"Prosaical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quicksand and hence sundry secondary and metaphorical significations, under which, as in the "Semitic" (Arabic) tongues generally, the prosaical and material sense of the word is clearly evident. I noted this in Pilgrimage iii. 66 and was soundly abused for so saying by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... modern cants, one of the most mistaken is the cant about the 'mission of genius,' the 'mission of the poet.' Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed kings of mankind—at least, so the little poets sing, each to his little fiddle. There is no greater mistake. It is the practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and moralise on dead asses, till he ends ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... amusing; poetical, but comprehensive; prosaical, but full of emphasis. That's my nature. Plain-dealing, too, is my nature, and I adore the same quality in others; most especially in those I could ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... under the trees, they began their return to the house, Bettina felt that her sense of adventure had altered its character. She was still in the midst of a remarkable sort of exploit, which might end anywhere or in anything, but it had become at once more prosaic in detail and more intense in its significance. What its significance might prove likely to be when she faced it, she had not known, it is true. But this was different from—from anything. As they walked up the sun-dappled avenue she kept glancing aside ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... they walked, or stood before the doors straight and silent as figures of stone, causing one to conjure up romantic visions of guarded forts, sudden surprises, and daring deeds; for in these war times the humdrum life of Yankeedom has vanished, and the most prosaic feel some thrill of that excitement which stirs the Nation's heart, and makes its capital a camp of hospitals. Wandering up and down these lower halls I often heard cries from above, steps hurrying ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the girl and that of the young man, or some one who represents them, commence the more prosaic part of the business, that is: they decide upon the sort of presents that the bridegroom must give the parents and sisters of his spouse on the wedding-day, to compensate them for the girl ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... boatswain—loud, imperative, violently remonstrant, but swept under and swamped at moments by cries and volleys of foulest, Neapolitan argot from hoarse, Neapolitan throats. And that abruptly silenced orchestra?—Richard came back to himself, came back to actualities of environment and prosaic fact. An infinitely weariful despair seized him. For the sound that had reached so sudden a termination was not that of cunningly-attuned, musical instruments, but the long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal, pitched from the baskets down ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... en passant that many of the revived medieval words which sound so picturesque in Scott are of very prosaic origin. Thus ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... queer, frightening romance of 2 a.m. in Frinton had swept through his mind. Well, she had not the imposingness nor the mystery of Lady Massulam, nor perhaps the challenge of Lady Massulam; she was very much more prosaic to him. But still he admitted that she had an effect on him, that he reacted to her presence, that she was at any rate at least as incalculable as Lady Massulam, and that there might be bits of poetry gleaming in her prose, and that after a quarter of a century he had not arrived at a final ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... than introduced us, yet already I felt sure that I scented a romance behind the ordinarily prosaic conduct ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... present, since I purpose hereafter to give numerous examples of this kind of ideal landscape. Of true and noble landscape, as such, I am aware of no instances except where least they might have been expected, among the sea-bred Venetians. Ghirlandajo shows keen, though prosaic, sense of nature in that view of Venice behind an Adoration of Magi in the Uffizii, but he at last walled himself up among gilded entablatures. Masaccio indeed has given one grand example in the fresco of the Tribute Money, but its color ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... quite imperceptible where we stand, will be dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and commonplaceness of the prosaic plain. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... (color) and music,—analogies often hinted at, but never, that we are aware, fully followed out. Color bears the same relation to form that sound does to language. If a painter sit down before Nature and accurately match all her tints, we have an absolute but prosaic rendering of her; and the analogy to this in music would be found in a passage of ordinary conversational language written down, with its inflections and pauses recorded in musical signs. Both are transcripts of Nature, but neither is in any way poetic, or, strictly speaking, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the appreciative critic seeks a further beauty outside of the object, in his own reflections and fancies about it. But if we care greatly for the associations of literature, we Are in danger of disregarding its quality. A vast deal of pretty sentiment may hang about and all but transmute the most prosaic object. A sedan chair, an old screen, a sundial,—to quote only Austin Dobson,—need not be lovely in themselves to serve as pegs to hang a poem on; and all the atmosphere of the eighteenth century may be wafted from a jar ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... birds, insects, and vegetation we are surrounded by diversified life, and our life grows richer, more healthful and complete, as we enter into their life and comprehend it. The clouds above us are not mere reservoirs of water for prosaic use. In their light, shade, and exquisite coloring they are ever a reproach to the blindness ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her progresses, the people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The temper of the age in fact was changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... realise the personality of a man whose imagination could soar to the mystical and philosophical conception of "Seraphita," which is full of religious poetry, and who yet had the power in "Cesar Birotteau" to invest prosaic and even sordid details with absolute verisimilitude, or in the "Contes Drolatiques" would write, in Old French, stories of Rabelaisian breadth and humour. The only solution of these contradictions is that, partly perhaps by reason of great physical strength, certainly ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... and intrinsically superior to that of France, may readily be admitted; but this is not enough to account for all the circumstances of the case. It does not explain why some of the very passages in Corneille and Racine, which to us appear dull and prosaic, are to the Frenchman's apprehension instinct with poetic fervour. It does not explain the undoubted fact that we, who speak English, are prone to underrate French poetry, while we are equally disposed to render to German poetry even more than its due ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... resembles that agent of disruption in following a curiously wayward path. Curtis was piloted into an elevator by an affable negro, was conducted to 605, which, of course, lay on the sixth floor, and was plunged forthwith into the prosaic business of consigning a good deal of soiled linen ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... ones at Peking), as it had become plain that the very necessitous Huang had no other possession to contribute to the amount to be expended in coloured lights as a mark of public rejoicing on the occasion of the moonday of the sublime Emperor. The illiterate and prosaic-minded Huang, having in a most unseemly manner reviled and even assailed those who acted in the matter, has been effectively disposed of, and his wife now alternately laughs and shrieks in ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... for me! With my lady fair seated in front of me upon the speeding palfrey, my body between her and the bullets and lances and bludgeons of countless pursuers! Zounds! Odds blood! Gadzooks! and so forth! Not any of this stealing away in the night for me! Ah, me! How different we are in these prosaic days! But, even so, if I were you, the next time I undertake to run away with the valiant Mr. Lapelle I should see to it that he does his part in the good old-fashioned way. And I should not drag such loyal, honest folk as Striker and his wife into the ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... the noise and riot, may well have seemed demoniacal to simple people slightly "elevated," perhaps, by Christmas feasting, while the human nature of the maskers was not altogether forgotten.