"Unadorned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... girls, one of perhaps ten and the other of fourteen years, evidently sisters of the unadorned beauty, the middle-aged woman who had admitted us, and the dog—the only male member of the household—composed the family. I had seen negro cabins, but these people were whites, and these whites were ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... bell-tower at Venice, and Kepler stood on the bridge at Prague to watch the stars. The men, not the buildings, do the work. No disappointment, need be felt, then, to find the modern Observatory a range of unadorned buildings running east and west, with slits in the roof and in some of the walls. Within these simple buildings are the instruments now used, displaying almost the perfection of mechanical skill in their construction and finish—beautifully adapted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... flag high in one hand, let it balloon to the wind, made a sign of refusal, and all at once poured out a flood of speech—pledges to Anna and her fellow-needlewomen—charges to his men—hopes for the cherished cause—words so natural and unadorned, so practical and soldier-like, and yet so swift, that not a breath was drawn till he had ended. ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... species, but raised in a glass bell, in a jar from jam. And precisely to this childish phase of their existence do I attribute their compulsory lying—so innocent, purposeless and habitual ... But then, how fearful, stark, unadorned with anything the frank truth in this business-like dickering about the price of a night; in these ten men in an evening; in these printed rules, issued by the city fathers, about the use of a solution of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... made on the occasion by the elchi was characteristic of the people he represented—that is, unadorned, unpolished, neither more nor less than the truth, such as a camel-driver might use to a muleteer; and had it not been for the ingenuity of the interpreter our Shah would neither have been addressed by his title of King of Kings, or of the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... on her land, Agnes experienced all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans, dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the doctor's guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there never had been one which ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... brought to lose all Apprehensions of what shall befall them in the Possession of younger Men. It is a common Postscript of an Hagg to a young Fellow whom she invites to a new Woman, She has, I assure you, seen none but old Mr. Such-a-one. It pleases the old Fellow that the Nymph is brought to him unadorned, and from his Bounty she is accommodated with enough to dress her for other Lovers. This is the most ordinary Method of bringing Beauty and Poverty into the Possession of the Town: But the particular Cases of kind Keepers, skilful Pimps, and all others who drive a separate Trade, and are not in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... unkind, and the ground penurious, so that the most fruitful years will produce only enough to maintain themselves; where life unimproved, and unadorned, fades into something little more than naked existence, and every one is busy for himself, without any arts by which the pleasure of others may be increased; if to the daily burden of distress any additional ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... quickly convey to each other—while seeming scarcely to do more than play—the entire history of their lives and surroundings, is a sort of occult secret. It is not a matter of prolonged conversation. Perhaps images created by the briefest of unadorned statements produce on the unwritten tablets of the child mind immediate and complete impressions. Safe as the locked garden was, Andrews cannot have forgotten her charge for any very great length of time and yet before Donal, hearing his attendant's voice from her corner, left Robin ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... elegant palace, ninety feet by sixty, and forty high, in which an unadorned simplicity reigns. It is light and pleasing, without the addition of wings or lesser parts, which too frequently wanting a sufficient uniformity with the body of the edifice, are unconnected with it in effect, and divide the attention. Large and ample offices are conveniently placed ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... artifices, can a cause like ours be carried onward. Leave these to parties contending for office, as the "spoils of victory." We need no disguises, nor false pretences, nor subterfuges; enough for us to present before our fellow- countrymen the holy truths of freedom, in their unadorned and native beauty. Dark as the present may seem, let us remember with hearty confidence that truth and right are destined to triumph. Let us blot out the word "discouragement" from the anti-slavery vocabulary. Let the enemies of freedom be discouraged; let the advocates of oppression despair; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... exist'?' he repeated scornfully. 'Will you listen to my version of what has happened—the barest, unadorned tale? I was your host and Miss Foster's. I had begun to show the attraction that Miss Foster had for me, to offer her the most trifling, the most ordinary attention. From the moment I was first conscious of my own feeling, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pine log in a state of unadorned nature, oblivious to all around, intent only on the massacre of the things that had violated me. How much time flew I could not guess. Great loud "Haw-haws!" roused me to consternation. There behind me stood Jones and Emett shaking as ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... was the greatest known to any traveler, but the temples built to the god, Mazda, and his son, Ihua'Mazda, were empty and unadorned—the people had forgotten God. ...
— The Sun King • Gaston Derreaux
... of the historical documents which he unearthed in his investigations, and many of those issued by the "Camden," "Clarendon," and other societies. He was ed. of The English Historical Review, and contributed largely to the Dictionary of National Biography. The sober and unadorned style of G.'s works did little to commend them to the general reader, but their eminent learning, accuracy, impartiality, and the laborious pursuit of truth which they exhibited earned for him, from the first, the respect ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... There was then a hard, long straightness about his head and face, giving to his countenance the form of a parallelogram, to which there belonged a certain meanness of expression. He wanted the roundness of forehead, the short lines, and the graceful curves of face which are necessary to unadorned manly comeliness. His whiskers were small, grizzled, and ill grown, and required the ample relief of his wig. In no guise did he look other than a clever man; but in his dress as a simple citizen he would perhaps be taken as a clever ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... was at home in his theme. He viewed man first in the savage state, preferring in this the positive accounts of voyagers and travellers to the vague myths of antiquity and the dreams of speculators on our pristine state. From Australia and Abyssinia he drew pictures of mortality unadorned, as lively as if he had lived amongst Bushmen and savages all his life. Then he crossed over the Atlantic, and brought before you the American Indian, with his noble nature, struggling into the dawn of civilization, when Friend Penn cheated him out of his birthright, and the Anglo-Saxon ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Lincoln into emancipation. It is impossible, even at this distance of time, to turn the pages of his ponderous volumes without feeling the matchless force of his energy, the strength of his masterly array of facts, his biting sarcasm, his bold assumptions, and his clear, unadorned style. There is about it all an impassioned conviction, as if he spoke because he could not keep silent, making it impossible to avoid the belief that the whole soul and conscience of the writer were in his work. Day after day, with kaleidoscopic change, he marshalled arguments, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Yet, German accounts say expressly, that a thick, stinking mist advanced from the East, and spread itself over Italy; and there could be no deception in so palpable a phenomenon. The credibility of unadorned traditions, however little they may satisfy physical research, can scarcely be called in question when we consider the connection of events; for just at this time earthquakes were more general than they had been within the range of history. In thousands ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... remember that a jealous wife may be cultivating her finger nails with a view to exercising them upon one's countenance. I prefer the 'human face divine' in its natural state, being of the opinion with another that 'beauty unadorned is adorned most.' Do you know, Ulrica, that I lost my taste for guitar music listening to a little pink-cheeked, simpering married woman, eternally strumming to a Benedict of her acquaintance, in lovelorn tones—'I'll be true to thee,'—accompanied ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... resting across his knees, and his face upturned to a palace beautiful of pearl and saffron cloud; but the woman mounted the steps, and, crossing the boards, came up to the door and the men beside it. Her dress was gray and unadorned, and she was young and of a ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... the sea, the ridgy waves of which were sparkling like emeralds tipped with diamonds in the grand glow of the setting sun. But ere long he turned thence with a sigh, called up perhaps by some fancied similitude between that bright and boundless ocean, desolate and unadorned even by a single passing sail, and his own course of life so ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... times when we must tell the truth. (Applause) And when I say that there is no one more humble for a man of his achievements from here to Honolulu than Mr. O'Crowley himself, I am only telling the truth in a plain and unadorned form. Every effort put forth by Mr. O'Crowley for the welfare of mankind has been characterised by success, and what greater proof of his ability could we have than the fact that he is one of the largest wine merchants and hotel proprietors in the ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... intellectual rest, when the brain is wearied with protracted toil, which far surpasses the mere animal enjoyment which follows relaxation from physical labor. That rest I cannot find in society. I must seek it among wild and primeval solitudes, where I can be alone with nature in her unadorned simplicity, away from the barbarisms, so to speak, of civilization, where I can act and talk and think as a natural, and not an artificial man, where I can be off my guard, and free from the weight of that armor which the conventionalities of life, the captions espionage of the world ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... habitation, save that of a miserable police guard of four or five, who occupy a wretched hut on the side of the road midway, and seem by their presence to render the scene around more dreary.[4] the road is a mere footpath unimproved and unadorned by any single work of art; and, except in this footpath, and the small police guard, there is absolutely no single sign in all this long march to indicate the dominion, or even the presence, of man; and yet it is between two contiguous [sic] capitals, one ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... proposal of their master, declaring that they were ready to receive the rule that he would give them, and to go to Rome to solicit its confirmation. Francis betook himself to prayer, and composed, in a plain, unadorned style, in twenty-three chapters, a rule of life, the immovable basis of which was the observance of the Gospel; to which he added some exercises, which he considered necessary for the sake of uniformity. Besides the three vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, they ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... unadorned as far as her complexion goes, believe me," said I to my sister. "During my constant journeys she has always slept at my side, and her face at waking has always been as at noon and all day long. She related to us once at the Marechale d'Albret's, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... itself possesses nothing very remarkable with the exception of the cathedral, the tower of which is very high, and is perhaps the purest specimen of Gothic architecture at present in existence. The interior of the edifice is neat and appropriate but simple and unadorned, for I observed but one picture, the Conversion of St. Paul. One of the chapels is a cemetery, in which rest the bones of eleven Gothic kings, whose souls I trust in Christ ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... rusty with long service, and now stand forth clean and more vividly green than at any other time of year. The deciduous trees follow the fashions and change their suits for the prevailing mode three or four times a year, yet it is true of them that nature unadorned is adorned the most. There is a beauty in the bare wood standing revealed in November that they never had in the flush of June or the glory of early October. There is nothing in flower or leaf that can match the exquisite harmony of the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... duckers and divers of both sexes. Situations for obtaining favourable views are anxiously sought after by elderly gentlemen, by whom opera glasses and pocket telescopes are much patronised. Greatly as we admire the investigation of nature in her unadorned simplicity, Ramsgate would be the last place we should select, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... the poetical idea of "sweet simplicity" always and everywhere. Not that the rich gown is in itself objectionable, or the inexpensive dress intrinsically beautiful. It is not invariably true that "beauty unadorned is most adorned." It is not true that a "simple calico" is more charming than a sheeny silk, nor is cotton edging to be compared with point ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... family and to our sincere and trusted friends; and we decided therefore, in order to provide against a possible destruction of the one manuscript, to have a small number of copies printed at our own expense. As the value of this autobiography consists in its unadorned veracity, which, under the circumstances, is its only justification, therefore my statements had to be accompanied by precise names and dates; hence there could be no question of their publication until some time after ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... got rid of Hsiang Ling with all her rubbish, and here we have a chatterbox like you thrown on us! But what is it that that mouth of yours keeps on jabbering? What about the bathos of Tu Kung-pu; and the unadorned refinement of Wei Su-chou? What also about Wen Pa-ch'a's elegant diction; and Li I-shan's abstruseness? A pack of silly fools that you are! Do you in any way behave ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... be obtained; and if the garden seems to our taste to have been laid out in rather a formal way, with its box-trees cut into different shapes of animals and birds, he was in that respect only following the fashion of his day, and his delight in the unadorned beauties of the surrounding country has a genuine ring in it. In another curious respect Pliny was ahead of his times. He had no taste for the Circensian games and the brutalities of the gladiatorial shows. Writing to Sempronius Rufus (iv. 22), he bluntly declares that ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... life, some few facts concerning myself are probably necessary for the better understanding of the circumstances which led up to the events here presented. It will be obvious that I can make no claim to literary skill; I have simply written down my exact and unadorned remembrance of incidents which I witnessed and took part in. Now it is all over I wonder more and more at the slightness of the hazard which suddenly placed me at such a period in so strange ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... American dollars and British half-crowns and other coins. In short, these Sumatran young girls carried much of the wealth of their parents on their persons, and were entitled to wear it until they should be relegated to the ranks of the married—the supposed-to-be unfrivolous, and the evidently unadorned! ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... themselves, a thoroughly practical, prosaic character. Their theology consisted not of abstract dogmas, but merely of simple prescriptions for the ensuring of material welfare. Even at the present day, in the districts not completely Russified, their prayers are plain, unadorned requests for a good harvest, plenty of cattle, and the like, and are expressed in a tone of childlike familiarity that sounds strange in our ears. They make no attempt to veil their desires with mystic solemnity, but ask, in simple, straightforward fashion, that God should make ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... brown cheeks blush with the blood of ancient Pharaohs and who exult with Babbulkund in her surpassing beauty, and who know nought of the desert or the jungle or the bleak hills to the north. Quite unadorned and clad in simple garments go all the kith of Nehemoth, for they know well that he grows weary of pomp. Unadorned all save one, the Princess Linderith, who weareth Ong Zwarba and the three lesser gems of the sea. Such a stone is Ong Zwarba that there are none like it even in ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... that this union should be indissoluble. Afterwards, from the natural influence of association, we expect in real life to meet with virtue when we see grace, and we are disappointed, almost disgusted, when we find virtue unadorned. This false association has a double effect upon the conduct of women; it prepares them to be pleased, and it excites them to endeavour to please by adventitious charms, rather than by those qualities which merit esteem. Women, who ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... always short, unadorned, and practical. He has endeavoured, by moving a resolution, to reduce the inordinate length of the speeches in the House as the only way of saving time to get through the yearly increasing work of legislation, and he has proposed some other resolutions for facilitating ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... simpler than Bach's; for Bach's thoughts are often led away by the interest of developing his subject, by certain habits of composition, and by repetitions and clever devices, which weaken his strength. In Franck's music we get Christ's speech itself, unadorned and in all its living force. And in the wonderful harmony between the music and the sacred words we hear the voice of the world's conscience. I once heard someone say to Mme. Cosima Wagner that certain passages in Parsifal, particularly the chorus "Durch Mitleid wissend," ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... our eyesight on that journey! The appeal to the eye was constant—the color and form of scenes unfamiliar offering views of compelling attraction and delight. Each unadorned car window and door became the frame of pictures not a Millet ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... elaborate framework was so far reduced that fourteen short tales were crowded into two volumes as compared with eighteen in the four volumes of the previous work. Writers of fiction were evidently finding brief, unadorned narrative most acceptable to ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... its fresh and unadorned rascality, was the famous "option law," or "two-penny act," of 1758: an act firmly opposed, on its first appearance in the legislature, by a noble minority of honorable men; an act clearly indicating among a portion of the people of Virginia a survival of the old robber instincts of ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance' would be a puzzle indeed, did we not know how often this great rhetorician was by the stream of his own mighty rhetoric swept far away from the unadorned strand of naked truth. To his unjust and insulting attack I shall content myself with opposing the following extracts which with some trouble I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... hear, but he maintained an aggrieved attitude. "I heard him," he complained afterwards, "but what good was it to me? What I want is to have the Gospel druv well home to my soul." The feeling of most audiences is very much the same as his was. Unadorned statements of fact, or what is meant to be taken as fact, do not satisfy them. They like to have something, fact or fiction, driven thunderously home into their souls. The only one of Mr. Billing's hearers ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... hands were fragrant. An old, haggard woman, passing by, asked, "Who will give me a gift, for I am poor?" all three denied her; but another who sat near, unwashed in the stream, unstained with fruit, unadorned with flowers or perfume, gave her a little gift, and satisfied the poor woman. Then the woman asked them what was the subject of their dispute; and they told her, and lifted up before her their beautiful hands. "Beautiful indeed!" she exclaimed, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... Tintagel for the first time may be disappointed. If so, they have expected too much, or have expected the wrong thing. There is no gloss of false romance about the place; the ruins have not the hollow pretentious grandeur of some Norman castles; what we see is the unadorned, unveiled reality of a majestic coast, the low, stark walls of ruin on an immemorial site, the naked wind-beaten church on the heights, the sea breaking into gaunt caverns below. Sheep feed within the enclosure to which we scramble ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... made the discovery that a quantity of long black tresses, which, in the maiden fashion of his own country, were unadorned by any ornament, except a single chaplet lightly woven out of ivy leaves, formed a veil around a countenance which, in its regular features, dark eyes, and pensive expression, resembled that of Melpomene [the Muse ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... As these feminine-looking warriors always carry their large shields before them, it was but natural, when the Spaniards saw them, or other tribes similarly adorned, that they should have supposed them to be women. When, also, they saw in the distance parties of unadorned persons carrying burdens, they took them to be slaves captured in war. This, no doubt, was the origin of the fable of nations of Amazons found on the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Neville put forth a second part, "A New and further Discovery of The Isle of Pines," which purported to be the relation of the Dutch captain to whom the history of Pines had been confided. It is an unadorned story such as might have been gathered from a dozen tales in Hakluyt or Purchas, and is interesting only in giving the name of the [38]Dutch captain—Cornelius Van Sloetton—and the location of the supposed island—longitude 76 deg. and latitude 20 deg., ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... unadorned," or rather when not under any sort of disguise, a really handsome and delicate-featured man, and although a man of extraordinary strength, he was not an over-sized man, but on the contrary a little under the average height; but he was a full-blooded, resolute, athletic fellow all the same, ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... to ask you, if they have reached the importance you claim for them, why is it that so few women are made immortal by bein' represented in the Hall of Fame? And why are the four or five females represented there put away by themselves in a remote unadorned corner with no roof to protect them from the rough winds and ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... presented in their proper settings. "Caught By The Witch" would not be ineffective if, on a dark night, it were acted in the vicinity of a graveyard! And one ballad—if I may be permitted to dignify it by that name—called "Promises of Freedom" is characterized by an unadorned narrative style and a dramatic ending which are associated with the best English folk-ballads. The singer tells simply and, one feels, with a grim impersonality of how his mistress promised to set him free; it seemed as if she would never die—but "she's somehow gone"! ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... these transactions, although unadorned with the pomp of words in the letters of Agricola, was received by Domitian, as was customary with that prince, with outward expressions of joy, but inward anxiety. He was conscious that his late mock-triumph over Germany, [126] in which he had exhibited ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... simultaneously. It had never yet dawned upon her that as a rule it is because one has not experienced a feeling that one is able to describe it; she reasoned in the contrary direction, and came to the conclusion that those persons have no hearts at all whose sleeves are unadorned with the same. Therefore it was intolerable to her when Christopher—who had played with her as a child, and had once very nearly made her grow up into a woman—talked to her about ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... of Penrod's inner texture, a mere unadorned walk from one point to another was intolerable, and he had not gone a block without achieving some slight remedy for the tameness of life. An electric-light pole at the corner, invested with powers of observation, might have been surprised to find itself suddenly ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... and adorned with purple garments, all over interwoven with gold; those that were chosen for carrying these pompous shows having also about them such magnificent ornaments as were both extraordinary and surprising. Besides these, one might see that even the great number of the captives was not unadorned, while the variety that was in their garments, and their fine texture, concealed from the sight the deformity of their bodies. But what afforded the greatest surprise of all was the structure of the pageants that were borne ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... been carried to England in the form of ballads by the Anglo-Saxons; or it may be Scandinavian material, later brought in by Danish or Norwegian pirates. At any rate it seems to have taken on its present form in England during the seventh and eighth centuries. It relates, with the usual terse and unadorned power of really primitive poetry, how the hero Beowulf, coming over the sea to the relief of King Hrothgar, delivers him from a monster, Grendel, and then from the vengeance of Grendel's only less formidable mother. Returned home in triumph, Beowulf much later receives the due reward ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... sealing-wax, gave a faint, pale light, almost absorbed by the walls; the rest of the room lay well-nigh in the dark. But the dim brightness, concentrated upon the holy things, looked like a ray from Heaven shining down upon the unadorned shrine. The floor was reeking with damp. An icy wind swept in through the chinks here and there, in a roof that rose sharply on either side, after the fashion of attic roofs. Nothing could be less imposing; yet perhaps, ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... was a log dwelling, and near it stood another log structure, about twelve feet square,—the weaving shop of the family. On entering the dwelling I found the numerous household all clothed in substantial garments of their own manufacture. The floor was unadorned by a carpet and the room devoid of superfluous furniture; yet they had all that necessity required for their comfort. One needs but little experience like this to learn how few are our real wants,—how easily most luxuries ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... not by neglecting earth, but by making earth the road to heaven. Her religion was pre- eminently practical, while it was deeply spiritual; in fact, it was the religion of sanctified common sense. The true grace of her character gained the admiration which she never sought. As some simple unadorned column rising in the midst of richly-carved sculptures arrests attention by its mere dignity of height and grace of perfect proportion, so in the unassuming wife of Bernard Oliphant there was a loftiness ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... of invective, of eloquence, of ornament, or of any attempt at pathos, did our barrister mix with this statement. It was his object to put the jury and the court clearly in possession of facts, which, unadorned, he knew would appear stronger than if encumbered by any ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... supremely, and with a flame-like vividness. There the divine origin of the State which in the Athens of Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms of art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or Caesar in tragic action, displays itself in naked purity and in majesty unadorned. If artistic loveliness marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature of the Islam of Omar. The thought and the deed, logos kai poiesis, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... lawful things. They bowed the neck to bear The unadorned yoke that brings Stark toil and sternest care. Wherefore through them is Freedom sure; Wherefore through them we stand From all but sloth and pride secure, In a ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... "that you admire my favourite Alps." Nothing more. I tried to prick him to the consideration of the scenery by asking him which were his favourite Alps, but this also came to nothing. Having acknowledged his approval of the Alps, he seemed willing to let them go unadorned by either fact or fancy. I offered him sandwiches, but he seemed to prefer his moustache. ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... not too far from the Hall of Meeting. Though the depth of the fortress prevented me from knowing the time, it felt to be early afternoon by that strange internal clock that so seldom errs. It was correct, as usual. There was a quaint fireplace on the far wall of the room with a small, unadorned and unpretentious mantle, decorated like the rest of the fortress in a practical and experienced way, finding just the right flavor between the ornate, the practical, and the quaint, and avoiding all the while ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... most distant as well as the nearer provinces to grace the occasion, each in his robes of state, the magnificent white elephant, caparisoned with silk and velvet, and blazing with jewels, the king and queen, in simple majesty, alone unadorned amid the gaudy throng, surpassed any pageant ever exhibited in the western world. Alas! this pomp and pride were soon to ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... Skylark approached the top of the dock, all the escorting vessels dropped away and Crane saw that instead of the brilliant assemblage he had expected to see upon the landing-place there was only a small group of persons, as completely unadorned as were those in the car. In answer to his look of surprise, the Kofedix ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... speech. Van der Werff was still speaking. The sacred fire of enthusiasm sparkled in his eyes, and though the few words he addressed to his fellow-combatants in the deepest chest tones of his powerful voice were plain and unadorned, they found their way to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be equally gathered from an observation of the course of actual life—namely, the superiority of high over low principles, and of greatness over littleness of mind. These writings are like photographs, in which no feature is softened; no ideal expression is introduced, all is the unadorned reflection of the natural object; and the value of such a faithful likeness must increase as time gradually works more and more changes in the face of society itself. A remarkable instance of this is to be found in her portraiture of the clergy. She was the daughter and the sister ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... work which, of late, you have carried on so well, and which is now so near being finished. My wishes and my plan were to make you shine and distinguish yourself equally in the learned and the polite world. Few have been able to do it. Deep learning is generally tainted with pedantry, or at least unadorned by manners: as, on the other hand, polite manners and the turn of the world are too often unsupported by knowledge, and consequently end contemptibly, in the frivolous dissipation of drawing-rooms ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... sake,—indeed, they belong to him who can make them his by the right of superior strength. But every one has his own firm and sure possession of his friendships, while even if those things which seem the gifts of fortune remain, still life unadorned and deserted by friends cannot be happy. But enough has been said on this branch of ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... literary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and verse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned, with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:—he knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to which any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... gay scenes—women in their smartest gowns, men wearing their medals and ribands. General Sir H. Stisted was there in his red collar and cross and star of the Bath. Burton "looked almost conspicuous in unadorned simplicity." On 4th June [260] Burton left for Iceland. The parting from his friends was, as usual, very hard. Says Miss Stisted, "His hands turned cold, his eyes filled with tears." Sir W. H. Stisted accompanied him to Granton, whence, with new hopes and aspirations, he ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... The people whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could be ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... remembered, when the cactus had once rewarded her by producing two bright-red blossoms. That was long ago, and it had never done anything so brilliant again. Content with its one effort it had since remained unadorned, yet as it stood there, with its fat green leaves and little bunches of prickles, it had the air of saying to itself, "I have done it once, and if I liked I could do it a second time." Even now as she bent tenderly over it Lilac thought she could make out the faint beginning ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... Oliphant. Is it likely I should care to imitate one whom I despise? There was a brief, dreadful hour when I absolutely pined to have pretty things in my room as she has in hers; now I can do without them. My room shall remain bare and unadorned. In this state it will at least ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... transfigured in the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms and shoulders laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain calico, she would be unendurable—in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... slight in the waist, with broad skirts beneath the corselet, in its slender grace and curious slimness, always has the air of a woman's armour, and seems made for Queen Penthesilea or for the Roman Camilla. The Maid's armour was white and unadorned, if one may judge from its modest price of one hundred livres tournois. The two suits of mail, made at the same time by the same armourer for Jean de Metz and his comrade, were together worth one ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... sermons with the eloquent mannerisms of the pulpit, save, as Payson held, they were infinitely more logical and eloquent, but to-night, husking his logic of these externals, he fell flatly to preaching an unadorned philosophy of continence acutely at variance ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... what is the cause of his sighing, and of his forehead being mutilated; when thus begins the Calydonian river, having his unadorned hair crowned with reeds: ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... with being good, without considering that unadorned virtue may command esteem, but will never excite love; and both are necessary in marriage, which I suppose to be the state every woman of honor has in prospect; for I own myself rather incredulous ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... drawn inspiration from the noble reflections contained in the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius and in the Discourses of Epictetus, those great Stoics! The unadorned translations of George Long will serve to ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... that of the song sparrow, being softer and wilder, sweeter and more plaintive. Add the best parts of the lay of the latter to the sweet vibrating chant of the wood sparrow, and you have the evening hymn of the vesper-bird,—the poet of the plain, unadorned pastures. Go to those broad, smooth, uplying fields where the cattle and sheep are grazing, and sit down in the twilight on one of those warm, clean stones, and listen to this song. On every side, near ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... 3 vols. 8vo.—These Travels, which have been translated into English, possess a wonderful charm in the narrative, attained, however, too often by the sacrifice of plain and unadorned truth, to the love of romance and effect. Notwithstanding this drawback, Levaillant's Travels are valuable for the light they throw on the natural history ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... with unabated enthusiasm. "It's the bare and unadorned truth, Prince Pierre. My fine Galahad, if you came within eye-shot of her there'd be a ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... unmusical; and requires considerable skill and management to render it expressive and graceful. Simplicity in Latin is scarcely separable from baldness; and justly as Terence is celebrated for chaste and unadorned diction, yet, even he, compared with Attic writers, is flat and heavy.[256] Again, the perfection of strength is clearness united to brevity; but to this combination Latin is utterly unequal. From the vagueness and uncertainty of meaning which ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the remains in the rock of the primitive Marmoutier. The grottoes of S. Gatianus and of the disciples of S. Martin have been cleared out. There is a little arcade of three round-headed unadorned arches cut in the cliff that served as a cloister, and there is the old baptistry where Martin admitted his converts into the Christian Church, sunk in the rock for adult and complete submersion, and the niches ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... A cheap bureau, unadorned, with a broken mirror swinging in a rickety frame; one chair, and the bed in which she had tried to sleep, were the only articles ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... but gave an account of the disaster in unadorned English, and received forgiveness at once. Had he confessed to having chopped his entire tower to pieces, Sir Iltyd would have listened without a tightening of the lips, and with the air of a man about to invite his guest to make a bonfire of the castle if so it pleased him. As for Weir, her ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... course poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity of utterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide and how various are poetry’s domains. For if in one mood poetry is the simple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... melody. From all directions small boats are crossing river and bay to the little red school-house at Popham. Moved, we confess, more by curiosity than by any thirst for religious consolation, we joined the procession. Gathered within the cheerless room, unadorned, save here and there by wretchedly-executed prints of early patriots who would scarcely be recognized by their own friends, old and young alike presented ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... eighty- five feet below, with the sweep of the firm lines of the sides converging toward the bow on the background of the water. Suddenly the ship seemed to have grown large, impressive; her structure had a rocklike solidity. Her beauty was in her unadorned strength. One was absorbing the majesty of a city from a cathedral tower after having been it its thoroughfares and seen the detail ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... when Imber paused to remember, Howkan translated and a clerk reduced to writing. The court-room listened stolidly to each unadorned little tragedy, till Imber told of a red-haired man whose eyes were crossed and whom he had killed with a remarkably ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... we may properly descend to the consideration of the language, which, in imitation of the ancients, is through the whole dialogue remarkably simple and unadorned, seldom heightened by epithets, or varied by figures; yet sometimes metaphors find admission, even where their consistency is not accurately preserved. Thus Samson confounds loquacity with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... cousin, noting the evidences of vigorous health which glowed in eye and lip and cheek. He knew that the girl would have no dot, but he had reached a place where he was perfectly aware that if he wanted youth and beauty, he must take them unadorned. So he made up his mind at once, and in due time the ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... smiled at by a wiser generation. But much that is noble and heroic in the feelings of the nineteenth century has its hidden roots in the thirteenth. Gothic architecture and Gothic poetry are the children of the same mother; and if the true but unadorned language of the heart, the aspirations of a real faith, the sorrow and joy of a true love, are still listened to by the nations of Europe; and if what is called the Romantic school is strong enough to hold its ground against the classical taste and its royal patrons, such as Louis XIV., ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... what were the flowers of the clematis. The falling leaves are golden; those already fallen are of an ashen gray. The delicate tracery overhead is of infinite complexity, exquisite in its endless detail; and the whole of this disrobed Nature, in its unadorned simplicity, has an impress of sincerity that reminds you of the drawings of Holbein. Flat pools of shallow water lie about, carpeted with mosses and mirroring the sky; the smoke of the huts rises upward gaunt ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... conjugal infidelity. I make this solemn asseveration because there have been malevolent spirits who, in the plenitude of their calumny, have slandered me by suspecting my fidelity even at this early period of my existence. These pages are the pages of truth, unadorned by romance and unembellished by the graces of phraseology, and I know that I have been sufficiently the victim of events too well to become the tacit acquiescer where I have been grossly misrepresented. Alas! of all created beings, I have been the most severely ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... kind of hut, he is in the soundest and most sanitary type of temporary hospital that the mind of man has yet devised. The rain-drops may rattle a shade noisily on the roof, the asbestos lining may be devoid of ornamentation, but as he lies in bed and contemplates that unadorned ceiling he is a deal better off than if he were gazing at the elaborate (and dust-harbouring) cornices of the So-and-So Club's grandiose ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir |
