"Homeliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... do all they can to attract them, love them as the apples of their eyes, discover them to be fools, hold them to be their equals, deceive them, and speedily despise them. It is otherwise with the ugly man, who, in consequence of his homeliness, must work his wits and take pains with himself, and become as pleasing as he is capable of being, till women forget his ape's face, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... by politeness and firmness, that the Chinese take me at my own valuation. And they invariably did so. They always gave way to me. They recognised that I must be a traveller of importance, despite the smallness of my retinue and the homeliness of my attire; and they acknowledged my superiority. Had I been content with a humbler place, it would quickly have been reported along the road, and, little by little, my complacence would have been tested. I am perfectly sure that, by never verging from my ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... rather odd-looking persons entering it, young-old persons they seemed, who might own to any age or any occupation. Their dress, especially that of the younger, amused us by its queer mixture of fashionableness and homeliness, such as grey ribbed stockings and shining paste shoe-buckles, rusty velvet small-clothes and a coatee of blue cloth. But the wearer carried off this anomalous costume with an easy, condescending air, full ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... imagination; rather doing things worthy to be written, than writing things fit to be done. What that before time was, I think scarcely Sphynx can tell; since no memory is so ancient that gives not the precedence to poetry. And certain it is, that, in our plainest homeliness, yet never was the Albion nation without poetry. Marry, this argument, though it be levelled against poetry, yet it is indeed a chain-shot against all learning or bookishness, as they commonly term it. Of such mind were certain Goths, of whom it is written, that ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly his own, but it is not always felicitous. There are times when it has the true epic touch—or at least as much of it as is possible in an age of detail and elaboration; there are times when it has a touch of the pathetic—when in homeliness of phrase and triviality of rhythm it is hardly to be surpassed; and there are times, as in The Snake Charmer when, as in certain pages in the work of Richard Wagner, it is so studiously laboured and so heavily charged with ornament and colour as to be ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... papers adroitly and had kept them in their places so that he never felt himself obliged to search for any one of them. With many little contrivances she had given his bed-sitting-room a look of comfort and established homeliness, and he had even begun to ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... work—its genuine nationality of tone and sentiment, its refined and poetic homeliness, and its strokes of quiet humour. The author may be described as a refined or feminine Galt. In the pathetic element we are not unfrequently reminded of Wilson's 'Lights ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... heretofore, but wondered whether they could not be done better and more profitably. Joyfully the old mistress revealed her secrets, but often said, "I think you do it better; I must try that too." The comfortable homeliness of the party lured in host and hostess, sensible people, and both helped to advise and discuss what was best, and showed their pleasure in much that they heard. And the more they heard the more desire to learn did Uli and Freneli ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... while at least his existence is transformed. All those front doors aligned in their innumerable sequence, which in daylight or darkness he passes when he wanders alone, are now no longer barred against him; they open at the touch of his fancy, and he sees within the light of homeliness, where father, mother, and child weave round warm firesides their close conspiracies of affection. At last he knows what is passing behind those bars; like an old family friend he takes his place by the fire and receives as of right the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... to please her patron, who appeared so interested and so busy about it. And he, what were his sensations as he watched through the long, weary hours till evening? He examined the room round and round in which he was to see her; with all its strangeness and homeliness it seemed to him to be an abode for angels. He thought over and over what he had better do; whether he should take her by surprise, or whether he should prepare her for meeting him. At last the second course seemed the preferable one. He sat down and wrote a letter, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Showerman's country chronicles are now well known to American readers, and this is quite the best of them. These sketches rank with those of Hamlin Garland as a permanent and delightful record of a pioneer life that has passed away for ever. Their deliberate homeliness and consistent reflection of a small boy's attitude toward life have ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... about Barnes a false air of homeliness; but in a few moments it became apparent that her life had been spent amid muslins, confidences, and illicit conversations. Now, with motherly care she removed a tulle skirt from the table, and Violet, with quick, nervous glances, examined the room. In the middle of the floor stood the large work-table, ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... in Victoria, and the astonishing homeliness of it gives us both a warm feeling of delight. It seems as if we really had got almost in touch with our own country again. As we wandered through the town to-day we saw in the outskirts red-brick creeper-covered ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... of painting, though destructive of all beauty, is, however, favourable to natural homeliness and deformity. It accustoms the eyes of the other sex, and in time reconciles them to frightfull objects; it disables them from perceiving any distinction of features between woman and woman; and, by reducing all faces to a level, gives every female an equal chance ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... in the light of the meadow of Pisa; and yet this very smallness, only smallness when we consider the great buildings set there so precisely, gives it an element of beauty lacking in the great Piazza of Rome and in Pisa too—a certain delicate colour and shadow and a sense of nearness, of homeliness almost; for the shadow of the dome falls right across the city itself every morning and evening. And indeed the Piazza del Duomo of Florence is still the centre of the life of the city, and though to some this may be matter for regret, I have found in just that a sort of consolation ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... mentality. She was brought up to believe in a jealous God, whose Providence when you felt too happy on earth just landed you in some unexpected disaster to fit you for the Kingdom of Heaven—a Kingdom which all healthy human beings shrink from entering with the terror of the unknown and a certain homeliness of disposition which is humbly content with this cosy planet ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... write like Hazlitt." To write a style that is easy yet incisive, lively and at the same time substantial, buoyant without being frothy, glittering but with no tinsel frippery, a style combining the virtues of homeliness and picturesqueness, has been given to few mortals. Writing in a generation in which the standards of prose were conspicuously unsettled, when the most ambitious writers were seeking an escape from the frozen patterns of the eighteenth century in a restoration ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... wreath of smoke that floated lazily out of the galley funnel and away over the lee cat-head to the melody of a rollicking sea-ditty chanted by the cook, as he busied himself with the preparation of breakfast, imparted that sense of homeliness and light-hearted happiness which seemed to be all that was required ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... two afterwards Mr. Grey entered. The door opening on to the quadrangle, where the trees, undeterred by east wind, were just bursting into leaf, was shut; and the little assembly knelt, while Mr. Grey's voice with its broad intonation, in which a strong native homeliness lingered under the gentleness of accent, recited the collect 'Lord of all power and might,' a silent pause following the last words. Then the audience settled itself, and Mr. Grey, standing by a small deal table with the gaslight behind him, began ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mountains of the Severn and the Wye are in close proximity to each other. That of the Rheidol stands somewhat apart front both, as if, proud of its own beauty, it disdained the other two for their homeliness. All three are contained within the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong conviction that the time had come when the Labour party must have separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to this frank renunciation of whatever ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... although he would not retreat. When he saw Maria again after the exercises of the day were closed, and he encountered her as she was leaving the academy, she looked distinctly homely to him, and yet such was the honor of the man that he did not in the least realize that the homeliness was an exterior thing. It seemed to him that he saw her encompassed with the stiffness of her New England antecedents, as with an armor, and that he got a new and unlovely view of her character. On the ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of "taffy" was accompanied by a woodcut portrait of Miss H—s which made her resemble a half-naked Indian squaw suffering with an acute attack of mulligrubs, superinduced by an overfeed of baked dog. If Miss H—s' face does not hurt her for very homeliness, any male jury in the country would award her damages against the News in the sum of a million dollars, and help her collect it with ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... flannels, she had asked him with a telling emphasis what that meant to him? With the sweetest smile in the world, he had leaned forward, sipped his tea, gazed thoughtfully in the fire, and answered, with a polite apology for the homeliness of the illustration, that it reminded him most strongly of a tack fixed in the seat of a chair, with the attendant circumstances! After a convulsive effort to include in one terrible sentence all the scorn and regret and pity that she felt, Miss Gould had decided that silence was best, and sat back ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... and his generous spirit warms his diction—not always chaste—into a fluent eloquence. His composition overflows with figurative expressions, yet the rude, ungainly form on which they are moulded deprive them of all claim to elegance or chastity; but while the homeliness of his diction fails to impress us with an idea of his versatility as a writer, his chatty anecdotal style rivets and keeps the mind amused, so that we rise from the little book with the consciousness ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... more sophisticated eyes than Eleanor's the place seemed to be a realized ideal of charm and homeliness. It was one of the older fashioned duplex apartments designed in a more aristocratic decade for a more fastidious generation, yet sufficiently adapted to the modern insistence on technical convenience. Peter owed ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... lunch at the inn, into the little church which stood embowered among blossoming trees. The old vicar left his garden and offered to show them its beauties, and Jean fell in love with the simplicity and the feeling of homeliness ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... civilisation. An old acquaintance of my former voyage, pretty Sister Winifred, showed us around the garden, with its smooth green lawns, bright flower-beds, and white statue of Our Lady in a shrine of pine boughs. All the surroundings wore an air of peace and homeliness suggestive of some quiet country village in far-away France, and I could have lingered here for hours had not large and bloodthirsty mosquitoes swarmed from the woods around and driven me reluctantly back to ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... of the sensation he made among his old friends and neighbours; he liked to feel his own importance. He came pretty frequently at first; he was tolerant of Susan's homeliness and sisterly advice, he took kindly to Prissy, and brought her a fine coral necklace to wear on her fat dimpled neck; but after a year or two ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... illustrious lineage and impressive manner." Then he added: "I hope she isn't too homely, Bess—not a 'clock-stopper,' as the saying is. You don't want people's appetites taken away when you've worked for hours on a menu calculated to tickle the palates of your guests. Would her homeliness—ah—efface itself, for instance, in the presence of a culinary creation, or is it likely to overshadow everything ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... MELNOTTE'S cottage; flowers placed here and there; a guitar on an oaken table, with a portfolio, etc.; a picture on an easel, covered by a curtain; fencing foils crossed over the mantelpiece; an attempt at refinement in site of the homeliness of the furniture, etc.; a staircase to the right conducts to the ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the scene of his happy, unsuspecting girls; of the pale Little Scout—whose simple touch would then have instantly revived and soothed him, whose tender love was his comfort, his sanctuary from pursuing evils; the scene of his old home, far cosier, far more beloved, far more cheerful for all its homeliness, for all its poverty, than the more pretentious one of Emanuel Griffin; the scene of lowly pleasures it had cherished; of the bitter trials it had assuaged; and, finally, of the bright, laughing group he had left there, ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... required a chain of her husband's faithful subjects in Homburg to encompass his consort. She accommodated herself wonderfully, though she was an elderly woman before she had ever been out of England, to the curious quaint mixture of State and homeliness in the little German town in which she was held in much respect and regard. The Landgravine was seventy years of age at the time of her death. After her widowhood she resided in Hanover, where her brother, King William, gave her a palace, and then at Frankfort, where she died. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... most mining villages of Scotland are an outrage on decency. In Lowwood there were no sanitary conveniences of any kind, and it was a difficult matter for the women folk to keep a tidy house under these circumstances. But it was wonderful, the homeliness and comfort found in those single apartment houses. It was home, and that made it tolerable. In such homes fine men and women were bred and reared, but the credit was due entirely to our womenfolk; for they had the fashioning of the spirit of the homes, and ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Gospel when preached by a saint whose countenance is honesty itself. The very drapery—il prudente costume e religioso—[31] was held to contribute to Michael Angelo's praise. The grave and kindly face, devout and holy,[32] together with a certain homeliness of attitude, give the St. Mark a character which would endear him to all. He would not inspire awe like the St. John or indifference like St. Peter. He is a very simple, lovable person whose rebuke would be gentle and whose counsel ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... by the smaller gentry of the interior is a kind of solemnity, so to speak. It involves so much labor and anxiety,—its spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of every-day family-life,—it is such a formidable matter to break in the raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table,—there is such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary operations,—so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line which divides ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... tiny tea-table was drawn up before a bright fire. As he sat down by her side there swept over him once more a desire, keen, passionate, to escape from the turmoil of the last few months. Here at least was rest. The very homeliness of the little scene awoke in him the domestic instinct—heritage of his middle-class ancestors. Cicely chattered gaily to him. She was very charming in her dark red dress, and she had so much to say about this ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... The Last Supper. (Opposite the former.) These two pictures have been painted for their places, the subjects being illustrative of the sacrifice of the mass. This latter is remarkable for its entire homeliness in the general treatment of the subject; the entertainment being represented like any large supper in a second-rate Italian inn, the figures being all comparatively uninteresting; but we are reminded that the subject is a sacred one, not only by the strong light shining from the head ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... him, and with a reverence showed him into the parlor; the same Judy Haskell as of yore, ornamented with a lace cap, a collar, deep cuffs, and an apron; through which her homeliness shone as defiantly as the face of a rough mountain through the fog. She had been instructed in the delicate art of receiving visitors with whom her intimacy had formerly been marked; but for Monsignor she made ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... to tender profuse apologies for its homeliness, on the plea that it is refreshing at times to lay aside ceremonial magnificence and unbend in rural simplicity, though it is not humanly possible to unbend oneself upon the thorny bosoms of chairs and couches severely upholstered with the prickling hairs ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... us to a different country and a different race. And he who has been called the father of German painting is thoroughly German, not only in his Saxon honesty, sedateness, and strength, but in the curious mixture of simplicity, subtlety, homeliness, and fantasticalness, which are still found side ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... suffered them?—who overdo the thing, have no repose, no instinct telling them when to ease up and let the place alone. I have always held the perpetual stirring up of dust a scientific error; left to itself, it is harmless, may even be regarded as a delicate domestic bloom, bestowing a touch of homeliness upon objects that without it gleam cold and unsympathetic. Let sleeping dogs lie. Why be continually waking up the stuff, filling the air with all manner of unhealthy germs? Nature in her infinite wisdom has ordained that upon ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... outspokenness, the downrightness, and, at the same time, the nervous delicacy of pausation, the rhythm all ripple and suspended fall, the dainty but, the daintier and forsooth, as though the pouting of a proud reserve curved the fine lip of him, and had to be atoned for by the homeliness of ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... seems so glad," said Mary Fuller, struck with a thrill of sympathy for the dog, rendered repulsive to that silly woman by his age, as she was by her homeliness. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... are to be absent to-day, and the attendance is slim. There are no ravishingly beautiful women present, and no positively ugly ones. The men are fair to middling. They will never be slain in cold blood for their beauty, nor shut up in jail for their homeliness. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... was swollen and her eyes red. She looked anything but lovely. Grant, however, was instantly so moved that he did not notice her homeliness. Also, he was one of those unobservant people who, having once formed an impression of a person, do not revise it except under compulsion; his last observation of Margaret had resulted in an impression of good looks, exceptional charm. He bent upon her a look in which understanding sympathy was heavily ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... "in my analysis and explication of the agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the crowning grace,—their homeliness. By homeliness I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt to be used, but the air that is given to a room by being really at home in it. Not the most skilful arrangement can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... themselves most agreeably ridiculous. Somewhat later appeared one more example of the same species of epic, "The Malmantile," by Lippi (1606-1664). This poem is considered a pure model of the dialect of the Florentines, which is so graceful and harmonious even in its homeliness. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... specimen of fourteenth-century English. He translated not for scholars or for nobles, but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those for whom he wrote—plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all its homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made men feel that they were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... note as indispensable to a national hymn (as we have it, for instance, in "Hail, Columbia," and "The Star-spangled Banner") the low key in which Bjoernson's songs are pitched will no doubt appear as a blemish. But it is their very homeliness in connection with the deep, full-throbbing emotion which beats in each forceful phrase—it is this, I fancy, which has made them the common property of the whole people, and thus in the truest sense national. I could never tell why my heart gives ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... are remarkable for a certain unconscious ease and homeliness. Even when, in the course of their progress, they grow more copious and mature, they hardly discover any consciousness of literary dignity. Of the Latin writings of the Anglo-Saxon period this could not be said. This navet ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... "how dispirited she seems—how melancholy! I ought to feel afraid of your meeting her, I suppose, Edward; but I do not—you have grown satisfied with your poor Rose. We shall be able to make her very comfortable, shall we not?"—and then she smiled at the homeliness of the phrase, and wondered what Helen would ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... was a ruler among men: this we know historically; this every man who came within his range felt at once. He was like Agamemnon, a native {anax andron}, and with all his homeliness of feature and deportment, and his perfect simplicity of expression, there was about him "that divinity that doth hedge a king." You felt a power, in him, and going from him, drawing you to him in spite of yourself. He was in this respect a solar man, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... under an impression that they were in church and had heard a sermon. Their work had been so idealized for them—it had been endowed with so much meaning—it seemed so different from an ordinary "raising"—that they lost, momentarily, the consciousness of their own roughness and the homeliness ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... both dreams is the same, but the second goes beyond the first in the grandeur of the emblems, and in the inclusion of the parents in the act of obeisance. Both sets of symbols were drawn from familiar sights. The homeliness of the 'sheaves' is in striking contrast with the grandeur of the 'sun, moon, and stars.' The interpretation of the first is ready to hand, because the sheaves were 'your sheaves' and 'my sheaf.' There was no similar key included ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... solitary, to shun melancholy. She asked how I came there? I answered, as I was walking with my lord of Hunsdon, as we passed by the chamber door, I heard such melody as ravished me, whereby I was drawn in ere I knew how, excusing my fault of homeliness as being brought up in the court of France, where such freedom was allowed; declaring myself willing to endure what kind of punishment her majesty should be pleased to inflict upon me, for so great an offence. Then she sat down low upon a cushion, and I upon my ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... about an order from the Lord Chamberlain for admission to view the two Houses of Parliament; and the ambassador drew from his pocket a colored silk handkerchief, and made a knot in it, in order to remind himself to ask the Lord Chamberlain. The homeliness of this little incident has a sort of propriety and keeping with much of Mr. ———'s manner, but I would rather not have him do so before English people. He arranged to send a close carriage for us to come and see him ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to his feet more angry than ever at being whipped by one whom he regarded as a boy, and drew a long dirk-knife. But he was blind with rage, and Bud dodged the knife, and this time gave Pete a blow on the nose which marred the homeliness of that feature and doubled the fellow up against a tree ten ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... With him leaving himself at that rate, you could take pencil and paper and figure to the minute when Alexander Fulton was booked to cross the big divide. And we liked the kid. In spite of his magnificent feet, and his homeliness, and his thumb-handsidedness, I got to feel sort of as if he was my boy—though if ever I have a boy like Aleck, I put in my vote for marriage being a failure, and everything lost, honor and all. ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... intention; but she inclined to the belief that the widow rather than herself was the object of Pierston's regard; though why this educated and apparently wealthy man should be attracted by her mother—whose homeliness was apparent enough to the girl's more modern training—she ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... had received from gunpowder in a quarry, that had destroyed the sight of one of his eyes, and considerably dimmed that of the other, had, of course, not served to improve his looks; but he always wore a cheerful, contented air; and, with all his homeliness, was a person pleasant to the sight. His companion was a really handsome man—grey-haired, silvery-whiskered, with an aristocratic cast of countenance, that would have done no discredit to a royal drawing-room, and an erect though somewhat ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... realized in the earlier work is distinct and important in this. It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid his work of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speaking his own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to have moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony, for all its absolute and formal character, reflects a landscape. It is full of home sounds, of cattle and "saeters," of timbered houses and sparse nature. And ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and ranged in registers behind them are the younger members of the royal family, whose ages are indicated by their occupations.(3) The employment of basalt in place of limestone does not disguise the sculptor's debt to Assyria. But the design is entirely his own, and the combined dignity and homeliness of the composition are refreshingly superior to the arrogant spirit and hard execution which mar so much Assyrian work. This example is particularly instructive, as it shows how a borrowed art may be developed in skilled hands and made to serve a ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... livery was slowly opening the folding leaves of the magnificent gates, so as to admit them into the park. The very oxen hesitated ere they took their slow way through it, as if dazzled by so much splendour, and ashamed of their own homeliness—the honest brutes little suspecting that the wealthy nobleman's pomp and glitter are derived from the industry of the lowly tillers of the soil. It certainly would seem as if only fine carriages and prancing horses should be permitted to pass ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... that a medical man, being admitted to the highest degree of intimacy with his patients, was bound to be as insensible as an anchorite to any beauty or homeliness in those whom he was attending professionally; he should have eyes only for the malady he came to consider and relieve. Dr. Dobree had often sneered and made merry at my high-flown notions of honor and duty; but ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... from Martigny, that this was in comparison but a peaceful valley. It was a cosey cleft among the mountains, with just room for the river to be frilled with green between its walls. There was a look of homeliness about the sloping pastures, which slept in the sunshine, lulled by the ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... claim her? Yet was this assumption of his return so very safe? How altered things would be at that time! At twenty-five he would still be young and handsome; she would be three-and- thirty, fading to middle-age and homeliness, from a junior's point of view. A fear sharp as a frost settled down upon her, that in any such scheme as this she would be building ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... property, the appanage of his house, and the object of his pride,—is equal as a portrait: but both must yield to the Nurse, who is drawn with the most wonderful power and discrimination. In the prosaic homeliness of the outline, and the magical illusion of the coloring, she reminds us of some of the marvellous Dutch paintings, from which, with all their coarseness, we start back as from a reality. Her low humor, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... "I have you now. A woman might, just possibly, have granted her own homeliness: but no woman that ever breathed would have conceded the Princess had a ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... modulated, arms and hands gracefully borne, heads carried high, movement itself an artful science. Here eyes were raised or lowered with studied effect; beautiful shoulders, gracefully shrugged, became dimpled and irresistible; faces with perfect profiles were always—in profile. Here, indeed, Age and Homeliness went clothed in magnificence, and Youth and Beauty walked hand in hand with Elegance; while everywhere was a graceful ease that had been learned and studied with the Catechism. Barnabas was in a world of silks and satins ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... magnificent, but before we examine it let us proceed with the Tintorettos. In "The Adoration of the Shepherds," in the far left-hand corner as one enters, there is an excellent example of the painter's homeliness. It is really two pictures, the Holy Family being on an upper floor, or rather shelf, of the manger and making the prettiest of groups, while below, among the animals, are the shepherds, real peasants, looking up in worship and ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... he was he would have liked to be his wife's second husband. And no wonder that Mr. Coade wanted nothing better than to remain attached to so adorable a creature as his wife, played with a delightful homeliness by Miss MAUDE MILLETT, who has lost nothing of that charm to which, with Mr. Coade, we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... suite, this strip of homeliness so artfully introduced into a palace, that Marie Antoinette fled on that fateful August morning when the mob of ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... give one no notion of it;—any more than Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built gloomy palace of black ashlar marble, shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us: no; rough as the North Rocks, as the Iceland deserts, it is; with a heartiness, homeliness, even a tint of good humour and robust mirth in the middle of these fearful things. The strong old Norse heart did not go upon theatrical sublimities; they had not time to tremble. I like much their robust simplicity; their veracity, directness ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... after his health. He had indeed fallen asleep in very ill-humour; but his night's rest had much composed his mind, and the effect of this was increased by the extreme politeness of the doctor, so that he answered with tolerable temper, only making bitter complaints of the homeliness ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... Madonna del Bacino.) (Dresden Gal.) The Child stands in a basin, and the young St. John pours water upon him from a vase, while Mary washes him. St. Elizabeth stands by, holding a napkin; St. Joseph, behind, is looking on. Notwithstanding the homeliness of the action, there is here a religious and mysterious ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... of the pair was not as unreal as it might have been supposed to be. The thought came to her, as she sat musing in the twilight, that wherever there was a home there must surely be homeliness. The hope of a home, denied to them on earth, was realised in the eternal life—that life which has no need of marriage because the spiritual union is complete without ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... should first emerge from such a writer as Phaedrus, the Aesopian fabulist. A great mistake it was, on the part of Doctor S., that the second book in the Latin language which I was summoned to study should have been Phaedrus—a writer ambitious of investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of Aesop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy. But so it was; and Phaedrus naturally towered into enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that the most intellectual of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised a mighty statue to one who belonged to the same class in a ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... huge frame and forgot his homeliness. Into her mind came a picture of the fat boy, grown into a man, driving down the road in the wagon and leeringly asking her to ride with him. A flood of anger at the memory of the look of greedy assurance in his eyes came over ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... wood, and the furniture was completed by a rustic table and chair, made from branches, and showing considerable ingenuity in their fashioning. Wallaby skins thrown over the chair and upon the floor lent a look of comfort to the tiny dwelling; and a further touch of homeliness was given by many pictures cut from illustrated papers and fastened to the canvas walls. The fly of the tent projected some distance in front, and formed a kind of verandah, beneath which a second rustic seat stood, as well as a block of wood that bore ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... putting them through their gymnastic exercises I studied their faces. At first my impression was one of prevailing homeliness; scrubbed, flat, peasant faces, for the most part, without the features or the mental apparatus that provides expression. But soon I singled out two or three pretty and engaging children, and rarely one whose face was devoid of character. And they stood well and went through ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... plaintiff. Without any assistance from turgid rhetoric, or indignant denunciation, he depicted it in a manner so simple, yet so direct, that his audience shivered in response. Then, with consummate art, he played upon their sensibilities by picturing the simple homeliness of Amy Johnson's happy family circle, on to the fervour of Reg's devotion, the complete happiness of the young couple up to their disunion under the diabolical arts of Wyckliffe. Gently, but still with a power that swayed them in their own despite, he wrung their sympathies from them with a pathetic ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... path turns trustedly aside, unhindered, into the garden of some statelier house, surrounded in rural pride with its golden hives, and carved granaries, and irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening to look upon in their delicate homeliness—delicate, yet in some sort, rude; not like our English homes—trim, laborious, formal, irreproachable in comfort—but with a peculiar carelessness and largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed loveliness of their country. For there is ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... her countenance haggard. Charles, though he liked her conversation, laughed at her ugliness, and said that the priests must have recommended her to his brother by way of penance. She well knew that she was not handsome, and jested freely on her own homeliness. Yet, with strange inconsistency, she loved to adorn herself magnificently, and drew on herself much keen ridicule by appearing in the theatre and the ring plastered, painted, clad in Brussels lace, glittering with diamonds, and affecting all the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... grievous injustice who deny them restlessness, vice, ostentation, cruelty; as they do cities a grievous injustice who deny them simplicity, homeliness, friendship, and contentment. It is one of those undeniable facts (which everybody denies) that a city is only a lot of small towns put together. Its population is largely made up of people who came from small towns and of people ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... plains, describing a gay party of Easterners who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeliness of a Montana ranch-house. The merry-hearted cowboys, the fascinating Beatrice, and the effusive Sir Redmond, become ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... immoderate means. And then the gardens and paddocks were exactly suited to it; and everything was in good order;—not exactly new, so as to be raw and uncovered, and redolent of workmen; but just at that era of their existence in which newness gives way to comfortable homeliness. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... arrangement, but a strong, sincere, simple, enthusiastic species of religion. It has largely to do with the heart and the feelings; is warm-natured, full of strong, straightforward, devotional vigour; combines homeliness of soul with intensity of imagination; links a great dash of honest turbulence with an infinitude of deep earnestness; tells a man that if he is happy he may shout, that if under a shower of grace he may fly off at a tangent and ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... in the black headlines and laid down the newspaper, a sense of the miraculous upon him. There again was the angled, low-celled room of the country tavern, reeking with food and lamps and perspiration; for a central figure the man of surpassing homeliness,—coatless, tieless, and vestless,—telling a story in the vernacular. He reflected that it might well seem strange yea, and intolerable—to many that this comedian of the country store, this crude lawyer and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to the country at large than was his antagonist. During his long public career, people had become partially accustomed to his manner of presenting arguments and enforcing them. The novelty and freshness of Lincoln's addresses, on the other hand, the homeliness and force of his illustrations, their wonderful pertinence, his exhaustless humor, his confidence in his own resources, engendered by his firm belief in the justice of the cause he so ably advocated, never once rising, however, to the point of arrogance or superciliousness, fastened upon ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... prior provincialis and definitor of his province. Having early gained a great reputation for pulpit eloquence, he was appointed court preacher at Vienna in 1669. The people flocked to hear him, attracted by the force and homeliness of his language, the grotesqueness of his humour, and the impartial severity with which he lashed the follies of all classes of society and of the court in particular. In general he spoke as a man of the people, the predominating ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the people can touch and live in and be made willing to believe in when the higher truths are brought before them. In many things it is a most prosaic life, dirt and dust and noise and silliness and sin in every form, but full, too, of the kindliness and homeliness and dependence of children who are not averse to be disciplined and taught, and who understand and love just as we do. The excitements and surprises and novel situations would not, however, need to be continuous, as they wear and fray the body, and fret the spirit and rob ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides—the low-built roof—parlours ten feet by ten—frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home—these were the condition of my birth—the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... stake, leaning indolently on his mallet, his long black lashes down-cast over the dark pallor of his cheeks, very handsome, very graceful. Bobby had drawn near on Celia's other side. The comparison showed all his freckles and the unformed homeliness of his rather dumpy, sturdy figure; it showed also the honest dull red of his cheeks and the clear unfaltering gray of his eyes. Celia, between them, looked down, tapping her croquet ball with the ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... the matter?" Marion asked, mildly. During the winter a beautifying change seemed to have passed upon Atherstone's daughter. She was younger, better looking, better dressed; yet keeping always the touch of homeliness, of smiling common-sense, which had first attracted a man in secret rebellion against his ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... even as I was Before he came; Till there is nothing I shall be." Yet there the sun shines after noon So cheerfully The place almost seems peopled, nor Lacks cottage chimney, cottage hearth: It is not more In size than is a cottage, less Than any other empty home In homeliness. It has a garden of wild flowers And finest grass and gravestones warm In sunshine hours The year through. Men behind the glass Stand once a week, singing, and drown The whistling grass Their ponies munch. And yet somewhere, Near or far ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... with a little warm-hearted postscript from good Mrs. Elderkin,—so unlike to the carefully modulated letters of Aunt Eliza! The Doctor's missive, very likely, did not impress him more than the scores that had gone before it; but there was a practical tact, and good-natured, common-sense homeliness, in the urgence of the Squire, which engaged all Reuben's attention; and the words of the good woman, his wife, were worth more than a sermon to him. "We all want," she writes, "to think well of you, Reuben; we do think well of you. Don't disappoint us. I can't think of the cheery, bright ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... might well be confident in it. His is a homespun style, not a manufactured one; and what a difference is there between its homeliness, and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger L'Estrange and Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of English undefiled to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair, if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English—the vernacular speech ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... scene, with much loss of effect. That third volume, which ought to have been most interesting, is the dull one. We have Boz described as he would be in an encyclopaedia, instead of through Forster, acting as his interpreter, and much was lost by this treatment. Considering the homeliness and every-day character of the incidents, it is astonishing how Forster contrived to dignify them. He knew from early training what was valuable and significant ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... county; since nothing so adds to the charm of a building as a roof of Horsham stone, those large grey flat slabs on which the weather works like a great artist in harmonies of moss, lichen, and stain. No roofing so combines dignity and homeliness, and no roofing except possibly thatch (which, however, is short-lived) so surely passes into the landscape. But Horsham stone is no longer used. It is to be obtained for a new house only by the demolition of an old; and few new houses have rafters sufficiently stable ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... was plain and odd; she did not think to ask herself whether the people on those bright stars, so beautiful and happy, might not repulse her for her homeliness. ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... children, while the men were out exploring the country, with a careful and steady shrewdness and good sense, to determine where should be the site of the future colony. The record of their adventures is given in their journals with that sweet homeliness of phrase which hangs about the Old English of that period like the smell of ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... headgears, curled hairs, plaited coats, cloaks, gowns, costly stomachers, guarded and loose garments, and all those other accoutrements, wherewith our countrywomen counterfeit a beauty, and so curiously set out themselves, cause more inconvenience in this kind, than that barbarian homeliness, although they be no whit inferior unto them in beauty. I could evince the truth of this by many other arguments, but I appeal" (saith he) "to my companions at that present, which were all of the same ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... my home, Far in the pale-blue skies and slaty seas, What time the sunset dies not utterly, But withered to a ghost-like stealthy gleam, Round the horizon creeps the short-lived night, And changes into sunrise in a swoon. I found my home in homeliness unchanged: The love that made it home, unchangeable, Received me as a child, and all was well. My ancient summer-heaven, borne on the hills, Once more embraced me; and once more the vale, So often sighed ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... four distinct patterns—we cannot call them styles. Siam in the centre has a chocolate-colored tower picked out with silver, and surmounted by a triple pagoda roof, whence floats the flag, a white elephant in a red field. The six feet of homeliness belonging to Tunis has a balcony of wood which neither reveals nor hides the almond-eyed whose supposed relatives are selling trumpery in booths on the other ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... of evidence came knocking at the door now, a picture of quaint and humble homeliness . . . herself standing before the stove with the roast on a plate, and little Mark saying fastidiously, "Oh, how nasty raw meat looks!" She recalled her passing impatience with the childishness of that comment, her passing sense of the puerile ignorance of the inherent unity of things, in such ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... observing it?—a certain large and patriarchal homeliness—a kind of royal domesticity—about much that he writes. Those touches, as when Gargantua, his little dog in advance, enters the dining hall, when they are discussing Panurge's marriage, and they all rise to do him honor; as when Gargantua bids Pantagruel farewell and gives ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... like a ribbon carelessly unwound, the only bit of level to be seen, and prolonged for miles. The distant mountains that bound the prospect you may see elsewhere, but this ravine, with the traces of the 'Willey Slide' on one side of it, has no parallel. Don't laugh at me for the homeliness of the simile—it suggested a gigantic cradle. Here, as elsewhere, we were dazzled by the brilliancy of the October foliage, and having found a seat quite as convenient as a sofa, though being of rock, not quite so easy, we loitered till the last golden hue faded ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... dean of the Hotel Magnifique's floor clerks. The primary requisite in successful floor clerkship is homeliness. The second is discreet age. The third is tact. And for the benefit of those who think the duties of a floor clerk end when she takes your key when you leave your room, and hands it back as you return, it may be mentioned ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... indiscretion; always the same; never lingering beyond his time—never leaving before. He is like a clock that maintains always the same movement and sound. The empress, accustomed for thirty years to see him enter daily her apartments, has become used to his homeliness, and often in the kindness of her heart enters into conversation with him. His answers are always laconic, in a tone of perfect indifference—at times brusque, even harsh—but they have a sensible and often a deep meaning. When the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... retaining the same steadfast and lofty faith, which had ennobled and redeemed the errors of her life, and was now to glorify the ignominy of her death. This project, after much deliberation, he relinquished, as too difficult. By a new mode of management, much of the homeliness and rude horror, that defaced and encumbered the reality, is thrown away. The Dauphin is not here a voluptuous weakling, nor is his court the centre of vice and cruelty and imbecility: the misery of the time is touched but lightly, and the Maid of Arc herself is invested ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... that period it saw two revolutions, and the change of national conditions from the comparative mediaevalism of the days of the eighth Henry to the comparative modernity of the beginning of the Hanoverian era. It is not, perhaps, overfanciful to see something of the lavish richness, the opulent homeliness, of the earlier period typified in the varied buildings, courts, and gateways of the Tudor portion of the Palace, and the more formal grandeur of the later time in the symmetrical stateliness ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... sunlight in their way. The forest behind, the wilderness of blackberry bushes in front; the wide view over the hills and vales, without one spot of cultivation anywhere, or a trace of man's habitation; the scene was wild enough. The soft curling smoke, grey and embrowned, gave a curious touch of homeliness to it. From two fires it went, curling up as comfortably as if it had been there always. The second fire was lit for the purpose of boiling green corn, which two or three people were busy getting ready, stripping the green ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... love human more than any other nature has not life in himself, does not carry his poetry in him, as Gibbie did, therefore cannot find it except where it has been shown to him. Neither was a common house like this by any means devoid of any things to please him. If there was not the lovely homeliness of the cottage which at once gave all it had, there was a certain stateliness which afforded its own reception; if there was little harmony, there were individual colours that afforded him delight—as for ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the distant Down, and then for the first hour of the day the room was aglow. For quite two hundred years every visible sunrise had shone in at that window more or less, as the season changed and the sun rose to the north of east. Perhaps it was that sense of ancient homeliness that caused Cicely, without knowing why, to steal in there alone to dream, for nowhere else indoors could she have been so far away from the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... the filling of the slender, tall-stemmed glass. A window was open, and the wind blowing in made the candles to flicker. With the wind came a murmur of leaves and the wash of the river,—stealthy and mournful sounds that sorted not with the lighted room, the cheerful homeliness of the flowered hangings, the gleeful lady and child above the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity: a slow sea voyage, and a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned him, he thought, from sounds ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... yet all himself, his sympathy, namely, with the animal world. That was a sentiment connected at once with the love of outward nature in himself and in the "Lake School," and its assertion of the natural affections in their simplicity; with the homeliness and pity, consequent upon [95] that assertion. The Lines to ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... she aloud, "we have begun our acquaintance. Let us be good friends. I do not intend to make one effort to lessen your ugliness by womanly art; I must seek to win its pardon from the world by noble deeds and a well-spent life. Perhaps, in future days, when my subjects lament my homeliness, they may add that nevertheless I was a GOOD, and—well! in this hour of humiliation we may praise one another, I think—perchance a ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... walk we arrived at our dwelling, an elegant little building of white stone, and only two storeys in height. There was such a general appearance of comfort and homeliness about it, both inside and out, that M'Allister exclaimed: "Professor, I never thought coming to Mars meant a reception like this. I rather expected to have had ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... have been shaken to the very depths of their being can understand the marvellous fidelity of this image, the soul quaking and squeaking like an overloaded cart,—all the more faithful because of its very homeliness. Do not wonder, therefore, when the last, intensest grief, the consciousness of being crushed by his rival, finds in his Diary the following expression: (5) "And so I suffered," says the superfluous man, "like a dog whose hind parts had been crushed in by the cart-wheel ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... this Griseldis through her wit *Couth all the feat* of wifely homeliness, *knew all the duties* But eke, when that the case required it, The common profit coulde she redress: There n'as discord, rancour, nor heaviness In all the land, that she could not appease, And wisely bring them all ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... insult, the girl had flung open the door and ushered in a very tall, angular person, who at first sight seemed all arms and legs. But when one caught a glimpse of his face, one straightway forgot all other characteristics, for in rugged homeliness it would have been hard to surpass him, and yet there was a striking kindliness of feature, a certain gentleness of eye that instantly drew people to him, so that instinctively they knew him to be their friend. Up into this face sulky Peace found herself ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... marriage and which it seemed to her might be utilized delightfully in her department. She would endeavor to treat dress from the standpoint of ethical responsibility to society, and to show that both extravagance and dowdy homeliness were to be avoided. Clothes in themselves had grown to be a satisfaction to her, and any association of vanity would be eliminated by the introduction of a serious artistic purpose into a weekly commentary concerning them. Accordingly she accepted the position and entered ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... covered the deck, and great baskets of roses—pink, and red, and yellow—were placed about here and there. Tea was ready on a low table, a swinging brass kettle hissing merrily, with an air of supreme homeliness. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Indian and wild lands of the West, and such other lazy brutes as our good farmers would not impose upon the government with or later were condemned by the army buyers. These were largely of the Abdallah type of horse, noted for coarseness, homeliness, also soft and lazy constitutions. No one disputes the brute homeliness of the Abdallah horse, and in this the old and trite saying of "Like begets like" is exemplified in descendants, with which our country is flooded. The speed element of which we boast was left in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... I said, "in my analysis and explication of the agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the growing grace,—their homeliness. By 'homeliness' I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt to be used, but the air that is given to a room by being really at home in it. Not the most skillful arrangement can ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the Rhine flows, so flows the national genius, by mountain and valley, the wildest solitude, the sudden spires of ancient cities, the mouldered castle, the stately monastery, the humble cot,—grandeur and homeliness, history and superstition, truth and fable, succeeding one another so as to ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such a room as this—where all was comfort, and nothing in the quiet, but cheerful, ensemble disturbed the peaceful homeliness. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... "God's plenty" of poetry in these sights and sounds, if only one looks deep enough to discover the beauty of homeliness. But there is even more of beauty and poetic inspiration to be drawn from the city by him who, instead of thus straitly confining his gaze to any one aspect of urban life, is able to see it steadily and see it whole, with its subtle nuances and its over-powering dramatic contrasts—as a twentieth-century ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... referred again to the consummate mastery of technique manifested throughout the opera, and here there is no falling off from this mastery. Throughout we have that atmosphere of bygone generations, and also a combination, curious when looked into, of homeliness with nobility. Sachs' song is merrily trolled out, but underneath its joviality we feel the greatness of the man—a man so great in character that no suits of shining armour, no heralds and no waving banners are needed to make him impressive: he remains, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the good old times—say, three hundred years ago—a family lived on the border between England and Scotland, with one daughter of a marvelous homeliness. Her name was Meg. She was a capital girl, as homely girls generally are. She knew she had no beauty, so she made sure of quality and faculty. But the Scotch say that "while beauty may not make the best kail, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... then it glowed again, as if there were many passing and re-passing. I wondered what it could all mean in such an hour, on such a night as this. Then I thought of old Conlow's children, of "Possum" in his weak, good-natured homeliness, and of Lettie. How I disliked her, and wished she would keep out of my way, which she never would do. Her face was clear to me, there in the dark. It grew malicious; then it hardened into wickedness, and I slipped from ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The Midsummer Holiday group has two pictures of sweet homeliness—'The Mill Garden' and 'On a Country Road'—the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth's phrase), such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch book, of value the more remarkable because ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... discussion to the neglected qualities. As a rule, a durable, useful, and comfortable article is a beautiful one. At least it has the beauty of "grace," by which terms the old writers on aesthetics characterized perfect adaptation to purpose, and the beauty of what they called "homeliness," or, as we would now say, since this term has been perverted, of "hominess," the suggestion of adding to the pleasure of ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... sir," said Mrs. Cassley, dropping her erudition, and coming down to bedrock homeliness; "I've got a young lady stopping with me, as respectable a gel as I've had to deal with. And I know what respectability is, I might tell you, for I've taken professional boarders and I have been ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... she had a deep moment. Joining him on the door-step, they sat side by side watching in silence the light die over the scanty fields handed down to him by his father, who had grown bent and weary in wrenching a living from them as he was aging. Neither was young; both were marked by the swift homeliness of the hard-working; but the look on their faces was that which falls when two have gotten an immortal youth and ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... of the great room had now been thrown open, and the passengers were passing slowly out to the long, deserted platform. It was almost daylight now, and the train was drawn up in readiness to start, with a fresh engine and new officials. The homeliness of Germany had vanished, giving place to that subtle sense of discomfort and melancholy which hangs in the air from the Baltic to the ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... affection. The matter was worse when he found that she could speak no language but Dutch, of which he was entirely ignorant; and that the charms of her conversation were not likely to compensate for the homeliness of her person. He returned to Greenwich very melancholy; and he much lamented his hard fate to Cromwell, as well as to Lord Russel, Sir Anthony Brown, and Sir Anthony Denny. This last gentleman, in order to give him comfort, told him, that his misfortune was common to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... qualifications, is well fitted to enliven such an entertainment. His manners are extremely easy, and his style of speaking simple and natural, yet full of vivacity and point; and he has the art, if it be art, of relaxing into a certain homeliness of manner, without losing one particle of his dignity. He thus takes off some of that solemn formality which belongs to such meetings, and, by his easy, and graceful familiarity, imparts to them somewhat of the pleasing character of a private entertainment. Near Sir W. ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... and none so quick as women to scent resistance. His very unbending attitude aroused their inherent craving for rigidity in his profession; he was neither plastic, unctuous, nor subservient; his very homeliness, redeemed by the eyes and mouth, compelled their attention. One of them told Mrs. Larrabbee that that rector of hers ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... men inwardly acknowledged that the mother had spoken less than half the truth, for the girl was extravagantly, bewitchingly attractive. Her face and form would have been noticeable anywhere and under any circumstances; but now in contrast with the unmodified homeliness of her parents and brother her comeliness was almost startling. The others seemed to harmonize with their drab surroundings, with the dull, unattractive house and its furnishings, but Lorelei was in violent opposition to everything about her. She wore her beauty unconsciously, too, as a princess ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Roman army. He left behind him a firm road on which public confidence could follow; he took America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by its work-day homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Nutter stood up, and turned his face toward the empty grate. I have seen some plain faces once or twice look so purely spiritual, and others at times so infernal, as to acquire in their homeliness a sort of awful grandeur; and from every feature of Nutter's dark wooden face was projected at that moment a supernatural glare of baffled hatred that dilated ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... centre of the roof that sloped down to the lower story in the back part, and in their general unpretending appearance, reminding one vividly of that simplicity of life which characterized our people before the Revolution. Their very homeliness is delightful, by leaving the imagination free to dwell upon their pleasing suggestions. Not many of these charming old houses are now extant: but whenever we see one, we are almost sure to find it accompanied by its Elm, standing upon the green open space that slopes up to it in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... struck with the rude and uncomfortable appearance of every thing about this people,—the rudeness of their habitations, the carelessness of their agriculture, the unsightly coarseness of all their implements and furniture, the unambitious homeliness of all their goods and chattels, except the axe, the rifle, and the horse—these being invariably the best and handsomest which their means enable them to procure. But he is mistaken in supposing them indolent or improvident; and is little aware how much ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... a dialect not easy to the Southron, contrived to touch a more intimate and more responsive chord. With the simplest materials he achieved an almost unendurable pathos, which yet is never forced; and the pathos is salted with humour, while about the moving homeliness of his humanity play the gleams of a whimsical wit. Stevenson, in a letter to Mr Henry James, in December 1892, said justly of Barrie that "there was genius in him, but there was a journalist on his elbow." This genius found its most ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the peasant who has dwelt on one spot from birth to age. In that faint light, in those deep shadows, she could trace all the scene as though the brightness of the moon shone on it; it was all, in its homeliness and simplicity, intensely dear to her. In the playtime of her childhood, in the courtship of her youth, in the joys and woes of her wifehood and widowhood, the bitter pains and sweet ecstasies of her maternity, the hunger and privation of struggling desolate years, the contentment and ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... a sort of writing which has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness, simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... the doctor, 'that you have been married to somebody. But it is no proof that you have been married to Mr. Armadale of Thorpe Ambrose. Jack Nokes or Tom Styles (excuse the homeliness of the illustration!) might have got the license, and gone to the church to be married to you under Mr. Armadale's name; and the register (how could it do otherwise?) must in that case have innocently ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... all morning, no loathsome mouldy walls, no dank, foul odors. She pictured the little home not as it stood when last she saw it, brightened with all Betty's bridal gifts, with Betty as mistress, but as it was at that last Christmas reunion, in all its dear shabby homeliness. The sun shone in across the clean faded carpet, and every old chair held out ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... himself would lie down to sleep in such a place. As if to refute this accusation, the wind turned a corner of the blanket quietly off a white face with closed eyelids,—an old, worn, gentle face, appealing in its homeliness, though stamped now with the dignity of death. Leander knelt and handled the body tenderly. It was long before he satisfied himself that life was still there. Another case for Polly and the Springs. A man worth saving, if ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... a friend's complexion if it was really bad. With her, as with a great many of her sex, charity began at homeliness and did not generally ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... capable women, came in next morning to help, and in a few hours the windows were curtained, the linen laid out and the turkey in the oven. Under Zulime's hands the rooms bloomed into homeliness. The kitchen things fell into orderly array. Pictures took their places on the walls, little knick-knacks which had been brought from the city were set on the mantels and bookcases, and when our guests ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was not to be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the air of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make his comrades ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... he said heartily, rising to his feet and bowing with a quaint ceremonial gesture that contrasted with and yet somehow matched the homeliness of his greeting. "You slipped in so quiet on them dainty little feet of yours I never heared you comin' a-tall." He took her small hands in his broad pudgy ones, holding her off at arm's length. "And don't you look purty! Mighty nigh any woman looks cool and sweet when she's ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... shut his eyes and beheld hillsides where abandoned castles stood, and the fox and the squirrel and the hawk gave shade and welcome to the dusty pilgrims of the road; or, when the wild winds blew in winter, gave shelter and wood for the fire, and a sense of homeliness ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... comfort, I came so late, that I must lodge without doors all night, or else in a poor house where the good wife lay in child-bed, her husband being from home, her own servant maid being her nurse. A creature naturally compacted, and artificially adorned with an incomparable homeliness: but as things were I must either take or leave, and necessity made me enter, where we got eggs and ale by measure and by tail. At last to bed I went, my man lying on the floor by me, where in the night there were pigeons did very bountifully mute in his face: ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... that remained Roman Catholic much of the old Christmas continued, though the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, faced by the challenge of Protestantism, made for greater "respectability," and often robbed the Catholic Christmas of its humour, its homeliness, its truly popular stamp, substituting pretentiousness for simplicity, sugary sentiment for naive ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... between gentleman and gentleman, where, in public affairs, all are essentially of one mind, or seem so to an American politician, accustomed to the fierce conflicts of our embittered parties; where life was made so enticing, so refined, and yet with a sort of homeliness that seemed to show that all its strength was left behind; that seeming taking in of all that was desirable in life, and all its grace and beauty, yet never giving life a hard enamel of over-refinement. What could there be in the wild, harsh, ill- conducted American approach to civilization, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... There I remained, sunk in contemplation, and reveling in remembrances, till the sun was almost dipping behind the snow-clad tops of Nivolex. I did not wish to cross the lake, or enter the town by daylight, as the homeliness of my dress, the scantiness of my purse, and the frugality of life to which I was constrained, in order to live some months near Julie, would have seemed strange to the inmates of the old doctor's house. They formed too great a contrast with my elegance in dress and habits of ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... seen physiognomies (often old farmers, sea-captains, and such) that, behind their homeliness, or even ugliness, held superior points so subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as a wild perfume or fruit-taste, or a passionate tone of the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman |
