"Homely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame—Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand, Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass With roots that groped about eternity, And in each drop of dew upon each blade The ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... be the dreariest of all the dreary ones they had already passed in their extemporised dwelling—"home" they called it, as people will style any shelter to which they can retreat from all the trials and exposures of the outside world, "no matter how homely!" ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... last worn were thrown carelessly about, unsmoothed, unbrushed; the scanty articles of furniture were out of their proper places; slovenly discomfort marked the death-chamber. And by the bedside stood a neighbouring clergyman, a stout, rustic, homely, thoroughly Welsh priest, who might have sat for ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pointed out to them the importance of what we had found. We had hitherto been in great need of salt—for we had not a single grain of it—and had felt the want ever since our arrival in the valley. Only they who cannot get salt, can understand what a terrible thing it is to be without this homely, ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... observed and there is a world of homely, ay, of legislative knowledge in the observation, that wherever you see a flower in a cottage-garden, or a bird at the window, you may feel sure that the cottagers are better and wiser ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... an object, and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you,— at your side,— you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea— to use a homely but expressive phrase— you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... listening for a few moments, and, under the spell of the fresh, young voice, the homely, heart-searching words, and the intimate sweetness of the woods, the despairing apathy lifted slowly away. She started forwards again with a new understanding, her footsteps quickened. She would go to Father ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with delight, but with complete astonishment: having forgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice and sea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human, familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachy scent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe and a charm in that place at that hour, as it were of those gardens of Hesperus, and fields of asphodel, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... the dull average five foot ten or eleven that appears taller, while it keeps lean—so naturally I have a hopeless yearning for nymph-like creatures who pretend to be engaged when I ask them to dance. Still, there's consolation and homely comfort in talking with a little woman who makes you feel the next best thing to a giant. Biddy is an old-fashioned five foot four in her highest heels; and as she smiled up at me I saw that she hadn't changed a jot in the last ten years, despite the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... must needs come breaking through, And now and then the office hum Dies like a mist, ... and there will come An Oxford breakfast scene: the quad All blue and grey outside—O God— And there sits Twiston at the feast Proclaiming he will be a priest! I see his eyes, his homely neb— Ring, telephones, and ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... society demands. It is probable that Sir John suffered more, though he betrayed nothing. Youth has the upper hand in these cases, for life is a larger thing when we are young. As we get on in years, our eggs, to use a homely simile, have a way of accumulating ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... trepidation under which he was laboring, feel good-natured all over—the Colossus of finance was so earnest at his music, so painstaking and interested in placing his thick, clumsy fingers, and so frankly delighted with the effect of his performance upon his own ear. It seemed to Brett homely and pleasant, the thought that one of the most important people of eighty millions should find his pleasure in an art for which he had ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... in his homespun, may possess the real essentials which make the gentleman—good feeling, and respect for the feelings of others. The homely dress, weather-beaten face, and hard hands, could not deprive him of the honest independence and genial benevolence he derived from nature. No real gentleman would treat such a man, however humble his circumstances, with insolence or contempt. But place ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... frequenting the place arose, in the end, less from the excellence of the food than from the enjoyment of his old friend's conversation. Amid the flashy sophistications of the Parisian life to which Garnett's trade introduced him, the American sage's conversation had the crisp and homely flavor of a native dish—one of the domestic compounds for which the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It was a mark of the old man's impersonality that, in spite of the interest he inspired, Garnett had never got ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Mrs. Burr!" exclaimed Eugenia. She lifted her gaze from the homely figure in its awkward finery, to the man who stood beside her. Then she stooped and kissed ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... all. The position of the barrier guard ceased to be—if it ever were—a sinecure, and he was kept busy picking pockets, examining bills, perusing love-letters, written in all sorts of prose, and in verse which was homely, if not exactly Homeric. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... earth would you do with Nancy if you didn't marry her off? If she were homely she'd have to fill in chinks in other people's lives, but with her nice little basket of eggs, good looks, money, not too much wit, and a desire to please, she just naturally is put up for ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... couple of volumes of Practical Suggestions towards alleviating the Sufferings of the Sick. One volume is little more than a selection of religious extracts, not likely to be more apt or useful to the sick than to the whole. The other is a discreet and homely little manual of nursing, distinguished from the common run of such books by its delicate consideration and wise counsel for the peculiar mental susceptibilities of the invalid. The collection of Maxims and Observations was designed to be 'an useful ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... garments, lying among her own wraps, gave her a sense of homely intimacy. It was as if her happiness came down from the skies and took on the plain dress of daily things. At last she seemed to ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... you listen to me. You think I'm a homely old woman, probably, set in my ways as an eight-day clock. I guess I look like it and act like it. But I ain't so awful old—on the edge of forty, that's all. And when I was your age I wa'n't so awful homely, either. I had fellers aplenty hangin' round and I could have married any one ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... born in London; a clerk nearly all his days in a bank; his poems, mostly on homely subjects, but instinct with poetic feeling and fancy, gained him the friendship of Southey and Charles Lamb, as well as more substantial patronage in the shape of a government ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... where the birds are singing. I do not understand the words, but the sound is sweet to the ear." The boys in a certain district school on Hawaii call the weekly head inspection "playing the ukulele" in allusion to the literal interpretation of the name for the native banjo. These homely illustrations, taken from the everyday life of the people, illustrate a habit of mind which, when applied for conscious emotional effect, results in much charm of formal expression. The habit of isolating the essential feature leads to such suggestive names as "Leaping ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... knew no greater pleasure than to receive their old friends in their country house at Tourbeville. It was an intimate and healthy pleasure, the pleasure of homely gentlefolk who had spent most of their lives in the country. They used to go to the nearest railway station to meet some of their guests, and drove them to the house in their carriage, watching for compliments on their district, on the rapid vegetation, on the condition of the roads ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of a bad man, yet you may measure the difference between them by valuing one minute of the one at an hour of the other ('One day in thy courts is better than a thousand'), or you might say that 'there is an infinite difference.' But this is not so much as saying, in homely phrase, 'They are a thousand miles asunder.' And accordingly Plato finds the natural vehicle of his thoughts in a progression of numbers; this arithmetical formula he draws out with the utmost seriousness, and ...
