, all its technical vagueness menacing her with unknown terrors; and she felt that she could endure it ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... explained. Professor Mueller and his contemporaries used to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first discovered ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... knocked at the door of the house of mourning as I so often had done before. I could never call on Mr. Offord again, but I had come literally to call on Brooksmith. I wanted to ask him if there was anything I could do for him, tainted with vagueness as this inquiry could only be. My presumptuous dream of taking him into my own service had died away: my service wasn't worth his being taken into. My offer could only be to help him to find another place, and yet there was an indelicacy, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... myself, however strange it may appear. I don't pretend to be able to analyze my own motives; I don't pretend even to guess how other women might have acted in my place. It is true of me, that my husband's terrible warning—all the more terrible in its mystery and its vagueness—produced no deterrent effect on my mind: it only stimulated my resolution to discover what he was hiding from me. He had not been gone two minutes before I rang the bell and ordered the carriage, to take me to Major Fitz-David's house in ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... and mountains are all Everests. He had felt it when he talked with Ruth about Bill and the squirrels, and he felt it now. He was conscious of being extraordinarily irritated, not so much with any particular person as with the world in general. The very vagueness of Bailey's insinuations against Basil Milbank ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... at the watch I wore strapped on my wrist, I saw it was two o'clock. A species of nervous dread now laid hold of me, and a thousand and one vague fancies, all the more distressing because of their vagueness, oppressed and disconcerted me. Moreover, I was impressed for the first time with the extraordinary solitude—solitude that seemed to belong to a period far other than the present, and, as I glanced around at the solitary pines and gleaming ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... the spirits and enfeebles the vital powers. The prospect of death, even when its approach is realised—and this is not so rare as some may imagine—brings in general but small alarm. This may be from the vagueness of the child's ideas; it may be, as the poet says, that in his short life's journey, 'the heaven that lies about us in our infancy' has been so much with him, that he recognises more clearly than ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... England so well as she, or who has the peculiar genius so to profit by the knowledge. Already there have been scenes in 'The Minister's Wooing' that, in their lowness of tone and quiet truth, contrast as charmingly with the humid vagueness of the modern school of novel-writers as 'The Vicar of Wakefield' itself, and we are greatly mistaken if it do not prove to be the most characteristic of Mrs. Stowe's works, and therefore that on which her fame will ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... gaining precision in opposition to her vagueness, "his Helen is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... to be nothing, nothing tangible save vagueness. He felt he was in a blind spot in space, a place of no dimensions, no time, where beings abhorred by nature, things which had never developed any dimensional ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... that there were officers of the French Army in Liege and Namur before the war broke out. Neither names nor dates have been given, and the allegation might be fairly dismissed because of the very vagueness of the charge. But even if it were true, international law does not forbid the officers of one nation serving with the armies of another. German officers have for many years been thus employed in Turkey and engaged in training ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... thousand. A large number crossed the plains from the Western States, and many of them sought for farming lands upon which to settle. To them a grant of land, leagues in extent, seemed a monstrous wrong to which they could not be reconciled. The vagueness, also, in many instances, of the boundaries of the land claimed gave force and apparent reason to their objections. They accordingly settled upon what they found unenclosed or uncultivated, without much regard to the claims of the Mexican grantees. If the land upon which they thus settled ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... essayed to speak I found it impossible to utter a single intelligible word; moreover, I must have been on the very verge of becoming unconscious, from the violence of my agitation, for I had precisely the same feeling that one experiences when dreaming—a sensation of vagueness and unreality as to what was transpiring, so that, when Miss Onslow spoke, her voice sounded faint and far away, and her words, although I heard them distinctly, conveyed no special ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... and of ignorance. Many people will know nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of the play, others a vague and misleading summary. It would be ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... ascertain general principles, and more than Milton's usual disregard of method. A jurist's question, is here handled by a rhetorician. He has preached a noble and heart-stirring sermon on his text, but the problem for the legislator remains where it was. The vagueness and confusion of the thoughts finds a vehicle in language which is too often overcrowded and obscure. I think the Areopagitica has few or no offences against taste; on the other hand, it has few or none of those grand passages which redeem the scurrility of his political ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... South—or somewhere," answered Mrs. Piper, radiating that divine vagueness that helps to lift beauty ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
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