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More "Uncouth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... series of figures and coats-of-arms was placed in 1824. At the same time the wainscotting painted in 1580 with inscriptions and heraldry was cleared away and replaced with cement. The inscriptions were copied with care, but "the ornamentation was followed without any very fastidious copying of the uncouth ancient style"![8] The timber roof is of low pitch, with traceried spandrels above the tie-beams. Angels playing on a variety of instruments are placed at the centre of each tie-beam and there is much good carving of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... are three semicircular recessed portals, below an entablature resting on two single and two double columns. The capitals are Corinthian, but the pedestals (considerably effaced) consist of lions and grotesque animals in uncouth positions. Behind them, on the piers of the arches of the portals, stand in bold relief statues of apostles and saints, separated from each other by pilasters. The interior, consisting of a nave and two aisles, is ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... wild, leaping horde. His brown, sweat-streaked, muscular body, glistening in the moonlight, shone supple and graceful among the uncouth, awkward, ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... my view, All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless labour all along, Endless labour to be wrong; Phrase that time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... grimaces excited the mirth of the whole assembly. Tommy, who had never before seen one of these creatures, was very much surprised and entertained, but still more so when he saw the animal rise upon his hind legs at the word of command, and dance about in a strange, uncouth manner, to the ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the passing tribute ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... as the dwarf felt himself free he laid hold of a bag which lay amongst the roots of the tree, and which was full of gold, and lifted it up, grumbling to himself, "Uncouth people, to cut off a piece of my fine beard. Bad luck to you!" and then he swung the bag upon his back, and went off without even once looking at ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a man ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... certainly an enigma. Iris wrinkled her pretty forehead in the effort to place him in a fitting category. His words and accent were those of an educated gentleman, yet his actions and manners were studiously uncouth when he thought she was observing him. The veneer of roughness puzzled her. That he was naturally of refined temperament she knew quite well, not alone by perception but by the plain evidence of his earlier dealings with her. Then why this affectation ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... answered by "Blunderbuss" Pepper, the new Senator who had turned every aristocrat out of office in his aristocratic Southern State and filled the vacancies with men of his own humble origin. He was a burly untidy- looking man, and frequently as uncouth in speech, a demagogue and excitable. But the Senate, now that three years in that body had toned him down, conceded his ability and took his abuse with the utmost good-nature. Betty recalled his biography as sketched by Senator ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... loss for words. A great pity and resentment swelled up in my heart. I still hoped that there might be a mistake somewhere. I shrank from picturing this young and beautiful girl as the wife of old Griffith Hawke, sharing with him the uncouth and half-barbarous life of a wilderness trading post. It was too ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... fear, almost ludicrous to see. Foxes, weasels, and opossums fared sumptuously. Even for the common armadillo (Dasypus villosus) it was a season of affluence, for this creature is very adroit in capturing mice. This fact might seem surprising to anyone who marks the uncouth figure, toothless gums, and the motions—anything but light and graceful—of the armadillo and perhaps fancying that, to be a dexterous mouser, an animal should bear some resemblance in habits and structure to the felidas. But animals, like men, are compelled to adapt themselves to ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... its style and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... rhyme I never could endure, Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure. To him as Nature, when he ceas'd to see, Milton's an universal Blank to me ... Thompson [sic] write blank, but know that for that reason These lines shall live, when thine are out of season. Rhyme binds and ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame which began to smoulder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. 'Midway upon the path of life' he opened the Book of Revelation: he figured to the people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and at sight of him upon his rough piebald horse, with its uncouth trappings, and the old and mouldy jerkin upon the youth, the knights and others broke forth in excessive laughter, as much at the sight as to cover their discomfiture and fear of the knight ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... matter to thought; an allusive writer often robs it of both these functions. He must needs display his possessions and his modesty at one and the same time, producing his treasures unasked, and huddling them in uncouth fashion past the gaze of the spectator, because, forsooth, he would not seem to make a rarity of them. The subject to be treated, the groundwork to be adorned, becomes the barest excuse for a profitless haphazard ostentation. This fault ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... refreshments as my poor cave affords; and for your evening's entertainment I will relate the history of my life from my first landing in this desert island." He then called for Caliban to prepare some food, and set the cave in order; and the company were astonished at the uncouth form and savage appearance of this ugly monster, who (Prospero said) was the only attendant he had to wait ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... little hand, and her golden curls floated around her like a cloud, for she had ridden forth without her hood on hearing the sound of the horns and bells, eager to see the show like any child, and the merrymakers stared at her, grinning with uncouth delight and never any resentment. There was that in Mary Cavendish's look, when she chose to have it so, that could, I verily believe, have swayed an army, so full of utter good-will and lovingkindness it was, and, more than that, of ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... favourite game of ball, with an eye to speculation. We stood at "Government House," over the Ashurbara Gate, to see the Bedouins, and we quizzed (as Town men might denounce a tie or scoff at a boot) the huge round shields and the uncouth spears of these provincials. Presently they entered the streets, where we witnessed their frantic dance in presence of the Hajj and other authorities. This is the wild men's way of expressing their satisfaction that Fate has enabled them to convoy the caravan ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... upon the rebec that had first attracted Mary's attention. Later he had become her secretary for French affairs and the young Queen, reared amid the elegancies of the Court of France, grew attached to him as to a fellow-exile in the uncouth and turbulent land over which a harsh destiny ordained that she should rule. Using his opportunities and his subtle Italian intelligence, he had advanced so rapidly that soon there was no man in Scotland who stood higher with the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... boys knelt at the foot of the tree, while the old sailor in simple, uncouth speech, offered up a little prayer of humble thanks for the deliverance of the two lads he loved ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... a something that slipped agilely between his legs, pinching each fat calf as it passed—a something that looked like a ball, but proved to be a human creature—no other than the crazy Sigurd, who, after accomplishing his uncouth gambol successfully, stood up, shaking back his streaming fair locks and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... piercing eyes, and long matted locks. Most I met in the interior looked, a little distance off, like perambulating masses of dirty rags; but all, even the filthiest and most ragged, carried a bright, sharp tulwar. Though rough and uncouth, however, I found the natives, as a rule, hospitable and kindly. It was only in the far interior that any unpleasantness was experienced. This was, perhaps, only natural, seeing that seventy miles of the journey lay through a region as yet unexplored by Europeans, the inhabitants of which ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... hospitality; and I daresay she was the more puzzled at not being able "to place me," as the Yankees say, for she asked me if I was a Saxon, an Austrian, or a Turk? My appearance, I suppose, was rather uncouth and alarming. She was young and very pretty—an Armenian, I learned afterwards. These women are apt to have Oriental notions about men, and she was evidently afraid to ask ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... at the age of fifteen I was but a poor psychologist. But Le Mansel's pride was too subtle to strike one at once. It had no concrete shape, but seemed to embrace remote phantasms. And yet it influenced all his feelings and gave to his ideas, uncouth and incoherent though they ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... Still the domestic animals kept up those noises, so familiar to Tite's ear when at home. And these were broken at intervals by what seemed the barking of a wolf. Now a strange and shadowy figure passed and repassed in the cabin, its uncouth form reflecting every few seconds in the light. Should they advance, enter the cabin, and see who this strange being was, or return to the beach and wait until morning? This was the question which occupied their thoughts now. Impelled as well, perhaps, by anxiety as necessity, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... Revolutionary colonists than they had been under the British government, after the expression of such sentiments as those addressed to the people of Great Britain, on the 21st of October, 1774. The Americans, uncouth in manners, were, in truth, most intolerant of papacy. In the "Cradle of American Liberty," a dancing school was not permitted. While in Boston a fencing school was allowed, there were no musicians permitted to exist, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... mule by the tail, and made her fly off like a four-year old, made friends with the savage watch-dog on the chain, coaxed the pigeons to fly to him, and finally went off to the fields in search of his uncle. On the road outside the farmyard gate he met a team, driven by a big uncouth-looking man, dressed in coarse trowsers, a red shirt, and a ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... wandered up and down, searching for some one to whom to speak, and had almost made up his mind that he had found a real enchanted Castle of Silence, when in the distance he saw a figure approaching up one of the green walks. There was something uncouth and strange about the way the newcomer kept waving his hands over his head—then, for no apparent reason, flapping them across his breast like a groom on a frosty day, hopping all the time first on one foot and then on the other. Tiring of this way of getting over the ground, he would ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... composer of "The Last Judgment," he set great store upon his learning, and was fond of trivial themes that admitted of obvious contrapuntal treatment. Even when he avoided that failing, his music is often uncouth and ponderous, while on its surface lies a superfluous, highly-coloured froth. The basses move with leaden-footed reluctance; the melodies consist largely of ineffective arpeggios on long-drawn chords; the embroidery seems ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... not to be unreasonably shocked by such vulgarities. But we should at least endeavour to correct the rash judgments which we may be disposed to form on these occasions, and should learn to recognize and to prize a sound texture and just configuration, though disguised beneath a homely or uncouth drapery. It was an Apostle who declared that he had come (to the learned and accomplished Grecians too) "not with excellency of speech, or the wisdom of words." From these he had studiously abstained, lest he should have seemed to ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... for the letter," concluded Heron with the same marked feverishness of manner which sat so curiously on his uncouth personality. "Pen, ink and ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... lines strongly resemble a passage in the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne, a Poet who has told an interesting story in uncouth rhymes, and mingled sublimity of thought and beauty of expression, with the quaintest conceits, ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... man, the long and uninteresting seven miles on his small and rather tight-shod feet, through country that had been once beautiful but was now scrubbled all over with mining villages, on and on up heavy hills and down others, asking his way from uncouth clowns, till at last he came to the Common, which wasn't a Common at all, but a sort of village more depressing than usual: naked, high, exposed to heaven and ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Bishop, who only gives us a slight Account or Essay of their persecution and Sufferings. The Indians of this Country use to break out into such Words as these, when they are driven, loaded like Brutes through the uncouth wayes in their Journeys over the Mountains, if they happen to faint through Weakness, and miscarry through extremity of Labour, (for then they are kicked and cudge'd, their Teeth dasht out with the Pummels ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... and almost simultaneously a bat, to whirr round and round over the bed and along the ceiling, while from off the dark waters of the fen came from time to time strange splashings and uncouth cries, which would have startled a wakeful stranger to these parts. Now and then a peculiar moan would be heard, then what sounded like a dismal, distant roaring, followed by the cackling of ducks, and plaintive whistlings of ox-birds, oyster-catchers, ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... sometimes in chariots sometimes on horseback, riding at their head. Parta welcomed them, and food was served out to the men while the chiefs were entertained in the hall. Beric, looking at the wild figures, rough and uncouth but powerful and massive in frame, was filled with regret that these men knew nothing of discipline, and that circumstances had forced on ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... to languish if it gets too far away from primitive conditions. But, like life also, it is a poor thing and a very uncouth affair if it has nothing but primitive conditions to recommend it. Because there is a decadent art about, one need not make a hero of the pavement artist. But without going to the extreme of flouting the centuries of culture that art inherits, ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... nature choleric; and the credit he had acquired made him insolent and conceited. Even his exterior was portentous. A fleece of white periwig showed a most uncouth visage, of great length, having the mouth, as the organ by use of which he was to rise to eminence, placed in the very centre of the countenance, and exhibiting to the astonished spectator as much chin below as there was nose and brow above the aperture. His pronunciation, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... marked, was small, with a kindly expression about it. Altogether he was a strange mixture of the Methodist preacher and the Indian patriarch. His son was much more savage than himself in appearance—a silent, cold-looking man; and the grandson, a boy of ten or twelve, was one of the most uncouth, impish-looking creatures we ever beheld. He wore a long-tailed coat twice too large for him, with boots of the same size. The child's face was very wild, and he was bareheaded, with an unusual quantity of long, black hair streaming about his head and shoulders. While ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... Thence home, calling at my bookseller's and other trifling places, and in the evening the mother come and with a nurse she has got, who demanded and I did agree at 10s. per weeke to take her, and so she away, and my house mighty uncouth, having so few in it, and we shall want a servant or two by it, and the truth is my heart was a little sad all the afternoon and jealous of myself. But she went, and we all glad of it, and so a little to the office, and so home to supper and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... The gross, jaded, uncouth present has slipped from me as a garment might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures from the past come and go ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... there was no sequence in the order of their happening. Tiny occurrences filled him with disproportionate, inconceivable horror; and great events, on the other hand, passed him scathless. The spirit of disorder—monstrous, uncouth, terrifying—reigned supreme; and Jimbo's whole desire, though inarticulate, was to escape back into ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... geology. That formation had hitherto been regarded as well nigh barren of organic remains; but Mr. Miller demonstrated that it contains at least three successive stages, each characterized by a suite of uncouth and hitherto unknown fishes. A few years later he published his "Footprints of the Creator." This is undoubtedly his chef-d'oeuvre, exhibiting, as it does, the full powers of his massive intellect and his poetic imagination. As a piece of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... was thinking of the queer-looking men and women who were swarming through the rooms, and he made, after his own delicate notion of humour, some uncouth jests on those who passed by. Mrs. Lee, however, was in no humour to explain or even to ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... girls' schools, however, the elements of Latin are almost necessity. It is wanting in courtesy, it is almost uncouth for us to grow up without any knowledge of the language of Holy Church. It is almost impossible for educated Catholics to have right taste in devotion, the "love and relish" of the most excellent things, without some knowledge of our great ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... supper with us on Saturday next? I should not merely be pleased, I should be grateful. My wife is writing formally to Mrs. Elliot'—(Here, Agnes, take your letter),—but I venture to write as well, and to add my more uncouth entreaties.'—An olive-branch. It is time! But (ridiculous person!) does he think that we can leave the House deserted and all go out pleasuring in term time?—Rickie, a letter ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... course, went into No. II.; and if exceedingly difficult, (and also important,) it was very properly thrown into No. III.; being a question that really ought not to have been asked, and did not deserve an answer. The fruit within these uncouth shells, however, was precious. Mr. Tresayle's law was supreme over everybody's else. It was currently reported that Lord Eldon even (who was himself slightly acquainted with such subjects) reverently ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... where the men are abrupt, not seldom uncouth of speech and appearance, the women have a lively relish for the gentle gravity of the men of the North: they feel thankful to them for speaking a language at once aristocratic, official, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... grudge, I suppose, good fellow," replied the earl, laughing at the rustic's uncouth appearance; "but thou seem'st a stout fellow, and one not likely to flinch, and may discharge the office as well as another. If no better man can be found, let him do it," he added to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... who will later fear the multitude as little as they now mind the Berkshire winds. And from the pittance she receives for training these rebellious urchins into heroic men she is supporting an old mother somewhere, or helping a brother to an education. And your deacon will be some farmer, perhaps uncouth in appearance and rough of dress, and certainly blunt in his scanty speech. He'll not flatter you nor your sermons; and until you've lived with him for years you will not know what a great heart there is in that rugged frame, and what wealth of affection in that silent hand-shake. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... worship God publicly after their own mean and tasteless fashion; had admitted them to the bench of justice and to the Privy Council; had gratified them with fur robes, gold chains, salaries, and pensions. In return for his liberality, these people, once so uncouth in demeanour, once so savage in opposition even to legitimate authority, had become the most abject of flatterers. They had continued to applaud and encourage him when the most devoted friends of his family had retired in shame ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Purcell, and also Gostling, the son of the singer of the same name for whom Purcell wrote; but neither acquaintance seems to have profited him aught. His anecdotes are the product of inborn wickedness and an uncouth, boorish imagination. When we have cleared away his garbage, there remains only a skeleton life, but at any rate we have the satisfaction of ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... along the woodland way Strange creatures leer at me with uncouth love, And from the grass reach upward to my breast, And to my mouth ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... Mr. Sheridan's life we are indebted for most of those elegant love-verses, which are so well known and so often quoted. The lines "Uncouth is this moss-covered grotto of stone," were addressed to Miss Linley, after having offended her by one of those lectures upon decorum of conduct, which jealous lovers so frequently inflict upon their mistresses,—and the grotto, immortalized by their quarrel, is supposed ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... sent out a half-breed clerk to the Swan River every winter. But this man had lately died, and now the trade threatened to lapse for the lack of an interpreter. None of the Kakisas could speak English, and there was no company employee who could speak their uncouth tongue except Gordon Strange the bookkeeper, who could not be spared ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... anger against him and to be beginning to like him. She had such a warm, quick smile; such a caressing look in those serious eyes. She was so natural and easy with him; turned to him so quickly for his approval of what she said or did and took his uncouth criticism so sweetly. It was flattering—yes, that was just the point. Was she sincere, or was she planning to add him to the list of her victims? She would not do that. He was no boy, to ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... felt himself free he laid hold of a bag which lay amongst the roots of the tree, and which was full of gold, and lifted it up, grumbling to himself: 'Uncouth people, to cut off a piece of my fine beard. Bad luck to you!' and then he swung the bag upon his back, and went off without even once looking at ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... be regarded, if not as a fiction, at least as one more result of Borrow's inveterate habit of "drawing the long bow,"—to wit the passages in Lavengro wherein Borrow recounts his acquisition of the "strange and uncouth-looking volume" at the price of a kiss from the yeoman's wife, and the purpose ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... we must rank that navigator, who, ignorant of the compass and even of the art of steering by the stars, pressed his shallop out beyond sight of land, into the trackless sea after the fall of night. Such a one braved, beside the ordinary dangers of the deep, the uncouth and mythical terrors with which world-wide ignorance and superstition had invested it. The sea was thought to be the domain of fierce and ravenous monsters, and of gods quite as dangerous to men. Prodigious whirlpools, rapids, and cataracts, quite without any physical reason for ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... frontiers of civilization, who lived by war and marauding. Luckily the lower part of the face, the thick, double lips which parted readily in a fascinating, good-humored smile, tempered with a sort of Saint Vincent de Paul expression that uncouth ugliness, that original countenance, so original that it forgot to be commonplace. But his inferior extraction betrayed itself in another direction by his voice, the voice of a Rhone boatman, hoarse and indistinct, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... may be added, that if Quaker-men were to attempt to marry out of their own society, they would not in general be well received. Their dress and their manners are considered as uncouth in the eyes of the female-world, and would present themselves as so many obstacles in the way of their success. The women of this description generally like a smart and showy exterior. They admire ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... Many uncouth and frivolous ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies of the middle ages, which good sense had banished from most other parts of France, where they once were common, still lingered in the archbishop's seignory. Thus, at no very remote period, it was customary on the Feast of Pentecost to cast ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... fortune, I am. And from what I hear, 'tis a dangerous place, full of fierce beasts and uncouth people. But go thither I must, for I seek a man I shall not find elsewhere. If thou wouldst find a hawk, needs must that thou find a hawk's nest; no other bird's will serve thy purpose—that is my position. Is there any chance that I shall light upon ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... passion! The splendid pavement reflecting the entire edifice, the facings of the pilasters with their medallions of popes, the tiara and the keys borne aloft by chubby angels, the walls covered with emblems, particularly the dove of Innocent X, the niches with their colossal statues uncouth in taste, the loggie and their balconies, the balustrade and double steps of the Confession, the rich altars and yet richer tombs—all, nave, aisles, transepts, and apsis, were in marble, resplendent ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... account the practical difference between colloquial or off-hand speech and the diction of a scientific treatise. This is said without forgetting that colloquialism always needs watching and that some people form the habit of being careless or positively uncouth as if it were a ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... eyes, and the girl sat studying his face in the dim light, graving it deep on her inner vision, seeking to formulate some conception of the strange being so still and placid before her. How had she ever thought him ridiculous and uncouth? How had she ever dared to insult him by distrust? What did it matter what other men, estimating him by their own sordid standards, said of him? As if her thought had established a connection with his, he opened ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape. When the Scotch child sees them first he falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her swift brooks Dance in thy verse; to her grave sylvan nooks Thy steps allure us, which the wood-thrush hears As maids their lovers', and no treason fears; Through thee her Merrimacs and Agiochooks And many a name uncouth win gracious looks, Sweetly familiar to both Englands' ears: Peaceful by birthright, as a virgin lake, The lily's anchorage, which no eyes behold Save those of stars, yet for thy brother's sake That lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... possibly accept it, when you permit me to know the hand from which it comes. Be assured, madam, that there is much truth in the assertion of its being more easy to give than to receive. "I have the honour to remain, madam, yours, etc., etc., "J. J. ROUSSEAU." This was rather an uncouth manner of refusing; nevertheless, when at this distance of time I review the transaction, I cannot help admitting that I well deserved it. Perhaps when it first occurred I might have felt piqued, but since I have quitted the court I have again read over the works of J. J. Rousseau, and I now ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... less of the Shoshones and Piute tribes were to be seen lounging in picturesque groups at nearly every railroad station. A few also traveled with us short distances in the baggage car, which is made free to them. The men were dirty, uncouth specimens of humanity, besmeared with yellow ochre and vermilion, dressed in red blankets, and bearing a hatchet in their hands, their only visible weapon. The women were dressed in tawdry colors,—striped government blankets and red flannel leggins, with a profusion of colored beads about ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... drew near, the first hint the old hermit received of our approach was the doctor's stepping up and touching his shoulder, as he was kneeling over on a stone cleaning fish in the brook. He leaped up, and stared at us. But with a variety of uncouth gestures, he soon made us welcome; informing us, by the same means, that he was both deaf and dumb; he then ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... to his belov'd Belvira; for a little Verse after the dull Prose Company of his Servant, was as great an Ease to him, (from whom it flow'd as naturally and unartificially, as his Love or his Breath) as a Pace or Hand-gallop, after a hard, uncouth, and rugged Trot. He therefore, finding his Pegasus was no way tir'd with his Land-travel, takes a short Journey thro' the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... splendid and the scene was lovely. The handsome black-brown Sheykh in dark robes and white turban, Omar in a graceful white gown and red turban, and the wild Ababdeh in all manner of dingy white rags, and with every kind of uncouth weapon, spears, matchlocks, etc., in every kind of wild and graceful attitude, with their long black ringlets and bare heads, a few little black-brown children quite naked and shaped like Cupids. And there we sat and looked so romantic and talked quite like ladies and gentlemen about the merits of ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Magazine for 1779, a correspondent relates a ceremony, which is still preserved in some parts of England. 'The girls, from five or six to eighteen years old, were assembled in a crowd, burning an uncouth effigy, which they called a holly-boy, and which they had stolen from the boys; while in another part of the village, the boys were burning what they called an Ivy-girl, which they had stolen from the girls. The ceremony of each burning was attended ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bosom, and constantly read them, or shared them with those who cared to know it, even to tearing a volume in two. If his belief was true and we are in this world surrounded by spirits, evil or good, which our evil or good behavior invites to be of our company, then this harmless, loving, uncouth, half-crazy man walked daily with ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... Mistress," a gross translation by Sir Charles Sedley of Terence's "Eunuchus," had been often represented with the highest approbation. But the satire of Dryden was rather accounted too personal, than too loose. The character of Limberham has been supposed to represent Lauderdale, whose age and uncouth figure rendered ridiculous his ungainly affectation of fashionable vices. Mr Malone intimates a suspicion, that Shaftesbury was the person levelled at, whose lameness and infirmities made the satire ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... with a prayer, and unconsciously demonstrates the origin of the use of stimulants. It may be that when the jolly companion has become a loathsome sot, and his mind is ablaze with the fire of drink, and he sees uncouth beasts in horrid presence, that inherited memories haunt him with visions of the beast-gods worshipped by his ancestors at the very time when the ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... Creek at once to carry out the Maluka's suggestion, and succeeded so well that I was soon the centre of a delighted dusky group, squatting on its haunches, and deep in fascinations of teaching an outsider its language. The uncouth mispronunciations tickled the old men beyond description, and they kept me gurgling at difficult gutturals, until, convulsed at the contortion of everyday words and phrases, they echoed Dan's opinion in queer pidgin-English that the "missus needed a deal of education." Jimmy gradually became ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... with Captain Shmaleff, and in the afternoon, in order to vary our amusements, he treated us with an exhibition of the Russian and Kamtschadale dancing. No description can convey an adequate idea of this rude and uncouth entertainment. The figure of the Russian dance was much like those of our hornpipes, and was danced either single, or by two or four persons at a time. Their steps were, short and quick, with the feet scarce raised from the ground; the arms ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... harsh, abrupt; dry, stiff, cramped, formal, guinde[Fr]; forced, labored; artificial, mannered, ponderous; awkward, uncourtly[obs3], unpolished; turgid &c. 577; affected, euphuistic[obs3]; barbarous, uncouth, grotesque, rude, crude, halting; offensive to ears polite. % 2. Spoken Language % 580. Voice. — N. voice; vocality[obs3]; organ, lungs, bellows; good voice, fine voice, powerful voice &c. (loud) 404;, musical voice &c. 413; intonation; tone of voice ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wizened and repulsive old creature, that, huddled in his chair in the dirty, boxed-in little office, made her think of some crafty old spider lurking in its web for unwary prey. Was the man lying to her? Was he in any degree suspicious? Why should he be? He had given not the slightest sign that her uncouth language was either unexpected or unnecessary. Perhaps to Shluker, and perhaps to all the rest of the gang—except Danglar!—Gypsy Nan was accepted at face value as just Gypsy Nan; and, if that were so, the idea of playing up a natural wifely anxiety on Danglar's behalf could not be used ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... uncouth sounds of the still more uncouth savages of that distant region. The fellow who carried us in had a name of his own, doubtless, but it was not to be pronounced by a Christian tongue, and he got the sobriquet of the Dipper from us, owing to the manner in which he ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... talk of large political movements we have to recall ourselves to a young labouring man with hardly any schooling, naturally and incurably uncouth, but with a curious, quite modest, impulse to assert a kindly ascendency over the companions whom chance threw in his way, and with something of the gift, which odd, shy people often possess, for using their very oddity as a weapon in their struggles. In the conditions of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... masses which had broken loose from the "thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice," and were working their way, by wind and current, some alone, and some in fleets, to milder climes. No pencil has ever yet given anything like the true effect of an iceberg. In a picture, they are huge, uncouth masses, stuck in the sea, while their chief beauty and grandeur,—their slow, stately motion; the whirling of the snow about their summits, and the fearful groaning and cracking of their parts,—the picture cannot give. This is the large iceberg; while ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... was finished, furniture began to arrive, and this was another surprise for the Close, where houses were not adorned with the designs of any one period, but were filled with a heterogeneous collection of articles, generally aged and remarkably uncouth. Everything in the Tenor's long low room, on the contrary, even down to the shape of the brass coal scuttle and including the case of the grand piano, was in harmony with the colour and design of the frescoes on the walls and ceiling; the floor, which was polished, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... different out upon the rose-tinted waters of the central lake. It boiled and heaved with strange life. Great slate-colored backs and high serrated dorsal fins shot up with a fringe of silver, and then rolled down into the depths again. The sand-banks far out were spotted with uncouth crawling forms, huge turtles, strange saurians, and one great flat creature like a writhing, palpitating mat of black greasy leather, which flopped its way slowly to the lake. Here and there high serpent heads projected out of the water, cutting swiftly through it with a little collar ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... twenty virgins, arrayed in white vestments, and singing in honour of Juno Regina a hymn, which to the uncultivated minds of that time might appear to have merit, but if repeated now would seem inelegant and uncouth. The train of virgins was followed by the decemvirs, crowned with laurel, and in purple-bordered robes. From the gate they proceeded by the Jugarian street into the forum: in the forum the procession stopped, and the virgins, linked together by a cord passed through their hands, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... embedded in the libretto of Tristan serve their turn, though a finer and more poetical way of saying the same things might have been found. But Wagner did not find that more poetical way, so let us rejoice that through this uncouth lingo Wagner managed to get into a sort of verse the idea that night was the friend of Tristan's love and day its enemy, and that in the end everlasting night is best of all. In his letters, however, we find him playing with the love and death notion, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... think of that which is "the goal, the Comforter, the Lord, the Witness, the resting-place, the asylum, and the Friend." Is it by any of these dear and familiar names? The soul of the modern mystic is becoming a mere hoarding-place for uncomely theories. He creates an uncouth symbolism, and blinds his soul within with names drawn from the Kabala or ancient Sanskrit, and makes alien to himself the intimate powers of his spirit, things which in truth are more his than the beatings of his heart. Could we not speak of them in our own tongue, and the language ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... and bribed a hostler at the Maypole Inn to spy for him and prevent, if he could, these letters passing. The hostler was an uncouth, drunken giant that people called Maypole Hugh, as strong as an ox, and cruel and cunning. Hugh watched carefully, and from time to time would go to Sir John's house in London and report ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... the good things of the world. After maintaining his ground during the first twenty or thirty years, it had probably been easier for him to forge along afterwards, for he could impose upon the new generation with his stories of success in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was by nature, the external polish and trick of good form which he had acquired, and, no doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had influenced men to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him extraordinary good-fortune with women. He had not ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... territory drained by the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi, and the imagination of the cartographer had made good his lack of information. Rivers and mountains appeared where nature had made no such provision, while the names, quaint and uncouth, with which Jefferson proposed to burden states yet in embryo sprawled in large letters across the yellow plain. "Assenispia—Polypotamia—Chersonesus—Michigania," read Rand. "Barbarous! I could name them better out of Ossian!" ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... trousered legs and conical wolf-skin cap, walked our own ancestor, representative of subject Germany, under a figure very familiar in later Roman sculpture; and, though certainly with none of the grace of the Dying Gaul, yet with plenty of uncouth pathos in his misshapen features, and the pale, servile, yet angry eyes. His children, [198] white-skinned and golden-haired "as angels," trudged beside him. His brothers, of the animal world, the ibex, the wild-cat, and the reindeer, stalking and trumpeting grandly, found their due place in ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... I lodged in my way from London, the host hath courteously offered me the bath, and the hostess linen curious and fragrant; and to say truth, the poor people are hospitable and kind, despite their uncouth hate of the foreigner; nor is their meat to be despised, plentiful and succulent; but pardex, as thou sayest, little helped by the art of dressing. Wherefore, my father, I will while the time till the poulardes be roasted, and the fish broiled or stewed, by the ablutions thou profferest ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paused as he wished and was listening in surprise. As much because he talked so well and so easily as at the really joyous tone in which he hailed his uncouth acquaintance ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... he said, mysteriously; "I hope, in the course of a few weeks, to place a document in your possession that will not only surprise, but which, I believe, knowing that beneath a somewhat uncouth manner lies a kindly heart, will also ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... this uncouth-looking person that Mr. Winkle's eye rested, and it was towards him that Mr. Pickwick extended his hand when he said, 'A friend of our friend's here. We discovered this morning that our friend was connected with the theatre in this place, though he ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... voluntary submission to an inexorable logic. Rene Descartes, who was born at La Haye, near Tours, in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650, escaped the influence of Richelieu by the isolation to which he condemned himself, as well as by the proud and somewhat uncouth independence of his character. Engaging as a volunteer, at one and twenty, in the Dutch army, he marched over Germany in the service of several princes, returned to France, where he sold his property, travelled through the whole of Italy, and ended, in 1629, by ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a small kit of uncouth tools, he works upon his own account, but at the smallest possible profit. When he has finished a pair of shoes, if he be a shoemaker, he or his wife starts out to dispose of them to some passer-by in the street before a new pair ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... none with her opine, and, in the lack Of a companion, singly must she fare, So then, alone and friendless, she a track Uncouth pursues, and through a wooded lair. Gryphon the white and Aquilant the black Take road more beaten with the other pair; And on the following day a castle see, Within which they ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... shrubs, that it suggests to every one, who ever read a fairy tale, a scene for the revels of elves and fairies. Yet no Oberon—no Titania dwelt there; but long ago, where there are now some ruinous remains of old houses, and an uncouth new one, stood the first frame house of the lower valley of the Housatonic. It was inhabited by the last Indian who maintained the dignity of a Chief, and from him passed to the first missionary to the tribe. There Kirkland, the late honoured President of Harvard ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... again sight land. We stand in, and heave-to off the coast. It is Savage Island, justly so-called by Captain Cook. Several canoes, with uncouth, fierce-looking savages, come off to us, with painted faces and long hair, even more brutal than those of Aitutaki. Taro ascertains from them that another vessel with two masts has just called there, but gone away,—undoubtedly ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... from within, a man who had evidently been watching his chance thrust himself before the two women, barring their way, and proceeded to address Natalie in a vehement, gesticulating fashion, with much clinching of his fists and throwing out of his arms. Anneli had shrunk back a step, for the man was uncouth and unkempt; but the young mistress stood erect and firm, confronting the beggar, or madman, or whoever he was, without the slightest ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... They are far too brutal, too morally degraded, to know anything of these finer points of etiquette and propriety. They are really an uncouth bunch. Why, do you know, I am certain that they would have had the bad taste to use an energy weapon to dispose of the victim in a case such as you just witnessed! They are really quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely be called civilized at all. But we will soon ...
— Upstarts • L. J. Stecher
... I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason.... I'll ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... seek to know him; and you will find that in those points in which he differs from you rests his power to instruct you, enlarge you, and do you good. Keep your heart open for everybody, and be sure that you shall have your reward. You shall find a jewel under the most uncouth exterior; and associated with homeliest manners and oddest ways and ugliest faces, you will find rare virtues, fragrant ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... material: a good brain, a sturdy sense of honour, and above all an imagination that lifted him safely,—if not always sanely,—above the narrow world in which the farmer of that day spent his entire life. Not that he was uncouth to begin with,—far from it. He had been irritatingly fastidious from boyhood up. His thoughts had wandered afar on frequent journeys, and when they came back to take up the dull occupation they ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... there he brought about the merry marriage. And in the house she bare Hermes a dear son who from his birth was marvellous to look upon, with goat's feet and two horns—a noisy, merry-laughing child. But when the nurse saw his uncouth face and full beard, she was afraid and sprang up and fled and left the child. Then luck-bringing Hermes received him and took him in his arms: very glad in his heart was the god. And he went quickly to the abodes of the deathless gods, carrying the son wrapped ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... own countrymen, do not require great amendment? I am very sure, that the citizens of the States so disrespectfully spoken of, would feel a deep humiliation, to be compelled to exchange their urbanity of deportment, for the uncouth incivility of the people of Massachusetts. Look at their public journals, and you will find them, very generally, teeming with abuse of private character, which would not be countenanced here. The idea of New England becoming a school for manners, is about as ...
— The Code of Honor • John Lyde Wilson
... represents one of those fishes to which, on account of their uncouth appearance, the name of Toad Fish has been popularly given. Under this denomination there have been included many very dissimilar kinds, extreme ugliness being held as alone sufficient for the establishment of an undeniable claim to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... she'd say,' replied Kit, with something like a blush on his uncouth face; 'she'll never know nothing, and consequently, she'll ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... circumstances it would hardly have occurred to any one to try to derive the monotheistic narrative of Gen. i. from either of these pagan myths, crowded as they are with uncouth and barbarous details. But it happened that Mr. George Smith, who brought to light the Assyrian Creation tablets, brought also to light a Babylonian account of the Flood, which had a large number of features in common with the narrative of Gen. vi.-ix. The actual resemblance between the ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... pit-head gear and stark brick chimney, sprinkled the bare fields between, for hedgerows were scanty and fences of rusty colliery rope replaced them. Yet it was a wealthy country, and bred keen-witted, enterprising men, who, uncouth often in speech and exterior, possessed an energy that has spread their commerce to the far corners of the earth. That day the autumn haze wrapped a mellow dimness round its defects, but Grace Carrington sighed as she ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... thirteenth stanzas of "Childe Roland." Both effects are artistic because each sort of combination is in response to the nature of the thought. It is true that sometimes, perhaps not infrequently, the verse is rugged or uncouth where the sense does not call for such form, and there are lines that not only remind us of De Quincey's dictum that certain words should be "boiled before they are eaten," but which have no metrical flow at all; they defy any sort of scansion and read like rough ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... boat-builders, two master sail-makers and twenty workmen, two compass-makers, two carvers, two anchor-smiths, two lock-smiths, two copper-smiths and two tinmen; making, with some others, not much less than five hundred persons. However uncouth the manners of Peter may have been, he was a great favourite with King William, and the Tzar had also a high opinion of his Majesty, whom he visited frequently, and consulted on all important occasions. The king engaged him to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... keeps this small house, and my bedroom is sweetened with lavender, has a clean sash-window, and the walls are, moreover, adorned with ballads of Fair Rosamond and Cruel Barbara Allan. The woman's accent, though uncouth enough, sounds yet kindly in my ear; for I have never yet forgotten the desolate effect produced on my infant organs, when I heard on all sides your slow and broad northern pronunciation, which was to me the tone of a foreign land. ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... cannot be, everything; and indeed, as a matter of experience, cannot even be counted upon to educate. Some of us have known men of extreme learning who yet are, some of them, uncouth in conduct, others violent and overbearing in converse, others unfair in controversy, others even unscrupulous in action—men of whom the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato's "Republic" may stand for the general type. Nay, some of us will subscribe with the old schoolmaster whom I will quote ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... neighbor, whose husband had just bought a country-house at Soisy, near Montmorency. Mademoiselle d'Ars, daughter to the Comte d'Ars, a man of fashion, but poor, had married M. de Verdelin, old, ugly, deaf, uncouth, brutal, jealous, with gashes in his face, and blind of one eye, but, upon the whole, a good man when properly managed, and in possession of a fortune of from fifteen to twenty thousand a year. This charming object, swearing, roaring, scolding, storming, and making his wife cry all day long, ended ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... sat down after the first hymn John Dexter formally presented Grant Adams to the congregation. The young man rose, walked to the chancel rail and stood for a moment facing his audience without speaking. The congregation saw a tall, strong featured, uncouth man with large nose and a big mouth—clearly masculine and not finely chiselled. In these features there was something almost coarse and earthy; but in the man's eyes and forehead, there lurked the haunting, fleeting shadow of the eternal feminine in his soul. His eyes ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... frightened Am I. But at that why wonder, If myself I do not know? Did you see a fearful corse here, A dead body with a soul, An apparent man supported By his skeleton alone, Bones from which the flesh had rotted, Fingers rigid, gaunt, and cold, Naked trunk, uncouth, abhorrent, Vacant spaces whence the eyes, Having fallen, left bare the sockets?— ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... house. Then he threw up the sash and scrambled out. It was quite dark by this time: he was enclosed between two rows of vague, black houses, with bright windows here and there, and chimney-cans faintly cutting their uncouth designs among a few pale London stars. The space between was filled with the two lines of little gardens and the ranks of walls, and in the middle the black chasm of ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... humans, except only the Mistress and the Master, Lad detested patting or handling of any kind. Whether he thought this maneuver of the bear's an uncouth form of caress or knew it for a menace,—he moved back from it. Yet he did so with a leisurely motion, devoid of fear and expressive of a certain lofty contempt. Perhaps that is why he moved ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... jetty hair, curled loosely on his head, Fell down upon his shoulders glistening white, The rounded symmetry of breast and limb, And the rich color of his sensuous lips Almost belied the down upon his cheek. No uncouth garments hid his perfect form, Nor marred its grace, but, naked like the gods, The ruddy sunlight ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... any authority. The idea of his bodily deformity is utterly without foundation, and may have been adopted as a foil to his extraordinary shrewdness and wit, as exhibited in the anecdotes related of him by Planudes. That there was nothing uncouth in the person of Esop is evident from the fact that the Athenians erected a fine statue of him, by the famed sculptor Lysippus.—The Latin collection of the fables ascribed to Esop was first printed at Rome in 1473 and soon afterwards translated into ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... been going on even then, he verily believed, but for an interposition only equalled by that of the geese at the Capitol. For that, when he had got about half through his recapitulation, and was stopping at the end of a sentence to see the impression he was making, that uncouth fellow, Lively, moved by what happy inspiration he did not know, suddenly broke in, apropos of nothing, nodding his head, and speaking in a clear cackle, with, "Pray, sir, what is your opinion of the infallibility of the ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... gods of Arabia belong mostly to another class than that of nature-gods; or at least if they ever were connected with nature, they have parted with such associations. They are uncouth figures, with vague legends and miscellaneous attributes. One set of them is said to have been worshipped by the contemporaries of Noah; they are big men, and it is their property to drink milk. Hubal was the chief god of Mecca. It was his property to bring rain. Vadd ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the earth, and in the centre there was something that might almost be a tower rising above the rest of the building. Then there were documents that seemed all names and dates, with here and there a coat of arms done in the margin, and she came upon a string of uncouth Welsh names linked together by the word 'ap' in a chain that looked endless. There was a paper covered with signs and figures that meant nothing to her, and then there were the pocket-books, full of old-fashioned writing, and much of it in ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... kitchen fire from a huge pile in the back yard. After heaping up more than a sufficient quantity, we returned to the sitting-room, drew our chairs close to the hearth, and began to talk over our prospects. Soon, with a tremendous stamping in the entry, appeared Silas Foster, lank, stalwart, uncouth, and grizzly-bearded. He came from foddering the cattle in the barn, and from the field, where he had been ploughing, until the depth of the snow rendered it impossible to draw a furrow. He greeted us in pretty much the same tone ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lusty burgesses of the fifteenth century were thoroughly at home, and the comedy and pathos of these scenes must have been as welcome a relief to the spectators, from the |133| long-winded solemnity of many of the plays, as they are to modern readers. In the York mysteries the shepherds make uncouth exclamations at the song of the angels and ludicrously try to imitate it. The Chester shepherds talk in a very natural way of such things as the diseases of sheep, sit down with much relish to a meal of "ale of Halton," sour milk, onions, garlick and ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Adam Craig, hobbling down the frozen streets of this old-fashioned town. He thought, rubbing his bony hands together, that even the wind knew that Christmas was coming, the day that Christ was born: it went shouting boisterously through the great mountain-gorges, its very uncouth soul shaken with gladness. The city itself, he fancied, had caught a new and curious beauty: this winter its mills were stopped, and it had time to clothe the steep streets in spotless snow and icicles; its windows glittered red and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... looking Wentworth squarely in the eyes with a heavy stare. "Some fur is good, and some is bad. A Russian sable is better than a baum marten." At the words, Jean McNabb, who had been a silent but fascinated listener to all that transpired, leaned swiftly forward, her eyes staring into the uncouth face of the speaker, who continued, "And when the coat is dark, and of matched skins, it is very much better than any baum marten. And when one receives the sable coat on a winter's night from the hands of a beautiful Russian princess whom one is helping to escape through a roaring blizzard ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... by adverse fortune to the lowest shifts of his calling, such as the horse-play of Policinello, and the imitation of uncouth sounds, that resembled nothing either in heaven or earth, Pippo was a clever knave in his way, and was quite equal to a display of the higher branches of his art, whenever chance gave him an audience capable of estimating his qualities. On the present occasion he ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... was handed in to the Missing Link, and he put it on with awkward, monkey movements; he donned the crush hat, put the eyeglass in his eye, and with the walking' stick promenaded the cage with some uncouth affectations of humanity. Meanwhile, Madame Marve had carried the small table into the cage. She spread a cloth, put on a few articles, ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... paused to look down into the vast chamber below. At some point among its chandeliers burned a small pinhole of light that revealed in a strange dimness various forms of furniture, showing monstrous and uncouth in their night attire. Night-gowns rather than pajamas seemed the general wear; only a few legs were to be seen. In this, its sleeping aspect, the place was certainly more harmonious and more chaste ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... This uncouth vestment, which was used only by men of the lowest order, or by others solely when engaged in long and toilsome journeys, or in cold wintry weather, was composed of a thick loose-napped frieze or serge, of a dark ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... occupied in creating the earth and providing for its illumination, a whole host of maggot-like creatures had been breeding in Ymir's flesh. These uncouth beings now attracted divine attention. Summoning them into their presence, the gods first gave them forms and endowed them with superhuman intelligence, and then divided them into two large classes. Those which were ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Unseen, uncouth John Thorne, furious at the scant courtesy shown to the lady of his dreams, had brought his whip down heftily, just above the mangy tail of the colonel ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... approach the South, we meet with what are supposed to be rude and uncouth idols, but they have not been found under such circumstances as to make it positive that they belonged to the Mound Builders. In this illustration we have two idols, considered to be genuine relics of the stone-grave people of Tennessee. The first one is an Aztec idol found at Cholula, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... of all this bustle, Willie moped and pined. He had the same chord of delicacy running through his mind that made his body feeble and weak. He kept out of the way, and was apparently occupied in whittling and carving uncouth heads on hazel-sticks in an out-house. But he positively avoided Michael, and shrunk away even from Susan. She was too much occupied to notice this at first. Michael pointed it out to her, saying, with ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... forward, and always with imaginings and wonders concerning what manner of uncouth Being or Brute might come out of the darknesses all about. Yet, in all that time, there was a certain proudness of the heart, that I did come safe out of the power of the Grey Man, and did surely slay him. But, truly, it were ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... sacrifice. A few pieces of gold and some emeralds were discovered on the ground, and, as their eyes became accommodated to the darkness, they discerned in the most retired corner of the room the figure of the deity. It was an uncouth monster, made of wood, with the head resembling that of a man. This was the god, through whose lips Satan had breathed forth the far-famed oracles which had deluded his Indian votaries! ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... shaggy hair uncombed. I had been used to the sight of rough men in Adelaide, on our sheep-farm, but I had never seen one more boorish. He stood in the doorway, rubbing his hands, and gazing at us unflinchingly with the hard stare of a Norman peasant, while he spoke in rapid, uncouth tones to his wife. I turned away my head, and shut my eyes to this ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... Massachusetts which Benjamin Russell, an ardent Federalist and editor of the "Centinel," hung up over the desk in his office. The celebrated painter, Gilbert Stuart, coming into the office one day and observing the uncouth figure, added with his pencil a head, wings, and claws, and exclaimed, "That will do for a salamander!" "Better say a Gerrymander!" growled the editor; and the outlandish, name, thus duly coined, soon ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... artist of the name of Lucas, whom Lord Egremont is bringing into notice, and who will owe his fortune (if he makes it) to him. Lord Egremont is enormously rich, and lives with an abundant though not very refined hospitality. The house wants modern comforts, and the servants are rustic and uncouth; but everything is good, and it all bears an air of solid and aristocratic grandeur. The stud groom told me there are 300 horses of different sorts here. His course, however, is nearly run, and he has ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... grew rich with the romance which his young fancy lent them. One evening he asked whether he might go home with her; but his aunt was afraid that he might catch something, and his uncle said that evil communications corrupted good manners. He disliked the fisher folk, who were rough, uncouth, and went to chapel. But Philip was more comfortable in the kitchen than in the dining-room, and, whenever he could, he took his toys and played there. His aunt was not sorry. She did not like disorder, and though ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the feelings of a fish of the northern ocean around which the waters suddenly rose to tropical temperature, and swarmed with strange forms of life, uncouth and threatening, we should have a fair symbol of the mental condition in which Thomas Wingfold now found himself. The spiritual fluid in which his being floated had become all at once more potent, and he was in consequence uncomfortable. A certain intermittent ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... too much use is made of those strange and uncouth dialects which have to be represented to the eye by bad spelling. We have the familiar Yankee type in Mr. Bangs, and a new form of phraseology in the speech of the Newfoundland fishermen. A little of this is well enough, but it should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... through Grizzly Canyon—by this time clothed in funereal drapery and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. A hare, surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the ferns by the roadside as the cortege went by. Squirrels hastened ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... only stayed five minutes, staring blankly at the ground and smiling stupidly in profound silence, and suddenly, at the most interesting point, without listening to what she was saying, he got up, made an uncouth sideways bow, helpless with confusion, caught against the lady's expensive inlaid work-table, upsetting it on the floor and smashing it to atoms, and walked out nearly dead with shame. Liputin blamed him severely afterwards for having accepted the hundred roubles ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... too late in the day to do much work upon the cutter, I invited the seamen to give me a detailed account of how they had fared since the wreck. It was Svorenssen who undertook to tell the story, and he told it in the coarse, uncouth language of the forecastle, embellishing and emphasising it here and there, after the manner of the shellback, by the introduction of words and phrases comprehensible enough to me but confusing and quite unintelligible to a landsman. I shall therefore take the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... floats were painting the hulls of the black ships. The faces of the men they met were red and sunburned mostly,—not with the sunburn of the fields, but of the sea; these men lurched in their gait with an uncouth heaviness, yet gave them way kindly enough; but certain dull-eyed, frowzy-headed women seemed to push purposely against her grandfather, and one of them swore at Lydia for taking up all the sidewalk with her bundles. There were such dull ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... agent and the patient, together with a perception, and that the patient ceases to be a perceiving power and becomes a percipient, and the agent a quale instead of a quality? I suspect that quality may appear a strange and uncouth term to you, and that you do not understand the abstract expression. Then I will take concrete instances: I mean to say that the producing power or agent becomes neither heat nor whiteness but hot and white, and the like of other ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... the forest of Windsor situated near to the castle and measuring some twenty-five score yards of open level ground, stood Grey Dick, a strange, uncouth figure, at whom the archers of the guard laughed, nudging each other. In his bony hand, however, he held that at which they did not laugh, namely, the great black bow, six feet six inches long, which he said had come to him "from the sea," and was fashioned, not of yew, but of some ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... to "Ellsworth to Great Pond" and marvel! True, we still find the vivid delineation of human feelings, but what a distance we have travelled! Gone is the young dreamer with his world of moonshine, for here roars the Maine lumberjack with all the uncouth vigour and rude natural expressiveness of the living satyr. It is life; primal, uncovered, and unpolished—the ebullient, shouting vitality of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... of willows, clematises, grape-vines, and all our water-loving shrubs, that it suggests to every one, who ever read a fairy tale, a scene for the revels of elves and fairies. Yet no Oberon—no Titania dwelt there; but long ago, where there are now some ruinous remains of old houses, and an uncouth new one, stood the first frame house of the lower valley of the Housatonic. It was inhabited by the last Indian who maintained the dignity of a Chief, and from him passed to the first missionary ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... reduce it—and so had my face, at no time very smooth, now covered from ear to ear with a stubble, long, strong, and black as a shoe-brush. My broad-brimmed hat was battered and dinted into strangely uncouth cavities, and the leaf hung flapping over my brows like a broken umbrella; my jacket was tinselled indeed, but it was with the ancient scales of trout; my leathern overalls were black-glazed and greasy; and my whole equipment bore, I must confess, the evident signs ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... and somewhat uncouth, speaking with broad Derbyshire accent, adhering with all his tenacity to his work and to his town position, making good designs, and becoming fairly well-off. But at drawing, his hand swung naturally in big, bold lines, rather lax, so that it was cruel for ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... and Zernebock. Not having submitted to the embraces of any polluting Norman, as poor Ulrica had done, and having assisted no parricide, the milk of human kindness was not curdled in her bosom. She never cursed therefore, but blessed rather. This, however, she did in a strange uncouth Saxon manner that would have been unintelligible to any peasants ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of reading foreign or ancient languages, or of discoursing at all on General Grammar. And, since many of the users of this work may be but readers of our current English, to whom an unknown letter or a foreign word is a particularly uncouth and repulsive thing, we shall here forbear the use of Saxon characters, and, in our explanations, not go beyond the precincts of our own language, except to show the origin and primitive import of some of our definitive and connecting ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... return to the ships, the old Indian made signs that the young girls should be taken on board, nor would he admit of any denial. On entering the ships the girls showed no signs of grief nor alarm, though surrounded by what to them must have been uncouth and formidable beings. Columbus was careful that the confidence thus placed in him should not be abused. After feasting the young females, and ordering them to be clothed and adorned with various ornaments, he sent them on shore. The night, however, had fallen, and the coast was ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... marriage, Johnson opened a private school for boys. To operate a private school successfully implies a certain amount of skill in the management of parents; but Johnson's uncouth manners and needlessly blunt speech were appalling to those who had children who might possibly be given ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them, and tried them, and marked them. Ah! what platitudes he must have heard! what feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple, that that Irishman was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not present itself under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived with Swift. Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service—ate humble pie and came ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... watched him with perfectly quiescent observance. The large, somewhat uncouth man gave evidence to her intelligence that he was all physician—that he had not chosen his profession from any theory or motive, however good, but had been as much chosen by it as if he had been born a Physician. He was incredibly gentle and soft in all his movements, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... eminence popularly of men so devoid of all principle and integrity, so strangely uncouth and assorted, as the Daniel O'Connells, the John M'Hales, and the Feargus O'Connors; of men so unlearned in all principle, political and economical—so wanting, moreover, in the presence of the higher order of moral sentiments, as the Cobdens, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... was immediately dispatched to enter into a treaty with them, and, approaching the shore, hailed them through a trumpet in the most friendly terms; but so horribly confounded were these poor savages at the tremendous and uncouth sound of the Low Dutch language that they one and all took to their heels, and scampered over the Bergen hills; nor did they stop until they had buried themselves, head and ears, in the marshes on the other side, where they ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Cross to dine; and saw on the opposite coast the house Of Sir Francis Drake, which was built by his famous ancestor. Here we saw a sight that reminded me of the drawings of Webber from the South Sea Isles; women scarce clothed at all, with feet and legs entirely naked, straw bonnets of uncouth Shapes tied ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... rainbow-hued Blue Mountain parrots, who have held their ground to the last, whirr up with a prodigious flapping of wings, and, alighting on a gum-tree, can be seen hanging about the blossoms, head downwards, sucking out the honey with their uncouth beaks and awkward little tongues, which seem but badly adapted to such a delicate task. But I find I am digressing terribly, and the gloomy winter days of England, which make the recollection of a bright tropical morning so agreeable a task ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... the chase and the capture of the otter. The animal is impaled on the huntsman's spear, while the rough, shaggy, and picturesque-looking pack are represented with eyes intently fixed on the amphibious beast, and howling in uncouth chorus round their agonized and ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... and lack of organization too often characterizing a union, in marked contrast to the orderly management of a factory, often confuse us as to the real issues involved, and we find it hard to trust uncouth and unruly manifestations of social effort. The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that those who are formulating a code of associated action so often break through the established code of law and order. As society has a right to demand ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... him travel, that he might know something of other people besides his own. For people who stay at home always are apt to think everything strange that differs from what they have been accustomed to. Thus it is that English-speaking people, where knowledge is limited, think that German names are uncouth, when it is only the narrowness of their own culture that ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... associating with us on the white side, or attempting to be at all familiar. A mutual atmosphere of suspicion, in fact, seemed to pervade our quarters, making things already uncomfortable enough, still more so. Now, however, they fraternized with us, and in a variety of uncouth ways made havoc of the English tongue, as they tried to impress us with the beauty, fertility and general incomparability of their beloved Cape Verds. Of the eleven white men besides myself in the forecastle, there were a middle-aged German baker, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... chimney of this crazy hut a thin thread of smoke would now and then rise into the air, for there were folk living far up in that empty, airy desert, and oftentimes wild, uncouth little children were seen playing on the edge of the dizzy height, or sitting with their bare legs hanging down over the sheer depths, as they gazed below at what was going on in the court-yard. There they sat, just as little children in the town might ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... generally painted with a mixture of grease and coal. Over the shoulders is a loose robe or mantle of buffalo skin dressed white, adorned with porcupine quills, loosely fixed, so as to make a jingling noise when in motion, and painted with various uncouth figures, unintelligible to us, but to them emblematic of military exploits or any other incident: the hair of the robe is worn next the skin in fair weather, but when it rains the hair is put outside, and the robe is either thrown over the arm or wrapped ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... [256] Uncouth. "If thou shuldest refuse to do any of these thynges, and woldest assaye to do some thing of more sadnes and prudence, they wyll esteme and count the vnmanerly, cloubbysshe, frowarde, and clene contrarye to all mennes ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... been familiar friends from childhood. I remember an English author who, in speaking of your German Philosophies, says very wisely; 'Often a proposition of inscrutable and dread aspect, when resolutely grappled with, and torn from its shady den, and its bristling entrenchments of uncouth terminology,—and dragged forth into the open light of day, to be seen by the natural eye and tried by merely human understanding, proves to be a very harmless truth, familiar to us from old, sometimes so familiar as ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and trusted this man, entertained for him, notwithstanding his harsh speech and uncouth exterior, something akin to affection. Yet remembering the part he had played in the fate of the father, it was very dreadful to her that he should touch the child. And Dr. Knott read her thought. He did not resent it. It was all natural enough! From his heart ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... one person, however, who did not join in the jesting; and this was Langley. When he began to understand the matter he regarded the two with sympathetic curiosity and interest. Why should not their primitive and uncouth love develop and form a tie to bind the homely lives together, and warm and brighten them? It may have been that his own mental condition at this time was such as would tend to often his heart, for an innocent passion, long cherished in ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... brain-picture resolved into the formless dark. From the black waters, almost at her feet, sounded, raucous and loud, the voice of the great loon. Frenzied, maniacal, hideous, rang the night-shattering laughter. The uncouth mockery of the raw—the defiance ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Delancy Grandcourt, uncouth and highly coloured, stood up to shake hands; Bunbury Gray, a wiry, bronzed little polo-playing squadron man, hailed Duane ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... a distinct branch of study with them; and then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they passed away. The Moorish cavalier had no longer a place in the history of the coming days; the sage had done his duty and departed, leaving among his mysterious manuscripts, bristling with uncouth and, as the many believed, unholy signs, the elements of truth mingled with much error,—error which in the advancing centuries fell off as easily as the husk from ripe corn. Whether the present civilization of Spain is an advance upon that of the Moors might in many respects become a matter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... very leaves on those gnome-like, distorted trees seemed to rustle sibylline secrets in his ear. Those rugged and sombre Apennines, the cataract that dashed between, suited, more than the actual scenes would have done, the mood and temper of his mind. The stern, uncouth forms at rest on the crags below, and dwarfed by the giant size of the Matter that reigned around them, impressed him with the might of Nature and the littleness of Man. As in genius of the more spiritual cast, the living man, and the soul that lives in him, are studiously made the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... difference between colloquial or off-hand speech and the diction of a scientific treatise. This is said without forgetting that colloquialism always needs watching and that some people form the habit of being careless or positively uncouth as if it were a mark of high ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... I would not, and in a few minutes more arrived at the Grammar School. I looked at its peaked, antiquated front, and called to mind my feelings when, years back, I had first entered its porch. What a difference between the little uncouth, ignorant, savage, tricked out like a harlequin, and now the tall, athletic, well-dressed youth, happy in his independence, and conscious, although not vain, of his acquirements! and I mentally blessed the founders. But I had to talk to the Dominie, and to keep my appointment with the veal and bacon ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... our process of universal education is to-day so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by parrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By unnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... cruelty of the Huns were felt, and dreaded and magnified by the astonished Goths, who beheld their fields and villages consumed with flames and deluged with indiscriminate slaughter. To these real terrors were added the surprise and abhorrence which were excited by the shrill voice, the uncouth gestures, and the strange deformity of the Huns. These savages of Scythia were compared (and the picture had some resemblance) to the animals who walked very awkwardly on two legs, and to the misshapen figures, the ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... looking at the view. He wandered up and down, searching for some one to whom to speak, and had almost made up his mind that he had found a real enchanted Castle of Silence, when in the distance he saw a figure approaching up one of the green walks. There was something uncouth and strange about the way the newcomer kept waving his hands over his head—then, for no apparent reason, flapping them across his breast like a groom on a frosty day, hopping all the time first on one foot and then on the other. Tiring of this way of getting over the ground, he would ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... a man light a cigar so carelessly that one side of the roll will burn rapidly, with prodigious fumigation and giving out a dark and offensive cloud, while the other side remains untouched by the fire, only to wither and crackle and twist into uncouth shapes, until the smoker flings the cigar away, with an accompaniment of expletives which attach rather to his own stupidity than to the piece of tobacco he has so abominably abused. You will see another with a good pipe, laden with good tobacco, well lit, blowing incessantly down the mouth-piece ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... note. The early Bishops of Winchester had a palace and park here; remains of the former were laid open by a fire about seventeen years since. Then, who does not remember, in the love of sports and pastimes, the bull and bear-baiting theatres, and the uncouth glory of the Globe theatre, associated with the poet of all time—Shakspeare. Southwark was, therefore, a fitting site for a royal palace for occasional retirement, and its contiguity to the Thames must have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... For the settlements along the sea the usual mode of communication was by water, but there was a road along the whole coast of Massachusetts. In the interior of the colony, as Johnson boasted, "the wild and uncouth woods were filled with frequented ways, and the large rivers were overlaid with bridges, passable ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... They still by puffs of fame are nourish'd? Or whether have the world discern'd The tricks by which my fame was earn'd; That, lacking in my pencil skill, I made my tongue its office fill: That, marking (as for love of truth) In others' works a limb uncouth, Or face too young, or face too old, Or colour hot, or colour cold; Or hinting, (if to praise betray'd) 'Though coloured well, it yet might fade;' And 'though its grace I can't deny, Yet pity 'tis so hard and ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... by the police. I was extremely careful to see that they noted and described all papers and written matters of any kind. There are often produced in court documents that are not found on a Secret Service agent at the time of his arrest. Inspector French—I recall him as an uncouth, illiterate bungler who subsequently tried to get a lot of publicity out of my arrest as if he himself had detected the whole concern, instead of having it thrust under his nose by the London chemical company—was preparing to ride ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... men with the long loping step that comes from walking on the plowed ground. Following them are lanky women with their front teeth gone, and their figures bowed by drudgery, dragging wide-eyed children whose uncouth finery betrays the "country jake," even if the freckles and the sun-bleached hair could keep the secret. From the far-off fastnesses, where there are still log-cabins chinked with mud, they have ventured to see the show come into town, and when they have seen that, they will retire ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... feudal institution operated upon life with their full force. He might therefore have displayed a series of subordination and a form of government, which, in more luminous and improved regions, have been long forgotten, and have delighted his readers with many uncouth customs that are now disused, and wild opinions that prevail no longer. But he probably had not knowledge of the world sufficient to qualify him for judging what would deserve or gain the attention of ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... between looking on a black and white engraving and the coloured picture from which it has been taken. Another thing also struck me. The provincial dialect, which, when its peculiarities are indicated by letters, looks so uncouth as to be sometimes almost puzzling, seemed to produce no difficulty at all as he read it, though he in nowise mitigated it in the least. It seemed the absolutely natural and necessary presentation of the thoughts and emotions to be rendered. It was, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... that Bernard was struggling to turn over on his side, flapping about with his slow uncouth gestures like a bird with a broken wing. "Let me—!" Laura's "No, Lawrence!" came too late. Hyde had taken the cripple in his arms, lifting him like a child: "You're light for your height," he said softly. He ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... woman," continued Priscilla; "she is brave, she is a heroine. Although she is just a commonplace old woman, no one has ever led a grander life in its way. She wears poor clothes— oh, the poorest; she has an uncouth appearance, worse even than I have, but I am quite sure that God— God respects her— God thinks her worthy. When my father and mother died (I was fourteen when my dear mother died) Aunt Raby came and took me home and my three little sisters. She gave us bread ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... such refreshments as my poor cave affords; and for your evening's entertainment I will relate the history of my life from my first landing in this desert island." He then called for Caliban to prepare some food, and set the cave in order; and the company were astonished at the uncouth form and the savage appearance of this ugly monster, who (Prospero said) was the only attendant he had to wait ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... overcome by a small degree of practice and application [113]: however, for the further illustration of this matter, and the satisfaction of the curious, a fac simile of one of the recipes is represented in the annexed plate. If here and there a hard and uncouth term or expression may occur, so as to stop or embarrass the less expert, pains have been taken to explain them, either in the annotations under the text, or in the Index and Glossary, for we have given it both titles, as intending it should answer the purpose of both [114]. Now in ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... the trench they were in some measure protected from the storm. The lashings had been fixed on the brickwork under his careful superintendence; the men were on the point of hauling on the ropes, when a thing of monstrous size and uncouth shape glided silently into the opening of the trench, and ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... them, Nurse would become once more composed; the phantom danger was again put off, and the violinist would presently fall into silence,—sometimes into sleep. But still, while he slept, the witch-eye watched him; though with an expression of yearning, uncouth intensity which seldom ventured forth while ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... societies That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more; Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore In thy large recompense, and shalt be good To all that wander in that perilous flood. Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with sandals grey; He touched the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay: And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropt into the western bay: At last he rose, and twitched his mantle ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... upon the motherly bosom of the good woman, soon ceased her cries, and presently fell again to sleep; while Teddy, with rather an injured look upon his uncouth face, and yet pleased to see the little sister in his mother's arms, crept softly from the room, with his breakfast in ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... as the hills, considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience was convulsed with merriment, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of loitering about in the churches, monasteries, catacombs, markets, listening to that Little Russian dialect which is so sweet on the lips of the natives, though it looks so uncouth when one sees their ballads in print, and by gazing out over the ever beautiful river and steppe, I came at last to pardon Kieff for its progress. I got my historical and mythological bearings. I felt the spirit of the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... resting-place of the dead. Arrived there, the two coffins were at once deposited in their respective graves, when the new captain, standing between the two holes, somewhat hurriedly completed the ritual—for the light was fading fast; whereupon, after bestowing a final parting glance at the rough, uncouth box which concealed our beloved chief's body, we all turned slowly and reluctantly away to retrace our steps back to the apology for a camp which was to shelter us for the night, leaving a fresh party of workers to ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... its sands, rocks, breakers and by-laws regulating the costume of bathers, merely exasperated my nerves. How far more subtle the appeal of these grey and dun-coloured opacities, these tent-cloths of fog pressed out into uncouth, dumbly pathetic shapes by the struggle for existence that seethes below it always—always! Decidedly I must begin to-morrow to practise walking. It seems a necessary step towards acquainting myself with the inner life of these inchoate millions, which must be well worth knowing. ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... do, George? What in the name of goodness are you doing here? I hardly recognized you." Marsh's voice was round and musical, his accent Eastern. With an assumption of heartiness, he extended a white-gloved hand, which the big, uncouth man who faced him refused to take. The other three had risen. George seemed to be groping for a retort. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... of Daniel, when his attention was called to a rustling noise in the foliage, on his right, a short distance from the spot on which he sat. He looked, and beheld the uncouth form of the maniac king slowly approaching him. The sight affected the Hebrew's heart. His eyes became moistened with tears. The punishment was just, he knew; but in the history of that degraded monarch, he could find many things to admire. In ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... pull out his note-book and write in it. The doctor, to indulge them, made a few clear strokes; and a young man, who had attached himself to Jerry and me, imitated them in a wonderful way, considering his rough and uncouth hand. We had heard them making a number of strange sounds, and at last we discovered that ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... supposes you meant as a compliment, even as the old people meant to pass a compliment to their great folks, when they called them bears; though she cannot help thinking that they might have found an animal as strong as a bear, and somewhat less uncouth, to call their great folks after: even as she thinks yourself, amongst your great store of words, might have found something a little more genteel to call her hair after than flax, which, though strong and useful, is rather a coarse ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... frontlet of the elk adorns, Or mantles o'er the bison's horns; Pennons and flags defaced and stained, That blackening streaks of blood retained, And deer-skins, dappled, dun, and white, With otter's fur and seal's unite, In rude and uncouth tapestry all, To ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... single piece, so great and ponderous that it seems almost impossible that such a stone, weighing more than 200,000 libbre,[4] could have been set into place so high. But to return to our subject; there issued from the hands of the masters of these times those puppet-like and uncouth figures that are still to be seen in the works of old. The same thing happened to architecture, seeing that, since it was necessary to build, and since form and the good method were completely lost by reason of the death of the craftsmen and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... and his companion approached them, they suddenly desisted from their play, and stared at him with such, fixed, statue-like gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lack-lustre countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together. His companion now emptied the contents of the keg into large flagons, and made signs to him to wait upon the company. He obeyed with fear and trembling; ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... and by and bye to dance, which after some uncouth excuses he is prevailed on to do, the fiddler playing the tune, which here is commonly called "Auld Glenae;" in short he is all the time so plied with liquor that he is understood to get intoxicated, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... not referring to any uncouth fellow, Mrs. Dingle, but merely to Mr. Jasper Randall, a gentleman and ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... under a close-cut fringe of gray moustache. "Shaky" Pindle, the carpenter, was a sad-eyed man who looked as gentle as a disguised wolf. His big, scarred face never smiled, because, his friends said, it was a physical impossibility for it to do so, and his huge, rough body was as uncouth as his manners, and as unwieldy as his slow-moving tongue. Taylor, otherwise "Twirly," the butcher, was a man so genial and rubicund that in five minutes you began to wish that he was built like the lower animals ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the hieroglyphics of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... and Viol makers, at a period when they raised their model, and introduced into the German School the scooping round the sides of the backs and bellies, the inelegant sound-hole, the harsh outline, and uncouth scroll. As experience ripened his understanding, he may have felt that these characteristics of the German School were not such as could be moulded with advantage by an artist, whatever his talent might be, and resolved ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... 'Neath their primeval solitary shade, — Still, gracious Pow'r, some kindling soul inspire, To wake to life my country's unknown lyre, That from creation's date has slumbering lain, Or only breathed some savage uncouth strain; And grant that yet an Austral Milton's song Pactolus-like flow deep and rich along, — An Austral Shakespeare rise, whose living page To nature true may charm in ev'ry age; — And that an Austral Pindar daring soar, Where not the ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Ituraea, was represented on the maps by "a virgin white patch." Burton found it teeming with interest. There was hardly a mile without a ruin—broken pillars, inscribed slabs, monoliths, tombs. A little later he travelled as far northward as Hamah [232] in order to copy the uncouth characters on the famous stones, and Drake discovered an altar adorned with figures of Astarte and Baal. [233] Everywhere throughout Palestine he had to deplore the absence of trees. "Oh that Brigham Young were here!" he used to say, "to plant a million. The sky ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... passed a day or two at the Concordia as an ordinary traveller would carry away a strong impression. The people of the house would seem to him little short of savages, filthy in person and in habits, utterly uncouth in their demeanour, perpetual wranglers and railers, lacking every qualification for the duties they pretended to discharge. In England their mere appearance would revolt decent folk. With my better opportunity of judging them, I overcame ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... ugliest of all. They have a strange fascination, and quickly endear themselves to the stranger who lounges on their parapets and looks down upon the grimy little steamers scuttling under them, or the uncouth barges pushed and pulled over the opacity of the swift puddle. They form also an admirable point for viewing the clumsy craft of all types which the falling tide leaves wallowing in the iridescent slime of the shoals, showing their huge flanks, and resting their blunt snouts ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... and look from the little chamber, glowing with fire-light, into the strange, eerie, silent waste, crowded with the chaos of dis-created homes. There scores on scores of things, many of them unco, that is uncouth, the first meaning of which is unknown, to his eyes, stood huddled together in the dim light. The light looked weary and faint, as if with having forced its way through the dust of years on the windows; and Donal felt as if gazing from a clear conscious present out into a ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... and urban as more or less interchangeable terms. He has a social consciousness and a social passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of no greater man than his own Isak of "Growth of the Soil"—a simple pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... undeveloped. Let us now see what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct, has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard. Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of music; not such, indeed, as Milton's echo, with Henry Lawes's notes, would have made,—of which the night and the scene had made me dream; but the voice of the slaves on this their night of holiday, beguiling their cares with uncouth airs, played on rude African instruments. Taking one of my ship-mates with me, I immediately went to the huts of the married slaves, where all merry-makings are held; and found parties playing, singing, and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... appearance of an author agrees with the preconceived ideas of his admirer. Langton, from perusing the writings of Johnson, expected to find him a decent, well dressed, in short a remarkably decorous philosopher. Instead of which, down from his bed chamber about noon, came, as newly risen, a large uncouth figure, with a little dark wig which scarcely covered his head, and his clothes hanging loose about him. But his conversation was so rich, so animated, and so forcible, and his religious and political notions ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... investigate, to probe. For days, he declared, he had been endeavouring, in vain, to make anything of the figures. Dr. Hofmeier, too, examined the slip, but inclined to believe that the figures—rude and uncouth as they were—were only such as might be drawn by any school-boy in an idle moment. They consisted merely of a man and a woman seated on a bench, with what looked like an ornamental border running round them. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... these happy people I have described already; and besides these, we saw several sheds inclosed within a wall, on the outside of which there were several uncouth figures of men, women, hogs, and dogs, carved on posts, that were driven into the ground. Several of the natives were from time to time seen to enter these places, with a slow pace and dejected countenance, from which we conjectured that they were repositories ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... toward Cipango," said the Admiral. "I look first for small outward islands, where perhaps the folk are uncouth and simple, ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... in the spell of youthful fancy and expectancy, which touched and transfigured the homely scene, as the moonlight touched and transfigured the silent river. But I associate it all with the barges, and shall ever see in those uncouth craft ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... so; for I am but a rude, uncouth companion, and my society annoys you. The duke did, indeed, very wrong to ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... word. This may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... years ago two young men came up to London to try their fortune: half riding, half walking, the young fellows made their journey. One was thick-set, heavy and uncouth, and years afterward became known to men and fame as Samuel Johnson: the other was bright, slender, active, and was called David Garrick. Some ten years later, just before the battle of Culloden, a Dutch vessel, having crossed the Channel, landed at Harwich. There ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... servants, who are to be found only in high-class families, take it for granted that ignorant "servant girls" and "hired men" are representative of their kind. Therefore they put upper class servants in the same category—regardless of whether they are uncouth and illiterate, or persons of refined appearance and manner who often have considerable cultivation, acquired not so much at school as through the constant contact with ultra refinement of surroundings, and not infrequently through ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... hair and rubbed some lotion into it that darkened its color, too. She really looked as wild and uncouth as the bold girl who waited upon the queen ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... same organ, viz. the trachea or windpipe. See Class I. 1. 3. 4. But as the inflammation is seldom I suppose confined to the upper part of the trachea only, but exists at the same time in other parts of the lungs, and as no inflammation of the tonsils is generally perceptible, the uncouth name of cynanche trachealis should be changed for peripneumonia trachialis. The method of cure consists in immediate and repeated bleeding. A vomit. A grain of calomel or other mild cathartic. Bathing in subtepid water, and in breathing over the steam of warm water, with or without a little vinegar ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... remarkably tipsy, and therefore, unusually ripe for a combat with any one, Heath and I, crossing the street opposite Spring's Bank, encountered him coming toward us, surrounded by a party of roughs. As we approached them, Burrill making some uncouth gestures, came forward, in advance of the rest, and as he came opposite Heath, leaned toward him, and whispered a few words in his ear. I don't know what he said, but the effect on Heath was magical. For a ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... belonged to the body of the inhabitants. It was known to us all that abundance of poor despairing creatures who had the distemper upon them, and were grown stupid or melancholy by their misery, as many were, wandered away into the fields and Woods, and into secret uncouth places almost anywhere, to creep into a ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... once or twice a week,—the citizens abandoned even their favourite game of ball, with an eye to speculation. We stood at "Government House," over the Ashurbara Gate, to see the Bedouins, and we quizzed (as Town men might denounce a tie or scoff at a boot) the huge round shields and the uncouth spears of these provincials. Presently they entered the streets, where we witnessed their frantic dance in presence of the Hajj and other authorities. This is the wild men's way of expressing their satisfaction that Fate has enabled them to convoy the caravan through ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... for this uncouth Scotch lawyer to have accomplished! He knew he had done a great thing; but even he did not know how great a thing. Had he known he might have answered as proudly as Dryden answered when some one said to him that his Ode to St. Cecilia was the finest that had ever been ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... in silent awe before this sumptuous canvas, with her long, interlaced fingers strenuously tugging at each other and her wide eyes half popping from her head. She was as completely overpowered and shattered as an uncouth and angular raft under the thunderous downpour of Niagara. Presently she turned; Mrs. Bates stood peeping in from without, her eyes ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... presenting the most difficult item in the problem of transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality. The train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped curtains stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth cradle. The porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one whose hopes of largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called after her redundant farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... which I had taken up was the "Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Sikou a cardboard mask representing the bloated countenance of Dai-Cok, god of wealth; and Sikou replies by a long crystal trumpet, by means of which are produced the most extraordinary sounds, like a turkey gobbling. Everything is uncouth, fantastical to excess, grotesquely lugubrious; everywhere we are surprised by incomprehensible conceptions, which seem the work of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... he could hardly remember anything but her pleading, half-inimical eyes, her mouth that twisted easily to anger, her shame that her hands and feet were uncouth. And now she had loved him. And now hated him. He remembered one May evening when suddenly she had caught his hand and kissed it, and pressed it to her heart. And later that night she had cursed bitterly at him, saying black was the day she had set eyes on ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... of earth outside, at one corner of the platform. A large piece of timber, with notches cut in it instead of steps, and placed against the platform at an angle of forty-five degrees, is the method of ascending and descending, particularly unsafe and inconvenient for those not accustomed to so uncouth a staircase. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... producing this exquisite fruit is like an uncouth-looking poet who gives beauty from an inner life, but disappoints in externals. It is low-branching and unshapely, and must be forced into good form—the bush, not the poet—by the pruning-knife. If this is done judiciously, no other variety will ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... with wandring Feet The dark unbottom'd Infinite Abyss, And through the palpable Obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his airy Flight Upborn with indefatigable ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... distinguish it from books of its class; its insight into Semitic modes of thought and its picture of Arab manners give it the value of an historical document; its grim humour, keen observation and reckless insobriety of opinion, expressed in peculiar, uncouth but vigorous language make it ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the masthead of some lonely vessel, kept forever at sea. You feel as if no one but yourself had ever landed there; and yet, perhaps, even there, looking straight downward, you see below you in some crevice of the rock a mast or spar of some wrecked vessel, encrusted with all manner of shells and uncouth vegetable growth. No matter how distant the island or how peacefully it seems to lie upon the water, there may be perplexing currents that ever foam and swirl about it —currents which are, at all tides and in the calmest weather, as dangerous ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of love, your postillon d'amour, who was certainly rather uncouth and awkward for so delicate ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... the little party, and their leader made signs to Aimery to dismount. The Constable had procured for him a letter in Tartar script, setting out the purpose of his mission. This the outpost could not read, but they recognised some word among the characters, and pointed it out to each other with uncouth murmurings. They were strange folk, with eyes like pebbles and squat frames and short, broad faces, but each horse and man moved ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... occasions teach new duties—Time makes ancient good uncouth, They must upward still and onward, who would ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... still more disorder'd march advance, (Nor march it seem'd, but wild fantastic dance,) The uncouth ANAGRAMS, distorted train, Shifting, in double mazes, o'er the plain. C. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... your money where you have your interest. That man who, in building a mission church in a rough, uncouth neighborhood, called on the hoodlums in the vicinity to make a contribution of a brick apiece for the new church, was a wise man. Every bootblack, every newsboy, every garbage gatherer in it who put a brick in that church had an interest in it. It was "Our Church," and ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... world. It was a world they were to become a part of as soon as possible, and, with characteristic earnestness, they fell to work at any thing they found to do. After a year in Amsterdam they settled in Leyden. They made them homes. They learned as best they could the uncouth language. They taught their farmer hands unaccustomed crafts, and applied their farmer heads to the ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... poetry. There is a chaste and noble beauty in the forms of Greek and Roman architecture which consorts well with the classic literature of those countries. The compositions of Sir Walter, on the contrary, resemble what he so much loved to describe—the rich and fantastic Gothic, at times ludicrously uncouth, at times exquisitely beautiful. There are not finer passages in all his writings than some of his architectural descriptions. How exquisite is his Melrose Abbey,—the external view in the cold, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... voice or uncouth charm I call up the departed. Soul of Albert! Hear our soft suit, and heed my milder spells: So may the gates of Paradise unbarr'd Cease thy swift toils, since haply thou art one 15 Of that innumerable company, Who in broad circle, lovelier than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of what real parentage we know not; reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward, ungainly even among the uncouth about him: it was reserved for this remarkable character, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity, raised to supreme command at a supreme moment, and intrusted with the destiny of a nation. The great leaders of his party ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes; how at each stage of the construction roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in these uncouth places Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, gambling, drinking, quarreling, and murdering like wolves; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... Tipping and some of the smaller boys were there already, their gloves and shiny shoes giving them a feeling of ceremony and constraint which they tried to carry off by an uncouth ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... he said. He drew a deep breath. The wild look faded. Sanity appeared to return. "Well, it's the truth about those wild animals! Some sort of large, uncouth critter was observed just now ducking into the forest at the ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... a call from his friend Sir Charles Lyell, the geologist, enabled him to use in fun. Lyell walked in on him, in London, with a spear-head and the curiosity, 'How old do you judge that would be?' The weapon was of stone, uncouth, barbarous. 'A thousand years, eh?' Lyell pursued. Sir George let him go on for a while, then broke in, 'If that's a thousand years old, I likewise am a thousand years old, because one has been taken out of me.' 'What do you mean?' was Lyell's ejaculation. 'Oh,' said Sir George, 'a head almost ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted in their uncouth rhyme, That their great imperial city stretched ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of the heathen deities; they only considered them as devils, and Plotcock, so far from implying any thing fabulous, was a synonyme of the grand enemy of mankind." {2} "Yet all thir warnings, and uncouth tidings, nor no good counsel, might stop the King, at this present, from his vain purpose, and wicked enterprize, but hasted him fast to Edinburgh, and there to make his provision and famishing, in having forth of his army against the day appointed, that ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... western districts. The school-house was only a log hut; the master was a lad of twenty; and the textbooks were of the very meagrest sort. But at least James Garfield was thus enabled to read and write, which after all is the great first step on the road to all possible promotion. The raw, uncouth Yankee lad who taught the Ohio boys, slept at Widow Garfield's, with Thomas and James; and the sons of the neighbouring settlers worked on the farm during the summer months, but took lessons when the long ice and snow of winter along the lake shore put a stop almost entirely ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... ravine, widening as it issued on the prairie. We entered it, and galloping up, in a moment were surrounded by the bleak sand-hills. Half of their steep sides were bare; the rest were scantily clothed with clumps of grass, and various uncouth plants, conspicuous among which appeared the reptile-like prickly pear. They were gashed with numberless ravines; and as the sky had suddenly darkened, and a cold gusty wind arisen, the strange shrubs and the dreary hills looked doubly wild and desolate. But Henry's face was all ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... from the East, and cleared The mists, that melted with advancing Morn, When suddenly from out the woods appeared An uncouth form, a creature wan and worn, Scarce like a man, in piteous plight forlorn. Suppliant his hands he stretches to the shore; We turn and look on tatters tagged with thorn, Dire squalor and a length of beard,—what more, A Greek, to Troy erewhile in ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... happy the man is who can always employ himself I do not believe that the proud prelate, who would not make you a little happier, is half so much to be envied. Thank you for the print of Soame Jenyns: it is a proof of Sir Joshua's art, who could give a strong resemblance of so uncouth a countenance without ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... dignity and modesty, Duerer showed his religion, the admiration and love that bound his life, in a way that at all times and in all places commands applause. The burning indignation of the following passage may in times of spiritual peace or somnolence appear over-wrought and uncouth. We must remember that all that Duerer loved had been bound by his religion to the teaching and inspiration of Jesus, and had become inseparable from it. All that he loved—learning, clear and orderly thought, honesty, freedom to express the worship of his heart without ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... sadden for him as I noticed his uncouth, nervous movements, his furtive glances and twitching features. Who would have believed that this slinking, cowering creature had once been a dashing officer, who had fought the battles of his country and ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was in the dust. The streets of his capital were filled with strangers, and the volatile Parisians were almost compensated for the degradation, in their wonder at the novel garb and uncouth figures of their enemies. The Cossacks of the Don had made their threatened "hurra," and bivouacked on the banks of the Seine. Prussian and Austrian cannon pointed down all the great thoroughfares, and by their side, day and night, the burning match suggested the penalty of any popular ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... of the Family (METHUEN) may in a measure depend upon your capacity to appreciate William Linkhorn and the glory of his "great flaming beard." To me, unhappily, William was an uncouth rustic, just that and very little else; but he possessed some mysterious attraction for women; so, at any rate, Mrs. HENRY DUDENEY tells me, though she does not explain to my satisfaction what it was. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... off by friction and wash away in the rains. The house was a stiff, formal parallelogram, resembling a man with high shoulders, appearing to be "stuck up." It had two rows of formal, short and ungraceful windows, that being a point in orthodoxy at the period of its erection. It had a tower, uncouth, and in some respects too large and others too small, if one can reconcile the contradiction; but there are anomalies of this sort in art, as well as in nature. On top of this tower stood a long-legged belfry, which had got a very dangerous, though a very common, propensity in ecclesiastical ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... far capital forgot, Its splendour and its blandishments, In poor Moldavia cast her lot, She visited the humble tents Of migratory gipsy hordes— And wild among them grew her words— Our godlike tongue she could exchange For savage speech, uncouth and strange, And ditties of the steppe she loved. But suddenly all changed around! Lo! in my garden was she found And as a country damsel roved, A pensive sorrow in her glance And in her ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... sorted out "youths of conspicuous intelligence" to whom he gave special attention. Alcuin afterward succeeded Aelbert as scholasticus, and was widely known as a gifted teacher. Well aware of the precarious condition of learning amid such a rude and uncouth society, he handed on to his pupils the learning he had received, and imbued them with something of his own love for it and his anxiety for its preservation and advancement. It was this Alcuin who was soon to give ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... spite of all that nature did To make his uncouth form forbid, This creature dared to love. He felt the force of Edith's eyes, Nor wanted hope to gain the prize ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... "cannot the man hold his tongue? His uncouth vociferations distract me! So fine a scene, so placid the moonlight—but there is always something that is not in perfect ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the best part of the teaching wasn't in the books. Some of the students were queer and uncouth when they came, the boys eating with their knives in the fashion of the farm; some of the brightest girls in ill- fitting clothes—perfect guys they'd be thought in the city. But there were others of quite different manner, and from them ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
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