— The Republic • Plato
... the ear, and on the side where Mark could see it best, admiring its effect and forgetting the arrangement of the hair in his admiration of the well-shaped head, bending so industriously over the work which Helen had resumed—not crocheting, nor yet embroidery, but the very homely work of darning Uncle Ephraim's socks, a task which Helen always did, and on that particular night. Helen knew it was not delicate employment and there was a moment's hesitancy as she wondered what Mark would think—then with a grim delight in letting him see ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... to do since Uncle Phineas left me that money folks have called me foolish or crazy, and I always was reckoned sensible before, if I was homely. Abijah's folks warn me against lettin' John's folks have it, and John's folks against Abijah's, and they say that banks burst up and railroad stocks are risky, and I'll end by bein' on the town. I never heard anything about my bein' in danger of comin' on to the town before. I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... elm-shaded. Such hath it been depicted in their legends who went before me; What therefore, I have seen and heard, declare I unto you In measures artless and untuneful. Fearless of hardship, In costume, as in manners, unadorn'd and homely Were our ancestral farmers, the seed-planters of a strong nation. Congenial were their wives, not ashamed of the household charge, Yoke-fellows that were help-meets, vigorous and of a good courage; Revolting not at life's ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... seemed to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw, with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats. The comparison is a homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was irresistibly suggested ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... cousin Wally and his new baby sister?" As you know, if you've read A New Sugar Creek Mystery, I had a homely, red-haired cousin, named Walford, who lived in the city, who had a new baby sister. Mom had been to see the baby, and also Pop, but I hadn't, and didn't want to, and certainly didn't exactly want to see my red-haired cousin, Wally, but would like to see his crazy Airedale dog, and ...
— Shenanigans at Sugar Creek • Paul Hutchens
... I rushed (so that every board in the house shook) up to my lost Lorna's room, and tore the little wall-niche open and espied my treasure. It was as simple, and as homely, and loving, as even I could wish. Part of it ran as follows,—the other parts it behoves me not to open out to strangers:—"My own love, and sometime lord,—Take it not amiss of me, that even without farewell, I go; for I cannot persuade ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... let us pretend, walking in the park. You come upon two benches arranged as shown in the above diagram. Would you know which bench it would be proper to sit on if you are (1) a young man just out of college—(2) a rather homely young woman? To avoid embarrassment look this up ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... were chosen for a basis, as calculated to interest, where the wildest dream of the novelist would pall upon the satiated mind. It has been remarked, in a homely phrase by another, that "what comes from the heart, reaches the heart," and if the present fruits of long and unremitting mental labor, sustained often amid such trial and discouragements, as seldom fall to the lot of mortal ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... those officers who were there to be stationed were arriving by every train, and the post was all bustle and confusion and rejoicing. Some changes had occurred, as had been predicted by the colonel, but many of our old friends and several of later date were ensconced within the homely walls, and preparing for the combined rigors and comforts of a Wyoming winter in garrison. Here again were old Stannard and his loyal, radiant wife: here were the Turners and Raymonds and Webbs and Waynes and Truscotts and Heaths and Freemans, and others of whom we have ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... for her mother and her bourgeois surroundings generally. She appears to have been thrown into the greatest excitement by my proposal, while her friend Louise Wagner was in the end so powerfully influenced that she frankly advised me, with homely shrewdness and precision, to obtain a legal separation from my wife first of all, after which everything else would be easily arranged. Grievously shocked, I at once withdrew my offer, as having been made without due deliberation, and strove ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... the recollection of having deserted the friend who had shown them so much homely kindness, without a word of justification, would have filled her with sorrow and regret. But now, all other considerations were lost in the new uncertainties and anxieties, and in the ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... seem as if, in our more humble, homely, and useful capacity as fellow human beings, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... been told over the wine and cigars. The nervousness which had been on him in the morning, and which he had hoped that he had shaken off, swept over him again in an overpowering wave. He had been so proud of being alone, and yet he would have given 10 pounds now to have had Joe Clarke's homely face beside him. And then, just at that moment, there broke out from the thickest part of the wood the most frantic hullabaloo that ever he had heard in his life. The hounds had run into ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... scrawled over with obscene jests and drawings, product of the leisure hours of generations of prisoners. The writing, like all writing, was unintelligible to him. But some of the artistic efforts left little to the imagination. He was saddened, less by homely pictures than by the unfamiliar script. He had always distrusted the written word. Why all these strange letterings—so unnecessary, so dangerous to the life of an orthodox Christian? What one brother has to tell another—why ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... growing custom of diversifying the hard facts of history with homely fiction of a more or less comic nature. He declines to mingle clowns and courtiers. Variety is secured by a slightly fuller delineation of the secondary characters than is usual with him, with its consequent effect on the dialogue, and by abrupt changes in the political situation. Two great scenes, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... "Humph," and no more, but there is no word in any vocabulary that represents as much in the way of sustained argument as that homely, unspellable ejaculation. ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... earlier plays there is little or no prose, and that the proportion of prose to blank verse increases with the decrease of rhyme. In Julius Caesar three kinds of prose may be distinguished: (1) The prose of homely dialogue, as in the talk of the common people in I, i, and III, iii. (2) The prose of serious information as to the nature of a situation, as in Casca's description of the offer of the crown to Caesar. This kind of ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... knew them all by name under the skies of Greece. Achilles had taught them to him; and he counted them, like a flock, as he lay on the terrace—rolling out the great Greek names while they girdled the sky above him in a kind of homely chant. ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... dampness of our insular climate forces upon us, it may be well to inquire how they can be brought to bear when a man, who is an expert swordsman, or one who has given attention to his fencing lessons, is attacked without anything in his hands save the homely umbrella. ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... polished silver is a mighty poor radiator. Homely example: Try waiting for your coffee to cool if it's in a polished silver pot. Then try it in a tungsten-beryllium pot. No matter how you polish that tungsten-beryllium, the stuff WILL radiate heat. That's why an IP ship is always so blamed cold. You know the passenger ships use polished aluminum ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... they may, the responsibility is with those who have imposed upon me this necessity. The Senator from Massachusetts has thought proper to cast the first stone, and if he shall find, according to the homely adage, that "he lives in a glass house,"—on his head be the consequences. The gentleman has made a great flourish about his fidelity to Massachusetts. I shall make no professions of zeal for the interests and honor of South Carolina—of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sweet face, as fair and fresh as a damask rose, to be kissed, and submitted to Mrs. Kane's caresses rather from consciousness that she ought to do so, than from any warmth of gratitude in her own heart. So far from being grateful to the homely sun-burned woman who hugged her, she felt a sort of resentment towards her for finding her on the sea-shore and making a cottage child of her. It ought to have been Mrs. Rushton who found her, and perhaps she might have done so if Mrs. Kane or her husband had not been in such ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... felt that man was more than his abode,— The inward life than Nature's raiment more; And the warm sky, the sundown-tinted hill, The forest and the lake, seemed dwarfed and dim Before the saintly soul, whose human will Meekly in the Eternal footsteps trod, Making her homely toil and household ways An earthly echo of the song of praise Swelling from angel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... their journey was without adventure, save for the frequent eluding of the monsters of that teeming world. Grom had his club, A-ya her broken spear; but they were avoiding all combats in their haste to get back to their own country of the homely caves and the guardian watch-fires. At the approach of the great black lion or the saber-tooth, or the wantonly malignant rhinoceros, they betook themselves to the tree-tops, and continued their way by that aerial path as long as it served ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Bishop from Sir Cecil's endless hoard of beauty daughters, who is still prettier than her sisters. The new Spanish embassy was there—alas! Sir Cecil Bishop has never been in Spain! Monsieur de Fuentes is a halfpenny print of my Lord Huntingdon. His wife homely, but seems good-humoured and civil. The son does not degenerate from such high-born ugliness; the daughter-in-law was sick, and they say is not ugly, and has as good set of teeth as one can have, when one has but two and those black. They seem to have ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the different classes of Orators in their proper order."—"You understand me right," said I; "and I heartily wish those venerable Odes were still extant, which Cato informs us in his Antiquities, used to be sung by every guest in his turn at the homely feasts of our ancestors, many ages before, to commemorate the feats of their heroes. But the Punic war of that antiquated Poet, whom Ennius so proudly ranks among the Fauns and rustic Bards, affords ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... his name may be associated, nor through the fame of some feat he may have performed, but by awakening an inexpressible animal sympathy, by the contagion of emotions felt before the same objects. Estimation has been partly arrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely accent to universal discourse. Friendship might thus be called ideal sympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous affinity colouring ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... by a cool, gentle hand on my brow. I opened my eyes and saw the homely and beloved face of Uncle Peabody smiling down at me. What a face it was! It welcomed me, always, at the gates of the morning and I saw it in the glow of the candle at night as I set out on my lonely, dreaded voyage into dream-land. Do you wonder that I stop a moment and ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... obedience to the laws of their constitution. But on the brink of the gulf of prostitution in Paris, the young girl of sixteen, beautiful and pure as the Madonna, had met with Castanier. The old dragoon was too rough and homely to make his way in society, and he was tired of tramping the boulevard at night and of the kind of conquests made there by gold. For some time past he had desired to bring a certain regularity into an irregular life. He was struck by the beauty of the poor child who had drifted ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... but all the same,— I must reject all pleas in such a cause. Staunch comrades we have been in times of dearth; Of life's disport she asks but little share, And I'm a homely fellow, long aware God made me for the ledger and the hearth. Let others emulate the eagle's flight, Life in the lowly plains may be as bright. What does his Excellency Goethe say About the white and shining milky way? Man may not there the ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... industrious and an honest man. What he was employed to do he did diligently, and he did it well and faithfully. He received no wages that were not his due. Industry and honesty are the virtues peculiarly inculcated in this Degree. They are common and homely virtues; but not for that beneath our notice. As the bees do not love or respect the drones, so Masonry neither loves nor respects the idle and those who live by their wits; and least of all those parasitic acari that live upon themselves. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... strong, blunt-bowed affair, awakening the ideas of primitive solidity, like the wooden plough of our forefathers. And there were, about her, other suggestions of a rustic and homely nature. The extraordinary timber projections which I have seen in no other vessel made her square stern resemble the tail end of a miller's waggon. But the four stern ports of her cabin, glazed with six little greenish panes each, and framed in wooden sashes painted brown, might have been the windows ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... finally to the most highly specialized or involved forms of all, as seen in the orchid—the multifarious, multiversant orchid; the beautiful orchid; the ugly orchid; the fragrant orchid; the fetid orchid; the graceful, homely, grotesque, uncanny, mimetic, and, until the year 1859, the absolutely non-committal and inexplicable flower; the blossom which had waited through the ages for Darwin, its chosen interpreter, ere she yielded her secret ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... In termes had he case' and doomes* all *judgements That from the time of King Will. were fall. Thereto he could indite, and make a thing There coulde no wight *pinch at* his writing. *find fault with* And every statute coud* he plain by rote *knew He rode but homely in a medley* coat, *multicoloured Girt with a seint* of silk, with barres small; *sash Of his array tell I no ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... the way I was brought up, and the things I was taught to care for. Or no—I won't blame anybody for my faults: I'll say it was in my blood, that I got it from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress, who reacted against the homely virtues of New Amsterdam, and wanted to be back at the court of the Charleses!" And as Miss Farish continued to press her with troubled eyes, she went on impatiently: "You asked me just now for the truth—well, the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... were a happy life, To be no better than a homely swain.... ... The shepherd's homely curds, His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle, His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade, All which secure and sweetly he enjoys, As far beyond a prince's delicates." (Henry VI., Part 3, Act ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... why they are so everlastingly interesting, and why we blundering, ram-stam, homely ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... that Douglas, sixth of yore, Who coronet of Angus bore, And, when his blood and heart were high, Did the third James in camp defy, And all his minions led to die On Lauder's dreary flat: Princes and favourites long grew tame, And trembled at the homely name Of Archibald Bell-the-Cat; The same who left the dusky vale Of Hermitage in Liddisdale, Its dungeons and its towers, Where Bothwell's turrets brave the air, And Bothwell bank is blooming fair, To fix his princely bowers. ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... eagerly, and his eyes wandered about the cell-like room devoted to Swythe—a very plain and homely place, with a stool or two and a large table beneath the window, while one side was taken up by the simple pallet ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... caprice to refuse an alliance. "Wedding rings!" she had said to Stanislass. "Bosh! they spoil the look. Sometimes it is chic to have a good jewel on one finger, sometimes on another, but to be tied down to that band of homely gold! Never!" ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... like to have it between me and my village. I could not help preferring that homely relation in which the houses are built up like swallow-nests on to the very walls of the cathedrals themselves, to the arrangement here, where the river flowed, with what flow there was in it, between the ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... and bridegroom exchanged salutes to the general satisfaction, amid a chorus of facetious "Oh, ohs!" and "Ah, ahs!" less really indecent than the furtive glances of young girls that have been well brought up. There was something indescribably infectious about the rough, homely enjoyment ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... was right, lads. Simple, homely, and unpolished as was his language, he had succeeded in giving utterance to a grand truth; one which all boys will do well to lay to heart and profit by to the utmost extent of ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... Chateau-Cambresis and had remained some time in the Netherlands, in order to settle the affairs of that country, he embarked for Spain; and as the gravity of that nation, with their respectful obedience to their prince, had appeared more agreeable to his humor than the homely, familiar manners and the pertinacious liberty of the Flemings, it was expected that he would for the future reside altogether at Madrid, and would govern all his extensive dominions by Spanish ministers ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Margaret, in her last passionate interview with her father on his way to the Tower, was succeeded by Margaret Giggs and a maid-servant, who embraced and kissed their condemned master, "of whom he said after, it was homely but very lovingly done." Of these and other of his servants, Erasmus remarks, "after Sir Thomas More's death, none ever was touched with the least suspicion of any evil fame."—Mrs. Hall, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... and affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchy and monarchs. The necessities of the Churchills were pressing: their loyalty was ardent: and their only feeling about Arabella's seduction seems to have been joyful surprise that so homely a girl should have attained such ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Radical," was published in 1866. It has never been one of George Eliot's very popular books. There is less in it of her own life and experience than in most of her novels, less of the homely wit of agricultural England. The real value of the book is the picture it gives of the social and political life, and for this reason, it will always be read by those who want to know what English political methods and customs were like at the time of the passing of the Reform ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... that Wordsworth has, up to this time, at all obtained his deserts. "Glory," said M. Renan the other day, "glory after all is the thing which has the best chance of not being altogether vanity." Wordsworth was a homely man, and himself would certainly never have thought of talking of glory as that which, after all, has the best chance of not being altogether vanity. Yet we may well allow that few things are less vain than real glory. Let us ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... from one topic to another. Again they reverted to the little girl. He had dreamed of her in that week of black night. He wondered if he had also talked of her. He had lain at death's door—Rosendo had said so—but he had had no physician. Perhaps these simple folk brewed their own homely remedies—he wondered what they had employed in his case. Above the welter of his thoughts this question ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... cadets continued down the tunnel, the roaring sound growing louder and louder. After twenty minutes, Astro paused, his homely features wrinkled in a frown ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... for so long a time? They have to some degree stimulated and nourished qualities of supreme worth in individual and social life. With the young the struggle against greed and falsehood and pride and cowardice is a very real one, and situations in which these homely, fundamental traits are involved are full of interest and seriousness. Again, to mature people the reward of well-doing and the punishment of evil conduct portrayed in these stories are apt to seem too realistic, too much also on the cut-and-dried pattern; ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... something doing. It was a Welsh rhapsodie that he was playing. It was all there—the mountains and the rivers, and the towering cliffs with glimpses of the sea where waves foam on the rocks, and sea-fowl wheel and scream in the wind, and then a bit of homely melody as the country folk drive home in the moonlight, singing as only the Welsh can sing, the songs of the heart; songs of love and home, songs of death and sorrowing, that stab with sudden sweetness. A child cries somewhere in ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... vassals more sordid and dependent. The secrets also of political intrigue and dexterity made a difference between noble and villain, in later and more complex medieval politics, such as is unknown in the earlier days and the more homely forms of Society. An heroic age may be full of all kinds of nonsense and superstition, but its motives of action are mainly positive and sensible,—cattle, sheep, piracy, abduction, merchandise, recovery of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... meanwhile were busy at her wheel; who had no schooling, no wise and influential friends; who had few books and little time to read; who knew no formal religion; who never traveled out of his own country; who had no helpmeet, but who walked solitary—alone, a man of sorrows; down whose homely, furrowed face the tears of pity often ran, and yet whose name, strange paradox! stands in many minds as a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... sitting-room; they had had their supper—the eight elderly women and the three elderly men, all that were left of the community. The room had the austere and shining cleanness which Athalia had called a perfume, but it was full of homely comfort. A blue-and-white rag carpet in the centre left a border of bare floor, painted pumpkin-yellow; there was a glittering airtight stove with isinglass windows that shone like square, red eyes; a gay patchwork cushion in the seat ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... the steamboat, and if history denies to Fulton entire precedence with his "Clermont," in 1807, it may still be claimed for John Fitch, another American, with his imperfect boat on the Delaware in 1787. But perhaps none of these inventions had more homely utility than the New England schooner, which had its birth and its christening at Gloucester in 1713. The story of its naming is one of the oldest ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... and, though for that very reason this is not always the case, we were the best of friends. She would be rich some day, so the men I met in her father's business said; but if Alice Lorimer ever remembered the fact, it made but little difference to her. She was delicate, slight, and homely, with a fund of shrewd common-sense and a very kindly heart, whose thoughts, however, she did not always reveal. Now she sat on a lounge before the fire, with the soft light of a colored lamp falling upon her, while a great embroidered ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... feeling of unrest left her, and a lightness of heart took its place. She was living, at all events, and the horizon was not all gray. It seemed almost delightful to be putting on a real evening dress presently, even though it was a rather homely white thing with a pink sash, and to be going down to the restaurant in it with Aunt Caroline in front in her best ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... on the lawn left the unfinished rabbit-hutch and paint-pots and strolled towards a garden-seat. All the gates and seats on Miss Abingdon's small property were painted white once a year, and their trim spotlessness gave an air of homely opulence to the place. The bench which her young relatives sought was placed beneath a beneficent cedar tree that stretched out long, kindly branches, and looked as though it were wrought of stitch-work in deep blue ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... emerald greenness. Yet itself (I saw when I studied it) was worthy of them. Sussex is rich in fine Jacobean cottages; and their example, clearly, had not been lost on the builder of this one. Its proportions had a homely grandeur. It was long and wide and low. It was quite a yard long. It had three admirable gables. It had a substantial and shapely chimney-stack. I liked the look that it had of honest solidity all over, nothing anywhere scamped ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... nothing," said Mr Crawley, "and all speech on such homely matters would amount to an impertinence before you, sir, were it not that you have hinted at a purpose of connecting yourself at some future time ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... words "Treaty Point" painted in large letters upon her red sides. If I had thought upon the matter at all, I should naturally have expected to see the name of the ship set forth in, to me, unintelligible hieroglyphics, but instead, there it was in plain homely English, and I comforted myself with the reflection that if the Japanese used British characters and words to distinguish their lightships, my as yet very imperfect knowledge of their tongue was not going to handicap me as ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... respecting the stone of Ensisheim on the Rhine, at which philosophy once smiled incredulously, regarding it as one of the romances of the middle ages, may now be admitted to sober attention as a piece of authentic history. A homely narrative of its fall was drawn up at the time by order of the Emperor Maximilian, and deposited with the stone in the church. It may thus be rendered: "In the year of the Lord 1492, on Wednesday, which was Martinmas eve, the 7th of November, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... of the warm, homely fragrance of molasses candy; a pot of it was boiling on the stove, and from time to time Uncle Ivory stirred it, lifted a spoonful, and watched the drip. On a table near by other candies were cooling, peanut taffy, lemon drops, and great masses of ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... latent in the Scotsman, nor the peculiar sense of his humour; for, no sooner had the Indian charged, than he found himself gripped by powerful hands, turned face downwards on a bent knee, and smacked in good old homely style of punishment, which the medicine man's ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... the courtyard, and shut the gate after her, while Julien turned to examine the room into which they had been shown, and felt a certain serenity creep over him at the clean and cheerful aspect of this homely but comfortable interior. The room served as both kitchen and dining-room. On the right of the flaring chimney, one of the cast-iron arrangements called a cooking-stove was gently humming; the saucepans, resting on the bars, exhaled various appetizing odors. In the centre, the long, massive table ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... little ale-house, or "public," my head-quarters for the night. Having discussed my supper in solitude, I called up mine host to enable me to discuss my bottle, and to give me a statistical account of the country around me. Seated in the "blue" end, and well supplied with the homely but satisfying luxuries which the place afforded, I was in an excellent mood for enjoying the communicativeness of my landlord; and, after speaking about the cave of Slaines, the state of the crops, and the neighbouring franklins, edged him, by degrees, to speak about ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... wag calls them—and above all, for their taking to their hearts that great old dog and his dead friends,—for all which the one friend who survives thanks them. There is no harm and some good in letting our sympathy and affection go forth without stint on such objects, dead and homely though they be. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... decrees (Numbers xxvi. 32-36; xxvii. 8-11 and xxxvi. 1-9), holding it indirect internal evidence of Mosaic authorship (?). Another tone, however, is used in the case of Al-Islam. "And now, that he might not stand in awe of his wives any longer, down comes a revelation," says Ockley in his bluff and homely style, which admits such phrases as, "the imposter has the impudence to say." But why, in common honesty, refuse to the Koran the concessions freely made to the Torah? It is a mere petitio principii ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... curiosity among his friends, it can not, however, be said to have been wide-spread, inasmuch as up to the appearance of this book of travels, comparatively few were aware of the presence of Mr. Trollope in this country. When Charles Dickens visited America, our people testified their admiration of his homely genius by going mad, receiving him with frantic acclamations of delight, dining him, and suppering him, and going through the 'pump-handle movement' with him. Mr. Dickens was, in consequence, intensely bored by this attestation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... speech, their manners, their art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages) to give any unified picture of this national character with its activity, its self-reliance, its belief in the homely virtues and its earnest ambition to make the best of itself. But of the future of a people with such a character there need be no misgivings, and Americans are justified in the confidence ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... in fustian as a king in velvet, and a truth is as comfortable in homely language as in fine speech. As to the way of dishing up the meat, hungry men leave that to the cook, only let the meat be ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... reflection.[296] No impression I have gained in Japan is sharper than an impression of ardent patriotism. For good or ill, patriotism is the outstanding Japanese virtue. What some patriots here and elsewhere do not seem to realise, however, is what a quiet, homely, everyday thing true patriotism is. The Japanese, with so many talents, so many natural and fortuitous advantages, and with opportunities, such as no other nation has enjoyed, of being able to profit by the social, economic and international experience of States that have bought their experience ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... hesitations it would be unjust to dwell. I mention them only to bring out the fact that between these two men, so different in outward fates,—between "the adored, the incomparable Nelson" and the homely poet, "retired as noontide dew,"—there was a moral likeness so profound that the ideal of the recluse was realized in the public life of the hero, and, on the other hand, the hero himself is only seen as completely heroic ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... blondes and a blonde is never so homely as when she is cold," she added sententiously, "for her face is much more apt to get blue than red, except the end of ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... furniture: my cousins having given me carte blanche to