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More "Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so simple and commonplace to the man, were to the boy like a telescope lifted to the unknown heavens, but through which he could not yet look. He watched the men go down the mountainside, the strange words which he did not comprehend, but was never ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... Farm, thinking of Alice Johnston. She had given him of her peace, of her confidence, her large way of taking the issues of life. 'And I used to say that she was a commonplace dumpy country girl!' he mused. He pondered what she had spoken,—the suggestion, vague but comforting, of purpose, of a place for him in the world to fill. Just what was she thinking of? "We'll see," he murmured, as he mounted the steps of the terrace. As Alice had said, the unseen in life ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... would require unremitting effort through the very best years of his manhood. His brain, his strength, his ability, his ambitions, what were they all in the strife after place and power, compared to the money of some commonplace adversary? Preston Cheney, the native-born American directly descended from a Revolutionary soldier, would be handicapped in the race with some Michael Murphy whose father had made a fortune in the saloon business, or who had himself acquired a ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the girls slept on in the dreamless, heavy sleep of tired girlhood. Of course, not one of the three had had the least intention of doing anything so commonplace as going to sleep; in fact, the very idea had been vaguely irritating. Had they not looked forward to this very thing for months—at least, so it seemed to them—and it was almost impossible for them to have patience with the idiocy of any one who could calmly suggest slumber at such ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... piqued. "She very properly declined to mingle with the Messieurs and Mesdames Jourdains who consort with the Bourgeois Philibert! She was preparing for a ride, and the city really seems all the gayer by the absence of so many commonplace people as ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... (importance) 642. Adj. dull, dull as ditch water; unentertaining, uninteresting, flat, dry as dust; unfunny, unlively[obs3], logy [U.S.]; unimaginative; insulse[obs3]; dry as dust; prosy, prosing, prosaic; matter of fact, commonplace, pedestrian, pointless; "weary stale flat and unprofitable" [Hamlet]. stupid, slow, flat, insipid, vapid, humdrum, monotonous; melancholic &c. 837; stolid &c. 499; plodding. boring, tiresome, tedious &c. 841. Phr. davus sum non Aedipus[obs3]; deadly ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... associated purple velvet and bare feet with the idea of financial catastrophe, knowing in her heart that even ruin would seem bearable if it could bring her such magnificent indifference to the details of commonplace existence. ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book, and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy, and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... dropped, charred and burned out, before she had finished reading. After she had read it, her first love letter, she must needs go over it again, to learn by heart the sweet phrases in which he had wooed her. It was a commonplace note enough, far more neutral than the strong, virile writer who had lacked the cunning to transmit his feeling to ink and paper. But, after all, it was from him, and it told the divine message, however haltingly. No wonder she burned her little finger tips from the flame of the ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... we are, under the shadow of the departed Nine Elms and of the official palace of the Odos, deep enough in Lunnon to satisfy the proudest Cockney, in less time than we have taken in getting off that last commonplace on political economy. Adam Smith and Jefferson never undertook to meditate at thirty-five miles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... suit, which was rough and blue, with a smart little pony coat. She also wore a white veil festooned around her hat, and white gloves that were quite unspotted from the world. The raw February winds had whipped roses into her cheeks; her pure ultramarine eyes made the blue of her suit look commonplace and dull. Dusk had fallen over the city, and Queed cleverly bethought him to snap on an electric light. It revealed a very shabby, ramshackle, and dingy office; but the long table in it was new, oaken, and handsome. In fact, it was one of ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... strange—the strangest I ever knew. But that isn't against it. It's the commonplace case which baffles. We shall get the key to the whole ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... viceroy of Hukwang, a giant in intellect and a hero in achievement, is not a commonplace character. If my readers will follow me, while I trace his rise and progress, not only will they discover that he stands head and shoulders above most officials of his rank, but they will gain important side-lights on great ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... work except in secrecy" (History and Philosophy of Masonry, chap. xxi). But neither writer seems to realize the psychology and pedagogy of secrecy—the value of curiosity, of wonder and expectation, in the teaching of great truths deemed commonplace because old. Even in that atmosphere, the real secret of Masonry remains hidden to many—as sunlight ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... existence and of priceless value. When she isn't wearing it it is kept in the vaults of the Tiverton Trust Company, and how on earth we are to get it without the assistance of a maid we can trust I don't see—except in the vulgar, commonplace way of sandbagging the lady and brutally stealing it, and Newport society hasn't quite got to the point where you can do a thing like that to a woman without causing talk, unless you are ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... younger generation." He relied on Andrey Semyonovitch for this and before his visit to Raskolnikov he had succeeded in picking up some current phrases. He soon discovered that Andrey Semyonovitch was a commonplace simpleton, but that by no means reassured Pyotr Petrovitch. Even if he had been certain that all the progressives were fools like him, it would not have allayed his uneasiness. All the doctrines, the ideas, the systems, with which Andrey Semyonovitch pestered him had no interest ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... inform us how much their patron measures around the bust (they have already told us of the snowy whiteness of her bosom); the actual size of the "tiny little foot" as sworn to by the bootmaker, and how many inches of elastic it requires to make her garter? When this becomes commonplace, perhaps it will be necessary, in order to command attention, to publish portraits of their patrons posing as Venuses, Eves, Hebes, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... defended and applied with violence and with a superfluous hatred of the clergy, it forms the justifiable element in the endeavors of the deists. It is a commonplace to-day that everything which claims to be true and valid must justify itself before the criticism of reason; but then this principle, together with the distinction between natural and positive religion based upon it, exerted an enlightening and liberating influence. The ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... thus renders more substantial service to the modern dramatist than to the old poet—and for this reason, that it transforms the commonplace actual world into the old poetical one; that it enables him to dispense with all that is repugnant to poetry, and conducts him back to the most simple, original, and genuine motives of action. The palaces of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... through which I had seen the white hand glide. It was swinging up and down in an impatient way, so out of keeping with the emotions perceptible on this side of the drapery that I felt forced to ask myself what sort of person this could be who thus kept watch and ward with such very commonplace impatience over a creature who was able to hold every other person in her presence under a spell. The drapery did not give up its secrets, and again I yielded to the ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... first time in her life Nanny felt queer in the company of a man, queer and puzzled and almost uncomfortable. She was not a flirt and her remark was commonplace and trivial. Yet this new chap was taking it seriously and making her feel insincere and trifling. She told herself that she was not going to like him and kept her eyes studiously on the ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... was naturally a commonplace in politics. In the campaigns, the party managers were too often men to whom "nothing was dreadful but defeat." At every Presidential election, immense sums of money were poured into the most important doubtful states—Connecticut, New York, ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... my unexpected companion I was seized with an unconquerable shyness, moreover he inspired me with a curiosity which was quite equal to my shyness. Any number of circumstances, from a telegram from a sick relative to the most commonplace matter of business, might have explained his sudden departure from the chateau where I had left him so comfortably installed the night before. But that the expression of his face should have changed as ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the stereoscopic illusions which made his father's life solid, he could not continue to exist. His point of view was hopelessly cosmic. All was equally great and mysterious? Yes; but all was equally small and commonplace. Kant's Starry Infinite Without? Bah! Mere lumps of mud going round in a tee-totum dance, and getting hot over it; no more than the spinning of specks in a drop of dirty water. Size was nothing in itself. There were mountains and seas in a morsel of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain statement; for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with the four centuries which have ensued, that we can estimate the magnitude of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been added to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... grammata]), i.e. the elements of literary culture, reading and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of AEsop, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and later the tragic poets, were read, and partly learned by heart. The orators borrowed from them often the ornament of their commonplace remarks. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... the insect Ferfitchkin would snigger at me in order to curry favour with Zverkov; how completely Simonov would take it all in, and how he would despise me for the abjectness of my vanity and lack of spirit—and, worst of all, how paltry, UNLITERARY, commonplace it would all be. Of course, the best thing would be not to go at all. But that was most impossible of all: if I feel impelled to do anything, I seem to be pitchforked into it. I should have jeered at myself ever afterwards: "So ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... York, she removed her school to Troy, in 1821. It was a new departure, and there was ignorant prejudice to overcome. Governor Clinton, in an appeal to the legislature for aid, said: "I trust you will not be deterred by commonplace ridicule from extending your munificence to this meritorious institution." They were not deterred. An act was passed for the incorporation of the proposed institute, and another which gave to female academies a share of ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... Aristophanes. This had been a commonplace in the discussions at the end of the seventeenth century, in England and France, on the morality ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... boy, I'll briefly report the remainder of M. d'Anquetil's discourse. I know very well that it's rather commonplace, almost vulgar, to lay much stress on trifling circumstances. It is, on the contrary, some sort of duty to express them in the fewest possible words, to condense them carefully and reserve the tempting abundance of word-flow to moral instruction and exhortation, which may be hurled as the ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... of man or maiden aunt ran not to the contrary. She always declared, indeed, that they were born married, and that their wedding-day would seem like a silver wedding. Harry was quiet, unobtrusive, and manly. He might seem commonplace at first beside the brilliant Kate and his more gifted sister; but thorough manhood is never commonplace, and he was a person to whom one could anchor. His strong, steadfast physique was the type of his whole nature; when he came into the ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... his arm in a Florentine gallery while she stood to look at the pictures. What a pleasure it would be to him merely to watch this good little creature expanding under the splendours of Art and Nature! When she had got free from the commonplace atmosphere in which she had lived, she would, in a little while, become a charming companion. M. Roque's wealth, moreover, tempted him. And yet he shrank from taking this step, regarding it ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... to-night, and a far lovelier picture even than the glorious sunset and the rose-tinted mountain, awaits anyone curious enough to come out-doors and look. The Persian moonlight seems capable of surrounding the most commonplace objects with a halo of beauty, and of blending things that are nothing in themselves, into scenes of such transcendental loveliness that the mere casual contemplation of them sends a thrill of pleasure coursing through the system. There is no city of the same size (180,000) in ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... book by simply glancing over the pages. On an average he could read with intelligent comprehension three books in a working day of eight hours, and in time mastered his library of twenty-two thousand volumes, indexing every book on the back, and transcribing many pages into his commonplace-books. In this way he spent fifteen years of study in collecting ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... way, and, in that she was susceptible to the personality of the man beside her, Sally forgot the circumstances of their acquaintance, forgot to review them with that same impartial judgment which she would have exercised had the man conveyed to her mind a more commonplace impression. ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... However commonplace this incident may appear to the reader, to us it was the tocsin of danger. Before the lofty crags above us had ceased to reverberate the echoes, every ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... peninsula, and filled with chronicles, plays, and ballads, about Moors and Christians, which I keep by me as mental tonics, in the same way that a provident housewife has her cupboard of cordials. Whenever I find my mind brought below par by the commonplace of every-day life, or jarred by the sordid collisions of the world, or put out of tune by the shrewd selfishness of modern utilitarianism, I resort to these venerable tomes, as did the worthy hero of La Mancha ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... name at home giving them joy to-night at their supper in hell! And yet one would not at first sight think that such triumphs and such toasts, such medals, and clasps, and garters were to be won on earth or in hell just by saying such simple- sounding and such commonplace things as those are for which Ill-pause receives his decorations. 'Take time,' he says. 'Yes,' he admits, 'but there is no such hurry; to-morrow will do; next year will do; after you are old will do quite ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established themselves in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than in Athens. It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such distinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace annals of the Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female name that lent lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes Sorel, of Diane de Poitiers, of Madame ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... form has gone back to the universal life, and will express itself again in some higher and better form. To think of God in this way is an inspiration and a help in the doing of the humblest tasks. It redeems life from the dominion of the sordid and commonplace. It supplies an incentive to endeavour, and fills the heart with hope and confidence. To put it in homely, everyday phraseology, God is getting at something and we must help Him. We must be His eyes and hands ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... heard of Mr. Broad," said Pauline, "I should think the explanation of him is very simple; he is a hypocrite—an ordinary hypocrite. What is the use of going out of the way to seek for explanations of such commonplace persons?" ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... a head and shoulders above the level of the weaklings excluded as "finished" from these commonplace educational institutions—schools called colleges and colleges called universities, resulting necessarily from the proclamation of man's equality. He sickened at seeing the neutral-tinted lake of society, with ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... romance is strong in adolescence, but it is stronger still when the turnstile of years is reached and there is finality in the air. Hartley was built for platonics; Fate gave him the necessary touch of the commonplace that dispels romance and replaces it with a kind of deadly domesticity; and yet Hartley was unaware of ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... are bigger than this it both tends to illegibility and makes the page ugly. I remember once buying a handsome fifteenth-century Venetian book, and I could not tell at first why some of its pages were so worrying to read, and so commonplace and vulgar to look at, for there was no fault to find with the type. But presently it was accounted for by the spacing: for the said pages were spaced like a modern book, i. e., the black and white nearly equal. Next, if you want a legible book, the white should be clear and the black black. ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... coterie of friends rallied to the standard of their queen. They intimated to Mae's followers that the quality of the romance was quite different in the two cases. Mae might be the heroine of any number of commonplace flirtations, but Rosalie was the victim of a grande passion. She was marked with an indelible scar that she would carry to the grave. In the heat of their allegiance, they overlooked the crookedness of the ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... was an unceasing stream of wit, of which he was profuse, as if he knew the source to be inexhaustible. He never kept it for display, or for company, or for those only who knew its value: wit was, indeed, as natural to him as commonplace to commonplace characters. It was not only in puns, in repartees, in lively retorts, in sparkling sentences, in brilliant illustrations, or in apt or exciting anecdote, that this faculty was developed. I have known him string together a number of graceful verses, every one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... or three feet during that time, while Giovanni sat motionless under the plane-tree, watching every movement of their spades. He rose nervously when he heard footsteps in the corridor, for he did not wish any one to find him seated there, apparently watching a most commonplace operation with profound interest. He had made a step towards the door of the laboratory, when he saw his father emerge from the dark passage. He was a coward, and he trembled from head to foot, his teeth chattered in his head, and the cold sweat moistened his forehead ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... some gentle rebukes on account of the past, which acid he threw in to assist in subduing the patient's obstinacy, as Hannibal used vinegar in cutting his way through rocks. It was not in human nature to endure this flood of commonplace eloquence in silence; and Jin Vin, whether desirous of stopping the flow of words—crammed thus into his ear, "against the stomach of his sense," or whether confiding in Richie's protestations of friendship, which the wretched, says Fielding, are ever so ready to believe, or whether merely ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... rattling of the loose planks as another car sped over the unseen structure, little dreaming of the part that bridge was destined to play in his young life. The commonplace noise of the neglected flooring seemed emphasized by the quiet of the woodland. That reminder of human traffic, so near and yet so far and out of tune with all the gentler sounds of the valley, presented a strange contrast and jarred ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair but with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard. Only in semblance was he superhuman for he gave some astonishing and spectacular exhibitions. But again, if I look at his commonplace physique, I, for one, cannot call him an angel. And everything whatsoever he wrought through some invisible power, he wrought through some word and a command. Some said of him, 'Our first law giver is risen again, and displays many ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... stepped out into the cold sunlight of early November, she smiled bitterly at the exaggeration of last night's mood. After the first hectic flush of dawn there is nothing so sane and sweet and commonplace as morning. The spectacle of Mrs. Finnegan, who lodged in the flat below, slopping warm suds over the thin marble steps, added a final note of homeliness, which ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... without, my worthy friend and neighbour, PHORMIO, sometimes gives me a call—and we have a rare set-to at my old favourite volumes—the 'Lectiones Memorabiles et Reconditae' of WOLFIUS[172]—a commonplace book of as many curious, extraordinary, true and false occurrences, as ever were introduced into two ponderous folios. The number of strange cuts in it used to amuse my dear children—whose parent, from the remembrance of the past, still finds a pleasing recreation in looking at ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy—holding an olive branch—emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... revival. Mr. Thomas Turner had moral and religious aspirations, but these could not be satisfied by the clergyman of his parish or the curate of Laughton, the companions of his debauches but not the sharers of his remorse. When the clergy were sincere and moral, they were still too cold and commonplace to seriously influence their flocks. The sermons of the time were at best, moral essays, teaching little, as Mr. Lecky says, "that might not have been taught by disciples of Socrates and Confucius." They might ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... a pity that, two days before the party, an original idea on the subject of snowmen struck one of the children who used to play together, with their sleds and snow shoes, in the back streets. The idea was this: That instead of having a commonplace snowman, whose legs were obliged to be mere stumps, for fear he should be top-heavy, and who could not walk, even with them; who, in fact, could do nothing but stand at the corner of the street, holding his impotent stick, and staring with his pebble eyes, till ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... admiring nature!" exclaimed Cora Kimball, with a sudden descent to the commonplace. "Mother will be wanting that worsted, and if we are to play bridge tonight, I must help Nancy get the rooms in ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... to convey justly the composer's idea. Take, for instance, the well-known change which every soprano who sings the role of Leonora introduces in the Miserere scene of Il Trovatore. The passage occurs four times in succession, and as printed becomes commonplace and monotonous. ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... his commonplace love, its easy conquest, and somewhat grotesque declaration. He wishes he could propose with like freedom, and receive a similar response. His comrade's success should embolden him; but does not. There is no parallelism ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... dared in secret what he had not strength to acknowledge openly, and it was with some hesitation Violet prepared to ask those definite questions which would elucidate the cause and manner of a loss seemingly so important. She dreaded to hear some commonplace tale of inexcusable carelessness. Something subtler than this—the presence of some unsuspected agency opposed to young Clement's interest; some partisan of Carlos; some secret undermining force in a house full of servants and dependants, seemed necessary for the development ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... by pointing out that the study of this commonplace matter of eating and drinking opens out to us the conception of the grand unity of nature; since we see that the body of man differs in no way essentially from other natural combinations, but is subject to the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... wager you spend hours here at night gazing at the stars and imagining they are the voting-papers of infinity. And then you titillate yourself with your ideas of truth and justice; and this is so evidently the case that those ideas of yours cause just as much alarm to commonplace middle-class folks as my sketches do. Between ourselves, now, do you imagine that if you were Robine I should take any pleasure in your friendship? Ah, no, my friend, you are a ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... which a uniform hum could be heard, the profoundly reassured activity of a sunny work-day. This made him sad and discouraged. He had a disagreeably distinct feeling that he himself was uninteresting and commonplace. The girls fell in love with others, unusual experiences existed for others; and even his sleek, pale-blond hair, his round face, his light-blue eyes seemed to cause him woe. And suddenly a very remote recollection came to him. He must have been a very small child as he sat with his ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... so many years lay between them, a hundred petty cares fell on her girlish shoulders, and tried her patience greatly with their weight, sometimes. And in the hard family struggle for everyday necessities there was too much of commonplace reality to admit of much poetry. The wearisome battling with life's needs had left the mother, as it leaves thousands of women, haggard, careworn, and not too smooth in disposition. There was no romance about her. She had fairly forgotten her girlhood, it seemed to lie so far behind; and even ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... debating societies at school and college. But there were two great defects in it. First, as Professor Wilkins points out, the subjects of declamation were too often out of all relation to real life, e.g. taken from the Greek mythology; or if less barren than usual, were far more commonplace and flat than those of our debating societies. To harangue on the question whether the life of a lawyer or a soldier is the best, is hardly so inspiring as to debate a question of the day about Ireland or India, which ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... laughingly opened her desk, while Hilda's dark eyes regarded her with sharp and eager watchfulness. "You must not make it too eloquent, dear," said she. "Remember the very commonplace epistles that you have been giving forth ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... was wont to slide into the commonplace; and where my own dull life intrudes to clog the action I cut it down here and pare it away there until I am merely explanatory, and not too much in evidence. I rode out the Wilderness Trail, fell in with other travellers, was welcomed by certain old familiar faces ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... road, and possessing as well a unique command of picturesque and varied profanity. These gifts he considered as necessarily related, and the exercise of each was always in conjunction with the other, for no man ever heard Macmillan swear in ordinary conversation or on commonplace occasions. But when his team became involved in a sleugh, it was always a point of doubt whether he aroused more respect and admiration in his attendants by his rare ability to get the last ounce of hauling power out of his team ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... regularity they gave the name of Nature. But at the same time, their infantile and untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible, commonplace, orderly world of Nature was surrounded and interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the thoughts and passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to exercise an intermittent ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not worth your while to come to hear them, nor mine to speak them; but if we would lay them to heart, and realise how true it is about every step of our earthly course that 'ye have not passed this way heretofore,' we should complain less than we do of the weariness and prosaic character of our commonplace lives, and feel that all was mystical and great and awful; and yet most blessed in its possibilities and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as the victory of Blenheim itself," Mr. Harley said, who was famous as a judge and patron of letters, and so, perhaps, it may be—though for my part I think there are twenty beautiful lines, but all the rest is commonplace, and Mr. Addison's hymn worth a ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... education of Cicero probably became a commonplace among Latin school-masters and Latin writers. In the dialogue De Oratoribus, attributed to Tacitus, the story of it is given by Messala when he is praising the orators of the earlier age. "We know well," says Messala, "that book ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... they could see long lines of white-covered wagons, level plains dotted with tents, and the rising smoke of many fires, where people who had gone in ahead of them were cooking their suppers; for they entered Parkville late in the afternoon. It was a commonplace-looking view of Kansas, after all, and not at all like what the lads had fancied it would be. Sandy very emphatically ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... to be true, that's all. No, Joan is a dear child, but her body's no more than a perfect casket to a commonplace little soul. She talks a great deal and I like nothing better than to listen; for although what she says is naught, yet her manner of saying it does not lack charm. Her voice is wonderfully sweet—it comes from her throat like a wood-pigeon's, and education has ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... dryly and unimportantly, as if to a perfectly commonplace inquiry. Then Lady Nottingham, in her turn, got up. Jeannie's restlessness and disquiet seemed to have transferred themselves ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Not the prosaic commonplace shells usually found on a New England shore nor even the brighter colored, more intricately formed shells of tropic seas. These were shells he had never seen before, even in library collections. Alien ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... avoided, for the gold gives the wall an unstable and cheap appearance. Papers with small single figures repeated all over the surface are apt to look as if a plague of flies or beetles had arrived and are quite impossible to live with. Borders and cut out borders have a commonplace appearance and are not in the best of taste. And then there are papers with vulgarity of design. This quality is hard to define clearly, for it may be only a slightly redundant curve or other lack of true feeling for the beauty of line, or a bit too much, or ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... The destruction of the commonplace Cathedral of Cologne could never recompense the damage done to the glorious Cathedral of Rheims. Nor could the slaughter of a million German women and children restore the innocent victims of Belgium, France, Servia, ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... is dedicated in grateful memory of the Prince Adept, Albert Pike, 33°, Mystic, Poet, Scholar, who through his researches and his study of the Symbolism of Free Masonry has raised that Institution far above the commonplace and enthroned it on the lofty plane of a sublime system of Philosophy, embracing the accumulated Wisdom of the ages fitted to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... shortcoming from bygone days attended other aspects of the scene. Instead of fiery oratory and pipes of peace—the stone calumets of old—the vigorous arguments, the outbursts of passion, and close calls from threatened violence, here was a gathering of commonplace men smoking briar-roots, with treaty tobacco instead of "weed," and whose chiefs replied to Mr. Laird's explanations and offers in a few brief and sensible statements, varied by vigorous appeals to the common ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... have dropped away from the commonplace face as if it had been a veil; the eyes were burning with a hungry pathos and fire and passion; they were raised to his and held him with the power of an indescribable anguish. "Dunnot forget as I'm here," the voice growing sharp and intense, "ready an' eager an' waitin' fur ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life. Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... distinction. He invests virtue, however lowly, with the dignity that belongs to it. He rewards merit, however obscure, with its due honour. Whatever is true or beautiful or good, finds from him an immediate sympathy. The true is never rejected by him because it is commonplace; nor the beautiful because it is everyday; nor the good because it is not also great. He calls nothing unclean but vice and crime, He sees meanness in nothing but in the sham, the affectation, and the spangles ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... very happily with commonplace wives, and Robert Worth had never regretted that his Maria did not play on the piano, and paint on velvet, and work fine embroideries for the altars. They had passed nearly twenty-six years together ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... hurled themselves violently on top of a meek-looking little fellow who had just fallen on the ball. Ginger, you are well out of it! That was the scrum-half, and I gathered that that sort of thing was a mere commonplace in his existence. Stopping a rush, it is called, and he is expected to do it all the time. The idea of you ever going in for such brutal sports! You thank your stars that you are safe on your little stool in Fillmore's outer office, and that, if anybody ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... far, and the conversation began to crystallise, as it could but do with the scanty stream which the commonplace world supplied. Amongst other things they spoke of the middle ages: some praised that period as far more interesting, far more poetical than our own too sober present; indeed Councillor Knap defended ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... privations she succeeded in sending the boys to college and the girls to a boarding-school. When they came home, pretty, refined girls and strong young men, abreast with all the new ideas and tastes of their times, she was a worn-out, commonplace old woman. They had their own pursuits and companions. She lingered unappreciated among them for two or three years, and then died, of some sudden failure of the brain. The shock of her fatal illness woke them to consciousness of the truth. They hung over her, as she lay prostrate, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... want to see Mrs. Montagu. I truly said, I should be the most insensible of all animals not to like to see our sex's glory.' That she was a very extraordinary woman we have Johnson's word for it. (See post, May 15, 1784.) It is impossible, however, to discover anything that rises above commonplace in anything that she wrote, and, so far as I know, that she said, with the exception of her one saying about Voltaire. Johnson himself, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, has a laugh at her. He had mentioned Shakespeare, nature and friendship, and continues:—'Now, of whom shall I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... wrote a famous line it has become a commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an East and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking of England, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... those poignant moments in the boat I met Dugald Shaw in commonplace fashion at the table, a sudden, queer, altogether unprecedented shyness seized me. I sat looking down at my plate with the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... silently differed, for she had read in the man's eyes and voice a great deal more than belonged to the commonplace character of a forest-ranger. That first vision ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... piece of writing that purports to tell us the secret of success in life; yet how often we are disappointed to find nothing but commonplace statements, or receipts that we know by heart but never follow. Most of the life stories of our famous and successful men fail to inspire because they lack the human element that makes the record real and brings the ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... hand, while himself sucking at his pipe, as though he had suddenly recollected something extraordinarily amusing or important, then he would open his mouth, let off a few rings of smoke, and utter the most commonplace remarks, or even keep silence altogether. After gossiping a little with Ivan Afanasiitch about the neighbours, about horses, the daughters of the gentry around, and other such edifying topics, Mr. Bublitsyn suddenly ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Burr, raising his hand. "Remember, madam, your son Allen is only a commonplace medical man, and while I taught him a little from my vast store of knowledge, he was ignorant and of much less value to science and humanity than myself. Do you not understand, can you not comprehend, also, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... most respectable business men of the day. Being yet a young man, just scanning forty, he is one among the extraordinary men of the times. Born, like the most of colored men in this country, in obscurity, of poor parents, raised without the assistance of a father, and to a commonplace business, without the advantages of schools, by his own perseverance, he qualified himself to the extent that gave him an inclination to traffic, which he did for several years on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, investing his gains in real estate, until he acquired ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... does not plead guilty to this most unkind charge, at least no further than is laudable, for that which is rare and is distinguished and singular ought to be more prized and sought after than what is commonplace and disagreeable. How can the other accusation, of being easily pleased, agree with this? The very circumstance of seeking out that which is of high value shows at least a mind not readily satisfied. But to attempt excuses ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Ideas advance most readily along the solid ground of practical reality, and often find true sublimity while laying aside empty marvels. Progress is the result, not so much of sudden flights of genius, as of sustained, patient, often commonplace endeavour; and the true lesson of scientific history lies in the close connection which it discloses between the most brilliant developments of knowledge and the faithful accomplishment of his daily task by each individual ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... sure of this, Mr. Cardross and his daughter, that neither put to him a single question on the subject, but instinctively passed it over, and kept the conversation to all sorts of commonplace topics: the journey—the wonders of London—and the small events which had happened in quiet Cairnforth during the three months that the earl had ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... at a party, but a musician? no!' and like all mere 'talents' Frank failed in his songs to give them just what is of most value—just that which separates an artistic performance from the vast region of well-meaning, respectable, but uninteresting commonplace. There was a curious lack in him also of correspondence between his music and the rest of himself. As music is expression, it might be supposed that something which it serves to express would always lie behind it; but this was not ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... dearest friend is not within the province of this narrative to determine, but Jingleberry had it in its most virulent form. He had often got so far along in his proposal as "Marian—er—will you—will you—," and there he had as often stopped, contenting himself with such commonplace conclusions as "go to the matinee with me to-morrow?" or "ask your father for me if he thinks the stock market is likely to strengthen soon?" and other amazing substitutes for the words he so ardently desired, yet feared, to utter. But this afternoon—the one upon which the extraordinary events ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon the billows! With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea! I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare. If there were more people of his ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fall it is when Joe resumes his life. From being a pirate, a fighter, and a buffalo-hunter, he becomes—think of it!—a pastrycook. He leaves the magnificent society of Jack Armstrong, and Black Peter, and Red Indians, to mix with the commonplace citizens of London—as a pastrycook! He makes buns. He makes sponge cakes. Think of it—he ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... favourably impressed by her smile—there was something at once sad and cruel in it. It came slowly, and it went away suddenly. He began to doubt whether he had been wise in acting on his first impression. His mind reverted to the commonplace patients and the discoverable maladies that were waiting for him, with ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... what it was in this commonplace exchange of remarks that thrilled. Probably Maloney's swift acquiescence in the doctor's mood had something to do with it; for his quick obedience certainly impressed me a good deal. But, even without ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... scene of the dinner is actually at Cumae this sounds very peculiar; it might even be a gloss added by some copyist whose knowledge was not equal to his industry. On the other hand, suppose Trimalchio is speaking of something so commonplace in his locality that the second term has become a generic, then the difficulty disappears. We today, even though standing upon the very spot in Melos where the Venus was unearthed, would still refer to her as the Venus de Melos. Friedlaender, in bracketing Cumis, has not taken ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... perceiving a piece in which two flies were engaged upon the carcass of a dog half devoured, he ran to his brother brush, and swore he was worthy of being a fellow-citizen of the immortal Rubens. He then lamented, with many expressions of grief and resentment, that he had lost his commonplace book, in which he had preserved a thousand conceptions of the same sort, formed by the accidental objects of his senses and imagination; and took an opportunity of telling his fellow-travellers, that in execution he had equalled, if not excelled, the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... sought; and he could indeed see that she was in a sore strait. It must, however, be understood that, while thus discoursing, they often, to take away all ground for suspicion, passed and repassed in front of the shelter-place where the worthy dames were seated—talking the while on commonplace and ordinary matters, and at times disporting themselves through ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... I could not. Oh, Dic—" Thereupon she began to weep, and Dic, though pained, found a certain selfish joy in comforting her, compared to which the conversation of Madame de Stael herself would have been poor and commonplace. Then came the gate, a sweet face wet with tears, and good-by and ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... when we reached the banal outskirts of a town where the bourgeoise houses were modern, commonplace, save those which had been ennobled by ruin. It was Arras, one of those few magic names, eloquent with suggestions of mediaeval romance and art, intrigue and chivalry; while upon their significance, since the war began, has been superimposed still ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... means of expression for all animals, mankind included. If musical sounds were accepted as symbols for things we would have another speech. It seems strange to say that by means of music one could say the most commonplace thing, as, for instance: 'I am going to take a walk'; yet this is precisely what the Chinese have been doing for centuries. For such things, however, our word-symbols do perfectly well, and such a symbolising ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... English; and 'Timber, or discoveries' "made upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the times." The 'Discoveries', as it is usually called, is a commonplace book such as many literary men have kept, in which their reading was chronicled, passages that took their fancy translated or transcribed, and their passing opinions noted. Many passage of Jonson's 'Discoveries' ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... might almost be termed lady-like. Indeed, several of the other native wives of the mutineers were similar to Mrs Christian in these respects, and, despite their brown complexions, were remarkably good-looking. One or two, however, were commonplace enough, especially the wives of the three married Otaheitan men, who seemed to be, as no doubt they were, of a lower social class than the others who had mingled with the best Otaheitan society, Edward Young's wife, for instance, being a sort of native princess—at least she was the ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... place, through such institutions, distinct original societies may come to be inside the great commonplace world. Here special personalities may find the only existence that suits them. If devout or laborious, not only do these afford an outlet for the deeper needs of conscience, of the imagination, of activity, and of discipline, but also ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... older town, Melbourne is justly entitled to be considered the metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere. The natural beauties of Sydney are worth coming all the way to Australia to see; while the situation of Melbourne is commonplace if not actually ugly; but it is in the Victorian city that the trade and capital, the business and pleasure of Australia chiefly centre. Is there a company to be got up to stock the wilds of Western Australia, or to form a railway on the land-grant system ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... describes, in not the least noble of his lyrics, the sudden apparition of some "Monster Fate" in the circles of careless Joy, he assigns to him who teaches the world, through parable or song, the right to invoke the spectre. It is well to be awakened at times from the easy commonplace that surrounds our habitual life; to cast broad and steady and patient light on the darker secrets of the heart,—on the vaults and caverns of the social state over which we build the market-place and the palace. We recover from the dread and the awe and the half-incredulous ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... left the cardinal, but without returning to St. Germain. He remained at the Louvre. Richelieu had in vain questioned the physicians as to how long he had to live. One, only, dared to go beyond commonplace hopes. "Monsignor," he said, "in twenty-four hours you will be dead or cured." "That is the way to speak!" said the cardinal; and he sent for the priest of St. Eustache, his parish. As they were bringing ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... beautiful young ladies but none of them had the charm of Sally. The memory of youth—true-hearted, romantic, wonder-working youth—had enthroned her in its golden castle and was defending her against the present commonplace herd of mere human beings. No one of them had played with me in the old garden or stood by the wheat-field with flying hair, as yellow as the grain, and delighted me with the sweetest words ever spoken. No one of them had been glorified with ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... as if he were dining at his own table in Chatham County. He was a gallant trencherman, and the strange tropic viands tickled his palate. Heavy, commonplace, almost slothful in his movements, he appeared to be devoid of all the cunning and watchfulness of the sleuth. He even ceased to observe, with any sharpness or attempted discrimination, the two men, one of whom he had undertaken with surprising ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... picture is almost peculiar to the backwoods of America. Some may deem it commonplace. For my part, I cannot regard it in this light. I have never looked upon this primitive homestead of the pioneer without receiving from it an impression of romantic pleasure. Something seems to impart to it an air of vague and mystic grandeur. Perhaps I associate the picture with ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... listener of note, and makes all sorts of confidences to him. The King with his very haughty bonhomie and his somewhat infatuated wisdom; the grave and sweet DUCHESS D'ORLEANS, the boisterous and amiable princes—the whole commonplace and home-like court—are depicted ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... out of mind, of being insipid. Nor can he catch and reproduce the easy grace and unconscious dignity of high-bred men and women. His gentlemen, whether young or old, are apt to be stiff, priggish, and commonplace; and his ladies, especially his young ladies, are as deficient in individuality as the figures and faces of a fashion-print. Their personal and mental charms are set forth with all the minuteness of a passport; but, after all, we cannot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... fresh information about Johnson's life and career. Consequently, the unfavorable portion of the poem is a conventional catalog of Johnson's often publicized foibles and prejudices, just as the favorable section is in part a commonplace ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... incurring the dreaded pneumonia of Madrid. Except for that dreaded pneumonia, I believe the air of Madrid is not so pestilential as it has been reported. Public opinion is beginning to veer in favor of it, just as the criticism which has pronounced Madrid commonplace and unpicturesque because it is not obviously old, is now finding a charm in it peculiar to the place. Its very modernity embodies and imparts the charm, which will grow as the city grows in wideness and straightness. It is in the newer quarter that it recalls Rome or the newer quarters ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... not be deemed too pompous for the preface to a story in which true love is crossed by a soldier's sense of honour. The theme is a variant on a great commonplace: and, following my habit, I let the incidents and characters have their own way without the author's comment ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Yates knew many of the generals in the late war, and all of the politicians. Of the latter there was not an honest man among them, according to the reporter; of the former there were few who had not made the most ghastly mistakes. He looked on the world as a vast hoard of commonplace people, wherein the men of real genius were buried out of sight, if there were any men of genius, which he seemed to doubt, and those on the top were there either through their own intrigues or because they ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... mince pie. Then we remembered that we had just dined. Never mind, we sat there and contemplated the apple as it lay ruddily on the white porcelain tabletop. Should we give it to the waitress? No, because apples were a commonplace to her. The window of the restaurant held a great pyramid of beauties. To her, an apple was merely something to be eaten, instead of the symbol of a grand escapade. Instead, we gave her a little medallion of a buffalo that happened ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... he had not seen the triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace delights—a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of reflection, even a well-cooked meal—make up for the suffering of not wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary battle ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... than one imagination there rose a vision of that haunted water in which floated the great Yellow God, and of some mad being casting himself to his death beneath the moon, while his beautiful witch wife who was "hungry for more spirits" sat upon its edge and laughed. Although his language was now commonplace enough, even ludicrous at times, the negro had undoubtedly the art of narration. His auditors felt that he spoke of what he knew, or had seen, that the very recollection of it frightened ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... almost perpendicularly above the man's eyes; and these were large and dark and full of fire, though marred by a discontented expression. His mouth was full-lipped, his other features huddled rather meanly together under the high brow: but his face, while admittedly plain even to ugliness, was not commonplace; for its eyes were remarkable, and the cast of thought ennobled it as ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Hamlet—the sportive relief, which he threw into the darker shades of Richard—disappeared with him. Tragedy is become a uniform dead weight. They have fastened lead to her buskins. She never pulls them off for the ease of a moment. To invert a commonplace from Niobe, she never forgets herself to liquefaction. John had his sluggish moods, his torpors—but they were the halting stones and resting places of his tragedy—politic savings, and fetches of the breath—husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist—rather, I think, than ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... think he would, and I do not think he would because we underrate gifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvalue the good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues of mediocrity. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... A commonplace series of Preces dia, with miniatures, were first sold off at mediocre prices. Needless to say, the illuminations of these books were ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... forte is simply such vulgar things as suffice to raise a laugh! Worse than her is that P'in Erh with that coarse tongue! She has recourse to the devices of the 'Ch'un Ch'iu'! By selecting, from the vulgar expressions used in low slang, the most noteworthy points, she eliminates what's commonplace, and makes, with the addition of a little elegance and finish, her style so much like that of the text that each sentence has a peculiar character of its own! The three words representing 'female locust' bring out clearly ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... reason (than that of reverence to her mother's name). Strange enough, this pupil of mine is unique in her speech and deportment, and in no way like any ordinary young lady. But considering that her mother was no commonplace woman herself, it is natural that she should have given birth to such a child. Besides, knowing, as I do now, that she is the granddaughter of the Jung family, it is no matter of surprise to me that she is what she is. Poor girl, her ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the expression, however, are natural and even graceful, bearing thus the divine impress. The echoes of Weber should be noted. Of two mazurkas, in G and B flat major, of the year 1825, the first is, especially in its last part, rather commonplace; the second is more interesting, because more suggestive of better things, which the first is only to an inconsiderable extent. In No. 2 we meet already with harmonic piquancies which charmed musicians and lovers of music so much in the later mazurkas. Critics and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... but it was also somewhat pathetic. These two good commonplace souls had travelled through life together side by side for over thirty years, and, despite age, infirmity, and "nearves", were still lovers at heart. Before the wife's eyes the figure of "Mr Macalister" loomed so large that it blocked ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... brilliant success in the narrower region of the domestic novel. He said himself, in expressing his admiration of Miss Austen, "The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me." Indeed he tried it to some extent in St. Ronan's Well, and so far as he tried it, I think he failed. Scott needed a certain largeness of type, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... also, had looked into mine. Then I forgot my fruitless efforts at conversation, I forgot the height of my collar, the stiffness of my shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,—the dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,—was restored to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a man and a woman together. Our consciousness had ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... entering into conversation with various people that I met; several of these were of the middle class, shopkeepers and professional men; they were all Constitutionalists, or pretended to be so, but had very little to say except a few commonplace remarks on the way of living of the friars, their hypocrisy and laziness. I endeavoured to obtain some information respecting the state of instruction in the place, and from their answers was led ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of ingenuity, various acquirements, and agreeable manners, Mr Skinner was held in much estimation among his contemporaries. Whatever he read, with the assistance of a commonplace-book, he accurately remembered, and could readily turn to account; and, though his library was contained in a closet of five feet square, he was abundantly well informed on every ordinary topic of conversation. He was fond of controversial ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... in real life do not behave or talk—at least, this is my experience—in the smallest degree as they behave or talk in novels or plays; life as a rule has no plot, and very few dramatic situations. In real life the adventures are scanty, and for most of us existence moves on in a commonplace and inconsequent way. Misunderstandings are not cleared up, complexities are not unravelled. I think it is time that more unconventional forms of expression should be discovered and used; and at least, we can ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was deserted, and nothing was easier than to play off there, unchallenged, such commonplace tricks as the showing of colored lights, the clanking of chains, shrieks, groans, and a howling spectre with beard and tail,—all in accordance with the prejudices of that age; nor do we read that any one was bold enough to penetrate, during the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... would be simply burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Physical Astronomy! Science would not have got very far on that plan, I fancy. The truth is, that science, while it is perpetually dealing with questions of magnitude, and knows ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... there is no more sport to war. It has become scientific, businesslike, and commonplace. Never has an unprepared nation been so helpless against the prepared as to-day. The American Revolution could never have been won by untrained levies to-day against the British regulars if they possessed modern weapons. Our forefathers had their fowling pieces, taken from ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... short and broad and ugly man, approaching middle age; of a commonplace cut of features, of poor birth, of mean fortunes, of small account in the scheme of things; but he had an eye for beauty; he had a soul; and his eye was filled with a beauty completely satisfying his conception; and ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... Mountain fascinates us by its diversity. It is an inspiration and yet a riddle to all who are drawn to the mysterious or who love the sublime. Every view which the breaking clouds vouchsafe to us is a surprise. It never becomes commonplace, save ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... Captain Bland for coming in one evening, even though Mary accompanied him, because Bill became suddenly far more reticent than usual in his presence, if not altogether dumb, and when he did speak, merely described in a modest tone some very commonplace occurrences. I could not make it out. After some time, when Bill was out of ear-shot, I heard Captain Bland remark to father that he liked lads who did not speak about themselves. It was a pretty sure sign that they were better doers than talkers. "He'll succeed, ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... long as I have and seen as much of men, you would cease to be surprised at the reputations men of essentially commonplace powers—aided by circumstances ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... do. I sort of leaven the lump. Without me he'd be just a clever prig; he couldn't help it. With me he is only better than most men; and his lofty ideas don't get top-heavy, because I keep him in touch with commonplace humanity." ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... dear boy!" she said. "What an artist you are! And how difficult it is for us commonplace, matter-of-fact people to understand the artistic temperament. Here you go, almost turning my steady old head by your rapture over what seemed to you perfection of sound which has reached you through the ear; just as, again ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... measuring-rod was a far mightier implement than the pen. His turgid and pompous rhetoric displays itself in the introductions to the different books, where his exaggerated effort to introduce some semblance of style into his commonplace lectures on the noble principles which should govern the conduct of the architect, or into the prosaic lists of architects and writers on architecture, is everywhere apparent. Even in the more technical portions ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... party to a series of cruelties, that may break the spirit, and, perhaps, shorten the life of their children. Unfortunately, the most promising minds are those that soonest yield to the effect of harsh discipline. The phlegmatic, the dull, and the commonplace vegetate easily through this state of probation. The blight that will destroy the rose, passes ever harmlessly over the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... came Constance's return from extravaganzas to a sufficiently graceful every-day manner, only enough touched with high spirits and lawlessness to free it from the charge of commonplace. But the contrast of these high spirits with her own rather made Fleda's mood more quiet, and it needed no quieting. Of the sundry people that she knew among those presently assembled there were none that she wanted to talk to; the rooms were hot and she felt ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... time, squarely, always, in the middle of the pitch. When she opened her rather dainty-looking mouth and sang, she could give you across the footlights the impression that at least four first-class sopranos were going uncommon strong. She hadn't a salient or commonplace enough sort of beauty to have singled her out from the chorus and she was no better a dancer than passable. But none of the girls who would be picked out by a committee of automobile salesmen as the prettiest and the best dancers in the chorus could sing a note, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Bunyan's hero was travelling the usual road of the Idle Apprentice, and the gallows would have been the commonplace ending of it. But this would not have answered Bunyan's purpose. He wished to represent the good-for-nothing character, under the more instructive aspect of worldly success, which bad men may arrive at ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... time threatened to rival the Lotos in the latter's particular field. Writing men snatched up into the clouds in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for illustrations with which to garnish descriptions of the most commonplace events of everyday life. Here is another gem from Mr. Fairfield's book, also in his chapter about ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... differently. However, it is quite possible that if such had been the case Oscar Wilde, the aesthete, the paradoxer, the disciple of Walter Pater and Baudelaire, would have stayed in the land of the to be born. I mean that then we would not have had Oscar Wilde, but another person, genius or commonplace, who also might have borne the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... each other: a trait frequent in rural households, and one which stands in curiously inverse relation to most of the peculiarities distinguishing villagers from the people of towns. Thus hiding their warmer feelings under commonplace talk all round, Grace's reception produced no extraordinary demonstrations. But that more was felt than was enacted appeared from the fact that her father, in taking her in-doors, quite forgot the presence of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of the hill we found a rustic table, also a rustic seat on which was seated a comely matron engaged in the very commonplace work of darning socks. She cast on us a sharp and remarkably penetrating glance as we approached. Doubtless our appearance was peculiar, for a pretty maiden in savage costume, a somewhat ragged white man, and a gigantic savage, all mounted on magnificent steeds and looking travel-stained ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... billiard-room. The gardener and the butler and cook say there was a great crash in the room just when the parish minister was saying grace, and that many of the people from outside noticed it, and "they just looked at each other." I was myself in the room, but as we had just had a very physical and commonplace disturbance—the arrival of an uninvited and intoxicated guest, of which the other people did not know as I did—I was preoccupied ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... Chivalry, where have you been?" "I've been out seeking a beautiful queen." "Chivalry, Chivalry, what did you find?" "Commonplace women, ...
