In England, college honors may have more influence in advancing the fortunes of a young man than in this country; but I seldom have known valedictorians who have come up to popular expectations; and most of them, though always respectable, have remained in comparative obscurity.

But what? Profound obscurity.

Away before them spread the phantasmagoria of a wilderness of London roofs, softened and melting into the dim blue obscurity of the falling twilight.

The powers of all the members of the Anglo-Saxon government are disputed among historians and antiquaries; the extreme obscurity of the subject, even though faction had never entered into the question, would naturally have begotten those controversies.

The causes and circumstances of this are involved in considerable obscurity.

It is, however, not only to these occasional obscurities and ambiguities that we are to ascribe the comparative oblivion into which so remarkable a book has fallen; but also to the fact that its noteworthiness is perhaps more evident and relative to us than to our forefathers.

I often lean out of the window late at night, when the mountains above are wrapped in dusky obscurity, and listen to the low, musical ripple of the river.

" "I see but little obscurity in that," returned John Effingham.

Yet, if the shuddering of her fabric were fair criterion, the pace of the Sybarite was unabated, she was ploughing headlong through that dense obscurity using the utmost power of her engines.

Other women appeared frequently like comets in his sky, flamed for a little into brightness and disappeared into conjugal obscurity, but Ayesha's star remained fixed, even if it was transitorily eclipsed by the brilliance of a new-comer.

The civilization of the new era has developed in man moral and physical qualities, which furnish new expressions by which the artist may set forth that part of human life which Delsarte called "the transluminous obscurities of our inmost organism."

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which was the best part of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp.

Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity, most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered, and owed the honours which they once obtained, not to judgment or to genius, to labour or to art, but to the prejudice of faction, the stratagem of intrigue, or the servility of adulation.

They are supposed in their invasions to have conquered the aboriginal inhabitants, whose remote origin is veiled in impenetrable obscurity, but who retained some principles of the primitive religion.

Go, languish on in dull obscurity; Thy dazzled soul, with all its boasted greatness, Shrinks at th' o'erpow'ring gleams of regal state, Stoops from the blaze, like a degen'rate eagle, And flies for shelter to the shades of life.

Most of our public men retire to utter obscurity when they have lost office, but Hamilton was as prominent in private life as in his official duties.

The causes are not far to seek: in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty of his language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought, resulting mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt transitions, and in the third place that amount of monotony which must of necessity attach to a series of poems provided for a succession of similar occasions.

And, when we escaped From their influence, aped GEORGE MEREDITH'S vivid obscurity.

If an author be supposed to involve his thoughts in voluntary obscurity, and to obstruct, by unnecessary difficulties, a mind eager in pursuit of truth; if he writes not to make others learned, but to boast the learning which he possesses himself, and wishes to be admired rather than understood, he counteracts the first end of writing, and justly suffers the utmost severity of censure, or the more afflictive severity of neglect.

His resolutions, worded with ingenious obscurity, skilfully evaded the important aspect of the controversy, and two of them, the second and third, gave equal consolation to the Liberals and the Conservatives.

I stopped several times, looking about for château, chalet, or village, but none did I see, though I twice came upon railway lines; and not till midnight did we run down a rather steep pass upon the shore of a lake, which, from its apparent vastness in the moonless obscurity, I could only suppose to be the Lake of Geneva once again.

This secret tribunal, from the summary punishments it inflicted, the mysterious obscurity in which it was enveloped, and the impossibility of escaping from its pursuit, became the terror of all Germany.

Then she threw herself upon it, and the work of destruction began, in the midst of the sacred obscurity of the infinite repose of this funereal vigil.

Your obscurity, where you are dark, which is seldom, is that of too much meaning, not the painful obscurity which no toil of the reader can dissipate; not the dead vacuum and floundering place in which imagination finds no footing; it is not the dimness of positive darkness, but of distance; and he that reads and not discerns must get a better pair of spectacles.

This, of course, necessitates much not merely of circumlocution, but of contrivance, involving endless obscurity.