"Indefinable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... precisely. But the town soon began to comprehend that he was a rising man, a man to watch. The town admitted that, so far, he had lived up to his reputation as a dancer with countesses. The town felt that there was something indefinable about Denry. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... that phase of it consideration. He did remember that he had been strongly impressed by the way she had managed her bolting horse. But aside from that, there had been something in her personality, an indefinable calm and sureness, a grip upon herself, that he had felt the very first moment. Undoubtedly all this had flicked him into a novel curiosity. He pulled himself together with ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... the idealist who translates his vision into the actuality of the hour and who also exalts this actuality of the hour to the universality of the vision. In the creation of portrait busts and of the statues and monumental memorials of great men he infuses into them the indefinable quality of extended relation which relegates his work to the realm of the universal and, therefore, to the immortality of art, rather than restricting it to the temporal locality. Louis Gorse observes that it is not the absence of faults that constitutes a masterpiece, but that it is flame, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... contain a single minor note of apology and the country will visualize you at the head of the column. You know this country, and every country, wants a man to lead it of whom it is proud, not because of his talent but because of his personality,—that which is as indefinable as charm in a woman, and I want to see your personality known to the American people, just as well as we know it who sit around the Cabinet table. Your speech glows with it, and that is why it gives me such joy that I can't help writing ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... composed of his valued friend, Samuel Burnett—his fine face alight with his purpose—and two gray-bearded men of somewhat unpromising exterior, but plainly of prominence in the church, by the indefinable look of them. He watched the three climb the pulpit stairs, and come up to the figure in the chair—Sam, with tact, ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... outward-bound, deep-water American ship. Mr. Jackson looked in vain for the heavy, foreign faces, the greasy canvas jackets and blanket trousers he was accustomed to see. Not that these men seemed to be landsmen—each carried in his face and bearing the indefinable something by which sailors of all races may distinguish each other at a glance from fishermen, tugmen, and deck-hands. They were all young men, and their intelligent faces—blemished more or less with marks of overnight ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... paleness, were her cheek and forehead, which wore an appearance of almost marble immobility, save when, in moments of oft recurring abstraction, a slight but marked contraction of the brow betrayed the existence of a feeling, indefinable indeed by the observer, but certainly unallied to softness. Still was she beautiful—coldly, classically, beautiful—eminently calculated to inspire passion, but ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... him with a faint smile. She spoke with great deliberation, but very clearly, and there was in her voice some hidden quality, indefinable in words, yet both ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her happiness had seemed complete, but Darrell's absence on that morning of all mornings had seemed to her inexplicable, and when her guests had taken their departure and the long day wore on without his return and with no message from him, an indefinable dread haunted her. She had watched eagerly for Darrell's return, believing that one look into his face would banish her forebodings, but, instead, she had read there only a confirmation of her fears. And now she waited in suspense, longing, yet dreading to ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... meeting for a moment in honest grief. In some indefinable way, this parting marked the end ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... there was a mysterious and indefinable sentiment with which Dionysia had inspired him; for he had succumbed to her charms, like everybody else. It was not love, for he who says love says hope; and he knew perfectly well that altogether and forever Dionysia belonged to Jacques. ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... affair with such abhorrence. For, much as she liked George, her hesitation to become his wife and renounce the bachelor-girl career to which, since her last birthday—her twenty-fifth—she had felt herself committed, was a sort of indefinable suspicion as to the real integrity of his standards. He was an excellent talker, of course; his ideals of public life and private ethics, as expressed in drawing-rooms, or during pleasant dialogues when they were alone together, were exemplary. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... slowly on, as people naturally would who were about to be overwhelmed in a calamity that threatened their annihilation, while an indefinable sensation of sleepiness and inertia seized the whole of the party. Vultures and other birds of prey screamed dismally, as they hovered round our heads in the greatest excitement, arising either from terror or the anticipation of a rich repast, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... perceptible: momentary touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust. And Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure—in spite too of medicine and biology; for the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... easily through that indefinable change between a young girl and a married woman: her step was firmer, her smile freer, her head more quietly poised. Some other change, too, in her look, showed that her affections had grown truer and wider of range than before. Meaner women's hearts contract after marriage about their husband ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with an indefinable expression in her eyes, and Dr. HERDAL looks on gloomily as the Curtain ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... New York," and "Mr. Potter of Texas," and "Miss Nobody of Nowhere," and "That Frenchman," which should have been called "M. De Vernay of Paris." Those were the earliest and the "big four." The list of successors is a long one, but that certain something, that indefinable quality, which had made the first books great trash was irrevocably gone. Of all the flamboyant characters of the tales Mr. Barnes was deservedly the most popular, and at such times as he was not winning international rifle ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... of the third afternoon May had completed the best sketch she had ever done. Just as she was putting the finishing stroke to it, a gondola went gliding by, an old and shabby one, and in the tall figure at the stern she recognised Nanni. An indefinable shadow crept over the bright elation of a moment previous, and ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... after their early supper that Coleman came down to camp at the heels of Chip and the Old Man. Straightway he sought out Andy like a man who has something on his mind; though Andy did not in the least know what it was, he recognized the indefinable symptoms and braced himself mentally, half suspecting that it was something about that blue roan again. He was getting a little bit tired of the blue roan—enough so that, though he had chosen him for his string, ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... growths of sun and planet and satellite; through all varieties of matter; through infinite diversities of life and thought; possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the cosmos is its impermanence. It assumes the aspect not so much of a permanent entity as of a changeful process in which naught endures save the flow of energy and the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... drawn two diverging lines which at first are at a definite distance apart, but are produced to infinity, it is certain that the distance between the two lines will be continually increased, until at length it changes from definite to indefinable. As these absurdities follow, it is said, from considering quantity as infinite, the conclusion is drawn, that extended substance must necessarily be finite, and, consequently, cannot appertain to ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... taut, indefinable something in the air that kept the desire for sleep from both; in the brooding darkness they were alert, watchful, expectant. The tobacco-loving Pendleton afterwards recalled with surprise that not once did he think of the weed. But when the queer, mysterious ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... A subtile, indefinable prevision had suggested to her that Colonel Philibert would not have failed to meet Le Gardeur at Beaumanoir, and that he would undoubtedly accompany her brother on his return and call to pay his respects to the Lady de Tilly and—to herself. She felt her cheek ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... literary way, and need not further detain us. It was the irresolute pilgrimage of a man who had not yet received his vocation. Everywhere he was received in the best society, and the charm of his manner and his ingenuous nature made him everywhere a favorite. He carried that indefinable passport which society recognizes and which needs no vise. He saw the people who were famous, the women whose recognition is a social reputation; he made many valuable friends; he frequented the theatre, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... having seen the horse, which was a sorrel with a white left forefoot and a white nose. The men noticed him and reined up a little. Why he should have been startled by the presence of these men he could not tell, but an indefinable dread seized him. They galloped on, and he stood still shivering with a nervous fear. The cold seemed to have got into his bones. He remembered that the region lying on Flat Creek and Clifty Creek had the reputation of being infested with thieves, who practiced horse-stealing and house-breaking. ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... other artists—he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell—the affair is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this—that what most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature, the large general manner of existing. Of course, he is the result of evolution from the primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude visions of life in the cafe or the club, or on the kerbstone. ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... came the feelings which must follow fierce love and deadly action and vague remorse and fear of something indefinable. He saw the face and form of Lightfoot; he saw again the struggle, death-ending, with the friend of youth and of mutual growing into manhood. He remembered dimly the half insane flight, the leaps across the dreaded morass and, more distinctly, the chase by the wolves. The aspect of the Fire ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... haughty ones left behind, sullen and untamed, but with a horrible indefinable dread on them that was worse than death, or mere pain, howsoever fierce—these saw all the ships go out of the harbour merrily with swelling sail and dashing oar, and with joyous singing of those aboard; and Svend's was the ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... of the Wartburg where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall; the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms; he was worn-down with long labour, with sickness, abstinence from food: there rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work: Luther started-up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the chief to the exiled family constituted a strong bond of union between Lovat and his followers; and having them once under his command, "that indefinable magic by which he all his life swayed those who neither loved nor esteemed him," to borrow Mrs. Grant's expression, caused them afterwards to follow his desperate fortunes. "He resembled, in this respect," says the same admirable writer, "David when in the cave of Adullam, for every ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... to Clochegourde, conversing by fits and starts. Once in the salon an indefinable uncertainty and dread took possession of us. The count flung himself into an armchair, absorbed in reverie, which his wife, who knew the symptoms of his malady and could foresee an outbreak, was careful not to interrupt. I also kept silence. As she gave me no hint to leave, ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... sounds that greeted the mourner as he wandered listlessly from room to room apparently looking for some object, some vague uncertainty, something indefinable. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... very powerful influence over his destiny, nevertheless. There was a strange fascination in the society of the Austrian widow—a nameless, indefinable charm, which few were able to resist. A bitter experience of vice and folly had robbed Reginald Eversleigh's heart and mind of all youth's freshness and confidence, and for him this woman seemed only what she was, an adventuress, dangerous ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... every day—except for two months' holiday, varied only by occasional tours of inspection—sounds horrible slavery to a man accustomed to wander at his own free will; and finally, at my time of my life, I have an indefinable dislike to anything involving a total change of life and habits. En revanche, I have a provision for old age and for my family, and shall be almost as glad to be spared the necessity of writing for bread—for butter ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... There was a permeating tonal effect in the music, striking at times, merely suggestive at others, which seemed to breathe the spirit of bivouac and battle, of suffering and patriotism, and the yearning of great devotion. A lump came into her throat. An indefinable emotion swept her with an appreciation of the spirit of a soldier which renders him happy at the thought of dying in his country's battles. The flood-gates of Peggy's tears were open, and she wept unrestrainedly. Presently Colonel Dayton ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... Hugh Carew began. He was a man uninteresting to look upon, save that his face wore a certain indefinable expression of a man who has been a stranger in many places; a man habituated to loneliness and to silence. But he was evidently a man also accustomed to speak, for he addressed ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... laboured up the steep slope, wallowing in the sliding snow, straining silently at the load; again they threw themselves, exhausted, upon it. Now, as he eyed the panorama below, it seemed to have suffered a subtle change, indefinable and odd. Although but a few minutes had elapsed, the coast mountains no longer loomed clear against the horizon, and his visual range appeared foreshortened, as though the utter distances had lengthened, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... with a sudden smile; the love of little children was a great joy to him, and the touch of these small hands gave him the indefinable comfort of hope. God, who had made the sweetness of childhood, would be merciful to his own children. He would give them time, He would not withdraw the day of grace; surely Tom Davis's soul would yet be saved. There was a ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... course,—and it is curious to study in the two pictures those points in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The treatment of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but where the greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost in that indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to that brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower and ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting of note in Venice, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... sensitive child, after this experience she was careful not to reveal her feelings to anyone. She felt instinctively that in this she was different from others. Her sense of beauty developed early, but there was always an indefinable feeling of melancholy associated with it. The twilight, a dark night when the stars shone brightly; these had a very depressing effect upon her, but possessed a strong attraction nevertheless, and pictures appealed to her. At the age of 12 she ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... quite picturesque. His manner was at once courteous and cordial and his conversation charming, so that strangers were quickly won, and in friends who knew him well he inspired strong affection and respect.[427] There was an indefinable air of authority about him, as befitted a man of great heart and lofty thoughts.[428] Out of those kindling eyes looked a grand and poetic soul, touched with that divine spark of religious enthusiasm ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... cannot be distinguished. Thus they say that there is a certain divine person in the man Jesus Christ; but that, when they use the term 'person,' they mean, not a person, but a certain indefinite and indefinable distinction. The later Unitarians, meantime, are found asserting that God is present in Christ in a mysterious and peculiar communication of his being; so that he is the living embodiment and express image of God. If, now, the question ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called seriousness,—which means the willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be in se, it is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be our rule of life. There can be no greater incongruity than for a disciple of Spencer ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... sit down again for a minute or two to dream pleasant dreams and think pleasant thoughts. At last I rose and turned towards the door—it was standing wide open, by the bye. But I had hardly made a step from the fireplace when I was stopped short by what I saw. Again the same strange indefinable feeling of not knowing how or when it had come there, again the same painful sensation of perplexity (not yet amounting to fear) as to whom or what it was I saw before me. The room, you must understand, was perfectly ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... there seemed to be nobody else moving. She filled the hall with grace, and the heart of the spectator with an indefinable longing. She carried strings of bouquets. She made men happy by asking them to hold some of her flowers while she danced; and then, when she returned to take them, the gentlemen were steeped in such a gush ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... flour sack containing her belongings on the counter and registered. He saw in Kate only a woman peculiarly dressed, with a tanned and not too clean face, dishevelled hair, weary-eyed, and alone at a late hour. He missed altogether the indefinable atmosphere of character and substantiality which a more discerning and experienced person ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... of this imposing occasion. Pen and pencil can describe but faintly the majestic order, the admirable regularity, the blaze of diamonds, the beauty of a brilliant illumination, the gorgeous dresses, and above all the noble ease, the indefinable grace, and perfect elegance which have always characterized the ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... combat, but lurked with his chest under the table and his eyes cast down, Mrs. Wilfer proceeded, in a voice of increasing sternness and impressiveness, until she should force that skulker to give himself up. "Mama would appear to have had an indefinable foreboding of what afterward happened, for she would frequently urge upon