effect what alterations I pleased, and a sum having been set aside for that purpose. The ordinary sitting-room and bedrooms I left much as they were: for I knew Diana and Mary would derive more pleasure from seeing again the old homely tables, and chairs, and beds, than from the spectacle of the smartest innovations. Still some novelty was necessary, to give to their return the piquancy with which I wished it to be invested. Dark handsome new carpets and curtains, an arrangement of some carefully selected antique ornaments ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... or look out—were at liberty to seek out a soft plank and lie back, gazing up at the gently swaying mastheads till sleep came again. Higher and higher, as the days went by, the southern stars rose from the sea-line, while—in the north—homely constellations dipped and were lost to view. Night by night we had the same true breeze, the sea unchanged, the fleecy trade clouds forming on the sea-line—to fade ere they had reached the zenith. There seemed no end ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... necessary evil. After putting it out of their power to purchase the more costly clothing of the mother country, it would be an intolerable exercise of authority to prevent them from having recourse to the homely products of their own industry and ingenuity. Under existing circumstances, indeed, there is no alternative between permitting them the use of their own manufactures, and compelling them to go naked, or to clothe themselves like the aborigines ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... his head?" Who lived on the scanty fare of a small purse in common with the family of his disciples? Who withdrew from the entertainments of Jerusalem to the humble cottage of Mary and Martha, cheerfully subsisting on the most homely and casual provision?—HE, who has taught us to limit our desires of temporal good within the narrow circle of one short request—"GIVE US ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... homely affair," she explained. She had recovered her form and was now quite the lady again. "Two other guests beside yourself: a Mr. Airlie—I am sure you will like him. He's so dilletanty—and Mr. McKean. He's the young man upstairs. Have ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... season of sweet simplicity, of homely kindliness and good-fellowship! Would to God this carpet beneath my feet might change to velvet moss and springy turf, these walls to the trees and whispering boskage I grew to love so well, this halting pen to the smooth shaft of sledge hammer or the well-worn crank ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... "indoor," artificial, and ordinary image; I refer Mr. Bowles to the stanza, and ask if these three lines about "needles" are not worth all the boasted twaddling about trees, so triumphantly re-quoted? and yet, in fact, what do they convey? A homely collection of images and ideas, associated with the darning of stockings, and the hemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches; but will any one deny that they are eminently poetical and pathetic as addressed ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... half-fatherly kindness and sympathy for her, than either by love or desire of wealth, took her to himself, and made her his wife, to the great and grateful satisfaction of the girl herself, whose strange upbringing and brief introduction into a higher sphere had spoiled her for that homely country-town existence in which every woman flattered and every ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... homely mullen weed, on a donkey heath, straightway he makes it a full-blown rose, in the land of Ophir, shedding an odor balmy as the gales of Arabia; while with a facility the wonderful London auctioneer Robbins might envy, Ralph imparts to a lime-box, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use. The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous odours, which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... homely background the beauty of the young girl appeared in most striking contrast. Her curls peeped out from under the white Dutch cap she wore. Her eyes sparkled with indignant protest, her face was piquant and was just then flushed, and her nose had the least bit of a natural uptilt, giving her ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Often, in after years, and in far different circumstances, the thoughts of Hugh reverted, with a painful yearning, to the dim-lighted cottage, with its clay floor and its deal table; to the earnest pair seated with him at the labours that unfold the motions of the stars; and even to the homely, thickset, but active form of Janet, and that peculiar smile of hers with which, after an apparently snappish speech, spoken with her back to the person addressed, she would turn round her honest face half-apologetically, and shine full upon some one or ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... a few words, moving with the unswerving directness of a Greek play. The novel is lightened by a delicate love interest and touches of homely humor." ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... Civil War he began making patriotic speeches that gained enlistments. After going to the front he was sent back home for a time, on furlough, to make more speeches to draw more recruits, for his speeches were so persuasive, so powerful, so full of homely and patriotic feeling, that the men who heard them thronged into the ranks. And as a preacher he uses persuasion, power, simple and homely eloquence, to draw men ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... around this axis is called a sidereal day. The sidereal day is a little shorter than the ordinary day, being only 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. The rotation is performed just as if a rigid axis passed through the centre of the earth; or, to use the old and homely illustration, the earth rotates just as a ball of worsted may be made to rotate around a ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... of the newspapers. It is more serious objection to The Pillars of Society that in it, as little as in The League of Youth, had Ibsen cut himself off from the traditions of the well-made play. Gloomy and homely as are the earlier acts, Ibsen sees as yet no way out of the imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the masters of the "well-made" play. The social hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned by a sort of death-bed repentance at the close, which is ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... this hour of extremity he saw seated by the corner of a fence a very black and homely-looking woman; there was something so gloomy and sullen in her countenance that he felt repelled by its morose expression. Still he needed food, and was very weary, and drawing near he asked her if she would give him anything ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... the green hemlocks, and the rustic lodges displaying the gayly decorated bow and quiver, make a picture somewhat attractive; but the Indians themselves are dirty and homely, and far from inviting in their appearance. The slim, blackeyed, barefooted boys, who pester you with petitions to "set up a cent," as a mark for their arrows, have a sort of Gypsy picturesqueness, however; and as one walks ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... thing to be kept out of our daily dealings, and thought of only on Sundays: they look on true religion, which is to obey God, as a thing which mixes itself up with all the cares and business of this mortal life, this work- day world; and, therefore, they are written in work-day language; in homely words taken from the common doings of this mortal life, as our Lord's parables are. And, like the most simple of those parables, the most simple of the proverbs have ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the first lesson, parts of the prophecy of Amos. They are somewhat difficult, here and there, to understand; but nevertheless Amos is perhaps the grandest of the Hebrew prophets, next to Isaiah. Rough and homely as his words are, there is a strength, a majesty, and a terrible earnestness in them, which it is good to listen to; and specially good now that Advent draws near, and we have to think of the coming of our ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... in the next seat, how homely her little girl is, with freckles all over her face! Perhaps her mother wishes she was as white as I am. Why, who is that pretty little ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... to wrestle with the storm, To fight for homely truth with vulgar power; Grace looked from every feature, shaped his form, The rose ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... men and only Beecher was passable in the way of refinement and gentlemanly bearing. Physical appearance, as so many think, is not the sesame to the interest of an audience. Daniel O'Connell, the Irish tribune, was a homely, ugly, awkward, ungainly man, yet his words attracted millions to his side and gained for him the hostile ear of the British Parliament, he was a master of verbiage and knew just what to ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... than possibly most handsome faces. In a handsome face one sees the lines of its coming perfection, and has a glimpse of what it must be when finished: few are prophets enough for a plain face. A keen surprise of beauty waits many a man, if he be pure enough to come near the transfiguration of the homely face he loved. ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... boyhood in the old Canadian city presented themselves unasked; the maple-foliage, incredibly dense and verdant, the shabby, comfortable houses behind the trees, and the homely, happy-go-lucky people who lived in the houses and sprayed their lawns on summer evenings; friendly people, like people everywhere prone to laughter and averse to thought. "People are so foolish and likeable, it's amazing!" thought Stonor, visualizing ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... Square—the lonely, dust-whitened place, around which my past happiness and my wasted hopes had flung their golden illusions, like jewels hung round the coarse wooden image of a Roman saint. Dishonoured and ruined, it was among such associations as these—too homely to have been recognised by me in former times—that I journeyed along the well-remembered way to ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... weather; also it had quite a large orchard and garden behind it running down to the river's edge, where the people of the Inn raised good fruit and good vegetables, which added materially to the excellence of their homely table. The high-road that skirted the Inn encountered, a little way above it, a bridge that spanned the river and continued its way to Neuilly and the fair and the world beyond. At one side of the Inn was a little space of common land, on which, at this time of fair-making, a company of gypsies were ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... star; and it is a curious fact that the spectacle of a star almost invariably fills the most sensible moth with thoughts above his station. No doubt, if Ramsden Waters had stuck around and waited long enough there might have come his way in the fullness of time some nice, homely girl with a squint and a good disposition who would have been about his form. In his modest day dreams he had aspired to nothing higher. But the sight of Eunice Bray seemed to have knocked all the sense out of the man. He must have ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... to trouble him further, but what does he mean by "it"? Because there are two stories, one in "Mark" and "Luke," and the other in "Matthew." In the former, which I quoted in my previous paper, there is one possessed man; in the latter there are two. The story is told fully, with the vigorous homely diction and the picturesque details of a piece of folklore, in the second gospel. The immediately antecedent event is the storm on the Lake of Gennesaret. The immediately consequent events are the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... contrast," said Miss Ruth as she folded the letter, "I have a story to tell you of a poor little forlorn, homely, insignificant dog, of low birth and no breeding, which was picked up on the street by a boy I know, and which made for himself friends and a good home by seizing the first opportunity that offered to do his duty and protect the property of those who had taken him in. I have ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... your tenderer blossom of sin while he qualify for an airy crown, or find space for repentance and the fruits of true contrition; lastly, a persuasive tumbril, a close lover for your incorrigible wanton girls—homely chastisement such as a father Abbot may bestow, and yet wear a comely face, and yet be loved by those he chasteneth. Madam, is this too much for so great a charge as ours? We of Holy Thorn nurture the good seed with scant fortune, being ridden down by evil livers, deer-stealers, notorious persons, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... news of his daughters' flight reach the King of Georgia, than attiring himself in homely russet, like a pilgrim, with an ebony staff in his hand, tipped with silver, he took his departure, all alone, from his palace, resolved to recover his beloved children, or to lay his bones to rest in some unknown spot, where, forgotten, he ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... her wardrobe as often as there was occasion. Forty-five years had now rolled over her head, leaving clearer traces of their presence, doubtless, than if her spirit had been more cheerful; so that Rachel, whose strongly marked features never could have been handsome, was now undeniably homely. ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... arbitrary methods as Duhm's, may occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the edge of an Oracle yet oftener dulls the melody and weakens the emphasis.(54) The figures again are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming—the house-candle, the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a very ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive, somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh; passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous, large-browed, courtly thinker, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... us, with the exception of the Dandy, were Scotch, four of us being Macs, the Maluka chose our Christmas grace from Bobby Burns; and quietly and reverently our Scotch hearts listened to those homely words: ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... evidently not Egyptians; their Greek descent could be perceived even by the moonlight. The elder was an unusually tall and powerful man of more than sixty; thick grey curls, showing very little attempt at arrangement, hung down over his short, firm throat; he wore a simple, homely cloak, and kept his eyes gloomily fixed on the water. His companion, on the contrary, a man perhaps twenty years younger, of a slender and delicate build, was seldom still. Sometimes he gazed into the heavens, sometimes made a remark to the steersman, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... which is obviously absurd appear quite rational, and to give to that which is intrinsically small or mean an air of refined dignity. Divested of its dignified and delusive rhetoric, what does the lady say or mean in plain, homely English? ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... Judith to the kitchen and here, in the shining quiet of an old-fashioned kitchen whose spotless rows of pans and its rocker by the window reflected nothing of first citizenship, the memory-making mystery of child and woman in a homely setting drew taut an age-old chord of sympathy. Out of the hum of the kettle and the fire-shadows of the grate it came, out of the winter wind that rattled the checkerpaned windows—that eternal something that is only given to women to understand. Jimsy did not know why ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... came hollowly; they chirped and buzzed from the parched grass; they trilled from the ripples of the creek ford; they floated up in clear Pan's pipe notes from the dimming meadows; the whippoorwills joined in as they pursued midges in the upper air; slow-going cow-bells struck out a homely accompaniment—and this was what each one said: "You've found your way ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... ease and of unmitigated warfare with the hostile forces of Nature. Yet he had built up a modest competency after a life time of struggle. With a few more years of industry he might have claimed material victory. In the homely parlance of his kind he had things "hung-up," which signified such prosperity had come to him as came to the pioneer woodsmen who faced the famine times of winter with smoked hams hanging from their nails, and tobacco and pepper and herbs ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... a girl with two hundred ruble-dowry, but she was awfully homely and deaf; and he knew a widow with three hundred rubles, but she was twenty years older than himself. It was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... died and she was free, but she had no longer any desire to return to the theater. She shuddered at the thought of resuming that eternal pilgrimage from town to town and the everlasting poverty of a provincial actor's life. Moreover, she realized that she was growing old and homely. So she sold all her household furnishings, received a pension from the management to which her husband had belonged, and for half a year played the role of a widow. She was very eager to marry a second time and ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... is lashed firmly into place, the oxen are slowly pulling, the long whips are cracking, the house is answering the gentle traction, and, already several miles away from its first site, it will to-morrow settle down upon new foundations, a homely type of one whose wreath will soon be a-making, and who will soon after come to be the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... his home. His children were intelligent, loving, and obedient; his wife was one of those rare women—seen nowhere more often than in the South—who, to a cultivated mind and polished manners, add the more homely accomplishments of a good housewife. It is years since she laid aside the weary cares of her plantation home, and entered on the higher duties of another life; but her gentle words are still as fresh in my memory, her kindly image as warm in my heart, as on that autumn day, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Schreckhorn, the Jungfrau, and their sister peaks, with their avalanches and their palaces of ice, all glowing in the southern sun; and dwelling among them are a race of manly husbandmen, heroic without ceasing to be homely, poetical without ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... as her manners were absolutely submitted to the discretion of an hireling. Notwithstanding this willing concession of power on the part of Miss Emmerson, there was no deficiency in ability to judge between right and wrong in her character; but the homely nature of her good sense, unassisted by any confidence in her own powers, was unable to compete with the dazzling display of accomplishments which met her in every house where she visited; and if she sometimes thought ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... been Fright. The conjecture is supported by the fact that, as was usual, Rome had any number of deified epithets, as she had also a quantity of little bits of gods. These latter greatly amused the Christian Fathers. Among them was Alemona, who, in homely English, ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... orthodox. To a remarkable extent the local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans—social, theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... opened, and closed behind a strongly made fellow of twenty-six or seven, of homely features, with black hair, in clothes which he had outgrown. It was a bitter night, but he had no coat over his flannel jacket. He walked straight down the store, between the dry-goods counters, to the snug corner at the rear, where the knot of talkers ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... her lips have been transmitted to posterity. But I suspect that the shivering soldiers on the bleak hillsides at Valley Forge found more comfort in the warm socks she knitted than they could have in the bon mots of a Madame de Stael or in the grace of a Josephine and that her homely interest in their welfare tied their hearts closer to their Leader and ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... article in its particular place; and was scrupulously exact that not a scrap of old lumber, cracked china, broken spoons, or half-worn linen, should be missing on the day of the sale. Helen, quite unconcerned about such homely matters, dashed about in Mrs. Jerrold's carriage from morning until night, making splendid purchases, and indulged in all those expensive tastes which her natural love for the beautiful, and her undisciplined will, made so necessary to her happiness. Happiness! Could she in whose soul the poison ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... very comfortable things under one's feet in winter," said grandmother. "They're homely as a stump fence, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of "flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour (his ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... that that was poetry and pathos. It was a natural illustration out of his homely, gentle, compassionate life. He knew how to help dumb things in their hurts. His wife ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... large an undertaking, that the canal would be clogged by floods or frozen up for half of each year, and that commerce would ignore artificial courses and cling to natural channels. But the answer of the Empire State to her rivals was the homely but triumphant cry "Low Bridge!"—the warning to passengers on the decks of canal boats as they approached the numerous bridges which spanned the route. When this cry passed into a byword it afforded positive ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... 'Ask your Sunday-school teacher,' when such questions are put to them. The decay of parental religious teaching is working enormous mischief in Christian households; and the happiest results would follow if Joshua's homely advice were attended to, 'Ye shall let ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to the amateur gardener should undoubtedly be the blue-flowered shrub known as "plumbago". This homely but hardy plant will grow anywhere. It naturally prefers a good soil, and a sufficient rainfall, but if need be it will worry along without either. Fowls cannot scratch it up, and even the goat turns away dismayed from its hard-featured branches. The flower is not strikingly ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... of farmers' calendar, in which the poet points out to the husbandman the lucky and unlucky days for doing certain kinds of work, eulogizes industry, and intersperses among all his practical lines homely maxims of morality and beautiful descriptive passages of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... only public apartment, and in which not only food was now prepared and taken, and the occasional guest received, but in which the Hebrew ladies pursued their daily avocations. Here Zarah would pursue her homely occupation of spinning, and Hadassah copy out on rolls of vellum portions from the Law and the Prophets. This latter occupation was fraught with peril; and had Hadassah been discovered in the act of transcribing from the sacred pages, it might have ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... sweet and virtuous humility was hid in him, in the strict retirement of the cloister. The writings of that humble monk outlive the fame of many a proud ecclesiastic or haughty baron of his day; and well they might, for how homely does his pen record the simple annals of that far distant age. Much have the old monks been blamed for their bad Latin and their humble style; but far from upbraiding, I would admire them for it; for is not ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... provision should be devised; Toleration of Dissent and of free expression of religious belief, but still on this side of Quakerism and other anomalies, heresies, and extravagancies: such, after all, was the homely outcome. If Vane and the theorists of the Harringtonian Club were disappointed, Ludlow was even in worse despair; and at the last moment he proposed an extraordinary addition. If the late Rump was not ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... have ever homely wits," they say; but much as travel by land may enlarge the mind, it never can be expanded to the utmost of its capabilities, until it has also peregrinated by water. I believe that not only the human intellect, but the instinct of brutes, is ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat |
