"Prosy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... engagement for the evening, and, being alone, was glad of even the companionship of a prosy attorney. ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... many years of his life had old Isaac Mole led a wandering career, that he found it exceedingly difficult, not to say irksome, to settle down to the prosy existence which they had all ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... to utter aloud. They remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries; " How beautiful!" "Cursed prosy!" "I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all." "I think Pelham is a sad dandy." Mr. Croker is perpetually stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in the language, to observe that really Dr. Johnson was very rude, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... art. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless. To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing, short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to our souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... acquainted with the family of scarlet fish, and some handsome gold-fish. Two of the gold-fish, called respectively Gay and Gilt, were particularly friendly to Sammy, who soon found them much more entertaining than the worthy, but somewhat prosy Pilot. ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... and rivers and mountains of Germany are full of all sorts of strange sprites, and you know the people believe in them, and that is one of the things which make life in the Old World so fascinating. But here we are too prosy and practical and business-like, and we don't believe in anything except what we can touch with our hands, and see with our eyes, and ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... terribly prosy and serious and learned and philosophical. It is worse than being religious, at OUR ages. (The ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... polyhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes colours like a chameleon, and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound; then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull—oh so very dull! it is an ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... favorable Answer) your unknown Adorer." The custom of inserting letters in the course of the story was, as has already been indicated, a heritage from the times of Gomberville, La Calprenede, and the Scuderys when miscellaneous material of all sorts from poetry to prosy conversations was habitually used to diversify the narrative. Mrs. Haywood, however, employed the letter not to ornament but to intensify. Her billets-doux like the lyrics in a play represent moments of supreme emotion. In seeking vividness she ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... Arden, my old friend, I grow prosy, and you tire; Fill the glasses while I bend To prod up the failing fire. . . . You are restless:—I presume There's a dampness in the room.— Much of warmth our nature begs, With rheumatics in our legs! ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... the day is long," said Augusta, "but rather prosy, after all. This tiresome temperance business! One never hears the end of it nowadays. Temperance papers—temperance tracts—temperance hotels—temperance this, that, and the other thing, even down to temperance pocket handkerchiefs for little ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of heat, and the light steam of evaporation lay along the sluggish water and hung like a veil between the eye and the bank. Seated in an armchair and overcome by the heat and the droning of some prosy passengers near by, I fell asleep. When I awoke the guards were crowded with passengers in a high state of excitement, pointing and craning shoreward. Looking in the same direction I saw, through the haze, the sharp outlines ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... like the one that Daisy was married in. Instead of being all in white, she was married in the dress she happened to have on when she ran away,—just an old black walking skirt and plaid shirt-waist. No veil, no trail, and no orange-blossoms, and she had counted on having all three. It was so prosy and commonplace after the grand ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... his tail against the floor, with a sort of glimmer of fun in his eyes, as though he comprehended our conversation, and interposed a "Hear, hear!" and when he had had enough of it, and we were growing prosy, he would turn over on his back with an expression of abject weariness, as though canine reticence ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, "Women," was pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be "the best after dinner speech ever made." Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming altogether into his own.—[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be preserved. The reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in Appendix G, at ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... you would use it oftener than any of the other pieces of furniture. I shall make it so deliciously easy that you will make me 'Knight of the Chair,' and perhaps permit me to play a sort of devoted John Brown to your Victoria. You will need one dull and prosy squire to arrange your pillows, so that you can laugh at Jack's jokes without weariness, and doze quietly while Geoff and Uncle Doc are ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover, there is a progression—I cannot call it a progress—in his work towards a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau: "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like 'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I must say in passing, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... keep alive the natural wickedness in man, to set snares and evil mischances before the feet of simpler folk, to teach youth to be idle and young men to be quarrelsome, to lure rogues to their ruin; but, above all, to import wit into prosy dialogues, merriment into dull situations. Such is 'the Vice'. Hear ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... he, as he blotted and sealed the letter. "That, I should say, is as prosy and didactic as a discourse of my venerated ancestor. I wonder if the tendency to sermonize runs in the blood. I dare say if I had the good fortune to have any religious convictions, I should dogmatize over them ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... before the opening, which was attended by the musical elite of Europe (whatever that may mean), poets, critics, managers, composers, princely folk, musical parasites, and other east winds, as Nietzsche has it, the performance went on leaden feet. The acting of Victor Arnold (Berlin) as prosy old Jourdain just bordered on the burlesque; Camilla Eibenschuetz, not unknown to New York, cleared the air with her unaffected merriment. Strauss, after a delightful overture in the rococo manner of Gretry, contributes some fascinating dance measures, a minuetto, a polonaise, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... reader not to be alarmed at the hacknied word, which generally augurs that a person is going to be very egotistical and prosy. This, at least, it will be my ambition to avoid. Nor is it my intention to assume its literary prerogatives in any way as a mask for a sort of mock humility, endeavouring to impose upon good-natured persons by protestations of demerits, want ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... clear the spot where the trees grew must once have been above the level of the sea, so that it is certain the land must have been depressed by at least as many thousand feet as the superincumbent subaqueous deposits are thick. But I am afraid you will tell me I am prosy with ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... whether his proposal was carried. The Club de la Delivrance is by far the most reputable public assembly in Paris. Those who take part in its proceedings are intensely respectable, and as intensely dull and prosy. The suppression of gas has been a heavy blow to the clubs. The Parisians like gas as much as lazzaroni like sunshine. The grandest bursts of patriotic eloquence find no response from an audience who listen to them beneath half-a-dozen petroleum lamps. It is somewhat ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... to Prospero's advantage to have the King killed, since Ferdinand would then succeed to the throne of Naples? Did Ariel's intervention kill the plot? What light is thrown on the characters by scene i. of this act? Do you think it is intended to be shown that Gonzalo is prosy and tiresome, although good, or only that the lower and more frivolous characters find him so? Which is the likelier, that Shakespeare intended the dialogue about Gonzalo's ideal commonwealth to be a satire upon it, or favorable to Utopian schemes? Which comes out the better at last in the ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... have done enough duty for one day?" asks Molly. "Have I been prosy enough to allow of my leaving off now? Because I don't think I have got anything more to say about the coming harvest, and I wouldn't care to say it if ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... all this Thomasin was not sorry that she had started. To her there were not, as to Eustacia, demons in the air, and malice in every bush and bough. The drops which lashed her face were not scorpions, but prosy rain; Egdon in the mass was no monster whatever, but impersonal open ground. Her fears of the place were rational, her dislikes of its worst moods reasonable. At this time it was in her view a windy, wet place, in which a person might experience much discomfort, lose the path without ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... an hypothetical person whom Sir W. Scott makes use of to introduce some of his novels by means of prefatory letters. The word is a synonym for a dull, prosy, plodding historian, with great show of learning, but very ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... mentally noted, for introduction at a more favourable time. It will mean that the teacher will respect the continuity of thought and interest as completely as she would wish an audience to respect her occasional prosy periods if she were reading a report. She will remember, of course, that she is not training actors for amateur theatricals, however tempting her show-material may be; she is simply letting the children play with expression, just as a gymnasium ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... prefer plain prose. It may amuse those who feel like that to remember that hundreds of years ago it was just the other way round. Then it was prose that was considered dull—hence we have the word prosy. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... prosy thing of four U's,' said Geraldine. 'You are sitting up there, you great fair creature, you, for the poor child to worship and adore, and not ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... yet, early in the afternoon, and the riotous beams, who are no respecter of persons, and who honor the righteous and the ungodly alike, are playing merrily in this sombre chamber, given so entirely up to science and its prosy ways, daring even now to dance lightly on the professor's head, which has begun to ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... man in bed. Had he done this artistic bit of acting for the purpose of spending his Christmas on the flat of his back talking to a prosy old doctor? He lay still, trying to think what answer could be made to this physician who told him seriously that he had appendicitis. He ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... younger Holbein; while the heads of the two boys are very like those which we shall find later in a drawing in the Berlin Gallery. From the pronounced way in which his father's hand rests on little Hans' head, while the left points him out,—and even his elder brother "Prosy" shows by his attitude the special notice to be taken of Hans,—it is clear that if this is a portrait-group either it was painted when the boys were actually older, or the younger had already given some astonishing proof of that precocity which his early works display; ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... in it. I can't get the story from Mustapha, who is ashamed of such superstitions, but I'll find it out. We had a fantasia at Mustapha's for young Strutt and Co., and a very good dancing-girl. Some dear old prosy English people made me laugh so. The lady wondered how the women here could wear clothes 'so different from English females—poor things!' but they were not malveillants, only pitying and wonderstruck—nothing astonished them so much as ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... poetical and fanciful," said Rex, glancing down into the beautiful brilliant face beside him. "My thoughts are so dull and prosy compared with yours, are you not afraid you will have a ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... the type which the village barber had etched so clearly for Trenholme's benefit. Whatsoever quickening of romance might have crept into such lives had long yielded to atrophy. Marriage, to the girl's imaginative mind, was synonymous with a dull and prosy middle age. Most certainly the vague day-dreams evoked by her reading of books and converted into alluring vistas by an ever-widening horizon were not sated by the prospect of becoming the wife of either of the only two ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... to me how important it is that a poet, or any other writer, should be a critic of himself. Wordsworth, who was a really great poet, was great only at rare intervals. His habitual mood was dull and prosy. His sin was that he kept on writing during those moods, grinding out sonnets by the hundred—one hundred and thirty-two ecclesiastical sonnets, and over half as many on liberty, all very dull and wooden. His mill kept on grinding whether it had ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... breakfasted, therefore, later than usual—after the rest of the family; and at this meal pour lui soulager he ordered the luxury of a muffin. Now it so chanced that he had only finished half the muffin, and drunk one cup of tea, when he was called into the shop by a customer of great importance—a prosy old lady, who always gave her orders with remarkable precision, and who valued herself on a character for affability, which she maintained by never buying a penny riband without asking the shopman how all his family ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Whole affair stunning. Turkey and mince-pies first-rate. Champagne might have been drier—but, tol lol! Uncle BOB rather prosy, but his girls capital ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... most daring of the girls, and galloped clumsily around like a sportive and giddy elephant set free for the first time in its native jungle, and finding it very much to its liking. His daughter Maria, faithfully at her mother's side, sat with one ear grudgingly lent to the prosy heaviness of Mr. Webb's light talk, and her whole face turned longingly toward the spot where the happy sinners were gyrating, and, seeing her father there, her round eyes grew rounder than ever, as she watched in breathless ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... manifested less and less of the apostolic virtue of suffering bores gladly, and though always delightful to his intimate friends, he was less and less inclined to curry favour with mere acquaintances. A characteristic instance of this latter manner has been given to the world in a book of chit-chat by a prosy gentleman whose name it would be unkind ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... sat for some eight hours every day, transcribing (when I imagined eyes were upon me) documents of every description in every possible hand, Blackstone kept company with Ab Gwilym—the polished English lawyer of the last century, who wrote long and prosy chapters on the rights of things—with a certain wild Welshman, who some four hundred years before that time indited immortal cowydds and odes to the wives of Cambrian chieftains—more particularly to one Morfydd, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the full attention that should be given to such a brilliant and original essayist (which is not always an ipso facto of brilliant essayists) as Chesterton. Essayists are of all men extremely elastic. Occasionally they are dull and prosy, very often they are obscure, quite often they are wearisome. The only criticism which applies adversely to Chesterton as an essayist is that he is very often—and I rather fear he likes being so—obscure. He is brilliant in an original manner, he is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughly English if he had not in him some fibre of la nation boutiquiere. Let us now see how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science (the most obstinately prosy material) with poetry. Speaking of "a more exact knowledge of the longitudes," as he explains in a ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... A certain prosy preacher recently gave an endless discourse on the prophets. First he dwelt at length on the minor prophets. At last he finished them, and the congregation gave a sigh of relief. He took a long breath and continued: "Now I shall proceed to the ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various
... open" to me. By the middle of February I had gone three times through the inimitable classic, Cobwebs-to-catch-Flies, and read at least six other books through twice, besides being up to my eyes and over the head of my understanding in Sandford and Merton, that most fascinating of prosy impossibilities. Beside the classic I have named, and Rosamond, Harry and Lucy, Berquin's Children's Friend, Mrs. Sherwood's Little Henry and His Bearer and Fairchild Family, Anna Ross and Helen Maurice, we had no books that were written expressly for children. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... little, and I could see the top of Eloise's head, with its crown of reddish-brown hair, on which a gleam of sunshine from a window fell, bringing out tints of gold, as well as red. That sounds rather poetical, don't it? for a prosy chap who professes never to have been moved by any piece of femininity, however dainty. I'll confess I was moved by this little girl. She is very slight and very young, I judge. I like Mrs. Brown, and do not think her perfumery bad, or ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... into the latter, and am rewarded with my first Cis-atlantic header, but fortunately both myself and the bicycle come up uninjured. Unlike the Swabish peasantry, the natives east of Munich appear as prosy and unpicturesque in dress as ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... in a plush-bottomed and gilt hammock-chair near a tiled fireplace, with Japanese fans on the mantel and a glow of coals in the grate. Lifting her hands, she glanced wearily here and there into the many pages. It was not her fault they were so prosy, so completely uninteresting—from "My darling wife" at the beginning, to "Your loving husband" at the end. She couldn't be really expected to understand all these ship affairs. She was glad, of course, to ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... put the book on his desk, tightened his belt, buttoned his coat and took up the prosy records of Caesar. Pebble Stone showed him the place. He straightened up and, glancing at the ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... elderly in appearance than his years warranted. He was bald and clean-shaved but for scraps of side-whiskers that gave him a resemblance to the traditional stage-lawyer of amateur theatricals, a likeness increased by his heavy and prosy manner. It was hard to believe that he had ever been a young subaltern, though such had once been the case, for the Indian Political Department is recruited chiefly from officers of the Indian Army. But he was never the gay and ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... not argue out that question, but went on talking in a low prosy tone, as we sat there with our backs supported against the cliff; and I suppose it must have been Bob's low muttering voice, mingled with the darkness, the natural hour for sleep, and the murmuring of the waves, ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... All prosy dull society sinners, Who chatter and bleat and bore, Are sent to hear sermons From mystical Germans Who preach from ten to four: The amateur tenor, whose vocal villainies All desire to shirk, Shall, during off-hours, Exhibit his powers To Madame Tussaud's waxwork: The lady who ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... quite forget, or even the occasional grossness or harshness of sentiment which contrasts so strongly with the superficial polish. A genuine report of even the best conversation would be intolerably prosy and unimaginative. But imagine the very pith and essence of such talk brought to a focus, concentrated into the smallest possible space with the infinite dexterity of a thoroughly trained hand, and ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... louder and louder, and repeated six or seven times, is also familiar to most ears; but its wild, ringing, rapturous burst of song in the air high above the tree-tops is not so well known. From a very prosy, tiresome, unmelodious singer, it is suddenly transformed for a brief moment into a lyric poet of great power. It is a great surprise. The bird undergoes a complete transformation. Ordinarily it is a very quiet, demure sort of bird. It ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... list of events, as prosy and commonplace as a private's or a carpenter's or a sutler's diary. However, there is more sense in this poor man's performance; he flies his true colours from the first; he has cleared the ground for some educated ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... in his morning paper. It was his custom to seize the journals the moment they arrived, and read to Dora at the breakfast-table all war news of vital interest—and a good deal more that was prosy, and only interesting to a soldier. By chance, he saw the story of Dick's death before his daughter came upon the scene, and was discreet enough not to mention the matter. Since Dora's refusal of Ormsby, he was fairly certain as to the nature of his daughter's feelings toward ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... refreshing in a sailor's yarn. I have listened to hundreds in the course of my consular career, and have yet to find one that is dull or prosy. They all bear the imprint of truth, perhaps a trifle overdrawn, but nevertheless sparkling with the salt of the sea and redolent of the romance of strange people and distant lands. In listening, one becomes almost dizzy at the rapidity with which the scene and personnel change. The icebergs and ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... him, but every now and then he came in so apropos that I am morally certain he gets a hint from somebody who watches the course of the conversation, and means through him to have a hand in it and stop any of us when we are getting prosy. But in consequence of That Boy's indiscretion, we were without a check upon our expansiveness, and ran on in the way you have observed and may be ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Hamlet is no mean test of a translator's ability—this quick, tense scene, one of the finest in dramatic literature. Foersom did it with conspicuous success. Blom has reduced it to the following prosy stuff: ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... before referred to, accompanied by a cur-dog, whose business it was to mind the farm, but who took as much delight in running away from prosy duty as if he had been a schoolboy, would frequently steal off and have a good hunt all by themselves, just for the fun of the thing, I suppose. I more than half suspect that it was as a kind of taunt or retaliation that ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... experience was so entirely new to him, that he became more deeply interested than the little learner herself. He went to church on Sunday, and was probably the most attentive listener the rather prosy ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... which he had already sacrificed fortune, position, home. Of his own brilliant past at the most luxurious court the world had ever known. He fired her enthusiasm, delighted her imagination, enchained her soul to his: she was literally swept off the prosy face of this earth and whirled into a realm of romance, enchanting, ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... this life soon wore away, and I found myself the creature of no romance, but plodding along a prosy road with very ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... notice of you and flatter you with their eyes and tongues, and you come to have the same interest in the world that other men have—and why shouldn't you?—then your imagination will not be running away with you, or making angels out of common little persons like myself—how dreadfully prosy and commonplace you have no idea! And I forbid you to allow Willie to stick your hat full of flowers, when you go fishing together; and order you to make that young impudence respectful to you on all occasions—asserting your authority, if necessary. And, lastly, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... two persons make concordant consecutive noises for ten minutes, the effect upon their relativities is one that without them might not have come about in ten weeks. We are not prepared to condemn the Philosopher, for once. He is prosy, as usual; but what he says refers to an indisputable truth. Nothing turns diversity into duality quicker ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... money made between human beings otherwise equal. He had a democratic philosophy which is sometimes that of Mr. Micawber, "Celui-la est riche qui recoit plus qu'il ne consume; celui-la est pauvre dont la depense excede la recette," But he is seldom so prosy as this. Let us think of him as one who wished to turn his talent as a painter of still life to the benefit of his nation, and who succeeded in a degree far beyond his ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... he resigned himself to a long, tedious hour. The room was hot and airless, the lawyer very prosy and unnecessarily fluent; but he seemed a straightforward, honest man, and gave them good counsel. Malcolm was soon put into possession of all the Strickland bequest, and after this it was all ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... which deals with the period from the outbreak of the French Revolution to the restoration of the Bourbons, and extends, in its original form (1833-42), to 10 vols. The work is one of vast industry, and gives a useful account of an important epoch, but is extremely diffuse and one-sided, and often prosy. Disraeli satirises the author in Coningsby as Mr. Wordy, who wrote a history to prove that Providence was on the side of the Tories. It had, however, an enormous sale. A continuation of it (1852-59) brought the story down to the accession of Louis Napoleon. A. was also the author ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... his little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such ravishing clearness ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... evening meeting of a scientific club, which was to be held at the house of a distinguished member. I was very reluctant to ask him to be present, for I knew he could be easily bored, and I was fearful that a prosy essay or geological speech might ensue, and I knew he would be exasperated with me, even although I were the innocent cause of his affliction. My worst fears were realized. We had hardly got seated, before a dull, bilious-looking old gentleman rose, and applied ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... am afraid, doctor, our age is too prosy for that sort of thing. We have neither wit enough, nor poetry enough, to furnish the disputants. I can conceive a state of society in which such tensons would form a pleasant winter evening amusement: but that state of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... shores, if any one were foolish enough to wish to attack us. If we need an army at all, we should need one ten times the size, but we don't. Nature has seen to that. Yet tonight, when I was particularly anxious to get on with some important domestic legislation, we had to sit and listen to hours of prosy military talk, the possibilities of this and that. They don't realise, these brain-fogged ex-military men, that we are living in days of common sense. Before many years have passed, war will belong ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... snuffy, tiresome, prosy professor? How can you talk such nonsense? I am sure the author must be young; there is ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... on. So that's all right, and don't you worry. Your partner, John Ingalls, is as nice as he can be to me. Why did you not tell me how good looking he was? Maybe you never discovered it—you slow, prosy old Joe! When you wrote to me of that rich find you stumbled on, I was sorry you had picked up a partner; for you always did trust folks too much, and I was afraid you'd be cheated by the stranger you picked up. But I guess that I was wrong, ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the only word I can think of that exactly describes him—dull and prosy. I don't say that he is not a good man. He may be. I don't say that he is not. I have never seen any sign of it, if he is. But I make it a rule never to say anything to take ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... Prefect's political and society talk, then to stories of the General's campaigns. Under the influence of the despised wine of Anjou, Monsieur de Mauves, whose temper needed no sweetening, became a little sleepy, prosy, and long-winded. General Ratoneau on his side was mightily cheered, and showed quite a new animation: long before the meal ended, he was talking more than the other three put together. It was he who had been the hero of Eylau, of Friedland, of Wagram; ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... and he stops at each tap to inquire angrily what it is that is not right; he shortly resolves, however, to pay no heed to the spiteful enemy, but cover over the interruptions with his voice. Louder and louder and ever more breathlessly he sings, a lyric that is more prosy than prose, a piece of common statement of facts, tortured into verse, which attains metre only by throwing the accent continually, ludicrously, on the wrong syllables. The melody, nasal and snuffling, is the very prose, too, of music. A ridiculous, dead-in-earnest song, relating ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... question being interpreted to the watcher, he replied that treason had been their end, diabolical treason and priest-craft. He then, being rendered communicative by drink, delivered a long prosy narrative, the purport of which was as follows. These honest gentlemen who now dangled here so miserably were all stout men and true, and lived in the forest by their wits. Their independence and thriving state excited the jealousy and hatred of a large portion of mankind, and many attempts were ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover? In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what was he? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You, prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shaking down the furnace fire, while the children are being put to bed, you dare to call "It might have been" the saddest words of tongue or pen? Those now almost forgotten dreams of what might have been are the best you ever were. Remember ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... my speech was voted prosy, and that my want of vivacity tended to prevent the interruptions which had been organized, and that it would have been impossible to make an oration more mild and inoffensive. This was exactly what ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... horrid, I think," laughed the little old lady, "and if you will let me think a few minutes, and then forgive my prosy way of telling it, you shall ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... hall, A prosy speaker, such a duffer, A mob that loves to stamp and bawl, Noise, suffocation—how ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... to me across the thousands of miles of land and sea, carried by sooty train and boat, buried in a dross of mail in prosy canvas sacks: I open them with the delight one feels when he brushes aside the mat of damp and frosty withered leaves to find the timid beauty ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... little girl," answers Eugene, "and you were always so shy, except with the professor. Did you really like him so much? I should have been bored to death with all that prosy writing. Briggs," turning to the rower, as Violet covers Cecil more closely, "we will steer our barque homeward. It is a shame not to stay out ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Dangler's prosy platitudes, which some deemed wit—Horner, par exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... rationalistic doctrines was the "prosaism" into which it led many minor versifiers. These poetasters, afraid of overstepping the limits of good sense, tabooed all imagination and described in deliberately prosy lines the most commonplace events. The movement reached its height at the beginning of the reign of Charles IV (1788-1808) and produced such efforts as a poem to the gout, a nature-poem depicting barn-yard sounds, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... friend and attract him from places of idle amusement; and I knew that a well-timed evening-call at his bachelor home meant a dozen or two of oysters, a glass of old brown sherry, a fragrant cigar and an hour's chat which was often instructive and never prosy. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... enchanting smile. There was a reason for the smile—a reason strictly feminine, yet doubly masculine. She had walked down the steps that led from the piazza betwixt Rich Hilary and Jack Adair, the catches of the season, in full view of the Hammond girl, who was left to waste her sweetness upon prosy old Van Ammerer. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... again and again that Tyndall was the greatest teacher he ever knew or heard of, inspiring the pupil to discover for himself, to do, to become, rather than imparting prosy facts of doubtful pith and moment. But Herbert Spencer, not being eligible to join a university club himself, was possibly ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is usually ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... nobody has more than a few, and you get to know them all off by heart. The books always say such a lot between the happening parts, and if you skip too much you lose part of the story. The story people all sit down and fold their hands, and wait till the close thick pages of prosy prosy are over, and when they get up again and go on they have forgotten their parts. Pappy says I shall like reading when I'm older; but I'm not older, and I don't like it. I just like to be doing something, and oh, dear, there is nothing ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... is not so prosy, The woods with mirth o'erflow, To me life seems all rosy, My trumpet ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... Pope's train of thought. A careful examination of his arguments in detail would be wholly out of place here. The reader who wishes to pursue the subject further may consult Warburton's elaborate vindication of Pope's argument, and Elwin's equally prosy refutation, or better still the admirable summary by Leslie Stephen in the chapter on this poem in his life of Pope ('English Men of Letters'). No one is now likely to turn to the writer of the early eighteenth century for a system of the universe, least of all to ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... doubt. We may fairly conjecture that Othello's passion for the simple Venetian damsel was love at first sight. He loved Desdemona because she was pretty, and looked at him with sweet maidenly glances of pity when he told those prosy stories of his—with full traveller's license, no doubt—over ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... be misunderstood; we well know that the humorous, the grotesque, the sublime may use ugliness to serve their own legitimate purposes, but then that ugliness must be humorous, grotesque, or sublime, and not flat, prosy, or revolting. A blemish is by no means necessarily an ugliness. A leaf nibbled by insects and consequently discolored, a lad with ragged jacket and soiled trowsers, a peasant girl with bent hat and tattered gown, are often more picturesque objects than the perfect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... capricious, and never surly; neither are they, like some clever folks, pertinaciously silent when we most wish them to shine. Did Shakespeare ever refuse his best thoughts to us, or Montaigne decline to be companionable? Did you ever find Moliere dull? or Lamb prosy? or Scott unentertaining?" ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... I have been prosy and practical enough and now have used my allotted time and space. It may not be wholly out of place to further tax your time and patience, and ask you to lift your eyes from taking a critical view of defective drains, ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Morris Stories" is to sow the seed of pure, noble, manly character in the mind of our great nation's childhood. They exhibit the virtues and vices of childhood, not in prosy, unreadable precepts, but in a series of characters which move before the imagination, as living beings do ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... circumstances of his humiliation and of his forlorn and pathetic death not less than the roistering frolics and jocund mendacity of his life and character—is essential to a right appreciation of the meaning of him. Shakespeare is never a prosy moralist, but he constantly teaches you, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, that the moral law of the universe, working continually for goodness and not for evil, operates in an inexorable manner. Yet it is not of any moral consideration that the spectator of Falstaff ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Saturday which ends Lent. We go to the Jesuits' church in the morning to hear the last sermon. Since Thursday at noon, as the organs have been silenced, harps and violins have taken their places. The sermon is long and prosy, and we rejoice that it is the last. Then the service of the day goes on until they come to the "Gloria in excelsis." The organ peals out again, the black curtain—which has hidden the high altar—parts ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... to be any one that is not read or recited; impromptu keeps its original sense, denoting something that springs from the instant; the impromptu utterance is generally brief, direct, and vigorous; the extemporaneous speech may chance to be prosy. Offhand is still more emphatic as to the readiness and freedom of the utterance. Unpremeditated is graver and more formal, denoting absolute want of preparation, but is rather too heavy a word to be applied to such apt, ready utterance as ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... scope for the epic writer. The Greek mythology was ready to hand, but it was hard for a Roman to treat it with high enthusiasm, and still harder to handle it with freshness and individuality. The purely historical epic is from its very nature doomed to failure. Treated with accuracy it becomes prosy, treated with fancy it becomes ridiculous. Vergil saw the one possible avenue to epic greatness. He went back into the legendary past where imagination could have free play, linked together the great heroic sagas of Greece with the scanty materials presented by the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... This must necessarily be done somewhat in the manner of Mr. Gradgrind. I am sorry thus to tax the reader's patience; but facts, which enjoy quite a reputation for stubbornness, cannot easily be wrought into fancies. Color the map as you will, it is but a prosy picture after all. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... time to cease," cried Media. "What have you to do with cogitations not in verse, minstrel? Leave prose to Babbalanja, who is prosy enough." ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... be punctual to a moment in her hours; a grievous yoke to her who had never been educated to submit to any. To dress with the most careful attention to neatness, though there was "nothing but a pack of women to look at her"—to listen to "a prosy book"—a book, I forgot to say, was read aloud in the work-room—instead of gossiping and having a little fun; and to walk out on Sundays under the wing of that old, hideous harridan, Mrs. Sterling, instead of going with ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... and safer settlements, the Indians had found devoted friends before Philip's War; and even now they had apologists and defenders, prominent among whom was that relic of antique Puritanism, old Samuel Sewall, who was as conscientious and humane as he was prosy, narrow, and sometimes absurd, and whose benevolence towards the former owners of the soil was trebly reinforced by his notion that they were descendants of the ten lost tribes ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... prosajxo. Prosecute persekuti. Proselyte prozelito. Prospect vidajxo. Prospective antauxvida, estonta. Prospectus prospekto. Prosper prosperi. Prosperity prospereco. Prosperous prospera. Prostrate (one's self) terenkusxigxi. Prosy teda. Protect protekti. Protection protekto. Protector protektanto, zorganto. Protectorate protektorato. Protg protektato. Protest protesti. Protestation protestado. Protestant protestanto. Protocol protokolo. Protrude elstari. Protuberance sxvelajxo. Proud, to ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... laboured as I have done on imaginary topics can judge of the comfort afforded by walking on all-fours, and being grave and dull. I dare say, when the clown of the pantomime escapes from his nightly task of vivacity, it is his special comfort to smoke a pipe and be prosy with some good-natured fellow, the dullest of his acquaintance. I have seen such a tendency in Sir Adam Ferguson, the gayest man I ever knew; and poor Tom Sheridan has complained to me of the fatigue of supporting the character ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... discovered that there was, after all, a latent wit in them hitherto quite unsuspected. Those who had been privileged to hear them discovered that remarks had been made at which they had laughed, and that the speakers were not such prosy old fossils ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... burn them? No, for they would smoulder. And if I left them here alone, to-morrow they would be wan. There! I have thrown them out wide into that gulf of a street twelve stories below. They will flutter down in the smoky darkness, and fall, like a message from the land of the lotus-eaters, upon a prosy wayfarer. And safe in my heart there lives that gracious picture of my lady as she stands above me and gives them to me. That is eternal: you and the pinks are but ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and love the penniless Claude Melnotte? I will act that part, if you like. I will love you my best in return. I will do my all to make your humble life happy: for humble it will be: at least the odds are against any other conclusion; we shall live and die in a poor, prosy, humdrum way. There will be no stars and epaulets for the hero of our story. I shall write one or two more stories, which will presently be forgotten. I shall be called to the bar, and try to get on in my profession: perhaps some day, if I am very ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stories, from two poor, humble men, that made my head just whirl, for they were really Odysseys, or sagas, or any of the big tales one ever heard of. It would seem, Aunt Jennie, dear, as if the world is not at all the prosy thing some people take it to be. I suppose that the great knights and warriors are altogether out of it now, but I find that it is running over with men one usually never hears of, who accomplish tremendous things without the slightest accompaniment ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... eight years old! not a grown up idea! not a thought beyond the nursery! One wondered what she could have talked of before she had children. Good Mrs. Norris, such was she. Good Mr. Norris was, for all purposes of neighbourhood, worse still. He was gapy and fidgetty, and prosy and dosy, kept a tool chest and a medicine chest, weighed out manna and magnesia, constructed fishing-flies, and nets for fruit-trees, turned nutmeg-graters, lined his wife's work-box, and dressed his little daughter's doll; and had a tone of conversation perfectly in keeping with his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... Shipwreck Clerk, "I am not bored. I did not come here to be bored, and as long as I have charge of this office I don't intend to be. The long-winded old salts who come here to report their wrecks never spin out their prosy yarns to me. The first thing I do is to let them know just what I want of them; and not an inch beyond that does a man of them go, at least while I am managing the business. There are times when John ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... it. The money will be ready; but of course, when that time comes, you will let me have the hundred and thirty for—" And then Mr. Sowerby took his leave, having certainly made himself master of the occasion. If a man of fifty have his wits about him, and be not too prosy, he can generally make himself master of the occasion, when his companions are under thirty. Robarts did not stay at the Albany long after him, but took his leave, having received some assurances of Lord Lufton's regret for what had passed and ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... "It's your duty. What a dear old chap he must be!—so thoroughly prosy and honest. I'm sure I should love him. I know just the sort of man he is. A downright Nonconformist minister of the midland counties, who was consecrated a Bishop ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... her shopping expeditions. Hilda rather prided herself on her skill in matching shades and selecting fabrics, and mamma was generally glad of her assistance in all such matters. However, perhaps it was only under-clothing and house-linen, and such things that she was buying. All that was the prosy part of shopping. It was the poetry of it that Hilda loved,—the shimmer of silk and satin, the rich shadows in velvet, the cool, airy fluttering of lawn and muslin and lace. So the girl went on her usual way, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton's great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... foolish. I thought of all this as I drove back to Blois by the way of the Chateau de Cheverny. The road took us out of the park of Chambord, but through a region of flat woodland, where the trees were not mighty, and again into the prosy plain of the Sologne—a thankless soil to sow, I believe, but lately much amended by the magic of cheerful French industry and thrift. The light had already begun to fade, and my drive reminded me of a passage in some rural novel of Madame Sand. I passed a couple of timber ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the condition I have described enables one to understand what is evidently the normal state of many thousands of hard-worked, ill-fed, and irregularly-sleeped labourers; the men who, sitting down thus weary at night, we expect to read some prosy book full of desperately good advice, of which one half the words are not needed for the sense and the other half are not understood by ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... "you know I never can remember poetry, Mrs. Merryweather. I shall have to take to 'Mother Goose.' I know I am terribly prosy—well, prosaic, then, Margaret; what's the difference? But I can't think of ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... my slaves to fellows who will use them no better than I, and becoming a slave myself; which, if you please, you shall not catch me doing in a hurry. No, my beloved, I must keep my foot on their necks for your sake as well as for my own. But you do not care about all this prosy stuff. I am consumed with remorse for having bored my darling. You want to know why I am living here like a hermit in a vulgar two-roomed hovel instead of tasting the delights of London society with my beautiful and devoted ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... the sea. In the mystery of moonshine Bessie lost sight of the phantom poplars that fringe the Orne. The excitement of novelty and uncertainty routed dull thoughts, and her fancy pruned its wings for a flight into the future. In the twilight came Mrs. Betts, and cut short the flight of fancy with prosy suggestions of early retirement to rest. It was easy to retire, but not so easy to sleep. Bessie's mind was astir. It became retrospective. She went over the terrors of her first coming to Caen, the dinner at Thunby's, and ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... love her too well to marry her and make of our devotion a stale, prosy thing of duty and compulsion. When a man does not marry a woman, he must keep her better than he would a wife. It costs. All that you gave me went to ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... horror to current prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the Palazzo Pubblico really to feel yourself a thrifty old medievalist. The state affairs of the Republic were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was marched through a number of vaulted halls and chambers, which, in the intervals of the administrative sessions held in them, are peopled only by the great mouldering archaic frescoes—anything but inanimate these even in their present ruin—that cover the walls ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... only, as his wife said, "Everybody knew how hard James worked, and how tired he was at night." The two gentlemen fraternised once more. They began one of those general arguments on the history of the times, which when spoken, are intensely interesting, and being written as intensely prosy. The ladies listened in a most wife-like ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the title should be short. Aptness and specificness do not require an epitome of the story; and a title like "Why Tom Changed His Opinion of Me," or "What the Rabbit Drive Did for Me" is prosy as well as long. It used to be the custom to make the title of a writing a regular synopsis of the matter contained therein; but modern readers object to being told in advance exactly what is to happen. ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... he was a prosy, weak-minded creature, who, although time was so precious, would have stood talking to me of its great value by the hour, if I had patience to listen. I thanked him for his offer, but assured him I would pay his usual price for the work. Mrs. Blake, however, ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... upon him to read her long dissertations on scientific subjects, and bored her incessantly with a translation of the orations of Demosthenes, which he intended dedicating to her in an elaborate preface. This was more than Ninon could bear with equanimity—a lover with so much erudition, and his prosy essays, appealed more to her sense of humor than to her sentiments of love, and he was laughed out of her social circle. This angered the Academician and he thought to revenge himself by means of an epigram in which he charged Ninon with admiring ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... to read the little book in an utterly unconcerned state of mind, believing indeed at the time that if there were any salvation it was not for me, and with a distinct intention to put away the tract as soon as it should seem prosy. I may say that it was not uncommon in those days to call conversion "becoming serious"; and judging by the faces of some of its professors, it appeared to be a very serious matter indeed. Would it not be well if the people of GOD had always ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... morning they gave the crack in the cylinder another dose (but oh, how prosy and unimportant seemed this business now), and at evening they screwed down the cylinder head, and with a gibing audience about them, wrestled with the mixing valve, slammed the timer this way ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... thank'God, with the long yarns Of the most prosy of ApostlesPaul,1 And now advance, sweet heathen of Monkbarns, Step out, old quizz, as fast ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... sympathize with children's little cares and joys, make them feel at home, and can hide wise lessons under pleasant plays, giving and receiving friendship in the sweetest way. But Aunt March had not this gift, and she worried Amy very much with her rules and orders, her prim ways, and long, prosy talks. Finding the child more docile and amiable than her sister, the old lady felt it her duty to try and counteract, as far as possible, the bad effects of home freedom and indulgence. So she took Amy by the hand, and taught her as she herself had ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... not stories that will live far into the piping times of peace because they are human documents or have the stamp of genius. These attractions are not present in Battle Days, which in truth is rather a prosy affair, though ambitious withal. It is not fiction in the ordinary sense. Mr. FETTERLESS essays to conduct the reader through every phase of a big "Push." Pushes were complicated affairs, and the author does not spare us many of the complications. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... shunned,—when princes possessing the most beautiful lands among the Rhine hills should, with great trouble and expense, have transported their seats to some flat, uninviting locality,—when, for instance, the dull, flat, prosy, wearisome gardens of Schwetzingen should have been deemed more beautiful than the immediate environs of Heidelberg. Yet such were the sentiments that prevailed in Switzerland until a comparatively late date. It is only since the days of Scheuchzer that Swiss ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... hands of Nicholas Stone, the sculptor, who made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the little urn concealing the feet. This was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, of which King was chief residentiary, and may still be seen in the present Cathedral King's elegy is very prosy in starting, but improves as it goes along, and is most ingenious throughout. These are the words in which he refers to the appearance of the dying preacher ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... regularly for thirty years, and shared almost every secret. Not a single misunderstanding occurred to mar the placidity of their solid confidence and good will. It is a pleasure, even at this day, to look through their voluminous, rather stiff and prosy, but entirely sensible ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... opposition, a bishop or two, a score of deluded, but well-meaning gentlemen, who obstinately adhere to the unfashionable notion, that, where great political powers are enjoyed, there are certain serious duties to the public closely connected therewith, a few prosy and pompous peers who believe that their constant presence is essential to the welfare and prosperity of the kingdom,—such, I think, is a correct classification of the ordinary attendance of noblemen at the House ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... prosy and opinionated; otherwise a good fellow. Whilst his homily in progress ground considerably cleared. Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Bill put oft till to-morrow; Kensington Subway Bill withdrawn; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... changed entirely, when, after many years, the book is read again with no lessened interest. Les Miserables was read once by a young boy whose attention was caught and held so strongly by the exciting story that he held himself through all the long, prosy meanderings with which Hugo has delayed the march of his plot. Some years later the same boy, grown to a college student, read Les Miserables again with even greater interest. He remembered the story quite well, but ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to them of '93, and recollections that were almost personal gave life to the prosy descriptions of the author. At that time the high-roads were covered with soldiers singing the "Marseillaise." At the thresholds of doors women sat sewing canvas to make tents. Sometimes came a ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... interested during my lecture in England in the chairmen who were to introduce me. I cannot help but feel that I have acquired a fine taste in chair men. I know them just as other experts know old furniture and Pekinese dogs. The witty chairman, the prosy chairman, the solemn chairman,—I know them all. As soon as I shake hands with the chairman in the Committee room I can tell exactly ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... appreciate even the society of jolly seraphims. Christmas, except to the young, is essentially a festival of "let's pretend"—let's pretend that we love everybody, that everybody loves us, that Aunt Maria isn't a prosy old bore, that Uncle John isn't a profiteer; that everybody has his or her good points and that all their bad ones are not sticking out, as they usually appear to us to be, as painfully apparent as those on the back of a porcupine should ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... lesson in poetry-making," said Aunt Louise, "which was worth lying awake to hear. Don't you suppose, Maria, that even prosy people, like you and me, might jingle poetry till in time it would ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... in special pleading the book does not lack ingenuity, and as an example of the familiar belief that other peoples will shut their eyes and swallow whatever opinions the Teuton thinks good to offer them, it may have interest for the psychologist. For the rest it is a very prosy piece of literature, only saved occasionally in its dulness by the unconscious crudity of the hatreds lurking beneath its mask of plausibility. One of these hatreds is clearly directed against Ambassador GERARD, to whose well-known book this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various |
