"Prosaical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thanks," the voice cried, passionately. "To be looked upon as 'dead,' to be near to the rascal who smiles to think that I am in my grave.... And everything so dull and prosaic on the surface! Yes, I have friends who will aid me in the business. Some day I may be able to thank you face to face, to tell you how I managed to see ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... interesting and peculiar phase of the new liberalism has little directly to do with the specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, and in fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and conventional pattern of English and American Unitarian thought. But this movement, known as Transcendentalism, would have been impossible without a preliminary and liberalizing stirring of the soil. It was a fascinating moment of release for some of the most brilliant and radical minds ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... voice which pronounced it. For several days I had been almost painfully alive to the beauty of an especially lovely spring, always so lovely after the long winter in the mountains. One evening, going on a very prosaic errand to a farm-house of our region, I walked along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen with melting snow, and found the old man I came to see, sitting silent and alone before his blackened small old house. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... a "gaudy-day"—of New-Year's tides in any way—was thought by Urian Oakes to savor strongly of superstitious reverence for the heathen god Janus; the Pilgrims made no note of their first New-Year's Day in the New World, save by this very prosaic record, "We went to work betimes." Yet Judge Sewall, as rigid and stern a Puritan as any of the earliest days, records with some pride his being greeted with a levet, or blast of trumpets, under his window, early on the morning of January ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... alone in the drawing-room, a basket of socks and stockings at her elbow, her thoughts working as busily as her needle. This girl had reduced the prosaic necessity of darning to a fine art; and since Evelyn's efforts in that direction bore an odd resemblance to ill-constructed lattice windows, Honor had taken pity on the maltreated garments very early in ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... manifold, I grant, but the root fact is there unchanged, and the sentiment being very intense, and already very much handled in letters, positively calls for a little pawing and gracing. With a writer of my prosaic literalness and pertinency of point of view, this all shoves toward grossness—positively even toward the far more damnable closeness. This has kept me off the sentiment hitherto, and now I am to try: Lord! Of course Meredith can do it, and so could Shakespeare; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beast—carrying in a cloud of dust that hid alike the chaser and the chased, till done their work the frightened herds swept onward and away, leaving the sward flecked with the huge forms that made the hunters' wealth! And now! on: fall prosaic from the wild charge, the danger of the fierce melee!—drifting from the camp the carts appear piled red in a trice with bosses, tongues, back fat and juicy haunch, a feast unknown to ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... are drawn in Greek or Brahmanic myths, must naturally seem like what Mr. Max Muller calls "temporary insanity". The imagination of the savage has been defined by Mr. Tylor as "midway between the conditions of a healthy, prosaic, modern citizen, and of a raving fanatic, or of a patient in a fever-ward". If any relics of such imagination survive in civilised mythology, they will very closely resemble the productions of a once universal "temporary insanity". Let it be granted, then, that "to the lower tribes of man, sun ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... prosaic life than this of Kew or Windsor, cannot be imagined. Rain or shine, the king rode every day for hours; poked his red face into hundreds of cottages round about, and showed that shovel hat and Windsor uniform to farmers, to pig-boys, to old women making apple dumplings; to all sorts of people, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a prosaic business executive snatched a moment from a busy day to indulge in a sentimental flight of fancy. He had read once of curious old-time beings called knights, who had undertaken to fight and slay fire-eating things ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... no whited sepulcher. It is a real living and livable thing, and moreover, when one visits it, he observes that the family burn great logs in their fireplaces, have luxurious bouquets of flowers on their dining-table, and use wax candles instead of the more prosaic oil-lamps, or ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... Chandler Harris, who had done so much to portray the negro's inner kindliness, as well as his singularly poetic outlook. Harris was one of the editors of the Atlanta Constitution, and there I found him in a bare, prosaic office, a short, shy, red-haired man whom I liked at once. Two nights later I was dining with James A. Herne and William Dean Howells in New York City, and the day following I read some of my verses for the Nineteenth Century Club. At the end of March I ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... caressingly, "we can be as happy as two pigs in clover!" And he proceeded to interpret, in plain prosaic detail, those blissful possibilities expressed by the ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... relieved against the background of Nature's beauty or sublimity. There is a poetical side to the commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you may frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Our poets, we must needs think, are deficient in that shiftiness, ready adaptation to circumstances, and ability of making the most of things, for which, as a people, we are proverbial. Can they make nothing of our Thanksgiving, that annual gathering of long-severed friends? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... once more descended from Pegasus, to our prosaic sphere. I believe he is working at a review of our work for the Munich Literary Journal of the Academy. Laboulaye (Vice-President of the Academy) says I have given him so much that is new to read, that he cannot be ready with his articles before ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... made Norman blush with the compunction that Richard's unselfish pride in him always excited. He had much to tell of his ecstasy with Oxford. Stoneborough Minster had been a training in appreciation of its hoary beauty, but the essentially prosaic Richard had never prepared him for the impression that the reverend old university made on him, and he was already, heart and soul, one of her most loyal and loving sons, speaking of his college and of the whole university ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... brilliant pattern of colours formed by the flower-beds on the lawn—now richly crowded with late summer blossom. But the vivacity of spirit which had hitherto enlivened her, was fast ebbing under the pressure of prosaic realities, and the warm scarlet of the geraniums, glowing most conspicuously, and mingling with the vivid cold red and green of the verbenas, the rich depth of the dahlia, and the ripe mellowness of the calceolaria, backed ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Hilda, with a smile. "You seem, from such circumstances, to have brought yourself to consider our very prosaic housekeeper as almost a princess in disguise. I, for my part, look upon her as a very common person, so weak-minded, to say the least, as to be almost half-witted. As to her accent, that is nothing. I dare say she has seen better days. I have ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... coast-guard path across the sand-hills, right out to Stone Horse Head. Would stay out till sundown, in the hope that by then Jennifer might have seen fit to exchange the manly joys of ratting for his more prosaic duties at the ferry, and so save her from further association with ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... by Dr. Shaw and even the cold, prosaic official report of the convention said: "It was one of the greatest speeches of the entire week." She began by telling of the immense demonstration in London during the past summer when 10,000 women marched through the streets ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... coldness to last long. Standing with Angelot's arms round her, trembling from head to foot with joy and fear, she tried between his kisses and tender words to tell him how indeed he must not stop her, for in real prosaic truth Madame de Sainfoy had sent her off ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... he has associated with the nomadic existence, the dull, wearisome round of squalor and wretchedness which is found, upon examination, to constitute the principal condition of the Gipsy tent. Whether it is that in this awfully prosaic period of the world's history the picturesque and jovial rascality which novelist and poet have insisted in connecting with the Ishmaelites is stamped ruthlessly out of being by force of circumstances, it is barely possible to say. Perhaps Gipsies, in common ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Kitty Sherard and Jane, left behind in comfortable and prosaic England, were spared the torment of flies and mosquitoes and other minor ills; they escaped most of the hard things of life, and enjoyed many of its pleasures and luxuries; and these mitigations ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... imaginations were kindled, and our prosaic breaking up was a time of grand excitement. With grim satisfaction they looked upon the dismantling of the rooms, and with sighs of relief saw carts take away such heavy articles ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... a habit, its exile a new home. The old ambition, now proved to be unrealisable, begins to seem capricious and extravagant; the circle of possible satisfactions becomes the field of conventional happiness. Experience, which brings about this humbler and more prosaic state of mind, has its own imaginative fruits. Among those forces which compelled each particular impulse to abate its pretensions, the most conspicuous were other impulses, other interests active in oneself and in one's neighbours. When the power of these alien demands is recognised ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... woman, and still occasionally composed a few verses to her memory, regretting, perhaps, the cooling of his poetic ardour. Then he had gradually lost sight of her in the hard work which made up his life. Profound study had made him more prosaic and he believed that he had done with ideals for ever, after the manner of many clever young fellows who at one and twenty feel that they are separated from the follies of eighteen by a great and ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... invigorating style can be cultivated. Style has nothing to do with the subject matter of a letter. Its only concern is in the language used—in the words and sentences which describe, explain and persuade, and there is no subject so commonplace, no proposition so prosaic that the letter cannot be made readable and interesting when a stylist takes ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... next morning with a bound, as if life had somehow become surcharged with fresh significance, fresh opportunity. His professional career seemed dull and prosaic—his critical work of small avail. His whole mind ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... party returned to the hotel the two women were walking lovingly arm in arm, and King was following after, in the more prosaic atmosphere of Cyrusville, Ohio. The good old lady began at once to treat King as one of the family; she took his arm, and leaned heavily on it, as they walked, and confided to him all her complaints. The White Sulphur waters, she said, had not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... when the proper material and limits of literary forms were being determined, oftentimes by means of false starts and grandiose failures. In particular, many efforts were made to give prolonged poetical treatment to many subjects essentially prosaic, for example to systems of theological or scientific thought, or to the geography of all England. 