— Are Women People? • Alice Duer Miller
... the actor's brain in the process of learning his art by practice. For the way to learn to do a thing is to do it; and in learning to act by acting, though there is plenty of incidental hard drill and hard work, there is nothing commonplace or unfruitful. ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... everything—capricious and unreasonable in all the actions of her life—Rachel melted into tears at those commonplace words, and returned her aunt's kiss ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... end my story now, There are phases more vivid in the commonplace lives of these men and women, I do not doubt: love as poignant as pain in its joy; crime, weak and foul and foolish, like all crime; silent self-sacrifices: but I leave them for you to paint; you will find colors enough in your own house ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... covered with buildings and crowded with people, would not strike many observers as a promising field for scientific exploration; but it is the peculiarity of genius to read instruction where others can find only a blank, or a record of commonplace character. Cuvier discovered in the geological construction and the fossil remains of the Paris basin, elements for the solution of the most critical scientific questions, relative not only to that locality, but to the globe at large. Long before, he had begun to treasure ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... been destroyed, there is still a massive dignity about the building that would have thoroughly justified its better preservation. In any case the municipal authorities might have had some memory of the traditions of the old centre of their civic life, before they moved to the commonplace erections on the north side of the Abbey Church ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... notions that make up the stock of a country grocery store. Little Compton's disappearance was a mysterious one, and under ordinary circumstances would have created intense excitement in the community; but at that particular time the most sensational event would have seemed tame and commonplace alongside ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... half in love with a woman whom you have never seen—with a shadow, a chimera? for what else can Miss Daw to be you? I do not understand it at all. I understand neither you nor her. You are a couple of ethereal beings moving in finer air than I can breathe with my commonplace lungs. Such delicacy of sentiment is something that I admire without comprehending. I am bewildered. I am of the earth earthy, and I find myself in the incongruous position of having to do with mere ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... at one another. They repeated vaguely this most commonplace of messages. As the final result of their strenuous enterprise, these cryptic words seemed pitifully inadequate. Quest's face darkened. He crumpled the paper in ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ladies retired to doff their hats ere partaking of afternoon tea, and Dawn took her father's hat while he trumpeted in his handkerchief and attempted a few commonplace platitudes from the biggest and stiffest arm-chair in the "parler," into which he had subsided. I left the room, but could hear him from where I stood awaiting the ladies' reappearance, one from the room that had been Miss Flipp's ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... question in such sudden change of subject that she started involuntarily. But then relief at the descent into the commonplace came on her and ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... not been a shopgirl," he said steadily. "You belong in a home like mine. If you have lost it by some accident, that is only the fortune of life. But you can't disguise yourself as a commonplace person, for you're not. And—I can't let you go out of my ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... enable Chichikov to go across Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... summons brought him at once within the ban of that judgment to which she had called him. It would be well if one could believe the story; there would seem a dramatic justice—a tragic retribution—about it. Its very terror would dignify the story of a life that, on the whole, was commonplace and vulgar. But, for ourselves, we confess that we cannot believe in the mysterious letter, the fatal summons, the sudden fulfilment. There are too many stories of the kind floating about history to allow us to attach any special significance to this particular tale. We doubt even ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... said my father quietly; and, intimate as I was with Bigley, school-fellows and companions as we were, I could not help noticing the difference, and how thoroughly my father was the gentleman and Jonas Uggleston the commonplace seafaring man. ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... his way to breakfast he found himself face to face with the man who so desperately needed financial assistance. "Why, how do you do, Mr. Worth. When did you land in San Felipe?" Cartwright's tone seemed to subtly change his commonplace question into—"Why are ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... did get hold of her, in what we must now call the Lover's Walk! Yes, she has yielded, to her father's great satisfaction and perhaps to her mother's, for she will be more comfortable in looking forward to a commonplace life for her than in the dread of modern aberrations. But Gillian is very funny, very much ashamed of having given in, and perfectly determined to go to her college and finish her education, which she may as well do while the Sparrow Hawk is at sea. He is off to-day, and she says she is very glad ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seemed even ludicrously unbecoming. The battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood, but how much harder and worthier battles are fought, not in shining armour, but amid filth and squalor physical as well as moral, on a field of wretched and wearisome commonplace! ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... it will be the faces of the dead and wounded that will live most clearly in the memory, but at present the pictures of the Belgian soldier which stand out sharpest are less lugubrious and more commonplace. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... a chieftain in a helpless body, dauntlessly maintained that for him who bears the torch of a lofty ideal it is an absolute duty to hold it high over the heads of his comrades; that it would be wrong to confuse it in the other illuminations. The commonplace of democracies that Voltaire had less wit than Mr. Everybody is nonsense.... "Democritus ait; Unus mihi pro populo est.... To me an individual is as good as a thousand." ... Our modern faith sees in the social group ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... witness from interpretative art only what is good and noble on which to form its taste; there should be nothing crude or commonplace put before it, which it might consider itself justified ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... thought Harry to himself. 'I never CAN teach her duly to respect the prejudices of Pi. Not that it matters twopence to Le Breton, of course: but if she talks that way to any of the other men here, they'll be laughing in every common-room in Oxford over my Christmas raisins and pounds of sugar—commonplace cynics that they are. I must tell her about it the moment we get home again, and adjure her by all that's holy not to repeat ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... professor at the said ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost. Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... of artists that the things they do best and easiest they value least, and this was so with Powers. His portrait busts were, in a sense, mere pot-boilers; he lavished himself upon his ideal figures. But these are now ranked as unimaginative and commonplace. ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... who boast of possessing supernatural intelligence, should be unwilling to yield the palm of knowledge to philosophers who have only their ordinary, faculties; still I should be surprised if I found them teaching any new speculative doctrine, which was not a commonplace to those Gentile philosophers whom, in spite of all, they stigmatize as blind; for, if one inquires what these mysteries lurking in Scripture may be, one is confronted with nothing but the reflections of Plato or Aristotle, or the like, which it would often be easier ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... own account, had no belief in love's existence. And the "fairy woman" she spoke of—who could that be but Morgana Royal? After his recent interview with Seaton his thoughts were rather in a whirl, and he sought for a bit of commonplace to which he could fasten them without the risk of their drifting into greater confusion. Yet that bit of commonplace was hard to find with a woman's lovely passionate eyes looking straight into his, and the woman herself, a warm-blooded embodiment of exquisite physical beauty, framed like a ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that bill which France expects to present some day. The old chateaux that were fouled and gutted by the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... among the ten, did she omit, the one in the next room, but at the end, after a pause, she said her name and repeated it again and again and again, lingering over it as if it were the most exquisite music and this her dying song. And yet it was a very commonplace name. ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... the "Kinderscenen," I owe to them one of the greatest pleasures of my life. You know, or you don't know, that I have a little girl of three years old, whom everybody agrees in considering angelic (did you ever hear such a commonplace?). Her name is Blandine-Rachel, and her surname Moucheron. [Pet name; literally, "little fly."] It goes without saying that she has a complexion of roses and milk, and that her fair golden hair reaches to her feet just like a savage. She is, however, the ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with the four centuries which have ensued that we can estimate the magnitude of that Renaissance movement by means ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... one window the dressing-room afforded—a double French window, at his right, but a little behind him, and reaching to the floor. Through this he could see across a court the opposite side of his own building, but no such window or commonplace vision as had just come to him. In his absorption in the phenomenon he called to Bangs, who rose slowly, and, coming to his side, regarded ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... a very primitive and clumsy method of harnessing the wind; but connected with it is a very ingenious contrivance that redeems it entirely from the commonplace. A system of mud walls are built about, the same height or a little higher than the shaft, in such a manner as to concentrate and control the wind in the interest of the miller, regardless of which ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... the green spears from between the woolly swaths of her shawl. She coughed, and pulled the white fleece closely over her mouth and nose. Then only her eyes were visible, which looked young as they gazed at the green spears of corn. The book-keeper nodded his elderly, distinctly commonplace, and unimportant head with the motion of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... their works in engravings, as well as by their paintings. If I could report a dinner-table conversation, I might be tempted to say something of my talk with Mr. Oliphant. I like well enough conversation which floats safely over the shallows, touching bottom at intervals with a commonplace incident or truism to push it along; I like better to find a few fathoms of depth under the surface; there is a still higher pleasure in the philosophical discourse which calls for the deep sea line to reach bottom; but best of all, ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... feeling about stars, and it is this: He never wanted them, male or female, to make themselves conspicuous or to do commonplace things. He was sensitive about what they said or did. For example, he did not like to see John Drew walk up and down Broadway. He spent a fortune sheltering Maude Adams from all kinds of intrusion. With her ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... brought up; but as to my knowledge it is merely commonplace. Young people now, when they quit school, know much more than all the philosophers of antiquity. It is only a pity that we have, in Europe, substituted half-a-dozen imperfect jargons, for the fine Latin language, of which your father made so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... deep; she seems to me to have made kindly acquaintance with some, to have admired others with artless enthusiasm. I don't think she troubled herself much about complication of feeling; she liked people to make repartees, or to invent machines, to pay their bills, and to do their duty in a commonplace and cheerfully stoical fashion. But then Maria Edgeworth certainly did not belong to our modern schools, sipping the emetic goblet to give flavour to daily events, nor to that still more alarming and spreading clique of DEGENERES who insist upon administering such doses ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... that fought under stress and strain, amid terror and tragedy, making life crackle with the strength of their endeavor. And yet the magazine short stories seemed intent on glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sordid dollar- chasers, and the commonplace little love affairs of commonplace little men and women. Was it because the editors of the magazines were commonplace? he demanded. Or were they afraid of life, these writers ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Assembly Rooms. The attitude of the press was distinctly inimical. "We must say," was one acid comment, "that a greater sell we have not met with for a very long time. All the audience got for their money were some remarks of the most commonplace and twaddling description. They lasted about an hour, and even this was an hour too much." Still, Brighton, where the tour finished, more than made up for Bath; and she was so successful there that "the Pavilion was crammed to the doors, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... sufficiently forcible. We sometimes encounter extravagant varieties of type, humorously intended, but the use of which seems a game hardly worth Mr. Reade's candle, which certainly possesses enough illuminating power of its own, without seeking additional refulgence by such commonplace expedients. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... in humble things:— How commonplace the precious ore! The shining vision sometimes springs The one man: From too much cheese the ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... is at best, but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... said his lordship slowly. "He related it... oh, just as a commonplace, an instance ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... parents, was an unspeakable charm and novelty to us all. We all worshipped the elder, and the little one was like a new discovery and toy to us, who had never been used to such a presence. She was not a commonplace child; but even if she had been, she would have been as charming a study as a kitten; and she had all the four of us at her feet, though her mother was constantly protesting against our spoiling her, and really kept up so much wholesome discipline that the little maid ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a commonplace boyhood must be filled in with many details drawn from environment. Stephen fell heir to a wealth of inspiring local traditions. The fresh mountain breezes had also once blown full upon the anxious faces of heroes and patriots; ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... heard you mention, convince me, without doubt, that it is no other reason (than that of reverence to her mother's name). Strange enough, this pupil of mine is unique in her speech and deportment, and in no way like any ordinary young lady. But considering that her mother was no commonplace woman herself, it is natural that she should have given birth to such a child. Besides, knowing, as I do now, that she is the granddaughter of the Jung family, it is no matter of surprise to me that she is ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... repugnance, to any mention of the Lord's return is the common thing. It is not surprising that earnest people are bewildered as to just what should be the attitude of one who would ring true to the absent Jesus. It hurts to remember that all this is the freely admitted commonplace, where such things are seriously ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... he had hoped it would be murder or piracy on the high seas; burglary and arson were so commonplace, he ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... hard-working magistrate, a man devoted to his task and whose mind never left the narrow groove of his official duties. His fiery breath reeked of the brandy he took to keep up his strength; but the liquor seemed never to fly to his brain, so clear-headed, albeit entirely commonplace, was every word ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... close by pointing out that the study of this commonplace matter of eating and drinking opens out to us the conception of the grand unity of nature; since we see that the body of man differs in no way essentially from other natural combinations, but is subject ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... beyond the bounds of possibility. It was an alluring vision. He saw the picture already. It was a scene from life, true in detail to the point of very minuteness, and yet with something spiritual in it that lifted it above the mere copy of the commonplace. At the Salon it would be hung on the line, and people would stand before it admiring its workmanship and asking who the artist was. He drew on his memory of old reading. In his mind's eye he saw Frank, unconscious of his own power or too modest to admit it, stand unknown among the crowds ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... now quiet and respected brother Lu, eh?" the other chuckled. "Well, what's he been doing now—-cut stick, and lit out, as we hoped would be the case, finding life in and around a sleepy town like Scranton too dull and commonplace to please the fastidious notions of ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... and not to shrink from an opportunity of thrusting his bayonet down the throat of his enemy. He was to set fire to churches, to throw images of Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... the military power of the whites, thrown out of his familiar relations, his stupendous conceit with its glamour of savage pomp and glory rudely dispelled, his occupation gone, himself a beggar, the red man becomes the most commonplace person imaginable, of very simple nature, limited ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... language now spoken and in use," in Latin and English; and 'Timber, or discoveries' "made upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the times." The 'Discoveries', as it is usually called, is a commonplace book such as many literary men have kept, in which their reading was chronicled, passages that took their fancy translated or transcribed, and their passing opinions noted. Many passage of Jonson's 'Discoveries' are literal translations ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... reproduce this incarnation of the ideal of umblemished youthful and manly beauty. The passion of artistic procreation fired his blood, and threw every thing else—even the history of Selene's fall into the sea, and her subsequent rescue—into the region of commonplace. Still he had not been inattentive, and what he heard must have had some effect in his mind; for long after Antinous had ended his narrative, he said in a low voice and as if speaking to the bust, which was already assuming ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... not been completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace delights—a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of reflection, even a well-cooked meal—make up for the suffering of not wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he received from ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... but at all events I was led with delicate diplomacy to talk about myself, and I presently realised that I was performing the grateful labour really well. My words were warmed into life by an eloquence that is not ordinarily mine, my adjectives were neither commonplace nor far-fetched, my adverbs fell into their sockets with a sob of joy. I spoke of myself with a noble sympathy, a compassion so intense that it seemed divinely altruistic. And gradually, as the spirit of creation woke in my blood, I revealed, trembling between a natural sensitiveness ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... him into a kind of Japanese idol. Their understanding was perfect. In season and out of season Zizine consulted Francis with a look, and Francis seemed to take his ideas from Zizine's eyes. They frowned and smiled together, and seemingly took counsel of each other before making the simplest commonplace remark. ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... profanation! The scandal is not ours, but Aubrey's, Shakspeare's earliest biographer, but who did not write till forty-six years after his death. His name and signature are connected with the buying and selling of land and theatrical shares, and such-like commonplace transactions; and his last will and testament, with which everybody is familiar, is as plain and prosaic as if it had been the production of a pig-headed prerogative lawyer. Now, in all this we see a sensible, sagacious, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... of heads that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are only pitiless to the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all eyes, we are to all intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be seen unless we raise ourselves above other people's heads? The common herd of humanity feels an involuntary respect ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... he, in his nervous, hurried manner, "perhaps you would be better able to answer my question were I first to tell you a story—an ordinary, a very commonplace one, I fear, but with the virtue that it is short, and ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... whole. He rarely rises to those lofty realms of poetry where Shakespeare so often soars, for he wrote not idealistic, but character, comedies; which is, perhaps, the reason that some of his would-be admirers consider him rather commonplace. His claim to distinction is based only on strong common-sense, good manners, sound morality, real wit, true humor, a great, facile, and accurate command of language, and a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... commonplace facts grow phosphorescent in the heat of true feeling. How little we may come to know Romance by the cloak she wears and how humble must be he who would surprise ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... it was round the toilet table that memory grew brightest, for thereon was a crystal phial of a most marvellous perfume, and two great mother-of-pearl shells, shedding a mystical radiance—the most commonplace Rimmel's, without doubt, and the shells 'dreadful,' one may be sure. But to him, as he took a reverent breath of that phial, it seemed the very sweetbriar fragrance of her gown that caught his sense; and, surely, ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... individual by the crowd is not certainly a constant rule, but it is a rule frequently observed. It is even observed in circumstances much less grave than those I have just cited. I have remarked that in the theatre a crowd exacts from the hero of the piece exaggerated virtues, and it is a commonplace observation that an assembly, even though composed of inferior elements, shows itself as a rule very prudish. The debauchee, the souteneur, the rough often break out into murmurs at a slightly risky scene or expression, though they be very harmless in comparison with ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... affectionate knowledge of the man, I can declare that the position in which he, like many a better man, had placed himself was intolerable. Other men of equal sensitiveness would have extricated themselves in a more commonplace fashion; but the dramatic appealed to my rascal, and he has often plumed himself on his calculated coup de theatre at the fork of the roads. He was delighted with it. Even now I sometimes think that Aristide ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... general to the special, and the known to the unknown, and that the great business of the teacher was imparting and guiding, and not storing the memory. These conclusions seem commonplaces to us of to-day, but what is commonplace today was genius three hundred years ago. To select the subject-matter of instruction carefully and on the basis of utility, to eliminate needless materials, not to attempt too much at a time, to use concrete examples, to have frequent repetitions ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... of Philippicus, in the years A.D. 584 and 585, were of the most commonplace character. He avoided any general engagement, and contended himself with plundering inroads into the Persian territory on either side of the Upper Tigris, occasionally suffering considerably from want of water and provisions. The Persians on their part undertook ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... Antonio, who, although he learned to paint from that same Stefano, nevertheless did not become anything more than a mediocre painter, as may be seen from his works, of which there is no need to make mention. To this Giovanni Antonio was born a son, called Jacopo, who likewise became a painter of commonplace works; and to Jacopo were born Giovan Maria, called Falconetto, whose Life we are about to write, and Giovanni Antonio. The latter, devoting himself to painting, executed many works at Rovereto, a very ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... proof of any motive. They reasoned, with perfect logic, that it was almost if not quite as improbable that the defendant should in broad daylight on a public street have shot down a man against whom he had not the slightest grudge as that twenty commonplace citizens should be mistaken as to what they had seen. Whether they were aided in reaching a verdict by "the implements of decision" I do not know, but in the end they found my client guilty and in due course he paid the penalty, as many another king has done, upon ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... Henry Ward Beecher was a constant wonder. He never wrote a commonplace letter. There was always himself in it—in whatever mood ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... religious aspirations, but these could not be satisfied by the clergyman of his parish or the curate of Laughton, the companions of his debauches but not the sharers of his remorse. When the clergy were sincere and moral, they were still too cold and commonplace to seriously influence their flocks. The sermons of the time were at best, moral essays, teaching little, as Mr. Lecky says, "that might not have been taught by disciples of Socrates and Confucius." They might ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... nearer to many of the contemporaries who have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are in him generally true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... burglar! It was cheap, farcical, an impossible absurdity. Had it been murder, high treason, defiance of some great law, a great crime inspired by a great passion or a great ideal, but it was burglary, brigandage of the cheapest and most commonplace variety, a sneaking night-coward's plagiarism of real adventure and real crime. It was impossible. Keith gritted the words aloud. He might have accepted Conniston as a Dick Turpin, a Claude Duval or a Macheath, but not as a Jeremy Diddler or a Bill ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... much about Milly's party as about one little girl who was in it that I am going to tell you; because parties are very commonplace things, and little girls, at least ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... however, from the solemnity of these historical meditations to the commonplace transactions of the journey, we had to carry on a considerable amount of wrangling with the muleteers, who were continually allowing their animals to stumble, and the ropes of the luggage to come loose, so that the things fell to the ground; I sent them back, and we proceeded without ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... your father talks a little sculduddery after dinner, which it is perfectly licit for him to do, and which (although I am not very fond of it myself) appears to be entirely an affair of taste. Your father, I scarcely like to remind you, since it is so trite a commonplace, is older than yourself. At least, he is major and sui juris, and may please himself in the matter of his conversation. And, do you know, I wonder if he might not have as good an answer against you and me? We say we sometimes find him coarse, but I suspect he might retort that he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the south side of the block, and found only plain and commonplace people. Overtop and Maltboy began to be weary. The former was gradually discovering that his theory was a bore. The latter wondered whether Quigg knew the tall girl, concerning the identity of the front part of whose ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... disappointment when I found that his art was his real bride, and that I was a sort of understudy; hardly that, after the first few months. I awoke to the fact that I had exchanged my youth and freedom for a domestic mill that sank all my ideals into commonplace. I said I would make my own mistakes and I did. Then came the long battle with my pride, and I suffered in silence. For seven long years I faced neglect and humiliation; and then one day after a visit to my old home, I returned to find my husband and one of his models occupying ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... happy-go-lucky household that Rebecca had grown up. It was just an ordinary family; two or three of the children were handsome and the rest plain, three of them rather clever, two industrious, and two commonplace and dull. Rebecca had her father's facility and had been his aptest pupil. She "carried" the alto by ear, danced without being taught, played the melodeon without knowing the notes. Her love of books she inherited ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... their cosy breakfast, talking of commonplace things, when Walter's double knock came to the door. Teen ran to admit him, and, with a series of nods, indicated to him that his sister was all right within. There was a strained awkwardness in their meeting. Liz felt and resented the questioning scrutiny of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... such new and varied surroundings it would be surprising indeed if the author, with his faculty of making even the commonplace attractive, did not tell an intensely interesting story of adventure, as well as give much information in regard to the distant countries through which our friends pass, and the strange peoples with whom they are brought in contact. This book, and ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... was developed and perfected; and we have abundance of beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and execution that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The modern work of countries where gold is found in quantities is commonplace, vulgar and inartistic, when compared with the work of the old Irish period. Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of varying size and shape, were worn as diadems, collars, or even belts; crescent bands of finely embossed sheet-gold were worn ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... magic nor religion belongs, but to which physical science, the knowledge of how to deal mechanically with material things, does belong wholly, is the workaday world, the region of normal, commonplace, calculable happenings. With our telescopes and microscopes we see farther and deeper into things than does the savage. Yet the savage has excellent eyes. What he sees he sees. Consequently, we must duly ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... question—whether it is better to marry a virgin or a widow—is inserted, merely in order that it may be answered by a no less irrelevant and, in the mouth of the interlocutrix, altogether absurd commonplace against women. But that is a trifle compared with the following specimen. In Menander's -Plocium- a husband bewails ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Governor only half attention. His nerves were unstrung by the bald, colorless report of Putney Congdon's disappearance, which shocked him all the more from the fact that it was so hideously commonplace, merely a bit of journalistic routine. He wished the Governor would stop reading newspapers. Now that the man's disappearance had been heralded the police of the entire country would be searching for him dead or alive and if his body were found there would be a great hue and cry ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Uttering some commonplace observation about the fatality attending certain families, he nodded a friendly good-by ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as these famous ones from the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... rather musical drawl. Her father, after the few words of introduction had been spoken, strolled away to speak to some acquaintances, and Immelan and the Prince discussed with measured politeness one of the commonplace subjects of the moment. Naida and her companion became ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... followers, and assemble them, brimming with affectionate enthusiasm, to a committee-room in some inn; what on earth should I say to them? What resolutions could I propose? I could only propose the old Socratic commonplace, Know thyself; and how black they would all look at that!' No; to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what that present state of English development and civilization is, which according to Mr. Lowe is so perfect ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... are the sources of religious confidence! They lie, not in remote or difficult regions of authority, or conformity, or history, but in the witness of daily service, and of commonplace endeavor. "The word is very nigh thee," says the Old Testament. The satisfying revelation of God reaches you, not in the exceptional, occasional, and dramatic incidents of life, but in the bread and ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... off them and we see the ship as she really is under the faintly diffused light of the clouded moon. She is a dirty commonplace hulk, packed with men in soiled clothes, no longer the radiant white ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to ponder, and was greatly worried lest the commonplace should ingulf him. So little he dreamed ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... Teacher, in her sober best suit, sat down in her entirely commonplace chair in the quiet old parlor, and looked unbelievingly at the sedate elderly couple who had made her this wild proposition. She caught her breath. But catching her breath did not seem to affect anything that had been said. Mr. De ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... is no greater work in life Than making beauty. Can the mind conceive One little corner in celestial realms Unbeautiful, or dull or commonplace? Or picture ugly angels, illy clad? Beauty and splendour, opulence and joy, Are attributes of God and His domain, And so are worth and virtue. But why preach Of virtue only to the sons of men, Ignoring ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... motionless I do not know. Finally, I was aroused by my syce taking the Waler's bridle and asking whether I was ill. From the horrible to the commonplace is but a step. I tumbled off my horse and dashed, half fainting, into Peliti's for a glass of cherry-brandy. There two or three couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the day. Their ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... he answered, lightly; but in reality he felt that something sweet and something regal was passing out of his conception of her. To see her even seated with these commonplace men and women detracted even from her glory, subjected her to the same laws. It was a relief to get out into the gay street—to her carriage, and to the hotel where the attendants hovered about her as ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... and then occurred a tiny coincidence: the elderly man, passing, let fall the apple from his hand, and it rolled toward the pin just as Corliss managed to secure the latter. For an instant, though the situation was so absolutely commonplace, so casual, Cora had a wandering consciousness of some mysterious tensity; a feeling like the premonition of a crisis very near at hand. This sensation was the more curious because nothing whatever happened. ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... is a very commonplace mode of defense, and you, who have great pretensions to be witty and clever, ought to avoid commonplaces. What else have you ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of pedants had she been more obscure. But, as Sir James Mackintosh says, "Dullness is not accuracy, nor is an elegant writer necessarily superficial." Divest German metaphysics of their obscurities, and they might seem commonplace; take away the clearness of French writers, and they might pass for profound. Clearness and precision, however, are not what the world expects from its teachers. It loves the fig-trees with nothing but leaves; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... Pompeii I thought it a grand place, but after all, when the traveller has seen the best, it is ordinary and commonplace. It was a town of only about 30,000 people and almost all of them escaped, so no particular distinction belongs to it in ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... the street was pulled down, and rebuilt in the flat, mean, unrelieved style of George the Third. The body of the houses was too solidly grand to submit to alteration; so people were occasionally surprised, after passing through a commonplace-looking shop, to find themselves at the foot of a grand carved oaken staircase, lighted by a window of stained glass, storied all over with ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... because it would make her FEEL, but because it would emphasize in her own mind the divine self-sacrifice which she wanted to believe she was making. But when the moment came to close the door of the old home behind them, her husband was cruelly commonplace about it—for poor Lewis had no more drama in him than a kindly Newfoundland dog! He was full of practical cares for his tenant, and he stopped even while he was turning the key in the lock, to "fuss," as Athalia said, over some last details of the transfer of the sawmill. ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... struck her like something pungent; they had individuality; they belonged to each other. There was a sinister character in the faces and bearing of the men, a formidable directness in the women; not one but had the air of carrying a hidden weapon. It was the commonplace evening population of an East African town which has never lived down the traditions of its pirate- founders, and Miss Gregory marked its fine picturesqueness with appreciation. Every one turned to look at her as she ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... history of a human soul through its commonplace nervous perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations, there is danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject of such weakness. It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... looking fixedly at the paper, until the commonplace paragraph imprinted itself upon his brain as no line of sage or poet had ever done, and then he folded it up and put it in his pocket. In his exaltation he felt that even the mother he had never loved was promoted to a certain respect as his father's wife, ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... shaven, except for a mustache and tuft covering lips and chin. Somehow he felt a deep disappointment. He had expected to see something lion-like, something regal, and, after all, the great King Henry was commonplace, fat, unwholesome-looking. It came to him with a sort of a shock that, after all, a King was in nowise different ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... faces which have the same expression, as if they saw beyond, as if they looked past their own youth across to an immortal youth, from their own life to an unquenchable, upwelling spring of life. When Michael spoke, which was little, his words verged on the commonplace. He explained the obvious with modest directness. He had thought out and made his own a small selection of platitudes. It is at first a shock to some of us when we discover that a beautiful spiritual nature is linked with a tranquil ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... came to him, and, after a short salutation, said, "So, Tom, I hear you had company very late last night. Upon my soul you are a happy fellow, who have not been in town above a fortnight, and can keep chairs waiting at your door till two in the morning." He then ran on with much commonplace raillery of the same kind, till Jones at last interrupted him, saying, "I suppose you have received all this information from Mrs Miller, who hath been up here a little while ago to give me warning. The good woman is afraid, it seems, of the reputation of her ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right adjustments being made, and made early. But to the observer whose eyes are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... variety of human forms upon a barren stage of stone or arid earth would suit his haughty sense of beauty. The nine persons who make up the picture are all carefully studied from the life, and bear a strong Tuscan stamp. S. John is literally ignoble, and Christ is a commonplace child. The Virgin Mother is a magnificent contadina in the plenitude of adult womanhood. Those, however, who follow Mr. Ruskin in blaming Michelangelo for carelessness about the human face and head, should not fail to ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the "cherisher of infancy," and one must fall on these occasions into reflections which it would be commonplace to enumerate, concerning death, "of chance and change, and fate in human life." Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's living many years; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere skeleton before she died, looked ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... away by it, and passed from sight. Ayrault stood musing and regretting the necessity of such general death. "But," he thought, "I would rather die than lose my love; for then I should have had the taste of bliss without its fulfilment, and should be worse off than dead. Love gilds the commonplace, and deifies all it touches. Love survives the winter, and in my present frame of mind I should prefer earth and cold with it to heaven and spring. Oh, why is my soul so clogged by ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... for it, but to be always "on the watch." I must treat everybody as though everybody was the Christ. And I must treat every commonplace moment as though it were the home of ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... most interesting sights of the city, a dramatic performance at the Swan. Later he communicated a description of the building to his friend Arend van Buchell,[248] who recorded the description in his commonplace-book, along with a crude and inexact drawing of the interior (see page 169), showing the stage, the three galleries, and the pit.[249] The description is headed: "Ex Observationibus Londinensibus Johannis de Witt." After a brief ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... trying to find out whether Hubert killed Arthur, whose little body lies close beside them. He says that he suspects Hubert "very grievously." Hubert protests. The Bastard tests the protest with one sentence: "Go bear him in thine arms." He utters the commonplace lines— ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... nothing but the usual commonplace talk, while the soup and fish were disposed of; when they reached the champagne and the entrees, things become more homelike and conversation flowed. A bushman, especially when primed with champagne, is always ready to give his tongue a run—and when he has two open-mouthed new chums for audience, ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... he exclaimed delightfully. "Where did you find a voice like that? I realise now that we've been entertaining genius unawares all this time. Joan, my dear, henceforth two commonplace bodies like you and me must resign ourselves to taking ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... can judge him only by what others may narrate of him. What may be familiar to those who saw with their own eyes is not so to others, who can only take at second-hand those things which they had no opportunity of seeing for themselves. Besides, details omitted as frivolous or commonplace by history, which makes a profession of more gravity, are perfectly appropriate in simple memoirs, and often enable one to understand and judge the epoch more correctly. For instance, it seems to me that the enthusiasm displayed by the entire ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... for the external. We think, however, that it will be found, in most cases where the plea is set up, that the humanity for which the sacrifice has been made is equally external with that which has been disregarded, and much more commonplace and conventional; being in fact, only the outer life of existing society. We are met, of course, by the triumphant answer that Shakspeare wrote Roman plays with a very slender knowledge of the classics. It would be sufficient to reply, that we are speaking of cases where ignorance of antiquity ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... point of view; I looked on it as a child of mine, brought up through stress and danger and troubles of all kinds, but the ordinary traveller of course knows nothing of this and doubtless thinks it only a very commonplace and ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... confidants revised his work. He even lacked, it seems to us, the uniform rhetorical spirit, that style which in Voltaire's time was the first mark of a born poet. The effect of beautiful and noble sentiments, in splendid phraseology, is spoiled by trivial thoughts and commonplace expressions in the next line. Nor was the development of his taste sufficiently assured and independent. In his esthetic judgment he was quick, both to admire and to condemn; in reality, he was much more dependent upon the opinion of his French acquaintances than his pride would have admitted. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... And as no one in particular was looking after Anne and her affairs, as a girl in her teens she had focused her heart upon the gangling youth, and there grew into life one of those matter-of-fact, unromantic love affairs that encompass the whole heart. For they are as commonplace as light and air and are equally vital. Because their course is smooth, such affairs seem shallow. But let unhappy circumstance break the even surface, and behold, from their depths comes all the beauty of a great force diverted, all ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... was a commonplace of American writing at the time and long after. A Rev. C.B. Boynton published a book devoted to the thesis that England and France had united in a "policy" of repressing the development of America and Russia (English and French Neutrality and the Anglo-French Alliance in their relations ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... rather than to Logic; and the foregoing is a commonplace account of a subject upon every point of which there ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... eyes. What did he care about commonplace declarations of friendship such as Silvey was making? His head was a-riot with the thrilling words of the latest love passage between the hero and a heroine so perfect that her like never existed beyond the covers of a novel, ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... miraculous and the commonplace intermixed. Following this bird, the invading force pushed on into Yamato, receiving the allegiance of a body of men who fished with cormorants in the Yoshino River and who doubtless supplied the army with food, and the allegiance of fabulous beings with tails, who came out of wells or through ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... mother, Robin and Rosamund, in Queen Anne's Mansions and Little Market Street. He had stayed with his mother for nearly two hours. She had a very bad cold, unbecoming, complicated with fits of sneezing, a cold in the "three handkerchiefs an hour" stage. And this commonplace malady had made him feel very tender about her, and oddly pitiful about all humanity, including, of course, himself. While they talked he had thought several times, "It's hard to see mother in such a state when perhaps I shall never see her again. I don't ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... and least observed of all lights, is, however, daylight; and his talk was commonplace, just as sunshine is, which gilds the most indifferent objects, and adds brilliancy to the brightest. As for the old-world anecdotes which these clever persons were condescending enough to laugh at as pleasant ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... by no means commonplace. To me, I own, there was some excitement in talking quietly across a dinner-table with a man whose venomous pen-stabs had sapped the vitality of at least one monarchy. That much was a matter of public knowledge. But I knew more. I knew of him—from my friend—as a certainty what the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... we least expect it the Ideal meets us in the street of the Commonplace and locks arms with us. Nevermore shall we choose our paths uninfluenced. A new leaven has entered our personality to ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it is, shows a sense of the evil, but gives no indication of the remedy. Its contents are commonplace, and in no sense characteristic of the Society. The men who were to make its reputation had not yet found it out, and at this stage our chief characteristic was a lack of self-confidence unusual amongst revolutionaries. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... ugliness, the dreariness of life, but its ardours, its passions, its transporting emotions, its beauties. That was a task for a lifetime. Whatever was doubtful, this was certain, that one was set in a mysterious, attractive, complex place; if one regarded it carelessly, it seemed a commonplace affair enough, full of material activities, dull necessities, foolish stirrings, low purposes; but if one looked a little closer, there were strange, dim, beautiful figures moving in and out, evanescent and shadowy, behind the nearer and more distracting ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with regard to Hawbury. For Minnie and her sister the indefatigable priest had already concocted a plan before leaving home. This was the very commonplace plan of a disguise. It was to be an old woman's apparel, and he trusted to the chapter of accidents to make the plan a success. He noticed with pleasure that some women were at the place, and thought that the prisoners might be ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Patteson had so faithfully loved from early childhood, and whose years of suffering he had done his best to cheer. 'At rest at last.' In the same letter, in answer to some complaint from his sister of want of detail in the reports, he says: 'Am I trying to make my life commonplace? Well, really so it is more or less to me. Things go on in a kind of routine. Two voyages a year, five months in New Zealand, though certainly two-thirds of my flock fresh every year. I suppose it still sounds strange to you sometimes, and to ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time before the excitement quieted down and they gave her a chance to say she would go. Even then she spoke the words with fear and trembling as one might step off a commonplace threshold into a fairy palace, not sure but it might be ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... complete seriousness. It was this boy's way to infuse into all his actions an enthusiasm that deprived the most trifling of the commonplace element. He was the gayest passenger on board—the very life of the boat. Yet he had few accomplishments to recommend him, his abundant spirits alone attaining for him the popularity he ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... wholesome way with this wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his "ambition," seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... people other than dealers had drifted in to wait for the sale to begin—something for which the weather was largely to blame, for the day was dismal with a clammy drizzle settling from a low and leaden sky—and with a solitary exception these few were commonplace folk. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... acquainted with an ethical view-point which was already fairly familiar to nearly every resident in and about Chickaloosa. Reading the narrative, one living at a distance got an accurate picture of a personality elevated above the commonplace solely by the role which its owner filled; a picture of an old man thoroughly sincere and thoroughly conscientious; a man dull, earnest, and capable to his limits; a man who was neither morbid nor imaginative, but filled with rather a stupid gravity; a man canny about the pennies and affectionately ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... shook his head. "That night was the one night for me. I was in paradise. It's commonplace with you, I know. But it wasn't to me. I shall never live at such a pitch again. I'm done with philosophy. I want never to hear another word ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... to someone; if the unconscious of the latter does not accept the suggestion, if it has not, as it were, digested it, in order to transform it into autosuggestion, it produces no result. I have myself occasionally made a more or less commonplace suggestion to ordinarily very obedient subjects quite unsuccessfully. The reason is that the unconscious of the subject refused to accept it and did ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... stood deferentially by her side, looking down on her, on her beautiful head. She half crouched, expecting to hear something banteringly complimentary; bold, commonplace—to feel even the touch of his sensual hand on her hair, on her cheek and My ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... f. was a clergyman, became minister of Athelstaneford, Haddingtonshire. His sole work was The Grave, a poem in blank verse extending to 767 lines of very various merit, in some passages rising to great sublimity, and in others sinking to commonplace. It was illustrated by William Blake (q.v.) B.'s s., Robert, was a very distinguished Scottish judge and Lord President of the Court of Session; and his successor in his ministerial charge was Home, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... most marked attention was offered to the Master of Ravenswood, in particular, by their noble entertainers. The truth was, that Lord Bittlebrains had obtained his peerage by a good deal of plausibility, an art of building up a character for wisdom upon a very trite style of commonplace eloquence, a steady observation of the changes of the times, and the power of rendering certain political services to those who could best reward them. His lady and he, not feeling quite easy under their new honours, to which use had not adapted their ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... "Q.E.D." This document he forwarded to his proposed antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... said for it," replied Bertie musingly. "You see, until one has broken one's neck, the excitement of the thing isn't totally worn out; can't be, naturally, because the—what-do-you-call-it?—consummation isn't attained till then. The worst of it is, it's getting commonplace, getting vulgar; such a number break their necks, doing Alps and that sort of thing, that we shall have nothing at all ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of coarse weave; and the ancient trees with their proud large crowns, pines and laurels, ashes, cypresses, and oaks. During all the period of their growth they were hated with the hatred which restless hearts feel for that which is commonplace, trivial, uneventful, for that which stands still and ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... Well, Bracy, you quite startled me, my lad; I was taken by surprise, and I looked at it from the commonplace point of view. I've had time to think of it now from the scientific side. Tell me, can you control yourself when those fits come on? I mean, this involuntary nerve and ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... than half dreaded his arrival, had been wondering how they should meet after the strange revelation of the afternoon, had been thinking of the most trite and commonplace remark with which she might greet him. But when it actually came to the point, she could not say a word, only looked up at him with eyes full of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... handicraft. It laid its hold upon agriculture, sowing and reaping the grain and transporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth century drew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made commonplace by achievements of the era ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... materials for an exhaustive biography of him. And the strange thing was that I could not, with the best will in the world, believe that he was lying to me. I had never heard a man telling so obviously the truth. And the truth about any one, however commonplace, must always be interesting. Indeed, it is the commonplace truth—the truth of widest application—that is the most interesting of ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... all these things about Miss Aiken, which seem to describe her, I have told only the commonplace, the expected or predictable details. Often and often I pause when I see an interesting man or woman and ask myself: "How, after all, does this person live?" For we all know it is not chiefly by the clothes we wear or the house we occupy or the friends we touch. There is something ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... which I wrote for McClure's, I made comment on the essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing land, a country without a hill, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... attempt class drill on petty town and county offices, would be simply burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Physical Astronomy! Science would not have got very far on that plan, I fancy. The truth is, that science, while it is perpetually dealing with ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... shall not expatiate on the works of the Byzantine Greeks, who, by the assiduous study of the ancients, have deserved, in some measure, the remembrance and gratitude of the moderns. The scholars of the present age may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobaeus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, who, from his horn of plenty, has poured the names ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... life unbearable for many Iraqis. Robberies, kidnappings, and murder are commonplace in much of the country. Organized criminal rackets thrive, particularly in unstable areas like Anbar province. Some criminal gangs cooperate with, finance, or purport to be part of the Sunni insurgency or ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... the young ones, and naturally enough; since it must be an extraordinary vigor and venerability of life that can overcome the rusty sloth of age, and keep the senior flexible enough to take an interest in new things; whereas, hundreds of commonplace young men come hither to stare with eyes of vacant wonder, and with vague hopes of finding out what they are fit for. And this war (we may say so much in its favor) has been the means of discovering that important secret to not ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... Chinese. In opening this Book, compiled by a disciple of Confucius, and containing his doctrines, we might expect to find a work like Cicero's De Officiis; but we find a very different production, consisting of a few commonplace rules for the maintenance of a good government [1].' My readers will perhaps think, after reading the present section, that the truth lies between these two representations. 2. I believe that the Book ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... whole setup no longer impressed him as it had several years before. Just as a professional actor is not impressed by being allowed backstage, or as a multimillionaire considers expensive luxuries as commonplace, so Spencer Candron thought of nothing more than his own personal work as he climbed the five steps and ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... is commonplace; grey tints predominate. Towards the end of the larval period, after a few moultings, it begins to give a glimpse of the adult's richer livery and becomes striped, still very faintly, with pale-green, white and pink. Already the two sexes are distinguished by their antennae. Those of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Sartor as an independent volume was published by James Munroe and Company, Boston. Emerson, at Mr. (now Dr.) Russell's request, wrote a Preface for the book. He told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased with the Preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... between her nurse and the keeper of her children, and her own wailings behind the scene, depicted with most touching effect. As soon, however, as she makes her appearance, the poet takes care to cool our emotion by the number of general and commonplace reflections which he puts into her mouth. Lower does she sink in the scene with Aegeus, where, meditating a terrible revenge on Jason, she first secures a place of refuge, and seems almost on the point of bespeaking ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... amused at this critical moment of my career by another observation that I overheard from the adjoining room. My grandfather, Jared, who was with my father at the time looking out of the window made the somewhat commonplace observation— ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... 'The commonplace injustice of a by-word,' Otto cried. 'The partiality of sex. She is a demirep; what then is Gondremark? Were she a ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... experience of the ages. The ordinary tasks and interests of boys, as well as daily conduct, can be made great channels for life's best achievement only in proportion to the dynamic throb of the Word that has inspired men to heroism amid the commonplace and the uncommon, to self-sacrifice ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... associated with the birth of the nation. Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the combatants in that war—who are obviously but commonplace men—for the figures of any but some three or four of the greatest of the actors to have yet assumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... am now saying amounts to this, that an educated intelligence is good, but an educated sympathy is better. I recall certain lines written by the late Lord Carlisle on being told that a lady was plain and commonplace:— ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... ingenuity, various acquirements, and agreeable manners, Mr Skinner was held in much estimation among his contemporaries. Whatever he read, with the assistance of a commonplace-book, he accurately remembered, and could readily turn to account; and, though his library was contained in a closet of five feet square, he was abundantly well informed on every ordinary topic of conversation. He ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... worrying your head, young lady, though, with any notion of his having had enemies, or anything of that sort. The poor fellow was no hero of romance. I don't fancy even your halfpenny papers could drag any out of his life. It was just a commonplace robbery, with a bad ending for poor Fynes. Good evening, miss! Good night, sir! Glad to have met you, ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... up "God Save the King." Three commonplace enough young men, seated at a table near to her, laid down their napkins and stood up. Yes, there was something to be said for war, she felt, as she looked at their boyish faces, transfigured. Not for them Business as usual, the Capture of German Trade. Other ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... took place the Captain was conscious of an absurd feeling of disappointment. He could not understand why he felt any anxiety to see Mrs. Errington refuse a beggar alms. Yet he would gladly have followed, like a spy, to behold a commonplace and dingy event. Despite the apparent reluctance of the beggar to ply his trade, Hindford felt convinced that presently the man would approach Mrs. Errington and be promptly sent about his business. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... meant little to the young Rainhams. But they knew that Cecilia held it as a commonplace of decent behaviour that people did not tell lies. They had, indeed, often marvelled that she preferred to "take her gruel" rather than use any ready untruth that would have shielded her from their mother's wrath. Avice and Wilfred had no such scruples on their own account: ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... if you can to obtain for me a gifted and elegant princess. Of all things in the world I would hate to have a dull and commonplace wife." ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... and there will always be more lovers in the world for such as you while your sweet youth lasts, whether I live to woo you or not. That thought saddens me. Yet should I not feel it enough to have known and loved you? Suppose you had never been in the world, and I had loved some commonplace pretty girl instead of little Allison, with eyes like an autumn ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... perfect exaltation, that I knew not the slightest prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that I was making my body die. All that was I was devoted to that sole task. I performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks, and I regarded the work as just about as commonplace as would a brick-mason ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... arrived with Celestine, Crevel's daughter, who was nursing the infant Hulot, he was delightful to his daughter-in-law, loading her with compliments—a treat to which Celestine's vanity was little accustomed for no moneyed bride more commonplace or more utterly insignificant was ever seen. The grandfather took the baby from her, kissed it, declared it was a beauty and a darling; he spoke to it in baby language, prophesied that it would grow to be taller than himself, insinuated compliments for his son's benefit, and restored ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... than Methuselah could have learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in learning; when apparent disorders are found to be only the recurrent pulses of a slow working order, and the wonder of a year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built upon our faith in its continuity; the belief that that chain has never been broken and will never be broken, becomes one of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... gave color so completely to her life, that it would have been as absurd for her as for them to have looked at the probabilities of the case. Never once did she say to herself, that to one in her circumstances, life would most likely be full of disappointments and commonplace incidents. But time, the great revealer, soon opened to her those pages which her wisest friend would not have dared to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with the objection that such a truth is only apparently a truth; i.e., on the plane of embodied appearances, and naturally the question arises, where (if at all) is the real truth of the mythos? That truth which is beyond the mere metaphysical thinker and commonplace philosopher; the truth which the Initiates recognize—where is it? That truth lies far beyond the purview of Astro-Mythology. It is connected with the center of angelic life. Sufficient here to say that, as there are seven races of humanity, seven divisions to the human constitution, seven ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... robin and starwort in the hedges like an unbroken collie. It is safe to say that no further thought of school or message crossed his mind from the moment that the highest white steading of Craig Ronald sank out of view, until his compulsory return. Andra had shut out from his view so commonplace and ignominious facts as home ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... songs of birds and a soft, shy wind that ruffled the short hair about her forehead, little Meg was supremely happy. To be tired, to be made to rest, to be kissed and tucked in and sternly commanded to stay where she was till she was fetched—all this, so commonplace to cherished, cared-for folk, seemed quite wonderful to Meg, and she snuggled down among the ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... Gros-Cassaud Florimond, Sep.19, 1799.) "Among the corruptible and corrupting agents there are only too many public functionaries."—Mollien, "Memoires," I., 222. (In 1800, he had just been appointed director of the sinking-fund.) "The commonplace compliment which was everywhere paid to me (and even by statesmen who affected the sternest morality) was as follows—you are very fortunate to have an office in which one may legitimately accumulate the largest fortune in France. "—Cf. Rocquain, "Etat de la ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... desperate estrangement of the world. Arthur and his lady-love vanished from my thoughts. No one could put into a rather hackneyed old hymn-tune such an appeal who had never known the meaning of the words. Their meaning, anyhow, isn't commonplace. I turned very cautiously and glanced at the musician. She was leaning forward a little over the keys, so that at the approach of my cautious glance she had but to turn her face into the thin flood of moonlight for every feature to become distinctly ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... the way we read of in Mr. Glaisher's own accounts. This part is in most cases approximately indicated in that most attractive volume of his entitled, "Travels in the Air," by diagrams giving a sectional presentment of his more important voyages; but a little commonplace consideration may take the ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... angrily pacing up and down the room. "What arrant nonsense a man can be capable of when he is headstrong to begin with! To think of the elegant Horatio King, a model for all men, surrounding himself with this commonplace family. Faugh! It is easy enough to see what they are all after. But I shall prevent it. Meanwhile, the only way to do it is to break the spirit of this Polly Pepper. Once do that, and I have the task ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... pearl set in the richest casket! This commonplace, flourishing centre of cotton spinning, woollen, and cretonne manufacture, built in red brick, lies in the narrow, beautiful valley of the Liepvrette, as it is called from the babbling river of that name. But there is really no valley at all. The congeries of red-roofed houses, factory chimneys ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths from *several* big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... relapsed into a deferential silence. His daughter smiled and questioned very graciously, and called everything beautiful and delightful; which rather disappointed me, as I had taken her to be a woman of some originality. She is rather a puzzle;—or is she, indeed, a very commonplace person, and the fault in me, who am forever taking women to mean a great deal more than their Maker intended? Regarding Miss Blunt I have collected a few facts. She is not twenty-four, but twenty-seven years old. She has taught music ever since she was twenty, in a large boarding-school just ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... box, Riatt at once seated himself behind Christine. There is no place like the opera for public devotion. Christine was resplendent in black and gold with a huge black and gold fan that made the fans of the temple dancers—the opera was "Aida"—look commonplace and ineffective. ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice; and ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... were instantly on their hind-feet, propping themselves against her waist. Lennan held the black horse—a bizarre little beast, all fire and whipcord, with a skin like satin, liquid eyes, very straight hocks, and a thin bang-tail reaching down to them. The little creature had none of those commonplace good looks so ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... She was a commonplace, narrow, selfish woman, whose character is not worth sketching. Tom stood a little in fear of her, and was usually careful not to impose extra tasks, but since she helped him to save and get ahead, he regarded her ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... so, and the carpenter doesn't think so, and the band doesn't think so. But he is. Many of the music-hall favourites, such as La Milo and La Loie Fuller, would have no existence but for him. Skilful lighting effects and changes of colour are often all that carries a commonplace turn to popularity; and just think of the power in that man's hands! He could ruin any young turn he liked simply by "blacking her out"; and, if he feels good, he can help many beginners with expert advice. The young girl new to the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Archie's room was the one his mother had occupied ever since his remembrance, and miserable and empty as it was, to him there was an atmosphere of the purest delight. All other spots were trivial and commonplace compared to the one where the maternal blessing had been pronounced, and the maternal breath had ceased; and hardened indeed must the heart have been that could resist his desire that this one sacred spot might be consecrated alone to him. Here were the books from which her thin and tremulous fingers ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... his guest appear this morning. His dreams would have been pleasanter had he been perfectly sure that she would not in her youthful horror and despair evade him in the one way possible. He bade her good-morning with an inoffensive commonplace. He had shot his bolt; now his policy must be soothing and unexacting until her fear of him had abated and custom had reconciled her to her new life. She was silent at breakfast, speaking only when spoken to, and observant of his mother's ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... easily happen to him that she was on the point of having a little weep all by herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did she know that Elliott was homesick? Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she had sat that first night, and talked about comforting, commonplace things—about the new kittens, and how soon the corn might be ripe, and what she used to do when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott got hold of her hand and wound her own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica's ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... discovered in due time, was a poetical way of expressing what in commonplace language would be called, "kicking ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... study, maintained an unnatural reserve, in which there was silent antagonism. Dora relieved the situation by a commonplace. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... duped leads them to reaction against the entire effort, the whole work of the century. Disgust with liberty, distrust of science, denial of the future, that is what they now profess. And they have such a horror of the commonplace that they would rather believe in nothing or the incredible. It may of course be commonplace to say that two and two make four, yet it's true enough; and it is far less foolish for a man to say and repeat it than to believe, for instance, in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... also; doesn't it?' said the banker petulantly. He was almost angry because she was introducing a commonplace as to the world's condition into a particular argument as to their daughter's future life,—which he felt to be ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... measure of his uncompromising chagrin, and as he was the central figure of the little group, as he held its heart-strings all in his own hand, it reflected faithfully the eclipse of his own genius. No one had ventured upon the cheerful commonplace of saying that the change of air and of scene would restore his spirits; this would have had, under the circumstances, altogether too silly a sound. The change in question had done nothing of the sort, and his companions had, at least, the comfort of their perspicacity. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... one fact about employers, in all cities which I know, which may seem commonplace to you, but which to me is very significant. Whatsoever business they may do in the city, they take good care, if possible, not to live in it. As soon as a man gets wealthy nowadays, his first act is to take to himself a villa in the country. Do I blame him? Certainly ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of a type radically different from the first. There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a certain jovial cosmopolitanism sat upon his features. He was several years older than the first arrival, his hair being slightly frosted, his eyebrows bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his cheeks. His face was rather full and flabby, and yet it was not ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... now. Nor will I believe, though you were to tell me so yourself, that you are leagued with any obscure, fanatic sect who desire Rome's downfall. Consider what Rome is;" and now he had got into the magnificent commonplace, out of his last panegyrical oration with which he had primed himself before he set out. "I am a Greek," he said, "I love Greece, but I love truth better; and I look at facts. I grasp them, and I confess to them. The wide earth, through untold ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... groomsmen, and how much six times seven is. Meanwhile, you are not the fellow in Aux Italiens, you know; you are not bothered by the faint, sweet smell of any foolish jasmine-flower, you understand, or by any equally foolish hankerings after your lost youth. You are simply a commonplace, every-day sort of man, not thoroughly hardened as yet to being engaged, and you are feeling a bit pulled down to-night, because your liver or something ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the honour of God. No Catholic could dream that blessed Mary would be in any wise honoured by the attribution to her of what belongs to her Son. These are no doubt commonplaces, but it is better to be commonplace than to be misunderstood. The intercession that is asked of the blessed Mother is the intercession of one who by God's election is more closely associated with God than any other human being is or can be. Her power of prayer is felt to proceed from the depth of her ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Mose's beefsteak; that yearling we beefed this morning is going to make some fine eating, if you ask me." His tone was absolutely devoid of anything approaching persuasion; it simply took a certain improbable thing as a commonplace fact, and it tilted the ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... an occasional commonplace remark both the driver and the passenger were allowed to use the time ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... have struck them as the least remarkable, and some things even which would in another have disgusted them altogether. Impertinent and rude things done by THEIR child they thought SO clever! laughing at them as something quite marvellous; her commonplace speeches were said over again as if they had been the finest poetry; and the pretty ways which every moderately good child has were extolled as if the result of her excellent taste, and the choice of her judgment and will. They would even say sometimes ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... flat and feeble set of expressions! is the Englishman's first thought—with the conventional 'Neptune,' and the vague 'armee,' and the commonplace 'vents.' And he forgets to notice the total impression which these words produce—the atmosphere of darkness and emptiness and ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... at once overwhelmed with anxiety lest he go too far, lest he himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle against commonplace reality. He opposes everything which we are accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism—musty pedantry, provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... clad in the height of the fashion, and his gay apparel, with its lace trimmings and jewelled ornaments, bespoke him no commonplace adventurer. But the most striking feature in his appearance was his hair, which fell in sunny locks upon his shoulders from under his velvet hat with its spreading plume. In truth he looked more like a Norse Viking of old than a cavalier of the ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... people continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of the household read, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... Sumner was in no mood to appreciate the divine precept, "Servants, obey your masters." Having declared fugitive slaves to be "the heroes of the age," he had not, as we may suppose, any very decided taste for the commonplace Scriptural duties of submission and obedience. Nay, he spurns at and rejects such duties as utterly inconsistent with the "inalienable rights of man." He appeals from the oracles of eternal truth to "the testimony of the times." He appeals from Christ ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... none else in modern literature could fill. His new book, Incredible Adventures (MACMILLAN), is a combination of both methods. Four of the five adventures are of the mystically gruesome kind, removed however from being commonplace ghost-stories by a certain dignity of conception. It is to be admitted that but for this dignity two at least would fall into some peril of bathos. Take the first, The Regeneration of Lord Ernie, in which a young tutor, bear-leading a spiritless scion ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... "The clothes are commonplace," remarked Holmes, "save only the overcoat, which is full of suggestive touches." He held it tenderly towards the light. "Here, as you perceive, is the inner pocket prolonged into the lining in such fashion as to give ample space for the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... will put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast table on the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. The piece about the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid besides (for fifteen francs,—12s. 6d.,—is nothing for a rich man to give for a couple of peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on the same day are ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... floating through his brain, the General leaned back in his chair more discomposed than usual by his late interview, for though his reflections were all worldly and commonplace, they had a deeper and unexpressed importance hardly recognized ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... culture, reading and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of AEsop, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and later the tragic poets, were read, and partly learned by heart. The orators borrowed from them often the ornament of their commonplace remarks. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Mozart, one of the immortal names in music, contradicts the rule that extraordinary youthful talent is apt to be followed by a sluggish and commonplace maturity. His father entered the room one day with a friend, and found the child bending over a music score. The little Mozart, not yet five years old, told his father he was writing a concerto for the piano. The latter examined it, and tears of joy and astonishment rolled down his face on ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... life, and everything else merely accidental or accessory, yet only too often in the jostle of the world, in the trough and tossing of the waves of time, the accidental smothers the essential, and life turns into a commonplace instead of a romance. And so, like every other story, this little story will perhaps be very differently judged, according to the reader's sex. The bearded critic will see it with eyes very different from those with which it may be viewed by the fair voter with no beard ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... misapplication. Hence arises a species of satire, or, if you will, satirist—THE SCRIBLERO-MASTIX. He must attack individuals. A heavily-resounding lash should scourge the immoral and the profane. Light stripes may suffice for quelling the less nocent dunces. In commonplace prose criticism, whatever form it may take, this can be done without supposed personal ill-will; for the Mastix is then only doing a duty plainly prescribed. The theologian must censure, and trample as mire, the railing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... but it is more than a chance that boys brought up together under like conditions have nothing to give each other. The Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical; singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... one else. She said nothing, and he sat down upon the other side of the fireplace. There was an air of embarrassment about their meetings, until one or the other had made some remark which led to a commonplace conversation. On the present occasion neither seemed inclined to be the first speaker and for some minutes they sat opposite to each other in silence. Giovanni glanced at his wife from time to time, and once she turned her head and met his eyes. Her expression was cold and grave ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... ascribed to him, and a prose Epistle apparently written to commend himself to Mecaenas, have been handed down to us; but I believe that neither of them are genuine works of his; for the Elegies are commonplace, and the Epistle is wanting in perspicuity, a fault which cannot be imputed to his style. He was born on the sixth of the ides of December [27th December], in the consulship of Lucius Cotta [973] and Lucius ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... Jack MacRae. He had never been taught to shrink from the inescapable facts of existence. Even if he had, the war would have cured him of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the infantry, nearly three years in the air, had taught him that death is a commonplace after a man sees about so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relief from suffering either of the body or the spirit. He chose to believe that it had proved so to his father. So his feelings were not that strange mixture of grief and protest which ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... his friend with surprise, and replied, with a laugh—"Why, Hans, you are displaying a new phase of character. Your remark is undoubtedly true—so true indeed that, although I object to that commonplace retort,—'You're another,'—I cannot help pointing out that it applies equally ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... from Brighton, it was absolutely commonplace, and written upon note-paper which the detective, with Machiavellian cunning, traced to a stationer's shop in West Street. But the trade at that particular shop was a very brisk one; scores of people had bought ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... the presence of my unexpected companion I was seized with an unconquerable shyness, moreover he inspired me with a curiosity which was quite equal to my shyness. Any number of circumstances, from a telegram from a sick relative to the most commonplace matter of business, might have explained his sudden departure from the chateau where I had left him so comfortably installed the night before. But that the expression of his face should have changed as it had, that in eighteen ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... become our slaves. The Lord meant to have Christianity planted at Malta, and therefore Euroclydon must drive the wreck to that shore, but still en route to Rome. Take the so-called misfortunes out of the history of religion, and you put it back into commonplace. Persecution has pushed on the cause it has striven to hinder, and heroes are made by hindrances. "Why do the heathen rage? The Lord shall have them in derision." This was never so true as it was when the time came for Jesus to die. It seems as ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... woman of wealth to practice any great self-denial, that few have independence of mind and Christian principle sufficient to overcome such an influence. The more a mind has its powers developed, the more does it aspire and pine after some object worthy of its energies and affections; and they are commonplace and phlegmatic characters who are most free from such deep-seated wants. Many a young woman, of fine genius and elevated sentiment, finds a charm in Lord Byron's writings, because they present a glowing picture ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... its mystic sense of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation has been trained into a likeness of the "Hymn of Life," despite the commonplace and the navrante vulgarite which characterize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American School. The same has been done to the words of Isa (Jesus); for the author, who is well-read in the Ingil (Evangel), evidently intended the allusion. Mansur el-Hallaj (the Cotton-Cleaner) ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... were very simple and commonplace; but the tone, the look, and the gesture that accompanied them spoke more than volumes, and completely won the heart of the passionate and despairing creature before her for ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... and small, that came in the train of the years, drove them ever further into the background. Want of sympathy in his home-life blunted the finer edges of his nature; of a gentle and yielding disposition, he took on the commonplace colour of his surroundings. After years of unhesitating toil, it is true, the most pressing material needs died down, but the dreams and ambitions had died, too, never to come again. And as it is in the nature ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... what I had been told to expect, I was surprised at the prettiness of the little house, when I stepped out of the cab and looked about me. It was stuck on like a swallow's nest to the end of a great row of commonplace houses, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, but itself was not the work of one of those wretched builders who care no more for beauty in what they build than a scavenger in the heap of mud he scrapes from the street. It had been built by a painter for himself, in the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... feel as though they have known them all their lives; and such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost, the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from another, as tastes or colours differentiate things—that a nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner or by some observer from within. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... number of failures will be greater for the failing pupils who remain in school the longer time may seem rather commonplace. But it will not seem trite to state that the percentage of the total failures on the total subject enrollments increases by school semesters up to the seventh; that the percentage of possible failures for all graduating pupils increases likewise; or that the failures ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... portions which floated slowly along, separating more and more, the dull grey growing rapidly silvery, then golden, and the gold becoming suffused with soft light. So beautiful was the scene that, while Archie gazed thoughtfully at its beauty, even commonplace, powder-besmirched Peter sat with his lips apart, staring hard, and then, forgetting himself and their risky position, with its need for concealment, he ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... of them, that little floating chip broken off from home, and every silent, ungainly step of the camels was carrying them more hopelessly away from it. That very morning how beneficent Providence had appeared, how pleasant was life!—a little commonplace, perhaps, but so soothing and ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Glass lamps of many simple shapes shared popularity for a long time with the pewter lamps; and as pewter gradually disappeared from household use, these glass lamps monopolized the field. They were rarely of cut or colored glass, but were pressed glass of commonplace form and quality. A group of them is here given which were all used in old New England houses in the early ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... of the power of the drum on simple and primitive natures. Something in Jim responded to it at once. The commonplace words of the commonplace leader were without power to move, and the droning hymn was soporific rather than inspiring; but the rhythmic thump, thump, thump, seemed to strike the chords of his being; ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... progressed with her day. The third diner was an adored young actor with a low, veiled voice which, combining itself with almond eyes and a sentimental and emotional curve of cheek and chin, made the most commonplace "lines" sound yearningly impassioned. He was not impassioned at all—merely fond of his pleasures and comforts in a way which would end by his becoming stout. At present his figure was perfect—exactly the thing for the uniforms of royal persons ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ... Aristophanes. This had been a commonplace in the discussions at the end of the seventeenth century, in England and France, on the morality ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... original form was practically done away with. No one reads it now but professed students of the literature of Queen Anne's time. And so artfully has the new matter been woven into the old that if the recasting of 'The Rape of the Lock' were not a commonplace even in school histories of English literature, not one reader in a hundred would suspect that the original sketch had been revised and enlarged to more than twice its length. It would be an interesting task for the student to compare the two forms printed ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... hell! And yet one would not at first sight think that such triumphs and such toasts, such medals, and clasps, and garters were to be won on earth or in hell just by saying such simple- sounding and such commonplace things as those are for which Ill-pause receives his decorations. 'Take time,' he says. 'Yes,' he admits, 'but there is no such hurry; to-morrow will do; next year will do; after you are old will do quite as well. The darkness shall cover you, and your sin will not find you out. Christ ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... interchange of thought—treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are born. They ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... physique, grand voice, the highest finish of musical execution, and the actor's faculty. What more unique triumph can be fancied than such a one violating all the laws of probability? Ronconi's low stature and commonplace features could express a tragic passion which could not be exceeded, or an exuberance of the wildest, quaintest, most spontaneous comedy ever born of mirth's most airy and tameless humor. Those who saw Ronconi's acting in this country saw the great artist as a broken man, his powers ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in the account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that the incident now before us may be the same as this, but there is nothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in the repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaic polemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of the blinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregone conclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with 'the prince of the devils'! And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... her enough to understand the sort of meeting, and the sort of pain it was creating. She had seen only Mrs. Martin and the two girls. They had received her doubtingly, if not coolly; and nothing beyond the merest commonplace had been talked almost all the time—till just at last, when Mrs. Martin's saying, all of a sudden, that she thought Miss Smith was grown, had brought on a more interesting subject, and a warmer manner. In that very room she had been measured last September, with her two friends. There were the pencilled ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... remind Von Barwig of his presence, he touched him gently on the arm. Von Barwig started. A look of recognition came into his eye, and with it a smile that metamorphosed his homely, almost ugly face into something beyond mere beauty; a smile that transformed a somewhat commonplace personality into an appealing and compelling individuality. There is no need to describe the delicate, sensitive, rugged countenance, which, when he smiled, radiated love and sympathy for his fellow-beings and made him what is ordinarily ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... the industry, good sense, and benevolence of its author. Of the "Travels" of Mr. Christian Curwen we hardly know what to say. He is bold and honest in his politics, a great enemy to abuses, vapid in his levity and pleasantry, and infinitely too much inclined to declaim upon commonplace topics of morality and benevolence. But, with these drawbacks, the book is not ill-written, and may be advantageously read by those who are desirous of information upon the present ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... began to talk about spring coming, about horses and cattle, and feed, about commonplace ranch matters not interesting to them, but which seemed to make conversation and hide their true thoughts. Wade listened, and it seemed to him that ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... elapsed since Charles Osborne ought to have received his father's letter, and yet no communication had reached either of the families. Indeed the gradual falling off of his correspondence with Jane, and the commonplace character of his few last letters left little room to hope that his affection for her stood the severe test of time and absence. One morning about this period she brought William into the garden, and after ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... heard her called by the pupils—had not been aware, owing to the noise, of a stranger's entrance, and Waymark on his side was so struck with the face presented to him. He had expected, at the most, a pretty girl of the commonplace kind: he saw a countenance in which refinement was as conspicuous as beauty. She was probably not more than eighteen or nineteen. In speaking with the children she rarely if ever smiled, but exhibited a gentle forbearance which had something touching ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... of the town have been described already. The Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed it from wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary country-villages. Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it brooded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... times, and how different things were when they were young. There is no romance in the world now, and no heroism. The very winters and summers are nothing to what they used to be; in fact, life is altogether on a small, commonplace scale. Now that is a miserable sort of thing; it brings a sort of paralyzing chill over the life, and petrifies the natural spring of joy that should ever be leaping up to meet the fresh new mercies ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... Mary. She longed to ask what they were, but the woman and the girl seemed absorbed in their books and papers. Mary thought they must be dull and stupid; but suddenly it came to her that to many people, these among others, maybe, this journey was a commonplace, everyday affair. Even going to France or Italy might not be to them a high adventure. Extraordinary to reflect that all over the world men and women were travelling, going to wonderful new places, seeing wonderful new things, and taking it as a ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... door. But had she been proof against the other folly? Had she been able to walk heart-whole by his side, while he chatted his commonplaces about love? Yes, they are commonplaces when we read of them in novels; common enough, too, to some of us when we write them; but they are by no means commonplace when first heard by a young girl in the rich, balmy fragrance ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... information but it is simply commonplace, every-day fact. Sausage, hamburger steak and "game" with a high flavor, are little if any better than carrion, and the poisons which such foods introduce into the body must all be detoxicated by the liver ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... house many treasures, once part of its adornment, are now missed; and while books, pictures, and gems have disappeared, modern ideas of comfort have suggested the insertion of electric lights and telephones. To regret the treasures of the past is a commonplace; it would seem fitter to make the best of the advantages of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... capitalist stepped from the elevator on his way to breakfast he found himself face to face with the man who so desperately needed financial assistance. "Why, how do you do, Mr. Worth. When did you land in San Felipe?" Cartwright's tone seemed to subtly change his commonplace question into—"Why are you in ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... neck, however, to see Mr. and Mrs. Pouch depart. They were too commonplace entirely. He played the march with such doleful indifference that Eddie found the aisle as long as the distance from Marathon to Athens. Also he was trying to walk so that his pinching ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the castle was completely destroyed and Italianised. The beautiful and picturesque irregularities of the walls were removed, the towers shaved off, the windows transformed into commonplace circular-headed apertures. And so the castle remained for ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... it is," said Harry, gravely. "It is not in Rose to do justice to Charlie. Even you don't do it, Graeme. Because he lives just a commonplace life, and buys and sells, and comes and goes, like other men, you women have not the discrimination to see that he is one of a thousand. As for Rose, with her romance, and her nonsense, she is looking for a hero and a paladin, and does not know a true heart when ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... and rejecting nothing, seeking only to express the greatest possible amount of fact.' Now we all know that the best way to stultify the mind and conception of a youthful student, in any branch of art, is to keep before him commonplace models. Indeed, what student gifted with genius, or even with any high degree of talent, will not (if unrestrained) himself select as studies, not any mere chronicle of desired facts, but the most significant forms (suited to his proficiency) ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the awakened spirit of the time. To this practical equipment he added a romantic temperament and a habit of reflection which carried him to greater certainty in his convictions than even that attained by his correspondent, the learned Toscanelli. Assuming that the world was round—no commonplace of the time—he determined forthwith to reach India by sailing westward. His bones lie buried in the Western hemisphere, which his intrepidity revealed to an ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... peacefullest, decentest raid I ever heard of, and it would be difficult to think of anything with a termination more tame and commonplace. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... the same dinner that was prepared every day for twelve was served for us three. Nothing worthy of note (so far as conversation went) was done at dinner, as we talked commonplace after the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... prisoner for lack of proof of any motive. They reasoned, with perfect logic, that it was almost if not quite as improbable that the defendant should in broad daylight on a public street have shot down a man against whom he had not the slightest grudge as that twenty commonplace citizens should be mistaken as to what they had seen. Whether they were aided in reaching a verdict by "the implements of decision" I do not know, but in the end they found my client guilty and in due course he paid the ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... eyes. "Why haven't I met such men as you are? I have not lived here all my life; I have travelled with my aunt, who knew the world, and she took me to many strange places, and I met many men, but they didn't appeal to me or interest me any more than those I met at home. It was all the same old commonplace flattery." ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... map I have named it Lake Lonsdale, in honour of the Commandant then or soon after appointed at Port Phillip. I hastily levelled my theodolite but the scene, although sublime enough for the theme of a poet, was not at all suited to the more commonplace objects of a surveyor. The sun rose amid red and stormy clouds, and vast masses of a white vapour concealed from view both sea and land save where a few isolated hills were dimly visible. Towards the interior the ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... silent a minute or two, for the last appeal had stirred him to chivalrous pity. He was shrewd enough to realize that if he persisted he could force her to come to him. Her father and mother were with him; she had nothing—no commonplace usefulness nor trained abilities—to fall back on if she defied them. But it was unthinkable that he should brutally ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... "If such commonplace espionage evinces any merit," retorted Talleyrand, "I am even here your superior; because I know not only what has already passed with you and in your house, but what is to pass hereafter. I can inform you of every dish you had for your dinners this week, who provided ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... rise up in out minds. Wherever it is spent, whether in the dusky room or walking home through the blue evening, all things grow strangely softened and united; the magic of the old world reappears. The commonplace streets take on something of the grandeur and solemnity of starlit avenues of Egyptian temples the public squares in the mingled glow and gloom grow beautiful as the Indian grove where Sakuntala wandered ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... quietly, without a smile, to assure herself that it was he and no one else. She said nothing, and he sat down upon the other side of the fireplace. There was an air of embarrassment about their meetings, until one or the other had made some remark which led to a commonplace conversation. On the present occasion neither seemed inclined to be the first speaker and for some minutes they sat opposite to each other in silence. Giovanni glanced at his wife from time to time, and once ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... especially in those parts that contain a catalogue, etc. of probable reasoning; lastly, to the senate, the pulpit, and our law courts, to whom the whole—but especially the latter three-fourths of the work, on the probable and the false—will be useful, and finally instructive, how to form a commonplace book by the aid of this Instrument, so as to read with practical advantage, and (supposing average talents) to 'ensure' a facility and rapidity in proving and in computing. I have thus amply detailed the contents ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... personally making one gentleman known to another. There is likewise a rare vigor of expression and pregnancy of meaning, such as only a man of habitual energy of thought could have conveyed into so commonplace a thing as an introductory letter. This autograph is a graceful one, with an easy and picturesque flourish beneath the signature, symbolical of a courteous bow at the conclusion of the social ceremony so admirably ...
— A Book of Autographs - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... makers, and the jacks-of-all-trades that were the pride of the South?" This is easily answered,—they are mostly dead. The survivors are too old to work. "But did they not train their children?" is the natural question. Alas! the answer is "no." Their skill was so commonplace to them, and to their former masters, that neither thought of it as being a hard-earned or desirable accomplishment: it was natural, like breathing. Their children would have it as a matter of course. What their children needed was education. ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... has happened, much has been achieved; Marvels, commonplace to-day, few then would have believed. Science, Liberty, Pure Manners, order, Peace, Goodwill, Punch for Fifty Years has championed, and will ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... is. Is there nothing you neglect? Is there nothing you know you ought not to do? You would know your duty, if you thought in earnest about it, and were not ambitious of great things." "Ah, then," responded she, "I suppose it is something very commonplace, which will make life more dreary than ever. That cannot help me." "It will, if it be as dreary as reading the newspapers to an old deaf aunt. It will soon lead you to something more. Your duty will begin to comfort ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... again in other directions we may trace the same essentials: there is a texture of colouring, a style in Literature, and an appropriate technique for harmony in every branch of Art, just as there is an harmonic scheme in Music. This may be airy, light, and gossamer, or turgid and obscure: it may be commonplace or ponderous. Like Nature, it may have a thousand or a myriad shades to mirror as many moods and tenses. It may have the misty filminess of steam, the limpid deeps of water, or the cold weight and icy dullness of ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... musicians as a class do not stand out specifically as more spiritual than their fellows. There are many reasons. Not all musicians pursue their calling with insight and understanding: mere perfunctory performance has the effect of influencing in the direction of the commonplace and the casual, and music is never the sole influence at work, and not always the chief. The character is the result, on balance, of ALL the forces that have played their part, just as the annual balance ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become a commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an East and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking of England, and England is ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... provincial or parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the said ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost. Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates from nothing previous, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... it, my dear. You've been mixed up with so many mysteries that you attach suspicion to the most commonplace events. What should there be about Sarah ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... old coat that had lived to moralise over the mutability of human affairs—thread-bare—napless—and what ignorant people might have called shabby-genteel. It was followed by a plain, sensible, honest, unpretending, commonplace, everyday sort of a coat—and not, perhaps, of the very best merino. Over it was drawn, with some little difficulty, what had, in its prime of life, attracted universal admiration in Princes Street, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... editors don't like lines from 'a kingdom outspread in the regions of thought,' for, as they say, such poems are apt to excite vagueness in the brains of that dim entity, the 'general public.' What they do like are commonplace ideas, put in pretty language, and sweetened with sentimentality or emotional religious feelings, such as the thinking powers of their subscribers are competent to absorb without mental strain, and without leaving their ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... beneath? Courageous dreams of freedom and patriotism? Yet if so, how could such beliefs fail to influence their daily lives? Could one cherish standards so noble, yet be himself so ignoble, so petty, so commonplace? ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... two letters. I must, however, mention one word about myself. In the new fourth volume of the Biographia Britannica I am more candidly treated about that poor lad than usual: yet the writer still affirms, that, according to my own account, my reply was too much in the-commonplace style of court replies. Now my own words, and the truth, as they stand in print in the very letter of mine which this author quotes, were, "I wrote him a letter with as much kindness and tenderness as if I had been his guardian." Is this by my own account a court-reply? Nor did I conceive, for ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of the facts of nature than an oyster? Is the conversation between men and women filled exclusively with twaddle? You would think so, from reading these books; and why? They are written by married people, most of them, people who don't dare step over the line of the commonplace any more than a woman would dare order her dressmaker to put pockets in ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... but as soon as I got a little rest and peace, I began to think of what I had left and especially of Terry. It was not only my love for him that called, but what my life with him had been and would be if I returned—a life that was not a commonplace life, a life of intelligence and freedom. Already I was bored by the quiet goodness of the people I was with, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... on account of the shawl—a strange article of dress, difficult to associate with a romantic singer. All the same, Evelyn was very probable in this picture; her past and her future were in this disconcerting compound of the commonplace and the rare; and the confusion which this picture created in the minds of Owen's friends was aggravated by the strange elliptical execution. Owen admitted the drawing to be not altogether grammatical; one eye was a little lower than the other, but the eyes were beautifully ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... antagonists, expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... was over. It had ended with a tameness that gave it an almost commonplace aspect. But Merefleet's resolution was ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... became with him more or less of a formula; but we may also note that even when he was most mechanical the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed to excite and exalt him, so that if he began with a commonplace "Let their celestial concerts all unite," before the end he was pouring forth glorious and living stuff like the last twenty-seven bars. So the pace at which he had to write in the intervals of bullying or coaxing ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... writers have seen slipped into the "stamped addressed envelope enclosed" and sent back to amateur photoplaywrights, one of the greatest mistakes that the young writer makes in his choice of titles is in making them commonplace and uninteresting. When an editor takes out a script and reads the title, "The Sad Story of Ethel Hardy," would he be altogether to blame if he did put the script back into the return envelope utterly unread, as so many editors are accused of doing yet really do not do? To anyone ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... of a mental output, rigidly confined within unbending modes of thought and expression, we have a literature that reflects the varied phases of human life, that can discard romance and look upon the commonplace; and instead of dry and meagre chronicles, rarely producing evidence at first hand, we have rich store of memoirs and private letters, by means of which we can form real pictures of individuals—approaching almost ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Colonel Antony's heroic disregard of commonplace safeguards in various outstanding cases made Gerrard persist. "Colonel Antony will choose the man he thinks best fitted for the post, as in the sight of God, Maharaj-ji, and it will be my duty ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... its echoes in our lives. Marcas confirmed us in our resolution to leave France, where young men of talent and energy are crushed under the weight of successful commonplace, envious, ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... Mr. Macaulay, and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew Baines, Esq., a barrister, became a member ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... between the second and third acts. It was then that she received visitors in her dressing-room. She had a sandwich and a glass of milk at that time, but was perfectly willing to send across the alley for bottled beer if her callers cared to take anything so commonplace as that. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... From time to time one of the matrons left the table and descended to the kitchen, when a finishing stroke was needed for roast pullet or stewed veal. The excuses they made their host for supposed failure in the dishes, lent a certain grace and comic charm to the commonplace of festivity. The entertainment was theirs as much as mine; and they all seemed to enjoy what took the form by degrees of curiously complicated hospitality. I do not think a well-ordered supper at any trattoria, such as at first suggested itself to my imagination, would have given any of us ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the cherry-trees in the yard," replied Ellen, taking refuge from her timidity in the security of commonplace observation, as she had done the night before, giving thereby both a sense of ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to respect the prejudices of Pi. Not that it matters twopence to Le Breton, of course: but if she talks that way to any of the other men here, they'll be laughing in every common-room in Oxford over my Christmas raisins and pounds of sugar—commonplace cynics that they are. I must tell her about it the moment we get home again, and adjure her by all that's holy not to repeat ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... as she really was—a commonplace woman endowed with the temper of a vixen, and disposed to outbursts of actual violence when her ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... simple and commonplace; but the tone, the look, and the gesture that accompanied them spoke more than volumes, and completely won the heart of the passionate and despairing creature ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... what it was so important that he wanted to say to me, he evaded me and continued to chatter on about commonplace things. Finally I insisted upon knowing why he had wanted me to come, and he replied that the reason for it had already been fulfilled, that he had nothing more to say, and that I could go as soon as I wanted to. He appeared ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... but Meryl soon grew serious again. "I'm awfully in earnest, Di. Who cares about Norway when they might go to Rhodesia! You'll perhaps fall overboard and be eaten by commonplace fishes if ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... to live as they pleased; and added other arguments such as men would use at such a crisis, and which, with little alteration, are made to serve on all occasions alike—appeals to wives, children, and national gods—without caring whether they are thought commonplace, but loudly invoking them in the belief that they will be of use in the consternation of the moment. Having thus admonished them, not, he felt, as he would, but as he could, Nicias withdrew and led the troops to the sea, ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth attending to is that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience. He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... that all this is to be found, in the same or a greater degree, in the Spectator. For myself, I do not think so; or at least, there is in the last work a much greater proportion of commonplace matter. I have, on this account, always preferred the Tatler to the Spectator. Whether it is owing to my having been earlier or better acquainted with the one than the other, my pleasure in reading these two admirable works is not in proportion to their comparative reputation. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... survivors. That was all they ever knew of the fate of their late captain. But for what some would term a mere accident, even that and their own fate would have remained unknown to the world—at least during the revolution of Time. The romances of life are often enacted by commonplace people. Many good ships with ordinary people on board, (like you and me, reader), leave port, and are "never again heard of." Who can tell what tales may be revealed in regard ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... spirit still subsists, hath manifestly appeared (among other instances of great compliance) from certain circumstances, that have attended some late proceedings in a court of judicature. There is not any commonplace more frequently insisted on, by those who treat of our constitution, than the great happiness and excellency of trials by juries; yet if this blessed part of our law be eludible at pleasure, by the force of power, frowns, and artifice; we shall have little reason to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... entered stood awhile with his back to the fire in his usual way, merely uttering a few commonplace remarks about the beauty of the weather, while he plucked up courage for the more interesting converse. It cannot probably be said that he had resolved then and there to make an offer to Eleanor. Men we believe seldom ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... and he sees no reason why he should. And the next day it is much the same for him. He gets up as early as he ever did, and he is likely to do a few odd bits of work that his father has not had time to come to. He talks with his mother and the girls of all sorts of little, commonplace things, and with his father he discusses the affairs of the community. And in the evening he strolls down town again, and exchanges a few words with friends, and learns, perhaps, of boys who haven't been lucky enough to get home on leave—of boys with ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... grow. This thought has become a commonplace in current political literature. And yet the growth of which men speak with such assurance is directed, that is, determined by the ideals of the people. Members of constituent assemblies and constitutional ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... go out there and be with those fellows," and Yan sighed as he compared his commonplace lot with ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... of sandal-wood, mother-of-pearl, and papier-mache, with broken hinges; faded fans and chipped paper-weights; gorgeous picture-books with loosened covers, and a magnificent portrait-album which had been deflowered and had nothing left in it but the old and ugly, the commonplace middle-aged, and the vapid young; with many other things besides, all ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the various inventions which he had ever seen, or had ever passed in his mind. These ideas are infused into his design, without any conscious effort; but if he be not on his guard, he may reconsider and correct them, till the whole matter is reduced to a commonplace invention. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... in a commonplace. The dear children would have to be told, but they would not grieve for ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... It was swinging up and down in an impatient way, so out of keeping with the emotions perceptible on this side of the drapery that I felt forced to ask myself what sort of person this could be who thus kept watch and ward with such very commonplace impatience over a creature who was able to hold every other person in her presence under a spell. The drapery did not give up its secrets, and again I yielded to the ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... the places into which Falconer led me that night I will attempt no description—places blazing with lights and mirrors, crowded with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full of the saddest of all sights, the uninteresting faces of commonplace women. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and there was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry household realities appertained to her, or that she, like all others, had moments of commonplace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered. Thus a mild sort of apotheosis took place in his fancy, whilst she still lived and breathed within his own horizon, a troubled creature ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... between radiant joy and confident hope in the future to a miserable misinterpretation of sensations both physical and psychical are rapid. It is the unknown that is terrible to us all, and to the child the changes in its body, the changes in its soul and spirit, which we pass by as commonplace, are full of suggestions of abnormality, of disaster, and of death. Young people suffer much from the want of comprehension and intelligent sympathy of their elders, much also from their own ignorance and too fervid imagination. The instability ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... galop was fashionable at that period; it ran to rather ordinary musical motives and mine were no exception to the rule. Liszt had to show by his Galop Chromatique the distinction that genius can give to the most commonplace themes. My waltzes were better. As has always been the case with me, I was already composing the music directly on paper without working it out on the piano. The waltzes were too difficult for my hands, so a friend of the family, a sister ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... look, and grow quiet and comfortable as if here were some one on whom she could entirely depend. The doctor's greeting was an every-day cheerful response to the women's welcome, and he stood for a minute warming his hands at the fire as if he had come upon a commonplace errand. There was something singularly self-reliant and composed about him; one felt that he was the wielder of great powers over the enemies, disease and pain, and that his brave hazel eyes showed a rare thoughtfulness and foresight. The rough ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... were terrible to Audrey. More than once she feared she would be ill. She could not sleep properly. The mornings, the afternoons, the evenings, were endless to her. Mollie's merry chatter seemed to jar on her. Her mother's kindly commonplace remarks seemed devoid of interest, and yet above all things she dreaded to be alone. Was she growing nervous? for any sudden sound, an unaccustomed footstep, even the clanging of the door-bell, made her start, and drove the blood from her heart. Would he write or would he telegraph? ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... drive to such a scene, reader, may seem very commonplace to you, but what tongue can tell, or pen describe, what it was to Tottie Bones? That pretty little human flower had been born in the heart of London—in one of the dirtiest and most unsavoury parts of that heart. Being the child of a ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... dropped away from the commonplace face as if it had been a veil; the eyes were burning with a hungry pathos and fire and passion; they were raised to his and held him with the power of an indescribable anguish. "Dunnot forget as I'm here," the voice growing sharp ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... these things about Miss Aiken, which seem to describe her, I have told only the commonplace, the expected or predictable details. Often and often I pause when I see an interesting man or woman and ask myself: "How, after all, does this person live?" For we all know it is not chiefly by the clothes we wear or the house we occupy or the friends we touch. ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... the two boys met to talk over these alluring matters the little town and the dusty lanes became exceedingly tame and commonplace. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... is a thriving, contented, commonplace town. Splashes of plaster, less weather-stained than the plaster surrounding them, are the only signs remaining of the explosive shells. The stone-mason and the plasterer have obliterated the work of the guns, the tiny shops have been refilled, the tide of life has ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... There had been a time... but that was long ago, very long ago. His apathetic face was expressionless as he listened to himself being held up as a shining example. He was the perfect worker. He knew that. He had been told so, often. It was a commonplace, and besides it didn't seem to mean anything to him any more. From the perfect worker he had evolved into the perfect machine. When his work went wrong, it was with him as with the machine, due to faulty material. It would have been as possible for a perfect nail-die ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... not—and will not be—a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her mother from becoming drugged with too ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... arose and passed from the room. The doing of the kindly, commonplace thing restored her ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... the tea but refused food, and Rivers sat down again still wearing an air of defiance, though Bailey did not appear to notice it. He ate a hearty supper, making a commonplace ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... school with a view to reading French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity for purposes of vulgar communication. The stirring together of the populations that is going on, the fashion and facilities for travel, the production of the radii from the trading foci, are rapidly making a commonplace knowledge of French, German, and Italian a necessity to the merchant and tradesman, and the ever more extensive travelling class. So that so far as Europe goes, one may very well regard this modern modern-language teaching as—with the modern mathematics—an extension of the trivium, of the apparatus, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... mother in her closet, who was talking to me on the old subject, matrimony, I saw Pamela's commonplace book, as I may call it; in which, by her lady's direction, from time to time, she had transcribed from the Bible, and other good books, such passages as most impressed her as she read—A method, I take it, my dear" ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... a picturesque way of putting the most threadbare, bald, commonplace of religious teaching. The word faith, when it has any meaning at all in people's minds when they hear it from the pulpit, is extremely apt, I fear, to create a kind of, if not disgust, at least a revulsion of feeling, as if ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Sir Sidney thinks that this and other changes, "which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference." To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to "wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing. Surely a much more likely explanation ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... trite and commonplace thing to say, but upon my word and honour, Edith, I haven't meant to fail you, as I see I have in a thousand ways. I'm sorry, deeply sorry, but I know that the words will not ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... clothes and learned to dance and gone out to parties and met many beautiful young ladies but none of them had the charm of Sally. The memory of youth—true-hearted, romantic, wonder-working youth—had enthroned her in its golden castle and was defending her against the present commonplace herd of mere human beings. No one of them had played with me in the old garden or stood by the wheat-field with flying hair, as yellow as the grain, and delighted me with the sweetest words ever spoken. ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... helplessly in the narrow path, perplexed what to do. Clearly the man wanted to talk. An idea natural enough under the circumstances, prompted him to keep the conversation going. "I've never suffered from sleeplessness myself," he said in a tone of commonplace gossip, "but in those cases I have known, people have usually ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... converts, a man who realised something of the grandeur of his master's schemes and their reach beyond a merely commercial ideal through discovery to empire, yet preserves in the speeches and actions of captains and seamen alike, proof enough of the thoroughly commonplace aims of most of the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... words were calm to the point of commonplace. Which made the effect of his statement all ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... and quenchless curiosity of youth are in these pages—and the magic power of youth to wrap about the commonplace the cloak ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... the head-master of an important middle-class school; stout, not fat, suggesting comfort, not grossness. His hands were white and well shaped. On the left he wore a fine diamond ring, but it shone rather than sparkled. He spoke of commonplace things in a voice that lent dignity even to the weather. His face, which was clean-shaven, radiated benignity tempered ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... strange, and yet it is true, that one sometimes finds even in the most commonplace countenance an undefinable something, which fascinates the attention, and forces it to recur again and again, while it is impossible to tell whether the peculiarity which thus attracts us lies in feature or in ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... there would have been no excitement, or call upon their skill and energy. There was nothing to be gained by climbing up the stone—nothing to see, nothing to find out; but there was the inclination to satisfy that commonplace form of excelsiorism which tempts so many to try and get to the top. So the boys sat there, thoughtfully gazing out to sea, while the dog, after a good many howls, gave it up for a bad job, curled himself into an ottoman, hid his nose under his bushy ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... where the Tresidders could not harm me," she cried, and then she went away, as though I were the merest commonplace stranger, as ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... hill with a dull world under, The dreary world of the Commonplace, I have stood when the whole world seemed a blunder Of dotard Time, in an aimless race. With worry about me and want before me - Yet deep in my soul was a rapture spring That made me cry to the grey sky o'er me: 'Oh, I know this life is ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... effort, only to become incapable of the least expression at his approach. Emotionally inarticulate even in happiness, Mary was quite dumb in grief. Her conversation became trite, her sore heart drew a mantle of the commonplace over its wound; Stefan found her ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... dressed in fancy habits of green and pink, surrounded a throne decorated in the same colors; Among pennons and flags, bearing wounded hearts, burning hearts, bleeding hearts, bows and quivers, and all the commonplace emblems of the triumphs of Cupid, a blazoned inscription informed the spectators that this seat of honor was designed for La Royne de la Beaute et des Amours. But who was to represent the Queen of Beauty and of Love on the present occasion no one ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a short and broad and ugly man, approaching middle age; of a commonplace cut of features, of poor birth, of mean fortunes, of small account in the scheme of things; but he had an eye for beauty; he had a soul; and his eye was filled with a beauty completely satisfying ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... famous, such as Spindler, Bulwer, Eugene Sue, and so on, serve this purpose. But what can be more miserable than the fate of a reading public of this kind, that feels always impelled to read the latest writings of extremely commonplace authors who write for money only, and therefore exist in numbers? And for the sake of this they merely know by name the works of the rare and superior writers, of all ages ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... that this monotonous life of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him than of a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation in this young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. I often wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, the interest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a great portrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good,—the type of the perfectly conscientious young Englishman, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... was written before the Whistler boom.] in twenty years they will cost three times as much; in twenty years Mr. Leader's pictures will probably not be worth half as much as they are to-day. What I am saying is the merest commonplace, what every artist knows; but go to an art patron—a City merchant—and ask him to pay five hundred for a Degas, and he will laugh at you; he will say, "Why, I could get a Dicksee or a Leader for ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Muir's letters were never commonplace and sometimes they were long and rich. I preserved them all; and when, a few years ago, an Alaska steamboat sank to the bottom of the Yukon, carrying with it my library and all my literary possessions, the ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... way, by railroad, and at first the place wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote themselves to falling ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... degree. There is, of course, a good independence in our dealings with our fellows. But this is carried to the extreme of independence of every one, even—say it softly—of God Himself. Criticising God, ignoring Him, leaving Him severely out so far as we are concerned,—this has become the commonplace. If for a moment He ignored us, how quickly things would go to pieces! This has come to be the dominant spirit of the whole race to a degree more marked than ever before, if ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... up involuntarily. "There isn't any pallid bust of Pallas," he announced. "But that jolly old raven's method of paying a visit was crude and commonplace compared to yours. He came tapping and rapping in the most old-fashioned way; but you reach me with a wonderful disembodied voice through the ever mysterious avenue of the telephone. It really makes me creepy. Won't you locate ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... have seen a shade of disappointment on Olive's face, he would also have seen it instantly suppressed. The young girl closed "Comus" with the drawing inside, and came to sit down again, looking up into the eyes of her "beautiful mamma." And even the commonplace question of dress soon became interesting to her, for her artistic predilection followed her even there, and no lover ever gloried in his mistress's charms, no painter ever delighted to deck his model, more than Olive loved to adorn and to admire the still ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... top hat, kid gloves, and patent shoes. Is he a commercial traveller? He looks it. He is rowed to the side of the steamer, and then the fun begins. A rope ladder is lowered from the deck, which is immediately clutched by one of the oarsmen in the boat, and this commonplace commercial scrambles towards it. Just then a wave breaks over him, and more like a drowned excursionist than an American pilot this little man is hauled ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... estimate of Bacon's character. In the result, in spite of the force and ingenuity of much of his pleading, I find myself most reluctantly obliged to differ from him; it seems to me to be a case where the French saying, cited by Bacon in one of his commonplace books, holds good—"Par trop se debattre, la verite se perd."[1] But this does not diminish the debt of gratitude which all who are interested about Bacon must owe to Mr. Spedding. I wish also to acknowledge the assistance which I have received ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... virginal and dreamy and insecure of her destiny in the world, with her high aspirations and her high temper, there is a certain lapse to the handsome matron united with a man beneath her in mind and spirit, and assured of the commonplace fact that in her love and duty to him is her happiness; but as Love must often mate men and women unequally, it is perfectly natural that Love in her case should strive to keep his eyes shut when no longer blind. Great exigencies afterwards ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... spoken in every drawing-room throughout the United Kingdom. "Yes, they are terrible: what a lot of harm they would do if they could. Thank God we have a House of Lords." Think now that this was commonplace conversation only three short years ago. And all the time the ears of the masses were being poisoned. Week after week and month after month some laughed but others toiled. The laughers, like the French nobles before the Revolution, said contemptuously, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... and ambitions, too. He had found what his surroundings meant. He had at least done one thing well. He had made well-received advances toward a friend; and a friend is a great thing for a boy, when he is another boy of about the same age. This friendship was not quite commonplace. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... Not much - God help me - and commonplace, commonplace like sin. I was honest once; I made a false step; I couldn't retrace it; and . ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... long at rest rushed again into a terrible and tumultuous action. The newly-formed stratum of my mind was swept away; everything seemed a wreck, a chaos, a convulsion of jarring elements; but this is a trite and tame description of my feelings; words would be but commonplace to express the revulsion which I experienced: yet, amidst all, there was one paramount and presiding thought, to which the rest were as atoms in the heap,—the awakened thought of vengeance!-but how was it ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... when the old civilisation is crumbling beneath our feet, the thought of poetry crosses the mind like the dear memory of things that have long since passed away. In our passionate desire for the new era, it is difficult to refrain oneself from the commonplace practice of speculating on the effects of warfare and of prophesying all manner of novel rebirths. But it may be well for us to remember that the era which has recently closed was itself marked by a mad ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... there, and her manner to them was curt and unpleasing. Each of them in turn, as he went up to her for his cup, cudgelled his brain for something to say; but it was no easy matter to converse with Johanna. The ordinary small change and polite commonplace of conversation, she met with a silent contempt. In musical chit-chat, she took no interest whatever, and pretended to none, openly indeed "detested music," and was unable to distinguish Mendelssohn ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... that Agatha Bowen slept but ill that night would be unnecessary; since there is probably no girl who did not do so after receiving a first love-letter. And this was indeed her first; for the commonplace and business-like episode of young Northen had not been beautified by any such compositions. A second harmless adventure of like kind had furnished her with a little amusement and some vexation,—but never till now had her girlish heart ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... that, for the future, you wear a yashmak to cover up your lips, which, I can see, were meant to be seductive, though dirty; and you can leave the blue eyes, and the little white-skinned freckled nose uncovered, if you like, they being commonplace enough. Meantime, if you care to see how to draw a ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... walls; and the outer park, which is likewise planted with trees, and diversified by garden-plots and cottages, had more the air of the outbuildings of a homely English park, than of a palace which we must all have imagined to be the most stately in the world. The most commonplace water-carts were passing here and there; roads were being repaired in the Macadamite manner; and carpenters were mending the park-palings, just as they do in Hampshire. The next thing you might fancy would be the Sultan walking out with a spud and a couple of dogs, on the way to ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reasonableness, and, moreover, without a spark of imagination (but that, indeed, was rather of course; belief in such supernatural agencies betokening, in my opinion, an absence of poetical imagination, as well as of spiritual faith), practical, sensible, commonplace, without a touch of nonsense of any kind about her, as I had always supposed—sat opposite the machine infernale, over which her daughter's fingers hung suspended, and as the answer did not come, broke out for all the world like one of Baal's prophets of old: "Now, Planchette, now, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... be angry—with you." The young man's commonplace features were irradiated by a great light, and for a moment one could forget his mean stature and ready-made clothing. "You will never understand—you couldn't—what you are to me; but before God," said Leonard Dowson solemnly, "I'd devote my life, my soul, all I have to ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Well, Captain Armytage did get hold of her, in what we must now call the Lover's Walk! Yes, she has yielded, to her father's great satisfaction and perhaps to her mother's, for she will be more comfortable in looking forward to a commonplace life for her than in the dread of modern aberrations. But Gillian is very funny, very much ashamed of having given in, and perfectly determined to go to her college and finish her education, which she may as well do while the Sparrow Hawk ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the wonderful cures they have heard of; they want to know what is the matter with somebody or other who is said to be suffering from "a complication of diseases," and above all to get a hard name, Greek or Latin, for some complaint which sounds altogether too commonplace in plain English. If you will only call a headache a Cephalgia, it acquires dignity at once, and a patient becomes rather proud of it. So I think doctors are generally ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Captain Zuyeff in no way resembled his prototype of the London stage and penny novelette. By rights our host should have been a cool cynical villain, always in full uniform, and continually turning up at awkward moments to harass some innocent victim, instead of which he was rather a commonplace but benevolent individual devoted to his wife and child and consumed with a passion for photography, which was shared by many of the exiles under his charge. I once had occasion to go to his office and found Zuyeff in his shirt sleeves, busily ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... "Not commonplace, but there is no room in marriage for a woman having personal ambitions of her own. Once married her duty is to her husband and her children—not ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... literary eulogies, moral essays and philanthropic pamphlets; his little lamp, lighted like hundreds of others of equal capacity at the focus of the new philosophy, would have burned moderately without doing harm to any one, and diffused over a provincial circle a dim, commonplace illumination proportionate to the little oil his ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not be better, instead of making the commonplace assertion that there was nothing of the ascetic about Jesus Christ, for us to recall to mind His teaching at another time, that every disciple shall be perfected as his Master (Luke vi. 40), and to inquire whether we might not do well to love and covet retirement, even of ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... let me close by pointing out that the study of this commonplace matter of eating and drinking opens out to us the conception of the grand unity of nature; since we see that the body of man differs in no way essentially from other natural combinations, but is subject to the same universal physical ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... dinner is actually at Cumae this sounds very peculiar; it might even be a gloss added by some copyist whose knowledge was not equal to his industry. On the other hand, suppose Trimalchio is speaking of something so commonplace in his locality that the second term has become a generic, then the difficulty disappears. We today, even though standing upon the very spot in Melos where the Venus was unearthed, would still refer to her as the Venus de Melos. Friedlaender, in bracketing ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... which enables commonplace mediocrity to look like genius. 5. In 1685 Louis XIV. signed the ordinance that revoked the Edict of Nantes. 6. The thirteen colonies were welded together by the ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... she had been guilty of a creeping sense of jealousy as she watched Stuart and Jeannette together, so evidently enjoying each other's society to the full, it was because it made her suddenly and unpleasantly understand what it would be to her to live her days in this commonplace little village without Stuart at her right hand. But here he was, literally at her right hand, and he was making her walk with him, not a beggarly square or two out of her way, but a good three miles around a ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... exhilarating, at times intoxicating; the other was chilling. The face of the princess, though beautiful, was touched with disdain. Every attitude was one of dignity and hauteur. Her words, though not lacking intelligence, were commonplace, and her voice was that of her father's daughter. Yolanda was a girl; the princess was a woman. The metamorphosis was complete, and Max's hallucination, I felt sure, would be cured. The princess's face was not burned ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... foxes assembled to dine with the strangers, they were most beautifully costumed, and their rich dresses made Dorothy's simple gown and Button-Bright's sailor suit and the shaggy man's shaggy clothes look commonplace. But they treated their guests with great respect and the King's dinner was ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... which really make us miserable arise from the difference between the real and the imaginary. Health, strength, and a good conscience excepted, all the good things of life are a matter of opinion; except bodily suffering and remorse, all our woes are imaginary. You will tell me this is a commonplace; I admit it, but its practical application is no commonplace, and it is with practice only that ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... coats—never exceeded six. The first used generally to be a pretty old coat that had lived to moralise over the mutability of human affairs—thread-bare—napless—and what ignorant people might have called shabby-genteel. It was followed by a plain, sensible, honest, unpretending, commonplace, everyday sort of a coat—and not, perhaps, of the very best merino. Over it was drawn, with some little difficulty, what had, in its prime of life, attracted universal admiration in Princes Street, as a blue surtout. Then came your regular ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... you all that; but the well-balanced man made it possible for the genius to make the world great. Genius is the bloom that bursts out at the top of commonplace humanity." ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... those cabalistic symbols signifying to the initiated, "Killed in action." After all, that tells the story. In those old-time Indian days of continuous foray and skirmish such brief returns, concise and unheroic, were commonplace enough. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... they were so religious and respectable and so contented to be robbed on a large scale, yet in small matters, in the commonplace and petty affairs of their everyday existence, most of these men were acutely alive to what their enfeebled minds conceived to be their own selfish interests, and they possessed a large share of that singular cunning which characterizes this ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the services of the master's mate in this perilous venture—a tough sea-dog who was ready for anything, provided it was out of the commonplace. This business, I promised him, would at least ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... stupid, boresome, to live in such peace as that. All I can answer is that it was not stupid, it was not boresome—oh, how far from it! In fact, in those early days we took our vow that the one thing we would never do was to let the world get commonplace for us; that the time should never come when we would not be eager for the start of each new day. The Kipling poem we loved the most, for it was the spirit of both of us, was "The Long Trail." You know the last ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... she cried, "what right had you? Why did you strike him?" The man regarded her gravely, lifting his cap politely as if answering a most commonplace question. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural: in fact the evidence shews that it is easier to love the company of a dog than of a commonplace child between the ages of six and the beginnings of controlled maturity; for women who cannot bear to be separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding schools cheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing their children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... when we met monks, as though they ought all to be off at work somewhere, —I will not say "earning money," for they do that as it is in such great monasteries as that of Kieff, but lightening the burden of the peasants, impossible as that is under present conditions, or making themselves of some commonplace, practical ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... marshalled chords; and when she sat down to the keyboard, it was apparent that the tall, pale, handsome young lady was not a little tremulous and anxious. Indeed, it was a very good thing for the composer that she had got Lionel Moore to sing the song; for the quite trivial and commonplace character of the music was in a large measure concealed by the fine and resonant quality of his rich baritone notes. The chorus was not much of a success—Lady Sybil's promised accomplices seemed to have found their courage fail ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... settlement and an initiative from the Western Hemisphere that will lead to a world congress. There are the two most hopeful sources of that great proposal. It is the tradition of British national conduct to be commonplace to the pitch of dullness, and all the stifled intelligence of Great Britain will beat in vain against the national passion for the ordinary. Britain, in the guise of Sir Edward Grey, will come to the congress like a family solicitor among the Gods. What is the good of shamming ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... edify their hearers, and after starting with them at the opening of the sermon from the north-pole, the Crystal Palace, or the nearest cabbage-garden, float them safe, upon the gushing stream of oratory, to the safe and well-known shores of doctrinal commonplace, lost in admiration at the skill of the good man who can thus make all roads lead, if not to heaven, at least to strong language about its opposite. True, the logical sequence of their periods may be, like that of the coming one, somewhat questionable, reminding one at moments of Fluellen's ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... consequence: whoever takes his place must personate Angus for some hours, till he can get safely away. [Note 3.] Only Keith can do this with any chance of success. As to sacrifice, why, soldiers sacrifice themselves every day, and he is a soldier. I can assure you, it seems to him a natural, commonplace affair. He is very anxious to ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... less than two glasses of wine after dinner. Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four, they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned, it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke, that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract". To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... they were sufficient to furnish a safe conduct of life even through the unsafest days of the most unsettled period of our nation's history. The wholesome, unsophisticated nature of our warrior ancestors derived ample food for their spirit from a sheaf of commonplace and fragmentary teachings, gleaned as it were on the highways and byways of ancient thought, and, stimulated by the demands of the age, formed from these gleanings anew and unique type of manhood. An acute French savant, M. de ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... like Heine must necessarily have such moods about a little woman like Mathilde; but the important fact remains that for some twenty years Heine was Mathilde's faithful husband, and that the commonplace, pretty, ignorant, pleasure-loving, bourgeoise Mathilde was good and faithful to a crippled, incomprehensible mate. Perhaps, after all, the wonder in this marriage is even more on the side of Mathilde than of Heine. Think what such a woman must have had to forego, ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... is almost peculiar to the backwoods of America. Some may deem it commonplace. For my part, I cannot regard it in this light. I have never looked upon this primitive homestead of the pioneer without receiving from it an impression of romantic pleasure. Something seems to impart ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... have repaid it by the time fixed?'[6] We must make allowance for the youth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and its significance from our own. Even then there remains something to regret. Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly of commonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches can elevate low souls.[7] That depends. If poverty means pinching and fretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense, but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind of delicacy ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... instinctively in the direction of Doctor Cockburn's house. Mrs. Cockburn was a plain little middle-aged woman with parted gray hair and sweet, faded eyes. In the life of the place she was a nonentity, and her tastes were homely and commonplace, but ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood, but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like Maurokordatos had a double end; ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... mind of the gazer all the horror seemed focussed in that calm statement, those commonplace letters ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... shaking all over with one of her sudden bursts of passionate crying. What could he do to console her? What could he say to comfort her? Not much, perhaps, but then much was not needed; only a few words commonplace enough, I daresay—but then, as we have said, Monsieur Horace's voice and words always had a wonderful influence with our little Madelon. How is it, indeed, that amidst a hundred tones that fret and jar ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... head nor tail of it, nor was there another word to give a clue to its meaning, so at last from constant repetition it became a commonplace and she gave it no ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his way to a thoroughly commonplace compliment which possessed the charm of complete novelty so far as his experience was concerned. He would actually have told her that she was incapable of doing anything which was not perfectly becoming to a charming person, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... has ever made'—her 'Will' is an architect, you know—'these seem to me most likely to suit you and Jack, although they are by no means, adapted to conventional, commonplace housekeepers. In the centre of the first floor the large hall, opening freely to the outside world, is a sort of common ground, hospitable and cheerful, where the stranger guest and the old friend meet; where the children play, where the entire household are ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... there was still another consideration in the scale; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part, and was found wanting in the ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and all display the ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore. From a fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which he presented them as new. The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great. He is a classic of those classics common to all languages—dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... after waiting for two hours, the cry of "All tickets are sold!" rang not unfrequently in the ears of disappointed students. When the play was over, Lucien went home with downcast eyes, through streets lined with living attractions, and perhaps fell in with one of those commonplace adventures which loom so large in ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... every toilet there Was commonplace and stupid, more or less; A fact which clearly made the whole affair, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... view. Pascal is certainly, like many other great writers, far more widely known than he is understood or appreciated. The old, which are still the common, editions of the ‘Pensées,’ have also given a certain commonplace to his reputation. It were certainly a worthy task to set him more clearly before our age both as a man ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... brightening beneath the words that Falkland whispered in her ear, when Mrs. St. John approached her. She placed herself on a chair beside them, and unmindful of Falkland's bent and angry brow, attempted to create a general and commonplace conversation. Lady Margaret had invited two or three people in the neighbourhood; and when these came in, music and cards were resorted to immediately, with that English politesse, which takes the earliest ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nothing. As men and women grow in imagination and common sense, more and more will sacred silly dolls be cast to the moles and the bats. But pretty Fancy and limping Logic are powerful usurpers in commonplace minds. ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... fire.' And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!' This is no commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled with ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... published one or more volumes. There are more than two hundred poets who have been thought worthy of mention. More than fifty poets have been credited to Virginia alone; and an examination of their works reveals, among a good deal that is commonplace and imitative, many a little gem that ought to be preserved. Apart from the five major poets of the South—Poe, Hayne, Timrod, Lanier, and Ryan—who are reserved for special study, we shall now consider a few of the minor poets who have produced verse of excellent quality. ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... the story of a man's past and his inability to escape from it. If that were all, it might be a very commonplace subject indeed. It is not all, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Earth Product Superstitions Self-Justice Symbolism Love Ideals of Love The Needs of Woman Man versus Woman Natural Cruelty of the Undeveloped The Worst Sin Reincarnation Processes of Reincarnation Education of Children Egotism Responsiveness Hell The Commonplace Petroleum Law Communism Happiness Pain Foes in the Household The Inner Life Root of Evils Rest in Change Miserliness Special Providence Human Destiny Ethical Law Human Life Animal Likeness Natural Superstition ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... name. Maybe the Independent-Conservatives have troubles, too, he thought hopefully. Then Lancedale's video screen became the frame for an almost unbelievably commonplace set ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened themselves in everybody's home. You want something, in fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe and glow in you. I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... then about Santry, but he evaded a direct answer beyond expressing the conviction that everything would end all right. They talked for a while of commonplaces, although nothing that he said seemed commonplace to her and nothing that she said seemed so to him. When it was fully dark he arose to go. Then she seemed a little sorry that she had not let him put his arm around her, and she leaned toward him as she had done on the trail; but he was not well versed in woman's subtleties, and he failed ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... at all, ma'am, as you put it. Still it is a little startling, to a commonplace man like me, to meet a young lady at a ball who believes in the Second Sight. Does she really profess to see into the future? Am I to understand that she positively falls into a trance, and sees people in distant countries, ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... gregarious habits and individual abundance, the history of many hoofed animals is preserved with especial clearness. So well known as to have become a commonplace, is the phylogeny of the horses, which, contrary to all that would have been expected, ran the greater part of its course in North America. So far as it has yet been traced, the line begins in the lower Eocene with the genus ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... as distinguished from airs—commonplace and vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations, as, for instance, "Yankee Doodle," or "Partant pour ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... teaching at lycees, provincial or parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the said ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost. Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... haven't! The clay you're made of is the ordinary kind: not the blue earth diamonds grow in. You might make up for your absolute lack of individuality by a brilliant suicide. But you don't. You're too commonplace. You're contented to go on being nobody. This may be a calm state, but it is certainly not ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... was accidental, and consequent merely on their choice of models, and especially of Petrarch, or essential and deliberate. If it was accidental, there is no greater accident in the history of literature. The absence of the personal note in mediaeval poetry is a commonplace, and nowhere had that absence been more marked than in England. With Wyatt and Surrey English poetry became at a bound the most personal (and in a rather bad but unavoidable word) the most "introspective" in Europe. There had of course been love poetry before, but its convention had ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... now elapsed since Charles Osborne ought to have received his father's letter, and yet no communication had reached either of the families. Indeed the gradual falling off of his correspondence with Jane, and the commonplace character of his few last letters left little room to hope that his affection for her stood the severe test of time and absence. One morning about this period she brought William into the garden, and after a turn or too, laid her hand, gently ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... enthusiast; for without enthusiasm what was ever achieved but commonplace? But again: consider the poor in London. To that mob of misery, what is a joint here and a loaf there? I am for voting to them twenty thousand bullocks and one hundred thousand barrels of flour to begin with. They ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... seems millions to one against the present order resulting. But to a certain state of knowledge it would seem millions to one against so fluid a thing as water ever becoming solid. To others it is a commonplace thing and a necessary consequence of the properties of water itself. To a savage it would be millions to one against a cloud of "fire mist" ever becoming a world with a highly diversified fauna and flora. To a scientist there is nothing more in it than ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... the gun-metal cigarette case and opened it. But this most commonplace action had an extraordinary result: the girl beside me stopped dead still and stood staring ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... there was one which throws a very strange light upon the time. Just before her arrival in Scotland, King Malcolm had been carrying fire and sword through Northumberland in one of the many raids over the Border which were the commonplace of the time—if indeed we may speak of the Border at such an unsettled and shifting period when the limits of the kingdoms were so little certain. The issue of this raid was that Scotland, probably meaning for the most part Lothian, the southern ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... modern times was John P. Altgeld, yet to those who heard him for the first time his appearance was always a disappointment. Altgeld was so earnest and sincere, so full of his message that he scorned all the tricks of oratory, but still he must have been aware that his insignificant form and commonplace appearance were a perfect foil for the gloomy, melancholy and foreboding note of earnestness that riveted his words ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... summit of the hill we found a rustic table, also a rustic seat on which was seated a comely matron engaged in the very commonplace work of darning socks. She cast on us a sharp and remarkably penetrating glance as we approached. Doubtless our appearance was peculiar, for a pretty maiden in savage costume, a somewhat ragged white man, and a gigantic savage, all mounted on magnificent steeds and looking travel-stained and worn ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... Max broke out impulsively; then, fearing he had said an indiscreet thing, he hurried on to something less personal. "How would it be," he suggested in a studiously commonplace tone, "if I should make myself comfortable sitting on my suitcase, just near enough to your berth to keep you from falling out in case another of those monsters hit the ship? You could go to sleep, and know you were safe, because ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... involving no question of principle, they are dismissed without any further comment. It must not be so, however, with the following remarkable deliverances which occur on page 67 of his too picturesque work:—"The commonplace intrudes upon the imaginative. At moments one can fancy that the world is an enchanted place after all, but then comes generally an absurd awakening. On the first night of my arrival, before we went to bed, there came an invitation to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... that what made him helpless must have been the sudden change in Hilary's manner to the commonplace. The president of the Northeastern stood where he was, holding the envelope in his hand, apparently without the power to move or speak. He watched the tall form of his chief counsel go through the doorway, and something told him ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... chorus of "Oh's!" not merely polite but sincerely surprised and admiring, recognised the quaint beauty of the little house. It was no commonplace country home now, though the changes wrought had been comparatively slight. It looked as if it might have stood for years in just this fashion, yet it was as far removed from its primitive characterless condition as may be an artist's drawing of a face upon which he ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... March, however, had progressed with her day. The third diner was an adored young actor with a low, veiled voice which, combining itself with almond eyes and a sentimental and emotional curve of cheek and chin, made the most commonplace "lines" sound yearningly impassioned. He was not impassioned at all—merely fond of his pleasures and comforts in a way which would end by his becoming stout. At present his figure was perfect—exactly the thing for the uniforms of royal persons of Ruritania and places of that ilk—and the ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Chardin says that "The Khan of Persia caused a tent to be made which cost two millions: they called it the house of gold;" and it was resplendent with embroideries.[445] These are comparatively modern works, and sound commonplace and vulgar compared to those ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... and diamonds, was gripping the side of her chair. Her expression was one of blank terror. Peter felt a shiver chill his own blood at the things he saw in her face. He himself was confused, apologetic, yet absolutely without understanding. His thoughts reverted at first to his own commonplace malady. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... towers, he ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from great poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort. It will give him a shock. You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is, until you bite into a layer of it ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... A most commonplace, mean-looking room, the wind blowing through it from open window to open door. The bed still unmade, but the square box of a place otherwise clean ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... be Milton's, there is not any prose fuller of grand poetic embodiments than Lord Bacon's. Yet he always writes contemptuously of poetry, having in his eye no doubt the commonplace kinds of it, which will always occupy more bulk, and hence be more obtrusive, than that which is true in its nature and rare in its workmanship. Towards the latter end of his life, however, being in ill health at the time, he translated seven of the Psalms ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... had strayed from the steps that night. In reviewing them certain features strained his credulity. Had he really met Captain Peek or Katie or the unparalleled Mexican in his wanderings—had he really encountered them under commonplace conditions and his over-stimulated brain had supplied the incongruities? However that might be, a sudden, elating thought caused him an intense joy. Nearly all of us have, at some point in our lives—either to excuse our own stupidity or to placate our consciences—promulgated some theory ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... has never yet been a settling-day since things were. You get entertainment pretty much in proportion as you give. As long as we were a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack doctor or a caravan, we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon as we sank into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted. And here is one reason of a dozen, why the world ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would select a picturesque background for his figures; but events have an inexorable fashion for choosing their own landscape. In the present instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,—a straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city neighborhoods. Being of comparatively recent date, the place has none ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a tender touch, for Phebe's strength had inspired her with a desire to be as self-reliant. "I'm going to set about living in earnest, as she has; though I think it will be harder for me than for her, because she stands alone and has a career marked out for her. I'm nothing but a commonplace sort of girl, with no end of relations to be consulted every time I wink and a dreadful fortune hanging like a millstone round my neck to weigh me down if I try to fly. It is a hard case, Uncle, and I get low in my ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... station, found it comparatively easy to deal with them amicably. With such a man as Egmont, it was impossible for the churchman to maintain friendly relations. The Count, who notwithstanding his romantic appearance, his brilliant exploits, and his interesting destiny, was but a commonplace character, soon conceived a mortal aversion to Granvelle. A rude soldier, entertaining no respect for science or letters, ignorant and overbearing, he was not the man to submit to the airs of superiority which pierced daily more and more decidedly through ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... cheek glowed in the night-beams that, as Clinton said, made her their focus, so brightly were they reflected from her face. What Clinton said, it is unnecessary to repeat, for the language of passion is commonplace, unless it flows from lips as fresh and unworldly ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... with his long, thin hand, thanking God in his heart for the brave spirit which He had been pleased to give to this young man, who had grown so dear to one who lacked a son. Only this he did in silence, nor did he ever allude to the subject afterwards, except as a commonplace ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... a sort of mechanic set up with a stock and tools for his trade, at as little expense as a tailor; and that there is much analogy between the utensils and abilities of both. That the "Tailor's Hell" is the type of a critic's commonplace-book, and his wit and learning held forth by the goose. That it requires at least as many of these to the making up of one scholar as of the others to the composition of a man. That the valour of both is equal, and their weapons near of a size. ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... never was told that this jocular feature Of mine was a trick reprehensibly rude, And yet I was sold, like a commonplace creature, To work in a ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... low tone, retaining her hand for a moment. All round them is a crowd separated into twos and threes, so that it is impossible to say more than the mere commonplace. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that I was making my body die. All that was I was devoted to that sole task. I performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks, and I regarded the work as just about as commonplace as would a brick-mason ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... an ambitious woman, though one with definite limitations. Among different surroundings and in an atmosphere less sordidly striving and commonplace, she was fitted to have become, with some encouragement, an admirable and utterly inconspicuous wife and mother. But here, in this narrow, money-getting environment, many things prevented; among them, primarily, the way in which she had been brought up. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... "I hope you will be all right again in a few days," he said formally as his eyes met Patty's upraised glance. In the warm room all the glamour of the twilight—and of that hidden country within his mind—had faded from her. She looked fresh and blooming and merely commonplace, he thought. A brief half hour ago he had felt that he was in danger of losing his head; now his rational part was in the ascendant, and his future appeared pleasantly tranquil. Then the girl smiled that faint inscrutable smile of hers, and the disturbing green ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... me in the corridor was a young man with a pale beard and moustache and fine delicate features. He had an air of distinction, and his clothes suggested a man of some wealth and standing. I spoke to him, a few commonplace sentences, and found, as I had guessed, that he ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... too beautiful, and had declined too many offers of commonplace marriage, for such questioning to seem the philosophy of disappointment. Indeed, the more she realized her own situation, the more she came to regard what others considered her sacrifice to her mother as a safeguard against ...
— Different Girls • Various
... faith of the blessed assurance, "My God will hear me!" Praise God! I begin to see it—I believe it. All can be different. Or, rather, I see Him, I believe Him. "My God will hear me!" Yes, me, even me! Commonplace and insignificant though I be, filling but a very little place, so that I will scarce be missed when I go—even I have access to this Infinite God, with the confidence that He heareth me. One with Christ, led ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... agreed upon, on the morning after the scenes last described, Miriam and Donatello directed their steps. At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... saw his crisp brown hair brushed smoothly back from its parting, his blue eyes, with their gay and conquering look, the firm red brown of his cheek, and even the bluish shadow encircling his shaven mouth. In his eyes, which said enchanting things, she could not read the trivial and commonplace quality of his soul—for he was not only a man, he was romance, he was adventure, he was the radiant ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... household who had to receive his direct orders or enjoyed the right of "paying their court at these privileged hours." At Saint Helena, Napoleon boasted that at the Tuileries he had suppressed in the matter of etiquette "all that was real and commonplace, and had substituted what was merely nominal and decorative." "A king," he said, "is not a natural product; he is a result of civilization. He does not exist ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... part, we are free to confess that the march of events has induced us to regard the dispute as a more commonplace kind of quarrel than it at first appeared to be. The real motives of the belligerents, as the truth transpires; appear to be exactly such motives as have caused wars in all times and countries. They are essentially selfish motives—that is to say, they are based ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... and molding it—supplying it with lofty concepts of interpretation and expression. Of course Auer (I studied with him in Petrograd and Dresden) has been especially fortunate as regards his pupils, too, because active in a land like Russia, where musical genius has almost become a commonplace. ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... and with a look which clearly showed the admiration he felt. He inquired how she liked the West Indies, and what parts of the islands she had seen, and whether she enjoyed being at sea. They were but commonplace questions, but his manner encouraged her to speak freely, and she described with much graphic power the scenery and ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... the appearance or the customary demeanor of the recluse that made strangers turn about to stare at him as he passed, and that made them remember how he looked when he was gone from their sight. The one was commonplace enough—I mean his appearance—and his conduct, unless one knew the underlying motives, was merely that of an unobtrusive, rather melancholy seeming gentleman of quiet tastes and habits. It was the feeling and the sense of a dismal exhalation from him, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and bivouacs, its battles, its commonplaces and surprises, its trials and its triumphs, are a singular school of experience. The various impacts upon man's psychological anatomy produce strange results. They seem like the blows of some Invisible Sculptor, producing out of commonplace material a hero and it may be a demi-god. The opening orchestra of shot and shell braces up the mind of the soldier and attunes it up to receive new sensitiveness. The bullets play strange dirges on the strings of life before they break them, and each dirge has its theme, some ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... expression for two minutes together, and though there could be no question as to which was the prettier of the two, it was safe to predict that few people who looked at Norah would be tempted to return to the study of Hilary's more commonplace features. ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... could the looseness of the skin beneath the man's eyelids, incongruous with his general youth, and the abnormal nervous twitching of a muscle here and there, have been noted. For perhaps a minute he sat so, taking in every detail of the commonplace surroundings. Then, apparently satisfied, he dismounted and, tying the animal to the wheel of an old surrey drawn up in the yard, he approached the single entrance ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... I stared motionless I do not know. Finally, I was aroused by my syce taking the Waler's bridle and asking whether I was ill. From the horrible to the commonplace is but a step. I tumbled off my horse and dashed, half fainting, into Peliti's for a glass of cherry-brandy. There two or three couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the day. Their trivialities were more comforting to ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... that I had ever seen, and I was surprised to notice that she shot arch little questioning glances at me, as if the admiration even of so insignificant a person were of some interest to her. My father, in his blunt, sailor fashion, tried to stammer out some commonplace condolence, but her eyes swept past his rude, weather-beaten face to ask and reask what effect she ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... conceded Kiddie. "But it ain't an explanation. It's too far-fetched altogether, an' it contradicts the theory that there were no inhabitants in these wildernesses all that time ago. If you'd thought a bit longer, you might have hit upon the true an' very commonplace explanation. Y'see, the stones haven't even been in the lake long enough to get a growth of weeds and moss on 'em. As a matter of fact, they've been there only a very few winters—since the time when the name 'Kiddie' was more appropriate to me than it is now. There ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... were lighted up, the company assembled. It was but a card party, it was but a mixture of those who had never met before, and those who met too often; a commonplace business, too numerous for intimacy, too small for variety; but Anne had never found an evening shorter. Glowing and lovely in sensibility and happiness, and more generally admired than she thought about or cared for, she had cheerful or forbearing feelings for every creature around her. Mr Elliot ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... names. Indeed, considering the Tendenz of the Ciaran Lives, it is remarkable that there is no supernormal element in the account of the birth of this particular saint; supernatural births are almost a commonplace in Irish ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... of the hand, while himself sucking at his pipe, as though he had suddenly recollected something extraordinarily amusing or important, then he would open his mouth, let off a few rings of smoke, and utter the most commonplace remarks, or even keep silence altogether. After gossiping a little with Ivan Afanasiitch about the neighbours, about horses, the daughters of the gentry around, and other such edifying topics, Mr. Bublitsyn suddenly winked, ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... being unjustly jealous | divinity and natural philosophy that every reach and depth of knowledge | (quotations in Briggs' text are from wherewith their conceits have not been | THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING): acquainted, should be too high an | elevation of man's wit, and a searching | A longstanding commonplace in Bacon and ravelling too far into God's secrets; | scholarship has been the notion that an opinion that ariseth either of envy | the Baconian advancement of learning (which is proud weakness and to be | depends upon a strict separation of censured and not confuted), or else of a | ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... blue about her. The contrast between her really fashionable air and manners and that of the strugglers and imitators struck me much: Lady Elizabeth Whitbread is, in one word, delightful. Miss Fox very agreeable—converses at once, without preface or commonplace: Lady Charlotte Lindsay ditto: Lady Darnley has been very polite in her attentions: both Lord and Lady Hardwicke peculiarly gracious. Lord Somerville I cannot help being charmed with, for he says he ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... sat with his arms resting on the table as if communing with himself: then, starting up as if filled with a sudden resolve, he went out and asked the landlady a few commonplace questions, and finally inquired whereabouts and in what direction did the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... outline of a commonplace boyhood must be filled in with many details drawn from environment. Stephen fell heir to a wealth of inspiring local traditions. The fresh mountain breezes had also once blown full upon the anxious faces ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... in the situation. It was a commonplace peril of the coast; it was a reasonable endeavor. It was thrilling, to be sure—the conjunction of a living peril with the emergency of the message. Yet the dusk and sweeping drizzle of rain, the vanishing lights of Scalawag Harbor, the interruption ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... of Washington and its pedestal move slightly; gradually they change and shape themselves into the figure of a well-dressed man, rather short and stocky, with a sociable, commonplace face. His head, however, is very peculiarly modelled; it reminds one, indescribably and faintly, of the fact that men sprang from beasts. The high position of the ears help this impression, as does also the astonishing animal brilliance of the ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... eh? Then, is one to assume that you are merely a band of ordinary, commonplace pirates, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... constant attendance upon the Baron Savitch, whose high-strung mental organization rendered him susceptible to sudden and alarming attacks of illness. Dr. Rapperschwyll was a Swiss—had originally been a watchmaker or artisan of some kind, she had heard. For the rest, he was a commonplace little old man, devoted to his profession and to the Baron, and evidently devoid of ambition, since he wholly neglected to turn the opportunities of his position and connections to the advancement of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... except when she was alone with me. Such beauty as she had, in those early days, lay in a certain artless purity and tenderness of expression, and in the charming reddish-brown color of her hair, varying quaintly and prettily in different lights. To all outward appearance two perfectly commonplace children, we were mysteriously united by some kindred association of the spirit in her and the spirit in me, which not only defied discovery by our young selves, but which lay too deep for investigation by far older and ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... his memory is still affectionately encysted in the traditions of our great Far West. I refer to the late Liver-Eating Watkins. Mr. Watkins entered into active life and passed through a good part of it bearing the unilluminative and commonplace first name of Elmer or Lemuel, or perhaps it was Jasper. Just which one of these or some other I forgot now, but no matter; at least it was some such. One evening a low-down terra-cotta-colored Piute swiped two of Mr. Watkins' paint ponies and by stealth, under cover of the cloaking twilight, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... the feud between the brothers would probably have been forgotten had it not been for the lamentable fact that his eldest son, who had grown up into a faithful likeness of his worldly and commonplace mother, took it into his head at the time of his father's death to write to his uncle in a way which showed as much greed as ill-breeding. The foolish young man's letter might have been put into the fire and forgotten, for Colonel ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... distinguished company of poets and scholars, all of whom were enthusiastic in singing her praise. Ariosto and the two Strozzi were there, likewise the Cardinal Bembo—who became a somewhat too ardent admirer—and Aldo Manuzio, and other men of distinction. Though of commonplace origin, Lucrezia had received the very best education possible, and she conducted herself with such propriety and showed such ready wit that she was the real centre of her literary coterie and gave little, if any, outward evidence of that immoral and dissolute character ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Do you wish me to guess his length?" she asked, evidently surprised that he should fetch her so commonplace an object. "I ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... job,—all the files of all the papers I could get,—and I'm almost ready to believe that much news which the papers publish has got realer facts up its sleeve: that the news is only the shadow of the facts. I'd like to get at the Why of the day's news. Do you remember Sherlock Holmes's 'commonplace' divorce suit, where the real cause was that the husband used to remove his front teeth and hurl 'em at the wife whenever her breakfast-table conversation wasn't sprightly enough to suit him? Once out of a hundred times, I suppose, the everyday processes of our courts hide something picturesque ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... upon her right to a voice in the ultimate settlement and an initiative from the Western Hemisphere that will lead to a world congress. There are the two most hopeful sources of that great proposal. It is the tradition of British national conduct to be commonplace to the pitch of dullness, and all the stifled intelligence of Great Britain will beat in vain against the national passion for the ordinary. Britain, in the guise of Sir Edward Grey, will come to the congress ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the gilt headdress, the black hair and the pale disturbing smile. She seemed to have paused in a slow graceful walk, waiting, with that wisdom at once satirical and tender, for him. Together, slowly, deliberately, they would move away from the known, the commonplace, the bound, into the unknown—dark gardens and white marble and the murmur of an ultramarine sea. He was rudely disturbed by the entrance of Anette and Peyton Morris. "We're so sorry," Anette said in an exaggerated ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... were still prepared to join in pursuit, following the track of reason wherever it might lead, as became the traditions of this classic building, which I sometimes think of as reason's last lair. I perceived that what you demanded was not panegyric, or immutable commonplace, but, above all things, sincerity. And sincerity is a dog with nose to the ground, uncertain of the trail, often losing the scent, often harking back, but possessed by an honest determination to hunt down the truth, if by any means it can ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These little gardens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought out our dead. Why should they be commonplace? Why should they be absurd? Why should it be grotesque to say that a pillar-box is poetic when for a year I could not see a red pillar-box against the yellow evening in a certain street without being wracked with something ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them we owe, however, these noble ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... The moralists, who utter their heathenish oracles in the commonplace complaints of a heathenish discontent, tell us, that we are born but to pursue, and pursue but to be deceived. They say, that man in his career after earthly honours, is like the child that chases the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Shall one mount the Acropolis or enter the market place? Worship in the temple of the Virgin Athena, or descend to the Agora and the roar of its getters and spenders? For Athens has two faces—toward the ideal, toward the commonplace. Who can regard both at once? Let the Acropolis, its sculptures, its landscape, wait. It has waited for men three thousand years. And ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... religious life and thought in his day were unquestionably the Pharisees. The controlling idea with them, and consequently with the people, was the sanctity of God's law. They were conscious of the sinfulness of the people, and their demand for repentance was constant. It is a rabbinic commonplace that the delay of the Messiah's coming is due to lack of repentance in Israel. But near as this conception is to John's, we need but to recall his words to the Pharisees (Matt. iii. 7) to realize how clearly he saw through the hollowness of their religious ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... absurdly you talk!" interrupted her husband. "You know well that without that my act would be commonplace, that no manager would want either it or me. And how, pray, should we live if ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... says that he is destined to a brilliant career. He is a manly, honourable, truthful little fellow. Faith Meredith is a beauty, and as inspiring and original as she is beautiful. There is nothing commonplace about her. All the other girls in the Glen put together haven't the vim, and wit, and joyousness and 'spunk' she has. She has not an enemy in the world. Every one who knows her loves her. Of how many, children or grown-ups, can ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and all visions dear To eastern poets of a watered land Are made the commonplace of nature here, Sweet rivers always full, and always bland. Beautiful, beautiful! What runlets clear Twinkle among the grass. On every hand Fall in the common talk from lips around The old names of old ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... disposition of mouldings, require some skill and thought; and, if they are to be agreeable at all, must be verily invented, or accurately copied. They cannot be drawn altogether at random, without becoming so commonplace as to involve detection: and although, as I have just said, the noblest imagination may be shown in the dispositions of traceries, there is far more room for its play and power when those traceries are associated ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... as self-reliant. "I'm going to set about living in earnest, as she has; though I think it will be harder for me than for her, because she stands alone and has a career marked out for her. I'm nothing but a commonplace sort of girl, with no end of relations to be consulted every time I wink and a dreadful fortune hanging like a millstone round my neck to weigh me down if I try to fly. It is a hard case, Uncle, and I get low in my mind when I think about it," sighed Rose, oppressed ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... "The commonplace injustice of a by-word," Otto cried. "The partiality of sex. She is a demirep; what then is Gondremark? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found again in chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in the account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that the incident now before us may be the same as this, but there is nothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in the repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaic polemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of the blinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregone conclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with 'the prince of the devils'! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... love, you would be disappointed. A man might seem a marvel of eloquence and wisdom to poor Theodore, while you would find him a very commonplace, perhaps obtrusive individual." ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... a freedom from commonplace, and a power to hold the interest to the close, which is owing, not to a trivial ingenuity, but to the spell which her personages cast over the reader's mind as soon as they come within his ...
— A Likely Story • William Dean Howells
... patted her hair awkwardly, but kept on talking in her matter-of-fact manner, looking at me sternly as though defying me to show, by look or word, any consciousness of anything unusual in the situation; and we fell at once, she and I, into a commonplace conversation about the incidents of the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... block, beheld his charming companion disappear. To say he was surprised were inexact, for he had long since left that sentiment behind him. Acute disgust and disappointment seized upon his soul; and with silent oaths, he damned this commonplace enchantress. She had scarce been gone a second, ere the swing-doors reopened, and she appeared again in company with a young man of mean and slouching attire. For some five or six exchanges they conversed together with an animated air; ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... has told you that for me it would be a rather quiet, rather commonplace marriage. Oh, naughty sister! Will you believe it, Richard, that I can not get this fear out of her head? She does not understand that, before everything, I wish to love and be loved; will you believe it, Richard, that only last week ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Lewis, now describes in a painfully commonplace manner the knight's further adventures. He and his guide wandered round and round and high and low in the maze of chambers within the castle, until at last a door of brass, whose bolt was a venomous snake, gave ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... later symphonies and operas show us the man at his best. His piano works and early operas show the effect of the "virtuoso" style, with all its empty concessions to technical display and commonplace, ear-catching melody ... He possessed a certain simple charm of expression which, in its directness, has an element of pathos lacking in the comparatively jolly ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... turned so scarlet that Lady Grenville knew her secret on the spot, and would have tried to turn the conversation: but before she could speak, some burgher's wife blundered out a commonplace about the jealousy of Spanish husbands; and another, to make matters better, giggled out something more true than delicate about West Indian masters ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... always a little uneasy in her presence. He felt not only that she was analyzing him, but that the results of the analysis seemed to her to be a very small residuum, of solid matter. Besides, he had been told that she had described him as a "commonplace young man," a thing nobody could ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... one through wildernesses of beauty, after whirling one past nooks where one could gladly linger whole summers, it is strange at what commonplace and graceless termini these railroads contrive to land one. Lovely Wells River, where the road makes its sharp angle, and runs back again until it strikes out eastward through the valley of the Ammonoosuc; where the waters leap to each other, and the hills bend round in majestic ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... sacrifice herself—and her best self; that is, her truthfulness—to save her cause; but only that; she would not buy her life at that cost; whereas our war-ethics permitted the purchase of our lives, or any mere military advantage, small or great, by deception. Her saying seemed a commonplace at the time, the essence of its meaning escaping us; but one sees now that it contained a principle which lifted it above that and made it great ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... phantom! A man's footsteps. A magnetic, deflecting, invisible cloak. You couldn't fool an audience with that, it's too commonplace. If Rance Rankin tried—" ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was truthfully described as a serious family. ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... the regularised life appeared to me, the life that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education, not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to dead and commonplace formulae. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... else." Val accepted one, and in default of a match Lawrence made him light it from his own. He was entirely at his ease, though the situation struck him as bizarre, but he did not believe that Val was at ease, no, not for all his natural manner and fertility in commonplace. Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had forgotten and never would forget. He had an excellent memory, photographic and phonographic, a gift that wise ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... through the loom, softening the light on the happy faces—each scalp crowned with chaplets of laurel tied with red ribbons: an enchantment of color, form and light where but an hour before only the practical and the commonplace had held sway. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which glorifies the poet of Pompilia." Festus, Michal's husband, the friend and adviser of Paracelsus, is a man of simple nature and thoughtful mind, cautious yet not cold, clear-sighted rather than far-seeing, yet not without enthusiasm; perhaps a little narrow and commonplace, as the prudent are apt to be. He, like Michal, has no influence on the external action of the poem. Aprile, the Italian poet whom Paracelsus encounters in the second scene, is an integral part of the poem; for it is through him that a crisis is reached in the development of the seeker ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... be easy enough," thought Mr Croft, "for me to say something about my being suddenly obliged to go away, and then notice its effect upon her. But, apart from the fact that I would not do anything so vulgar and commonplace, it would not advantage me in the slightest degree. She would see through the flimsiness of my purpose, and, no matter how she looked upon me, would show nothing but a well-bred regret that I should be obliged to go away at such a pleasant season." "I think the hour for ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... the size of the main building by depriving it of its top story and substituting a dwarfish parapet for what had once been its eight gables. The interior suffered at his hands to an even greater extent. A hall with a minstrels' gallery was turned by him into several rooms as commonplace as it is possible to imagine. Indeed little of special interest survived him but some fine Italian ceilings, the most curious of which exists no longer, a paneled dining-room of the reign of William and ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Frenchwomen of their class) affluent during the long period of the war, but they order men about, and they are further upheld with the thought that they are helping their beloved France to conquer the enemy. They live on another plane, and life is apt to seem very mean and commonplace under the ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... who should have come third among the ten, did she omit, the one in the next room, but at the end, after a pause, she said her name and repeated it again and again and again, lingering over it as if it were the most exquisite music and this her dying song. And yet it was a very commonplace name. ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... but after dinner the landlord, on the plea that the house was partly under repair, requested permission that a stranger might take a chop in the apartment, at a separate table. The company gave the required permission; and the stranger, a man of commonplace aspect, was brought in, ate his chop in silence, and then fell asleep—snoring so loudly and discordantly that the conversation could with difficulty be prosecuted. Some gentleman of the party made a noise; and the stranger, starting ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... I was to carry out the same programme, once more I hesitated. I could obtain very little precise information as to the real difficulties, if any, that beset the way, but everyone agreed that it was not at all a commonplace journey—in other words, not a very easy one. The long drive across the solitary Causse to St. Eminie or Florac, the four relays of boatmen necessary for the descent of the Tarn, the doubtfulness of the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... sense, was superficially acquainted with the ancients, and was somewhat more familiar with the moderns, thought himself provided with a standard scale which he could everywhere apply. Madame Boehme was an educated woman, who opposed the trivial, weak, and commonplace: she was, besides, the wife of a man who lived on bad terms with poetry in general, and would not even allow that of which she perhaps might have somewhat approved. She listened, indeed, for some time with patience, when I ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... been led to suspect, and which only make a passing and momentary mark. Bossuet's talk of universal history, which has been so constantly praised, was fundamentally, and in substance, no more than a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... The horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in an affair not altogether reputable, and for many years afterwards he clung bravely to the commonplace, and rejected all occasions of occult investigation. Indeed, on some homeopathic principle, he for some time attended the seances of distinguished mediums, hoping that the clumsy tricks of these gentlemen would make him altogether ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... in the commonplace tone of the tea table. "I want to apologize for my fit of temper, Mr. Secretary. I was very stupid and I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself. You may ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... off at work somewhere, —I will not say "earning money," for they do that as it is in such great monasteries as that of Kieff, but lightening the burden of the peasants, impossible as that is under present conditions, or making themselves of some commonplace, practical use ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... unbridled violence and moral degradation which are continually made known by the press, not merely to those who attend the new jury courts established in the present reign, but to every one. And what do we read almost daily? Of things beside which the present case grows pale, and seems almost commonplace. But what is most important is that the majority of our national crimes of violence bear witness to a widespread evil, now so general among us that it is difficult ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... mountains grouped about San Gorgonio, the real value of the inheritance he had received from his mother was to be tested. On the pine-fringed ridge of the Galenas, among those granite cliffs and jagged peaks, the mettle of his manhood was to be tried under a strain such as few men in this commonplace work-a-day old world are-subjected to. But the young man ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... narrative style which may be very far from nature. People in books very seldom talk as they do in real life. When people in books begin to talk like human beings the reader thinks the dialogue either commonplace or mildly realistic, and votes ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... all necessary to our time. We ought to be rapidly outgrowing warfare; isn't that the obvious next step in civilisation? It seems a commonplace that everyone should look to that end, and strive for it. Yet we're going back—there's a military reaction—fighting is glorified by everyone who has a loud voice, and in no country more than in England. I wish you could hear a Russian friend of mine ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... feel tired—terribly tired; but she wouldn't have admitted it, for fear of being asked the reason. Did mother, perhaps, know? Missy had a teasing sense that, under the placid, commonplace conversation, there was something unspoken. A curious and uncomfortable feeling. But, then, as one ascertains increasingly with every year one lives, Life is filled with curious and often uncomfortable feelings. Which, however, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Government," and that "to attempt class drill on petty town and county offices, would be simply burlesque of the whole subject." But, suppose one were to say, with an air of ineffable scorn, that petty experiments on terrestrial gravitation and radiant heat, such as can be made with commonplace pendulums and tea-kettles, have nothing whatever to do with the grand and noble subject of Physical Astronomy! Science would not have got very far on that plan, I fancy. The truth is, that science, ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... such an original way of speaking," he said, somewhat abashed by her sudden demand. "I mean—that—that what you say sounds different from what one would naturally expect. Not ordinary, not commonplace; I hardly know how to express it. Really, you ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of AEsop, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and later the tragic poets, were read, and partly learned by heart. The orators borrowed from them often the ornament of their commonplace remarks. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... of any motive. They reasoned, with perfect logic, that it was almost if not quite as improbable that the defendant should in broad daylight on a public street have shot down a man against whom he had not the slightest grudge as that twenty commonplace citizens should be mistaken as to what they had seen. Whether they were aided in reaching a verdict by "the implements of decision" I do not know, but in the end they found my client guilty and in due course he paid the penalty, as ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... dull party on the whole, for nobody could help feeling that the count and his daughter were absolute strangers to each other, or that our presence was a little awkward at the time. It was ridiculous to try to talk commonplace. It felt brutal and unsympathetic to sit in silence, and almost equally brutal and unsympathetic to say a word of what was nearest to all our hearts. But if we had been embarrassed on the journey, all our memory of it ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... There is a commonplace beauty about "Orchard House"—a kind of spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness—a kind of common triad of the New England homestead, whose overtones tell us that there must have ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... foolish opprobrious nicknames. Henderson was a good officer, he has shown himself an excellent son, always sacrificing his own predilections for the sake of duty. He is a right-minded, religious, sensible man, his own master, and with no connections to take umbrage at Miss White's position. It is no commonplace man who knows how to honour her for it. Nothing could be a happier fate for her; and you will be no friend to her if you use any foolish terms of disparagement of him because he does not happen to please ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... various inventions which he had ever seen, or had ever passed in his mind. These ideas are infused into his design, without any conscious effort; but if he be not on his guard, he may reconsider and correct them, till the whole matter is reduced to a commonplace invention. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... he has a saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven. Essentially he is to be numbered among the man- haters, a convinced contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition and greedy of applause. In talk, he is remarkable for a thirst of information, loving rather to hear than to communicate; for sound and studious views; and, judging by the extreme short-sightedness of common politicians, for a remarkable provision of events. All this, however, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Von Rabenau wrote also "Hans Kiekindiewelts Reise" (Leipzig, 1794), which Ebeling (III, p.623) condemns as "the most commonplace imitation of the most ordinary kind of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... resting upon both, as sculptors who know something of their art have occasionally set the figure. It is obvious that the body is leaning forward more than one-third of a cubit, which alone is the greatest and most insupportable fault committed by vulgar commonplace pretenders. Concerning the arms, they say that these are both stretched out without one touch of grace or one real spark of artistic talents, just as if you had never seen a naked model. Again, the right leg of Hercules and that of Cacus have got one mass ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... abroad over the universe of misery. For was not the world full of men and women who groaned, not merely under poverty and cruelty, weakness and sickness, but under dullness and stupidity, hugged in the paralyzing arms of that devil-fish, The Commonplace, or held fast to the rocks by the crab Custom, while the tide of moral indifference was fast rising to choke them? Was there no prophet, no redemption, no mediator for such as these? Were there not thousands of women, born with a trembling impulse towards the true and lovely, in whom it was withering ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of divination or intuition. I think I have rather a commonplace, careful, painstaking mind. But if ever I had an inspiration in my life I think I have one now. Perhaps it is the novelty of it that makes me confide in it with so little reflection. My inspiration, in a ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... has retained the name ever since. The statue of his wife, interred beside his own, is unfortunately mutilated. It is a mere trunk, without legs or arms (fig. 192); yet enough remains to show that the figure represented a good type of the Egyptian middle-class matron, commonplace in appearance and somewhat acid of temper. The "Kneeling Scribe" of the Gizeh collection (fig. 193) belongs to the lowest middle-class rank, such as it is at the present day. Had he not been dead more than six thousand years, I could protest that I had not ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... family had not yet retired, it would not be safe to commence operations for some hours. The stale, commonplace method of tying the sheets and blankets together, and thus forming a rope by which he could descend to the ground, occurred to him; but he had not much confidence in the project. He lay quietly on the bed till he heard the clocks on ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... of Nature Study; General Methods 13 Concrete Material 15 Topics and material must suit the season; matter suited to the child; use of the commonplace; order of development of lesson; problems in observation; ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... to the question ordinary and extraordinary So much a lover that love imposed silence on ambition The last thing I should desire would be to be as dead as he To draw back was to acknowledge one's guilt Too commonplace ever to arrive at a high position Vanity and self-satisfaction Very clear-sighted we can be about things that don't touch us Without fear of being called ...
— Quotes and Images From "Celebrated Crimes" • Alexander Dumas, Pere
... deck, was but a step, and Tom Haggin made it easily with Jerry still under his arm. The deck was cluttered with an exciting crowd. Exciting the crowd would have been to untravelled humans of civilization, and exciting it was to Jerry; although to Tom Haggin and Captain Van Horn it was a mere commonplace of everyday life. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... showed her to the best advantage. Beautiful she could never be, and had sense enough to know it; but a charming, distinguished-looking woman she had already become. Also, she was on the high road to becoming a vain, egotistical, commonplace woman. ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... although it was a novelty to do so in those days, and he made the draperies, garments, and other things somewhat more life-like, natural, and soft than the Greeks had done, who had taught one another a rough, awkward, and commonplace style for a great number of years, not by means of study but as a matter of custom, without ever dreaming of improving their designs by beauty of colouring or by any ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... reasoner may occasionally be deceived. He was likely, I thought, to fall into error through the over-refinement of his logic,—his preference for a subtle and bizarre explanation when a plainer and more commonplace one lay ready to his hand. Yet, on the other hand, I had myself seen the evidence, and I had heard the reasons for his deductions. When I looked back on the long chain of curious circumstances, many of them trivial in themselves, but all tending in the same direction, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was the fascination of the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and forbidding as was its general aspect, nothing could now have induced me to turn back. Instinct told me that I was about to enter into no commonplace experience. And so, unresisting, I was borne along in the swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before Springer's a great arm of this human ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... were lovely, innocent eyes; and oh! it was a sweet, sweet mouth! But the eyes never wavered, and the mouth had no trace of weakness in its dainty curves. You have reckoned without your host, John Arthur. It is no commonplace school-girl with whom you have to deal. Madeline Payne possesses a nature all untried, yet strong for good or evil. Intense in love or hate, fearless to do and dare, she will meet the fate you bring upon her—but woe to those who have compassed her downfall! If your hand has shaped the destiny ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... was drawing on as they walked across the lawn, from which the russet glow of the sunset had almost faded; the commonplace villa before them was tinted with violet, and in the west the hedges and trees formed an intricate silhouette against a background of ruddy gold and pale lemon; one or two flamingo-coloured clouds ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... to be married—fades one's ribbons and makes one look old. An espousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy. A woman handed over to you by a notary, how commonplace! The brutality of marriage creates definite situations; suppresses the will; kills choice; has a syntax, like grammar; replaces inspiration by orthography; makes a dictation of love; disperses all life's mysteries; diminishes the rights both of sovereign and subject; ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... his house, 'as relics are shown,' reclining on embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by kneeling attendants. More often, however, the old Florentines speak on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and characterized well the vulgarity and commonplace which marked the ambition of the new princes. 'What else mean their trumpets and their bells, their horns and their flutes, but "come, hangmen come, vultures!"' The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is lofty and ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... had seen the sabre cut of pain which had followed his thought of the girl and what she might have meant, knowing nothing of that grim tragedy. Now she saw his eyes clear as with their inspired light they were lifted to her. Yet the talk went on uninterruptedly on the same commonplace level. ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... pleasanter here," cried; Kitty, as she moved about the parlor, transforming the commonplace aspect of the room. "And it is cheap, too. I thought Frau Tisch would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... act as though nothing had happened at all—she knew this was what he wanted now, what he was silently begging her to be for his sake, for the family's sake. For he had been raised in New England. And so, when she turned back to him, her voice was flat and commonplace. ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... race they are, the proud poppies, lords of the July field, taking no deep root, but raising up a brilliant blazon of scarlet heraldry out of nothing. They are useless, they are bitter, they are allied to sleep and poison and everlasting night; yet they are forgiven because they are not commonplace. Nothing, no abundance of them, can ever make the poppies commonplace. There is genius in them, the genius of colour, and they are saved. Even when they take the room of the corn we must admire them. The mighty multitude of nations, the millions ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... in a poem should be charged with feeling; but actually this is not the case, for many words, taken by themselves, are too abstract or commonplace to possess any. Words all too familiar, or connectives, like "and" and "but" and "or," are examples of this; the former may be avoided by the poet, but the latter are indispensable. Originally, no doubt, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... been anticipating groundfall within a matter of hours, certainly. He'd just gone through his specbook carefully and re-familiarized himself with the work he was to survey on Xosa II. It was a perfectly commonplace minerals-planet development, and he'd expected to clear it FE—fully established—and probably TP and NQ ratings as well, indicating that tourists were permitted and no quarantine was necessary. Considering the aridity of the planet, no bacteriological dangers could ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... theme, a subject neither too new nor too old, neither too commonplace or too original,—so as to avoid shocking either the vulgar-minded ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... persons the importance of some study of the elements of philosophy is very great. They can hardly go through an elementary course of mental science without wishing to learn more, and being lifted to a higher plane. The weak point in the average person is a tendency to sink into the commonplace, because the consciousness of not being brilliant induces timidity, and timidity leads to giving up effort and accepting a fancied impossibility of development which from being supposed, assumed, and not disturbed, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... large) a Navajo rag rug for the floor of the room you intend to furnish as Ralph's den, in the home you are planning. Well, my dear, a wooden crochet hook in your deft fingers will be the magic wand which will perform a miracle and transform into Navajo blankets such very commonplace articles as your discarded gray eiderdown kimona, and a pair of your Uncle's old gray trousers, which have already been washed and ripped by Sibylla, to be used for making carpet rags. These, combined with the gray skirt I heard you ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... President, standing with several persons, the center of a group. The announcement and presentation were made by an officer in full uniform, and beyond this there was no formality, indeed, an abundance of republican simplicity; only the uniforms saved it from the commonplace. ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... strange, passionate instinct of unanimity prevailed. To all appearance it was a gathering of commonplace, commercialised and bourgeois, easy-living men, but the touch of the spirit was there. Fischer leaned a ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said,' Miss Jenrys replied, 'that the detective fever is contagious, and I feel now as if I must have this little mystery unravelled. I dare say it will end in something stupid and commonplace. Still, let us unravel it if possible. What ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... at the telephone. Her voice, hard and incisive, kept talking, stopping, talking again, repeating it to friend after friend, and making it hard, abrupt and real, stripping it of its mystery, making it naked and commonplace, like a newspaper item—Amy's death. ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... large share of preferment to their families, that at least was a domestic virtue. Some of them, Bishop Barrington of Durham, for example, took a lead in philanthropic movements; and, if considered simply as prosperous country-gentlemen, little fault could be found with them. While, however, every commonplace motive pointed so directly towards a career of subserviency to the ruling class among the laity, it could not be expected that they should take a lofty view of their profession. The Anglican clergy were not like ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... constantly overstrained. The author is always the author, and he communicates the defect to his personages. His Julie argues and descants for twenty successive pages on dueling, on love, on duty, with a logical completeness, a talent and phrases that would do honor to an academical moralist. Commonplace exists everywhere, general themes, a raking fire of abstractions and arguments, that is to say, truths more or less empty and paradoxes more or less hollow. The smallest detail of fact, an anecdote, a trait of habit, would suit us much better, and hence we of to day prefer the precise eloquence ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... either side of Miss Kingsley, and I glanced from the one to the other, debating with myself whether I preferred the bold strong beauty of the artist, or the subtile and more delicate traits of feature of the philosopher. For though I had begun by regarding Mr. Spence almost as commonplace in appearance, the earnestness of his manner and the serious fervor of his eyes gave him an expression of having a deep and genuine belief in his own theories, which when compared with the impetuous but more volatile air of Paul Barr commended him to my respect and ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... universal life, and will express itself again in some higher and better form. To think of God in this way is an inspiration and a help in the doing of the humblest tasks. It redeems life from the dominion of the sordid and commonplace. It supplies an incentive to endeavour, and fills the heart with hope and confidence. To put it in homely, everyday phraseology, God is getting at something and we must help Him. We must be His eyes and hands and feet; we must be ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... everyday to stand upon these pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But having once stood there, how can we forget the station? How can we fail, amid the tumult of our common cares, to feel at times the hush of that far-off tranquillity? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill or weary in city streets, we can remember the clouds upon the mountains we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of countless flowers. A photograph of Bisson's or of Braun's, the name of some well-known valley, the picture of some ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... modest, and made a date with me when he would take me to see the President and Gen. Sherman. At the time appointed we went, first to the White House, where we met the President. I shook hands with him, and after a few commonplace remarks, retired to the background. The President and Plumb talked a minute or two about some public matter, and then we left. "Now," said Plumb, "we'll go and see 'Uncle Billy'." Sherman was then the General ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... like America?" said the elder, with commonplace indifference, as he crunched a lump of sugar in the bottom of the glass, dissolving the particles with a few ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... other tasks which are ordinarily done either by automatic machinery or by highly skilled specialists in labor—for these two, thrown upon their own resources, had long since learned how much specialization may be represented by the most commonplace article. Whenever they needed a thing they did not have—which happened every day—they had either to make it or else, failing in that, to go back and build something that would enable them to manufacture the required item. Such setbacks had become so numerous as to be expected as part ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... blushed, another omen which means comparatively little to a man who is aware of the thousand emotions that are responsible for the blush of woman. I was again annoyed by the discovery that my pulses were not beating wildly, and that my heart was not throbbing tumultuously, and when I addressed a commonplace remark to her I was thoroughly ashamed and humiliated. It seemed like taking a mean ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... what was involved in their toils and sacrifices, no one ever seemed to care for them or sympathize with them. The men who received these hospitalities were rated as the heroes, while what these women did or suffered was counted of little worth, or certainly only as commonplace; yet they were the greater heroes by far, if for no other reason, yet, because their labors were even harder than the labors of others, and quite as essential to results, and wholly without compensation—even ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me—this drug of Dr. Dale's helping—has been the great release of my life. It crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... had we started when a chilling process commenced. The man erstwhile so effusive was silent, cold, impassive,—a marble statue of his former self. I scarcely got three sentences out of him during the journey, and these were of the most commonplace kind. Could ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... Laverick continued, "I was an honest but not very successful stockbroker, with a natural longing for adventures which never came my way. Since then things have altered. I have stumbled in upon the most curious little chain of happenings which ever became entwined with the life of a commonplace being like myself. The net result, for the moment, is this. Every one is trying to steal from me a certain document which I have in my pocket. I want to hide it for the night. I cannot go to the police, it is too late to go back to Chancery ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... on perhaps it will be the faces of the dead and wounded that will live most clearly in the memory, but at present the pictures of the Belgian soldier which stand out sharpest are less lugubrious and more commonplace. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... of bread is surely a sufficiently commonplace operation. Yet Jesus brake bread with his disciples in such way that that simple act has become the symbol of sublimely spiritual relations, the centre of the most august rite of the Christian Church. In like manner the act of sitting down to an ordinary ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... and they studied every book that came within reach. Themselves they knew well: the world, through books only. This probably accounts for the weird and even morbid character of much of their work. Their vivid imaginations, unchecked by experience, in a commonplace world were allowed free play, and as a result we find some of the most original creations in ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... apparent coolness brought him back with a shock to the commonplace. He almost shuddered. It was like a gust of icy wind piercing a ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... obstacle to the understanding of their hearts, became the common ground for mutual thoughts. But after a while the many looks in which their eyes encountered each other warned Marie de Verneuil that the silence was compromising her, and she turned to Madame du Gua with one of those commonplace remarks which open the way to conversation; but even in so doing she ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... Nights' serves admirably as a foil to the absolute realism of the picture in general. We enjoy being carried away from trivial and commonplace characters, scenes, and incidents; from the matter-of-fact surroundings of a workaday world, a life of eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, fighting and loving, into a society and a mise-en-scene which we suspect can ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... pall-bearers for the present and future, proxy-livers of life and vicarious sensualists that they are in a eunuch sort of way, insist, since their own selves, environments, and narrow agitations of the quick are mediocre and commonplace, that no man or woman can rise above the ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... the captain. "Let me see if I can remember some of them." And then he knit his brows and tapped his head, and repeated some very commonplace ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... almost unbearable pause that followed was broken by a commonplace remark, and the conversation kept in that vein by mutual consent. For, when the inner life is throbbing fast and strong, intimate expression becomes impossible. And above these two men, chatting about the trivial ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... became minister of Athelstaneford, Haddingtonshire. His sole work was The Grave, a poem in blank verse extending to 767 lines of very various merit, in some passages rising to great sublimity, and in others sinking to commonplace. It was illustrated by William Blake (q.v.) B.'s s., Robert, was a very distinguished Scottish judge and Lord President of the Court of Session; and his successor in his ministerial charge was Home, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... he lets the light breeze blow over him. I like to look on that good citizen and contrast the dull round of his wayfarings on many streets with the ease and satisfaction of his attitude on the sands. Then the night comes. The dancers are busy, the commonplace music is made refined by distance, and the murmur of the sea gathers power over all other sounds, until the noon of night arrives and the last merry voices are heard no more. Poor harmless revellers, so condemned by men whose round of life is a search for pleasure! Many of you do not understand ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... said Ulick O'More, who was playing with the little Awk in the window, 'that the feminine mind loves expedients? It would be less commonplace to confide the parcel to the conductor, than merely let him receive it as guard of the mail bag and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which is my plan at the school-house, dug themselves out. They hobbled cautiously over the snow, sometimes sinking into it to their knees, when they stood still and slowly took in the situation. It had been snowing more or less for a week, but in a commonplace kind of way, and they had gone to bed thinking all was well. This night the snow must have fallen as if the heavens had opened up, determined to shake themselves free of it ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... she said, and as she spoke there came the noise of shouting, singing and trampling feet outside. The poet dropped in a moment from the dizzy pinnacle of dreamland to the calm valley of a commonplace world. ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and its triumphs, are a singular school of experience. The various impacts upon man's psychological anatomy produce strange results. They seem like the blows of some Invisible Sculptor, producing out of commonplace material a hero and it may be a demi-god. The opening orchestra of shot and shell braces up the mind of the soldier and attunes it up to receive new sensitiveness. The bullets play strange dirges on the strings of life before ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... Luke ix, 62. Keep your eye on the mark, just as the ploughman looks at the staff he has fixed as his guide. Keep looking unto Jesus. Many a preacher, who could make hell tremble for its own, has, by looking back, become respectably commonplace. So the fine promise of his youth dies ignobly, and is laid in the grave of Demas! Whether it be a bag of gold, or a fair face, or a pillow of down, thou art called to look back upon, do as the Master ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... on him. I must not complain," she thought, and yet a certain regret darkened her face. "All that was so sweet and fine has passed out of our intercourse," she sadly admitted to herself. "I am no longer even the great actress to him. Once he worshipped me—I felt it; now I am a commonplace friend. Is the fault in me? Am I one whom familiarity ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... had all left the sky, save blue and silver-gray, and the sun was a commonplace, dazzling ball of yellow. Charming Billy Boyle, his hat set back upon his head at a most eloquent angle, led Barney from the creek up to the stable. His eyes were alight and his brow was unwrinkled. His lips had quite lost their bitter lines, and once more ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... incense, are such simple and obvious procedures that any people might adopt them without prompting or contact of any kind with other populations who do the same sort of things. But if such apparently commonplace acts be investigated they will be found to have a long and complex history. None of these things that seem so obvious to us was attempted until a multitude of diverse circumstances became focussed in some particular community, and constrained some individual to make the discovery. Nor did ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... relation of our distinguished contemporary) was a commonplace, meritorious person, with much blameless and intelligent conversation; but the only thing that recalls him personally to my memory is the fact of his being associated with a furious thunder-storm. My father and I were alone in the house at the time; my mother had gone to West ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... universities. Some of these Fathers were educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet ...
— Progress and History • Various
... has not felt the shadow's influence in dealing with such as have the Spark? Napoleon spoke of stars, being Corsican and a mystic. Those who met him in his last days were uneasily conscious that the second Bonaparte had died on the eve of Waterloo, leaving derelict his brother, a stout and commonplace man who was in turn sycophantic, choleric, and ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... of the other men was sufficiently commonplace; they were such persons as one meets and forgets that he met. All were younger than the man described, between whom and the eldest of the others, who stood apart, there was apparently no kindly feeling. They avoided looking at ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... foolish question. I do not even use my title there. But I intend to make Vienna the capital of a great and powerful Republic, and I therefore ask you to renounce, before it is too late, this commonplace and unworthy dream of young love, and stand beside me. Youth—real youth—and the best years of maturity are the seasons for love. You and I have sterner duties. Do you suppose that I would sacrifice Austria for some brief wild hope of human happiness? And you are only two years ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
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