me, 'Not a little man. Promise me, my child, not a little man. Never, never, never marry a little man!' Papa also would remark to me (he possest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... pretty, my dear," Mr. Marcy admitted. No sane man could do otherwise. The little house might have been placed very comfortably between the walls of the dining-room at the Marcy country house, but there was an indefinable, undeniable air of gracious hospitality and homelikeness about its aspect, and its surroundings gave it an appearance of being ample for the accommodation of any two people not anxious to get away ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... into her presence, they would have been amply repaid for their admiring curiosity concerning her. It is trite to speak of a woman as being radiantly beautiful, commonplace to refer to it at all, save by implication, since feminine beauty is a composite attribute, vague and indefinable, and should possess no single quality to individualize it. Beauty such as that possessed by Princess Zara can neither be defined nor described. It is the tout ensemble of her presence and ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... that lives there is mingled like pollen an indefinable element of the author's personality. In Thackeray's "Lectures on English Humorists" this subtle quality is particularly apparent. Elusive, delicate, alluring—it is the actinic ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... movement, there was a generous spirit and a chivalry in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the Conestoga, and the lazy canal boat, which did not to an equal degree pervade the iron age of the railroad. When machinery takes the place of human brawn and patience, there is an indefinable eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and levers and differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes and muscles. The old days of coach and canal boat had a picturesqueness and a comradeship of their own. In the turmoil and confusion and odd mixing of every kind of humanity along ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... function of the substance of the brain." Walter Bagehot, like Maudsley, suggests that the newly born child has his destiny inscribed on his nervous tissues.[203] Mr. Buckle assures us that certain underlying but indefinable laws of society, as indicated by statistics, control human action irrespective of choice or moral responsibility. Even accidents, the averages of forgetfulness or neglect, are the subjects of computation. To support his position he cites the averages of suicides, or the number ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... paper-knife and the third volume with me. The cat had followed me out of the library, and sat down in a convenient position so that I could scratch it gently behind the ear if I wanted to. I was smoking a pipe that had just reached the right stage of maturity, and, in some indefinable way, made life seem richer and better. Everything was well arranged for ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... Nancy was the prey to indefinable anxieties and vague forebodings. Everybody had noticed her sadness. Mr. Campbell had spoken of it with concern and had promised to take them all on another trip to ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... the Ritzes of two continents there could not have been found another like her, for never had I beheld a face as exquisite—and I've seen many. It possessed a beauty that left me helpless—yet there was an indefinable sadness in it that might have ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... streets or sitting indoors at home, which lasts us our lifetime, and about the confines of which no doubt can exist in the minds of reasonable people. But in truth this "we," which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and indefinable aggregation of many component parts which war not a little among themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps due to this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound and light is due to the jarring of vibrations. Moreover, as the component parts ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... entered the wood, the laughter and talking before it growing louder. Each grey marksman twitched his cartridge box in place, glanced at his musket, glanced toward his immediate officer. Across the intervals ran an indefinable spark, a bracing, a tension. Some of the men moistened their lips, one or two uttered a little sigh, the hearts of all beat faster. The step had quickened. The trees grew more thinly, came down to a mere bordering fringe of sumach. Cleave motioned to the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... was the condition of Godfrey Cass in this six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion, delusion, and waking from ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... my prison, there was certainly a cold wind blowing down the shaft, and later there was a kind of sirocco upward that corresponded with my fever. For at the end of about three weeks I fell ill of an indefinable sort of fever, and in spite of sleep and the quinine tabloids that very fortunately I had brought in my pocket, I remained ill and fretting miserably, almost to the time when I was taken into the presence of the Grand Lunar, who ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... we acted up to our great national motto of De mortuis nil nist bunkum. It is this class of success which puzzles the social student. How comes it that men without any other talent possess a mysterious and indefinable talent to succeed? Well, it seems to me that such men always display certain characteristics. And the chief of these characteristics is the continual, insatiable wish to succeed. They are preoccupied with ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... true, though none of them would acknowledge it—except the Talentless One herself. She was, as she insisted, the odd one in the busy little B-Hive. Her very face, small and dark and lean, was an "odd" one; the faces of the other three were marked by an indefinable something that she called talent, and she was not far wrong. A subtle refinement, intellectuality, asserted itself gently in all three of them. The dark little face of T.O. was vivacious and keen, but not ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... in bed by ten, for we wanted to be up and away on our tramp homeward with the dawn. I hung fire, but Harris went to sleep at once. I hate a man who goes to sleep at once; there is a sort of indefinable something about it which is not exactly an insult, and yet is an insolence; and one which is hard to bear, too. I lay there fretting over this injury, and trying to go to sleep; but the harder I tried, the wider awake I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... down, his action being imitated by Sexton. The bar-tender came forward around the end of the bar, while the man nearest shifted his position slightly so as to look them over, conversation instantly ceasing. Something indefinable in the fellow's attitude, and steady stare, gave West a feeling of hostility, which was not dispelled by the gruff greeting of ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... family either excited or fully occupied, and yet he was soon aware that a certain indefinable change in himself was only the more conspicuous for his fitful ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... it at first. There is no wonder that the work inspired such reverence, for it is a natural characteristic of Spinello to endow his figures with a certain simple grace, partaking of modesty and holiness, so that his saints and particularly his Virgins breathe an indefinable sanctity and divinity which inspire men with devotion. This may be seen also in a Madonna which is on the side of the Albergetti, in one on an outside wall of the Pieve in Seteria, and in another of the same kind on the side of the canal. ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... astonishment I gave him provoked the first and only sneer I have ever seen on his face. What was I to say—what could I say, in response to such a declaration, following so immediately upon his warm assertion of her innocence? Nothing. With that indefinable chill between us, which had come I know not ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... gambling for me," said Lucien; he was quite touched by the letter. A waft of the breeze from an unhealthy country, from the land where one has suffered most, may seem to bring the odors of Paradise; and in a dull life there is an indefinable sweetness ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Last Things. The opening is unnecessarily complicated by the exposition of a metaphysic that is quite uncharacteristic and has little to do with the personal exposition that follows; and, indeed, I feel with regard to the whole work that it attempts to define the indefinable. I deprecate the note of finality implied in the title. "It is as it stands now," I read in the Introduction, "the frank confession of what one man of the early Twentieth Century has found in life and himself," but that man has found much since then, and will continue to find ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and unknowable, but not in this sense as an element of inexactness running through all things. He thought, it seems to me, of the unknown as the indefinable Beyond of an immediate world that might be quite ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... and murmured, "I would be inclined to agree. Except that we're obviously dealing with superior intelligence—I'm speaking about the "people" responsible for these androids—and we have no idea how far they might have progressed in duplicating that indefinable something we call ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... matter; or as if the supreme content of the moment could spare a little benevolence even for these outside things. At last a question was asked which made Betty prick up her ears; this must have been due to something indefinable in the tone of the speakers, for the ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... come so near he did not have the strength to finish. Her face, with its indefinable charm, was raised to his, as she dropped these words one by one from her lips in lingering cadence: "Frederick—do you love me, then, so ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... future) might be better in the paper. The opening is excellent. But it passes too completely into the Irishman's narrative, does not light it up with the life about it, or the circumstances under which it is delivered, and does not carry through it, as I think it should with a certain indefinable subtleness, the thread with which you begin your weaving. I will tell Wills to send me the proof, and will try to show you what I mean when I shall have gone over ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... faculty exercised: from those of sensation up to the revived emotional experiences which constitute the aesthetic sentiment proper. Among the more vaguely revived emotions Spencer includes more permanent feelings of the race transmitted by heredity; as when he refers the deep and indefinable emotion excited by music to associations with vocal tones expressive of feeling built up during the past history of our species. This biological treatment of aesthetic activity has had a wide influence, some ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... but during the night the southwest wind had begun to blow, coming in at Isabelle's window with the cool freshness of anticipated spring. The day was calm and soft, with films of cloud floating over the hills, and the indefinable suggestion of change in the air, of the breaking of the frost. The southwest wind had brought with it from the low land the haze, as if it had come from far warm countries about the Gulf, where the flowers were already blooming and the birds preparing for the northward flight. It touched the earth ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... her ears to catch his words, when suddenly, above the sound of his voice, above the roar of the rain and the crash and roll of thunder, came another sound—a low, sullen growl—indefinable, ominous, terrible. The Texan, too, heard the sound and, jerking his horse to a standstill, sat listening. The sullen growl deepened into a loud rumble, indescribably horrible. Alice saw that the Texan's face was drawn into a tense, puzzled ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... true if personal charm merely meant charm of person, for she herself had experienced something of the strange impressiveness which men—men of imagination—submitted to in Emily's presence. Where did it lie, this magic? It was indefinite, indefinable; perhaps a tone of the voice represented it, perhaps a smile—which meant, of course, that it was inseparable from her being, from her womanhood. Could one attribute to Emily, even after the briefest acquaintance, a thought, an instinct, which conflicted with the ideal of womanly purity? Was ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... on slowly, softly, wailing Scotch tunes and mournful Irish songs. He seemed to find in the songs of these people, and especially in a wild, sweet, low-keyed Negro song, some expression for his indefinable inner melancholy. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... advance; but there being nothing of the kind he was fain to abide at his corner. Thence he beheld them come at last slowly to a stand-still, talk evidently a little more, and finally they shook hands—an indefinable something still of superiority in Lake's ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... called—confused and agitated by an indefinable something. He was silent, and his dark eyes flamed with sadness and fear. He walked up to the window, looked out in an attitude of expectancy. He seemed to see something in the distance. There was a look of apprehension in his ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... fully aroused, an indefinable terror struck to his heart. At all costs he must take some action. He rose suddenly to his feet but before he reached his full height his head struck the roof. The blow was so violent that he fell back ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... an indefinable air of boredom. He rose from his seat and began to pace up and down. The whole situation had a suggestion of unreality. In pleading with Helen for a chance to talk to Hilmer he had a sense of crossing swords with some intangible and sinister shadow; his wife seemed suddenly to have arrived at a ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... of colour, its triumphant music, its crash of sound, was far behind me, almost forgotten; like clouds of indefinable tint, piled up on some distant horizon, rose the memories of its loves, its woes, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... ordered without reckoning. It was the gay rendezvous of the girls and the Johnnies, the sporting men and the roues—in a word, the nightly bacchanal of New York qui s'amuse. In the atmosphere, heavily charged with tobacco smoke, floated a strange, indefinable perfume—an odor in which the vulgar smell of cooking struggled for the mastery with the subtle essences used by voluptuous women. Instantly, animalism was aroused, the passions were inflamed. The mouth watered ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... ill-favoured by hollow and hungry cheeks, deeply sunburnt, and thick black eyebrows, blacker in contrast with the perfect whiteness of his hair; roughly clothed in shabby garments, of a strange and uncouth make; and having about him an indefinable manner of depression and degradation—this, for a moment, was all he saw. But he looked again, and the face and person seemed gradually to grow less strange; to change as he looked, to subside and soften into lineaments that were familiar, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... conversation. As both were anxious and expectant, it naturally turned upon the subject of their expedition, on the manner in which it had been brought about, and on the hopes and fears they entertained respecting it. Of the former they had many, of the latter few—none perhaps beyond that indefinable uneasiness which is inseparable from suddenly ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... which such a mode of treatment is designed to produce, the child, especially if a girl, is agitated and distressed. Her nervous system is greatly disturbed. If calmed for a time, the paroxysm is very liable to return. She wakes in the night, perhaps, with an indefinable feeling of anxiety and terror, and comes to her mother's bedside, to seek, in her presence, and in the sense of protection which it affords, a relief ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... ideas of this kind were passing in my mind, and it was from these I drew that indefinable presentiment that ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... warmth, as it develops the fecundity of the earth, develops also the possibilities in many men and women. Despite her lassitude of body, which kept her motionless as an idol in her chair, with her arm lying along the parapet of the verandah, Domini felt as if a confused crowd of things indefinable, but violent, was already stirring within her nature, as if this new climate was calling armed men into being. Could she not hear the murmur of their voices, the distant clashing of ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... herself into notice. Everything attracted her, tempted her. She belonged, body and soul, to that machine with its manifold gearing, brilliant, noisy, active, puffing like a locomotive, that is called chic. Chic, that indefinite, indefinable word, changeable and subtle like a capillary hygrometer, is a Parisian tyranny that grinds out more fashionable lives than the King of Dahomey offers as victims on his great feast days. For Blanche, everything in this most ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... presented to the eyes of his customers the silliest face that ever looked over a counter. His retreating forehead, flattened by fatigue, was marked by three long wrinkles. His grizzled hair, cut close, expressed in some indefinable way the stupidity of a cold-blooded animal. The glance of his bluish eyes had neither flame nor thought in it. His round, flat face excited no sympathy, nor even a laugh on the lips of those who might be examining the varieties of the Parisian species; on the contrary, it saddened them. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... are all the light I know!" I said aloud, and, with an indefinable feeling of sadness, ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... subjects relating to individual and social well-being. The desire of acquiring this knowledge would quicken the faculties of the children, augment their industry, and lighten the labors of the teacher to an indefinable extent. The teacher who should fail to impart a moderate degree of skill in these arts to most, and of excellence to many, at the same time that adequate progress was made in the study of the sciences ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... jacket and stained grey flannels, as at our first meeting in Flensburg station. There was no bandaged hand this time, but he looked pinched and depressed; his eyes had black circles round them; and again I felt that same indefinable pathos in him. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... big, wondering eyes, her shy, hesitating French and childish curiosity, in some indefinable way gave back to Diana the self-control that had slipped from her. Her pride reasserted itself, rigidly suppressing any sign of feeling or emotion that could be noticed by the gentle, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... back to the dingy studio, where the man lighted a pipe and sat opposite his small daughter, puffing uneasily. They were both reserved; there was an indefinable barrier between them which each was beginning to recognize. Presently Alora asked to go to bed and he sent her to her room with a ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... doubtless a similar cheerful gathering beneath the shaded electric lights. Musing thus, glancing from face to face, and listening, half uncomprehending, to the laughing jargon, he glimpsed for an instant the indefinable Spirit of the Fleet. Each of these communities, separated by steel and darkness from the other, shared it. It stretched back into a past of unforgotten memories, linking one and all in a brotherhood that compassed the waters of the earth, and bore their traditions with unfailing hands across ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... looking upon him with an indefinable expression. "You ask me why not?" he said. "Why, look here—look in it—look at yourself! Do you like to see it? ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... willing to entertain such a servant, yet so warily, as putting him from me with my little finger, I drewe him to me with my whole hand[28]." Other little delicate turns of phrase may be found in the mine of Euphues—for the digging. Our author was no genius, but he had a full measure of that indefinable quality known as wit; and, though the stylist's mask he wears is uncouth and rigid, it cannot always conceal the twinkle of his eyes. Moreover a certain weariness of this sermonizing on the stilts of antithesis ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... finished their work. Only when they got down from aloft they came on to the quarterdeck cap in hand, with bleeding, swollen hands and faces, saying, "Captain, we have taken the maintop sail in," with that indefinable but touching look that a man has who has done his duty to the very end ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... however, dissatisfied with the measures of success already attained, is constantly stimulating his disciples to more strenuous exertions. He shares with other sectarian chiefs who have played a prominent part in the world's history that indefinable quality which stirs emotional susceptibility and renders those who approach him more easily accessible to ideas toward which they began by manifesting repugnance. Lenin is credibly reported to have made several converts among ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... up with the squadron and had insensibly drifted into a relationship which had no counterpart in any other branch of the service. He was "Tam," unique and indefinable. He had few intimates of his own rank, and little association with his juniors. The mechanics treated him as being in a class apart and respected him since the day when, to the prejudice of good order and military discipline, ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... time when he made his summer excursion in the Tyrol, Fritz was a stout blond youth of two and twenty. His round, sleek face was not badly modelled, but it had neither the rough openness, characteristic of a peasant, nor yet that indefinable finish which only culture can give. In spite of his jaunty, fashionable attire, you would have put him down at once as belonging to what in the Old World is called "the middle class." His blue eyes indicated shrewdness, and his red cheeks habitual ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... but whenever he became interested, this instantly slipped from him, as did his still more ineffective attempt to move and act the rustic. Indeed, the ease of his movements and the straightness of his carriage, with a certain indefinable precision of manner, led to a common agreement among his fellow-labourers that he had earlier in life accepted the king's shilling. Granting him to be but one and twenty years of age, as his covenant stated, and as in ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... nobody can fail to see some truth in Adams's assertion. Hay had not only the manners of a gentleman, but also the special carriage of a diplomat. He was polite, affable, and usually accessible, without ever losing his innate dignity. An indefinable reserve warded off those who would either presume or indulge in undue familiarity His quick wits kept him always on his guard. His main defect was his unwillingness to regard the Senate as having a right to pass judgment on his treaties. And ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the way in her anxious haste. The fresh wind and the exertion of running had a beneficial effect upon her, both physically and mentally, for by the time she arrived at Mr. Chartres' door, the feverish flush was replaced by a healthy glow, and the strange, indefinable feeling of restlessness which had all day possessed her, seemed to have been swept away by ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... oil into a burning lamp. Others imagined they had discovered something invisible and incorporeal in the air, that important medium which supports the life of man. They pretended to catch, refine, reduce, and materialize this indefinable something, so that it might be swallowed in the form of powders, and drops; that, by its penetrating powers, it might insinuate itself into the whole animal frame, invigorate, and consequently qualify it ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... offended with her for being so gay under such circumstances. But, in his loneliness, there were other feelings which were stronger than even this resentment and jealousy. There were certain strange and indefinable longings after some society; and the society which now seemed most desirable was the gentle presence of Dolores. Her last looks remained deeply impressed upon his memory; her last deep, earnest glance had sunk into his soul. He could not throw aside ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... the wheels. There was something even more than dignity, an indefinable something, a superiority which Fitzgerald's present attitude of mind could ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... many experiences, was of a most susceptible nature, and for the instant in which that door stood open, with only the memory of that expectant figure to disturb the faintly lit vista of the hall beyond, she felt that grip upon the throat which comes from an indefinable fear which no words can explain and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... his ever restless eyes showing through the slits of his hideous half-mask, and the pout of his whistling lips beneath; nay, there was about the whole figure, from the rusty spurs at his heels to the crown of his battered hat, something almost devilish, with an indefinable mockery ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... that as it was not proposed to take the wagon or any of the animals with them, they must indicate what few articles they thought they might require during the next few days, and those articles would be conveyed across with them. There was a certain indefinable, sinister suggestiveness in the character of this communication that seemed to imply a doubt in the mind of the official who made it whether the individuals to whom it was made would require anything at all after "the next few days"; but Dick and Grosvenor, acting ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... the patio and stepped upon the corridor he fancied he already detected in the internal arrangements the subtle influence of Mrs. Peyton's taste and the indefinable domination of the mistress. For an instant he thought of anticipating the servant and seeking her in the boudoir, but some instinct withheld him, and he turned into the study which he had used as an office. It was empty; ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Still, the eager and indefinable hope that was in her heart induced the girl to rise with the intention of descending the path, when she observed that the fallen man again moved. Rising on his hands and knees, he crept forward a few paces, and then stopped. Suddenly by a great effort, he raised ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... person. Send this imaginary other person the psychic vibrations, accompanied by the mental picture suitable for it. Act the part out seriously and earnestly, just as if the reflected image were really another person. This will give you confidence in yourself, and that indefinable "knack" of handling your psychic weapons that comes only from practice. You will do well to perfect yourself in these rehearsals, just as you would in case you were trying to master anything else. By frequent earnest rehearsals, you will gain not ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... his face there was an expression of effort, almost of painful effort, so far as the uncertain light permitted me to see, and his sleep seemed to be very profound. He looked, I thought, so stiff, so unnaturally stiff, and in some indefinable ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... her heart's blood pulsing madly, striking at her wrists, throbbing at her temples, making a race the length of her quivering body. Now, she could see him plainly in the dim light, and a smile deepened the dimple at each corner of her mouth. An indefinable shyness kept her from running to him to tell her glad tidings. But what made him walk so slowly and with hanging head? It wasn't like Frederick. Something unusual had happened or he would not lag so ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... in the Bay in the moonlight, glimmered the ribbed sail of a fishing junk, and the air was heavy with an indefinable odor which to this hour puzzles me; but it must be attributed either to sink or ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the party will ever forget the ensuing minutes. After the hubbub of the barricades the ominous silence was like icy water, chilling and petrifying with an indefinable fear. There was no sound but the wind, but presently mingled with it came ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... too of the obsolete soldier of fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny—the mysterious charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal world—the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of Hawthorne. Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas Browne, are seen with varying degrees of emphasis in his literary temperament. He was whimsical as an imaginative child; and everyone has noticed that he never grew old. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... assumed instead the serious gravity, the quaint movement, and marked emphasis which belong to popular music in Northern and Central Italy. An antique character was communicated even to the recitative of Verdi by slight, almost indefinable, changes of rhythm and accent. There was no end to the singing. "Siamo appassionati per il canto," frequently repeated, was proved true by the profusion and variety of songs produced from inexhaustible memories, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... in turn a whole series of contributors. But any writer in a paper, however free a course may be conceded to him, finds as a fact that the 'we' means something very real and potent. As soon as he puts on the mantle, he finds that an indefinable change has come over his whole method of thinking and expressing himself. He is no longer an individual but the mouthpiece of an oracle. He catches some infection of style, and feels that although he may believe what he says, it is not the independent ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... indeed nearly all Shakespeare's plays, certainly all his comedies, exhibit the same influence: for he knew his Lyly through and through, and his assimilative power was unequalled. Shakespeare might almost be said to be a combination of Marlowe and Lyly plus that indefinable something which made him the greatest writer of all time. Marlowe, his master in tragedy, was also his master in poetry, in that strength of conception and beauty of execution which together make up the soul of drama. Lyly, besides the lesson he taught him in comedy, was also his model ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Education act, which was being restricted to boys; she has organized and has won friends and votes not only over her own district of Ulster, but in many other quarters of Ireland; and often when in England some indefinable torpor has crept over a meeting—as will happen at times—a few eloquent and heart-stirring words from her have been sufficient to raise the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... conduct of this woman threw a damp over all who were present. They felt chilled, they knew not how; and were sensible of the influence of an indefinable terror, for which they could not account. For once, therefore, the feeling of comfort and security, of which all were conscious who were seated around M'Pherson's cheerful and hospitable hearth, was banished, and a scene of awe and dread supplied ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... systems, singly or in combination, will make possible the production of a standardized high-grade leaf in much greater quantity than heretofore, but it seems little probable that anything so produced will excel or even equal the best produced by these expert vegueros by their indefinable but thorough knowledge of the minutest peculiarities of this peculiar plant. Thus far, it has not even been possible to produce it elsewhere in the island. It has been tried outside of the fairly defined area of its production, tried by men who ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson |
