"Prosy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he said, coldly; "your knees must ache, and I, for my part, do not like such theatrical scenes at all, and such fine phrases make but little impression on my cold and prosy heart. I am accustomed to follow always my convictions, and when I advance a step, I must be sure not to fall to an abyss which some poetical hero may perhaps have merely covered for me with his flowery phrases. That I am aware of the ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... of American fiction, dominated by English writers, like Samuel Richardson. The early novels, like Mrs. Morton's The Power of Sympathy, were usually prosy, didactic, and as dull as the Sunday school books of three quarters of a century ago. The victory of the English school of romanticists influenced Charles Brockden Brown, the first professional American author, to throw off the yoke of classical didacticism ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of them," he repeated inwardly. A drawback indeed. Why could an interesting young organism so seldom be detached from its milieu and enjoyed in isolation? Prosy parents; tiresome, detrimental brothers ... He wondered if she had any idea what they were all like. It might be just as well, however, ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... compelled to read at school, he now read of his own accord, and he felt his romance and poetry. But he lingered longer over the somewhat prosy ancient history of Monsieur Rollin. His imaginative mind did not need much of a hint to attempt the reconstruction of old empires. But he felt that always in them too much depended upon one man. When an emperor fell an empire ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the Diver,' which he translated for us, and his Prize Poem, which didn't get the prize; and, indeed, I thought it very pompous and prosy," Laura ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... All-Highest. As an essay 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, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... did not wait until the end of his speech; I am, therefore, unable to say 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 singular, but it is not the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... 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
... Lizzie 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 ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... whether any man, who cannot make the people listen, should not be content to take his place in a pew. It is better to be able to heat or light the chapel well, than to wear out the patience of a congregation by prosy preaching, and it will be more to our eternal advantage to have been AN INDUSTRIOUS CHAPEL-KEEPER THAN ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... of 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
... letters with increasing ardor and slept with them under her pillow. It was all so secret and romantic, this glorious adventure rushing to fulfilment, under the prosy surface of everyday life. Of course she did not want to be married—not for ages and ages; but to be engaged, to be indefinitely adored by a consummate lover like Harold Phipps, who so beautifully shared her ambition, was an exciting and tempting proposition. Like most girls ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... 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
... back to me some day and let me tell you all those foolish, trite, tiresome things that I should have told a son of mine. I am so old that you will not take offense—you will not mind listening to me, or forgetting the dull, prosy things I say about the curse of idleness, and the habits of cynical thinking, and the perils of vacant-minded indulgence. You will forgive me—and you will forget me. That will be as it should ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... will pardon my talkativeness; and, even if you think me prosy, let me go on after my own fashion, and finish my story in my own way, for I am very old, and can speak in no other way. Remember, too, I shall ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... 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. ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... any reasonable man his life. I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of and going to introduce you to very particularly, for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that don't care for England in ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... 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 and that, until the dilapidated old engine began ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... she. "What you wish, so long as it is not conventional and hackneyed. But I know you will not be prosy, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... vehemence. 'How I am harassed by these emotions of mine!' He calmed himself by an effort. 'Well, duty after all it shall be, as nearly as I can effect it. "Honesty is the best policy;"' with which vigorously uttered resolve he once more attempted to turn his attention to the prosy object ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... chagrin, Giovanni realized his mistake in having attempted to hurry her, and now changed his tactics. Although his every nerve was strained to catch the sound of Nina's approaching footfall, he went into a long, prosy dissertation upon the history of the ceiling, dwelling purposely upon the dullest facts he could think of, until his tormentor was glad enough ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... 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
... bringing to Guy Landers a new Heaven and a new earth. Already the prosy old university town had begun to assume an atmosphere of home. The well-clipped campus, with its huge oaks and its limestone walks, had taken on the familiar possessive plural "our campus," and the solitary red squirrel which sported fearlessly in its midst had likewise ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... from Daisy and her small talk. Moreover, she was rather bored by the instructive conversation of the ancient parson, and wanted to attach herself to some younger and more frivolous man. Cupid in cap and gown and spectacles is a decidedly prosy divinity. ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... his body being no way affected but rather his intellect. Now men are not called perfectly self-mastering or wholly destitute of self-control in respect of pleasures of this class: nor in fact in respect of any which are not bodily; those for example who love to tell long stories, and are prosy, and spend their days about mere chance matters, we call gossips but not wholly destitute of self-control, nor again those who are pained at the loss ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... falling in love than his friend Captain Dale; but was the sacrifice worth his while? This was the question which he asked himself in those melancholy moments; while he was lying in bed, for instance, awake in the morning, when he was shaving himself, and sometimes also when the squire was prosy after dinner. At such times as these, while he would be listening to Mr Dale, his self-reproaches would sometimes be very bitter. Why should he undergo this, he, Crosbie of Sebright's, Crosbie of the General Committee Office, Crosbie who would allow no one to bore him between Charing Cross ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... Peggy, "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
... I watched her after she sat down. The big hat had moved a 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 herself very fat, and am glad they ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... spoken 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 wave ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... 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 ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 villanies All desire to shirk, Shall, during off hours, Exhibit his powers To Madame Tussaud's waxwork. The ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... ordinary-looking man, more 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
... reflections on the farmer's life in a prosy Crabbe-like manner; and here it may be noted that as a rule Bloomfield no sooner attempts to rise to a general view than he grows flat; and in like manner he usually fails when he attempts wide prospects and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... gas-lit, stuffy 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
... 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 ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... something doing!" quoth Frank. "That's the trouble with a crowd of girls. After they have played 'Ring Around the Rosy' and 'London Bridge is Falling Down' they don't know another living thing to do except to sit down and look prim and be prosy. But with boys it's different. There's something ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... paradox; his next to show them what fools they had been. I don't know how he has been kept on so long where he is, unless it be that he deals with news only. I believe he had to be withdrawn from the gallery of the House; he was very impatient over the prosy members and his remarks about them began to reach the Speaker's ear ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Killaloe. Ministers had a majority of thirty-seven, for Aberdeen and the Duke persisted in bringing on the question and dividing upon it. The former spoke nearly three hours, and far better than ever he had done before; the Duke was prosy. In the other House the Government had not a shadow of a case; their law officers, Home and Denman, displayed an ignorance and stupidity which were quite ludicrous, and nothing saved them from defeat but a good speech at the end from Palmerston, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the journal must treat of subjects in the most popular manner, avoiding, as far as is consistent with the dignity of the object in view, very elaborate and prosy disquisitions. I shall endeavor to get a circular out next week. Meantime accept my thanks for the interest you take in the subject, and be assured that if I succeed in starting the journal, I shall, at all times, be grateful for ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... going to Greece, others whisper an invasion of Paraguay, and others, of course, say other things; perhaps equally correct. I think he is for Greece. I know he is one of the most extraordinary men I ever met with. I am getting prosy. Good-bye! Write soon. Any fun going on? How is Cynthia? I ought to have written. How is Mrs. Felix Lorraine? She ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the less attention the minister pays to creeds, the less dogmatism he indulges in, the more popular he becomes with the people, the more eagerly they flock to hear him. The world does not care to listen to prosy lectures on foreordination and the terrors of Tartarus, because its reason rejects such cruel creeds; it takes little interest in the question whether Christ was dipped or sprinkled by the gentleman in the camel's-hair cutaway, because it cannot, for the life of it, see that it ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... employed him to act the character. He was an exception to the rule that a good playwriter is not a good performer. In Cibber, we especially mark the Spanish element, which then tinged the drama, and although somewhat prosy and sententious, he is fertile and entertaining in his love intrigues. Of real humour, he seems to have no gift—some of his best attempts referring to such common failures as sometimes occur at hotels. We have in "She ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... they made him 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