6. It continued to be largely influenced by the literature of Italy, and to a less degree by those of France and Spain. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... began in sober earnest. There were a great many witnesses to be called on both sides, their evidence being of more or less importance—chiefly less. But the interest centred round the prosaic figure of John O'Neill, the butler at Fitzwilliam Place, who had been in Mr. Brooks' family ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... the Crusades, not too near to be absorbed in observation and engrossed in the immediate results; not too far off to lose the sympathy for the religious chivalry which inspired the Holy War. Earlier, in the intensely prosaic period that immediately succeeded, the romance of the Crusades was gone; later, Europe was girding itself for the sterner task of reformation. Before the time of Tasso, Peter the Hermit would have been deemed a foolish enthusiast; later, he would have been sent ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... auxiliary aid societies, taking account of goods received for sanitary supplies, re-packing and shipping them to the points where they were needed, inditing and sending out circulars appealing for aid, in work more prosaic but equally needful and patriotic with that performed in the hospitals; and throughout every village and hamlet in the country, women were toiling, contriving, submitting to privation, performing unusual and severe labors, all for the soldiers. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... never noticed that it is often the most whimsically inconsequent, the most utterly ordinary, the most intrinsically prosaic of inanimate things that, with a sudden and overwhelming rush, will call into being memories the tenderest, the deepest, the saddest? It may be a worthless little book, a withered flower ghastly in its brown grave clothes, a cheap, tawdry ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... anything that is good and brave may be called, are always of use to the other fellow but barely and only indirectly the possessor of the virtues. Hence we praise the latter and spur others on to identical qualities (to our advantage). This is very barren and prosaic, but true. Naturally, not everybody has advantage in the identical virtues of other people, only in those which are of use to their individual situation— charity is of no use to the rich, and courage of no use to the protected. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... appeal to his vanity. She told him that it hurt her idea, her great idea, of him, that he should be in any way under obligations to or dependent on anybody. This way of putting the matter caught his fancy, which had remained blind to the more prosaic aspect of the case. "You must stand by your own strength," she said. She had to go a step farther still. "It'll make Amy Benyon quite angry too; it'll take away one of her grievances. Don't pay only the arrears, pay all you can." Thus she won and was comforted, in spite of her suspicion of ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... thinking of getting some dinner," said Winterborne, changing to the prosaic, as they walked. "And you, too, must require something. Do let me take you to a ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... lies in my power. Considering the means by which this end may be won, it appears necessary above all to avoid boring the student. He should be led to feel how charming is the business in hand even while engaged with prosaic details; and it seems to me, after some thought, that the sketch of a grand orchid nursery will best serve our purpose for the moment. There I can show at once processes and results, passing at a step as it were from the granary into ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... who went into exile for their religious and political faith. In the former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and poetic, like all of that old London which is so nearly gone, but now it is almost the most prosaic and commonplace thoroughfare of the newer London. It is wholly mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course, and which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of plebeian folks who have ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... felt it would be almost an outrage to discuss so prosaic a topic as the date of a house-match with one so broken up. Yet time was flying, ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... the romance out of things, in a general way, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article my impression that it rather does, I know not whether primitive Lorette has not become sadly vulcanized into prosaic progress by the grand system of water-works established there for the benefit of Quebec. Connected as it is, now, with the latter place, by seven miles of iron pipes, I would not undertake to say that it retains aught of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... expressions; but when, after treating of the creation of the angels and the revolt of Lucifer, the paraphrast comes to the Biblical part of the story, he follows the sacred text with servile fidelity, omitting no detail, however prosaic. The ages of the antediluvian patriarchs, for instance, are accurately rendered into verse. In all probability the Genesis is of Northumbrian origin. The names assigned to the wives of Noah and his three sons (Phercoba, Olla, Olliua, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... a happier woman in the world than Geraldine, nestled under her husband's plaid, in the big roomy porch, and looking out at the starlight? Even practical, prosaic people have their moments of poetry, when the inner meaning of things seems suddenly revealed to them, when their outer self drops off and their vision is purged and purified; and Geraldine, listening to the tinkling beck below, and inhaling the cool fragrance of the ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Sundays. The spot was harder to reach than most others along the twenty miles of nicked and ragged brim which helped enclose the wide blue area of the Big Water, but was better worth while when you got there. Her little tract lay beyond the more prosaic reaches that were furnished chiefly in the light green of deciduous trees; it was part of a long stretch thickly set for miles with the dark and sombre green of pines. Our nature-lover had taken, the year before, a neglected and dilapidated old farmhouse ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... become dumb when sporting talk is flying about. Of course you must not exaggerate too much. Only bumptious fools do that, and they are called liars for their pains. But a little exaggeration, just a soupcon of romance, does no one any harm, while it relieves the prosaic dullness of the ordinary anecdote. So, swallow your ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... balance of the imagination and the reasoning powers, in which the perfection of the human intellect is regarded as consisting, the exact correspondence between the thought and the expression, "the free music of prosaic numbers in the most diversified forms of style," the calmness, and perspicuity, and order, even in the stormiest moments of inspiration, revealed in every department of Greek literature, were not a mere happy stroke of chance, but a product of unwearied effort—and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and a list of articles with the help of which she hoped to effect a disguise for her father that would enable him to leave the district. It was a very prosaic service, Dick thought, but ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... and opening his wings, floats down, singing all the while. It is indescribable, but enchanting to see. In courtship, too, as related, he makes effective use of this exquisite movement. In simple food-hunting on the ground,—a most prosaic occupation, truly,—on approaching a hummock of grass he bounds over it instead of going around. In alighting on a tree he does not pounce upon the twig he has selected, but upon a lower one, and passes quickly up through the branches, as lithe as a serpent. So fond is he ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... Eliot's female figures she is the least ambitious, and on the whole, I think, the most successful. The part of the story which concerns her is much the most forcible; and there is something infinitely tragic in the reader's sense of the contrast between the sternly prosaic life of the good people about her, their wholesome decency and their noonday probity, and the dusky sylvan path along which poor Hetty is tripping, light-footed, to her ruin. Hetty's conduct throughout seems to me to be thoroughly consistent. The author has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... known a woman so entirely fascinating as Miss Landon; and this arose mainly from her large sympathy. She was playful with the young, sedate with the old, and considerate and reflective with the middle-aged. She could be tender and she could be severe, prosaic or practical, and essentially of and with whatever party she happened to be among. I remember this faculty once receiving an illustration. She was taking lessons in riding, and had so much pleased the riding-master ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... understand why even so conservative a critic as Louis Ehlert should exclaim, apropos of Chopin's "entirely new pianoforte life," "How uninteresting is the style of any previous master (excepting Beethoven) compared with his! What a litany of gone-by, dead-alive forms! What a feelingless, prosaic jingle! If anyone should, without a grimace, assure me sincerely that he can play pianoforte pieces by Clementi, Dussek, Hummel, and Ries, with real enjoyment even now, I will esteem him as an excellent man—yes, a very honest one; but I will not drink ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... No. 2—prosaic inscription! But as that front-door closed behind me I had the instant sense of having slipped away from the harsh light of the ordinary and contemporary into the dimness of an odd, august past. Here, in this dark hall, the past was the present. Here loomed vivid and vital on the ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Vaucluse. When they should have got well ahead I meant to go too, for if a cat may look at a king, a lady's maid may try to drink—if she can—a few drops from the cup of a great poet's inspiration. At first I resented those two ample, richly clad, prosaic backs marching sturdily toward the magic fountain; then suddenly the back of Sir Samuel became pathetic in my eyes. Hadn't he, I asked myself, loved his Emily ("Emmie, pet," as I've heard him call her) as long and faithfully as Petrarch loved his Laura? Perhaps, after all, he had earned the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... dark, came and went silently. To the people of her race a wedding means a fiesta, a village hubbub, a dance, and varying degrees of drunkenness. She was not herself in this house of a wedding supper for two, and a prosaic attitude toward the one event in life when money ought to be spent freely, even in ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... a somewhat fancy sketch to a more prosaic examination of what the telescope does actually reveal. Plate IX. represents the large crater Plato, so well known to everyone who uses a telescope. The floor of this remarkable object is nearly flat, and the central mountain, so ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... matter seems to be the mode in which a prosaic and ordinary dwelling was endowed with so evil a reputation. I was assured in London that it had had this reputation for twenty or thirty years. The family lawyer in P—— asserted most positively that there had never been a whisper of ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... probably sound asleep by now. Out of the question! Oh, why, why, with all the warning he had had, had he neglected to provide himself with a mysterious thing known to him all his life as a soothing-draught? It would have been so useful now, and Conrad would have defined it down to the prosaic requirements of pharmacy. But ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... anxious about the charge of heresy. Nothing indicates that any guilt of greater moment weighed upon his conscience.[31] After scrutinizing all accessible sources of information, we are thus driven to accept the prosaic hypothesis that Tasso was deranged, and that his Court-rivals had availed themselves of a favorable opportunity for making the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and here too, opposite, on the top of its high steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won't say immortalised, but unblushingly misrepresented, by the perfidious Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel the mystery of this prosaic painter's malpractices; he falsified without fancy, and as he apparently transposed at will the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the particular view that may have constituted his subject. It would look exactly like such and such a place if almost everything were not different. San Simeone ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... heart weighs the fall of a fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of a woman's glove in the same scales, and the glove is nearly always the heavier of the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic simplicity. The facts first, the emotions ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... may be so; but as yet the words only suggest sewers, ventilation, and chloride of lime. The poetry has not yet become vocal; and I think the same may be said of our 'material progress.' It seems thus far very prosaic. 'Only a great poet sees the poetry of his own age,' we are told. We every-day people are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... light across the gloom, hideous bats began flying madly about, and dashing to the ground in their fright great shreds of dusty cobwebs that must have been centuries old. Nobody minded that, however; it seemed just the sort of place where millions could really be found in these prosaic days! ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... fall flat upon the ear. no joke, serious matter (importance) 642. Adj. dull, dull as ditch water; unentertaining, uninteresting, flat, dry as dust; unfunny, unlively^, logy [U.S.]; unimaginative; insulse^; dry as dust; prosy, prosing, prosaic; matter of fact, commonplace, pedestrian, pointless; weary stale flat and unprofitable [Hamlet]. stupid, slow, flat, insipid, vapid, humdrum, monotonous; melancholic &c 837; stolid &c 499; plodding. boring, tiresome, tedious &c 841. Phr. davus sum ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of fact the ferry isn't a boat at all. It is more like a house or a street car or a park full of pretty benches. It doesn't sail, it only plies, plies between two given points at stated intervals, and could anything be more dull. Nothing is more prosaic than a ferry unless it be an ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... character, but they regarded them as positive statements, in guarded language, describing events which were to happen, and could be recognized when they did happen. It was the explanation, the perfectly prosaic and positive explanation, of all these wonders which drew them to study the Habershons and the Newtons whose books they so much enjoyed. They were helped by these guides to recognize in wild Oriental visions direct statements regarding Napoleon ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Journal office, smoking a morning cigarette and looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work. But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his day, he might have found ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... she actually attempted to seduce Herod, but failed, owing to his deep devotion to his wife Mariamne. The prosaic Josephus adds that Herod consulted his council whether he should not put her to death for this attempt upon his virtue. He was dissuaded by them on the ground that Antony would listen to no arguments, not even from ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... been praying we might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the other day, and the things that happened in that story on these lines were most remarkable. They do not happen here. Practical missionary life is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident. It is very prosaic at times. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... seen the great temples of the world, yet found in this humbler, but still magnificent structure an element of wonder. From the old world, ancient, rich in tradition, one expected all things; centaurs might spring from its soil unnoticed. That the prosaic rocks of Manhattan should heave for this sublimity stirred the ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... prosaic fact, established by actual excavation, destroys the basis of all the current ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... brought religion so much into practical life, and has done its allotted part in promoting upon earth the kingdom of God. But with ardour and unction religion, as we all know, may still be fanatical; with honesty and good sense, it may still be prosaic; and the fruit of honesty and good sense united with ardour and unction is often only a prosaic religion held fanatically. Bishop Wilson's excellence lies in a balance of the four qualities, and in a fulness and perfection of them, which makes this untoward result impossible; ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... affording an asylum to a whole rustic family, produce an indescribable mixture of great and simple ideas, a newly-discovered pleasure which inspires a continual interest. The greater part of our European cities have externally a common and prosaic appearance; and Rome, oftener than any other, presents the melancholy aspect of misery and degradation; but all of a sudden a broken column, a bas-relief half-destroyed, stones knit together in the indestructible manner of the ancient architects, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... conspicuous landmarks are associated in the minds of blacks with legends, generally of the simplest and most prosaic nature. About this rough rock Pee-rahm-ah is a story which in the minds of the natives satisfactorily ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... his death, Gerard de Lairesse, a popular painter, now forgotten, wrote of Rembrandt—"In his efforts to attain a yellow manner, Rembrandt merely achieved an effect of rottenness.... The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only ones he was capable of noting." Poor ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... in the north of England with which mine had been connected in the past. For the Greeks and Romans I cared very little; they seemed too remote from my own country and race, and the English present, in which my lot was cast, seemed too dull and un-picturesque, too prosaic and commonplace. My imagination being saturated with Scott, I had naturally the same taste as my master. I soon learned all about heraldry, and in my leisure time drew and colored all the coats of arms that had been borne by the Hamertons ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... there is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry, so in "Pauline," written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages, decasyllabically arranged. "Twas in my plan to look on real life, which was all new to me; my theories were firm, so I left them, to look upon men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as I pondered on them all, I sought how best life's end might be attained, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... very naturally, lovely lady! They were not a fairy gift; they became mine by the very prosaic transaction of purchase." ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... bring swift suspicion upon them. He was, however, not required to face any disconcerting climax. Indeed, it struck him as curious that a difficult situation in which strong emotion was stirred up could become so tamely prosaic merely because it was resolutely ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... be believed (and what siren is more comfortable to hearken unto than tradition?) these self-same patriots took their name of "Kit-Cats" from prosaic mutton pies. 'Twould be horrible to think on this gastronomic derivation of the title were we not to remember, quite fortunately, that geese saved classic Rome. Why, therefore, should not the preservers of perfidious Albion suggest the aroma ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... day that Mr. Daney had made his last call at the Sawdust Pile, Nan, spurred to her decision by developments of which none but she was aware, had blazed forth in open rebellion and given the Tyee Lumber Company's general manager the fright of his prosaic existence. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... quite separated fact from allegory might have been doubtful to a more prosaic mind than Honora's, but he had brought this dreamy strain with him from his father, and she thought it one of his great charms. She had been obliged to leave him to himself much more than usual of late, and she fervently resolved to devote herself with double energy ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... vigour of the original. If the poetical ideas of Kalidasa have not been expressed in language as musical as his own, I have at least done my best to avoid diluting them by unwarrantable paraphrases or additions. If the English verses are prosaic, I have the satisfaction of knowing that by resisting the allurements of rhyme, I have done all in my power to avoid substituting a fictitious and meagre poem of my own for the grand, yet simple and ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... such of them as he knew. But no disappointment, nothing but amazement, awaited him at a dinner that followed soon after. Emile de Girardin gave a banquet in his honour. His description of it, which he declares to be strictly prosaic, sounds a little Oriental, but not inappropriately so. "No man unacquainted with my determination never to embellish or fancify such accounts, could believe in the description I shall let off when we meet of dining at Emile Girardin's—of the three gorgeous drawing rooms with ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... good old Peg was munching in her stall. The fine, homely smell of horseflesh and long-worn harness leather went right to my heart, and while Bock frisked at my knees I laid my head on Peg's neck and cried. I think that fat old mare understood me. She was as tubby and prosaic and middle-aged as ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... unusual person," she said. "Bill didn't like you, but he never likes anything different. He's so—so prosaic. Don't you think that when a person gets older he should become—broadened ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... showing very little knowledge of Indian mind and character. Mr. David Bacon presented himself as a candidate for this somewhat unpromising field of labor. His son says he was one of those men who are called visionary and enthusiasts by men of more prosaic and plodding temperament. He had not a liberal education, but was a man of eminent intellectual powers and of intensely thoughtful habits, and beside a deep religious experience, he had endeavored ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... in the year 1760, published, by the house of B. Mecom in Boston, a 72 page brochure entitled "The Rudiments of Latin Prosody with a Dissertation on Letters and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic and Prosaic Composition, collected from some of the ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... serve to give definiteness to the impression, after all, perhaps, it is the eye alone, as it gazes, that really feels the impression. Astronomy is really a very prosaic science. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... in a lawyer's office, where he pursued for many years a sort of drudgery scarcely above that of a copying clerk. His daily dull routine made his evenings, which were his own, all the ore sweet; and he generally devoted them to reading and study. He himself attributed to his prosaic office discipline that habit of steady, sober diligence, in which mere literary men are so often found wanting. As a copying clerk he was allowed 3d. for every page containing a certain number of words; and he sometimes, by extra work, was able to copy ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... our readers will perceive that the wit is rather aukward, [sic] and the verses, especially the last, very prosaic. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... separate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominant tone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, like Nature's devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or, to choose a more prosaic illustration, like dipping a lump of sugar into a cup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the black coffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yet the presence of each is felt. It is ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... who was Sybarite enough to know that the discussion of the fish salad that he was then engaged upon, accompanied by the prattle of a pretty woman and irreproachable champagne, was about as near Elysium as a man of his years and prosaic temperament could expect to arrive at. He had had some conversation with his hostess on the way home. They had both arrived at the conclusion, from what they had seen in the theatre, that, even if everything was not yet settled, it would be before the evening was ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... servants of the church before they are slaves of the church's Master will never be troubled with Mr. Craig's difficulties. For one thing, his strong poetic nature made it impossible for him to believe in a dull, prosaic God: when told that God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, he found himself unable to imagine them inferior to ours. The natural result was that he remained a schoolmaster—to the advantage of many a pupil, and very greatly to the advantage ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... As a pretty French verse has it, "Meme quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes" [Even when it walks, we feel that a bird has wings].—My most cordial thanks therefore for the gift which you call prosaic, and my best regards to your husband. It would be charming if you came to Weimar again. From the middle of June to the 12th of ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... however, recalled her to earth and prosaic mundane affairs: her supply of money was rapidly getting dangerously low. Barring accident, she would have enough to get her to Dyer, where Eddie was to meet her. But suppose they should be snowed up for a day or ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... solid for forty years. The crowning mercy of my Trenton ministry was this, that one Sunday while I was watering the flock, a goodlier vision than that of Rebecca appeared at the well's mouth, and the sweet sunshine of that presence has never departed from the pathway of my life. To this hour the prosaic old capital of New Jersey has a halo of poetry floating over it, and I never go through it without waving a ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... books, for books, of which there were not many in those days, did not find their way to the Mendip villages. But the girl lived in her own world of romance, and peopled it with airy phantoms, as many a maiden has done before her. Her prosaic aunt and the two or three cronies who paid visits to Bishop's Farm were much more unreal to her than the ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... the ancient Romans had lamps constructed somewhat like that in the picture, it seems strange that so rude a contrivance should be in use in the nineteenth century. But this is only the practical and prosaic side of the question. For artistic purposes the lamp is just what is wanted in ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... the market-place, past the home where Schiller once lived and through the "street" scarcely more than arms'-breadth wide beyond, to the site of the older buildings of the university. Inornate, prosaic buildings they are, unrelieved even by the dominant note of picturesqueness; rescued, however, from all suggestion of the commonplace by the rugged ruins of the famed "powder-tower" jutting out from the crest of the hill ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams |
