"Ungenial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the Eternal. Brahma, the architect of the world, poised on a Lotus-leaf, floated upon the waters, and all that he was able to discern with his eight eyes was water and darkness. Amid scenes so ungenial and dismal, the god sank into a profound reverie, when he thus soliloquized: 'Who am I? Whence am I?' In this state of abstraction Brahma continued during the period of a century and a half of the gods, without apparent benefit or a solution ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... revolution in social and domestic life, and no less so in the life of a secluded student, this almost universal exchange of the open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove. On such a morning as now lowers around our old gray parsonage, I miss the bright face of my ancient friend, who was wont to dance upon the hearth and play the part of more familiar sunshine. It is sad to turn from the cloudy ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... end of month, and frequently to the middle of May. It was replete with snow crystals, and unusually dense, eight inches of snow producing one inch of water. Hail and fogs were frequent all over the kingdom; and aurora were numerous. The effects of so ungenial a season upon the mortality and health of the population were as evil as could be anticipated. The deaths greatly exceeded the average. In the winter quarter 134,605 deaths were registered, or 20,000 in excess of the average; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... at its old pranks. Last evening, I felt what I had not known for a long time, an inclination to walk for amusement; I took a short walk, and came back again neither breathless nor fatigued. This has been a gloomy, frigid, ungenial summer, but of late it seems to mend; I hear the heat sometimes mentioned, but ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... a good sailor and a hardy young chap, albeit a prince of royal blood, was abroad early, after a breakfast that staggered the few who remained unstaggered up to that particular crisis. A genial sailor-man and an equally ungenial deck swabber advised him, in totally different styles of address, to stay below if he knew what was good for him, only to be thanked with all the blitheness of a man who jolly well knows what is good for him, or who doesn't care whether it is good for him or not so long as he is doing ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... fledst me when the ungenial earth, Man's work-place, lay in gloom. Return'st thou in her hour of birth, Of hopes and hearts ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... often to attract the notice of the writer; while the results forced upon her mind the conviction, that the tender bud, nurtured with so much care and fidelity, and watered with so many prayers and tears, would never be permitted to burst into full flower, in the ungenial soil of earth. ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... postponed or evaded the hospitalities which establish intimacies. Some people said he was jealous of his young and beautiful wife. But for the most part his reserve was set down to the old inhospitable cause, some ungenial defect in his character; and in a little time the tramp of horses and roll of carriage-wheels were seldom heard up or down the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... inductions. The little medical lady struck him as a perfect example of the "Yankee female"—the figure which, in the unregenerate imagination of the children of the cotton-States, was produced by the New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the absence of chivalry. Spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflexion or a grace, she seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... wise. In his dealings with men he exasperates himself over the least divergence from the desired type. Before any over-tendency to the amenities and luxuries of civilization, in particular, he becomes unreasonable and relentless. Hence there appears something hard and ungenial in his views of life, utterly out of keeping with the delicate tenderness which he shows in the woods. The housekeeping of bees and birds he finds noble and beautiful, but for the home and cradle of the humblest human pair he can scarcely be said to have even toleration; a farmer's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... concerned the knife, fork, and wine-glass; but where four such natures as Mr. Hall, David Sweeting, Shirley, and Caroline were assembled in health and amity, on a green lawn, under a sunny sky, amidst a wilderness of flowers, there could not be ungenial dullness. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... virtues to have been the idly solemn utterance of mental aberration at the hour of death. So, with the integrity that belonged to his character, he had nurtured them as tenderly as was possible in the ungenial climate and soil of New England, putting some of them into pots for the winter; but they had rather dwindled than flourished, and he had reaped no harvests from them, nor observed them with any degree ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Medicean Tuileries, shall the French King and Queen now sit, for one-and-forty months; and see a wild-fermenting France work out its own destiny, and theirs. Months bleak, ungenial, of rapid vicissitude; yet with a mild pale splendour, here and there: as of an April that were leading to leafiest Summer; as of an October that led only to everlasting Frost. Medicean Tuileries, how changed since it was a peaceful Tile field! Or is the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... trying to the faith of parents, when all their early care seems blasted; when the vineyard, which they had fenced so tenderly, seems all despoiled and trodden under foot. It is indeed a discouraging season, the exact image of the ungenial springs of our natural year. But after this there comes, as it were, a second beginning of life, when principle takes the place of innocence. There is a time,—many of you must have arrived at it,—when thought and inquiry awaken; when, out ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... him. In being his own, they were invested with a greater charm than another man's castle. Here he had smoked and studied, here he had made many a glorious voyage into the land of books. Many a homecoming, too, rose up before him out of the dark ungenial streets, to a clear blazing fire, a neatly laid cloth, an evening of ideal enjoyment; many a summer twilight when he mused at the open window, plunging his gaze deep into the recesses of his neighbour's ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... Auberly, pompous, stern, and ungenial though he was, appeared to entertain some such thoughts, as he sat by his own fireside, one such night, in his elegant mansion in Beverly Square, Euston Road, London; and smiled grimly over the top of the Times newspaper at ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... as a class, from retaining more of the simplicity and quick susceptibility belonging to childhood, are unusually fond of waxen exhibitions. Too much worldly experience indisposes men to the playfulness and to the toyfulness (if we may invent that word) of childhood, not less through the ungenial churlishness which it gradually deposits, than through the expansion of understanding which ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... certainly, that a man such as has been described, of a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial, and sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, rather than sympathizing. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... of shock, therefore, when I saw that my friend took this view of me, and I strolled down moodily enough to the Chamber of Deputies. Turin is a dreary city for a lounger; even a resident finds that he must serve a seven years' apprenticeship before he gets any footing in its stiff ungenial society—for of all Italians, nothing socially is less graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the courteous civility, none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular Italians. They are cold, reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the less so, perhaps, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... in a very tame and prosaic country, nearly level, the utmost elevation getting hardly a couple of hundred feet above tidewater mark; a country with less natural beauty than belongs to most New England towns,—bare, bleak, rocky, with stunted vegetation and ungenial soil. Yet within its limits there are brooks and marshes and copses and woodlands,—rocks over which the wild columbine hangs its fuchsia-like pendants, and dells where nestle the earliest and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... below the salt lagoon there is not a blade of grass either in the bed of the creek or on the neighbouring flats, the soil of both being a stiff cold clay. We passed this ungenial line, therefore, and encamped near a fine pool of water, where both our own wants and those of our horses, as far as feed and water ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... child should ever be crammed with any unnatural mixture, till the provision of nature was ready for it; nor afterwards fed with any ungenial diet whatever, at least for the first three months; for it is not well able to digest ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... in the old gentleman's heart. Mary's affairs ripened rapidly. They seemed to me well typified by one of my Malmaison rose-buds that I have watched slowly growing through the ungenial May-days, drooping under a cold rain, suddenly expand into luxurious perfection with a half-day's June sunshine. The happy future was already arranged. The thrice-blessed October sun was to shine upon the bridal festival, and then Mary was to go with her husband, and accompanied by her father, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the innocence of her entire relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects itself with him in her husband's cold, insistent demand on her blind obedience to his will. She thinks alone of his thus binding her to a lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and purer fulness of life for which ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that most of the wild unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and ungenial districts, the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's sauce of sharp November air to be eaten with. At the foot of a hill near me ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... was not pure enough to detach him from "deformity and grimace" and "ungenial colour." Primaticcio and Nicolo dell Abate propagated the style of Julio Romano on the Gallic side of the Alps, in mythologic and allegoric works. These frescoes from the Odyssea at Fontainbleau are lost, but are worthy admiration, though in the feeble etchings of Theodore van Fulden. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... at about eleven o'clock. The sky was cheerless and the air ungenial, which we regretted, as we were going to Loch Lomond, and wished to greet the first of the Scottish lakes with our cheerfullest and best feelings. Crossed the Leven at the end of Dumbarton, and, when we looked ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... has been his lot to earn his bread by the exercise of the prose part of his mind,—by those qualities which he has in common with other men,—and his poetry has been written in the intervals and breathing-spaces of a life of regular industry. This necessity for ungenial toil may have added something to the shyness and gravity of the poet's manners; but it has doubtless given earnestness, concentration, depth, and a strong flavor of life to his verse. Had he been a man of leisure, he might have written more, but he could hardly have written better. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... "Kaintuck by birth and raisin'," as he described himself, he was a hunter of the Daniel Boone sort. The chase was his sole calling; and he would have indignantly scouted the suggestion that he ever followed it for mere amusement. Though not of ungenial disposition, he held all amateur hunters in lordly contempt; and his conversation with such was always of a condescending character, although he was not, after all, averse to their company. Being ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... decade ago, I may as well, in a note,[477] borrow, instead of merely paraphrasing it. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly not adjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ideals of Fecondite, to those of Travail. This ends in a sort of Paradise of Man, where electricity takes every kind of labour (except that of cultivating the gardens?) off men's hands, and the Coquecigrues have come again, and the pigs run about ready roasted, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... explanation, we see an effect very unlike its cause; but the chemistry of human emotion is like that of natural life. It will often form a compound in which neither of its constituents can be recognized. This perverse poem was the last as well as the first manifestation of an ungenial mood of Mr. Browning's mind. A slight exception may be made for some passages in 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country', and for one of the poems of the 'Pacchiarotto' volume; but otherwise no sign of moral or mental disturbance betrays itself in his subsequent work. The past ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... especially, to capture and subdue. Her little arts to effect his subjugation were too subtle and impalpable to attract my observation; but I thought there was a certain refined affectation of superiority, and an ungenial self-consciousness about her, that negatived all her advantages; and after she was gone, Rose interpreted to me her various looks, words, and actions with a mingled acuteness and asperity that made me wonder, equally, at the lady's artifice ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... of George the Second, it was said, had a very cold and ungenial manner. Lamb stammered out in his defence that "this was very natural in ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... but that his eyes happened, soon afterwards, to rest on the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was looking down on the scene like a ghost, and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one. The guest made an impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what might easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... than business, can be a remedy large enough for so large an evil. True it is, that a peculiarly frank or jovial temperament in a sovereign may do much for a season to thaw this punctilious reserve and ungenial constraint; but that is an accident, and personal to an individual. And, on the other hand, to balance even this, it may be remarked, that, in all noble and fashionable society, where there happens to be a pride in sustaining what is deemed a good tone ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... having darkened a life that had been to her childhood so benignant, and to her youth so confiding. As we have seen her, at the mention of Darrell's name—at the allusion to his griefs—fly to the side of her ungenial lord, though he was to her but as the owner of the name she bore,—so it was the saving impulse of a delicate, watchful conscience that kept her as honest in thought as she was irreproachable in conduct. But vainly, in summoning her intellect to the relief of her heart—vainly had ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heart is full of inarticulate pain, And beats laborious. Cold ungenial looks Invade my sanctuary. Men of gain, Wise in success, well-read in feeble books, No nigher come, I pray: your air is drear; 'Tis winter and low ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... for, from that day, his good fortune deserted him. And he might also have discovered that he had committed a great crime, with no other fruit than that of making a useless alliance, encumbering himself with an ungenial companion, and leaving an orphan child dependant on strangers, and continually tantalised by the recollections of a fallen throne. Those feelings, in the solitude of his chamber, and the general dejection ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death of his father, who had long been at the head of a great mercantile concern, imposed it ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... indeed a wild speculation to assert that the oriental wisdom ever wandered, that it is more likely that they were the offspring of the native ignorance [46], than the sublime importation of a symbolical philosophy utterly ungenial to the tribes to which it was communicated, and the times to which the institution is referred. And though I would assign to the Eleusinian Mysteries a much earlier date than Lobeck is inclined to affix [47], I search in ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enterprises, but without having the promptness, the fertility, and the suppleness of mind which Francis I. displayed in getting out of the awkward positions in which he had placed himself, and in stalling off or mitigating the consequences of them. Henry was as cold and ungenial as Francis had been gracious and able to please: and whilst Francis I., even if he were a bad master to himself, was at any rate his own master, Henry II. submitted without resistance, and probably without knowing it, to the influence of the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... but within the borders of Massachusetts, was another settlement, on the outskirts of a thriving village, the male inhabitants of which also followed the calling of small farmers and fishermen, some of them diversifying these pursuits by the occupation of shoemaking, at the ungenial season of the year. They were industrious, and far less rude than their compatriots, to whom reference has just been made. At this point lived three young men, hard by each other, and brothers, of the name, I will say, of Lowe. One ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... of little Kate Battledown, the effect of whose society on Archibald had been so strangely ungenial. A year or two after his "awakening" the little maiden was again thrown in his way, and this time with very different results. There is extant among the family papers a letter containing a very pretty account of the ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... year: but my grapes, that used to be forward and good, are at present backward beyond all precedent: and this is not the worst of the story; for the same ungenial weather, the same black cold solstice, has injured the more necessary fruits of the earth, and discoloured and blighted our wheat. The crop of hops promises to ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... the Federal cavalry back upon their camps; and the same afternoon Jackson, leaving Elk Run Valley, which was immediately occupied by Ewell, with 8000 men, marched up the river to Port Republic. The track, unmetalled and untended, had been turned into a quagmire by the heavy rains of an ungenial spring, and the troops marched only five miles, bivouacking by the roadside. May 1 was a day of continuous rain. The great mountains loomed dimly through the dreary mist. The streams which rushed ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... between the higher classes and the people; for the latter, wishing to live in conformity with the laws, and the former to be themselves the rulers of the people, it was not possible for them to abide in perfect amity together. This ungenial disposition, while their fear of the Ghibellines kept them in order, did not discover itself, but no sooner were they subdued than it broke forth, and not a day passed without some of the populace being injured, while ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... miles—no great distance as prairie miles are reckoned,—there were known to be some half dozen of the fraternity, putting their superior equipment to the test, opposing trained minds and muscles to the stubborn resistance of an ungenial nature. The varying result of the struggle in different cases would seem to indicate that it is moral fibre which nature respects and submits to, rather than ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... seventeen hundred years have no more important use than this—to afford shelter to a few little birds and to the solitary man that watched them—from the bleak wind. Many a strange Roman curse on this ungenial climate must these same stones have heard. Looking through a gap in the wall I saw, close by, on the other side, a dozen men at work with pick and shovel throwing up huge piles of earth. They were uncovering a small ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... an expressive pantomime of an overladen foot-soldier up and down the room, in time to the music. The only person who didn't laugh was James—which I thought ungenial. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... come back to me all shall be forgiven. My heart is as it ever was. Come, and let us leave this cold and ungenial country and go to the sunny south; to the islands of the blest, [Mr. Emilius during his married life had not quite fathomed the depths of his wife's character, though, no doubt, he had caught some points of it with sufficient accuracy] ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... case with Mr. Roscoe. Born in a place apparently ungenial to the growth of literary talent—in the very market-place of trade; without fortune, family connections, or patronage; self-prompted, self-sustained, and almost self-taught, he has conquered every obstacle, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... again dashed their hopes in 1821, and threw a great part of the South and West into a state of decided famine. The spring of that year was wet and stormy, retarding the necessary work, especially the planting of potatoes. The summer was also unfavourable, May was cold and ungenial; in June there was frost, with a north wind, and sometimes a scorching sun. The autumn, like the spring, was wet and severe, rain falling to a very unusual extent. The consequent floods did extensive injury; not merely were crops of hay floated off the lowland meadows, but in various places ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... self-respect, self-dedication are as needful as susceptibility, or these peerless local charms will only enchant to betray the artist. Crawford carried to Rome the ardor of an Irish temperament and the vigor of an American character. Hundreds have passed through a like ordeal of privation, ungenial because conventional work, and slow approach to the goal of recognized power and remunerated sacrifice; but few have emerged from the shadow to the sunshine, by such manly steps and patient, cheerful trust. It was not the voice of complaint that first attracted towards him intelligent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... were upholstered in dark green leather, the chimney-piece was of carved marble, a few ancient and rather dismal pictures hung almost out of sight on the walls; and generally, the room would have produced an impression of a repellent and ungenial kind of pomp, if it had not been for the extremely human note struck by the large assortment ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the burning fiery furnace ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... scene will earth become! Of purest spirits a pure dwelling-place, 40 Symphonious with the planetary spheres; When man, with changeless Nature coalescing, Will undertake regeneration's work, When its ungenial poles no longer point To the red and baleful sun 45 That faintly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... yellow-hammer sang, and brambles had put forth green buds. Two wasps went by in the sunshine. The 14th is old Candlemas, supposed to rule the weather for some time after. Old Candlemas was very fine and sunny till night, when a little rain fell. The summer that followed was cold and ungenial, with easterly winds, though fortunately it brightened up somewhat for the harvest. A chaffinch sang on the 20th of February: all these are ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... British Primrose, the Bird's-eye Primrose, almost defies garden cultivation, though in its native habitats in the north it grows in most ungenial places. I have seen places in the neighbourhood of the bleak hill of Ingleborough, where it almost forms the turf; yet away from its native habitat it is difficult to keep, except in a greenhouse. For the cultivation of the other non-English species, I cannot ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the colony, and a very superficial knowledge of its present state. That a period of twenty-two years has not been sufficient to render New South Wales independent of the mother country, is a reflection which must produce strong and ungenial suspicions of the prudence of those methods which have been pursued to accelerate such a desirable end; and the continuance of the late system, the inefficiency of which has been amply illustrated by recent events, ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... a close garrison, with so ungenial a companion, would have damped any man's spirits but O'Flaherty's. He, however, upon this, as other occasions in life, rallied himself to make the best of it; and by short excursions within certain prescribed limits along the river side, contrived to shoot and fish enough to get through ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... viticulture that the grapes which yield our most delicate and exquisite wines of Ay, all sparkle and sunshine, can only be made to yield those wines when they are planted in our poorest and most chalky soil, and in regions where the climate is so ungenial that the plants have to be set as closely as possible together in the ground. We really huddle them together, as we do sheep in the hurdles in winter, to keep one another warm. This M. Harmel did with his converts. He taught his workmen to associate more closely ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... where his force lay: is it not in the analysis of motive; and in a subtle perception of the most obscure and secret workings of the mind? Still, admire Balzac as we may, I think we do not like him; we rather feel towards him as towards an ungenial acquaintance who is for ever holding up in strong light our defects, and who rarely draws forth ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... very little akin to romance were the early pursuits and associates of the author of Childe Harold, and, combined with what we know of the still less romantic youth of Shakspeare, prove how unhurt the vital principle of genius can preserve itself even in atmospheres apparently the most ungenial and noxious ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... 'Schoolmistress,' the prettiest of poems, have been better if he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a home rusticism is fresh and startling, but where nothing is gained in expression it is out of tenor. It may make folks smile and stare, but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted as you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my puns. I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... if the weather is cold and ungenial, wheat turns yellow; this is the weaning time of the young plants, which have then exhausted the nourishment contained in the seed, and in the absence of growing weather they do not take kindly to the food in the land, upon ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... first-class work. We may envy this opportunity to his old opponent, O'Shanassy, who, in power at the time, generously found him a small appointment—a station upon one of the railways—which gave him, at least, a comfortable, and, in a social way, by no means ungenial home for the short remainder ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... true that, in some few instances, the pleroma of aristocratic dignity undergoes a sort of acetic fermentation, and comes out in ungenial qualities. Now and then, at a public watering-place, a man or woman appears no otherwise distinguished than by a remarkable talent for being disagreeable; and it is amusing to find, on inquiry, that this repulsiveness of demeanor ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... but he had a certain downright honesty about him, joined with an entire insensibility to those finer perceptions which would have interfered with plain speaking, where plain speaking was desirable; he had a broad, not ungenial humour, which showed him things and persons in their genuine light, and enabled him to picture them for us with a distinctness for which we owe ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... unjust, which gives the superiority to the sun over the wind. Who has not seen the lightsome earth, the balmy atmosphere, and basking nature become dark, cold and ungenial, when the sleeping wind has awoke in the east? Or, when the dun clouds thickly veil the sky, while exhaustless stores of rain are poured down, until, the dank earth refusing to imbibe the superabundant ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... improvement resulting from such calm discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indulged in, was not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps of granite, bringing neither warmth ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... entrance to the lawn, and by their loyal cheers, and smiles, and birthday suits, gave honest welcome to their monarch's brother, and in the fulness of their hearty zeal, paid a grateful tribute to their absent king. The ungenial state of the morning's weather had prevented many of the yachts from coming round, but a few jolly hearts had weathered the Needles, and displayed their loyalty by decorating their vessels with all the colours of all the nations of the world. At an appointed ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... at the head of the bed. But we have certain advantages. For example, in English restaurants there is always something on the table to eat at once— hors d'oeuvres or bread and butter. In America there is too often nothing ready but iced water—an ungenial overture to any feast—and you must wait until your order has been taken. Other travellers, even Americans, have agreed with me that it would be more comfortable if the convention which decrees that the waiter shall bring everything together ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... with his strawberries in an ungenial silence. He was irritated by his momentary self betrayal. If he had cared to explain it he would have had to confess that though personally indifferent to adventures he disliked to have women mixed up in them. He was glad when Laura with her intuitive tact changed ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... architecture,[6] differs little from the description of the same objects which would be given by an intelligent and well-educated European, if they could be presented to him in the aspect of utter novelty. The latest of these Oriental wanderers in the ungenial climes of Franguestan, is the one whose name appears at the head of this article, and who, with a rare and commendable modesty, has preferred introducing himself to the public under the protecting guidance of Maga, to venturing, alone and without a pilot, among the perilous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... English Minister at the Court of Hanover, set out for the palace of Herrenhausen to bear to the new King of Great Britain the tidings of Queen Anne's death. About two o'clock in the morning he entered the royal apartments of the ungenial and sleepy George, and, kneeling, did homage to him as King of Great Britain. George took the announcement of his new rank without even a semblance of gratification. He had made up his mind to endure it, and that was all. He was too stolid, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... me: you allude to the inconveniences of a woman traveling in mail coaches in December, and I almost felt, when I read the sentence, what my aunt Dall told me after I had requested you to come to us now, that it was a want of consideration in me to have invited you at so ungenial a season for traveling. I had one reason for doing so which I hope will excuse the apparent selfishness of the arrangement. Toward the end of the spring I shall be leaving town, I hope to come nearer your land, and the beginning of our spring is seldom much more mild and inviting ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... pursuits and habits. On the other hand, the quiet temperament of my mother required some more exciting cause than the affections of her husband, to quicken those germs of deep, placid, womanly love, that certainly lay dormant in her heart, like seed withering with the ungenial cold of winter. The last meeting of such a pair was not likely to be attended with any ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... rushed off into the melancholy meadows, among the sodden hay-cocks still standing among the green growth of grass; but a shower, increasing the damp forlornness of the ungenial day, made him turn homewards. When, late in the afternoon, Ethel came into the schoolroom for some Cocksmoor stores, she found him leaning over his books on the table. This was his usual place for study; and she did not at once perceive ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ocean, with a rocky coast, an ungenial climate, and a soil scarcely fruitful,—this was the material patrimony which descended to the English race—an inheritance that would have been little worth but for the inestimable moral gift that accompanied it. Yes; from ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... his tone which touched his daughter deeply. He seemed to have struck the key-note of his life in those few words; a disappointed unsuccessful life; a youth in which there had been some hidden cause for the ungenial temper of his ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... if she waited for that slow-coach of a Tom to bring them to her young master. No sweep of leaf-covered hills seen through bending branches laden with blossoms; no stretch of sky or slant of sunshine; only a grim, funereal, artificial formality, as ungenial and flattening to a boy of his tastes, education and earlier environment as a State asylum's would have been to a red Indian fresh ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... seas That wash th'ungenial pole, will rest no more Beneath the shackles of the mighty North; But rousing all their waves resistless heave.— And hark! the lengthen'd roar continuous runs Athwart the rested deep: at once it bursts And piles a thousand mountains to the clouds. Ill fares the bark, with trembling ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... boughs of the graceful willow tribes, and all the neighbouring shrubs, which only a moment before I had shivered to look upon, bent down, as they appeared, beneath a load of ungenial icicles, were now, as though touched by some enchanter's wand, sparkling and brilliant, reminding one of the diamond-growing trees of young ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... severity, and I had shot up into a very tall weak youth. Mr. Hunt gave up teaching, and became editor of Littell's Magazine. I was sent to the school of Mr. Hurlbut—as I believe it was then spelled, but I may be wrong. He had been a Unitarian clergyman, but was an ungenial, formal, rather harsh man—the very opposite of Mr. Hunt. My schoolmates soon found that though so tall, I was physically very weak, and many of them continually bullied and annoyed me. Once I was driven into a formal stand-up fight with one younger by a year, but ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... knight; "I was convinced that there was better food in the cell, Holy Clerk, since you first doffed your cowl.—Your keeper is ever a jovial fellow; and none who beheld thy grinders contending with these pease, and thy throat flooded with this ungenial element, could see thee doomed to such horse-provender and horse-beverage," (pointing to the provisions upon the table,) "and refrain from mending thy cheer. Let us see the keeper's bounty, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... travelled a good deal in Germany," I said, "and I have never anywhere found the people so stupid and stolid and ungenial ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... sea-encircled district, holding a midway place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valley and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conon and Carron open into the German Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, as the local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter protracts his stay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vast floats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and shallower estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... streets bareheaded, shouting in chorus whatever comes uppermost, perhaps a portion of a miserere, to the great scandal of pious Catholics tucked snugly in their beds. At length he reaches his lodging, and shutting himself up in his chamber is, at this, to every-day mortals, most ungenial hour, visited by some of his most brilliant inspirations. These he hastily scratches down on scraps of paper, and next morning arranges them, or, in his own phrase, instruments them, amid the renewed ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... February morning, when the incessant mistral is blowing, and far and near, upon desolate hillside and sandy plain, the scanty trees are bent sideways, the crumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dry ungenial air. Yet inside the town, all is not so dreary. The Papal palace, with its terrible Glaciere, its chapel painted by Simone Memmi, its endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber, funnel-shaped to drown and suffocate—so runs tradition—the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... toleration of false opinions would be the only palladium of progress; or that a doctrinaire State, composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial if mild tyranny. Mercier's is no exception to the rule that ideal societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... feeling it is for me to have someone who is to like my verses or I shall not ever like them after! So far differently was I circumstanced of old, that I used rather to go about for a subject of offence to people; writing ugly things in order to warn the ungenial and timorous off my grounds at once. I shall never do so again at least! As it is, I will bring all I dare, in as great quantities as I can—if not next time, after then—certainly. I must make an end, print this Autumn my last four 'Bells,' Lyrics, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... about the farm that produces fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that most of the wild, unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and ungenial districts the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... the slightest expression of his wishes, would, at any moment, have drawn her from pleasures of which she already wearied; and, amid the sweet tranquillity of nature, they might have regained that happiness, which had withered in the ungenial atmosphere of artificial life. But he was too proud to acknowledge the weakness he indulged; and when she besought him, even with tears, to explain the cause of his altered conduct, he answered her evasively, or repulsed her with a coldness, which she felt more ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... negatives. It was not stormy, it was not rainy, it was not sunshiny, it was not snowy, it was not frosty, it was not foggy, it was not clear, it was nothing but cloudy and quiet and cold and generally ungenial, with just a puff of wind now and then to give an assertion to its ungeniality. I should not in the least have cared to tell what sort the day was, had it not been an exact representation of my own mind. ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... merchant, who may no longer look out for his argosies, may yet be in glee when he finds it "a rare dropping morning for the early colewort." To another multitude, poverty involves loss of rank,— a letting down among strangers whose manners are ungenial, and their thoughts unfamiliar. For these there may be solace in retirement, or the evil may fall short of its threats. The reduced gentlewoman may live in patient solitude, or may grow into sympathy with her neighbours, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... technical rules in composition, and all the pedantry of art, too often fill up the ranks vacated by veteran genius, and of this there are examples enough in Flanders, Spain, and even Italy. The schools may, and often do, make men scholastic and ungenial, and art remains an instructor and ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the SIBYLLINE LEAVES have been printed almost two years; and the necessity of troubling the reader with the list of errata[1151:1] [forty-seven in number] which follows this preface, alone induces me to refer again to the circumstances, at the risk of ungenial feelings, from the recollection of its worthless causes.[1151:2] A few corrections of later date have been added.—Henceforward the author must be occupied by studies of a very ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... stout. Some of the younger women and the children had rather pleasing countenances, but the difference between these and the more aged of that sex, bore strong testimony to the effects which a few years produce in this ungenial climate. Most of the party had sore eyes, all of them appeared of a plethoric habit of body; several were observed bleeding at the nose during their stay near the ship. The men's dresses consisted ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... and moulded women who have come down to our day canonized as saints in the Roman Catholic communion, one too frequently gets the impression of most regal natures, gifted with all the most divine elements of humanity, but subjected to a constant unnatural pressure from the ceaseless scrutiny and ungenial pertinacity of some inferior and uncomprehending person invested with the authority of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... same ungenial climate, hostile as it generally is to the long remembrance of departed people, has sometimes a lovely way of dealing with the records on certain monuments that lie horizontally in the open air. The rain falls into the deep incisions of the letters, and has scarcely time to be dried away ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Malcontent, which is, in a crude way, very much in his own vein: he contributed (according to rather late authority) some charming scenes (elegantly extracted, on a hint of Mr. Gosse's, by a recent editor) to A Cure for a Cuckold, one of Rowley's characteristic and not ungenial botches of humour-comedy; he wrote a bad pageant or two, and some miscellaneous verses. But we know nothing of his life or death, and his fame rests on four plays, in which no other writer is either known or even hinted to have had a hand, and which are in different ways of the first order of interest, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury |
