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More "High-sounding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good accommodation aft for a large number of passengers, although in this instance I was the single solitary "landsman" aboard—that is, if a young shaver of thirteen can be dignified with such a high-sounding title! ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... fine square in Paris has a high-sounding name, For instance, that spot which has been the theater of so much tragedy, upon which so much human blood has been poured, is called the Place de la Concorde. It much more appropriately might be called the Place ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... elaborate rules of etiquette concerning titles and forms of address, none but a Master of Ceremonies can hope to be thoroughly familiar with them, or to be able to address the distinguished people without withholding from them their due share of high-sounding titles and epithets; and, be it whispered, these same distinguished people, however broad-minded and magnanimous they may be in other respects, are sometimes extremely sensitive in this respect. And even after one has mastered all the rules and forms, and can appreciate and distinguish the various ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... "High-sounding sentences," which an inexperienced writer is apt to put into the mouths of his people, only make them appear ridiculous. The schoolgirl in the story is too apt to say: "The day has been most unpleasant," whereas the real schoolgirl throws her books down with ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... speech which I had prepared and delivered to Mary in Jane's hearing, as you already know. I had said to the princess: "The universe will crumble and the heavens roll up as a scroll ere my love shall alter or pale." It was a high-sounding sentence, but it was not true, as I was forced to admit, almost with the same breath that spoke it. Jane had heard it, and had stored it away in that memory of hers, so tenacious in holding to everything it should forget. It is wonderful what ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... were badly bruised and torn, but both of them recovered, to bear from that day the high-sounding titles ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... Givenchy; he had laughed and joked as he lay all day in the open and listened to the bullets that went "pht" against the few clods of earth he had erected with his entrenching tool, and which went by the high-sounding name of "head cover." ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... said to himself, one morning, as he stood watching the animal that was greedily eating out of its manger—'it is not right that a knight's good horse should go forth without a name. Even the heathen Alexander bestowed a high-sounding title on his own steed; and so, likewise, did those Christian warriors, Roland and the Cid!' But, try as he might, no name would come to him except such as were unworthy of the horse and his rider, and for four nights and days he ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found at least one Certainty—that of being "among the English poets." He would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... of your frame, change your velvets and laces for trousers and coat, leave off your great peruke, and wear a derby hat instead of that picturesque, floppy affair, and try your fortune with some Twentieth Century damsel, your high-sounding gallantries, and flattering phrases, would fall singularly flat, and you would be promptly—turned ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... stumble upon even with the best recommendations. A large party of us had started, particularly recommended by letter from the consular agent of a place that shall be nameless, to no less a person than the Demarch of a high-sounding Greek town, who was to do every thing for us in the way of billeting. By great exertion, and with aching bones, we managed to reach this place after night-fall, prolonging, for its hope's sake, our course through a most break-neck road, and through unseen but clamorous numbers of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... teachers of singers for the stage. Madame Durand was a Neapolitan by birth and had been known to modest fame on the stage as Signora De Rosa, that being her real name; for Italian singers seem to be the only ones who do not care for high-sounding pseudonyms. She was a voluble little person, over-flowing with easy feeling which made her momentarily intensely happy, miserable, or angry, as the case might be. Whichever it might be, she ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... certainly very nice to be addressed by so high-sounding a title. She wished she could get Delia to call her signorita. But no; she felt sure that Delia ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... That he should himself lead his forces to battle was for him an unavoidable necessity, and certainly did him nothing but good at a time when a man in Italy was forced to be either hammer or anvil, and when per- sonality was a greater power than the most indisputable right. If despite all his high-sounding 'Away with the barbarians! ' he nevertheless contributed more than any man to the firm settlement of the Spaniards in Italy, he may have thought it a matter of indifference to the Papacy, or even, as things stood, a relative advantage. And to whom, sooner than to Spain, could the Church look ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... O'Meara, "had the reputation of being a man of talent: but I did not find him so. I employed him to write; but he did not display ability. He used many flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument; nothing but coglionerie wrapped up in high-sounding language." ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in its abstractness. What did it mean? Did it mean that they—the men who uttered the phrase so easily—would be willing to give these boys aid, friendship when they came out into the world? What would they say, those boys whose ears were filled with high-sounding, non-committal phrases, if some man were to stand before them and say, "And so, fellows, when you get away from this place, and are ready to get your start in the world, just come around to my office and I'll help you get a job?" ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... a world, a sky, eternity. A word we have no business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose. Look, we try to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to nature; and the effort, the struggle, breeds the dream. You can understand that. Men who ought to know say that love is nothing more." He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous against ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... printed title-page. We are vain in our generation; we fancy we have discovered something new under the sun, and we give the name "novel" to the things we write. I will not insult literature by honoring this story with any such high-sounding designation. A great many of the things I am going to tell you were told to me, so that I shall have some difficulty in putting the whole together in a connected shape, and I must begin by asking your indulgence if I transgress all sorts of rules, and if I do not succeed in ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... Orange). It was considered by the Government's advisers that this gentleman would use all his influence to crush any foolish ambition on the part of the Archduchess Marie-Brigitte. M. de Hausee was himself of too noble a family to care in the least for high-sounding titles or empty rights. M. de Hausee (whose mother was Scotch) had become a British subject, and had been elected to the English Parliament. He was under the protection of Mr. Disraeli, had every prospect of a brilliant political career ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... masters! I can only say they are not mine,—I am far too modest to utter any such high-sounding phrase on my own responsibility,—but they are the exact terms used by a high municipal dignitary in characterising the result of what he was pleased to term my "chivalrous conduct." My sardonic chum, on the contrary,—an individual wholly abandoned to the ignoble vice of punning,—asserts ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... himself, and his good wife Dorothy also, were 'convinced of Truth,' and faithfully did they adhere thereafter to their new faith, through fair weather and foul. In later years, men noted that this same Colonel Benson, following his teacher's love of simplicity, and hatred of high-sounding titles, generally styled himself merely a 'husbandman,' notwithstanding 'the height and glory of the world that he had a great share of,'[4] seeing that 'he had been a Colonel, a Justice of the Peace, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... a high-sounding paean, Applauded; but Jove hushed the many-voiced tide; "For now with the lord of the briny AEge'an Athe'na shall strive for the city," he cried. "See where she comes!" and she came, like Apollo, Serene with the beauty ripe wisdom confers; The clear-scanning eye, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... if I e'er took delight in thy praises, 'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases, Than to see the bright eyes of the dear One discover She thought that I was not unworthy to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... high opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he easily formed them into a nominal republican government—crowned their old Archimagus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial majesty's ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... from his Court a patent which authorised him to borrow the sum of 600,000 livres upon his benefices, ran in debt above a million, and thought to dazzle the city and Court of Vienna by the most indecent and ill-judged extravagance. He formed a suite of eight or ten gentlemen, of names sufficiently high-sounding; twelve pages equally well born, a crowd of officers and servants, a company of chamber musicians, etc. But this idle pomp did not last; embarrassment and distress soon showed themselves; his people, no longer receiving pay, in ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... of Alexander II., though revoking only part of the insulting restrictions in the elementary civil rights of the Jews, was given the high-sounding title of an "Act of Emancipation." The secluded hasidic mass of Poland was glad to accept the legal alleviations offered to it, without thinking of any linguistic or other kind of assimilation. On the other hand, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... with a feeling of unendurable disgust. But Darvid avoided high-sounding phrases, and would never think or say: torture, disgust. That was a manner of speaking for idlers and poets. He, a man of iron industry, knew only the words vexation, trouble. What is he to do now with that woman? Throw her out like a beast which, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... stars always appear so to her, and he turns to look in her face, he says, "Why, mother! how beautiful you look! Please to give me some little spectacles, all my own!" She could not resist this entreaty,—(who could?)—and little "Squire Specs" does not mind the shouts of his companions or the high-sounding nicknames they give him, he so rejoices in what seems to him a ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... ring in the ear, thunder in the ear; pierce the ears, split the ears, rend the ears, split the head; deafen, stun; faire le diable a quatre[Fr]; make one's windows shake, rattle the windows; awaken the echoes, startle the echoes; wake the dead. Adj. loud, sonorous; high-sounding, big-sounding; deep, full, powerful, noisy, blatant, clangorous, multisonous[obs3]; thundering, deafening &c. v; trumpet-tongued; ear-splitting, ear-rending, ear- deafening; piercing; obstreperous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... number of foreigners—Turks, Egyptians, Persians, Tunisians. I say nothing of the Corsicans, who were very numerous that day, because during my four years at the Territorial I have become accustomed to the pronunciation of those high-sounding, interminable names, always followed by that of the locality: "Paganetti de Porto Vecchio, Bastelica ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... oration. That he made standing on a table. He expatiated on the beauty of liberty and the soul-inspiring feeling of independence, and became quite eloquent. They cheered in a spiritless and cheerless manner. For them liberty was a high-sounding word which meant nothing. An enlightened government provided them with all they needed. Why have the bother to choose your doctor or your priest when all that is done for you? Only to pay taxes. Can anything ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... to Calicut, in India, where he had to contend with the enmity of the natives, stirred against him by jealous Arabian merchants; in 1499 he returned to Lisbon, was received with great honour, and had conferred on him an array of high-sounding titles; three years later he was appointed to the command of an expedition to Calicut to avenge the massacre of a small Portuguese settlement founded there a year previous by Cabrat; in connection with this expedition he ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... favour. It was for her an extraordinary moment. She had indeed been brought up in palaces and the men whom she had known had been reckoned the salt of the earth. Yet, at that crisis, she was most profoundly conscious that not all the glamour of those high-sounding names, the picturesque interest of those gorgeous uniforms, nor the men themselves, magnificent in their way, were able to make the slightest appeal to her. She remembered some of her own bitter words when an alliance with one of them had been suggested to her. It was she, ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and what does it do? The name is a contraction of Societe Internationale Forestiere & Miniere du Congo. In the Congo, where companies have long titles, it is the fashion to reduce them to the dimensions of a cable code-word. Thus the high-sounding Compagnie Industrielle pour les Transports et Commerce au Stanley Pool is mercifully shaved to "Citas." This information, let me say, is a life-saver for the alien with a limited knowledge of French and whose pronunciation ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. He knew how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words, but would not sacrifice meaning to the construction of high-sounding sentences. But with their opposite characteristics both were great and successful soldiers; both were true, patriotic and upright in all their dealings. Both were pleasant to serve under—Taylor ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... off this imposing list of titles La Pommeraye's sense of humour got the better of him. The rugged, uninviting land which he knew so well rose vividly before him; and the high-sounding terms which were heaped upon it in no way lessened its ruggedness. He turned to Roberval, and with a merry twinkle in his blue eye exclaimed: "King Francis is truly generous, most noble Sieur de Nor—you must pardon a soldier's tongue and memory; I shall have to shorten ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... precise, it was during the summer of 1903—I was paying what must have seemed like an interminable visit to my old friend John Saunders, who at that time filled with becoming dignity the high-sounding office of Secretary to the Treasury of His Majesty's Government, in the quaint little town of Nassau, in the island of New Providence, one of those Bahama Islands that lie half lost to the world to the southeast of the Caribbean Sea and form a somewhat ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... as well learn the hard facts of life. All the high-sounding arguments for a moral world and all the laws on the books implementing those arguments are just eyewash. Sure, the President swears that he will uphold the constitution and enforce ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland
... dance again. She felt, when they returned her to her mother, that she had not been a success with them. Others were boyish and diffident, and with them she got on pretty well. With one, a modest child of nineteen or so with a high-sounding title, she was almost maternally friendly, and he seemed to cling to her as a refuge from a new and bewildering world. They ate ices together—he told her that he had been brought up at home in Ireland under ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... Ste. Marie, "she won't see the humor of it. Good God, what a thing to happen! You know well enough what she'll think of me. At five o'clock this afternoon," he said, bitterly, "I left her with a great many fine, high-sounding words about the quest I was to give my days and nights to—for her sake. I went away from her like a—knight going into battle—consecrated. I tell you, there were tears in her eyes when I went. And now—now, at midnight—she sees me riding a galloping pig in a street fete with a girl from the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... female of his kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like an angry cat's, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, and watch his fists clench like an orang-outang's. Maybe he will even beat his chest. Touch his silly vanity, which he exalts into high-sounding pride—call him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes a hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a tiger's claw, or an eagle's talon, incarnate with ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... that once existed, and this applies to everything in the nature of inserts quite as much as to the names used for characters in the picture. Little by little "art" in motion picture production is becoming a reality instead of being merely a high-sounding word used occasionally ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... ought to," he said; "there isn't a man in this western country that understands the business better or has got it down any finer than my uncle. He may not be able to talk so glibly or use such high-sounding names for things as you fellows, but he can come pretty near telling whether a mine will pay for the handling, and if it has any value he generally knows how to go to ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... but your modern spirit is now the pilgrim of Health, Pleasure, Science, Art, and such-like—all high-sounding names to conjure by; and the world, that old time-server, ever seeking to accommodate itself to the new ways of its inhabitants, is ever supplying us with a new Spa, a new "old master," or masterpiece, a newly dug-up ruin, or hieroglyph, or Dark Continent, or—for ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... brought him in close relations with a group of unbalanced people operating under the high-sounding name League of Freedom. These people, led by a man, J., eagerly welcomed L., largely because his wife was still financing his ventures. Here comes a curious fact, and one prominent in the history of man, for this group, led by two unbalanced men, actually ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... his dark friend now dropped their high-sounding style of speech, and spoke for some minutes rapidly in an undertone. It was finally arranged that on a given day, at a certain hour, the woman should take the four horses down the shores of the lake to its lower end, as if she were going for firewood, there cross the creek at the ford, and drive ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... words, or some not less high-sounding than these, shakes his wings, by the motion of which all the earth is fanned, and the wide sea becomes ruffled; and the lover, drawing his dusty mantle over the high tops {of mountains}, sweeps ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... to the legend is the new spirit that he put into it. In the first place his vehicle is the swift-moving French octo-syllabic couplet, which alone gives an entirely different tone to the narrative from that of Geoffrey's high-sounding Latin prose. Wace, moreover, was Norman born and Norman bred, and he inherited the possessions of his race—a love of fact, the power of clear thought, the appreciation of simplicity, the command of elegance in form. Such a spirit ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... still a small Manchurian Principality striving for the succession to the Dragon Throne and launching desperate attacks on the Great Wall of China) to receive from the Dalai Lama, as well as from the lesser Pontiffs of Tibet and Mongolia, high-sounding religious titles, prove conclusively that dignities other than mere possession of the Throne were held necessary to give solidity to a reign which began in militarism and which would collapse as the Mongol rule had collapsed by a mere ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... is mostly denoted in China by clerical terms, expressive of the metamorphosis the funeral pyre is intended to effect, viz. 'transformation of man'; 'transformation of the body'; 'metamorphosis by fire.' Without the clerical sphere it bears no such high-sounding names, being simply called 'incineration of corpses.' A term of illogical composition, and nevertheless very common in the books, is 'fire burial.'" It appears that during the Sung Dynasty cremation was especially ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... scrupulously guard against vulgarisms. Simplicity and terseness of language are the characteristics of a well educated and highly cultivated person. It is the uneducated or those who are but half educated, who use long words and high-sounding phrases. A hyperbolical way of speaking is mere flippancy, and should be avoided. Such phrases as "awfully pretty," "immensely jolly," "abominably stupid," "disgustingly mean," are of this nature, and should be avoided. Awkwardness of attitude is equally as bad as awkwardness ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... back for the rest of the day. Exposure to the direct action of the sun's rays was frequently followed by nausea, a slight chill, and then a high fever. The doctors subsequently called this "thermal fever," which is suspected to be a high-sounding name calculated to cover up a very dense ignorance of the nature of the disease, because no one ever obtained any relief from it from them. Recurrence of the exposure brought recurrence of the fever, and, if persisted in, finally produced a ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... gathered together once more the weapons of hatred which Rumor had forged against its victims; with cunning skill, he painted the night of the murder in such colors that the horror of it seemed to live for the first time, Bastide's advocate, on the other hand, contented himself with high-sounding phrases; he waxed warm, his listeners remained cold. While he was speaking there was a shoving and pushing in the rear of the hall; some of the ladies shrieked, a fair-sized dog ran through an opening ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... a fall, this poor baby,—a cruel fall, from the consequences of which no high-sounding name could save him; and then presently the little mother died, and the ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... open door of a house attached to a wharf situated in that dreary district which bears the high-sounding name ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... petitions. For the first time, Legendre, a butcher of Paris, appeared at the bar of the Assembly, where he vociferated in oratorical strain the imprecations of the people against the enemies of the nation and crowned traitors. Legendre decked his trivial ideas in high-sounding language. From this junction of vulgar ideas with the ambitious expressions of the tribune sprung that strange language in which the fragments of thought are mingled with the tinsel of words, and thus the popular eloquence of the period resembles the ill-combined display at an extravagant ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... as these speculations may appear to the eyes of some, and high-sounding as they may strike the ears of many, they do not affect me with any force. In the first place, I do not perceive how they bear upon the question before me; it merely refers to the seizure of New Orleans, not to the maintenance of the balance ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... six a name more appropriate to prospective beauty and charm. The most sensible people have the most serious relapses, and once having given rein to her imagination nothing less than three names would satisfy her—and those three the high-sounding Patricia Monica de Vere. ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and by the officers authorized by such a majority. Outside of Christ and the Apostles the New Testament does not recognize any authority higher than that vested in the local churches. General ecclesiastical organizations and church dignitaries with high-sounding titles are human inventions that were added later. Where there is no organized church to act, individual Christians have authority to administer the affairs of the church or kingdom (Acts 8: 4; 9: 10-18; ii: 19-21). The only apostolic succession ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... planned for war. She was approximately ready for it. Under the shelter of such high-sounding phrases as "We demand our place in the sun," and "The seas must be free," the German people were educated into the belief that the hour of Germany's ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Sergius Vanno has returned,' he said, rolling upon his tongue, with evident satisfaction, that high-sounding title—once the acknowledged appellation of a conqueror, but now claimed as a right by the imperial line alone, and no longer elsewhere bestowed except as an informal and transitory compliment. 'It was a splendid ovation, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... life," said the Judge, "is to be the organizer of a lodge without flub-dub, gold tassel uniforms, red tape ritual, a regiment of officers with high-sounding titles, a calisthenic drill of idiotic signs and grips, a goat, and members who call each other 'brother.' I would name the presiding officer 'it,' and its first by-law would provide for the expulsion of the member who advocated the wearing ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... to refuse my assent to these high-sounding and long-bearded gentlemen, and yet could find no argument amongst them all, that had not been refuted by some or other of them; often was I on the point of giving credit to ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... the sake of a whim, of some silly fustian about patriotism, some fool's rubbish of high-sounding words! Me, you balance against a crazy notion! Very well, sir! How I shall hate you for it! Don't come near me—not a step! Cling to your notion; see if it will fill my place! From this moment, you're not my husband, I'm not your wife—unless you promise we shall sail in June! And don't dare ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... High Decision" is a title more high-sounding than descriptive. If the story had been called "The Slaves of Low Decision" it would be ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... blank-verse reads like that of one accustomed to rhyme, and unable to get out of his wonted rut. And the versification runs, throughout, in a stilted monotony, the style being made thick and turgid with high-sounding epithets; while we have a perfect flux of learned impertinence. As for truth, nature, character, poetry, we look for them in vain; though there is much, in the stage noise and parade, that might keep the multitude from perceiving the want ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Hudson and Cunninghame Graham, Bent, Bates and Wallace, The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of Modestine, The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I have run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding works on the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should we say, better dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is good reason to hope, is only one ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... to say, marks a new era in the Norwegian lyric. Among Bjoernson's predecessors there are but two lyrists of the first order, viz., Wergeland and Welhaven. The former was magnificently profuse and chaotic, abounding in verve and daring imagery, but withal high-sounding, declamatory, and, at his worst, bombastic. There is a reminiscence in him of Klopstock's inflated rhetoric; and a certain dithyrambic ecstasy—a strained, high-keyed aria-style which sometimes breaks into falsetto. His great rival, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... there, however, but tossed it carelessly into the well of the desk, and laughed again. The sheer folly of the thing offended him, and he was ashamed of his own eager speculation, as one who pores over the high-sounding announcements in the agony column of the daily paper, and finds nothing but advertisement and triviality. He walked to the window, and stared out at the languid morning life of his quarter; the maids ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... Guiana) by the marriage of exiled convicts and degraded women, which resulted in the most ghastly horrors. The principle of deportation was then formally condemned by publicists and government until suddenly in 1854 it was reintroduced into the French penal code with many high-sounding phrases. Splendid results were to be achieved in the creation of rich colonies afar, and the regeneration of the criminal by new openings in a new land. The only outlet available at the moment beyond the sea was French Guiana, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... their patrons that was particularly desirable, as they usually left the office in a state of such bewilderment, that they were unable to tell with any degree of certainty, just which one of the many high-sounding companies it was, with which they had entered into agreement, and as the eight or ten men were each connected in some way with all of the companies, they all came in for a share of the profits, no matter who ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy. It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force. If there is no intention of providing and of keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Jefferson is not the only American statesman who has spoken high-sounding words in favour of freedom, and then left his own children to ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... exclaimed, angrily interrupting him. "See what you are for all your high-sounding vaunts of yourself and your attributes! A woman may not smile upon you, may not say one kind word to you, but you must imagine you have made a conquest. Ma foi, you and yours do not deserve to be treated as anything but vassals. When we show you a kindness, see how you abuse ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... young woman named Marguerite. When the curtain goes up she has the best of intentions, the best character, the prettiest of faces, and two long, yellow braids down her back. She is dressed very prettily indeed, and in the opera house she has a high-sounding name, like ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... given their first children, Esdras and Maria, fine, high-sounding, sonorous names; but they had apparently wearied of these solemnities, for the next two children never beard their real names pronounced; always had they been called by the affectionate diminutives of childhood, Da'Be and Tit'Be. With the last ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... see me,' said Monks, rising boldly, 'what then? Fraud and robbery are high-sounding words—justified, you think, by a fancied resemblance in some young imp to an idle daub of a dead man's Brother! You don't even know that a child was born of this maudlin pair; you don't even ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... is to say, the red men gave the white men Indian names, and the white men gave the red men English names. Thus, for example, Washington gave the Half King the name of Dinwiddie, which pleased him greatly; while he, in his turn, bestowed on his young white brother a long, high-sounding Indian name, that you could pronounce as readily spelt backwards as forwards. Fairfax was the name given a young sachem, the son of Queen Aliquippa, whose eternal friendship to the English, it must be borne in mind, had been ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... their former pupils, and when they were examined it was amusing to note that in several cases the pupil entered a higher class than did his former teacher. It was also interesting to note how many big books some of them had studied, and how many high-sounding subjects some of them claimed to have mastered. The bigger the book and the longer the name of the subject, the prouder they felt of their accomplishment. Some had studied Latin, and one or two Greek. This they thought entitled them to ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... institution, high-sounding as it was, not only truthfully expressed the objects and purposes of its founders, but was wofully exact in the sense of its being national; for outside the bare walls of these rooms there was hardly a student's easel to be found the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the fur trade in Canada, but the grant is so furiously opposed by the merchants of the coast towns that it is revoked until the Marquis de la Roche, who had been a page at the French court, again obtains monopoly, with many high-sounding titles as Governor, and the added obligation that he must colonize the new land. What with wars and court intrigue, it is 1598 before the Governor of Canada is ready to sail. Of his two hundred people ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the real colors of those impractical zealots, and it was plain that their noisy minority would no longer be allowed to bluster down the truer and more equable spirit of "the best for all the people." The men and women of the State were taking time to analyze some of those high-sounding phrases with which so-called temperance had disguised vicious theories which left human nature out ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... memory of the heyday of that other land, where, in my babyhood, like the kings of Bagdad, I had a hundred bay horses in their stables, each bridled with a coloured woollen string, and stalled in the palings of the garden, and each with his high-sounding name, and princely lineage, and his thrilling history, and where I had a thousand black cattle at pasture in ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... With high-sounding phrases of the equality of man, the lower orders are kept in a state almost approaching to serfdom. The poor Indians toil and spin, and cultivate the ground, being almost the only producers. Yet in the revolutionary ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... far the most important of them, Ludwig was not by any means the only competitor for Lola's favours. Men of wealth and position—the bearers of high-sounding titles—with politicians and place-hunters, fluttered round her. It is to her credit that she sent them about ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... a few volumes of the principal poets of the end of the eighteenth century, and of the Empire, such as Delille and Fontanes; but their high-sounding and material poetry was not suited to us. She had been lulled by the melodious murmur of the waves of the tropic, and her soul contained treasures of love, imagination, and melancholy, which all the voices of ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... said, with a calmness that came of a stupendous effort, "at Choisy you sought my friendship with high-sounding talk of principles that opposed you to the proposed alliance, twixt the houses of Mancini and Canaples. Since then I have learned that your motives were purely personal. From my discovery I hold you ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... let him out. He did not thus phrase the position even to himself. He clothed it in other and high-sounding words. It was after all a sort of convention to accept acquittal as the proof of innocence. But at the back of his mind from first to last there was an immense fear of the figure which he himself would cut if he refused his consent to the marriage ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... three old servants remaining in the lonely house were delighted to see the young master home again. Olympia, the coloured cook, whose high-sounding cognomen was usually reduced to Olly, gave him a welcome equal to what might be expected from a whole plantation of darkies. Her eyes and teeth shone in perpetual smiles, her gaily turbaned head and dusky hands gesticulated in perfect time to ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... these high-sounding words flanks, an air of importance may be given to systems entirely at variance with the principles of the art. An army in retreat is always in a bad state, either physically or morally; because a retreat can ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... broke out in a harsh laugh that was partly amusement, but mostly hysterical. Both he and the captain regarded McCoy with incredulity and amazement. That this barefooted beachcomber should possess such high-sounding dignity was inconceivable. His cotton shirt, unbuttoned, exposed a grizzled chest and the fact that there was no ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... was one whom Gonzaga's high-sounding words in connection with that letter had left cold. This was Peppe, that most wise of fools. He hastened after Francesco, and while the knight was disarming he came to voice his suspicions. But Francesco drove him out with impatience, ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... the other southern Romance languages a fondness for diminutives, augmentatives, and pejoratives, and is far richer than French in terminations of these classes. Long suffixes abound, and the style becomes, in consequence, frequently high-sounding and exaggerated. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... recommend them to managers or institutions, should not my word count for something? Ought I not to know what my students can do, and what is required of a concert artist? But instead of their securing an engagement, with such a recommendation, a foreigner with the high-sounding name is the one invariably chosen. When I first started on my career I endeavored in every way to get a proper hearing in America. But not until I had made a name for myself in Europe was I recognized here, in my own ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... level, that was not named after, and intimately associated with, some event or individual. Every mass of seaweed became a familiar object. The various little pools and inlets, many of them not larger than a dining-room table, received high-sounding and dignified names—such as Port Stevenson, Port, Erskine, Taylor's Track, Neill's Pool, &c. Of course the fish that frequented the pools, and the shell-fish that covered the rock, became subjects of much attention, and, in some cases, ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... the service of General Walker. For my own share in the spoils of this Trojan adventure, I chose a well-legged mule, young, lively, and well enough looking generally; and thenceforward I was entitled to call myself "Mounted Ranger," according to General Walker's rather high-sounding classification. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... dogmatic solution of every problem suggested by this "unintelligible world" or the political variety of the same pernicious genus, whose statecraft consists in the ready application to the most complex question of national interest of some high-sounding commonplace which has done weary duty on a thousand platforms, and which even in its palmiest days was never fit for anything better than a peroration. But in our dislike of the individual, do not let us mistake the diagnosis of his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... those gentle squires and virtuous dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers; the monks and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourless passion, dignified by the high-sounding title of renunciation, and set to the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the 'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!" And—of Fouque's romances—"But our age turns away from all fairy pictures, no matter how beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... evils inflicted upon this country by the McClellan infatuation, must be added the fact that many young men, with otherwise sound intellects, have been taken in, stultified, poisoned beyond cure, by high-sounding words, as strategy, all-embracing scientific combinations, &c.—words identified with incapacity, defeats, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... nothing in his music, but says it magnificently. His orchestration covers a multitude of weaknesses with a flamboyant cloak of charity. [Now, here I go again; I could have just as easily written "flaming"; but I, too, must copy Berlioz!] He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his works, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to fill in his big sonorous frame with a picture. Your picture is not mine, and I'll swear that the young man who sits next to me with a silly chin, goggle-eyes and cocoanut-shaped ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... baron nor his heir cared for luxury; therefore Count von Otto was sure to be seen at the table d' hote as often as anybody would invite him, and that was nearly every day, for the Count von Stalkenberg was a high-sounding title, and his baronial father, proprietor of all Stalkenberg, lorded it in the baronial castle close by, all of which appeared very grand and great, and that the English bow down ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... rebellion. The settlers consoled themselves by laughing at him. Apart from one circular visit occupying two months, Captain Hobson himself kept sedulously away from the southern settlements, and stayed in the north, then a longer journey away from Wellington than Australia is now. Under the rather high-sounding title of Chief Protector of the Aborigines, Mr. Clarke, a missionary, was appointed to be the Governor's adviser on native matters; yet Mr. Clarke, the settlers complained, was a larger land claimant than any of themselves. It is not to be wondered at if a feeling ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... with colored chalks—garlands of roses entwined with the flags of the two countries. A marvelous supper was served; it is said it included 600 reed birds. It is to be hoped it also included other things more substantial than this high-sounding ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... Government and other officials at headquarters, who slept on, however, undisturbed. But the word was passed along the line of Police posts over the plains and far out into British Columbia to watch for signs and to be on guard. The Police paid little heed to the high-sounding resolutions of a few angry excitable half-breeds, who, daring though they were and thoroughly able to give a good account of themselves in any trouble that might arise, were quite insignificant in number; but there was another peril, so serious, so terrible, that the oldest officer on ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... found in A. E. Waite's Devil-Worship in France (1896). Assuming that Luciferianism really exists, I do not for a moment believe that it has the antiquity which Miss Vaughan claims for it. The various Rites of modern Freemasonry, with their fantastic and high-sounding degrees, are comparatively recent excrescences upon the original Craft Masonry. The New and Reformed Palladian Rite is said to have been founded at Charlestown by the well-known Mason, Albert Pike, in 1870. It is based on the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... as she pictured it all—smiled, yet sighed. She was not under Janet's fixed and unshakable delusions. She saw that high-sounding titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide's grand-aunt was part of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering. But that other self ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... I were the son of some good house, with a high-sounding name, and well-to-do relations, I'd soon bring them to terms if they dared to cast me off. I'd turn milk or muffin man, and serve the street they lived in. I'd sweep the crossing in front of their windows, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... falsifies many of these glorious symbols. Men rally round musty epithets. They take up issues which have no more relation to the deep, vital, throbbing interest of the time, than they have to the fashions of our grandfathers. They parade high-sounding principles to cover selfish ends; interpret the Constitution by a doctrine of loaves and fishes; while individual independence and private conviction are whirled away in the political maelstrom, and the party-badge is reverenced and hugged as the ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... the talk," grunted Jim Hickey, who, like his mates, styled himself "soldier of fortune." But, alas! that high-sounding title in his case, as in many others, was simply a polite way of disguising his true calling, to-wit, that of an unscrupulous adventurer, whose object was to line his own pockets. A fashion has arisen of late of writing about soldiers of fortune as if ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... mystical grace. "Saint Scholastica" is divine; and the "Taking down from the Cross" as noble a composition as ever was seen; I care not by whom the other may be. There is more beauty, and less affectation, about this picture than you will find in the performances of many Italian masters, with high-sounding names (out with it, and say RAPHAEL at once). I hate those simpering Madonnas. I declare that the "Jardiniere" is a puking, smirking miss, with nothing heavenly about her. I vow that the "Saint Elizabeth" is a bad picture,—a bad composition, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Oxford, she did better than my Lady Hamilton or my Lady Blessington of later times. Mrs. Wiseman read novels and plays, and, of course, during the intervals of domestic drudgery, began to write a drama, which she finished after she went to London. It was of high-sounding title, for it was called, "Antiochus the Great; or, the Fatal Relapse." Who relapsed so fatally—whether Antiochus with his confidant, or his wife with her confidante, or Ptolemy Pater with his confidant, or Epiphanes with his confidant—is more than I can tell. Indeed, I am ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... and the high-sounding title of the Russian Prince, to say nothing of the English lord and lady, had a mollifying effect on Josiah Brown. He even remembered the name of Bracondale—had he not been a grocer's assistant in the small town of Bracondale ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... letter which had vainly tried to hide the bitterness which had prompted it. Clear as daylight now was the explanation of that letter. Buoyed up by Trix's advice, by Trix's eloquence, she had once more attempted to put the high-sounding theories into practice. And it had proved a failure, ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... amused and interested M. Zola when he took his walks around Norwood was to note the often curious and often high-sounding names bestowed on villa residences. As a rule the smaller the place the more grandiose the appellation bestowed on it. Some of the names M. Zola, having now made progress with his English, could readily understand; others, too, were virtually French, such as ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... damage to her timbers or risk of her stability; and this roominess, besides, allowed good accommodation aft for a large number of passengers, although in this instance I was the single solitary "landsman" aboard—that is, if a young shaver of thirteen can be dignified with such a high-sounding title! ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... out in a harsh laugh that was partly amusement, but mostly hysterical. Both he and the captain regarded McCoy with incredulity and amazement. That this barefooted beachcomber should possess such high-sounding dignity was inconceivable. His cotton shirt, unbuttoned, exposed a grizzled chest and the fact that ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... vainly tried to hide the bitterness which had prompted it. Clear as daylight now was the explanation of that letter. Buoyed up by Trix's advice, by Trix's eloquence, she had once more attempted to put the high-sounding theories into practice. And it had proved a failure, ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... that on his tombstone Lady Tintagel should have had inscribed an impressive and high-sounding ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... years ago—to be precise, it was during the summer of 1903—I was paying what must have seemed like an interminable visit to my old friend John Saunders, who at that time filled with becoming dignity the high-sounding office of Secretary to the Treasury of His Majesty's Government, in the quaint little town of Nassau, in the island of New Providence, one of those Bahama Islands that lie half lost to the world to the southeast of the Caribbean Sea and form a somewhat neglected ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... of sophists, these vagaries of imagination, this rage of passion, this perversion of reason, and high-sounding declamation, confounding right with wrong, civilization with barbarism, but the paraphernalia of despotism arrayed against the liberties of mankind? Emancipation is all a delusion, a foible, a fantasy, an idle dream! The soul and ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... darkness. But from Pisgah there is a view backward as well as forward, and, we may look back for a moment on this last period of Christopher's life in Spain, inwardly to him so full of trouble and difficulty and disappointment, outwardly so brave and glittering, musical with high-sounding names and the clash of arms; gay with sun and shine and colour. The brilliant Court moving from camp to camp with its gorgeous retinues and silken pavilions and uniforms and dresses and armours; the excitement of war, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... were indeed lodgings left vacant by the gentlemen who had attended the King to Scotland, but perforce, so many scores had been left unpaid that there was great reluctance to receive any cavalier family, and the more high-sounding the name, the less trust there was in it. Nothing but paying down a month beforehand sufficed to obtain accommodation for us in a house belonging to a portly widow, and even there Nan and I would have to eat with the family (and so would my brother if he were well enough), and only two bedrooms ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Swarms of fighting men, Ostrogoths as well as Visigoths, overran the provinces south of the Danube. The great ruler, Theodosius, [5] saved the empire for a time by granting lands to the Germans and by enrolling them in the army under the high-sounding title of "allies." Until his death the Goths remained quiet—but it was only the lull ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... striving for the succession to the Dragon Throne and launching desperate attacks on the Great Wall of China) to receive from the Dalai Lama, as well as from the lesser Pontiffs of Tibet and Mongolia, high-sounding religious titles, prove conclusively that dignities other than mere possession of the Throne were held necessary to give solidity to a reign which began in militarism and which would collapse as the Mongol rule had collapsed by a mere Palace ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... Gormogons," alleged to have been instituted by Chin-Quaw Ky-Po, the first Emperor of China, many thousand years before Adam. Notice of a meeting of the order appeared in the Daily Post, September 3, 1723, in which it was stated, among other high-sounding declarations, that "no Mason will be received as a Member till he has renounced his noble order and been properly degraded." Obviously, from this notice and others of like kind—all hinting at the secrets of the Lodges—the ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of that other land, where, in my babyhood, like the kings of Bagdad, I had a hundred bay horses in their stables, each bridled with a coloured woollen string, and stalled in the palings of the garden, and each with his high-sounding name, and princely lineage, and his thrilling history, and where I had a thousand black cattle at pasture ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... now dropped their high-sounding style of speech, and spoke for some minutes rapidly in an undertone. It was finally arranged that on a given day, at a certain hour, the woman should take the four horses down the shores of the lake to its lower end, as if she were going for firewood, there cross the creek ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... resist designating her brother as Ararat, by way of localizing their relationship,—but also the young settlements of the country have often the most bombastic names. In the backwoods, one time, I found a party of honest settlers in a tavern over an old romance, searching for some sufficiently high-sounding title to confer on their ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... "Unworldly" put the match, and he flamed up. He possessed, it seemed, the other necessary qualifications; for a thin tenor voice, not unmusical, was his, and also a smattering of Hebrew which he had picked up at Cambridge because he liked the fine, high-sounding names of deities and angels to be found in that language. Courage and imagination he lumped in, so to speak, with the rest, and in the gilt-edged diary he affected he wrote: "Have taken on Skale's odd advertisement. I like the man's name. The ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... was a philosopher, a scientific man, and a rationalist. Farrar admired high literature with all his heart; though unfortunately it did not clarify his own taste, but only gave him a rich vocabulary of high-sounding words, which he bound into a flaunting bouquet. He was like the bower-bird, which takes delight in collecting bright objects of any kind, bits of broken china, fragments of metal, which it disposes with distressing prominence about its domicile, and runs to and fro admiring the fantastic ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... my political writings that I was a good hand at fiction, I turned my thoughts to novel-writing. These I wrote in the same pompous, inflated style as I had used in my other publications, hoping that my fine high-sounding periods would assist to make the unsuspecting reader swallow all the insidious reasoning, absurdity and nonsense I ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... will destroy this letter, although the saints bear witness that it has cost me both time and care to prepare it, but I will yield no further. I am weary of being made the puppet of an unfaithful husband and his band of unblushing favourites, who receive, each in succession, some high-sounding title by which they are enabled to thrust themselves and their shame upon me in the very halls of the palace. I must and will tell ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... had died young, but had incurred the hatred of the Marchesa by marrying the very man whom the latter had picked out for herself, namely, the elder of two brothers, and the Marchesa had reluctantly consented to marry the other, who had a much less high-sounding title and a far smaller fortune. She had revenged herself in various small ways, and had often turned her brother-in-law's wife to ridicule by representing her as an ascetic mediaeval saint, in contorted attitudes of ecstasy, with sunken cheeks and eyes like saucers full of ink. Like many ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... Edward Forster was a clergyman, who, notwithstanding he could reckon up some twenty or thirty first, second, and third cousins with high-sounding titles, officiated as curate in a district not far from that part of the country where Forster at present was located. He was one of the bees of the Church, who are constantly toiling, while the drones are eating up the honey. He preached three sermons, and read three services, at three ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... is steadily improving, but he has a tendency to a "fatal fluency," and he must beware of high-sounding phrases. Also too many passages in his speech sounded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under the powerful solvent of philosophy, to melt and coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomena which, according to the qualities with which our imagination invests it, goes by one or other of the high-sounding names which the wit of man has devised to hide his ignorance. Accordingly, so long as men look on their gods as beings akin to themselves and not raised to an unapproachable height above them, they believe it to be possible for those of their own number who surpass ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... which will be fruitful of wrong to others; and it must cause misery to the man who feels it. It will not be any the less fruitful of wrong and misery if, as is often the case with evil motives, it adopts some high-sounding alias. The truth is, gentlemen, that each one of us has in him certain passions and instincts which, if they gain the upper hand in his soul, would mean that the wild beast had come uppermost in him. Envy, malice, and hatred are such passions, and they are just as bad if directed ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca?" She tried the name on her tongue. "Yes, for an impromptu, Torrebianca is n't bad. It's picturesque, and high-sounding, and yet not—not invraisemblable. You don't think it invraisemblable? So here 's luck to that bold adventuress, that knightess-errant, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... back to Louis. This was what he had meant. He had known all along, and plotted with them; even if his stomach had turned now, he had been a party to this infamy. Even then she did not hate him; she saw him, misled as she had been by Doyle's high-sounding phrases, lured on by one of those wild dreams of empire to which men were sometimes given. She did not love him any more; she ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... reply of Mr. Harcourt was published in South Africa, supporters of this cruel law bubbled over with joy concerning it. One Dutch writer, after saying in a Dutch journal some very fine things about Mr. Harcourt, wound up a high-sounding eulogy by congratulating South Africa on having such a good Colonial Secretary at Downing Street. "Had Mr. Harcourt's predecessors been like him," said this writer to his readers, "South Africa would have ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... what quarters travellers may stumble upon even with the best recommendations. A large party of us had started, particularly recommended by letter from the consular agent of a place that shall be nameless, to no less a person than the Demarch of a high-sounding Greek town, who was to do every thing for us in the way of billeting. By great exertion, and with aching bones, we managed to reach this place after night-fall, prolonging, for its hope's sake, our course through a most break-neck road, and through unseen but clamorous numbers of their wolf-like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Bates and Wallace, The Crossing of Greenland, Eothen, the meanderings of Modestine, The Path to Rome, and all, or almost all, of E. F. Knight. I have run through most of them at one breath, and the sum total would not bend a moderately stout bookshelf. How many high-sounding works on the other hand, are already worse than dead, or, should we say, better dead? The case of Smollett's Travels, there is good reason to hope, is ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... and the "Taking down from the Cross" as noble a composition as ever was seen; I care not by whom the other may be. There is more beauty, and less affectation, about this picture than you will find in the performances of many Italian masters, with high-sounding names (out with it, and say RAPHAEL at once). I hate those simpering Madonnas. I declare that the "Jardiniere" is a puking, smirking miss, with nothing heavenly about her. I vow that the "Saint Elizabeth" ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and discreditable chapters of a man's history are able, wielding this knowledge over his head, to say, Thou shalt not do this good act which thou wishest to do, or, Thou shalt do this evil and shameful thing which we bid thee. There are companies in which men cannot utter the fine, high-sounding things they would say elsewhere, because there are present those who know how their lives have contradicted them. What is it that mocks the generous thought rising in our minds, that silences the noble word on our lips, that paralyzes the forming energy of our ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... one's personal appellation in the newspapers. Our heroine lived in the most gossiping of all ages, herself its greatest gossip; yet her own name, patronymic or baptismal, never was talked about. It was not that she sank that name beneath high-sounding titles; she only elevated the most commonplace of all titles till she monopolized it, and it monopolized her. Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, Souveraine de Dombes, Princesse Dauphine d'Auvergne, Duchesse de Montpensier, is forgotten, or rather was never remembered; but the great name of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... high-sounding name cost no more than a simple one, Kalimann chose the most imposing he could find, and, his country's hero in mind, called himself Sandor Hunyadi. This historic title revived, as it were, his latent ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... debitum. And the Court-preacher [Agricola] at that time juggled with the word must: 'das Muss ist versalzen.' He understood necessarium and debitum as meaning, coerced by fear of punishment, extortum coactione (extorted by coercion), and spoke high-sounding words, such as, how good works came without the Law. Yet the first meaning of necessarium and debitum is not extortum coactione, but the eternal and immutable order of divine wisdom; and the Lord Christ and Paul themselves employ these words necessarium and debitum." In December, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... with those Union generals who were prone to indulge in high-sounding promises, but whose performances did not by any means come up to their predictions as to what they would do if they ever met the enemy face to face. He said one day, just after one of these braggarts had been soundly thrashed ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... allowed to be come merely a high-sounding phrase, a vague generality, a pious hope, to which everyone can give lip-service. They must be made to have real meaning in terms of the daily thoughts and acts of every man, woman and child in our land during the coming year and during ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... and Manchegan author, relates in this most grave, high-sounding, minute, delightful, and original history that after the discussion between the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha and his squire Sancho Panza which is set down at the end of chapter twenty-one, Don Quixote raised his eyes and saw coming along the road he was following some dozen men on foot ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he easily formed them into a nominal republican government—crowned their old Archimagus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... exemplified in Ps. 702 ff. The versatile Pseudolus after a significant aside: "I'll address the fellow in high-sounding words," says to ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... holy lives, not only because our Divine Founder, Jesus Christ, was holy, but also because we bear His sweet and venerable name. We are called Christians. That is a name we would not exchange for all the high-sounding titles of Prince or Emperor. We are justly proud of this appellation of Christian; but we are reminded that it has annexed to it a corresponding obligation. It is not an idle name, but one full of solemn significance; for a Christian, as the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... development a connected unity of thought and action, so that through all the changes of its outward form it had been moved and guided by the same single spirit,—"Le roi est mort; vive le roi!"—A Vipont dies; live the Vipont! Despite its high-sounding Norman name, the House of Vipont was no House at all for some generations after the Conquest. The first Vipont who emerged from the obscurity of time was a rude soldier of Gascon origin, in the reign of Henry II.,—one of the thousand fighting-men who sailed from Milford Haven ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nothing of the Knype Ethical Society, except that in spite of its name it was regarded with unfriendly suspicion by the respectable as an illicit rival of churches and chapels and a haunt of dubious characters who, under high-sounding mottoes, were engaged in the wicked scheme of setting class against class. She had accepted the general verdict on the Knype Ethical Society. And now she was confirmed in it. As she gazed at Julian Maldon in that dreadful interior, chewing apples and brown ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... All Arts and Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette": this was the high-sounding name of a newspaper which Franklin's old employer, Keimer, had started in Philadelphia. But bankruptcy shortly overtook Keimer, and Franklin took the newspaper with its ninety subscribers. The "Universal Instructor" feature of the paper consisted of a page or two weekly of "Chambers's Encyclopedia". ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... was at table. He patted Dotty's head, and said she looked like "a sweet-pea on tiptoe for a flight." He seemed very fond of quoting poetry; and nothing could have been more pleasing to Dotty, who loved to hear high-sounding words, even if they did soar ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... property. Indeed, marriages are considered a very profitable speculation, the girl's hand being in the father's gift, who marries her to any one who will pay her price. This arrangement, however, is not considered a simple matter of buying and selling, but delights in the high-sounding title of "dowry." Slaves, cows, goats, fowls, brass wire, or beads, are the usual things given for this species of dowry. The marriage-knot, however, is never irretrievably tied; for if the wife finds a defect in her husband, she can return to her father ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... herself. Page 28: "It is most horrible with the keen sword to gore the finely fibred human frame," and what follows, pleased me mightily. In the second book, the first forty lines in particular are majestic and high-sounding. Indeed, the whole vision of the Palace of Ambition and what follows are supremely excellent. Your simile of the Laplander, "By Niemi's lake, or Balda Zhiok, or the mossy stone of Solfar-Kapper," [1] will bear comparison ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... centre of European civilization? So at least history informs us. Not even one foundation of its three hundred mosques can be found to-day. Seneca and Lucan were born here before the time of Christ, and the guide rehearsed with voluble facility some other high-sounding names of historic fame who were natives of the place, but who were quite unfamiliar to us. When we pointed, however, to the broad, pale-yellow river crossed by the old Roman bridge, and asked its name, he replied: "The Guadalquivir," and the name rang softly on the ear like a strain of half-forgotten ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... ago the wealth of our Spanish fathers was a serious object to the rest of Europe—as represented by the bold buccaneers. There is a curse of futility upon our character: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, chivalry and materialism, high-sounding sentiments and a supine morality, violent efforts for an idea and a sullen acquiescence in every form of corruption. We convulsed a continent for our independence only to become the passive prey ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... brilliant high-sounding prefaces of outrageous length, raising great expectations of the wonders to follow— and then comes a poor little appendix of a—history; it is like nothing in the world but a child—say the Eros you must have seen in a picture playing in an enormous mask ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... assistance that chiefly encouraged the King of Poland to continue the war, which had hitherto turned out so unfavourably for him, and the courts of Madrid and Vienna failed not to encourage him by high-sounding promises. While Sigismund lost one place after another in Livonia, Courland, and Prussia, he saw his ally in Germany advancing from conquest after conquest to unlimited power. No wonder then if his aversion to peace kept pace with his losses. The vehemence with which he nourished ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... which authorised him to borrow the sum of 600,000 livres upon his benefices, ran in debt above a million, and thought to dazzle the city and Court of Vienna by the most indecent and ill-judged extravagance. He formed a suite of eight or ten gentlemen, of names sufficiently high-sounding; twelve pages equally well born, a crowd of officers and servants, a company of chamber musicians, etc. But this idle pomp did not last; embarrassment and distress soon showed themselves; his people, no longer receiving pay, in order to make money, abused the privileges of ambassadors, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... sail, and began to turn down with the tide. It was near sunset before we got a view of the two or three spires that then piloted strangers to the town. New York was not the "commercial emporium" in 1796; so high-sounding a title, indeed, scarce belonging to the simple English of the period, it requiring a very great collection of half-educated men to venture on so ambitious an appellation—the only emporium that existed in America, during ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... concerning titles and forms of address, none but a Master of Ceremonies can hope to be thoroughly familiar with them, or to be able to address the distinguished people without withholding from them their due share of high-sounding titles and epithets; and, be it whispered, these same distinguished people, however broad-minded and magnanimous they may be in other respects, are sometimes extremely sensitive in this respect. And even after one ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... and then wined and dined by the Colonel safe from the curious eyes of the town. This time old Joe Grant was to preside, as he had done as a matter of course on all such occasions when he was the acknowledged head of the town in political and financial matters, in the old days of high-sounding oratory and simpler politics that were gone forever, but were not very long ago. Judge Saxon, an old timer, too, and better loved than the Honourable Joe, had declined the honour of presiding, ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... souls at all—the life of the soul was not for them, the laws of the soul had nothing to do with them. They were two bodies—two miserable and cold and sick and tormented bodies; and with yet a third body, utterly helpless and dependent upon them—in defiance of all the most high-sounding pronouncements about "the soul"! ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... unturned if you persist in your amazing idea of dismissing the other Hindus from college. For what—I ask you? Dismissed—for what? Because they love liberty enough to give their lives to it! The day you dismiss them, burn our high-sounding manifesto, Mr Fejevary, and admit that Morton College now sells her soul ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... although race identity still exists, the antagonisms and much of the prejudice of which we now complain will be buried under higher activities and greater enterprises—when we have more bank and railroad stock, fewer high-sounding societies, such as "The Seventeen Stars of the Consolidation," "The Rising, Persevering Free Sons of Joshua"; more landlords and fewer tenants, more owners of plantations and fewer share-workers, more merchants and fewer dudes, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... you are deprived of the just remuneration of your labor, while no one thinks of causing justice to be rendered to you. If you could be consoled by the noisy appeals of your champions to philanthropy, to powerless charity, to degrading almsgiving, or if the high-sounding words of Voice of the People, Rights of Labor, &c., would relieve you—these indeed you can have in abundance. But justice, simple justice—this nobody thinks of rendering you. For would it not be just that after a long day's labor, when you have received your wages, you should be ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... mettlesome charger and he was quite sure that his new steed would prove equal to any fatigue or danger that might come its way in the course of his adventures. And remembering that all the horses of famous warriors had possessed high-sounding names he called his horse Rocinante and adopted for himself the title of Don Quixote of La Mancha, under which name he will be known through the rest of the ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... not forgotten lumps of sugar for Calico and Caliph. Ernest had given his pony a high-sounding name. The intelligent beast was proud and dainty enough to deserve it. He was shy about coming for his lump, but when he once got the taste, he nosed around ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... Church, a Moravian synod, held in 1749, formally elected Wilson, the venerable Bishop of Sodor and Man, 'into the order and number of the Antecessors of the General Synod of the brethren of the Anatolic Unity.' With this high-sounding dignity was joined 'the administration of the Reformed Tropus' (or Diaspora) 'in our hierarchy, for life, with full liberty, in case of emergency, to employ as his substitute the Rev. T. Wilson, Royal Almoner, Doctor ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... so picking up the wife and babies in Virginia, we embarked for our Texas home. My better half was disappointed in my not joining in the proposed cattle company, with its officers, its directorate, annual meeting, and other high-sounding functions. I could have turned into the company my two ranches at fifty cents an acre, could have sold my brand outright at a fancy figure, taking stock in lieu for the same, but I preferred to ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly—impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the Church through her Pontiff, was intended to manifest her joy at the redemption of mankind by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, and the rose was an appropriate symbol of the quickening and refreshing body of our Redeemer. These high-sounding and long-winded expressions showed very plainly the real object of the Pope. The divine fragrance of this flower was so to permeate the inmost heart of Frederick, the 'beloved son,' that he being filled with it, might with pious mind receive and cherish in his noble breast those matters which Miltitz ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... strange affectations which people designate here very handsome names. I prefer the old homely Jewish names, such as that which it pleased my godfather and godmothers to bestow upon me, to one of those high-sounding christianities, the Minervas, Cinderellas, and Almerias of Canada. The love of singular names is here carried to a marvellous extent. It is only yesterday that, in passing through one busy village, I stopped in astonishment before a tombstone ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... and noble life of Akbar, he was overthrown by his own son, Selim, who took the high-sounding title Jehanghir, "Conqueror of the World," and he had been reigning but a short time when his own son, Kushru, endeavored to treat him in the same manner. The revolt was promptly quelled. Seven hundred of the supporters of the young prince were ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Scriptures" does not explain the Scriptures. The book, as an attempt to explain and crystallize truth, is a failure. It ranks with that great mass of literature, written and copied at such vast pains and expense, bearing the high-sounding title, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... of Aconcagua. There "crashes a sturdy box of stout John Bull;" and Russia, Tunis and Canada roll into close neighborhood with him and each other. A queer and not, let us hope, altogether transitory show of international comity is this. Many a high-sounding, much-heralded and more-debating Peace Congress has been held with less effect than that conducted by these humble porters, carpenters and decorators. This one has solidity. Its elements are palpable. The peoples ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... should drag the city as with a net and destroy all the captives, I was commanding the fugitives to press on still more in their flight, in order that they might save themselves as quickly as possible. For to trample upon captives is not holy." Such high-sounding and airy words did Chosroes speak to the ambassadors, but nevertheless it did not escape them why he gave time to the ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... unpopular position begins to be manifest. The candidates, unflinching in their efforts, mix with the medley, have the benefit of the full exercise of free thought and action, hear various opinions upon "the Squire's chances," and listen to the chiming of high-sounding compliments. While this clanging of merry jargon is at its highest, as if by some magic influence Romescos makes his appearance, and immediately commences to pit sides with Mr. M'Fadden. With all Romescos' outlawry, he is tenacious ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the most important of them, Ludwig was not by any means the only competitor for Lola's favours. Men of wealth and position—the bearers of high-sounding titles—with politicians and place-hunters, fluttered round her. It is to her credit that she sent them ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... ordinary theatrical season waned. A minstrel company, however, seldom closed for the summer, so the tour continued. For the first time Charles Frohman crossed the continent. Despite its high-sounding name and the glitter and splash that marked its spectacular progress from place to place, the long trip of the Mastodons was not without its hardships, for business was often bad. Nor did ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... coloured population. To-day, the adult males of Goa, such of them as have any enterprise, emigrate into less dull and dead regions of India, and are found everywhere as cooks, ship-stewards, messengers, and in similar menial capacities. They all call themselves Portuguese, and own high-sounding Portuguese surnames. Domingo de Gonsalvez de Soto will cook your curry, and Pedro de Guiterraz is content to act as dry nurse to your wife's babies. The vice of those dusky noblemen is their ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... policy under which the weak, the oppressed, and the ignorant of all nations are invited to come among us and share in the economic and political opportunities and privileges of American citizens. Such high-sounding and professedly disinterested cosmopolitanism appeals to a certain class of sentimental believers in democracy. It does not appeal, however, to any one who fully understands present-day industrial and political conditions. This capitalistic sympathy for the weak and the oppressed ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... religious origin, cremation is mostly denoted in China by clerical terms, expressive of the metamorphosis the funeral pyre is intended to effect, viz. 'transformation of man'; 'transformation of the body'; 'metamorphosis by fire.' Without the clerical sphere it bears no such high-sounding names, being simply called 'incineration of corpses.' A term of illogical composition, and nevertheless very common in the books, is 'fire burial.'" It appears that during the Sung Dynasty cremation was especially ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Froebel opened his first school at Griesheim, under the high-sounding title of "Universal German Educational Institute." At first he had his five nephews as his only pupils. Soon after, the school was removed to Keilhau, near Rudolstadt, in the Thueringian Forest. Here he was joined by his old friends Middendorff ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... History of the Robins, too, is a continuous delight; and from its pompous and high-sounding dialogue a skilful adapter may glean not only one story, but one story with two versions; for the infant of eighteen months can follow the narrative of the joys and troubles, errors and kindnesses of Robin, Dicky, Flopsy and Pecksy; while the child of five or ten or even ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... This fanciful and high-sounding title was given by the great Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, to a race of plants which are in reality by no means distantly allied to a very humble family—the ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... no reason to complain of want of civility from the officers of the ship; but the civilians, some of whom rejoiced in high-sounding titles, treated us with marked contempt, as beings altogether inferior to themselves. We agreed, however, to take no notice of this, and made ourselves as happy as we could. Halliday, after two or three substantial meals, recovered his spirits; and ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... imposing list of titles La Pommeraye's sense of humour got the better of him. The rugged, uninviting land which he knew so well rose vividly before him; and the high-sounding terms which were heaped upon it in no way lessened its ruggedness. He turned to Roberval, and with a merry twinkle in his blue eye exclaimed: "King Francis is truly generous, most noble Sieur de Nor—you ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... He added with a shrug of the shoulders, "A somewhat high-sounding name for such a humble citizen as myself, but it was ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... on the 2nd of April. It had no author's name, but it was an open secret that Goldsmith had written it; and to this day it remains to the critic one of the most interesting of his works. Obviously, in a duodecimo of some two hundred widely-printed pages, it was impossible to keep the high-sounding promise of its title; and at best its author's knowledge of the subject, notwithstanding his continental wanderings, can have been but that of an external spectator. Still in an age when critical utterance was more than ordinarily full-wigged and ponderous, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... served for alliteration; and when at the other, they answered for rhyme. By way of proving its progress, he showed us a composition by a man who was deaf and dumb, in praise of Morosofia, who, merely by the use of his eyes and hands, had made an ingenious and high-sounding piece of eloquence, though I confess that the sense was somewhat obscure. We went away filled with admiration for ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... the war-worn soldiers of Washington. John Howe was rewarded with the offices of King's Printer, and {18} Postmaster-General of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and the Bermudas. But in spite of these high-sounding titles, the family income was small, and all the economies of Joe's mother—his father's second wife, a shrewd practical Nova Scotian widow—could not stretch it very far. At the age of thirteen ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... skimmed to flew? Why? Compare the eighth sentence with this: "Large fat hogs were grunting in their pens and reposing quietly with an abundant supply of food." Sleek, unwieldy porkers would be too high-sounding an expression for you to use ordinarily, but it is in tone with the rest of the description. In the repose and abundance of their pens is much better than the words substituted above. It is shorter and stronger. It uses instead of ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... but my lady's name's a high-sounding one, and she's not at all backward about airing it; it rolls off her sweet tongue as easy as water off a duck's back—Mrs. Richmond Montague," and the girl tossed her head and drew herself up in imitation of ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... to them, oppression and corruption had grown intolerable, and would never cease until power passed into their own immaculate hands. They alone possessed the secret for turning France into a terrestrial Paradise, by applying in all SINCERITY the great and high-sounding principles, liberty, equality and fraternity. This SINCERITY of application, which has been so frequently announced, dallies somewhat in its coming, especially as regards equality, which to so many people merely means, "That which I have not nobody else shall have." The word equality is ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... hard work and was at the present time one of the most famous teachers of singers for the stage. Madame Durand was a Neapolitan by birth and had been known to modest fame on the stage as Signora De Rosa, that being her real name; for Italian singers seem to be the only ones who do not care for high-sounding pseudonyms. She was a voluble little person, over-flowing with easy feeling which made her momentarily intensely happy, miserable, or angry, as the case might be. Whichever it might be, she generally ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... terms of specific conduct in the home, at school, on the playground, at work, and in all the usual social relations. Without this, there may be fatal inconsistencies in the boy's conduct, not because he is essentially vicious, but because he has been unable to interpret high-sounding sermons and biblical ideals in terms of commonplace duty. If the evangelical message encourages, condones, or permits this divorce, it becomes an instrument of incalculable harm. Boys must be ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... appear, though they had promised to be on the field at fourteen days' notice. Rory O'Moore, like 'Meagher of the sword' in 1848, had never seen service; and Sir Phelim O'Neill, like Smith O'Brien, was only a civilian when he assumed the high-sounding title of 'Lord General of the Catholic army in Ulster.' He also took the title of 'the O'Neill.' The massacre of a large number of Catholics by the Carrickfergus garrison, driving them over the cliffs into the sea at the point of the bayonet, madly excited the Irish thirst ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... one must scrupulously guard against vulgarisms. Simplicity and terseness of language are the characteristics of a well educated and highly cultivated person. It is the uneducated or those who are but half educated, who use long words and high-sounding phrases. A hyperbolical way of speaking is mere flippancy, and should be avoided. Such phrases as "awfully pretty," "immensely jolly," "abominably stupid," "disgustingly mean," are of this nature, and should be avoided. Awkwardness of attitude is equally ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... superbly poetical speeches, the best known of which is that beginning, "O Sleep, O gentle Sleep." To the comic groups Shakespeare added a number of new figures, among them the braggart Pistol, whose speech bristles with the high-sounding terms he has borrowed from the theater, and old Justice Shallow, so fond of recalling the gay nights and days which are as much figments of his imagination as is his assumed familiarity with the great John of Gaunt. By placing more stress upon the evil and less pleasing sides of Falstaff's ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. He knew how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words, but would not sacrifice meaning to the construction of high-sounding sentences. But with their opposite characteristics both were great and successful soldiers; both were true, patriotic and upright in all their dealings. Both were pleasant to serve under—Taylor was pleasant to serve with. Scott saw more through the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... up. "All right, don't forget it. Trick it out with some high-sounding guesses if you have to, like I said. Right now I've got to see a man about a woman." He paused, ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... jacket-pocket, and nothing gave him so much pleasure as any one referring to him for the meaning of a hard word, which, although he could not always explain correctly, he certainly did most readily. Moreover, he was, as may be supposed, very fond of interlarding his conversation with high-sounding phraseology, without much regard as to ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... bumped our way through meadows quickened to life by the soft spring air; we halted at crossroads to pick up stray travelers and shoppers; we unloaded plowing machines and shipped crates of live fowl; we waited at wayside stations with high-sounding names for family parties whose unpunctuality was indulgently considered by the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... his glass violently upon the counter. "Thunder! how that fellow provokes me! He does not know the A B C of his profession. When he can't discover anything, he invents wonderful stories, and then misleads the magistrates with his high-sounding phrases, in the hope of gaining promotion. I'll give him advancement with a vengeance! I'll teach him ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... mingling with the felts and caps of lower strata. Here and there a voice could be heard raised in anger, but the prevailing emotion seemed to be mere curiosity. The people who would suffer most from the collapse of this high-sounding enterprise could not reach the scene of calamity at half an hour's notice; they were dwellers in many parts of the British Isles, strangers most of them to London city, with but a vague mental picture of the local habitation ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... a man of talent: but I did not find him so. I employed him to write; but he did not display ability. He used many flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument; nothing but coglionerie wrapped up in high-sounding language." ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my masters! I can only say they are not mine,—I am far too modest to utter any such high-sounding phrase on my own responsibility,—but they are the exact terms used by a high municipal dignitary in characterising the result of what he was pleased to term my "chivalrous conduct." My sardonic chum, on the contrary,—an individual ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... gave out my text, the struck Mariposa, rolling from side to side with the motion of a "weaving" horse on her rocking-chair—that squeaked dismally—was so wrought upon by the ring of unknown and high-sounding syllables as to set up a dreary drone like the hum of an exaggerated bumblebee, and to keep it up. This did not disconcert me. I had expected to stir the imagination of my hearers, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... Alice, Cicely, Margaret, Joan, Isabel, Emma, or Agnes: a strange name being the exception. But among working women the odd names were then the rule: they were Yngeleis, Sabelina, Orenge, Pimma, Cinelote, Argentella, and very many more of the same high-sounding kind. ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... Canada, but the grant is so furiously opposed by the merchants of the coast towns that it is revoked until the Marquis de la Roche, who had been a page at the French court, again obtains monopoly, with many high-sounding titles as Governor, and the added obligation that he must colonize the new land. What with wars and court intrigue, it is 1598 before the Governor of Canada is ready to sail. Of his two hundred people taken from jails, all but sixty ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... thought now was to make some amends to Lady Selkirk and his own reputation for the plundering visit of his lieutenant. He therefore addressed to her, the very day of his landing, an extraordinary letter—Jones was fond of letter-writing—full of high-sounding phrases, and professions of gallantry and esteem, in the midst of which he failed not to recite the splendid victory of the Ranger. He drew a picture of the terrors inflicted by the British in America; and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... Directly to the FIRST AND ONLY FAIR. Spare not in such a cause. Spend all the powers Of rant and rhapsody in virtue's praise, Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand, And with poetic trappings grace thy prose Till it outmantle all the pride of verse.— Ah, tinkling cymbal and high-sounding brass Smitten in vain! such music cannot charm The eclipse that intercepts truth's heavenly beam, And chills and darkens a wide-wandering soul. The still small voice is wanted. He must speak, Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... e'er took delight in thy praises, 'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases Than to see the bright eyes of those dear ones discover They thought ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... of these missions, politically considered, was, however, that of the Duque de Feria,[70] who arrived in France with a brilliant suite, charged with the most specious and high-sounding professions and promises of Philip of Spain, who pledged himself to support the Regency under all circumstances, and to place at the disposal of the Queen whatever assistance she might require against both external and internal enemies. These magnificent assurances were coldly received ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... officers authorized by such a majority. Outside of Christ and the Apostles the New Testament does not recognize any authority higher than that vested in the local churches. General ecclesiastical organizations and church dignitaries with high-sounding titles are human inventions that were added later. Where there is no organized church to act, individual Christians have authority to administer the affairs of the church or kingdom (Acts 8: 4; 9: 10-18; ii: 19-21). The only apostolic succession endorsed in the Bible ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... to high-sounding thoughts, to sentimental dreams, and melancholy subtleties, it has been assumed that his character is one nourished with the poet's own heart's blood. A thousand times the noble sentiment of duty has ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... not ask Cicely to dance again. She felt, when they returned her to her mother, that she had not been a success with them. Others were boyish and diffident, and with them she got on pretty well. With one, a modest child of nineteen or so with a high-sounding title, she was almost maternally friendly, and he seemed to cling to her as a refuge from a new and bewildering world. They ate ices together—he told her that he had been brought up at home in Ireland under a priest, and had never eaten enough ices ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... a very flourishing prospectus, setting forth the enormous benefits to be derived by shareholders from the profitable dealings of the company. Some good high-sounding names figured in the list of directors, and the chairman was Captain H. N. Cromie Paget. The prospectus looked well enough, but the holder of Mr. Sheldon's dishonoured bill was not able to derive much comfort from high-sounding phrases ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... called smart, it is a term of reproach. I don't like to think of a Smart Set. And my refuge is in the knowledge that there is just one thing that destroys smartness and that is, to put it in a very high-sounding word, Nobility. There is the test we can all put to ourselves—and it really is conscience and ethics and religion all in one—is the idea smart or is it noble? I'd take my chances of going to Heaven on the conformity of ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... turn the cheek of humility to the blows of arrogance, to commend the extravagant gift of the magdalene. And it was the poetry of life, after all, which counted. Fred Starratt knew that now. A year ago he had thought of poetry as strings of high-sounding words which produced a pleasant mental reaction, something abstract and exotic. He had never fancied that poetry was a thing to be seen and understood and lived, and that such common things as bread and wine and love and ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... chipper little city chap be, with his trig form and well-bred manners, in such marked contrast with those of the swaggering English sparrow? Afterwards he was identified as the house-finch, which rejoices in the high-sounding Latin name of Carpodacus mexicanus frontalis. His distribution is restricted to the Rocky Mountain district chiefly south of the fortieth parallel ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... was the happy hunting-ground of quacks, who gave themselves high-sounding names and wore gorgeous raiment. They went about followed by a retinue of pupils and grateful patients. In some cases the patients were compelled to promise, in the event of being cured, that they would serve their doctor ever afterwards. The retinue of students, no doubt, was ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
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