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... something. You can't sit still so put on your hat and go for a walk; but before you get to the corner of the street you wish you hadn't come out and you turn back. You open a book and try to read, but you find Shakespeare trite and commonplace, Dickens is dull and prosy, Thackeray a bore, and Carlyle too sentimental. You throw the book aside and call the author names. Then you "shoo" the cat out of the room and kick the door to after her. You think you will write your letters, but after sticking at "Dearest Auntie: I find ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... don't spin it out too long, Lumley," said I; "you know when men set their hearts on some magnificent plan or scheme they are apt to become prosy. I suppose you'll also take the writing class, ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us as of children who play that everything is something else, and are quite satisfied ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... I cried, "what a horribly prosy, matter-of-fact affair life would be in any other view! I believe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • 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
... 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
... 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 many promises of his ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... bearing a few belated workers homeward. The stark incongruity of the thing was appalling. How little those weary toilers, hemmed about with the commonplace, suspected that almost within sight from the car windows, amid prosy benches, iron railings, and unromantic, flickering lamps, two fellow-men moved upon the border ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... said, "there are plenty of things in the chaparral, and on the prairies, and up the canyons that you don't understand. But I want to thank you for listening to a garrulous old man's prosy story. We old Texans love to talk about our adventures and our old comrades, and the home folks have long ago learned to run when we begin with 'Once upon a time,' so we have to spin our yarns to the stranger ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... is correct and intelligible the artist has already told us what he wishes to convey in the most perfect language of which that idea is susceptible, and that any attempt to put it into the lower and more prosy language of the critic would only ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... all that night," observed the Hermit; "and then Wally wouldn't have caught any more than the rest of you this morning! And that reminds me, I promised to show you a good fishing-place. Don't you think, if you've had enough of my prosy yarning, that we'd better make ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... a while The arguments prosy and drear,— To lean at full-length in indefinite rest In the lap of the greenery here? Can't you kick over "the Bench," And "husk" yourself out of your gown To dangle your legs where the fishing is good— Can't you arrange ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... and they much 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
... 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 ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... preacher," or "teacher, teacher, teacher," uttered 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 walks about ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... 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 society ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... 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, that he talked ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Mrs. Cunningham's "at home" was of no particular interest. The guests were all middle-aged people whom the M.P. had known in his boyhood and Margaret, in her presumptuous youth, thought it would be a very prosy affair, although it had made quite a sensation in quiet little Murraybridge, where people still called an "at home" ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... old prosy, preachy professor!" she exclaimed affectionately, "I have been thinking of it. I've half a mind to try, really. Wouldn't Grace Noir just die?...O Lord, there she ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... discharge, so to speak. Yet every word and all that partook of the nature of communication by intelligible sounds seemed to be colourless, cold, and dead. Then you try and try again, and stutter and stammer, whilst your friends' prosy questions strike like icy winds upon your heart's hot fire until they extinguish it. But if, like a bold painter, you had first sketched in a few audacious strokes the outline of the picture you ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... 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
... keeps his courteous tranquillity to the end; he had been sent into the world, he had lived his life, why should he fear to be dismissed? It matters little, in the presence of this august imagination, if the real Socrates was a rude and prosy person, who came by his death simply because the lively Athenians could tolerate ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... maiden's beauty. Acting upon the impulse of this passion, he (the savage) began to hit himself severe thumps in the chest, and to exhibit other indications of being desperately in love, which being rather a prosy proceeding, was very likely the cause of the maiden's falling asleep; whether it was or no, asleep she did fall, sound as a church, on a sloping bank, and the savage perceiving it, leant his left ear on his left hand, and nodded ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... and at the same time instruct the young, and he has been completely successful. There is no weekly paper published in this or the Old World that so covers the field for the youthful mind as GOLDEN DAYS. There is nothing heavy about it—nothing prosy or difficult to comprehend in the matter it contains. Its stories are graphic, entertaining and by the best writers, while each number has articles especially prepared on subjects of practical interest to boys and girls by authors whose fame ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... 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
... honest, simple-hearted fellow, whose familiarities are so innocent that she can pardon them;—taking her hand in his, and talking on; sometimes looking in her eyes, and then looking into the sunshine for relief; sometimes prosy with narrative, and then sharpening up my matter with a few touches of honest pathos;—let her imagine this, I say, and we may become the most excellent ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... her soul had not been fed, as the carriage rolled away from the marble church; but there was much around her to attract the gaze of one who had never before spent a Sabbath in the city. Her husband was glad to be released from the sound of "the prosy old doctor's essay," and was in quite good humor with himself for his act of self-denial in going to church. So the drive home was quite a pleasant one, though considerably longer than ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... the city of London. The depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite; and 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 note, he tells ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... of anecdotic illustration, done what he could to keep down a really clever book to an inferior standard of taste. We would hope, however, that candid readers will have a kindly consideration of the author's intentions, and pass over much that is prosy and ridiculous for the sake of what is original and interesting. Traversing lands that have been described a hundred times before, it might be supposed that little was left for Dr Aiton to pick up; yet every traveller has his own method of observation. In justice ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... above all 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 ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... news 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 Dick, ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... hurry, then,' said Steerforth, 'come home with me to Highgate, and stay a day or two. You will be pleased with my mother—she is a little vain and prosy about me, but that you can forgive her—and she will ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... of contents in front of this little foreword, I am quite sure that few will pause to consider my prosy effort. Nor can I blame any readers who jump over my head, when they may sit beside kind old Baucis, and drink out of her miraculous milk-pitcher, and hear noble Philemon talk; or join hands with Pandora and Epimetheus in their play before ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... and likes attention, and it pleases her to have men admire her. That, Polly, is perfectly natural. Why, you wouldn't expect her to sit around under the trees, and read poetry with her own husband, would you? We have been married far too long for that, Patricia and I. She thinks me rather prosy and stupid at times, poor girl, because—well, because, in point of fact, I am. But, at the bottom of her heart—Oh, it's preposterous! We are the best friends in the world, I tell you! It is simply that she and Jack have a ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... for many months of again writing to you. Will you have the charity to send me one more letter (as soon as this reaches you) directed to the C. of Good Hope. Your letters besides affording me the greatest delight always give me a fresh stimulus for exertion. Excuse this geological prosy letter, and farewell till you hear from me at Sydney, and see me in the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... as from the brink of an elevator well, the Senior Surgeon found himself staring foolishly into a most sumptuous linen closet, tiered like an Aztec cliff with home after home for pleasant prosy blankets, and gaily fringed towels, and cheerful white sheets reeking most conscientiously of cedar and lavender. Tiptoeing cautiously into the mystery he sensed at one astonished, grateful glance how the change of a partition, the re-adjustment of a proportion, had purged like a draft of ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... its prosy usage, was resplendent in a winding robe of bunting and on its railing where cans of white lead and linseed oil had disported hung lanterns of every color in the rainbow. To this enchanted isle would stroll dance-weary couples and famishing ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... any particular word to say, for my mind is heavy, nor that you will find in what I may say anything that will illumine the way, but why should we not talk? What! may a friend not call upon a friend in time of vacancy to listen to his idle babble? O these pestiferous dealers in facts and these prosy philosophers, the world must have surcease from them and wander in the great spaces. To idle together in the sweet fields of the mind—this is companionship, when thoughts come not by bidding, and argument is taboo; to have ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... in the evening, however, that the Peacock presented attractions which enabled the two friends to resist even the invitations of the gifted, though prosy, Pott. It was in the evening that the 'commercial room' was filled with a social circle, whose characters and manners it was the delight of Mr. Tupman to observe; whose sayings and doings it was the habit of Mr. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Charles, dear! that snuffy, tiresome, prosy professor? How can you talk such nonsense? I am sure the author must be young; there is so much freshness ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Devil himself as his godfather, uncle, playmate. It is his duty to 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 him ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... 