{71} Another theory of an even more prosaic character has been propounded—"that the Kallikantzaroi are nothing more than established nightmares, limited like indigestion to the twelve days of feasting. This view is |246| taken by Allatius, who says that a Kallikantzaros has all the characteristics of nightmare, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... shore of the sea. They rode through forests together, they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who do the most prosaic things. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of experimentation, when the proper material and limits of literary forms were being determined, oftentimes by means of false starts and grandiose failures. In particular, many efforts were made to give prolonged poetical treatment to many subjects essentially prosaic, for example to systems of theological or scientific thought, or to the geography of all England. 6. It continued to be largely influenced by the literature of Italy, and to a less degree by those of France and Spain. 7. The literary spirit was ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Prosaic as these journeys may seem, they are nevertheless the inspiration of my hopes, the feeders of my visions. It is at such times that I enjoy my glimpses of the lady I long to meet. I jostle gentle creatures at every step: feminine shapes and feminine tones are on every side presented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... talking it over at the Elliotts' one evening, "to-morrow I shall take Patty to New York to select the most important pieces of furniture. We shall go alone, because it is a very special occasion, and we can't allow ourselves to be hampered by outside advices. Another day we shall go to buy prosaic things like tablecloths and carpet-sweepers; and then, as we know little about such things, we shall be glad to take ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... and attract attention to his paper. Efforts to obtain a Grizzly by purchase and "fake" a story of his capture had proved fruitless for the sufficient reason that no captive Grizzly of the true California type could be found, and the enterprising journal was constrained to resort to the prosaic expedient of laying a foundation of fact and ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... World as far as the World was then known. If not, it is clear that recourse must be had to some other expedient. Instead then of the "candid acknowledgment" required of us by the learned writer, may we be allowed to suggest to him the more prosaic expedient (1st) of making sure that he quotes Scripture accurately; and (2nd) that he understands it?... It happens that St. Paul does not use the words "every nation under heaven" as Mr. Wilson ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... was decided upon as something to be worked out quite independent of Peter Masters and his millions. Perhaps because he had seen the vision which covered Christopher with shy confusion, Aymer became very prosaic and practical over the details, and Mr. Aston was the only one of the trio who gave any more thought to the boy's dream on its sentimental side. He used to sit in the evenings watching the two poring over maps, letters and guidebooks, thinking ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... 'whitewashing' method is probably not less paradoxical than the opposite system, it makes a stronger and wider appeal, inasmuch as it implies a more amiable attitude towards life, and is more consonant with a flattering conception of the possibilities of human nature. A prosaic narrative of established facts does not immediately recommend itself to the average man. Possibly few have existed who were so good and so great that they can afford to have the whole truth told about them. ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... will happen either to you or me. Wait a bit, I promise you a journey, the most prosaic, the most homely, the flattest—flat as the steppes of Kara Koum, which the Grand Transasiatic traverses in Turkestan, and the plains of the desert of Gobi it crosses ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... none of it. She haled him away to the brookside. There she showed him how to wash dishes by filling them half full of water in which fine gravel has been mixed, and then whirling the whole rapidly until the tin is rubbed quite clean. Never was prosaic task more delightful. They knelt side by side on the bank, under the dense leaves, and dabbled in the water happily. The ferns were fresh and cool. Once a redbird shot confidently down from above on half-closed ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... a start to find a Swiss waiter placing tea upon the table. He felt like rubbing his eyes. He had been dragged rudely back from the Syrian desert to the prosaic ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... to teach the lesson, that the Hollander taught, of not refusing to do the small things because the day of large things had not yet come or was in the past; of not waiting until the chance may come to distinguish ourselves in arms, and meanwhile neglecting the plain, prosaic duties of citizenship which call upon us every hour, every day of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... the application of this romance in real life. I must return to the more prosaic generalizations of conservation and its relation to the products of cultivation with which this ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... Hilda, with a smile. "You seem, from such circumstances, to have brought yourself to consider our very prosaic housekeeper as almost a princess in disguise. I, for my part, look upon her as a very common person, so weak-minded, to say the least, as to be almost half-witted. As to her accent, that is nothing. I dare say she has seen ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... of Leavenworth is clearly a pot-companion of the first (whiskey and) water. He declines to address his fellow-citizens in the commonplace terms usually recognised in more prosaic communities. To adopt his own style of phraseology, ROBERTSON is clearly a "gay and festive cuss." He is a specimen brick from Kansas, and doubtless always carries one in his hat. The expression "ordinary gait," as applied to driving in Kansas, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... no other way. The piece de resistance was ham and eggs, great fragrant crispy slices of ham browned faintly gold across their pinky surface, and eggs—Hitty knew where to get country eggs, too—so white, so golden-yolked, so tempting that it was difficult to associate them with the prosaic process of frying, but fried they were. With them were served boiled potatoes in their jackets,—no wash-day cook ever removed the peeling from an emergency potato,—and afterward a course of Hitty's famous huckleberry dumplings, the lightest, most ephemeral balls of dumplings that were ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... inheritors of all this; how, while making it more prosaic, they rendered it more practical and more effectually realized it. All this most visible in the Imperial period. The Roman ideal: (a) world-wide peace, (b) secured and maintained by a centralized system ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... eye glancing down on a far more thrilling scene than the green three-sided courtyard enclosed by a crumbling grey wall, though to him the buildings, the men, and every detail that filled the great space, were no doubt quite prosaic. It did not thrill him to see a man-at-arms cleaning weapons, when the man and his clothes, and even the sword, were as modern and everyday as the soldier's wife and child that we can see ourselves, but how much would we not give for a half-an-hour ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... for publication, of course; not even to show your dearest friend, but just for practice. Put in a troubadour if you like, or anything else a romantic imagination may suggest, and let them sing themselves hoarse in every scene. In this prosaic century you might not be able to write a stirring love song, but if you become thoroughly identified with the characters, your troubadour or your fair lady would be bound to get off something creditable. The plot of the drama ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... see little in it but a prosaic want of colour. This exceeding simplicity or economy is a stumbling-block to those who are accustomed to the expansive modern manner. Yet such a reader would have been making the acquaintance of some of the finest things in Greek literature, which is always at its greatest ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... believed? Victoria's state of mind was far more simple; untroubled by imaginative yearnings, she never lost herself in that nebulous region of the spirit where feeling and fancy grow confused. Her emotions, with all their intensity and all their exaggeration, retained the plain prosaic texture of everyday life. And it was fitting that her expression of them should be equally commonplace. She was, she told her Prime Minister, at the end of an official letter, "yours aff'ly V. R. and I." In such a phrase the deep reality of her feeling is instantly manifest. ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... until sold. They are far from impressive in this state and it takes both imagination and enthusiasm to inspect the assortment offered. Usually the roof and possibly one or two of the sides will be covered with prosaic roofing paper. The doors and windows will be securely boarded ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... not of mere date. Almost all the green is grave, not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a daily colour, in majestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, to inconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o'clock looks after ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... private aim in undertaking the Eastern Expedition, that of dazzling the imagination of the French people and of exhibiting the incapacity of the Directory, had been abundantly realized. His eastern enterprise had now shrunk to practical and prosaic dimensions, namely, the consolidation of French power in Egypt. Yet, as will appear in later chapters, he did not give up his oriental schemes; though at St. Helena he once oddly spoke of the Egyptian expedition as an "exhausted enterprise," ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... apropos of Chopin's "entirely new pianoforte life," "How uninteresting is the style of any previous master (excepting Beethoven) compared with his! What a litany of gone-by, dead-alive forms! What a feelingless, prosaic jingle! If anyone should, without a grimace, assure me sincerely that he can play pianoforte pieces by Clementi, Dussek, Hummel, and Ries, with real enjoyment even now, I will esteem him as an excellent ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... itself, and that kind of secondary reason or instinct which long familiarity with critical pursuits gives us, combine to suggest that, occurring in a corrupt text, they are probably corruptions; and corruptions in lieu of some very common and even prosaic phrases, such as the corrector substitutes for them, and such as no conjectural critic would ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... are now the servants of the oppressor. And yet the oppressors are few, and the fear of you is in their hearts. They feast in their great cities, but they see the writing on the wall, and their eyes are anxiously turning lest the enemy be at their gates.' I cannot hope in my prosaic words to reproduce that amazing discourse. Phrases which the hearers had heard at mission schools now suddenly appeared, not as the white man's learning, but as God's message to His own. Laputa fitted the key to the cipher, and the meaning was clear. He concluded, I remember, ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... but little. Believing in heredity in moderation I knew well how sea-life fashions a man outwardly and stamps his soul with the mark of a certain prosaic fitness—because a sailor is not an adventurer. I expressed no regret at missing Captain Anthony and we proceeded in silence till, on approaching the holiday cottage, Fyne suddenly and unexpectedly broke it by the hurried declaration that ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... master, and let them become steps in the development of a love-plot, and the novel—the novel of the last century, at any rate—is fully formed. As was the self-contented, and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought of the age, which produced the novel, such the novel itself continued to be. Man, comfortable and acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by a reflex of the life which he no longer aspired to transcend. He wanted to enjoy himself twice over—in ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... another silence. Trevor felt it would be almost an outrage to discuss so prosaic a topic as the date of a house-match with one so broken up. Yet time was flying, ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... measuring calico and weighing out groceries failed to supply. Young Lincoln's bodily vigor stood him in good stead in many ways. In frontier life strength and athletic skill served as well for popular amusement as for prosaic toil, and at times, indeed, they were needed for personal defence. Every community had its champion wrestler, a man of considerable local importance, in whose success the neighbors took a becoming interest. There was, not far from ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... without being able to adduce any conclusion beyond a vague surmise that Lennox lived in a different world from hers. The foie gras suggested delicacy of living, the chemise immorality, the bottle of scent refinement of taste; the bracelet she could make nothing of. Prosaic and vulgar as were all these articles, in the dressmaker's imagination they became both poetized and purified. An infinite sadness, that she could not explain, rose up through her mind, and, staring vaguely at the pious exhortations ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... and the inscription little more than a dull list of figures. Jimmy sighed, pitying them all. He did not know that those who have never experienced the crude things of life seldom have any desire for them. Being prosaic, they are satisfied with prosaic surroundings, which is a fortunate thing in an essentially prosaic age. There is very little room for romance in a world which gauges success by the measure of a reputed ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... ease though he selected it for his speeches, and not French, which was also allowed and which he spoke admirably. His presence, too, did not lend itself to oratory; short and thickset, and careless in his dress, he formed a contrast to the romantic figure of D'Azeglio. Yet his prosaic face, when animated, gave an impressive sense of that attribute which seemed to emanate from ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... however, he remained quietly on guard till she left the nest with her joyful call, when he joined her, and away they went together, crying, "te-o-tum, te! te!" till out of sight and hearing. There was a joyousness of manner in this pair that gave a festive air to even so prosaic a performance as going for food. The source of supplies, as I soon discovered, was a bit of neglected ground between a buckwheat patch and a barn, where grass and weeds of several sorts flourished. Here each bird pulled down by its weight a stalk of meadow or other grass, and spent some ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... a side-table, where he found all that he needed to prepare a glass of "eau sucree," which he had certainly earned, and, without looking at la Peyrade, who left the room rather stunned, he seemed to have no other interest on his mind than that prosaic preparation. ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. 'Balzac! Balzac!' he said to me once, 'Oh, that was the man the French bourgeoisie read so much a few years ago.' I can remember him at supper praising wine: 'Why do people say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the sunlight and the sap?' and his dispraising houses decorated by himself: 'Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the third corner & in ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... year 1760, published, by the house of B. Mecom in Boston, a 72 page brochure entitled "The Rudiments of Latin Prosody with a Dissertation on Letters and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic and Prosaic Composition, collected from some of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... ardent lover of nature, whose first volume appeared in 1781, though usually conventional in expression, is always sincere and sometimes exquisite. Crabbe, a story-teller and preacher, wrote some true poetry, along with much that is prosaic: rarely moved by an inspiration drawn from nature to desert the conventional couplet, he nevertheless had something of the spirit of the new movement. In 1783 the artist-poet Blake began to write verse which is absolutely untrammelled by convention, mystical, strange, and unequal. Three ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... the happier days of old, When he would woo his lady-love divine, Beneath her window his affection told In skilful verse and neatly-balanced line; And even if he sometimes caught a cold, His was a less prosaic way than mine; Then they'd embrace—no doubt it was not proper, But I can only kiss a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... difficulty finish the sentence. Christ was not afraid of a paradox. When, e.g., He said, "Whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also," He was ready to risk the possibility of being misunderstood by some prosaic hearer, that He might the more effectually arouse men to a neglected duty. His language was concrete, not abstract; He taught by example and illustration; He thought, and taught others to think, in pictures. How often is the phrase, "The kingdom of heaven ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... were striking root along the coast, by somewhat prosaic but fruitful industry, and were growing in population with rapid strides, two other movements were in progress. To the south, the English, French and Dutch, though often in rivalry with one another, combined to break in on the monopoly of the Spaniards. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... saw those big white spots on the green grass beginning to move and to turn into sheep, I felt exactly as if Saint Cecilia had come out of her frame over the organ and was walking in the park." Such moments come into the life of the most prosaic youth living in the most crowded quarters of the cities. What do we do to encourage and to solidify those moments, to make them come true in our dingy towns, to give them expression in forms ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... repeated Miss Ludvigsen. "To think of a young girl using such an expression! If you're going to let your new-born love be overgrown with prosaic calculations, what will be left of the ideal halo which love alone can cast over life? That a man should be alive to these considerations I can more or less understand—it's in a way his duty; but for a sensitive, womanly heart, in the heyday of sentiment!—No, no, Marie; for ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... "if in prosaic Europe in our days the inhabitants of our villages believe these flames to be some wild sorcery, then surely in the land of mystery they must be at least the evidences of war between the ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... cared for her husband in a prosaic sort of way, but she knew no more of his inner nature and latent utter selfishness a year after her marriage than she had known a year before. Yet, because of the strain of dark blood in her veins—her mother was ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... ideas into the limbo of exploded fantasies. And the people won't be comfortable without them. You take away the poetry, which is an essential element in the Gaelic character, and you make the people prosaic and critical, which is the worst thing possible for them. Thiggin-thu? But I beg your pardon. You ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... adorned by the imagination and so warmed by the feelings as to lift it sometimes into the realm of genuine poetry. Thus Dryden's Religio Laici, the first didactic poem of special note in our language, is essentially prosaic in theme and purpose. But its opening lines, by a happy simile, are ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... healthful organism endured the cruel demand made upon it far better than the majority of her companions. Nature had endowed her with a very large appetite for fun. For a time her employment, with its novelty, new associations, and small excitements, furnished this, but now her duties were fading into prosaic work, and the child was looking around for something enlivening. Where in the great city could she find it? Before their poverty came there were a score of pretty homes like her own in which she could visit schoolmates; her church and Sabbath-school ties brought her into relation with ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... looks under those dark trees with the flickering lights and leaf-shadows! Just the spot for lovers!" cried Olive, smiling at Love and Dainty in quite a conciliatory manner, adding, lightly: "Do not ask me, Aunt Judith, to do anything so prosaic as to eat cream yet. I shall stroll away by ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... hangar, singing in close harmony "Sweet Adeline," "Teasing," "I've Been Working on the Railroad."... "Hay-ride classics, with barber-shop chords," the songs are called, but tears were in Carl's eyes as the minors sobbed from the group of comrades who made fun of one another and were prosaic and pounded their heels on the packing-boxes—and knew that they were parting to face death. Carl felt Forrest Haviland's hand on one shoulder, then an awkward pat from tough Jack Ryan's paw, as Tony Bean's violin ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... raged with great fierceness, and with almost uninterrupted success for the knights, till the final battle which took place near Pillerent, in 1456. A Nuremberg painter, Hans Rosenpluel, celebrated this in verses like Veit Weber's, with equal vigor, but downright prosaic street-touches. Another poem describes the rout of the Archbishop of Cologne, who attempted to get possession of the city, in 1444. All these Low-German poems are full of popular scorn and satire: they do not hate the nobles so much as laugh at them, and their discomfitures ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... By the most prosaic standards this should not seem to adorn vice with attraction. It is true that the spectator is more interested in Rip than in his wife, and that she is made a virago. But it is not his drunkenness ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... fair, putting all the hunger on to him, as if she had never felt anything so prosaic. Madame Frabelle always behaved as if she were superior to the weaknesses of hunger or sleep, and denied ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... freed the boys and girls from that destructive isolation of those who drag themselves up to maturity by themselves, and it gave them a glimpse of that order and beauty into which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore the bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic young people bear testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration of this came to us during our second year's residence on Halsted Street through an incident in the Italian colony, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... were no facts at all, and whom an unpoetic jury sentenced to vile imprisonment for wilful perjury? There he sat, transformed into a Pole, bearded and whiskered, and the hair of his head close clipped, but in every other regard the same as when the constable invited him to forsake a too prosaic and ungrateful world: and had Mr Levisohn been wise and guarded, the discovery would never have been made by me; for we had met but once before, then only for a short half hour, and under agitating circumstances. But my curiosity and attention once roused by his exclamation, it was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... quality at a time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that assures the value of each separately. It was not this or that which gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle that outran the forethought of other men,—it was Hannibal. But this prosaic element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or shorter space, but ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... with Newman, as with his brother Francis (in some ways also a remarkable man), was simply that, as the London Truth banteringly said, neither was able to swallow the Athanasian creed in a comfortable and prosaic way, as good Britons should; or, as the Saturday Review in all seriousness urged, that he did not hold as his supreme principle pride in the Church of England as such, determination to stand shoulder to shoulder with others "in resisting the foreigner, whether he came from Rome or from Geneva, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... I shall be reproached (for it is the fashion of the day) for placing interest, vile and prosaic interest, at the foundation of the fraternity of nations. It would be preferred that this should be based upon charity, upon love; that there should be in it some self-denial, and that clashing a little with ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... up in its walls, and the traveller could imagine, in this little old, deserted square, the crowds who gathered round the tower's base, and called for news of enemies and battle as moderns gather about the more prosaic bulletin of printed news. He could see them surging, peering up; and from above he almost heard the watcher's cry, "They're coming on,"—with the great answering howl beneath, and the rush to arms. Or, "They pass us by," and then what ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... a man of lively imagination. Had he been an ordinary, prosaic and plodding individual, he would have stayed at home combing wool as did his prosaic and plodding ancestors for several generations. At the age of fourteen he went to sea and soon developed an active curiosity about regions then unknown but believed to exist. There was even then some ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... her lusty young will; not only for what he was, but also for what she had been disappointed in not finding him after her first instinctive liking. Yet it was with an odd little thrill that she ran down again into the coulee where her prosaic life had found its first real adventure. He might be all they said, but nothing could wipe out the facts that she had offered her life to save his, and that he had lent her his body as a living shield for one ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... to come out of a beautiful dream, plump upon a prosaic boy who says, "Hullo!" It is apt to jolt ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... away by a bursting shell, lying on the battlefield pleading for water; show the children with tear-stained faces pressed against the window pane praying for their dead father to return. Avoid general and prosaic terms. Paint pictures. Evolve images for the imagination of your audience to construct ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... not now refer. But his comparison of Hogarth and Wilkie may fairly be summarized in this place, because it contains so much excellent discrimination of the former. Wilkie, Hazlitt contends, is a simple realist; Hogarth is a comic painter. While one is a "serious, prosaic, literal narrator of facts," the other is a moral satirist, "exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and, with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts.... He is carried ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... frivolous. But I have been frivolous—for ever since I have learned to love you, I have been so wrapped up in my love, with my happiness gilding everything about me, that I have never really faced the prosaic facts of life or discussed with you what our marriage will really necessitate. And now, at this eleventh hour, I realise that I have led you on in ignorance to an act which will perhaps take a great deal ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... nature "unimaginative globe-trotter—he was a hard-looking, iron-grey man of middle-age—related the usual tiger story, the time-honoured elephant anecdote, and a couple of snake yarns of no special value, and I was beginning to fear that I should get little entertainment from so prosaic a sportsman, when I ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... it, but I shall probably see the most interesting years. Of course if you were to marry our friend you'd still have a career—a very decent, in fact a very brilliant one. But relatively speaking it would be a little prosaic. It would be definitely marked out in advance; it would be wanting in the unexpected. You know I'm extremely fond of the unexpected, and now that you've kept the game in your hands I depend on your giving us some grand ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... swept his arm in a broad gesture of respectful devotion. It was a touch of gallantry which raised the affair above the prosaic details of mere business and which made the relations closer than those of employer ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... the Yntendente (the Count de Villa Nueva), with the same civilities; the third, the master of the house where we now are, and whence I indite these facts; the fourth, the Italian Opera, which rushed simultaneously into the arms of the A—-i; the fifth, prosaic custom-house officers; the sixth, a Havana count and marquis; the seventh, the family of General M—-o. Finally, we were hoisted over the ship's side in a chair, into the government boat, and rowed to the shore. As it was rather dark when we arrived, and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... though such certificates would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution such as the London County Council, for instance. The above prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine being published ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... was already installed, and making its presence known by an inspiriting valse tune. In a few moments twenty, thirty, forty couples were swaying to the music; Aurelia in her acting costume was dancing away with Ralph in his red stockings; Carr with the "heavy mother," and Charles in prosaic evening-dress was flying past with Evelyn, who, now that she had effaced her beautiful stage complexion, looked pale ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of his work. Characters not only strong but so uniquely strong, genius so supreme, misfortunes so overwhelming, set in its scenery so forlornly picturesque, could not fail to attract all readers, if told even in the most prosaic language. When we add to this, that Miss Robinson has told their story not in prosaic language, but with a literary style exhibiting all the qualities essential to good biography, our readers will understand that this life of Emily Bronte is not only as interesting as a novel, but a ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... and unfairly so, for when revivals were not in the air that ugly little chapel was served very faithfully by a spiritually-minded minister, who hurled himself all the year round against the obduracy of the people. Ishmael had a quick movement of withdrawal as his mother led him in through the prosaic yellow-grained doors, but it availed him nothing. Another moment and he was being propelled ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take a single ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mines belong to the men who find them, a doctrine which, after all, is much more rational than the more recent contention of sundry modern Orators of the Human Race that 'the mines belong to the miners'! But after it had talked itself hoarse, the Assembly had to descend to the prosaic business of legislation, and in dealing with the mines, as in dealing with other matters, it made a muddle of the laws which existed before it met, and left this muddle to be resolved into a new order of things legal, under the presiding ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of Swift's satires, the artistic finish of Fielding's novels, the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon's history and of Burke's orations,—these have no parallel in the poetry of the age. Indeed, poetry itself became prosaic in this respect, that it was used not for creative works of imagination, but for essays, for satire, for criticism,—for exactly the same practical ends as was prose. The poetry of the first half of the century, as typified in the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... "Dry, prosaic, trivial," said the reviewers; "Bjoernson has evidently worked out his vein. He has ceased to be a poet. He has lost with his childhood's faith his ideal view of life, and become a mere prosy chronicler of ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Spanish venta to take refuge at the club the morning after our arrival, they may surely be thankful for being directed to the best house of accommodation in one of the most unromantic, uncomfortable, and prosaic of towns. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... my prosaic subordinate's statements by methods with which I was familiar in secret-service work; and I soon found that he was generally right. Great crimes are the work of great criminals, and great criminals ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... equally of Walt Whitman and Artemas Ward. Yet it is not burlesque. It appears to have been written in good faith, and for this reason the incongruity of such a grandiloquent rhapsody on such a prosaic subject is all the more noticeable. As an example of "fine writing" it has seldom been surpassed, and for sheer nonsense it is unequaled in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... your own shepherd, which at first is more than probable, you will find that shepherding is one of the most prosaic professions you could have adopted. Sheep will be the one idea in your mind; and as for poetry, nothing will be farther from your thoughts. Your eye will ever be straining after a distant sheep—your ears ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... upon Sal, who had a touch of vanity, and was quite conscious of what she deemed the romantic side of her way of life, that she should be taken as the sort of incarnation of the prosaic. Nevertheless, all through that table d'hote dinner, Nan kept to her self-imposed task, and was busying herself about the wages of the coastguardsmen, and the probable cost of mackerel, and the chances of Sal's having to face ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... fancies year after year, till the solid world often turned about her. And she, all the while, so simple, so sane—the ordinary good woman, with the ordinary woman's hunger for the common blessings of life—a little love, a little chat, a little prosaic well-being! She had had two sons—they were gone. She had been the proud wife 'o' t' cliverest mon atwixt Sheffield an Manchester,' as Frimley and the adjacent villages had once expressed it, when every mother ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has given us his Ophelia and Desdemona, creations of this false theory, and I have heard men declare them to be perfect types of womanhood. In Ruffini's charming story of Doctor Antonio, we have the same lovely heroine in our prosaic modern life. But mark how all these women utterly fail in the great hours of trial. All untrue to the demands of their love, all incapable of mating the men who have sought them. But in Portia, in Miranda, in Imogen, we have women in whom is all the charm of womanhood without ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... so much nicer than having prosaic parents who could be produced at any moment; it left a wide field for the imagination, and Marcia was free to think herself a misplaced princess, or, at the very least, the daughter of a distressed earl. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes the student—the student of the thirteenth century—struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... multitudinous forces, moral, intellectual, and social, which are bearing mankind onward to a new and unknown goal. We may feel some natural regret at the disappearance of quaint customs and picturesque ceremonies, which have preserved to an age often deemed dull and prosaic something of the flavour and freshness of the olden time, some breath of the springtime of the world; yet our regret will be lessened when we remember that these pretty pageants, these now innocent diversions, had their origin in ignorance and superstition; ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... almost prosaic themes is the greater part of the Excursion occupied. Yet the poem is far from being composed throughout in a prosaic spirit. "Of its bones is coral made;" its arguments and theories have lain long ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... consistent truth of the costume, and the exquisite gradations of relief with which the most opposite hues are approximated, blend all into harmony. Romeo and Juliet are not poetical beings placed on a prosaic background; nor are they, like Thekla and Max in the Wallenstein, two angels of light amid the darkest and harshest, the most debased and revolting aspects of humanity; but every circumstance, and every personage, and every shade of character in each, tends to the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the reader, to lift him, with less danger of dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs, a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... 'Christmas Eve', were it not that its companion poem has failed to do so; though the tendency of 'Easter Day' is as different from that of its precursor as their common Christianity admits. The balance of argument in 'Christmas Eve' is in favour of direct revelation of religious truth and prosaic certainty regarding it; while the 'Easter Day' vision makes a tentative and unresting attitude the first condition of the religious life; and if Mr. Browning has meant to say—as he so often did say—that religious certainties ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... ever a boarding-house in the world where the seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions? You look on the black bombazine and high-necked decorum of your neighbor, and no more ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... country, while the shell-fire is gradually gaining power—and we may be sure that the enemy are suffering at the hands of our marksmen. And now suppose that an infantry brigade receives orders to charge. "Charge!" The word carries magnificent poetic associations, but, alas, it is a very prosaic affair nowadays! The lines move onward in short rushes, and it seems as if a swarm of ants were migrating warily. The strident voices of the officers ring here and there: the men edge their way onward: it seems as if there were no method in the advance; ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... have perhaps grown weary of seeing Edison's name in articles of a sensational character, it may sound strange to say that, after all, justice has not been done to his versatile and many-sided nature; and that the mere prosaic facts of his actual achievement outrun the wildest flights of irrelevant journalistic imagination. Edison hates nothing more than to be dubbed a genius or played up as a "wizard"; but this fate has dogged him until ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... just described was a rambling two-storied building with many porches—a typical vine-covered Southern cottage. It was picturesque from every side, and seemed to have no prosaic back. Marechal Niel roses, and honeysuckles, and some tropical vines, climbed over latticework almost to the roof. There were, also, many trees near the house, ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... embrowned the old gallery pictures; but Daubigny, looking at nature with a more literal eye than Corot, ran a gamut of color greater than he. It was Daubigny who said of Corot, in envious admiration: "He puts nothing on the canvas, and everything is there." His own more prosaic nature took delight in enregistering a greater number of facts. Floating quietly down the rivers of France in a house-boat, he diligently reproduced the sedgy banks, the low-lying distances the poplars and clumps of trees lining the shore, and reflected in the waters. He painted the "Springtime," ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... began to laugh. "We ought to be good friends," she said; "for our names are about equally imposing. Billy and Teddy! Could anything be more prosaic? Good-by," she added, as she rose. "Truly, I must go ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... has not reached the middle of the nineteenth century without making numerous attempts to fly bodily up to the skies. Fortunately, however, such ambitious efforts have seldom been made except by the intellectually enthusiastic. Prosaic man, except in the case of the Tower of Babel, has remained content to gaze upwards with longing desire, and only a few of our species in the course of centuries have possessed temerity enough to make the deliberate effort to ride upon the wings ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... mature Zoe," as Gibbon calls her, falls in love with him, and her husband, Constantine Monomachus, puts him in prison; but Saint Olaf still protects his mauvais sujet of a brother, and inspires "a lady of distinction" with the successful idea of helping Harald out of his inaccessible tower by the prosaic expedient of a ladder of ropes. A boom, however, across the harbour's mouth still prevents the escape of his vessel. The Sea-king is not to be so easily baffled. Moving all his ballast, arms, and men, into ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... is a writer of real power both in thought and style. The versification of his Astronomica shows a high mastery of technique. The matter is often prosaically handled, and often seeks relief from prosaic handling in ill- judged flights of rhetoric; but throughout we feel a strong and original mind, with a large power over lucid and forcible expression. In the prologue to the third book he rejects for himself the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... over the land, builded better than they knew. To the simple and ardent idealist its white stateliness must always suggest something symbolic, and, after all, it is the ardent and simple idealist whose dreams and symbols paint to prosaic human minds the beautiful impossibilities whose unattainable loveliness so allures as to force even the unexalted world into the endeavour to create such reproductions of their forms as ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had never occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its informing principles embodied in the England of his own day." This flowed, we may suppose, from Burke. In a passage in the seventh Book of the Prelude, he describes, in lines a little prosaic but quite true, how he sat, saw, and heard, not unthankful nor uninspired, the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Brera, is a superb piece of painting and an interesting characterisation. The woman is ripe, sensual, and calculating, feeling with her fingers for the gold chain, a mere golden-fleshed, rose-flushed hireling, solid and prosaic. The go-between is dimly seen in the background, but the face of the suitor is a strange, ironic study: past youth, worn, joyless, and bitter, taking his pleasure mechanically and with cynical detachment. The "Storm ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Even in the prosaic jolting of the cab, away from the terrible mysteries of the Red Lodge, one could ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... them going quietly about the routine of their work. It seems quite strange to me now. There should have been some mark set upon them, setting them apart as the particular messengers of fate. But there was nothing of the kind. They were just ordinary prosaic regimental officers. Doesn't it seem strange to you, too? Here were men who could deal out misery and estrangement and years of suffering, without so much as a single word spoken, and they went about their business, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... prose is true, indeed, and sound, and full of practical sense: few men have seen more clearly into the motives, the interests, the whole walk and conversation of the living busy world as it lay before him; but farther than this busy, and to most of us, rather prosaic world, he seldom looked: his instruction is for men of business, and in regard to matters of business alone. Prudence is the highest Virtue he can inculcate; and for that finer portion of our nature, that portion of it ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... a book that will stimulate the imagination of the most prosaic child—or at least give it exercise! Wonder, the most fertile awakener of intelligence, and vision are closely akin to imagination, and both are greatly needed in this ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... whose works had long been familiar to her. It was a new world of art and intellect and genius to which she was suddenly introduced, and which seemed to her all the more brilliant after the somewhat prosaic uniformity of society in her own republican land. To say that she admires and loves England with all her heart may be safely asserted. To say that it has almost succeeded in stealing away her heart from the land of her birth, ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... The usually prosaic and unimpressive appearance of the convention hall assumed for the occasion an entire change last evening. When the convention closed its forenoon's labors, it took a recess until half-past 7 o'clock for the purpose of affording the female suffragists an opportunity to plead their cause before a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... with Haddon Hall! The most prosaic summer tourist could hardly fail to be moved by admiration of its delights. It is still a real home, and seems alive with memories of the fair Dorothy Vernon and her family. The old castle has scarcely changed at all since the sixteenth ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... the Chinamen smoke. Those funny, crooked pipes and those little wads of tobacco are too ridiculous." The lightness of her words damped his ardor, and brought back the sense of failure. That formless huddle of buildings in the distance seemed to him all at once very dull and prosaic. Of course, it was just like scores of others that his sweetheart had seen all the way north from the border-line. He had never ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... any charm for him. In vain did the fields display their golden treasures of ripening corn; in vain did the pale barley and the silvery oats wave their luxuriant growth against the dark background of the woods; all these fairylike effects of summer suggested only prosaic and misanthropic reflections in Julien's mind. He thought of the tricks, the envy and hatred that the possession of these little squares of ground brought forth among their rapacious owners. The prolific exuberance of forest vegetation was an exemplification of the fierce and destructive ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... hoarse-voiced, six-foot specimen of Italian humanity, who looked in his little shop and on the prosaic pavement of Prytania Street somewhat as Hercules might seem in a modern drawing-room. You instinctively thought of wild mountain-passes, and the gleaming dirks of bandit contadini in looking at him. What his ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... experience awaits me I know not; but this I do know, that the emotion with which I confront it is not one of idle curiosity, or even of calmly sympathetic interest. It is not primarily to my intelligence, but to my imagination, that the word "America" appeals. To many people that word conveys none but prosaic associations; to me it is electric with romance. Only one other word in existence can give me a comparable thrill; the word one sees graven on a roadside pillar as one walks down the southern slope of an Alpine pass: ITALIA. But that word carries the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... startlingly aware, through the poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern conscience" may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson's acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... give you a very prosaic reason," she said, in her gentle, sad voice. "I have little or no color because I am always shut up in hot rooms, and because I miss the open-air life ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... Sheffield, coaching through the exquisite scenery around about Warwick, Kenilworth, and the Shakespeare country in Stratford-on-Avon. Most of these reminiscences are full of incidents too intimate for public interest. Like a dream that lifts one from prosaic life into the places of precious remembrance I recall these long, happy days in the glorious ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... own instantaneous success he tried to persuade Jane to go on the stage; but Jane had no artistic ambitions, to say nothing of her disinclination to paint her face. She preferred the prosaic reality of stenography and typewriting. No sphere could be too dazzling for Paul; he was born to great things, the consciousness of his high destiny being at once her glory and her despair; but, as regards herself, her outlook on life was cool and sober. Paul was peacock ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... prosaic little request I have to make. I only want you to let me take the night train and run up ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... went by the name of Berlin wool work, popular in the early XIXth century, we have before us a degenerate offshoot of this fine and poetic kind of work in which all its possibilities are missed, with a result that is prosaic in the extreme. Some of the canvas-work seat covers decorated with geometrical designs, seen on Chippendale chairs, were a pleasant and satisfactory variation in their way, but in most of the work after that period, the attempt at impossible naturalistic effect ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... with an oracular air, "it was a capital error to make Olla a married woman; what business I should like to know, can a married woman have in a story?—She belongs properly to the dull prosaic region of common life—not to the fairy land of romance. Now the charm of sentiment is as necessary to a perfect tale, as the interest of adventure, or the excitement of conflict, and had Olla been single, there would have been the elements of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... SEELY read studiously prosaic statement of events leading up to resignations on the Curragh. Someone had blundered, or, as the SECRETARY FOR WAR, anxious above all things to avoid irritation, preferred to put it, "there had been a misunderstanding." All over ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... spring air was fresh and fragrant, the country charming, with here a forest, there a valley, farther off the tiled, colored roofs of some little town. Our road, like a white ribbon, wound itself out endlessly between stone walls or brown fields. In my content I forgot food and such prosaic details till I noticed that the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... some prosaic proofs of the new life, I will take the liquor question, a test of social vitality. It is significant to examine how the different belligerent nations have treated this problem, which becomes acute whenever it is necessary to call upon all national ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... blissful poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For poor old prosaic Rudolph is in the right, after all. Your delicate, tender beauty must not be dragged down to face the unlovely realities and petty deprivations and squalid makeshifts of such an existence as ours would be. True, I would glory in them—ah, luxury ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... that pretext, wildly and wickedly would throw off all responsibility from him, and from ourselves, his retainers and abettors; and yet something, after all, is to be conceded to the mask of the poet. All nations and times have agreed in not judging him by the prosaic laws to which we who write and speak prose are amenable. His is a playful part, and he has a knack of slipping from under the hand of serious judgment. He is a Proteus, and feels himself bound to speak the bare truth only when he is reduced to his proper person, not whilst he is exercising ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... "I will ask you a prosaic question, and I only hope you won't think it impertinent. How—ever— did such a strangely assorted party as yours come to travel together? And if Vizard has turned woman-hater, as he pretends, how comes ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the Pyramids, seated, impassive, on his horse, gazing at the Sphinx, as if about to utter his immortal words to his soldiers: "Here, forty centuries look down upon us." These object lessons of the past are all gone now and the land used for more prosaic purposes. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... wild and beautiful setting, Sibley is now a town of farmers and traders rather than of miners. The wagons entering the gates are laden with wheat and melons and peaches rather than with ore and giant-powder, and the hotels are frequented by ranchers of prosaic aspect, by passing drummers for shoes and sugars, and by the barbers and clerks of near-by shops. It is, in fact, a bit of slow-going village life dropped between the diabolism of Cripple Creek and ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... national grievances. Mr. O'LEARY, for example, drew a moving picture of a poor old man occupying a single room, and dependent for his subsistence on the grazing of a hypothetical cow; he had been refused a pension by a hard-hearted Board. Translated into prosaic English by the CHIEF SECRETARY it resolved itself into the case of a farmer who had deliberately divested himself of his property in the hope of "wangling" five shillings a week out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... from the foreign glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and Chatham; and one of its first acts was to terminate the alliance with Prussia. Unfortunately, whatever was picturesque in the piracy of Potsdam was beyond the imagination of Windsor. But whatever was prosaic in Potsdam was already established at Windsor; the economy of cold mutton, the heavy-handed taste in the arts, and the strange northern blend of boorishness with etiquette. If Bolingbroke's ideas had been applied by a spirited person, ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... us but a means? If it seem prosaic, what care we? Have we escaped the French fashions of a-la-mode watering-places, to be fastidious amid ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the world that it often leaves no time for mourning—that in the midst of our sorrow it causes us to hear the prosaic voices of reality and necessity, compelling us to dry our eyes and turning our thoughts from painfully-sweet remembrances of a lost happiness to ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... is ushered in is conceived in the highest romantic spirit, and told in verse of wonderful effectiveness, not to mention two beautiful songs; and throughout the play the allegorical or supernatural passages show the same character. Nor are the more prosaic parts inferior, as, for instance, the pretty dialogue of Orleans and Galloway, cited by Lamb, and the fine passage where Andelocia says ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury |
