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More "Ungraceful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... touch. A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward. She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil case. The first, the most important trust which God has given to any one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... She bowed to him, shook the lines, and the old horse moved on. Just before reaching a bend in the road, she looked back at him. How powerful was his bearing, how strong his stride; and with all his bigness he was not ungraceful. ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts achieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest, the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the country-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by demonstrativeness—their kindness by reticence, and their religion ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... cause such a fury. A mere twenty Earth pounds of an indifferent grade of rock and a little iron, an irregular, ungraceful lump, spawned somewhere a billion years before as a star died. But it still had most of the awesome velocity and inertia ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... pose, and so gentle in every movement! It was evidently no drudgery to her; the material was handy, and the task one of love. All the behavior of the wood thrush affects one like music; it is melody to the eye as the song is to the ear; it is visible harmony. This bird cannot do an ungraceful thing. It has the bearing of a bird of fine breeding. Its cousin the robin is much more masculine and plebeian, harsher in voice, and ruder in manners. The wood thrush is urban and suggests sylvan halls and courtly companions. Softness, gentleness, composure, characterize every movement. In only ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... remember that Christianity still persecutes to the full extent of its power, and that a Creed which answers argument with prosecution cannot expect tender treatment in return; and I would also ask him, in the words of Ruskin, "to consider how much less harm is done in the world by ungraceful boldness ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... craft to follow the Indian canoes and the bateaux of the French missionaries down the great rivers, was the flatboat—a homely and ungraceful vessel, but yet one to which the people of the United States owe, perhaps, more of real service in the direction of building up a great nation than they do to Dewey's "Olympia," or Schley's "Brooklyn." A typical flatboat of the early days of river navigation was about fifty-five ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... to literary tasks, but still regarded himself as a scholar. Leisure fitted his temperament—he was never in haste, even when he was in a hurry, and he carried with him the air of having all the time there was. Nothing is so ungraceful as haste. Addison always had time to listen; and we make friends, not by explaining things to other folks, but by allowing others ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... waiting for him on the path under the yew-trees, with two of his troopers on guard in the background. He had removed his coat and vest, and stood, a not ungraceful figure, in the sunshine, bending his rapier and feeling its point with his thumb. He was doing this when his eyes surprised his opponent's entrance, and, without desisting from ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... obliged to be content with this ungraceful concession, and proceeded to begin my narration. I described the situation of my father's dwelling. I mentioned the year, month, day, and hour of her nephew's appearance among us. I expatiated minutely on his form, features, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... eyes, settled this question. "The lady is asleep. See, she has dropped her book." And; in fact, the whole attitude was lax and not ungraceful. Her right hand hung down, and the domestic story, its ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Mark Ratcliff,' and set me some atoning penance for my idiocy. You do not know what a curse that vile paper has been to me," and he shot the offending missive into the foolish little river and broke into vigorous and ungraceful language with regard ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... riding, being given a horse much inferior to either Uncle David's or Norah's—the latter rides like a jockey, and, of course, astride, which I consider very ungraceful. She turns out well, however, and all her get-up is good—her habits come from a Melbourne tailor. I think I will get some clothes in Melbourne on my way back; they may not have newer ideas, but it may be useful for purposes of comparison with the Sydney cut. My riding clothes were evidently ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... words of M. Sajous's note, to smile agreeably and then to laugh; she became gay. 'It makes me laugh,' she said, and then, 'I'm not tipsy, I want to sing,' and so on through the whole performance of a not ungraceful giserie, which we stopped at that stage, for I was loth to have the degrading performance of drunkenness carried to the extreme I had seen her go through at the Charite. I now applied a tube of alcohol, asking the assistant, however, to give ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... returned to the house of Edgar's cousin. Melissa's partner at the ball was the son of a gentleman of independent fortune in New-London. He was a gay young man, aged about twenty-five. His address was easy, his manners rather voluptuous than refined; confident, but not ungraceful. He led the ton in fashionable circles; gave taste its zest, and was quite a favorite with the ladies ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... public, and not a little to those religious sects who extended their supervision to all the affairs of life, that had a chief concern in settling the country, and who have entailed so much that is inconvenient and ungraceful (I might almost say, in some instances, disgraceful) on the nation, blended with so much that forms its purest sources of pride. Men are always an inconsistent medley ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a dead pine sapling from the stock of firewood under his wagon, and, of course, emphasising his address by an easy and not ungraceful clatter of the adjective used so largely by poets in denunciation of war—"we ain't goin' to travel these carrion a mile to the gate, an' most likely fine it locked when we git there. Hold on till I git my internal machine to work on the fence. Dad! Where's that ole morepoke? O, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... both gentle and timid, and he will always try to avoid danger by flight. It is when running that he exposes his only ungraceful point. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... forcible and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words, the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to Webster in the other of the two most famous ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... trouble you, Miss Deb," interrupted Jan, tilting himself backwards over the arm of the chair in a very ungraceful fashion, and leaving his legs dangling. "Others will, if he wo—if he can't. Lionel has just been saying that as Sibylla's sisters, he shall ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... varnished boots and lilac gloves on Sunday. Toward the close of his college course, he became particularly attached to a poor bursar, by name Lescande, who excelled in mathematics, but who was very ungraceful, awkwardly shy and timid, with a painful sensitiveness to the peculiarities of his person. He was nicknamed "Wolfhead," from the refractory nature of his hair; but the elegant Camors stopped the scoffers by protecting the young man with his friendship. Lescande felt this deeply, and adored his ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... in view, impossible, indeed, to close the eyes upon. Far enough it was from any semblance to historical fact, but almost possible, almost admissible, in the form of the woman, as historical fiction. She dared to sit upon the floor now, in the ungraceful huddled Eastern fashion, clasping her knees to her breast, with her back half turned to her lord, the friend of Caesar, so that he could not see the design that sat behind the mask of her sharp indifference. She rested her chin upon ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... from a ladle-shaped vessel of bamboo with a long handle, and then gives me a little blue towel to wipe them upon, a Votive towel with mysterious white characters upon it. Then we all ascend; I feeling very much like a clumsy barbarian in my ungraceful foreign garb. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... natives of sago districts consume a considerable quantity of sago flour, which is boiled into a thick, tasteless paste, called boyat and eaten by being twisted into a large ball round a stick and inserted into the mouth—an ungraceful operation. Tamarind, or some very acid sauce is used to impart to it some flavour. Sago is of course cheaper than rice, but the latter is, as a rule, much preferred by the native, and is found more nutritious and lasting. LOGAN, in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness which foreshadowed what I was subsequently to suffer. She was a singular fatuous artificial creature, and I was never more than ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... central tower. There is a legend to the effect that there were seven towers in the original design—the central one, two at the west end, and one at each angle of the transepts; and this seems to be supported by the solid character of some of the piers in the transepts. Yet, despite the rather ungraceful outline of the whole building, when its mere size is realised, it gradually asserts its importance and incontrovertibly proves its right to be considered one of the very ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... about fifteen and of a heavy, ungraceful build. His hair was thick and rather scraggly, his face was of the square type, and his expression what people call stolid. He had freckles but not too many, and his mouth was large and his lips tight-set. His face wore a characteristic frown which was the last feeble trace of ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... "Which is a much more definitive word than that, being never employed in any other way than as a relative; whereas that is a word of many senses; sometimes a demonstrative pronoun, often a conjunction. In some cases we are indeed obliged to use that for a relative, in order to avoid the ungraceful repetition of which in the same sentence. But when we are laid under no necessity of this kind, which is always the preferable word, and certainly was so in this sentence: 'Pleasures which the vulgar are not capable of receiving,' is much better than 'pleasures ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... their style, features, and attire. They all wore light-coloured "dual garments" of great width, and tight bodices. Their coiffure was carefully finished, but a part of the forehead was hidden by an ungraceful fringe of hair. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higher drama appeals. All these come within the scope of imaginative truth. To illustrate my third head by an example. Tieck criticises John Kemble's dressing for Macbeth in a modern Highland costume, as being ungraceful without any countervailing merit of historical exactness. I think a deeper reason for his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, that this garb, with its purely modern and British army associations, is out of place on Fores Heath, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Empire was still the same he employed at the military school; and as his shoes had been made by the same measure, from that time, and no new one ever taken, his shoes, as well as his boots, were always badly made and ungraceful. For a long time he wore them pointed; but I persuaded him to have them 'en bec de canne', as that was the fashion. At last his old measure was found too small, and I got his Majesty's consent to have a new one-taken; so I summoned the shoemaker, who had succeeded his father, and was exceedingly ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... unnaturally distorts his features, as to give to his countenance a very unpleasant expression. On such occasions, you would imagine that he was suddenly seized with some violent paroxysms of pain. He is one of the most ungraceful speakers I have ever heard address a public assemblage of persons. In addition to the awkwardness of his general manner, he 'makes mouths,' which would of themselves be sufficient to mar the agreeableness of his delivery. And his manner of speaking, and the ungracefulness of his ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... paint-brushes, and palettes, this young person slipped into the most comfortable chair near the fire, and, having waited for the rest to seat themselves, proceeded to open the council. Mollie, who was sixteen, large, fair, beautiful, and not as tidy as she might have been, dropped into a not ungraceful position at her feet. Aimee, who was a little maiden with a tender, spirituelle face, and all the forethought of the family, sat near, with some grave perplexity in her expression. 'Toinette and Tod, posed in the ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... party at the Homestead were assembled near the door, when, discerning them too late to avoid them, Lady Temple's equipage drew up in the peculiarly ungraceful fashion of waggonettes, when they prepare to shoot their passengers ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will display the greatest difference of light and shade when it is seen in the strongest light, as by sunlight, or, at night, by the light of a fire. But this should not be much used in painting because the works remain crude and ungraceful. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... ungraceful, thick starship on the verge of aging into scrap. Towering here between the village and the huge, bluish-green leaves of the Kappan forest, she was in the process of being transformed into a planet-bound object of a ...
— A Transmutation of Muddles • Horace Brown Fyfe
... have no other means of locomotion than their little feet. These beauties, as we may suppose them to be, since they are masked more closely than society ladies at the Opera ball, wear over their garments a habbarah, a sort of black taffeta sack, which fills with air and swells in the most ungraceful fashion if the animal's pace ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... grace nor style to the figure. It is too short to give the distinction and dignity that handsome wraps with long lines almost invariably do, although they seem to add age to the form. There is a hint of youth in this ungraceful jacket to be sure, but it is not especially attractive in its suggestion ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... of civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way: by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... one to presume that my mule and I had become reconciled by our lengthened companionship. Discomfort amounting to positive agony had taught me to adopt more attitudes, graceful or ungraceful, than all the combined systems of Delsarte and other physical culturists ...
— Six Days on the Hurricane Deck of a Mule - An account of a journey made on mule back in Honduras, - C.A. in August, 1891 • Almira Stillwell Cole
... smaller poems interspersed throughout the volume. Mr Tennyson has his "Claribels," and "Isabels," and "Adelines," and "Eleanores"—ladies with whom he frequently plays strange, though, we admit, by no means ungraceful vagaries; and Mr Patmore, as in duty bound, and following the imitative bent of his genius, must also have his Geraldine to dally with. The two following stanzas of playful namby-pambyism, are a specimen of the manner in which this gentleman ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... companion of the moment. There was nothing extraordinary in the face except the eyes burning fitfully under the gloom of incredibly thick, coarse, reddish eyebrows. His mouth was a curious mixture of softness and cruelty, and his hands were broad, but not ungraceful. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... "These," says Mr. Graves, "were not precisely his sentiments, though he thought, right enough, that every one should, in some degree, consult his particular shape and complexion in adjusting his dress; and that no fashion ought to sanctify what was ungraceful, absurd, or really deformed."] ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... constrained, uneasy, and ungraceful, can spoil the happiness of a dozen people. Therefore he is bound to create an artificial manner, if a natural one does not come to him, remembering always that "manners are ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... away, strong and rugged and ungraceful, from the head to the heel of him a man. Life had gone hard with him. She wondered whether that were the reason her heart went ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... the top, and tied with a drawing-string around the waist. My first impression was, that the men had got up in a great hurry, and put on their trousers hinder-end foremost. It would be difficult to invent a costume more awkward and ungraceful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... You will esteem it perhaps a paradox when I tell you that the very causes which preserve your temper in an external state of equability, your refinement of mind, your self-respect, your delicate reserve, your abhorrence of every thing unfeminine and ungraceful, may produce exactly the contrary effect on your feelings, and provoke internally a great deal of contempt and dislike for those whose conduct transgresses from your exalted ideas ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... "An ungraceful elision" of the possessive inflection, as Mason calls it. Cf. Dryden, Hind and Panther, iii.: "Affected Kindness ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... expand. The soul of the true artist is filled with unspeakable apprehension by the possibility of seeing these master-pieces destroyed or scattered abroad, these treasures plundered, all this wealth annihilated; and especially by the danger of seeing the ungraceful and meagre forms of modern utilitarianism usurp the place held by the manners, the habits, the face of all things in this privileged land of beauty, all consecrated by the admiration of ages. Alas! Holy Father, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... thanked her mutely. He was as plain-looking a man as he had been a boy, more hatchet-faced than ever. He was long and lean and angular, and his positions were ungraceful. But his eyes were the eyes of Don Quixote. The eyes had appealed to Nelly as long ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... ground beside her. Another almost as grotesque was a Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Breughel the Elder—a snow-scene in the wide street of a red brick, high-gabled village—soldiers, parents, children, all in the stiff, ungraceful Flemish dress of the sixteenth century, the poor little children, in square trousers and pinafores, clinging to their mothers' narrow skirts. Oddly enough, it made the story more real to me than it had ever seemed before, quite painfully ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... us "the heads of those who aspire to glory in apparel resemble a parterre, you see alleys and figures traced on them with a great deal of ingenuity." The bosom, elaborately bound downwards, is covered with a square bit of stuff, or a calico pagne—most ungraceful of raiment-wrapped under the arms, and extending ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the natives of Port Jackson, having fallen to the low pitch of their voices, recommenced their song at the octave, which was accompanied by slow and not ungraceful motions of the body and limbs, their hands being held up in a supplicating posture, and the tone and manner of their song and gestures seemed to bespeak the good will and forbearance of their auditors. Observing that they were attentively listened to, they each selected one of our people, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... might have given the hint to Raphael for one of his figures, in a similar attitude, introduced into the famous cartoon of the same subject. Before St. Paul, below, a woman is sitting—looking at him, and having her back turned to the spectator. The head-dress of this figure, which is white, is not ungraceful. I made a rude copy of it; but if I had even coloured like * * * I could not have done justice to the neck and back; which exhibited a tone of colour that seemed to unite all the warmth of Titian with all the freshness of Rubens. In ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Christopher was established as queer, and his townsfolk were disposed to let him rest at that. His pale face was remarkable for nothing except a pair of dreamy eyes which could at times give sign of inward lightnings. His hair was lank; his figure was attenuated and ungraceful; he wore his clothes awkwardly. He was commonly supposed to be sulky, and some people thought his tone of voice bumptious and insolent. He was far from being a favourite, but those who knew him best liked him best, which is ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... made it impossible for the House to comply with His Majesty's wish. At the next sitting the Committee reported; and on the report there was an animated debate. The friends of the government thought the proposed address offensive. The most respectable members of the majority felt that it would be ungraceful to aggravate by harsh language the pain which must be caused by their conscientious opposition to the King's wishes. Some strong expressions were therefore softened down; some courtly phrases were inserted; but the House refused ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... always worth consideration; but handwritings are surely equivocal testimonies of character; they depend so much on education, on times and seasons and moods, conscious and unconscious wills, &c. What would be said by an autographist to the strange old, ungraceful, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... place where we may talk of what we have done without being charged with self adulation. There is the place where we may lounge without being thought ungraceful. There is the place where we may express affection without being thought silly. There is the place where we may forget our annoyances, and exasperations, and troubles. Forlorn earth pilgrim! no home? Then die. That is better. The ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... rolling in; they drew back and silenced each other.—"The Doctor!" This was the remarkable person they called Jack Doubleface. Nature had stuck a philosophic head, with finely-cut features, and a mouth brimful of finesse, on to a corpulent and ungraceful body, that yawed from side to side as ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... there was perhaps too strong a suggestion of command in his attitude, and when Helen came abreast of him, he laid a hand restrainingly upon her arm. She shook it off, not with ill-humored petulance, for Helen was never ungraceful nor undignified, but with a disdain that hurt the man far more than anger. Nevertheless, knowing that he was right, he was determined that she should run no risk. Letting his hand swing at his side, he walked a few paces before her, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... fawn-skin falling from waist to instep. Their bodies were painted vermilion from brow to ankle; they carried in their hands red harvest apples, which they tossed one to another as they move lightly across the open space in a slow, springy, yet not ungraceful dance. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... assume she must be your wife, for how could it be supposed that you would have an unattractive sweetheart? A true woman may be ungraceful; but then, her ugliness implies a thousand disagreeable things for you. One supposes you must be a notary or a magistrate, as these two professions have a monopoly of grotesque and well-dowered spouses. Now, is this ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Presbyterian Sabbaths in the city, the extravagance of the independent preachers in the camp, the precise garb, the severe countenance, the petty scruples, the affected accent, the absurd names and phrases which marked the Puritans,—the valour, the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath these ungraceful disguises,—the dreams of the raving Fifth-monarchy-man, the dreams, scarcely less wild, of the philosophic republican, all these would enter into the representation, and render it at once more ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a forceful woman. She had power. It was in her lean, high-shouldered, ungraceful figure. It was in her thin, mobile lips and her high-bridged nose with its thin, clean-cut nostrils. She impressed herself upon her environment. Standing there at the mantel, her hands clasped behind her, she was so caught up by the possibilities of the future that she succeeded in imparting ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... mountains hang down "somewhat so poetical," as Mr. Ashe(439) said, that your own poet Gray will scarce keep tune with you. All this refers to your cascade scene and your letter. For the library it cannot have the Strawberry imprimatur: the double arches and double pinnacles are most ungraceful; and the doors below the book-cases in Mr. Chute's design had a conventual look, which yours totally wants. For this time, we shall put your genius in commission, and, like some other regents, execute our own plan without minding ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... he was close beside her, and stood leaning an elbow on the corner of the spinet, a long and not ungraceful figure, with the black curls of his full-bottomed wig falling about his swarthy, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... cap again, and made a not ungraceful gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red, hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a kind of Beanfeast for Two, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... expresses your meaning, and therefore sounds harshly. I am accustomed to speak plainly myself, and to strip of their flowery entourage the sentiments to which I listen. It may be an ungraceful habit, but it is a safe one. I am persuaded that if vice were always called by its true name, shame, misery, and ruin would ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... said—a kind of "white Brahmanas"; and it was certain that, as a matter of fact, the pride of race and the possession of western civilisation created a sense of superiority, the display of which was ungraceful and even dangerous, when not tempered by official responsibility. This feeling had been sensitive enough in the days of Lord William Bentinck, when the class referred to was small in numbers and devoid of influence. ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... leather belt buckled tightly around his waist. I lingered a moment on the curbstone, and looked after him with a sensation of mingled pride, amusement, and curiosity. That was my Family; there it was, in that broad back and those not ungraceful legs, striding up Sixth Avenue, with its noble intellect intent on thoughts of breakfast. I was thankful that it had not been written in the book of fate that this limb of the closely pruned Wesley tree should be lopped off by the sword of war. But as Washington ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... relative in the background." From this genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... evening progressed—became unpleasantly hot. Dancing was in full swing and the orchestra had just struck up the first strains of that inspiriting new dance—the latest importation from Vienna—a dreamy waltz of which dowagers strongly disapproved, deeming it licentious, indecent, and certainly ungraceful, but which the young folk delighted in, and persisted in dancing, defying the mammas and ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... hamlets. The Spanish and mestizo cavaliers, however, condescend to dance only with mestiza partners, and very seldom invite a pretty native girl to join them. The natives very rarely dance together; but in Samar I was present on one occasion at a by no means ungraceful native dance where "improvised" verses were sung. The male dancer compared his partner with a rose, and she answered he should be careful in touching it as a rose had thorns. This would have been thought a charming compliment in ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... those of the other islands; but that the gold country lay still more to the eastwards. By their description the men were not of large size, yet brawny and well set, without beards, having wide nostrils and broad smooth ungraceful foreheads, which were so shaped at their birth as a beauty, for which reason, and because they always went bareheaded, their skulls were hard enough to break a Spanish sword. Here the admiral observed the length of the day and night, and found ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... they were themselves not in favor of the new mode. They had little sympathy for the elimination of the graceful dance by the introduction of what they called the "shuffle" or the "bunny-hug," "turkey-trot," and other ungraceful and unworthy dances. It was decided that the Castles should, through Bok's magazine and their own public exhibitions, revive the gavotte, the polka, and finally the waltz. They would evolve these into new forms and Bok would present them pictorially. A series of three double-page ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... resumed its usual peaceful course. The names of these daughters, in order of age, were as follows: Jovita, Micaela, Socorro, and Emilita. In appearance, they were four insignificant beings, neither beautiful nor ugly, graceful nor ungraceful, young nor old, sad nor vivacious. There was nothing remarkable in any one of them, and yet by the domestic hearth the character of each was quite distinct. Jovita was sentimental and reserved, Michaela was quick tempered, and Emilita was the liveliest ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... resulted that my desire to play with her increased greatly. And she, knowing this, was as perverse as a princess in a fairy tale; she laughed mercilessly at my timid ways, at my awkward manners and my ungraceful fashion of entering the parlor; there was kept up between us a constant interchange of playful raillery, an oral ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... arrested by some play of light and shade. Cuban villages, with few exceptions, are unattractive, although there is not infrequently some particular building, usually a church, that calls for a second look or a careful examination. Most of these little communities consist of a row of low and ungraceful structures bordering the highway. They are usually extended by building on at the ends. If the town street gets undesirably long, a second street or a third will be made, on one or both sides of the main street, and thus the town acquires breadth as well as length. The houses are ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... morning he was delighted by the coming of a little herd of about a dozen giraffes, and he crouched among the bushes, watching them drink; the towering bull of about eighteen feet in height began by straddling out its forelegs in the most ungraceful way, till it could lower itself enough to reach the water ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... set by an inexperienced surgeon. This, also, was a blemish in his deportment; and though his broad shoulders, sinewy arms, and expanded chest, betokened the strength which he often displayed, it was strength of a clumsy and ungraceful character. His language and gestures were those of one seldom used to converse with equals, more seldom still with superiors; short, abrupt, and decisive, almost to the verge of sternness. In the judgment of those who were habitually acquainted with the Constable, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... adjusted his collar before the looking-glass which the propriety and satisfactoriness of our behavior had induced Frau Schmidt to add to our responsibilities, pulled his cuffs down, and remarked en passant that "the 'cello was a horribly ungraceful instrument." ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a man who might, perhaps, have numbered some five and thirty years; but at a hasty glance, he would have seemed considerably younger. He was above the ordinary stature; though a gentle, and not ungraceful bend in the neck rather than the shoulders, somewhat curtailed his proper advantages of height. His frame was thin and slender, but well knit and fair proportioned. Nature had originally cast his form in an athletic mould; but sedentary habits, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.[353] During the most happily productive period of his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... for the two horsemen were talking in ordinary, conversational tones as they rode leisurely down to the ford. When they passed Lorraine, the horse nearest her shied against the other and was sworn at parenthetically for a fool. Against the skyline Lorraine saw the rider's form bulk squatty and ungraceful, reminding her of an actor whom she knew and did not like. It was that resemblance perhaps which held her quiet instead of following her first impulse to speak to them and ask them to carry her to ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... of us through all the ungraceful, inartistic realisms of our lives; the high poetry is ever there, the kingdom of romance is at hand; the only trouble is to find the rhymes—O! if we could ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... signally in the one especial result that might have been expected from it: all my French dancing lessons had not given me a good deportment, nor taught me to hold myself upright. I stooped, slouched, and poked, stood with one hip up and one shoulder down, and exhibited an altogether disgracefully ungraceful carriage, which greatly afflicted my parents. In order that I might "bear my body more seemly," various were the methods resorted to; among others, a hideous engine of torture of the backboard species, made of steel covered with ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... breakfast table sits one of aspect so different, that you could ill believe they belonged to the same family. She is younger and taller—tall indeed, but not ungraceful, though by no means beautiful. She has all the features that belong to a face—among them not a good one. Stay! I am wrong: there were in truth, dominant over the rest, TWO good features—her two eyes, dark as eyes well could be without being all pupil, large, and rather long like her sister's until ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... a canon of the cathedral, and a preacher of considerable popularity. He had one of the most meagre and forbidding physiognomies I ever beheld, and his beard was black and unshaven. But he preached well; fluently, and even eloquently: making a very singular, but not ungraceful, use of his left arm—and displaying at times rather a happy familiarity of manner, wholly exempt from vulgarity, and well suited to the capacities and feelings of his youthful audience. His subject was "belief in Christ Jesus;" on which he gave very excellent ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... poem 'easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.' Of the songs in Comus he remarks: 'they are harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.' He could see nothing in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but 'glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments.' The passionate intensity of Donne escaped him altogether; he could only wonder how so ingenious a writer could be so absurd. Such preposterous judgments can only be accounted for by inherent deficiencies of taste; Johnson had no ear, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... be about one inch higher than the level of the elbows. A line dropped from the edge of the desk should strike the front edge of the seat. Sliding down into the seat, bending too much over the desk while writing and studying, sitting on one foot or resting on the small of the back, are all ungraceful and unhealthful positions, and are often taken by pupils old enough to know better. This topic is well worth the vigilance of every thoughtful teacher, especially of one in ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... soft interlude. It was an improvisation. She sat low at the instrument, and the lines of her body settled into ungraceful curves and angles that gave it an appearance of deformity. Gradually and imperceptibly the interlude melted into the soft opening minor chords of the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... "'Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... he discuss a subject which he did not understand? Carlino thanked her. He had been on the point of falling in love with her; had greatly feared such a catastrophe. Her words, coming as they did so soon after her appearance in a certain offensive hat, with an ungraceful feather, and after some rather bourgeois expressions of admiration for that poor, tiresome devil Mendelssohn, had saved him a jamais. The two sparred gaily for some time, and, in spite of his poisoned tonsils, Carlino was in such high spirits that Noemi congratulated him on the subject of ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy, ungraceful animal." This was written by Horace Walpole to Miss Berry, in 1791, in allusion to Dr Johnson's depreciation of Thomas Gray the poet.[192] It is an acute observation, well worth being wrought out. There is a grandeur and ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright. She had on a robe, I think, but I did not look so low, my attention being chiefly drawn to a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth, into the side-pockets of which her hands were thrust ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... boyish slenderness and spring, though the awkward angles were somehow softened away. He no longer stooped and shambled, but held his head up and his shoulders back; and if he did still prance, as his uncle declared, like the Mighty Ones of Scripture, it was not an ungraceful prancing. Briefly, Jack Ferrers ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... wintry. They are generally inspiriting, life-giving, but, if perpetual, would glare too much on the tired sense; one likes sometimes a cloudy day, with its damp and warmer breath,—its gentle, down-looking shades. Sadness in some is intolerably ungraceful and oppressive; it affects one like a cold rainy day in June or September, when all pleasure departs with the sun; everything seems out of place and irrelative to the time; the clouds are fog, the atmosphere leaden,—but 'tis ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Elizur Wright's translation,—a meritorious one, still master of the field which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are not ungraceful, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines—lines of six feet—obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... distinguish themselves in some way or other, tilted back the bench on which they sat so far that they completely lost their equilibrium, and indubitably proved the possibility of their getting out, at least, by finding themselves on the floor in various ungraceful positions, and with ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... the largest (as it also is the largest of antelopes), being sometimes of the size and weight of a full-grown horse! It is an animal of rather an ungainly appearance; but its beautiful buff colour and mild disposition make up for its ungraceful shape; and it is scarcely ever out of good condition. Its home is Southern Africa, where it is still found in large herds; and its flesh affords a plentiful subsistence both to travellers and the half-savage ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... be: see note, l. 12. without duck or nod: words used to describe the ungraceful dancing and awkward courtesy of the ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Toplitz, as if by accident, he met the Princess Mary out on a hunting party. The princess was on horseback; but she rode awkwardly, and her demeanor was shy and ungraceful. She well knew the object of this casual meeting, and when the King of Rome approached to greet her, she turned pale and trembled as she felt the gaze of his large blue eyes. Her paleness did not increase her beauty, nor ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... a loss in reading his own compositions, which it is supposed he has been preparing with much pains and thought for the instruction of his people? The want of a little more care in this article, is the cause of much ungraceful behaviour. You will observe some clergymen with their heads held down from the beginning to the end, within an inch of the cushion, to read what is hardly legible; which, besides the untoward manner, hinders them from making the best advantage of their voice: others again ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... of the new life which had come into the world, and give unerring promise of the progress which followed. The same improvement is seen in bronze-casting as in sculpture; and though to our eyes it still remains crude and ungraceful, yet by comparing it with the work of the previous century we mark a hopeful ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... fewer examples of iron and lead. They were fairly adroit workers in silver, electrum, and especially in gold. The amulets, cups, necklaces, and jewellery discovered in their tombs or in the ruins of their houses, are sometimes of a not ungraceful form. Their pottery was made by hand, and was not painted or varnished, but they often gave to it a fine lustre by means of a stone-polisher. Other peoples of uncertain origin, but who had attained a civilization as advanced ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... herself on a fragment of fallen rock to recover her breath and strength, while her companion, on whose sinews no personal exertion seemed to make any impression, stood at her side, leaning in his own and not ungraceful manner on his long rifle. Several minutes passed, and neither spoke; Mabel, in particular, being lost in ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... of different colours. They wear yellow leather boots, and no stockings. Over the boots they wear large slippers, in which they shuffle along with a gait very little less awkward than the toddle of a cramp-footed lady in China. If they are ungraceful on foot, matters are not much better when they ride. Sitting astride a donkey (for they do not use side-saddles), a Turkish lady is about as comical an object as you could wish to behold, though I have no doubt she is quite unconscious of looking anything but dignified, as she presses ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... may be sometimes occasioned by the adhesion of the lungs to the pleura, after an inflammation of them; or to the adhesion of some abdominal viscera to their cavity, or to each other; which also are more liable to affect ladies from the unnatural and ungraceful pressure of tight stays, or by sitting or lying too long in one posture. But in these cases the pain should be more of the smarting, than of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of etiquette to assume any ungraceful or uncouth position, such as standing with the arms akimbo, sitting astride a chair, smoking in the presence of ladies, wearing your hat, leaning back in the chair, standing with legs crossed or feet on the chairs, leaning forward in the chair with ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... farm—with the corner of a white deal table between them, sat two young people evidently different in rank, and meeting upon no level of friendship. The young woman held in her hand a paper, which seemed the subject of their conversation. She was about four- or five-and-twenty, well grown and not ungraceful, with dark hair, dark hazel eyes, and rather large, handsome features, full of intelligence, but a little hard, and not a little regnant—as such features must be, except after prolonged influence of ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... burly figure came rolling in; they drew back and silenced each other.—"The Doctor!" This was the remarkable person they called Jack Doubleface. Nature had stuck a philosophic head, with finely-cut features, and a mouth brimful of finesse, on to a corpulent and ungraceful body, that yawed from side to side as ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... complaisance, attentions, etc., for him. And the graceful manner of doing all these things opens the way to the heart, and facilitates, or rather insures, their effects. From your own observation, reflect what a disagreeable impression an awkward address, a slovenly figure, an ungraceful manner of speaking, whether stuttering, muttering, monotony, or drawling, an unattentive behavior, etc., make upon you, at first sight, in a stranger, and how they prejudice you against him, though ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Committee reported; and on the report there was an animated debate. The friends of the government thought the proposed address offensive. The most respectable members of the majority felt that it would be ungraceful to aggravate by harsh language the pain which must be caused by their conscientious opposition to the King's wishes. Some strong expressions were therefore softened down; some courtly phrases were inserted; but the House refused to omit one sentence which almost reproachfully reminded ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thirst was to be slaked at other fountains. The language in which those great bards embodied their thoughts was unapproachable to an Ayrshire peasant; it was to him as an almost foreign tongue: he had to think and feel in the not ungraceful or inharmonious language of his own vale, and then, in a manner, translate it into that of Pope or of Thomson, with the additional difficulty of finding English words to express the exact meaning of those of Scotland, which had chiefly been ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... bowl, a pair of red ribbons flaunted, a pair of eyes sent a swift challenge, Zeron and his assistants struck up again, and there in a corner was Nick Temple, with characteristic effrontery attempting a pas de deux with Suzanne. Though Nick was ignorant, he was not ungraceful, and the village laughed and admired. And when Zeron drifted back into a valse he seized Suzanne's plump figure in his arms and bore her, unresisting, like a prize among the dancers, avoiding alike the fat and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the King, but whereas he was heavily and awkwardly built, her faultless proportion made an ungraceful movement an impossibility, and the rhythmic ease of her slightest gesture expressed an unfaltering bodily energy which no sudden fatigue nor stress of long weariness could bring down. When she moved, Gilbert wished that he might never see her in repose, yet as soon as the motion ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... typified by a small wash-basin on the ground beside her. Another almost as grotesque was a Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Breughel the Elder—a snow-scene in the wide street of a red brick, high-gabled village—soldiers, parents, children, all in the stiff, ungraceful Flemish dress of the sixteenth century, the poor little children, in square trousers and pinafores, clinging to their mothers' narrow skirts. Oddly enough, it made the story more real to me than it had ever seemed before, quite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... like the natives of Port Jackson, having fallen to the low pitch of their voices, recommenced their song at the octave, which was accompanied by slow and not ungraceful motions of the body and limbs, their hands being held up in a supplicating posture; and the tone and manner of their song and gestures seemed to bespeak the goodwill and forbearance of their auditors. Observing that they were attentively listened to, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... mixture of gray and black, fell down his neck, and in some degree obscured the sides of his face, and, parting on his forehead, fell in either direction in straight and formal screens. On the top of this ungraceful exhibition was laid impending forward, so as to overhang in some measure the whole fabric, a large hat of three equal cocks. His coat was of a rusty black, and his breeches and stockings were of the same color; his shoes without luster, and half-concealed ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... desire to play with her increased greatly. And she, knowing this, was as perverse as a princess in a fairy tale; she laughed mercilessly at my timid ways, at my awkward manners and my ungraceful fashion of entering the parlor; there was kept up between us a constant interchange of playful raillery, an oral stream of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Symonds's Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts.... Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the square brown tower of the church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... the business of constancy chiefly is, bravely to stand to, and stoutly to suffer those inconveniences which are not possibly to be avoided. So that there is no supple motion of body, nor any movement in the handling of arms, how irregular or ungraceful soever, that we need condemn, if they serve to protect us from the blow that is ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... poetical," as Mr. Ashe(439) said, that your own poet Gray will scarce keep tune with you. All this refers to your cascade scene and your letter. For the library it cannot have the Strawberry imprimatur: the double arches and double pinnacles are most ungraceful; and the doors below the book-cases in Mr. Chute's design had a conventual look, which yours totally wants. For this time, we shall put your genius in commission, and, like some other regents, execute our own plan without minding ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the room other nymphs, painted at full length in lively colors, are bearing aloft various symbols of the sea—this one a sextant, that a chart, another a compass, a fourth a bannerol, sufficiently prosaic in idea, though not ungraceful in fact, as witness the floating damsel who carries a barometer lightly as a mermaid carries her glass, or the figure with the red-gold hair whose back alone we see as she unrolls her map. But it is not easy to say why we should recur to mythology ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... philosophic principles which either side was able to produce, thrown often into close and serre confutations of one another. The practice was necessarily very useful to us, and eminently so to me. I never, indeed, acquired real fluency, and had always a bad and ungraceful delivery; but I could make myself listened to: and as I always wrote my speeches when, from the feelings involved, or the nature of the ideas to be developed, expression seemed important, I greatly increased my power of effective writing; acquiring not only an ear for smoothness ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... sympathies of England were awakened by the terrible revolutions of France, and the desolation of Poland; as a principle, we hated Napoleon, though he had neither act nor part in the doings of the democrats; and the sea-songs of Dibdin, which our youth now would call uncouth and ungraceful rhymes, were key-notes to public feeling; the English of that time were thoroughly "awake," the British Lion had not slumbered through a thirty years' peace. We were a nation of soldiers and sailors, and patriots; not of mingled cotton-spinners and railway speculators ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Uncouth, Ungraceful, Unfashionable, Unladylike, Uninteresting, Unpresentable, and Ugly. She was Unpoetical, Unmusical, Unlearned, Uncultured, Unimproved, Uninformed, Unknowing, Unthinking, Unwitty and Unwise. She was ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... just out of reach. She took a survey of Warwick; he had not perceived her plight, and she felt an unwonted reluctance to call for help, because he did not look like one used to come and go at a woman's bidding. After several fruitless essays she decided to hazard an ungraceful descent; and, gathering herself up, was about to launch boldly out, when Warwick cried, "Stop!" in a tone that nearly produced the catastrophe he wished to avert. Sylvia subsided, and coming up he lifted the book, glanced at the title, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... gleamed about his mouth as he drew near. "How do you do?" was sometimes his greeting; but more often, "Good-bye!" or "Good-night!"—an original and more sensible greeting. Though ungainly in formation, he was not ungraceful in bearing and action; there was a fitness and harmony in his manifestations even on the physical plan. On the lecture platform he stood erect and unadorned, his hands hanging folded in front, save when he changed the leaf of ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... distinction other men there present may have; and in any public assembly, him who has the facts, and can and will state them, people will listen to, though he is otherwise ignorant, though he is hoarse and ungraceful, though he stutters ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... cried Elsie, suddenly. "Was there ever such an ungraceful rider! Just look at him, Bessie, and laugh, if he is your ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... nicknames to people because of something noticeable in their character or appearance was to give them the name of some animal having this quality. The well-known name of Oliphant comes from elephant, and was probably first given to some one very large, and perhaps a little ungraceful. Bullock as a surname probably had the same sort of origin. The names Falcon, Hawk, Buzzard, must have been first given to people whose friends and neighbours saw some resemblance to the quickness or fierceness or sureness or some other quality of these birds in them. ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... to save him from a fall, but he threw off her rescuing hands; and thus he was falling to his ungraceful finish, when he managed to free one foot and planted it on the rug as a balance. But the basin with its wet porcelain bottom kept sliding ever farther away, and Tom still rolled in the swaddling robes suddenly sat down ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... all of us through all the ungraceful, inartistic realisms of our lives; the high poetry is ever there, the kingdom of romance is at hand; the only trouble is to find the rhymes—O! if we could only find ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... another, an immense basket of turnips, freshly gathered, that seemed to me as much as a man could well carry on his back. These must be a stiff-necked people. The women step sturdily and freely, and with not ungraceful strength. The trip over to town was pleasant, it being a fair morning, only with a low-hanging fog. Had it been in America, I should have anticipated a day of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... herself with talking less, and casting ravishing glances of delight and roguish entreaty first at one girl and then at the other. It was extremely difficult to withstand her, for her voice was low and singularly sweet, her eyes were beautiful, she could not do an ungraceful thing, she was altogether like a bright, flashing meteor, and soon she began to exercise an extraordinary fascination both over Bessie Challoner and Gwin Harley. Having got over her first astonishment, Gwin began to take a sincere interest in the pretty ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... city, the extravagance of the independent preachers in the camp, the precise garb, the severe countenance, the petty scruples, the affected accent, the absurd names and phrases which marked the Puritans,—the valour, the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath these ungraceful disguises,—the dreams of the raving Fifth-monarchy-man, the dreams, scarcely less wild, of the philosophic republican, all these would enter into the representation, and render it at once more ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... interfere with their popularity, and that De Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man." Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also—as in the passage ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... his casement, and there is the little bit of garden enclosed and neatly kept; but here no such attempt is made to ornament the cottages. We saw no smiling orchard or grove to conceal the bare log walls; and as to the little farm-houses, they are uglier still, and look so pert and ungraceful stuck upon the bank close to the ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... lending of ears that do not hear—that objectless looking without ever once seeing, and straining their minds without an aim; alternating, it may be, with some feats of dexterity and effort, like a man trying to lift himself in his own arms, or take his head in his teeth, exploits as dangerous, as ungraceful, and as useless, except to glorify the showman and bring wages in, as the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... queer, and his townsfolk were disposed to let him rest at that. His pale face was remarkable for nothing except a pair of dreamy eyes which could at times give sign of inward lightnings. His hair was lank; his figure was attenuated and ungraceful; he wore his clothes awkwardly. He was commonly supposed to be sulky, and some people thought his tone of voice bumptious and insolent. He was far from being a favourite, but those who knew him best liked him best, ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... this time sharply, at his companion of the moment. There was nothing extraordinary in the face except the eyes burning fitfully under the gloom of incredibly thick, coarse, reddish eyebrows. His mouth was a curious mixture of softness and cruelty, and his hands were broad, but not ungraceful. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... saluted his disconcerted companion, who moved off with ungraceful displeasure. Fleda and Mr. Carleton then began to follow back the road they had come, in the highest good humour both. Her sparkling face told him with even greater ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... system, and that, turning away with disgust from their own national precedents and traditions, they should have sought for principles of government in the writings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and ungraceful affectation, the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion should speedily have engendered despotism sterner than ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... yet not ungraceful retorts which I mentioned may be instanced as follows. Demaratus, being asked in a troublesome manner by an importunate fellow, Who was the best man in Lacedaemon? answered at last, "He, Sir, that is the least like you." Some, in company where Agis was, much extolled the Eleans for their just ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the changing gears of a motor. He thought for a moment that it was Honduras at his own car; then he recognized the stroke of a far heavier engine. The powerful, ungraceful bulk of an English machine was stopping at his door. Immediately after he distinguished the slightly harsh, dominating voice of Peter Provost. The latter entered, followed by Kingsfrere Jannan. Peter Provost, a member of the New York family and connection of ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... you will go to your room, and try to learn a little patience. You begin to be too pat with your own opinions, which in a young lady is ungraceful. There, you need not cry, my darling, because your opinions are always sensible, and I value them very highly; but still you must bear in mind that you are but ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... etiquette to assume any ungraceful or uncouth position, such as standing with the arms akimbo, sitting astride a chair, smoking in the presence of ladies, wearing your hat, leaning back in the chair, standing with legs crossed or feet on the chairs, leaning forward ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... extravagance, of the want of moderation and restraint, is, I think, destructive of all beauty whatsoever in everything, color, form, motion, language, or thought, giving rise to that which in color we call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all unchastened; which qualities are in everything most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular operation. And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... corner of the sofa, letting one pretty foot swing over the other, and watching the new-comer with a malicious eye, which instantly and gleefully perceived that Lady Selina thought her attitude ungraceful. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... attached to the litter, bound the war chariots of the vanquished chiefs to the Pharaoh. He dragged them behind him like animals in leash. These men, with fierce despairing faces, their elbows drawn together by a strap and forming an ungraceful angle, tottered awkwardly at every motion of the chariots, driven ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... she had none, and was left in ignorance of what she was capable, and for what she was responsible. Made to believe that her fine feelings were oddities, her expansive thoughts absurdities, and her love of knowledge unfeminine and ungraceful, she kept them to herself, and became ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... might, perhaps, have numbered some five and thirty years; but at a hasty glance, he would have seemed considerably younger. He was above the ordinary stature; though a gentle, and not ungraceful bend in the neck rather than the shoulders, somewhat curtailed his proper advantages of height. His frame was thin and slender, but well knit and fair proportioned. Nature had originally cast his form in an athletic mould; but sedentary ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this spirit of humour. 'They may say that Michiella has bewitched you, my Camilla. I think your voice would sound as if it were dragging its feet after it just as a stork flies. O my Camilla! don't I wish I could do the same, and be ungraceful and at ease! A moan is married to every note of your treble, my Camilla, like December and May. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the one, and handed the case with no ungraceful acknowledgment to its owner; but before Mr. Kentish could return the courtesy by proffering his cigar-cutter, the bushranger had produced his razor from a pocket of the white jacket, and sliced off the ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... "never," as his friend Shelley used to say, "did he display himself to more advantage than on these occasions; being at once polite and cordial, full of social hilarity and the most perfect good humour; never diverging into ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout the evening." About midnight his guests generally left him, with the exception of Captain Medwin, who used to remain, as I understand, talking and drinking with his noble host till far into the morning; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way: by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of thought and ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... acquired a firm and even elegant seat, but no lady can ever learn to ride as a lady should ride, without a good deal of instruction; because her seat on horseback is so thoroughly artificial, that without some competent person to tell her of her faults, she is sure to fall into a number of awkward ungraceful tricks. Besides, a riding-school, with its enclosed walls and trained horses, affords an opportunity of going through the preliminary lessons without any of those accidents which on the road, or in a field, are very likely to occur with a raw pupil on a fresh ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... notice at all as she sat contentedly enjoying her cigarette and gazing out at the shining sea. After a minute she crawled out on the rock and lay with her face over the edge looking down. Carlyle, watching her, reflected how it seemed impossible for her to assume an ungraceful attitude. ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... ancient prowess, and Jerry was delighted with his passenger. Poised on one foot, and holding firmly to his shoulders, Nan sailed down the High Street in the full glare of the lamps. It was not a dignified mode of progression, but it was very far from being ungraceful. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... coming close behind him,—was tall, not ungraceful in an easy, almost mannish way ... slab-figured ... built more like a boy than a young woman dangerously near the old maid. She too wore bloomers. Her face was tanned. It was too broad and placid for either prettiness ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... frankly detestable,' said Urania. 'I endure her here for Bessie's sake; just as I would endure the ungraceful curves of a Dachshund if Bess took it into her head to make a pet of one; but at school I could keep her at ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... it; the ships, necessarily for the effect, but fatally for themselves, are confused, and incompletely drawn, except the little sloop, which looks paltry and like a toy; and the foreground objects are, for work of Turner, curiously ungraceful and uninteresting. ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... New York, culled out carefully, in fine, at my particular request, from a standing army of eight hundred boys, the flowers of all nations, so they wrote me, temporarily in barracks on an East River island—I say, this thirtieth boy was in person not ungraceful; his deceased mother a lady's maid, or something of that sort; and in manner, why, in a plebeian way, a perfect Chesterfield; very intelligent, too—quick as a flash. But, such suavity! 'Please sir! please sir!' always bowing and saying, 'Please sir.' In the strangest ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... through several chambers, decorated with much cost and barbarous splendour. The wainscot of one of the principal saloons is inlaid with mother-of-pearl, ebony, coral, and ivory; but the workmanship seems harsh and ungraceful. The ceiling is plastered with massive gilding, the effect of which is rather cumbrous than ornamental; "not graced with elegancy, but daubed with cost." Pillars, of a composition to resemble the richest marble, support the compartments, and the cornice is coloured ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... Beauties of Charles's court. "It was to his taste, as it was to that of a later artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, that we are indebted for the freedom which characterized their treatment of the rigid and somewhat ungraceful costumes before them." Walpole, in his "Anecdotes of Painting," says, "Lely supplied the want of taste with clinquant; his nymphs trail fringes, and embroidery, through meadows and purling streams. Vandyke's habits are those of the times; Lely's, a sort ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... dance here once," she continued, as they made their way across the room, talking a little vaguely and with an obvious effort. "I did not enjoy it at all. To me the style of dancing in this country seems ungraceful. Look behind, Mr. Chetwode. Tell me, is Mr. Rosario ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... value, procured from Assam, many of which are said to be extremely curious, but I regret to say that I never saw any of them. On these occasions spirits are drunk, and dancing kept up all night: the dance is described as a slow ungraceful motion, the women ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... your meaning, and therefore sounds harshly. I am accustomed to speak plainly myself, and to strip of their flowery entourage the sentiments to which I listen. It may be an ungraceful habit, but it is a safe one. I am persuaded that if vice were always called by its true name, shame, misery, and ruin would ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... hut. The Wild Ram of the Mountains, having lately been sealed to his twelfth wife, and having no suitable apartment for her, had ingeniously contrived a sleeping-place in a covered wagon-box at the end of the house,—an apartment which was now being occupied, not without some ungraceful remonstrance, by his first wife, a lady somewhat far down in the vale of years and long past the first glamour of her enthusiasm for the Kingdom. It had been her mischance to occupy previously in the community-house that apartment ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... Thou, indeed, art an exception; dressing like a coxcomb, yet a very clever fellow. Nevertheless so clumsy a beau, that thou seemest to me to owe thyself a double spite, making thy ungracefulness appear the more ungraceful, by thy remarkable tawdriness, when thou art ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... particular. "Holding up one finger," I say, "is a favourite way of bespeaking special attention to some 'point' which you are trying to make; and waving the right hand, with outstretched arm, the forefinger leading, is an easy and not ungraceful method of illustrating the narrative portion of your speech. For the more vehement passages, a sudden flourish of the hand upwards, over your head, generally accompanies some aggressive, triumphant assertion, such as, 'I care not who he may be!' And a similar ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 25, 1892 • Various
... feature were so happily blended, as formed one of the best imitations of the Apollo Belvidere. With this fine commanding figure, he was so much in the free and easy management of his limbs, as never to look encumbered, or present an ungraceful attitude, in all his various movements on the stage. Even his exits and entrances had peculiar graces, from their characteristic ease and simplicity. What must have greatly assisted Barry in the grace and ease of treading the stage, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... flexible spines, their long, smooth throats and curved waists, are drafted off to stand as veritable decoy-ducks? Who has not observed the grace and ease with which they wear risky patterns and unusual facons, and so delude the arrogant but ungraceful customer into buying, in the belief that she will look just as well as the pretty model? The average well-to-do woman, with some pretensions to good looks, sees a beautiful young creature with Junoesque air parading before her in bold color-combinations and doubtful ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the ball was the son of a gentleman of independent fortune in New-London. He was a gay young man, aged about twenty-five. His address was easy, his manners rather voluptuous than refined; confident, but not ungraceful. He led the ton in fashionable circles; gave taste its zest, and was quite a favorite with the ladies generally. His name ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... place, they assume she must be your wife, for how could it be supposed that you would have an unattractive sweetheart? A true woman may be ungraceful; but then, her ugliness implies a thousand disagreeable things for you. One supposes you must be a notary or a magistrate, as these two professions have a monopoly of grotesque and well-dowered spouses. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... and walked to and fro through the room, reading. She watched him, angrily confident that she should presently see him change countenance. Suddenly he drooped as if his spine had partly given way; and in this ungraceful attitude he read the remainder of the letter. When he had finished he threw it on the table, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and roared with laughter, huddling himself together as if he ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... extraordinary degree; as Mr. Brent remarks,[290] "Every few seconds over they go; one, two, or three summersaults at a time. Here and there a bird gives a very quick and rapid spin, revolving like a wheel, though they sometimes lose their balance, and make a rather ungraceful fall, in which they occasionally hurt themselves by striking some object." From Madras I have received several specimens of the common Tumbler of India, differing slightly from each other in the length of their beaks. Mr. Brent sent me a dead specimen of a "House-tumbler,"[291] which is a Scotch ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... confessions; one of her aunts used to call them her "side lights." By their aid she succeeded in interesting Frank. "How candid she is to tell me—to confide in me!" Sally was handsome now; the evening suited her dark skin and coal black eyes, and her strong figure was rich and not ungraceful in a dress of ruby velvet. Should he kiss her? What would she say? He threwhis ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... prove their loyalty and patriotism, on which some suspicions had previously been cast. Burns too offered himself, and was received into the corps. Allan Cunningham remembered the appearance of the regiment, "their odd but not ungraceful dress; white kerseymere breeches and waistcoat; short blue coat, faced with red; and round hat, surmounted by a bearskin, like the helmets of the Horse Guards." He remembered the poet too, as he showed among them, "his very swarthy face, his ploughman stoop, his large ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... seemingly pitifully inadequate for the great adventure on which she was bound; her lines were short and ungraceful. From her clumsy iron-shod bow to her high, round stern, from her bulging sides to the summit of her short, powerful masts there was scant beauty in her. She was broad, blunt, evidently slow in her movements, and in the smooth waters ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... yield up at least a man and woman and three or four children. Day after blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs, ironing-boards, veranda railings, climbing creaking stairways, now and again descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste and ungraceful posture, burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes, hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hidden away behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into dilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human being who fell in my ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... HANDY ANDY. He underlined his points heavily, and his hearers, like the self-conscious, emotionally shy young colonials they were, felt half amused by, half-superior to the histrionic display. They lounged in easy, ungraceful postures while he read, reclining one against another, or sprawling forward over the desks, their heads on their arms. It was the first hour after dinner, when one's thoughts were sleepy and stupid, and Mr. Repton was not ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... copy); 245 numbered leaves of text and final blank leaf with anchor. Sign. * and ** have eight leaves each, not ten as stated in the register on p. 245. Italic letter, 39 lines to the page, three- to seven-line spaces with guide-letters left for initials. The anchor is of the second, somewhat ungraceful, pattern in use 1519-1524, after which there was for some years a return to the first ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... asked her companion. "If it does hurt or harm to you or yours, or anything but good, may what is hanging over me be fulfilled!" and she extended a thin, but, considering her years, not ungraceful arm, in the act of holding out the bottle ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... broken by the fall of a charger, and inartificially set by an inexperienced surgeon. This, also, was a blemish in his deportment; and though his broad shoulders, sinewy arms, and expanded chest, betokened the strength which he often displayed, it was strength of a clumsy and ungraceful character. His language and gestures were those of one seldom used to converse with equals, more seldom still with superiors; short, abrupt, and decisive, almost to the verge of sternness. In the judgment ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... to go to sleep! Now prepare to trot, and don't go too fast at first. Remember always to change from one gait to another gently, for your own sake, that you may not be thrown out of position; for your horse's, that he may not be startled, and made unruly and ungraceful. He has nerves as well as you. Now, prepare to trot! Trot! Shorten your reins, Miss Beauty! Shorten them!" and during the next minute or two, while the class trots about a third of a mile, the poor beauty hears every command in the manual addressed to her, ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... a moment's hesitation, lingered near the big wood-fire in the hall, unwilling to admit that she had never seen a billiard table. She made a pretext of staying to talk to Mrs. Fiske, who sat stooping her tall figure forward in a chair too small for her. Sylvia looked at this ungraceful attitude with strong disapproval. What she thought was that such inattention to looks was perfectly inexcusable. What she said was, in a very gracious voice: "What a beautiful home you have, Mrs. Fiske! How wonderfully happy you ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... people stand, they sit possibly worse. Most people sit in the most unhealthful as well as in the most ungraceful way. Generally there is a complete "slumping" of the chest, the spine is brought into a wide, single curve instead ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... for ever!" again resounded, as we proceeded slowly and majestically towards the river, through a fog, which prevented our being advantageously seen, and which got down the throat of the sword bearer, who coughed incessantly during our progress, much to my annoyance, not to speak of the ungraceful movements which his convulsive barkings gave to the red velvet scabbard of the official glave as it stuck out of the window ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... Respectable, but forlorn. Nothing was ragged or untidy, but nothing either had the least look of home comfort or home privacy. As to home elegance, or luxury, the look of such a room is enough to put it out of one's head that there can be such things in the world. The ugly ingrain carpet, the ungraceful frame of the small glass in the pier, the abominable portraits on the walls, the disagreeable paper with which they were hung, the hideous lamps on the mantelpiece;—wherever the eye looked, it came back with uneasy ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... an accident which occurred in his infancy, was slightly deformed. His right shoulder—as I understood, for I never saw him—grew out, giving an ungraceful and somewhat comical twist to his figure, which, in female eyes—youthful ones at least—sadly marred the effect of his intelligent and handsome countenance. This personal defect rendered him shy and awkward in the presence of women of his own class of society; and he ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... in a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright. She had on a robe, I think, but I did not look so low, my attention being chiefly drawn to a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth, into the side-pockets of which her ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you wish to explain?" said the second stranger in Italian, bowing with a not ungraceful bend, and a touch of his hand ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the youth was well formed, tall, not ungraceful—with features of singular intelligence, though subdued to the verge of sadness. His face was pale and thin, his eyes were a little sunken, and his air, expression, and general outside, denoted a youth of keen sensibilities, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... used the assonance has necessarily been abused, and its excess has given rise to the saying "Al-Saj's faj'a"—prose rhyme's a pest. English translators have, unwisely I think, agreed in rejecting it, while Germans have not. Mr Preston assures us that "rhyming prose is extremely ungraceful in English and introduces an air of flippancy": this was certainly not the case with Friedrich Rueckert's version of the great original and I see no reason why it should be so or become so in our tongue. Torrens (Pref. p. vii.) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... him ride away, strong and rugged and ungraceful, from the head to the heel of him a man. Life had gone hard with him. She wondered whether that were the reason her heart went out to ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... indifferent teeth (seldom exhibited), a prominent chin, a long neck; his body was of firm, not ungraceful build. Society's evening uniform does not allow a man much scope in the matter of adornments; it was plain, however, that Godwin no longer scorned the tailor and haberdasher. He wore a suit which confidently challenged the criticism of experts, and the silk socks visible above his shoes might ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... lured her to Gopher Prairie: the cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... king of Burgundy was introduced by her faction into the mole of Hadrian or Castle of St. Angelo, which commands the principal bridge and entrance of Rome. Her son by the first marriage, Alberic, was compelled to attend at the nuptial banquet; but his reluctant and ungraceful service was chastised with a blow by his new father. The blow was productive of a revolution. "Romans," exclaimed the youth, "once you were the masters of the world, and these Burgundians the most abject of your slaves. They now reign, these voracious and brutal savages, and my injury ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... in which he delights too often; his equivocations, which Bentley endeavours to defend by the example of the ancients; his unnecessary and ungraceful use of terms of art; it is not necessary to mention, because they are easily remarked, and generally censured; and, at last, bear so little proportion to the whole, that they scarcely deserve ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... poplar nearly resembles this latter, but it is almost a profanation to compare the two, especially when they are agitated by the wind; for under such circumstances, the one is the most majestic, the other the most ungraceful, or—if I may apply such an expression to anything but human affectation of movement—the most awkward of trees. The poplar trembles before the blast, flutters, struggles wildly, dishevels its foliage, gropes around with its feeble branches, and hisses as in impotent passion. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... pleasant, is intensely uncomfortable—the suspension of respiration, indeed, quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation—and the posture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips is unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically, a man kisses a woman perpendicularly, with their eyes, those "windows of the soul," synchronizing exactly. But actually, on account of the incompressibility of the nasal cartilages, he has to incline either his or her head to an ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... which surrounded her, in right of her character, of her history, and of the relation which she fulfilled towards her brother, were the glancing quickness of her motions, and other circumstances in her deportment (such as her stooping attitude when walking), which gave an ungraceful character to her appearance when out of doors . . ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... fuller appearance than the flashlight view of lost tragedy which we have in Roland. But until the reflex influence of the Arthurian romance begins to work, they are, though not always disagreeable or ungraceful, of a very simple and primitive kind, as indeed are the delineations of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... honour and integrity; and of this his friends as well as his enemies were aware. As a speaker in the House of Commons he was luminous upon his own subject, but he had no pretensions to eloquence; his voice was feeble and his manner ungraceful; however, he was (unfortunately) one of the first men in the House, and was listened to with attention upon any subject. He left no children. Mrs. Huskisson has a pension of L1,200 a year. The accounts from Paris improve, inasmuch ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... in his chair. Without looking at him I knew that his gaze on the young rustic was quizzical and that he was recording on the tablets of his merciless memory the ungraceful abruptness of the other's action ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... and walked across the room, aimlessly, and stood there a moment, and came back. She picked up a thread on the floor. Sat down again. Picked up her pencil, rolled it a moment in her palms, then, catching her toes behind either foreleg of her chair, in an attitude that was as workmanlike as it was ungraceful, she began to draw, nervously, tentatively at first, but gaining in firmness and assurance ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... six black and six greyish-white, in regular alternation. The tip is black, and the tail itself is very full or "bushy." When the 'coon-skin is made into a cap—which it often is among hunters and frontiers-men—the tail is left to hang as a drooping plume; and such a head-dress is far from ungraceful. In some "settlements" the 'coon-skin cap is quite the fashion ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... undecorative! Bed, dresser, and washstand, forcibly recalling to one the big bear, middle-sized bear, and little bear of nursery lore, were clumsy and heavy and bad, even in hardwood; but when they were simply stained imitations of the real thing, and ornate with wooden knobs, machine carving, and ungraceful lines, they were truly unspeakable. The bed with its fat bolster, on top of which, like Ossa on Pelion piled, stood the pillows, perhaps covered with shams which bade one "Good night" and "Good morning" in red cotton embroidery—was especially ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... as if by accident, he met the Princess Mary out on a hunting party. The princess was on horseback; but she rode awkwardly, and her demeanor was shy and ungraceful. She well knew the object of this casual meeting, and when the King of Rome approached to greet her, she turned pale and trembled as she felt the gaze of his large blue eyes. Her paleness did not increase her beauty, nor did her shyness contribute ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... some one to read to him; for if the sitter is bored the portrait will look sad. Still, if the sitter has not got an amiable expression naturally the artist is not bound to give him one, nor 'if he is essentially ungraceful' should the artist ever 'put him in a graceful attitude.' As regards landscape painting, Mr. Collier tells us that 'a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the impossibility of reproducing nature,' but that there is nothing really to prevent a picture giving to the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... serve, but you would waste much time, and should the vertebrae have not been removed by the butcher, you would be compelled to exercise such a degree of strength that would make one's appearance very ungraceful, and possibly, too, throwing gravy over your neighbor sitting next to you. The correct way to carve this roast is to cut diagonally from fig. 1 to 2, and help in slices of moderate thickness; then it may be cut from 3 to 4, in ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... battle-field. But it requires a poetic sympathy, which in classical editors is rare, to understand that, as Lessing and others have urged, the very way he speaks of his own retreat was by implication a compliment, not ungraceful, to his friend, who had continued the struggle against the triumvirate, and come home at last, war-worn and weary, to find the more politic comrade of his youth one of the celebrities of Rome, and on the best of terms with the very men against whom ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... Jennie Cooper's walking party, and not even the sight of Gilbert and Christine, walking just ahead of her and Roy, could quite subdue the sparkle of her starry hopes. Nevertheless, she was not so rapt from things of earth as to be unable to notice that Christine's walk was decidedly ungraceful. ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and so much did he also excel in his manner of reading, that he was always disgusted if he heard his own writings repeated with an ill grace and accent. Accordingly, it is said, that, when he accidentally heard a potter singing a stanza of his Orlando in an incorrect and ungraceful manner, he was so incensed, that he rushed into his shop and broke several of the pots which were exposed to sale; when the potter expostulated with him for this unprovoked injury, Ariosto replied, "I indeed have broken half a dozen of your pots, which are not worth so many halfpence, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... sago districts consume a considerable quantity of sago flour, which is boiled into a thick, tasteless paste, called boyat and eaten by being twisted into a large ball round a stick and inserted into the mouth—an ungraceful operation. Tamarind, or some very acid sauce is used to impart to it some flavour. Sago is of course cheaper than rice, but the latter is, as a rule, much preferred by the native, and is found more nutritious ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... laws of the universe, vindicating themselves by apparent disorder and misfortune, happily prevent from being attained in real life.[13] It is thus pleasantly flattered into contentment with itself—a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure of practices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence as prejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead of wrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, and to place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which the novelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity of ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
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