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 ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... caribou. That night we camped, and I heard 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 ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... 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 weird talk of Janey Fricker ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... to 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 her companions where she pleased. In short, it was worse ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... 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 ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... said Hugh; "these are the last strawberries of the season, and I have no inclination to discuss anything at present but their sweetness. But I will venture to assert that at six o'clock this evening I shall have imbibed more knowledge in that very hammock then any of you in your prosy chairs." ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... got to Woodbridge. I remember thinking that I could write quite a book now myself. Already I began to feel quite a hardened pioneer. It doesn't take an adaptable person long to accustom one's self to a new way of life, and the humdrum routine of the farm certainly looked prosy compared to voyaging with Parnassus. When I had got beyond Woodbridge, and had crossed the river, I would begin to sell books in earnest. Also I would buy a notebook and jot down my experiences. I had heard of bookselling as a profession ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... hidden heap of books there. It is, as 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 grow ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that a good many Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate country house, and seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady, old-fashioned in her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer vision. He could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some minute point of honour, and it seemed ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... I went again to the same "church." The introductory part was shorter and more simple than in the morning. The Doctor's prayer (seven or eight minutes long) was admirable. I wished some dry, prosy petitioners in England could have heard it. It was devout, comprehensive, and to the point. All classes of men—but one—were remembered in it. The slaves were not mentioned,—their freedom ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... seems to be 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I've done, 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
... the night before, and would see on the morrow—the young men faultlessly appointed, handsomely cravatted, with the neatest glossy boots and white gloves—the elders portly, brass-buttoned, noble-looking, polite, and prosy—the young ladies blonde, timid, and in pink—the mothers grand, beautiful, sumptuous, solemn, and in diamonds. They talked in English, not in bad French, as they do in the novels. They talked about each others' houses, and characters, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... promise, he held his peace, until his master signified that the conference was ended, when he hastened to the barn, where he could give vent to his feeling in French, his adopted language being far too prosy to suit his excited mood. Suddenly Grace Atherton came into his mind, and Edith's request that ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... a trying task. If she read an account of anything unpleasant she was peremptorily stopped; if the news was dry or prosy, that ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... 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 ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... the primal civilizer,—the very keystone and foundation of all progress. From the plain, prosy, earthy fact that man is a hungry animal, and must eat, has sprung all the civilization of the world! I shall demonstrate this in my book, beginning with the scriptural legend of Adam's greed for an apple. Adam was evidently hungry at the moment Eve ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... understood 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 ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... drew up all his facts and figures in the form of a hollow square, Tyson charged with magnificent contempt of danger. No doubt Tyson's method was extremely amusing and effective, and his sparkling periods proved the enemy's dullness up to the hilt; unfortunately, the prosy but responsible representations of Smedley had more ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... the necessity of union among the magnates for the maintenance of the Catholic faith; the nobility and the Church being the two columns upon which the whole social fabric reposed. It is to be feared that the President became rather prosy upon the occasion. Perhaps his homily, like those of the fictitious Archbishop of Granada, began to smack of the apoplexy from which he had so recently escaped. Perhaps, the meeting being one of hilarity, the younger nobles became ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... rebuked, sometimes he was harmlessly playful and nobody minded 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)
... from cover to cover. One derives from the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to admire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of the curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... was a work of less pretentions, perhaps, and yet it had an immense sale. Eight years ago this book had reached a sale of 40,000,000, and yet it had the same grave defect. It was disconnected, cold, prosy and dull. I read it for years, and at last became a close student of Mr. Webster's style, yet I never found but one thing in this book, for which there seems to have been such a perfect stampede, that was even ordinarily ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye |
