"Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was utterly unexpected, and completely incongruous. That was the wonder of her, Kennon reflected. Her mercurial temperament made life something that was continually exciting She was ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Cincinnati military commission, visited Chicago as an accredited agent of the Davis government, but he was not molested, and mingled with men of his own stripe, without fear and without difficulty. It will be interesting by and by, to read of the Chicago Convention, and the incongruous elements there assembled. But as all things have an end, so did this remarkable gathering, and dispersed quietly, never again to meet as the representatives of ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... indeed, throughout Europe, that William of Orange was going to wed the Princess Mary, who was the daughter of the Duke of York, the King of England's brother, and likely to be herself the daughter of an English sovereign. For certain reasons it seemed an unlikely and incongruous alliance, for even in the end of 1677, when the marriage took place, anyone with prescience could foresee that there would be a wide rift between the politics of the Duke of York when he became ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... Somewhat incongruous and out-of-place, yet more numerous than truly Persian shops, are the semi-European stores, with cheap glass windows displaying inside highly dangerous-looking kerosene lamps, badly put together tin goods, soiled enamel tumblers and plates, silvered glass ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... dress or fifty dresses like it; no, it was not on account of the dress, but because she felt that she could find a fuller expression of grief in a loose wrapper than in a tight dress. That was the truth, she could not help things if they did seem a little incongruous. It was not her fault; she was quite sincere, though her grief to a third person might seem a little artificial. It was impossible to regret her brother more than she did. She would never forget him, no, not if they buried him ever so deep. She had been his little sister a long while; ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... light blue eyes almost served to mask his Semitic origin, shrugged his shoulders in a fashion incongruous in one of his complexion, though characteristic ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the matter—and feel it. Then he must tell the story just as he sees and feels it. Absolute truthfulness in the telling is as necessary as keen perception in the seeing. Humor must be sought through the simple, truthful presentation of an incongruous or humorous idea or situation; pathos must be sought by the truthful presentation of a pathetic picture. Just as soon as the reporter tries to be funny or to be pathetic he fails, for the reader is not looking to the reporter ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... being the pervading color of nature; it is chiefly used during the Epiphany Tide and the long period of the Trinity Season. Black is made use of at funerals and on Good Friday. This use of the colors applies to the stole as well as to the Altar hangings. The black stole is always out of place, incongruous, except at funerals and on Good Friday. Where they are used, the cope, chasuble, maniple, dalmatic and tunic also vary with the Season in the same manner. The use of the Church colors, besides "decking the place of His Sanctuary" is also most helpful to the devotions ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... a brougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses, all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grass billows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited horizon ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... surgeons and nurses to the station, when convoys of wounded were expected, if there was likelihood that British soldiers would be amongst them. These would cheer up at the sound of her pleasant voice speaking their tongue. Yet she would witness on such occasions incongruous incidents of German brutality. Once there came out of the train an English and a French soldier, great friends evidently. They were only slightly wounded and the English soldier stretched his limbs cautiously to relieve himself of cramp. At that moment ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... expression of the arts, why should its highest form be used to dramatize a drama? Without the aid of scene and actors, that were needed by the original poet, the artisan in absolute tones attempts his own theatric rendering. Clearly this symphony is one of those works of art which within an incongruous form (like certain ancient pictures) affords episodes ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... troubles of the Fronde commencing, its habitues were dispersed or absorbed by political interests. The presiding genius of this salon, the Marquise de Rambouillet, was the very model of the woman who can act as anamalgam to the most incongruous elements; beautiful, but not preoccupied by coquetry, or passion; an enthusiastic admirer of talent, but with no pretensions to talent on her own part; exquisitely refined in language and manners, but warm and generous withal; not given to entertain her guests ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... room, whose floor was covered with rich Turkish rugs, whose walls were covered with Oriental hangings, and in one corner was a great, wide divan, canopied, also with Oriental hangings at head and foot, serving presumably for a bed; but, striking a somewhat incongruous note, others of the appointments were modern enough—the flat-topped desk in the centre of the room with its revolving chair, for instance, and a large, ponderous safe that stood back against ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... was her astonishing ordinariness that impressed me. It was surprising to see such a one during such a scene; it was as incongruous as a man riding a bicycle on the judgment Day. Yet she, too, served to make it all real. She was like the real tree in the foreground of a panorama. She served the same purpose as the Voix de Lourdes, a briskly written French newspaper that gives the ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... in the habit of working with a Turkish cap on his head, and with a short apron tied round him. There was something picturesque about the cap, which might not have been incongruous with love-making. It is easy to suppose that Juan wore a Turkish cap when he sat with Haidee in Lambro's island. But we may be quite sure that he did not wear an apron. Now Dalrymple had thought of all this, and had made up his mind to work to-day ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... was in a mixed assembly of a hundred men, women, and children, who very quickly became two hundred, presently three hundred, all told; visitors, waiters, chambermaids, hotel officials, huddled together in the most incongruous and comic costumes, and thirty per cent. of them with no costumes at all, unless night-shirts and curl-papers count. I was decorous by comparison. I had on a pair of trousers (buttoned up the wrong way, certainly), a billycock hat, a surtout coat, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... she feel lonely afterwards. On the contrary, the silence and solitude of the isolated domain had a new charm. They kept the memory of her experience intact, and enabled her to refill it with his presence. She could see his tall figure again pausing before her cabin, without the incongruous association of another personality; she could hear his voice again, unmingled with one more familiar. For the first time, the regular absence of her husband seemed an essential good fortune instead of an accident of their life. For the experience belonged to ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... patronymic appellations? Do you think the landed Bart. knows any more of the medical Bart. than that, when he sends for the other to attend his wife, he calls him generally "doctor," and seldom Sir James: or that the military Bart. does not much like the naval Bart.? and do not all these incongruous Barts. shudder at the bare idea of been seen on the same side of the street with a gin-spinning, Patent-British-Genuine-Foreign-Cognac Brandy-making Bart.? and do not each and every one of these Barts. from head to tail, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... still more to the fantastic effect of Vassili-Blagennoi, is that it is coloured with the most incongruous tones which nevertheless produce a harmonious effect that charms the eye. Red, blue, apple-green and yellow meet here in all portions of the building. Columns, capitals, arches and ornaments are painted with startling ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... B., there are three other women on the Bar. One is called "the Indiana girl," from the name of her pa's hotel, though it must be confessed that the sweet name of girl seems sadly incongruous when applied to such a gigantic piece of humanity. I have a great desire to see her, which will probably not be gratified, as she leaves in a few days for the valley. But, at any rate, I can say that I have heard her. The far-off ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... husband glanced more than once to see if she were not gaining upon his daughter; and so in truth she was, personally, though it was exceedingly painful to see her where Mary had been used to see that dear suffering face; and it was impossible not to feel the contrast with her father as painfully incongruous. Mr. Ponsonby was a large man, with the jovial manner of one never accustomed to self-restraint; good birth and breeding making him still a gentleman, in spite of his loud voice and the traces of self-indulgence. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily wooded areas; so that it is by ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... framed the land where a man loved but one woman. She remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love. As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or so of wives ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... being socially a part of it. Most momentous of disillusions! With the exception of the Sidney Dallams and one or two young brokers who occasionally came out over Sunday, her husband had no friends in New York. Rivington and the Holt family (incongruous mixture) formed the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... learned friends; and then he will take some astrological or alchemical expression of AGRIPPA, or PARACELSUS, or some such outlaw, and will, as with his awl and rosin-end, sew together a sentence, and hammer together a page of the most incongruous and unheard- of phraseology, till, as we read Behmen's earlier work especially, we continually exclaim, O for a chapter of John Bunyan's clear, and sweet, and classical English! The Aurora was written in a language, if writing and a language it can be called, that had never been seen written ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... which had been employed by Bossuet for another purpose, I came to believe that religious systems resemble those pictures occasionally seen in the museums of the curious, which appear at first to be mere incongruous assemblages of unconnected and unmeaning figures, till they are regarded from one particular point of view, when these figures immediately mass themselves into a regular form, and the whole picture assumes a coherent and symmetrical appearance. To discover ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... herself. Mr. Hammersmith, at sight of her open, not unpleasing face, understood for the first time the decided attitude of the coroner. If this woman corroborated her husband's account, the poor young girl, with her incongruous beauty and emotional temperament, would not have much show. He looked to see her quailing now. But instead of that she stood firm, determined, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... strange, incongruous mixture of satisfaction and discontent in the remark, which was ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... restaurant. The action and the manner of speech did not harmonize. If I felt it borne in upon me that I must be a profane fellow to prove my manliness, I would choose another diet than spoon victuals to nourish my formidable zest for naughtiness. Rare beef or wild game would be less incongruous. There are times when a man may be excused for using objectionable language. Stress of righteous indignation, seasons of personal conflict with hansom cabmen, large-headed street car conductors, ubiquitous, never-dying expectorators and many other particular ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... of meeting a plain clothes man from detective headquarters around the next bend of a peaceful Missouri road was so preposterous and incongruous that Billy had found it impossible to ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ton lebm; for we was goin' out emp'y for wool, on account o' them two Vic. chaps snappin' our loads. I disremember if I tole you the yarn when I pulled you at the Willandra. Anyhow it was raining like (incongruous comparison) when I drawed up at the store; an' Moriarty he fetches me inter the office, an' gives me a stiffener o' brandy. Or whisky? Now, (hair-raising imprecation) if I don't disremember which. But I think it was brandy. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of the banquet at Fort Vancouver, because it is unpleasant to recite the difficulties of a kindly host who finds himself with jarring elements at his board. Precisely this was the situation of white-haired Doctor McLaughlin of Fort Vancouver. It was an incongruous assembly in the first place. The officers of the British Navy attended in the splendor of their uniforms, glittering in braid and gold. Even Doctor McLaughlin made brave display, as was his wont, in his regalia of dark blue cloth and shining ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... reply beyond a low laugh. He stared gloomily out of his window, noting indifferently that they were passing the National Gallery. On their left Trafalgar Square stretched, broad and bare, a wilderness of sooty stone with an air of mutely tolerating its incongruous fountains. Through Charing Cross roared a tide-rip ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... What should be done with the furniture? Of course the carters must wait for the keys, as she should need them to set the furniture up in the right places. But they could not stop for this. They put it down upon the piazza, on the steps, in the garden, and Elizabeth Eliza saw how incongruous it was! There was something from every room in the house! Even the large family chest, which had proved too heavy for them to travel with had come down from the attic, and stood against the ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... composed of the most dissimilar things, the most unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is merciless, without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable, illogical, and contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as miscellaneous facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject, can only select such characteristic details as are of use to it, from this ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... unkind laugh—it gave Bennie heart to listen to it—but it was exceedingly mirthful. Bennie could not know that the idea of himself, as a husband and father, was sending this tall man into such spasms of merriment—he could not know that it was rather incongruous to picture his small grubby form in the shining armour of St. George or of King Arthur. But, being glad that the doctor was not angry, he smiled too—his strange, ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... organic structures, with well worked-out plots and for the most part well-sustained characters. They present a complete fusion of the different elements contributed by each author; never showing that agglomeration of incongruous matter so often found among the work of the lesser playwrights, where each hand can be singled out and held responsible for its share. Elaborate attempts, based on verse tests, have been made to disentangle the two threads ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... not remember that there was a boat about the place. I had not seen one. As I thought all this in a wild, excitable way, I snatched up some of my clothes, slipped them on partly as I ran; and even then, incongruous as it may sound, I could not help thinking how the wet hindered me. Then running on, I came upon Gunson, with his face cut and bleeding, struggling back ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... succeeding conversation the more trying and peculiar was, that the presence of other persons in the room, though at a considerable distance, compelled both brother and sister, though anything but calm, to speak sotto voce. But in the history of mankind more strange and incongruous matter has been dealt with in an undertone, and with artificial and ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Kuo sitting on a donkey and offering a descendant to the newly married couple is often found in the nuptial chamber. It seems somewhat incongruous that an old ascetic should be associated with matrimonial happiness and the granting of offspring, but the explanation may possibly be connected with his performance of wonderful feats of necromancy, though he is said ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... in his closet pent, He toils to give the crude conception vent Abortive thoughts, that right and wrong confound, Truth sacrific'd to letters, sense to sound; False glare, incongruous images combine, And noise and nonsense chatter through ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of incongruous ideas. (With his hair combed and his shoes blacked, he gave the impression of being a very strong man.) The ideas of this sentence have no logical relation to each other. There is little likelihood, too, of making them more congruous by any change in the sentence. Blacking ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... plain clothes than in a fancy costume. Other melodies appear to advantage in a rich costume. Modern songwriters are much inclined to overdress their melodies to the extent that the accompaniment forces itself upon the attention to the exclusion of the melody. Such writing is as incongruous as putting on a dress suit to go ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... do with cards the better. Young men can have no occasion for the assistance of cards in order to pass their time; and there seems to be something almost incongruous in the idea of their sitting down to a rubber. Nor do they need the excitement: if they wish for it, that very wish is a reason why they ought not to have it. If they play for money—or, at all events, if they play for such sums as make the winning or losing an object of any degree of consequence—they ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... the air. The city has disappeared. We walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... business section of the town and turned into a less-frequented street, his emotion assumed the character of a quiet joy, evidenced in a more erect bearing and a firmer tread, as if he strove, despite his seventy-six years, not to appear incongruous as he ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... Dyan had been trying to pretend she was—even to himself. Ten chances to one, she was still at the core everything; even his present incongruous activities.... ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... very little resembled anything that would have fallen from a damsel bred in the modish world. Her affectation was shot through with spontaneity; her impertinence had a juvenile seriousness which made it much more amusing than offensive; and a feminine charm in her, striving to prevail over incongruous elements, made clear appeal to the instincts of the ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... antiquity all systematising was merely relative and limited, because the complex of sacred writings enjoyed a different authority from that which it possessed in the following period. Here the reference of a theologoumenon to a passage of Scripture was of itself sufficient, and the manifold and incongruous doctrines were felt as a unity in so far as they could all be verified from Holy Scriptures. Thus the fact that the Holy Scriptures were regarded as a series of divine oracles guaranteed, as it were, a transcendental unity of the doctrines, and, in certain circumstances, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... is," said Ribalta, who, leaping over several piles of volumes and thrusting aside with his foot an enormous heap of cartoons, opened the drawer of a tottering press. In that drawer he rummaged among an accumulation of odd, incongruous objects: old medals and old nails, bookbindings and discolored engravings, a large leather box gnawed by insects, on the outside of which could be distinguished a partly effaced coat-of-arms. He opened ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... extreme urbanity). I think, Mr. Brudenell, that as the usual professional observations seem to strike Mr. Dudgeon as incongruous under the circumstances, you had better omit them until—er—until Mr. Dudgeon can no longer be inconvenienced by them. (Brudenell, with a shrug, shuts his book and retires behind the gallows.) YOU seem ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... miscellanies of every description, including bottles and cabinets, rags and bones, fenders and street-door knockers, fire-irons, wearing apparel and bedding, a hall-lamp, and a room-door. Imagine, in addition to this incongruous mass, a black doll in a white frock, with two faces—one looking up the street, and the other looking down, swinging over the door; a board with the squeezed-up inscription 'Dealer in marine stores,' in lanky white letters, whose height is strangely out of proportion to their width; ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... mixture of acting and reality in this passion. She kept hold of her purpose as a child might tighten its hand over a small stolen thing, crying and denying all the while. Even Grandcourt was wrought upon by surprise: this capricious wish, this childish violence, was as unlike Lydia's bearing as it was incongruous with her person. Both had always had a stamp of dignity on them. Yet she seemed more manageable in this state than in her former attitude of defiance. He came close up to her again, and said, in his low ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... opportunity of Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he had looked his young man up—producing on the latter's part, as soon as the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined itself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface—and Densher was well aware of it—than the relief he found during this short period in the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news nor asking ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... attentively, without, however, addressing him. But when he had reached the middle of the bazar, where the best and most costly wares are exposed for sale, and when, as though intoxicated by the sight, he seized the most incongruous things, and untiringly pushed them into his sack—pearls from Ormuz and blades from Damascus, tons of Mocha coffee, and bales of silk, fishes and rings, bracelets and dates, watches, saddles, and diamonds—then the Caliph, for it was no less a personage who was following ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear of Death ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Libretto, as they call it, is not approved, the opera, notwithstanding the excellence of the music, will be condemned. For the Italians justly determine, that the very music of an opera cannot be complete and pleasing, if the drama be incongruous, as I may call it, in its composition, because, in order to please, it must have the necessary contrast of the grave and the light, that is, the diverting equally blended through the whole. If there be too much ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... phenomenon so opposed to all scientific probability, and so directly at variance with natural laws, that it loses in interest in a direct ratio with the violence it does to our feelings. Nor is the mode of conveyance imagined by Voltaire less incongruous than that of Swift. When Micromegas, ah inhabitant of Sirius, whose adventures were evidently suggested by those of Gulliver, accompanied by an inhabitant of Saturn, leaves the latter planet, they are, in the first place, made to leap upon the Ring of Saturn, which they find tolerably flat, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... heal: in short, Ventnor is spoiled for those who remember it in its early days, and for aristocratic dwellers roundabout, but it is a case of the greatest good to the greatest number; and when the quick-springing green shall have kindly softened and folded in the crowded, incongruous buildings, and blended into rounded masses above them, Ventnor will be forgiven its railway that has made this region accessible to the many-headed, in consideration of the comforts and amenities of life brought to the doors of circumjacent dwellers, instead of being, as once, lacking, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... little) why excessive drinking is induced in prohibition states. Tell me that I may not laugh, and I wish at once to laugh my head off,—though I am at heart a holy person who loves Keats. This incongruous emotion must have been felt, under this or that influence of external inhibition, by everyone who is alive enough to like swimming, and Dante, and Weber and Fields, and Filipino Lippi, and the view of the valley underneath the sacred stones ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... have often seen it, the Cross on the sleeve-band of a man who bears a revolver in his belt, or a rifle on his arm, has always struck me as a most incongruous thing. The noncommissioned officer in charge of the squad—chief orderly I suppose you might call him—held by leashes ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... contrived hiding-place, nor by Margaret's ready wit; but by a good impulse in one of his captors, by the bit of humanity left in a somewhat reckless fellow's heart, aided by his desire of gain. So mixed and seemingly incongruous are human motives, so shortsighted ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... vague idea of a law about keeping birds, but he couldn't exactly recall what it was. There was something incongruous about Mrs. Pierpont Pumpelly keeping a cockatoo. What did anybody want of a cockatoo? He concluded that it must be an ancestral hereditament from Athens, Ohio. Nervously he ascended the stairs to what Edna ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... horned athlete we are apt to think of when we associate the great lawgiver with marble, but staid and stately in full drapery. He strikes the rock of Meribah, and water exudes from its crevices into a marble basin. Outside the circular rim of this are equidistantly arranged the rather incongruous effigies of Archbishop Carroll, his relative the Signer, Commodore Barry and Father Mathew. Each of these worthies presides over a small font designed for drinking purposes—unless that of the old sea-dog be salt. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... more for the death of an infant unable to provide for itself in the world of spirits, than for one who had attained manhood and was capable of taking care of himself. An interesting instance of this is given by Major Carver, and furnishes at once, affecting evidence of their incongruous creed and of their parental ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... sonnet Nuptial Sleep from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr. Watts took the view (to Rossetti's great vexation at first) that this sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic point of view, was "out of place and altogether incongruous in a group of sonnets so entirely spiritual as The House of Life," and Rossetti gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... if we think of Christ's assumption of human nature as, in any respect, an incongruous act of humiliation. For man was made in the image of God; so that when Christ was made flesh, without sin, he took upon himself that which, in some sense, was congruous with his divine nature. His humiliation consisted, in part, in his doing this; but ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... had all the pride of her class; the Irish saloon-keeper with his shining tall hat, the loud-talking mate of the lake schooner, the trim sentinel pacing the fort walls, were nothing to her, and this somewhat incongruous hauteur gave her the ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and the resuscitation of Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Caleb in the Bride, Triptolemus and Halcro in the Pirate, are all laborious, and the first incongruous; half a volume of the Abbot is spent in extremely dull detail of Roland's relations with his fellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do with the future story; and the lady of Avenel herself disappears after the first volume, 'like a snaw wreath when it's ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common councils, and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Heber, heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to be on terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint poem in contemplation. What a strange, incongruous dream ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Second is undoubtedly Marlowe's masterpiece. It marks the elevation of the Chronicle History Play to its highest possibilities, and is, at the same time, a deeply moving tragedy. One wonders how Peele could write the medley of incongruous and ill-connected scenes which we know under the abbreviated title of Edward the First after having once seen his rival's 'history' acted. For the strength of Marlowe's play lies in its concentration upon the figure of the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... popular religion by direct description before or even during the Buddhist period, but we have fragmentary indications of its character. Firstly several incongruous observances have obtruded themselves into the Brahmanic ritual. Thus in the course of the Mahavrata ceremony[237] the Hotri priest sits in a swing and maidens, carrying pitchers of water on their heads and singing, dance round an altar while drums are beaten. Parallels to this may ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the sunny lawn, with its trees and their long shadows, with its shrubberies, its bright flower-beds, its marble benches, its artificial ruin; over the lake, with its coloured sails, its incongruous puffing steamboats; down the valley, away to the rosy peaks of Monte Sfiorito, and the deep blue sky behind them. She plucked a spray of jessamine, and brushed the cool white blossoms across her cheek, and inhaled their ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... of the keenest, namely, whether he had breakfasted that morning or no? It was in this twilight humour, now thinking of the loss of the child, then involuntarily compelled to meditate upon the somewhat incongruous subject of hung beef, rolls, and butter, that his route, which was different from that which he had taken in the morning, conducted him past the small ruined tower, or rather vestige of a tower, called by the country people the Kaim ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... could mentally congratulate his successor on having an hour still to sit in Miss Fancourt's drawing-room. He himself might use that hour for another visit, but by the time he reached the Marble Arch the idea of such a course had become incongruous to him. He passed beneath that architectural effort and walked into the Park till he got upon the spreading grass. Here he continued to walk; he took his way across the elastic turf and came out by the Serpentine. He watched with a friendly eye the diversions ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... sides of the road may be seen a variety of incongruous edifices, called villas and cottage ornees, peeping up in all the pride of a retired linen-draper, or the consequential authority of a man in office, in as many varied styles of architecture as of dispositions ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... hearers came under the influence of the earnest look from the deeply-set eyes and of the absolute integrity of purpose and of devotion to principle which were behind the thought and the words of the speaker. In place of a "wild and woolly" talk, illumined by more or less incongruous anecdotes; in place of a high-strung exhortation of general principles or of a fierce protest against Southern arrogance, the New Yorkers had presented to them a calm but forcible series of well-reasoned considerations upon which ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... be thus prepared, where the meaning seems plain and obvious, to believe that the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation which implies that when he came to speak of himself he said what he did not mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions, incongruous or inappropriate. And if in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer that they are imitations of Petrarch, or that the genius of the poet, cribbed ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... to be an old joke about "Horse Marines." A sailorman on a horse is an incongruous thing—a sight to make you hold your sides. But the marines are not plain sailormen. They are "soldier and sailor, too," and as soldiers they have turned the joke on the old saw about "horse marines." ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... to laugh is comparatively unimportant in politics, but it affords a good instance of the way in which a practical politician has to allow for pre-rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate effect of the recognition of the incongruous, just as trembling is of the recognition of danger. It may have been evolved because an animal which suffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have been the merely accidental result of ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... publication. But that she should be an habitual, professional author, with a passion for her art, and a fountain-pen and an agent, and sums down in advance of royalties on sales in Canada and Australia, and a profound knowledge of human character, and an essentially sane outlook, is somehow incongruous with my notions—my mistaken notions, if you will—of what ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... of the author's reading is remarkable, and he has a wonderful gift of illustration. But he was not content to trust to the interest of the subject to make his book popular, and tried to attract readers by placing it in a most incongruous setting. There is something almost offensive in telling the story of men like Tauler, Suso, and Juan of the Cross, in the form of smart conversations at a house-party, and the jokes cracked at the expense of the benighted "mystics" are not always in the best taste. Vaughan ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... height, in four stages, gradually diminishing in area upwards, the lower part supported by buttresses, and the summit crowned by battlements, with a small bell-turret and vane. More interesting than the tower itself—which is, in fact, an incongruous addition to the church—are the Bells which it contains, a precious inheritance from the Augustinian Canons, and in some respects the most remarkable in London. The foundry stamp shows them to have been cast by Thomas Bullisdon, who died about 1510. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... centuries ago, and how intimately they knew me! A strange trio we made—he, the little wizened English hermit; she, the Italian woman in her nun's habit; and I in my modern Bond Street clothes: outwardly we were indeed incongruous, we had no links, but inwardly we were bound together by bonds of the ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... banks of the Lago Maggiore.—Rousseau mentions somewhere, that it was once his intention to place the scene of the Heloise in the Borromean Islands. What a French idea! How strangely incongruous had the pastoral simplicity of his lovers appeared in such a scene! It must have changed, if not the whole plan, at least the whole colouring of the tale. Imagine la divine JULIE tripping up and down the artificial terraces of the Isola ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... parting from her uncle necessarily involved parting from his son. She hated him; still, to lose sight of him altogether would be very hard to bear. To go with Philippus and live with him as his sister would never do; nay, it struck her as something inconceivable, strangely incongruous. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the incongruous mixture called the family, were there assembled, including the Professor. The latter was just then discussing the condition of his patient with Miss Payne, in blissful ignorance of the fact that the young lady was fully conversant with his mode of treatment, ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Castle, a very ruinous pile of incongruous masonry that stood in a wild and dreary part of Galway, that I passed my infancy and youth. When a mere child I was left an orphan to the care of my worthy uncle. My father, whose extravagance had well sustained the family reputation, had squandered a large and handsome property in contesting ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... of trade became clogged and blocked by its constant increase. Auction houses became the means of brokerage; and their number increased to such an extent that half a dozen red flags at last dotted every block on Main street. And incongruous, indeed, were the mixtures exposed at these sales, as well as in the windows of the smallest shops in Richmond. In the latter, bonnets rested on the sturdy legs of cavalry boots; rolls of ribbon were festooned along the crossed barrel ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... date and an address: the reply came giving a date, and an address, too—but an address wrapped up in cypher, which, of course, I, as a supposed member of the society, was expected to be able to read. At any rate, I now knew the significance of the incongruous circumstance that the Latin proverb mens sana etc. should be adopted as the motto of a Greek society; the significance lay in this, that the motto contained an address—the address of their meeting-place, or at least, of their chief meeting-place. I was ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... inside this recess the water was rotting, green-scummed; and a powerful fermentation filled the nostrils with hot fever-smells. In the center of the ditch the broad, flat head of a caribao emerged slightly above the water; the floating lilies made an incongruous wreath about the great horns and the beatifically-shut eyes, and the thick, humid nose exhaled ecstasy in shuddering ripplets over ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... thought almost like spoken words kept running through his mind—"A little girl—a little girl in Old Salem"—for the almost two hundred years gave her the right to that eminence, and a little girl from a foreign land seemed incongruous. Not but that there were little girls in Salem, but their life-lines did not touch his. And this one came so near, for the sake of both parents ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... reminds me that one distressing phase of early rising is the incongruous and unpleasant contact of the preceding night. The social yesterday is not fairly over before nine A. M. to-day, and there is always a humorous, sometimes a pathetic, lapping over the edges. I remember ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... there was a strange and incongruous mixture of medicine and exorcism. Notice the ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... connection with Sterne, being largely stylistic and illustrative, may be designated as a drapery of foreign humor about his own seriousness of theorizing. Wieland's Hellenic tendencies make the use of British humor all the more incongruous.[37] ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... been her scholar, with such edifying resignation did she submit to the dispensation," returned the clergyman, uttering these long words in a broad northern accent which had nothing incongruous in it to Richard's ears, and taking advantage of the lady's absence on "hospitable tasks intent" to speak ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... blush of confusion to my cheek. A silly notion had induced me to don my full evening regalia, spike-tail coat and all. Nothing could have been more ludicrously incongruous than my appearance, I am sure, and I never felt more ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... landscape gardening as well as architecture, but the former has been neglected. The one thing that strikes a stranger and almost bewilders him is the vivid colors. They seem unnatural and inappropriate for a sacred city, but are not more incongruous ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... is truly a tenement dweller, and his home is occupied not only by his own kind, but by owls and rattlesnakes. Most naturalists believe that these incongruous families live in perfect harmony; but it is a well-known fact that the snake occasionally devours the young prairie-dogs, and he must be considered by them as an intruder who procured board and ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... hopelessly unable to see the need of having the unfortunate Mr. Linden shot at all. Everything was going on very well before, as nearly as we could see, and nothing appears to come of it, after all,—not even the condign punishment of the incongruous and never-to-be-sufficiently-marvelled-at assassin, who is suspected by several people, and yet remains as unharmed as if murder on the highway were altogether too common an occurrence in New England to excite ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... he never takes his characters from the borrowed story, because it was less trouble and more fun to him to create them afresh; but none the less he heaps the murders and villainies of the borrowed story on his own essentially gentle creations without scruple, no matter how incongruous they may be. And all the time his vital need for a philosophy drives him to seek one by the quaint professional method of introducing philosophers as characters into his plays, and even of making his heroes philosophers; but when they come on the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw |
