"Exotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the ordinary materials of composition. His creative force is always impelling him to break through the fetters of the diatonic scale, and to find utterance for his ideas in archaic and extremely exotic tonalities. The pentatonic scale is a favorite with him; he employs it as boldly as Wagner did in Das Rheingold. But it is not enough, for he proceeds from it into the Dorian mode of the ancient Greeks, and then into the Phrygian, and ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... her creation is based on destruction; her lives live only by murder. The cruel images of the pagan are truer delineations of Nature than the figures which typify the impotent charity of Christendom—an exotic in the midst ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... / /To assume form. | |Incapacity of material—To retain form. | |Incapacity of the artisan. | |Changes in method of manufacture. |By adventition—|Changes in environment. |Changes of use. Modification of form—| |Lack of use. | Influence of new or exotic forms, etc. | | /To enhance usefulness. |By intention—| | To please fancy.—/For the beautiful. For ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... published when he was in his thirty-first year. It owed its existence to an accident, and was but an ordinary production, as inferior to the best of his subsequent works as Byron's "Hours of Idleness" to "Childe Harold." It was a languid and colorless copy of exotic forms: a mere scale picked from the surface of the writer's mind, with neither beauty nor vital warmth to commend it. We speak from the vague impressions which many long years have been busy in effacing; and we confess that it would require the combined forces of a long voyage and a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... physician, began a few years ago a physic garden adjoining to his house in this town; and as he is particularly curious, and, as I was told, exquisitely skilled in botanic knowledge, so he has been not only very diligent, but successful too, in making a collection of rare and exotic plants, such as are scarce to be equalled ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... stage. No one plays a love scene better, but it is a picture of love that she gives, a strange orchidaceous picture rather than a suggestion of the ordinary human passion as felt by ordinary human people. She is exotic—well, what else should she be? One does not, at any rate one should not, quarrel with an exquisite tropical flower and call it unnatural because it is not a ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... young wife, are no sooner wed than their troubles begin—troubles of the domestic budget, of cooking and stove lighting and the rest. (By the way, for all its carefully British topography, I strongly suspect the whole story of an exotic origin, chiefly from certain odd-sounding words that seem to have slipped in here and there. Does our island womanhood really talk of a matinee, in the sense of an article of attire? If so, this is the first I hear of it). To return to the Kerr household. In the midst of their ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... records the adventures of a monkey in Morayshire, whose wanderings sadly alarmed the inhabitants who saw him, all unused as they were to the sight of such an exotic stranger. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Auxiliary. In fact, he was unanimously chosen an official in all the local public works which had no salary attached to them. But then, he was gaining in popularity, and what did it matter if his office was filled to overflowing with exotic paraphernalia, he was reaching that apex to which he had aspired, and the emolument was a mere bagatelle. The booby prize, after all, had been the ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... of this decidedly exotic character of Slavic popular poetry, that, when the author of the present work first published a German version of the Servian popular songs, Goethe considered it as an advantage, that the work of translation had fallen into the hands ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... places in which different authors should be read. Pope is doubtless at his best in the midst of a formal garden, Herrick in an orchard, and Shelley in a boat at sea. Sir Thomas Browne demands, perhaps, a more exotic atmosphere. One could read him floating down the Euphrates, or past the shores of Arabia; and it would be pleasant to open the Vulgar Errors in Constantinople, or to get by heart a chapter of the Christian Morals between the paws of a Sphinx. In England, the most fitting background for ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... covered with the low, prickly pine-apple plant; the air is fragrant with a rich perfume wafted from a neighboring grove of oranges and lemons; the mango spreads its dense, splendid foliage, and bears a golden fruit, which, though praised by many, tastes to us like a mixture of tow and turpentine; the exotic bread-tree waves its fig-like leaves and pendent fruit; while high over all the beautiful cocoa-palm lifts its crown of glory.[10] Animal life does not compare with this luxuriant growth. The steamer-bound traveler may see a few monkeys, a group of gallinazos, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... or Argentine countess? Or have these plutocrats of the great republic some special distinguishing titles, such as "Silver King," "Railway Prince," etc., and was this exotic countess the daughter of some such lord of the money market? At any rate, I had to obey her polite commands, so, throwing away my cigar, I bowed to Mr. Dumany and followed the lead ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... Everywhere nature had triumphed over science and skill. Everything was changed, and nature had shown herself a more perfect gardener than man. The gravel paths were embedded with soft green moss, studded with clumps of white and purple violets, whose faint fragrance, mingled with the more exotic scent of other plants, filled the warm air with a peculiar dreamy perfume. Nowhere had the hand of man sought to restrain or to develop. Nature had had her own way, and had made ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... garden was, for the most part, pure affectation in France, or, at best, it was treated as a frank exotic. Even to-day, in modern France, where an old dwelling of the period of Henri IV, Francois I, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, or Louis XV still exists with its garden, the latter is more often than not on the classically pure French lines, while that of a modern cottage, villa or chateau is often a poor, ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... penal law (ritsu), although its Chinese original has not survived for purposes of comparison, was undoubtedly copied from the work of the Tang legislators, the only modification being in degrees of punishment; but the code, though it, too, was partially exotic in character, evidently underwent sweeping alterations so as to bring it into conformity with Japanese customs and traditions. Each of the revisions recorded above must be assumed to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... humble modiste. How rapidly can they see whether the Cashmere shawl of some passing dame owes its rich but sober tints to an Indian loom, or to the fabric of M. Ternaux, who so skilfully imitates the exotic luxury; and what a difference does the circumstance make in their estimation of the wearer! The beauty of a woman, however great it may be, excites less envy in the minds of her own sex in France, than does the possession of a fine Cashmere, or a garniture of real Russian ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... academy. There is not a single diacritical mark in the book. Where possible, the discussion is based on English material. It was necessary, however, for the scheme of the book, which includes a consideration of the protean forms in which human thought has found expression, to quote some exotic instances. For these no apology seems necessary. Owing to limitations of space I have had to leave out many ideas or principles that I should have liked to touch upon. Other points have had to be barely hinted at in a ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... themselves by no sectarian name, nor could they have told to what "party" they belonged. They troubled themselves with no theories of education, but mingled gentle nurture with "wholesome neglect." There was nothing exotic or constrained in the growth of Eric's character. He was not one of your angelically good children at all, and knew none of the phrases of which infant prodigies are supposed to be so fond. He had not been taught any distinction between "Sunday books" and "week-day" books, but no book had been ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... preliminary announcement, a gentleman so glossy and ancient, with such a fixed unnatural freshness of smile and eye, that he gave Garnett the effect of having been embalmed and then enamelled. It needed not the exotic-looking ribbon in the visitor's button-hole, nor Mrs. Newell's introduction of him as her friend Baron Schenkelderff, to assure Garnett of his connection with a race as ancient ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... costly jewels, India shawls, and splendid equipage, have thought of this whilom rival, who issued every summer morning from the lane, in her hand a bunch of those simple flowers, occupying, as she did, the border-ground between the wild hemlock and honeysuckle of the wilderness and the exotic of the parterre, the bachelor's-button, mulberry-pink, southernwood, and bee-larkspur, destined to fill a tumbler on an end of the counter where she displayed her most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... I found this year for the first time is the Conotrachelus juglandis. This beetle ordinarily lays its eggs in the involucre of the butternut. With the introduction of exotic walnuts, the beetle has changed its habits, and lays its eggs in the herbaceous shoots of walnuts and hickories. The larvae tunnel into the center of a shoot, and destroy it, or seriously ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... attempted to brand with a new name that set of pert, petulant, sophistical sciolists, whose philosophy the French, since their revolutionary period, have distinguished as philosophism, and the philosophers themselves as philosophistes. He would have designated them as literators, but few exotic words will circulate; new words must be the coinage of our own language to blend with the vernacular idiom. Many new words are still wanted. We have no word by which we could translate the otium of the Latins, the dillettante of the Italians, the alembique ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... serving up an olio entirely in the taste of the day. But through it all he is conspicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and the extraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as Contarini Fleming are borrowed from no exotic source. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... under spreading trees with the sunlight filtering through the leaves upon the well-kept lawns, were spread tables covered with delicious fruits and every delicacy that the human mind could devise in the way of culinary delights. Rare wines, exotic flowers were constantly supplied in profuse display. Luxurious divans and reposeful seats were interspersed about. The most modern as well as the most famous musicians furnished exquisite music, while flitting about in neat white aprons partially concealed ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... maxims exist in unexampled profusion. After reading Aristotle's ethics, I feel, when I turn to the New Testament, as Linnaeus is said to have felt when he first saw growing wild the masses of blooming gorse, which he had never seen in his cold North, except as a sheltered exotic. Whether it was likely that contemporaries of the Pharisees, who were sunk in formalism, and who had glossed away every moral and spiritual the Law, could reach and maintain such elevation of tone, I leave you to judge." But though ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... And though he was living in the midst of a civilisation which possessed great cities whose walls reached to heaven, he pitched his tent beneath the terebinth tree at Mamre, and would have nothing to do with the order of things around him, but remained an exotic, a waif, an outcast in the midst of Canaan all his life. Why? Because he 'looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God.' And now he has gone to it, he is gathered to his people. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... deities of Babylonia were adopted by the Assyrians. But in Assyria they were always somewhat of an exotic, and even the learned class invoked Assur rather than the other gods. Assur was the personification of the old capital of the country and of the nation itself, and though the scribes found an etymology ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... Germany, pure literary forms of composition. While in Italy the sonnet is still sung, we are filled with astonishment that Brahms should have set to music a distich—Anacreon. Numerous other forms, taken up principally by the Romantic school and the closely related "Exotic School," have remained mere literary playthings. For a certain length of time the ghasel seemed likely to be adopted as a shell to contain scattered thoughts, wittily arranged, or (almost exclusively by Platen) also for mood-pictures; but without doubt the undeservedly great success ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of syringa and lilac freshened her, cleansing her of the last lingering taint of joss-sticks. The cardinal birds were very busy in the scarlet masses of Japanese quince; orioles fluttered among golden Forsythia; here and there an exotic starling preened and peered at the burnished purple grackle, stalking solemnly through ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... like some exotic that does not show its true beauty in our greenhouses. The life of a Christian on earth is a prophecy by both its greatness and its smallness, by both its glory and its shame, by both its brightness and its spots. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... I shall thereby be able to confine myself solely to the group you are studying and to other matters touched upon in your letter. I had heard from Mr. Stevens some time ago that you had begun collecting exotic Geodephaga, but were confining yourself to one or two illustrations of each genus. I was sure, however, that you would soon find this unsatisfactory. Nature must be studied in detail, and it is the wonderful variety of the species of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... dwell 'neath a palace dome, With rare exotic flowers, Whose perfumed splendour gaily gleams In radiant ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... them, when examining the details of these buildings, and picturing to themselves the lives of their inhabitants, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, that the 'forcing system' is a mistake—that art never flourished as an exotic, and assuredly never will—that before we live again in mediaeval houses, and realise the true meaning of what is 'Gothic' and appropriate in architecture, we must begin at the beginning, our lives must be simpler, our costumes more graceful and appropriate, and ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than women. ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... plants here on my place as possible because I believe we can live easier and better and make better use of the land both for ourselves and nature when we learn how to use our various native plants to the best advantage along with many of the exotic ones. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... make inquiries regarding this maiden, he would have found that she was from the Chinese settlement in Macassar, and on her way to Canton, to pay a visit to a grandmother she had never seen. But it was Peter's nature to spin little dreams of his own whenever he contemplated exotic young women, to place them in settings of ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... in 1856, and died suddenly on the evening of Oct. 22, 1883, after delivering a lecture in the Midland Institutes on "Exotic Art." An architect of most brilliant talent, it is almost impossible to record the buildings with which (in conjunction with his partner, Mr. Wm. Martin) he has adorned our town. Among them are the new Free ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... issued proclamations in derogation of the legislative powers of the Assembly; assessed, levied, held, and disbursed the colonial revenue without check or responsibility; transplanted into Virginia exotic English statutes; multiplied penalties and exactions and appropriated fines to his own use; he added the decrees of the court of high commission of England to the ecclesiastical constitutions of Virginia." Could we have a more perfect description of ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... he said in his animated, exotic way, and all creased with smiles, "my cinema business is not business alone! No! It is Art! It is the art hunger that ever urges me onward, not the desire for commercial gain. For me, beauty is ever first; the box-office last! You understand, Mr. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... an occasional southerly wind as keen as Kingsley's wild north-easter. But in gardens to the north of Auckland I have stood under olive trees laden with berries. Hard by were orange trees, figs, and lemon trees in full bearing. Not far off a winding tidal creek was fringed with mangroves. Exotic palm trees and the cane-brake will grow there easily. All over the North Island, except at high altitudes, and in the more sheltered portions of the South Island, camellias and azaleas bloom in the open air. The grape vine bids fair to lead to wine-making in both ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... followed, will produce but a scanty entertainment for the imagination: everything is to be done with which it is natural for the mind to be pleased, whether it proceeds from simplicity or variety, uniformity or irregularity: whether the scenes are familiar or exotic; rude and wild, or enriched and cultivated; for it is natural for the mind to be pleased with all these in their turn. In short, whatever pleases has in it what is analogous to the mind, and is therefore, in the highest and best sense of the ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... gathered together the most complete collection of his works, which lend themselves to endless inspection, you can, in a sense, reconstruct for yourself an idea of the works of Edgar Saltus. One finds therein the same unicorns, the same fabulous monsters, the same virgins on the rocks, the same exotic and undreamed of flora and fauna, the same mystic paganism, the same exquisitely jewelled workmanship. One can find further analogies in the Aubrey Beardsley of "Under the Hill," in the elaborate stylized irony of Max Beerbohm. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... light she saw her image in the glass and paused, eyeing it. So far her appearance had had no value for her save as a stage asset. Now she looked at herself with a new, critical interest. Behind the footlights she was another person, blossomed into an exotic brilliance, took on fire and beauty with the music and excitement. Might not a man seeing her there be disappointed when he met her as she really was? She studied her face intently, viewing it at different angles, judging it by the standards of her world. By these she found ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... orange-colored blossoms! They look like a rare exotic, with their huge clusters and flaunting ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... something of the brown and ruddy complexion of his schoolfellows. The English system did not commend itself to Scotland in these days. There was no little Eton at Fettes; nor do I think, if there had been, that a genteel exotic of that class would have tempted either my wife or me. The lad was doubly precious to us, being the only one left us of many; and he was fragile in body, we believed, and deeply sensitive in mind. To keep him at home, and yet to send him to school,—to ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... wrote that immortal idyllic romance, Paul and Virginia; subsequently he became a gracious and amiable pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau, being smitten with the sentiment of nature in his Harmonies of Nature; finally he attained a great importance in literary history as the creator of exotic literature through the descriptions he wrote of many lands: Asia, African isles traversed and studied by him, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... from her; her happiness and her respect for you would suffer from this misplaced confidence. Allow her to retain that flower of purity, which should distinguish her, in your eyes, from every other woman." We should think so, truly, under this canon. Such a man must esteem purity an exotic that could only be preserved by the greatest care. Of the degree of mental intimacy possible, in such a marriage, let every one judge ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the rest of Europe, and especially in the central and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes local and almost parochial touches—sometimes unimportant heroes, not seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent—the generic character ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the precepts of the higher life. Next to Miss Lee, Maggie was one of the most popular girls in the college. Annabel Lee had the kindest of hearts, as well as the most fascinating of ways. She was an extraordinary girl; there was a great deal of the exotic about her; in many ways she was old for her years. No one ever thought or spoke of her as a prig, but all her influence was brought to bear in the right direction. The girl who could do or think meanly avoided ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... by the light of a bobbing lantern. We entered a crowded, noisy kitchen, filled with rushing waiters and shouting cooks bending over charcoal fires. In contrast to the freezing wind outside the air was deliciously warm, redolent with the fumes of charcoal and the aroma of savory exotic food. Our table was waiting for us in a private dining-room; the whole place consists of private dining-rooms, separated by good thick stone walls, so that one can't hear the plots and intrigues being hatched next door, though ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... and freezing cold. And it appears sometimes as difficult to maintain the strength and steadfastness of religious principle and feeling when we go forth from the church to the world, as it would be to preserve an exotic alive in the open air in winter, or to keep the lamp that burns steadily within doors from being blown out if you take it ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... shooting excursions. Bread stuffs, he would have to admit, were scarce in that cornless land: but hard exercise and fresh air sharpen the appetite and strengthen the digestion; and a keen woodsman will not heed bannocks when he can get beef, varied by such an exotic viand as kangaroo venison, and by such delicate and fantastical volatiles as harlequin pigeons and rose-breasted cockatoos. Nay, so easy is it to fight battles in one's back parlour, and to endure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... she sat in the first seat she came to. As she waited, the gloom was slowly dissipated, to reveal the familiar outlines of the church. At the same time, her nostrils were assailed by the pervading and exotic ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... the harbor, with a beautiful view of the sea, the Villa Monte-Cristo lay. It was like all dwellings of the count, rich and elegantly furnished, and a splendid terrace with exotic plants could readily induce the inhabitants to believe they were really in a tropical region. Parrots of many colors swung on the branches of tamarind-trees—the sycamore rustled, and leafy bananas and beautiful palm-trees reflected their branches in ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... ornamental support, which had been pushed to one side by being used as a horse-post. What once was a large garden was now all grown over with weeds, through which, here and there, some solitary exotic reared its forsaken head. What had been a conservatory had now no window-shades, and on the mouldering shelves stood some dry, forsaken flower-pots, with sticks in them, whose dried leaves showed they ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... spondyle, bright-coloured, bristling with spines, a rare specimen in the European museums—(I estimated its value at not less than L1000); a common hammer-fish of the seas of New Holland, which is only procured with difficulty; exotic buccardia of Senegal; fragile white bivalve shells, which a breath might shatter like a soap-bubble; several varieties of the aspirgillum of Java, a kind of calcareous tube, edged with leafy folds, and much debated by amateurs; a whole ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... but it was only in Perpendicular that we attained a really free and beautiful native style in our domestic buildings and what one might call our domestic churches. Strassburg Cathedral is thoroughly German and acceptable as such, but Cologne Cathedral is an exotic, and all the energy and the money of Germany through a thousand years can never make it anything but cold, mechanical, and artificial. When I was in Burgundy I felt that the Burgundians had a genius for Romanesque, and that ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Europe they must have seemed steps in fairyland. If such an one could but have followed our two friends into the wide-verandahed house, sat down with them in the cool trellised room, where the wine shone on the lamp-lighted tablecloth; tasted of their exotic food—the raw fish, the breadfruit, the cooked bananas, the roast pig served with the inimitable miti, and that king of delicacies, palm-tree salad; seen and heard by fits and starts, now peering round the corner of the door, now railing within against invisible ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... current issues: extirpation of native bird population by the rapid proliferation of the brown tree snake, an exotic species ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... ready to imitate the negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men of our time, to wear my cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking in disorder, which seems to express a kind of haughty disdain of these exotic ornaments, and a contempt of the artificial; but I find this negligence of much better use in the form of speaking. All affectation, particularly in the French gaiety and freedom, is ungraceful in a courtier, and in a monarchy every gentleman ought to be fashioned ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to flaunt the beauty that should be the appanage of the woman of seven and twenty. She should be modestly well-favoured, as becomes her childish stage of development. She looked incongruous among my sober books, and I regarded her with some resentment. I dislike the exotic. I prefer geraniums to orchids. I have a row of pots of the former on my balcony, and the united efforts of Stenson, Antoinette, and myself have not yet succeeded in making them bloom; but I love the unassuming velvety leaves. Carlotta is a flaring ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... to Dr. Hooker for having sent me many plants from Kew; and to Mr. Veitch, of the Royal Exotic Nursery, for having generously given me a collection of fine specimens of climbing plants. Professor Asa Gray, Prof. Oliver, and Dr. Hooker have afforded me, as on many previous occasions, much ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... front of the house was varied by three circular garden beds, one of red tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and the third of some white, waxen-looking blossoms that the visitors did not know and presumed to be exotic. A heavy, hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener was hanging up a heavy coil of garden hose. The corners of the expiring sunset which seemed to cling about the corners of the house gave glimpses here and there of the colours of remoter flowerbeds; and in a treeless space on one ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... times. Then he would go with Fan to explore Whiteley's, which seemed to require a great deal of exploring; and from these delightful rambles they would return laden with treasures—choice bon-bons, exotic flowers and hot- house grapes at five or six shillings a pound; quaint Japanese knick- knacks; books and pictures, and photographs of celebrated men—great beetle-browed philosophers, and men of blood and thunder; also of women ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardor of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of the road to Effingham, is a large, grey, castellated building; its entrances might be fortifications. The park holds some superb beeches. But the grey coldness of Horsley Towers is a little exotic among these stretches of southern English parkland. Good Jacobean or Georgian red-brick much better suits oaks and beeches than the chateau-like ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... at the best of times, and what we all want is to have you with us again for a little while. I am sure you must have had a surfeit of the simple life by this time, so come to us and be luxurious and exotic in London for a ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... yet that she was not always on a footing with them; but they will not do so long. She will be their leader, for she was born to rule. Yes; and she queens it most proudly among them. It were a pity to lose sight of her stately, graceful dignity. I regard her very much as I would some beautiful exotic, and her opinion of me affects me about as much as if she were the flower, and not the mortal. And yet I can never see her without wishing that the influence she exerts might be turned into a better channel. She has ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... serpent are found, there does not appear to be any species of cult unless we include the Warramunga cult of the mythical Wollunqua totem animal, whom they seek to placate by rites. In Africa the chief centre of serpent worship was Dahomey; but the cult of the python seems to have been of exotic origin, dating back to the first quarter of the 17th century. By the conquest of Whydah the Dahomeyans were brought in contact with a people of serpent worshippers, and ended by adopting from them the cult which they at first despised. At Whydah, the chief centre, there is a serpent temple, tenanted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... Krech had considerable grounds for her romantic suspicions. Twice during the ten days aforementioned Creighton was obliged to go to New York and spend half a day on business that would not be denied, and each time he returned bearing books and candy and a vast quantity of assorted and exotic fruits for which Miss Ocky had expressed a casual longing and which the marts of Hambleton could not provide. On the first occasion he pretended they were for Lucy Varr, still confined to her room, but on the ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... singing in parts was indigenous to the parts beyond the Humber, and on the borders of Yorkshire. Threeman singing may still be heard (not as an exotic), in Wales and the West of England. This last is referred to in the above passage, 'There's scarce a maid westward but she sings it'—viz., the ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... to care for his exotic plants he built adjoining the upper garden a considerable conservatory or hothouse. In this he placed many of the plants sent to him as presents and also purchased many others from the collection of the celebrated ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... a consolidation of two rival papers, appeared a brief notice chronicling the death of an unidentified miner, whose assassin, also nameless, had escaped. Ensenada Rose, described as an exotic female of dubious antecedents and still more suspicious motives, had left the Eldorado on the morning after the shooting "for parts unknown." She was believed to hold some "key to the tragic mystery which it was not her purpose ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... played their parts neither better nor worse than amateur actors in general; and the best that could be said of them was, that they seemed more than half ashamed of their exotic dresses, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... natives tip with flame the quiet chronicles of the sisters left at home; and gorgeous peacock fans, rosy, enamelled shells, strings of sandalwood beads, riotous, bloomy embroideries and supple folds of exotic muslin weave their scents and suggestions through the sober-coloured stuff of everyday. Indeed, New England as I have known her, both as a child in her chief and representative city, and as a man in her farthest, least-spoiled hamlets has always seemed to me far more complicated ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... plants of this extensive family in the intratropical parts of Terra Australis especially when aided by some individuals of almost wholly exotic tribes, that form a prominent feature in the Flora of other equinoctial countries, tend, in some measure, to diminish the peculiar character of the vegetation of Terra Australis on those shores, and thus it is a considerable ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... Dr. Opimian. Allowing full weight to the two last-named ingredients, they are not more than a counterpoise to Competitive Examination, which is also a recent exotic belonging to education. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... popular to pose as a "friend of humanity," or a "friend of the working classes." The character, however, is quite exotic in the United States. It is borrowed from England, where some men, otherwise of small account, have assumed it with great success and advantage. Anything which has a charitable sound and a kind-hearted tone generally passes without investigation, because ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. I wonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not? The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful elegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of grace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of head and neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I made while I ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... consecrated his existence. The manner in which the hunters of heretics performed their office has been exemplified by slightly sketching the career of a single one of the sub-inquisitors, Peter Titelmann. The monarch and his minister scarcely needed, therefore, to transplant the peninsular exotic. Why should they do so? Philip, who did not often say a great deal in a few words, once expressed the whole truth of the matter in a single sentence: "Wherefore introduce the Spanish inquisition?" said he; ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... lurked in the corridor; did he seek refuge in the gloom of the library, she arose to confront him from its dimmest nook; did he plan a masterly escape by a rear stairway, she burst upon him from the ambush of some exotic shrub to demand which way he had thought of going. He had never thought of a way that did not prove to have been her own. The creature was a leech! If she had only talked, he believed that he could ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Connected also with this, and again in contrast with Wordsworth, is the limited quantity of his poetical performance, as he himself [85] regrets so eloquently in the lines addressed to Wordsworth after his recitation of The Prelude. It is like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in the somewhat un-english air of Coleridge's own south-western birthplace, but never ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... been often sought for in their remains. The group,—that which immediately preceded the animals of our own times, and included not a few of the indigenous species which still inhabit our country,—was chiefly remarkable for containing many genera, all of whose existing species are exotic. It had its great elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyaena, its tiger, and its monkey; and much ingenious calculation has been employed by writers such as Granville Penn, in attempting to show how ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... mathematical shadows; here and there rose a feathery elm or a maple of wide-branched beauty. To the right, a shallow fall of terraces led to the Italian garden, Mrs. Dinsmore's chief pride, now a glory of matched and patterned color and a dazzle of spray from marble basins. Beyond all the careful, exotic beauty of the place, the wide valley dipped away, alternate meadow and grove, until it met the silvery shiver of willows marking the course of the river. Beyond that again, the hills, solemn in unbroken green, rose ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... faults of his friend, it is suicidal to draw on his friend's love to neutralize his own faults. Love should be cumulative, since it cannot be stationary. If it does not increase, it decreases. Love, like confidence, is a plant of slow growth, and of most exotic fragility. It must be constantly and tenderly cherished. Every noxious and foreign element must be carefully removed from it. All sunshine, and sweet airs, and morning dews, and evening showers must breathe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... people's appreciation of the needs, the capacities, and the holier aspirations of the better part of humanity. Hence the revival of art has a deep significance; it is something more than a forced, an exotic, and hence ephemeral growth; it is the manifestation of the awakening of the people to the aesthetic sentiment; it is the actual result of the intellectual and moral needs of society; it is in itself the striving of a great people for the beautiful and true. And as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... river-breeze, intensified her desire for escape from conventional limitations. Oh! to find herself under totally new conditions! The heavy fragrance of magnolia and gardenia blossoms seemed freighted with exotic suggestion. The tropical odours blended with the perfume of autumn roses, which made a trellis over her head and overran the balustrades. The subtle mingling of perfumes that float in the clear air of an Australian ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... it may seem to some of us that such efforts are easily overdone; the native beauty of an English garden or woodland has infinitely more appeal, more freshness, more loveliness, than any grandeurs of the exotic. The glories of Kew Gardens have their charm, their utility, their educational value; but tropical growths are really as much out of place in an English landscape as a Moorish palace or a Buddhist temple would be. All who know anything of landscape gardening know that it has ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... decay, First turn plain rash, then vanish quite away. This thing has travelled, speaks each language too, And know what's fit for very state to do; Of whose best phrase and courtly accent joined, He forms one tongue, exotic and refined, Talkers I've learned to bear; Motteux I knew, Henley himself I've heard, and Budgel too. The doctor's wormwood style, the hash of tongues A pedant makes, the storm of Gonson's lungs, The whole artillery of the terms of war, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... language is an exotic, a far-fetched, costly, sickly imitation of that which elsewhere may be found in healthful and spontaneous perfection. The soils on which this rarity flourishes are in general as ill-suited to the production of vigorous ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... all the forms of French existence, and her character was so deeply impressed by it that when she returned to her Canadian home, a few months before our introduction to her, she was looked upon very much in the light of an exotic. Yet was the heart of Zulma really unspoiled. Her instincts and principles were true. She by no means regarded herself as out of place in her native country, but, on the contrary, felt that she had a mission to fill in it, and, having had more than one opportunity ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... somewhere as an heirloom of the modern safety-vault. By that time she was seventy years old or more, and thoroughly weary of being beaten about a stormy world. To the boy she seemed singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her Sevres china; an object of deference to every one, and of great affection to her son Charles; but hardly more Bostonian than she had been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the shadow of the Tower ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... on the other hand, shows a complete mastery of form. He was a close student of Horace; he tried successfully the most exacting of exotic verse-forms, and enjoyed the distinction of having written the only English example of the difficult Chant-Royal. Graceful vers de societe and bits of witty epigram flowed from him without effort. But it was not to this often dangerous facility that Bunner owed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... morning lessons, the pupils were to be dismissed to a holiday. As Fanny now came last, with the hopeless spelling-book, she stopped suddenly short, and her eyes rested with avidity upon a large bouquet of exotic flowers, with which the good lady had enlivened the centre of the parted kerchief, whose yellow gauze modestly veiled that tender section of female beauty which poets have likened to hills of snow—a chilling simile! It was then autumn; and field, and even garden ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a conversation with him he would carry away enough amusement to last him till evening. He also found heaps of amusement in looking at the monkeys, and could conceive no greater luxury for a rich man than to own these animals as one owns cats and dogs. This kind of taste for the exotic he had in his blood, as people have a taste for the chase, or for medicine, or for the priesthood. He could not help returning to the quay every time the gates of the barracks opened, drawn toward it ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... dunghill of our vices Raise human pine-apples and spices. Of all the children of John Bull 120 With empty heads and bellies full, Who ramble East, West, North and South, With leaky purse and open mouth, In search of varieties exotic The usefullest and most patriotic, 125 And merriest, too, believe me, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... vegetable, vegetable kingdom; flora, verdure. plant; tree, shrub, bush; creeper; herb, herbage; grass. annual; perennial, biennial, triennial; exotic. timber, forest; wood, woodlands; timberland; hurst[obs3], frith[obs3], holt, weald[obs3], park, chase, greenwood, brake, grove, copse, coppice, bocage[obs3], tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus. Not only all common Speech, but Science, Poetry itself is no other, if thou consider it, than a right Naming. Adam's first task was giving names to natural Appearances: what is ours still but a continuation of the same; be the Appearances exotic-vegetable, organic, mechanic, stars or starry movements (as in Science); or (as in Poetry) passions, virtues, calamities, God-attributes, Gods?—In a very plain sense the Proverb says, Call one a thief, and he will steal; in an almost similar sense ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... that justify the introduction of a few exotic plants, provided they be confined almost to the doors of the house, we may add, that a transition should be contrived, without abruptness, from these foreigners to the rest of the shrubs, which ought to be of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... cantankerous servant. I could get no other. Dear "Mother Monroe," as wise as she was good, and as tender as she was strong, who had nursed two generations of mothers in our village, was engaged at that time, and I was compelled to take an exotic. I had often watched "Mother Monroe" with admiration, as she turned and twisted my sister's baby. It lay as peacefully in her hands as if they were lined with eider down. She bathed and dressed it by easy stages, turning ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... every style, upon every available bracket and shelf and corner where a cup or a plate can be made to stand. Four large windows on one side open on to the lawn; two, at right angles to them, lead into a large conservatory, where there is, even at this dead season of the year, a blaze of exotic blossoms that fill the room with ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... of Africa served to strengthen his conviction that cancer is a product of civilization, 'like apoplexy and scores of other exotic ailments,' Dr. Senn said. He could not find or hear of a case of cancer among the 'Hamites,' as he termed them. And from the fact that he found the disease, to be an unknown one to the Esquimaux of Greenland, he is assured that climate has nothing whatever to do with it. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... is an exotic of exotics, and the daintiest of fine ladies bears it in her jewelled fingers to the opera, and there imbues it with the languid ecstasy of an Italian melody. The aroma, floating round those creamy buds, vibrates to the impassioned agony of artistic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... two baskets at his feet. One was filled with carefully chosen fruits, and the other with the exotic flowers of the island. Hastily changing himself into a green parakeet, Chris alighted on the rail of the Vulture just as Osterbridge Hawsey reached the top of the ladder. Determined to make a good impression and perhaps catch Osterbridge's fancy, Chris, in his ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... universities—doctors of law, doctors of medicine, embryo doctors still in the making—each swinging a light cane. Their black hats and cutaway coats, in the fashion of a temperate clime, would have looked exotic were it not for the serene dignity with which they were worn. With them, merchants lazed along, making a deal as they walked. Clerks, under their masters' ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... wanted European foods rather than exotic Indian crops. The foods also had to be comparatively nonperishable and easily transported. Grains, particularly wheat, and processed meat (hams, salt pork, and such) especially met European preferences. Commercial production of these commodities compelled American ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... green; uneven, hacked and ragged; shorn of its emerald beauty. A high fog filtered the late afternoon light to show Mr Barelli's task accomplished and the curious watchers gone. It was no smoothly clipped carpet, yet it was no longer a freakish, exotic thing. Rather forlorn ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... end of a day he arrived in a way-side eddy and moored his poplar-bottom craft against a steep bank and the last twilight had faded from his vision, he would eat some simple thing for supper, and then, by lamp-light, try to read his exotic life into the Bible which accompanied him on his travels. He knew the Book by heart, almost; he knew all the rivers told about in it; he knew the storms of the various biblical seas; he knew the Jordan, in imagination, and the Nile, ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... street of open markets where they examined the contents of barrows—flowers, cheap lace, stockings, furs, trays of battered coins and bits of china, brass and copper vessels—now and then peering into a provocative alley-way, held by the spell of the exotic. Hatless women with smooth shining heads bustled past them, children in black pinafores played noisily in the gutters, ouvriers in dust-coloured corduroys bound about the waist with red sashes lurched along, often with a clatter of black varnished sabots. In a doorway one of these fellows, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... native soil. He did some brilliant and engaging work of foreign setting and motive. "The Island Nights' Entertainments" is as good in its way as the earlier "New Arabian Nights"—far superior to it, indeed, for finesse and the deft command of exotic material. Judged as art, "The Bottle Imp" and "The Beach of Falesa" are among the triumphs of ethnic interpretation, let alone their more external charms of story. And another masterpiece of foreign setting, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... clematis. Pinks, lilies, columbines made the garden patches gay, and, as though so many flowers were not enough, the windows, too, shone with geraniums and the scarlet tassels of great cactus, that lifted their exotic, thorny bodies behind the window panes. Not a wall but flaunted red valerian and snapdragon. Indeed Bridetown was decked ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... significance has the tropical radiance of the lotus flower, the sacred symbol of Buddhism, for the Mongolian lama in the cold and arid borders of Gobi or the wind-swept highlands of sterile Tibet? And yet these exotic ideas live on, even if they no longer bloom in the uncongenial soil. But to explain them in terms of their present environment would be ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Spanish, yet the other elements that entered into her mercurial nature heightened and vivified her Castilian traits. Her mother was a Spaniard—partly Moorish, however. Her father was an Irishman. There you have it—the dreamy romance of Spain, the exotic touch of the Orient, and the daring, unreasoning vivacity of ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... solicitor naturally suggested problems. Mr. Palford found his charge baffling because, according to ordinary rules, a young man so rudimentary should have presented no problems not perfectly easy to explain. It was herein that he was exotic. Mr. Palford, who was not given to subtle analysis of differences in character and temperament, argued privately that an English youth who had been brought up in the streets would have been one of two or three things. He would have been secretly terrified and resentful, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... species of deer in Ceylon, the spotted deer is alone seen upon the plains. No climate can be too hot for his exotic constitution, and he is never found at a higher elevation than three thousand feet. In the low country, when the midday sun has driven every other beast to the shelter of the densest jungles, the sultan ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... beyond their genius, out and out VIRTUOSI, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory; as men, Tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble TEMPO or of a LENTO in life and action—think of Balzac, for instance,—unrestrained workers, almost destroying ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... shop windows. Tokens of unbridled luxury and glaring evidences of wanton waste were flaunted daily and hourly in the faces of the humbled men who had saved the nation and wanted the nation to realize the fact. Lucullan banquets, opulent lunches, all-night dances, high revels of an exotic character testified to the peculiar psychic temper as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice," these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so soon forgotten?" For one ghastly ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... dominated by two men of genius. In prose, MAUPASSANT carried on the work of Flaubert with a sharper manner and more vivid style, though with a narrower range. He abandoned the exotic and the historical visions of his predecessor, and devoted himself entirely, in his brilliant novels and yet more brilliant short stories, to an almost fiendishly realistic treatment of modern life. A precisely contrary ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... her age and caste in France, starving for the life she might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration —which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin of obviousness. For he was well aware that her response was impersonal; it was not his but any admiration ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... faintly medicinal, but it filled her brain with exotic visions. She shut her eyes. Yes, that was a voice of Africa too. Oh! how far away she was from her old life and hollow days. The magic carpet had been spread indeed, and she had been wafted into a strange land where she ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... you know where I can find some picturesque rites? Mystical dances, human sacrifice? I've got to work up some glamor and exotic lore." ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... domestication," and the passing away of the old by its absorption into the new. Our religion, like our language, is a garden not only for indigenous vegetation, but also for acclimatisation, in which we improve under cultivation exotic plants whose roots are drawn from every soil on the earth. And, as Paul preached in Athens the God whom the Greeks worshipped in ignorance, so our missionaries carry back to less enlightened peoples the fruit of that life-giving tree whose germs exist among themselves, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... they have but little root in the country, and but little power. They are like a religion which has still some temples left standing, though men have ceased to believe in it. But amidst these half-obliterated notions of exotic honor, some new opinions have sprung up, which constitute what may be termed in our days American honor. I have shown how the Americans are constantly driven to engage in commerce and industry. Their origin, their social condition, their political ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... that Toru lacked to perfect her as an English poet, and of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said. When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... interstices of so great a department, for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of something even more recondite and exotic—an intelligent corpse-washer, for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it was only one more afternoon wasted—one out ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... to brighter worlds. This word transfigures everything, and brings fresh green shoots even from the dry wood of souls defrauded of love and hope. Life is a thorny rose-bush, and Art its flower. Here Mirth is melancholy—Joy is sorrowful and Liberty is dead. Here Art withers and—like an exotic—is prevented perishing outright only by artificial culture. But there is a land, I know it well, for it is my home—where Art buds and blossoms and throws its shade over all the highways. Favorite of Antonio, knight of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Congress Hall with its ball-room, and the grounds of the Grand Union, are illuminated by colored lights, presenting a fairy-like scene of bewildering beauty. Upon these occasions a large proportion of the population, both exotic and native, come forth as ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... large placards, in big red letters, invited all foreigners who were true friends of liberty to enter the volunteer corps, which was called into existence for defence against the tyrants. It was enough to show some exotic trait of dress or appearance to be literally embraced on the streets by ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... unusual for Manville Fenn to set a novel in a boys' boarding school, since I had become used to exotic settings in Malaysia, or South America, for his tension-filled novels. Here he certainly does not disappoint if it's tension and suspense you are expecting of him. The last few chapters, in particular, are ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... nineteenth century the Handelian type of opera was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he happens to be someone as famous as Julius Caesar, the ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... no establishments in town, rarely venture up, for fear of the footpads on the heath, and the insolence of the black-guard Cockneys. Their wives are staid dames, learned at the brew-tub and in the buttery,—but not speaking French, nor wearing hoops or patches. A great many of the older exotic plants have become domesticated; and the goodwife has a flaming parterre at her door,—but not valued one half so much as her bed of marjoram and thyme. She may read King James's Bible, or, if a Non-Conformist, Baxter's "Saint's Rest"; while the husband regales himself with a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... joy; the "whole sunrise, not to be suppressed" is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it? With God all service ranks the same, and she shall serve Him all this long day by ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... craft of comedy has it, "led up" to; the probable course to such a goal, the goal of so conscious a predicament, would have in short to be finely calculated. Where has he come from and why has he come, what is he doing (as we Anglo-Saxons, and we only, say, in our foredoomed clutch of exotic aids to expression) in that galere? To answer these questions plausibly, to answer them as under cross-examination in the witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in other words satisfactorily to account for Strether and for ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... morning. The misery of the previous week was forgotten in the rapture of a moment. The sky was cloudless and the contours of the lovely island were bathed in opaline light. What joy the first sight, smell, and taste of the tropical fruits brought. Cold storage, by bringing all descriptions of exotic fruit to Europe, has robbed travel towards the tropics of one of ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully |
