"Uncongenial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little in them of that mildly dramatic, stirring quality which might perhaps make their recital deserving of being heard beyond my own frugal fireside. Strange to say, only one of the seven is a return trip. I am afraid that the prospect of going back to rather uncongenial work must have dulled my senses. Or maybe, since I was returning over the same road after an interval of only two days, I had exhausted on the way north whatever there was of noticeable impressions to be garnered. Or again, since I was ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... as Herbert Spencer says, enables it "to adjust the inner relations with outer relations," to correspond to its environment—in short, to live. That single cell contracts and recoils from the things in its environment uncongenial to its constitution, and the things congenial it draws to itself and absorbs. It has no mouth, no stomach, no alimentary canal. It is all mouth, all stomach, all ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... alone till the child is old enough to feel the want of it. It is true that the seed will thus be sown late, but in what a soil! On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be painful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of his father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness of stillborn love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... talked together. The uncongenial life had been cheerfully borne; a new uprooting and uncertain change would be as steadfastly carried through, once they were sure God willed it. And at last it seemed best to decide upon removal. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... if weary at last of seeing me between her paws, suddenly let me escape. Before I had been working a month at my uncongenial trade Big Rapids was favored by a visit from a Universalist woman minister, the Reverend Marianna Thompson, who came there to preach. Her sermon was delivered on Sunday morning, and I was, I think, almost the earliest arrival ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... at least not so embarrassing as his dinner of the night before with Lady Poynter. Barbara seemed chilled by uncongenial company, though she touched his hand on her way to the door and turned, with patent consciousness that she was being watched, to give him a parting smile. Mrs. Manisty also turned, before she could control her curiosity, to see for whom the smile was intended. And, as Eric threw away ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... the officious character, which I have been describing, were uncongenial to my natural temper, to the genius of the Movement, and to the historical mode of its success:—they were the fruit of that exuberant and joyous energy with which I had returned from abroad, and which I never had before or since. I had the exultation ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... not likely to remain alone much longer,' said Agnes, 'and while I have an opportunity, let me earnestly entreat you, Trotwood, to be friendly to Uriah. Don't repel him. Don't resent (as I think you have a general disposition to do) what may be uncongenial to you in him. He may not deserve it, for we know no certain ill of him. In any case, think ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... are not of great and pressing urgency. The fate of the nation does not depend upon their being all accomplished and arranged off-hand, and if the Government which the King may form exhibits no spirit uncongenial to the public feeling generally, and wars not with the genius of Reform, which is dear to the people, it is my belief that a great majority of the nation will shrink from the mere possibility of a direct breach with the King, and from offering him ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... room, and no lessons. And if I wished to see any of my friends I might do so, and on no account was I to be allowed to fret or be disturbed in mind. I couldn't help feeling half sorry for Miss Henniker being charged with all these uncongenial tasks; but Stonebridge House depended a great deal on what the doctor said of it, and so she ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... and coldness make uncongenial neighbors. The man, all passion, and the woman, who has no answering spark, grope toward each other ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... imagined that anything could be so horribly uncomfortable or disagreeable. The Mazatlan was overcrowded, improperly ballasted, and rolled continually. The table was bad, the accommodations inadequate, the passengers hopelessly uncongenial. Cold and foggy weather accompanied the boat continually. The same endless procession of bleached hills still filed past under the mist, going now in the opposite direction, and the same interminable game of whist was played in the smoking-room, only with greasier, second-class cards, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... great men of the railway company to outspoken praise, a somewhat unusual circumstance. But now he was called back to the work that more properly belonged to an officer of Her Majesty's North West Mounted Police and his soul glowed with the satisfaction of those who, having been found faithful in uncongenial duty, are rewarded with an opportunity to do a bit of work which ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... a puzzle even to herself, and was wont to say, indifferently, that the problem was not worth a solution. For this beautiful girl of fifteen was somewhat bitter and misanthropic, a condition perhaps due to the uncongenial atmosphere in which she had been reared. She was of dark complexion and her big brown eyes held a sombre and unfathomable expression. Once she had secretly studied their reflection in a mirror, and the eyes awed and frightened her, and made ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... flies Across the sea, rough autumn-tempest tossed, Poor bird, shall it be lost? 20 Dropped down into this uncongenial sea, With no kind eyes To watch it while it dies, Unguessed, uncared for, free: Set free at last, The short pang past, In sleep, in death, in dreamless ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... delicate carved work which she chose to use as her staircase, she alighted harmless and unharmed within my reach. Then she mewed once more; but that was her last expression of doubt or dread. I soon reassured her; and that moment was the first of a confidence and intimacy seldom seen between our uncongenial races. ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... should be absent long from your thoughts; impossible that His remembrance should long remain merged in the stream of other imaginations; unless you are supposed chargeable with a decided indifference to divine things! Unless you are destitute of love to God you can never be so utterly uncongenial in sentiment and feeling with the psalmist, when he says, "My mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips, while I meditate upon thee in the night watches." "How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God!" When that man of God gazed upon the starry heavens, his mind was ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... WHY it is my lot, and so forth? Why, damn it, the causes are many. For one thing, if one has neighbours who neither live nor see things as oneself does, but are uncongenial, what does one do? One just leaves them, and clears out—more especially if one be neither a priest nor a magistrate. Yet YOU say that I had better consider why this is my lot. Do you think that YOU are the only man able to consider ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... would not be constantly reminded of soap—to devote himself to the History of the Thebaid, when this cousin died suddenly and precipitated responsibilities upon him. In the frankness of conviviality, Moggs bewailed the uncongenial task thus thrust into his hands, and my uncle offered to lighten his burden by a partnership then and there. They even got to terms—extremely muzzy terms, but ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... happy time, and we spectators still derive the greatest pleasure from beholding them; and this, I take it, is precisely what you would yourself most wish. Now I maintain, that throwing somersaults in and out of swords is a display of danger uncongenial to a banquet. And as for writing and reading on a wheel that all the while keeps whirling, I do not deny the wonder of it, but what pleasure such a marvel can present, I cannot for the life of me discover. Nor do I see how it is a whit more charming to watch these fair young people ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... Saturnalia of successful villany and rampant vice, but few listened to their warnings. They were jeered at by the vulgar, fined, imprisoned, or banished by Ministers and Magistrates. All that was good, noble, and generous in the nation withered in the uncongenial atmosphere. The language of Pascal and of Corneille became the medium of corrupting the minds of millions. The events of the day were some actress who had discovered a new way to outrage decency, or some new play which deified ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... gossiped about her extravagance. She had her arrested, condemned and ducked as we have seen. There was no open rupture between Dorothe and her husband's relatives. She still greeted them with half-smiles; but those half-smiles were cold and uncongenial, and there seemed to be a settled purpose on her part as well as theirs to dislike each other. To no one did Dorothe express this dislike save to her husband, and to him she never lost ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... will be either to something better or at least not worse, he has in his fearlessness of death no small help to ease of mind in life. For to one who can enjoy life when virtue and what is congenial to him have the upper hand, and that can fearlessly depart from life, when uncongenial and unnatural things are in the ascendant, with the words on ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... the post for him. Jackson himself seems to have been influenced by the hope that his salary would help towards his education, and by the wish to become independent of his uncle's bounty. His new duties were uncongenial, but, despite his youth, he faced his responsibilities with a determination which men of maturer years might well have envied. In everything he was scrupulously exact. His accounts were accurately kept; he was punctuality itself, and his patience was inexhaustible. For two years ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Secretary of War. A Commander-in-chief, as mentioned above—one fighting and manoeuvring on paper—making plans in his office, unfamiliar with every thing constituting a genuine military, scientific or practical soldier—to whom field and battle are uncongenial or improper—to whom grand and even small tactics are a terra incognita—such a chief is at best but an imitation of the English military organization, and certainly it is only in this country that obsolete English routine is almost uniformly ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... friend to me," I answered, "and never more so than in this instance. Forgive me that I cannot show my appreciation of your goodness, or thank you properly for your performance of an uncongenial task. I am sunk deep in trouble. I'm not myself and cannot be till I know what action will be taken by ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... visions of that night became reality. For many and various were the difficulties which Layard had to contend with during the following months as well as during his second expedition in 1848. The material hardships of perpetual camping out in an uncongenial climate, without any of the simplest conveniences of life, and the fevers and sickness repeatedly brought on by exposure to winter rains and summer heat, should perhaps be counted among the least of them, for they had their compensations. Not ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the earth had made a deep impression upon him, although he was to end as the declared adversary of that vulcanism which we can trace already at the bottom of Buffon's theory—naturally enough, when we think how uncongenial all violence in society and nature was to him, how he looked everywhere for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theoretical study he had early turned to direct observation; and when his administrative functions obliged him to survey the mines of the little dukedom, ample opportunity ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... "Very well, very pretty indeed! My dear, don't you think, before you write poetry, you had better learn grammar?" a suggestion which sent me crestfallen to a diligent study of Lindley Murray. But grammar is perfectly uncongenial matter to me, which my mind absolutely refuses to assimilate. I have learned Latin, English, French, Italian, and German grammar, and do not know a single rule of the construction of any language whatever. More over, to the present day, my early familiar use of French ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... day, and with stockings at a dollar and a half a pair, one was apt to get the nine stitches, or a pretty comfortable multiple of them, every Wednesday when the wash came in; and how these different kinds of lives, coming together with a friendly friction, found themselves not so uncongenial, or so incomprehensible to each other, after all,—all this, in its detail of bright words, I cannot stop to tell you; it would take a good many summers to go through one like this so fully; but when the big bell rang for dinner, they all came down the ledge ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the ebb-tide of humanity sets strongest from the City, that the honoured guest of a City Company may be seen fighting his way, like a minnow against stream, in a hansom to his dinner at the hall of the Guild. Still, he goes "where glory waits him," so what recks he that the hour is altogether uncongenial and inconvenient? ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... patiently straighten out the confusion of books and papers on the table they shared in common. Although there were no more frozen silences between them their conversations were far from satisfactory. They were totally uncongenial. But after the first week, that part of their relationship did not affect Mary materially. She was too happily absorbed in the work and play of school life, throwing herself into every recitation, every ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... inverted commas, as though Mr. Darwin had intended to quote it: "In other parts of Africa the xanthous variety [of man] often appears, but does not multiply. Individuals thus characterised are like seeds which perish in an uncongenial soil.") ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... had not: implacability and a fine Jewish literary gift, with terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all the bitter qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather pampered young genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do family) by a social system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on by exile and poverty. Thus Marx and Darwin between them toppled over two closely related idols, and became the prophets of ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... of Leicester's found this increased activity decidedly uncongenial. He had no real patriotism in him. He played cricket well, but he played entirely ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... was an invalid, and the whole weight of the perplexing affairs of the failing firm fell upon the one who detested business, and counted every hour lost that he gave to it. His letters for two years are burdened with harassments in uncongenial details and unsuccessful struggles. Liverpool, where he was compelled to pass most of his time, had few attractions for him, and his low spirits did not permit him to avail himself of such social advantages as were offered. It seems that our ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... I ride to the Mission Dolores. It has a strangely solitary aspect, enhanced by its surroundings of the most uncongenial, rapidly growing modernisms; the hoar of ages surrounded by the brightest, slightest, and rapidest of modern growths. Its old belfries still clanged with the discordant bells, and Mass was saying within, for it is used as a place of worship for the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Dennis replied. "That may account for the heresy of my profound disbelief in science. I wouldn't cross the road to see a 'miracle.' The twentieth century is uncongenial to anything of that sort. Take it from me, old chap, there's a man at the back of this—not a nice man, I admit, but an ordinary human being to all outward appearances—and when we catch a glimpse of his outward appearances we shall ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... At length, from uncongenial air, water, food, and circumstances in general, the transplanted flower began to droop. The great heat and rarified mountain air caused frantic headaches, aggravated by the glare which came through the white canvas roof. Then came the sudden mountain tempests, when the rain deluged ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... had been recognized; for from this time on he held important public positions. He was often sent to the Continent—to France, Flanders, and Italy—on diplomatic missions; and for eleven years he was in charge of the London customs, where the uncongenial drudgery occupied almost all his time until through the intercession of the queen he was allowed to perform it by deputy. In 1386 he was a member of Parliament, knight of the shire for Kent; but in that year his fortune turned—he lost all ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... requisite to go on with. In noisome dungeons, subject to studied tortures, in abject and shifty poverty, after consummate shame, upon tremendous change of fortune, in the profoundest desolation of mind and soul, in forced companionship with all that is unlovely and uncongenial—men, persevering nobly, live on, and live through all. The mind, like water, passes through all states, till it shall be united to what it is ever seeking. The very loneliness of man here is the greatest proof, to my mind, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... conversation." No creature with a heart can jostle daily with his kind, but he wins some consciousness of kindly feeling. The very annoyances and constraints of propinquity are in their own way disciplinary, and insistent, uncongenial persons, like glaring red buoys with clanging bells, serve at least to keep us in the fairway of navigation. And in a city there are voices of cheerful exhortation always echoing in the higher air above the roar and the trampling, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... some fifteen years Oxford was his home, latterly as Fellow and Lecturer of Corpus. The story of his marriage is slightly pathetic, but more than slightly ludicrous, and he appears to have been greatly henpecked as well as obliged to lead an uncongenial life at a country living. In 1585 he was made Master of the Temple, and held that post for seven years, distinguishing himself both as a preacher and a controversialist. But neither was this his vocation; ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... freezing crags to reach that shining plateau, where "beauty pitches her tents", and the Ideal beckons. Favorable environment is the steaming atmosphere that fosters, forces and develops germs which might not survive the struggle against adverse influences, in uncongenial habitat; but nature moulds some types that attain perfection through perpetual elementary warfare which hardens the fibre, and strengthens the hold; as in those invincible algx towering in the stormy straits of Tierra del Fuego, swept from Antartic homes toward the equator,—defying ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... pervaded the kingdom. All he appeared to care about was to secure for himself and his family a high position, which he scarcely knew how to occupy: to fill the pockets of his German attendants and his German mistresses; to get away as often as possible from his uncongenial islanders whose language he did not understand, and to use the strength of Great Britain to obtain petty advantages for his German principality. At once the new king exhibited violent prejudices against some of the chief men of the nation, and irritated without ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... found to exist, because the durable cement is wanting—the sense of security and permanence, without which the body of affection cannot be consolidated, nor the heart commit itself to its whole capacity of emotion. I believe that many a brother and sister spend their days in uncongenial wedlock, or in a restless faintly expectant-singlehood, who might form a "comfortable couple" could they but make up their minds early to take each other for ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... of saints, yet of many saintly uses, and much that is beautiful in Christian life. He made his country eminent, and secured for her one great chapter in the history of the world; but he imprinted upon her a certain narrowness uncongenial to her character and to her past, which has undervalued her to many superficial observers, and done perhaps a little, but a permanent, harm to her national ideal ever since. A small evil for so much good, but yet not ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... however, has not seemingly regretted the inability of Byron to trammel his muse with the uncongenial fetters of Pope's metre, and has certainly never quarrelled with Tom Moore for not assuming the manners and diction of the revered Samuel ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a gambler, a fighter, and "a very wicked young man." Lincoln cannot in truth be said to have chosen such a partner, but rather to have accepted him from the force of circumstances. It required only a little time to make it plain that the partnership was wholly uncongenial. Lincoln displayed little business capacity. He trusted largely to Berry; and Berry rapidly squandered the profits of the business in riotous living. Lincoln loved books as Berry loved liquor, and hour after hour he was stretched out on ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... throughout His life and 'poured out His soul unto death' as He had been pouring it out all through His life. We have no measure by which we can estimate the inevitable sufferings in such a world as ours of such a spirit as Christ's. We may know something of the solitude of uncongenial society; of the pain of seeing miseries that we cannot comfort, of the horrors of dwelling amidst impurities that we cannot cleanse, and of longings to escape from them all to some nest in the wilderness, but all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... studying and settled down to genuine hard work for perhaps the first time, in his idle, irresponsible young life. He had been prepared to put on the screws if necessary. There had been no need. Ted had applied his own screws and kept at his uncongenial task with such grim determination that it almost alarmed his family, so contrary was his conduct to his usual light-hearted shedding of all obligations which he could, by hook ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... meant to be inconstant, but while I strove sullenly for success in uncongenial occupation, she came to me—Aspiro—came like the truth and light, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... influences and effects, its uncontrollable impulses, its intoxicating joys, its reckless and mad career, and the dreadful remorse, and ultimate despair and ruin in which it always and inevitably ends." But Mr. Abbott has disposed of the uncongenial theme with his accustomed ingenuity and good sense. Without vailing the character of the voluptuous queen, or concealing the poetical aspects of her romantic history, he delineates the events in her life, for which she is now chiefly remembered, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... our eventual abiding place, when upon our first embarkation, as infants in arms, her violent rolling—in after life unperceived—makes every soul of us sea-sick? Does not this show, too, that the very air we here inhale is uncongenial, and only becomes endurable at last through gradual habituation, and that some blessed, placid haven, however remote at present, must be ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... years, and the following summer one of the most oppressively hot they had ever experienced. The gradations of spring, autumn, and twilight, are there scarcely known, and the sudden transition from summer to winter is as trying to the health of an European as that from day to night is uncongenial to the taste. Here, too, I repented at leisure, and amended with no small difficulty and labor, my neglect of those accomplishments to which my dear mother had so often vainly solicited my attention. The pencil was profitless; I had long thrown it by: books were ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... these invaluable if slightly uncongenial administrative activities, Sir John French was brought to a tragic standstill. A political intrigue cut across his soldier's life, and ended its usefulness for the time being. At this early date it is extremely difficult ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... explained the recognized fact that she shunned his society by thinking that she knew his evil tendencies, and that to her believing and Christian spirit his faithless and irregular life was utterly uncongenial. For a short time he had tried to ignore her opinion and society in reckless indifference; but the loveliness of her person and character daily grew more fascinating, and his evil habits lost in power as she gained. For some little time before Mrs. Byram's company, he had been ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... improvising a jollification—Jack, at any rate, does not take his pleasures sadly. The gallant bands that have from time to time gone forth to a bloodless campaign in the icy north, have always managed to keep their Christmas right joyously. Certainly they could not complain of uncongenial skies or unseasonable temperatures; while, so far as snow and ice are necessary to thorough enjoyment, the supply in the Arctic regions is on a scale sufficient to satisfy the most ardent admirer of an old-fashioned Christmas. The frozen-in Investigators under McClure kept their first ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Ojibbeway, but an Agnostic; the after-life of spirits is only (as one of our great teachers says) 'an hypothesis based on contradictory probabilities;' and I really must decline to accompany you to a place of which the existence is uncertain, and which, if it does anywhere exist, would be uncongenial in the extreme to ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... strictly reported, did not use the expression extremely, but another one which we need not dwell upon except to make reference to its inappropriateness. Mr. Rackstraw was not a man of many words, so he had to fall back upon the same very often or hold his tongue: a course uncongenial to him. This word was a piece de resistance—a ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Return to two months more of the uncongenial drudgery from which he had been so glad to escape? Besides, he could hardly hope to drag the pea-pod up on the beach and regain his bunk without attracting the notice of somebody in the cabin. He could imagine the talk of the others when he was ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... wanted to be a literary man, but his brother died, and there was no one else to help his father, so he gave up his own plans for the sake of the family. That seems to me very hard—to be unselfish and take up uncongenial work, and then to meet with nothing but failure and disappointment! I should expect to be rewarded by making piles of money, but poor old Ned has lost almost all he has. Dear, sweet, kind Mr Vanburgh, find ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... strongly influenced by Byron, as the above-mentioned poems and the short lyrics of the same period show. Again his life and his poetry were changed radically by a caustic but witty and amusing epigram on his uncongenial official superior in Odessa; and on the latter's complaint to headquarters—the complaint being as neat as the epigram, in its way—Pushkin was ordered to reside on one of the paternal estates, in the government ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... comparatively small surgical interest, since, as a rule, the features presented were those of mere lacerated wounds, while the more severe of the cases which survived only offered scope for operations of the mutilating class so uncongenial to modern ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... Certain country cousins who occasionally visited the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson cut all mental work off short; the philosopher laid down his pen when the cousins came a-cousining and literally took to the woods. An uncongenial caller would instantly unhorse Carlyle, and Tennyson had a hatred of all lion-hunters—not merely because they were lion-hunters, but because they broke in upon his paradise and snapped the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... premeditated. Even if she kissed me, I thought she did it with a purpose; if she smiled up at me as of old, I fancied the smile to be only a concealment of its opposite. By degrees we became shy of each other. We were like uncongenial intimates, forced to occupy the same house, forced into a fearful knowledge of each other's personal habits, while we knew nothing of the thoughts that make up ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... geographical, for that work, at "bread-and-butter wages," and subsequently to his translating Legendre's "Elements of Geometry" from the French for L50. At the beginning of the session of 1819, he enrolled in the class of Scots Law, with the intention of becoming an advocate. But he found law as uncongenial a study as divinity. Till 1822 he lived in various lodgings in Edinburgh, finding his chief relief from tutorial drudgery in visits to his parents in Dumfriesshire. His health, which had suffered from too close application to study, was at times "most miserable;" ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... really the best-certified Bohemians are they who choose to reside in railway-cars on stilts. But—why particularly railway-cars? That is a difficult question. A possible answer is that the Bohemian, as tending always to nomady, feels that the least uncongenial way of settling down is to stow himself into a thing fashioned for darting hither and thither. Yet no, this answer won't do. It is ruled out by the law I laid down in my first paragraph. There's nothing sadder to eye or heart ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... slumber." The first year that he spent at St Paul's was, writes one of his friends, one of "misery" for a man who loved study and quiet and the country, and hated official pomp and financial business and ceremonious appearances. But he performed his difficult and uncongenial task with almost incredible success, and is said never to have made an enemy or a mistake. The dean was distinguished for uniting in a singular degree the virtues of austerity and sympathy. He was pre-eminently endowed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... brother still lies in a very critical state, and she will not leave him at present. His motherless children, too, she thinks require her care. It seemed very lonesome at first without her. I did not think I could have missed an uncongenial person, one with whom I had so little sympathy, so much. I think I must belong to the tribe of creeping plants, which cling to whatever is nearest to them. Ashcroft grows daily more beautiful, and Thornton comes often to see me. We read together books ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... wife, cold, practical female being, you know me not; we are sundered as fah apart as if you was sitting on the North Pole and I was sitting on the South Pole. Uncongenial being, you ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... with his hand upraised, denounced the mockery of such a couple coming to God's altar. Quiet waters in landscapes, with the sun reflected in their depths, asked, if better means of escape were not at hand, was there no drowning left? Ruins cried, 'Look here, and see what We are, wedded to uncongenial Time!' Animals, opposed by nature, worried one another, as a moral to them. Loves and Cupids took to flight afraid, and Martyrdom had no such torment in ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... situations with nothing to do. How can such people be assisted to any advantage? Give them money, and they squander it; place them in situations of trust, and they are dismissed as incompetent, or they throw them up as uncongenial to their tastes. All we want in this magnificent country are people who will try to work, and if they do not succeed in one thing, will turn their hands to something else. There is ample room, I say, for persons of every ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... to call upon his captain, Woodbury Kane, when he got out, and procuring a horse rode until he found Kane's house, when he hitched the horse to a lamp-post and strolled in; how Cherokee Bill married a wife in Hoboken, and as that pleasant city ultimately proved an uncongenial field for his activities, how I had to send both himself and his wife out to the Territory; how Happy Jack, haunted by visions of the social methods obtaining in the best saloons of Arizona, applied for the position of "bouncer out" ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... providing everywhere, cheaply and unavoidably, the best possible reading-books, and it is manifest that the standard of copy-books for writing might also be pressed upward by similar methods. In addition, we have to consider—what is to me a most uncongenial subject—the possible rationalization of English spelling. I will frankly confess I know English as much by sight as by sound, and that any extensive or striking alteration, indeed that almost any alteration, in the printed appearance of English, worries me extremely. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... had not then crystallized into cast, into immiscible, uncongenial yet co-ordinate elements of a so called ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... vicinity. He was then in his sixteenth year; and having already afforded evidence of a refined taste, both in poetry and music, though careless of the ordinary routine of scholastic instruction, his new occupation was altogether uncongenial to his feelings. He, however, remained about eighteen months in the baker's service, but at length made a hasty escape from Mirfield, with only three shillings and sixpence in his pocket, and seemingly without any scheme except that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... that "writing was hard work to do, and ill paid when done." But the youth was bound to take the road to Arcady. He asked for nothing better than this ill-paid craft. His passion for it, doubtless was strengthened by his physical toil and uncongenial surroundings. For one I am not surprised that much of his early verse, which is still retained in his works, breathes the spirit of Keats, though where and how this strayed singer came to study that most perfect and delicate of masters none but himself can ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... were so totally dissimilar as to make mutual affection incompatible; and that they were unfitted for each other by nature, education, and habit. All this she had said, and with the earnestness of sincerity; yet this was not enough, for he immediately denied there being anything uncongenial in their characters, or anything unfriendly in their situations; and positively declared, that he would still love, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... place of concealment, where she could pay a more minute attention to his wants, and have an assistant in the task of ministering to his infirmities; that assistant too the lord of her affections, to whom she was ha longer compelled to wear the air of cold reserve so uncongenial ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... is no longer what it was. Formerly ideas came to me unsought: I am now obliged to seek for them; and for this I feel I am not formed." It is a sad picture, that of the old composer sitting down to work in his seventieth year, distrustful of his own powers, with an uncongenial text before him; but no indications of age or weakness are to be found in this music, which from its first note to the last is fresh, original, bright, and graceful,—a treasure-house of ideas to which subsequent composers have gone time after time when they would write of Nature or attempt ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Netherlands had not been a success. The Belgian and the Dutch people had nothing in common and their king, William of Orange (the descendant of an uncle of William the Silent), while a hard worker and a good business man, was too much lacking in tact and pliability to keep the peace among his uncongenial subjects. Besides, the horde of priests which had descended upon France, had at once found its way into Belgium and whatever Protestant William tried to do was howled down by large crowds of excited citizens ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... of her during these last few years—exile, privations, uncongenial tasks, and the mothering of eight orphans. This last demand had been the hardest. Even to their own mother, upon whom the burden had been laid gradually and gently, in Nature's wise way, the task had been a big one; ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... father does not like me; he wishes to humiliate me. Of course we are not loved here in your land. We are the irksome ones all through history. Obstinate idealists are not loved. He who is born with a pain, he who is brought up for a pain, is uncongenial, I know. To be unhappy is out of date here among you, it ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... loudness—almost the notoriety—with which he had uttered Miss Pratt's name, demanding loosely to be presented to her, regardless of the well-known law that a lady must first express some wish in such matters—these were indications of a coarse nature sure to be more than uncongenial to Miss Pratt. Its presence might make the whole occasion distasteful to her—might spoil her day. Both William and Joe Bullitt began to wonder why on earth Johnnie Watson didn't have any more sense than to invite such a big, fat lummox of a ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... result of our ignorance, great possibilities lie undeveloped in nearly all men. Self-expression is smothered in uncongenial toil. Parents and teachers, groping in the dark, have long been training natural-born artists to become mechanics, natural-born business men to become musicians, and boys and girls with great aptitudes for agriculture and horticulture to ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... be given for the composition of one of the heaviest and most unreadable of dramatic performances, interesting now, if interesting at all, solely as a curious example of the result of bestowing great powers upon a totally uncongenial task. Young men, however, may be pardoned for such blunders if they are not repeated, and Johnson, though he seems to have retained a fondness for his unlucky performance, never indulged in play writing after leaving Lichfield. The best thing connected with the play was Johnson's ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... looked very black and dull after the bright little sitting-room where she had parted with Selina; the lessons were wearisome, her companions more uncongenial than ever; she felt actually cross at the examination to which Clara subjected her about every trifle she could think of, in the house of Marchmont. She could have talked of its delights if there had been anybody to care about them in her own way, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... arrangements, and as much comfort is to be found as is compatible with throng and publicity. Still the domestic charm of private life is wanting, and its absence renders the system of constant residence most uncongenial to English habits and feelings. An unsocial reserve lies on the surface of English character, and the love of privacy, or at least of a retirement which can be closed and expanded at will, is an extensive and deep-seated ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... even when they are harmless." And rather thoughtfully she disengaged herself from the sheltering arm of that all too sympathetic young man, and went forward, shivering a little as the hiss of the enraged adder broke out from the uncongenial mud where he had ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... very liberal education—the one distinct ideal of success in life which such a nature as his could form. Constituted as he was, he probably suffered very little through the paternal unkindness which had forced him into an uncongenial career. Its only palpable result was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... happens that the much-desired carabina is graciously conceded to an unfortunate pollito, or very young gentleman, who has been unable to secure a partner. Tunicu often avails himself of a pollito when he happens to be afflicted with an uncongenial partner, or one whose manner of dancing ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... is found in the beautiful affection of Auguste Comte for his idolized Clotilde de Vaux. Although Comte was bound to a woman whom he had married in the flush of erotic desire and whom he found entirety uncongenial, Clotilde became the inspiration of his later life, and held his affection without the aid of any material bond because she so closely resembled the dead ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... at the naive confession and the gloom vanished from his face as he stood up, his long limbs cramped with the uncongenial attitude. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... had not loved him. Why, he could not tell, except that she was too young. And he wondered how much miladi had loved Laurent Giffard. How much was she capable of loving? And the sweet angel-like Helene, who had willingly crossed the ocean and exiled herself from the life she loved to these uncongenial surroundings. They were that for ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... could, and the next day at quarter before seven she was, like the rest of us, bending over her machine again. She had been a school-teacher, after passing the necessary examination at the Geneseo Normal School. She could not say why school-teaching was uncongenial to her, except that the children "made her nervous" and she wanted to try factory work. Her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the Genesee Valley. She might have lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a dependent. She was of the mystic, sentimental type. She had a broad forehead, ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... devoted to breeding work with a wide range of other plants, a continuation of much of the work he had been doing at Little Silver. The move to Chico, Cal., resulted in a great loss to his breeding work. Some of his material was left at Little Silver, much of it died in the uncongenial climate at Chico, and other promising plants were lost in the long shipment across the continent, both ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... or two tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... to be severe and unmerciful toward the poor. He remembered how, years before, his son had longed for an education, and how the mother had pleaded that he might go to school and to college, and how sternly he said, 'No, I want him in my business;' and he remembered how he kept him slaving at his uncongenial tasks, how he scolded because he still pored over his books, until at last the mother had laid the poor boy in the grave before he had attained to manhood. He remembered how the mother grew paler day by day—she who had been such a help-meet in all his ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... boy, by Martha's whimsical accounts of them, good-natured as they were. And this strange, premonitory instinct was no premonitory instinct at all, it was just the natural reluctance of a shy nature to face a new and uncongenial situation. And yet—and yet—and yet, try as she would, she could not shake off the impression that, beyond it all, there loomed something a hidden inner sense made her ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... and his company, entered the king's household, went with him to the court at London, and remained in his service for a year and three months. Having by that time become weary of this uncongenial mode of life, he obtained permission from the king to pay a visit to his old residence at Barnesdale. Here he resumes once more his former way of life 'under the greenwood-tree,' and becomes again chief of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... like the Wilds In which my early feelings had been nursed— Bare hills and valleys, full of caverns, rocks, 635 And audible seclusions, dashing lakes, Echoes and waterfalls, and pointed crags That into music touch the passing wind. Here then my young imagination found No uncongenial element; could here 640 Among new objects serve or give command, Even as the heart's occasions might require, To forward reason's else too scrupulous march. The effect was, still more elevated views ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... being uncongenial When the "discord is within," that makes all things go awry. A drunken man sees the whole world go around, and blames it, ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... plaintive song of the teakettle may have been but the wail of imprisoned power, until Watts set it free to work out its glorious destiny, so the boy's surly ways had been his own protest against a destiny that seemed enchaining him to an uncongenial work, for which he brought neither love nor patience. In more congenial labor his soul had broadened, his heart grown warmer, his very looks had improved—But we were talking of the great house near the church. This stately pile, with broad ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... strangely brought together again, lay a few feet from one another; the mind of each turning in the stillness of the night, to the link which had bound them, nay, which still bound them in a forced and uncongenial union. ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... when I witness stage tragedies arising out of a marriage of uncongenial types is to understand how the couple ever came together. And so here, when the English girl, Margaret Tinworth, in face of poverty and parental disapproval, marries a Prussian officer in a small garrison town, and then finds all sorts of unbearable conditions in her surroundings, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... to send them away by sea when it should be no longer feasible to keep them. Escovedo shared in the sentiments and entered fully into the schemes of his chief. The plot, the secret enterprise, was the great cause of the advent of Don John in the uncongenial clime of Flanders. It had been, therefore, highly important, in his estimation, to set, as soon as possible, about the accomplishment of this important business. He accordingly entered into correspondence with Antonio Perez, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... goes naturally with a love—excessive or reasonable—of the old order; and Scott, though writing carelessly to amuse idle readers, was stimulating the historical conceptions, which, for whatever reason, were most uncongenial to the Utilitarian as to all ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... to which they belonged. The real issue was that they were at war with its mores. In that war they could not prevail so as to change the mores. They could not even realize their own plan of life in the midst of uncongenial mores. The English Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to transform the mores of their age. Many of them emigrated to uninhabited territory in order to make a society in which their ideal mores ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... but here she stopped. She was sanguine, impulsive, courageous, but, with all that could be said for it, the change she must face if he claimed her was a startling one. Besides, he must clear himself of suspicion, and because the part of a mere looker-on was uncongenial, there was a course which she would urge on him. She must see him and convince him of the necessity for it. Soon after she had made up her mind on this point, Jernyngham and Colston came in, and she had to ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... spirit, thus warmed into life, should descend into its natural ties. Uncongenial brothers and sisters are often thrown together and bound by the most indissoluble natural ties. We should cultivate these natural affections and family ties as types of the ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... unallied unopening earth, Over the unrecognising sea; while air Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth, And fire repel us from its living waves. And then we shall unwillingly return Back to this meadow of calamity, This uncongenial place, this human life; And in our individual human state Go through the sad probation all again, To see if we will poise our life at last, To see if we will now at last be true To our own only true, deep-buried selves, Being ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... crossed the boundary stream, and, in so doing, did indeed destroy a mighty kingdom; not however that of the Medes and Persians, but my own poor Lydia, which, as a satrapy of Cambyses, finds its loss of independence a hard and uncongenial yoke." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... She wondered if Nancy Ellen would be compelled to put off her wedding and teach the home school in order that it might be taught by a Bates, as her father had demanded. She wondered if Nancy Ellen was forced to this uncongenial task, whether it would sour the wonderful sweetness developed by her courtship, and make her so provoked that she would not write or have anything to do with her. They were nearly the same age; they had shared rooms, and, until recently, beds, and whatever life brought them; now Kate ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... been sacrificed to exigencies not very long before. He had no difficulty in deciding how to use this money. His mother's desire to live in London had in him the force of an inherited motive; as soon as possible he released himself from his uncongenial occupations, converted into money all the possessions of which he had not immediate need, and betook ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... selection of your calling do not stand hesitating and doubting too long. Enter somewhere, no matter how hard or uncongenial the work, do it with all your might, and the effort will strengthen you and qualify you to find work that is more in accord ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... you and me up like that, out of these surroundings, congenial and pleasant, and set us down where we had no thought of going, and never would have gone of our own choice, and we sing as we are picked up, and keep on singing where we find ourselves amidst the uncongenial perhaps, the strange, the unprecedented and hard,—if He were free to control like that these days, there would be a present-day Pentecost beside which the Acts-Pentecost was but the beginnings ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... his spontaneous impulses, even though it might be for the last time of asking. To his surprise, Cook was delighted with his article, and henceforward he was able to write freely, without hampering himself by the attempt to satisfy uncongenial ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... writings of Cervantes or of Sterne. Are we incapable of ardent idealism? Then we cannot be just to Shelley. Is a capacity for profound reverence and adoration not ours? Then we must not claim to say the last word on Dante. The uncongenial subject prevents us from feeling with the writer, and we therefore fancy a defect of literary power or charm in him, while the defect is all the time in ourselves. We will, for the moment, suppose ourselves to be the ideal critics. And let us first see what the supreme ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the only member of the Bumpus family who did not find uncongenial such distractions and companionships as were offered by the civilization that surrounded them. The Bagatelle she despised; that was slavery—but slavery out of which she might any day be snatched, like Leila Hawtrey, by a prince charming who had made a success in life. Success to Lise ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... it could not be fairly said that his appearance was unprepossessing; indeed, to the congenial, it would have been doubtless not uncongenial; while to others, it could not fail to be at least curiously interesting, from the warm air of florid cordiality, contrasting itself with one knows not what kind of aguish sallowness of saving discretion ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... requisite of congenial marriage is love. Without being cemented by this element the conjugal union is sure to be uncongenial. It is the strongest bond, the firmest cord, uniting two hearts inseparably together. Love for the opposite sex has always been a controlling influence with mankind. It is the most elevating of all the emotions and the purest and tenderest of all sentiments. It exerts a ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... the room. Reaching the mantel-piece, he took a pipe from the pipe-rack and some tobacco from the jar that stood behind the books. His face looked tired and a little worn, as is common with men who have worked long at an uncongenial task. Shredding the tobacco between his hands, he slowly filled the pipe, then lighted it from the fire with a spill ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... on the skirts of the forest, and marched quietly down the bowsprit to his usual place on deck. He had evidently found the forests of the Rio Negro very different from those of the delta lands of the Japura, and preferred captivity to freedom in a place that was so uncongenial to him. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... upon his appearance, much as it struck me at the time. I will merely say he offered a contrast to Guy, who, if I may speak so plainly in this presence, had seemed much at home in the task he had set himself, uncongenial as one might consider it to the usual instincts and habits of a gentleman. But Dwight—you see I can be just, Miss Sterling—looked anxious and out of place; and, instead of seeming to be prepared for the situation, turned and ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... for the first time, although her father had been almost two years in his quiet grave amongst the Hills; and, with her cousin, who was now indeed her only friend, if slightly uncongenial, decided ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... charming bungalow by the sea; capital bathing, shooting, fishing; nice quiet time generally; back Monday morning in season for biz!" This was certainly satisfactory as far as it went, but I added, by way of parenthesis, "and who else will be present?" knowing well enough that one uncongenial spirit might be the undoing of us all. To this Bartholomew responded, "No one but ourselves, old fellow; now don't be queer." He knew well enough my aversion to certain elements unavoidable even in the best society, and how I kept very ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Slavery flourished only where the plantation system was profitable and this was not the case in Pennsylvania. The industrial development of the State was in the direction of small farming, manufacturing and commerce, all of which were uncongenial to slavery. In the absence of paramount economic needs, slavery was unable to hold its own against the moral idealism of the Quaker and the racial antipathies of the German and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... vocation, and Carlyle was himself quite undecided about it. To promote this idea the profession of schoolmaster was taken up for the time. He continued in it for more than six years, first at Annan and then at Kirkcaldy; but he was soon finding it uncongenial and rebelling against it. A few years later he tried reading law with no greater contentment; and in order to support himself he was reduced to teaching private pupils. The chief friend of this period was ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... complexion, his restless dark eyes, and his profusely curling black hair. The other was a middle-aged woman in frowsy garments; tall and stout, sly and sullen. The smart young man stood behind the uncongenial-looking person with whom he had associated himself, using her as a screen to hide him while he watched the travellers on their way to the train. As the bell rang, the woman suddenly faced her companion, and ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... of his wife's more sympathetic insight, Edward Spence would have continued to interpret Miriam's cheerless frame of mind as a mere result of impatience at being removed from the familiar scenes of her religious activity, and of disquietude amid uncongenial surroundings. "A Puritan at Naples"—that was the phrase which represented her to his imagination; his liking for the picturesque and suggestive led him to regard her solely in that light. No strain of modern humanitarianism complicated Miriam's character. One had not to take into account a possible ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... in society he was the shyest and most undemonstrative of men. To a single friend whom he trusted, he would pour out his inmost heart; but let two or three be gathered together, above all, introduce a stranger, and he instantly became a quiet, unobtrusive listener, though never a moody or uncongenial one! ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... with relief of the Sundays ahead and felt very much the way a hospitable housewife feels when an uncongenial guest departs and the home springs back to its old cheery order and ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... spirit; lived in a suggestive atmosphere of private sorrow and amid a community of much quaintness; he was also enabled to know books at an early age; yet these things only helped, and not produced, his genius. Sometimes they helped by repression, for there was much that was uncongenial in his early life; yet the clairvoyance, the unconscious wisdom, of that interior quality, genius, made him feel that the adjustment of his outer and his inner life was such as to give him a chance of unfolding. Had he gone to sea, his awaking power would have come violently into contact ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... who now recognized in time the power of the satirist and the value of his approval. Churchill himself was delighted with his good fortune. He was the talk of the town; he had plenty of money in his pocket; he was separated from his wife, freed from his uncongenial profession, and he could exchange the solemn black of the cleric for a blue coat with brass ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... folk fancy that mind counts for nothing in marriage. A man must have congenial company, or he will fly to company that is uncongenial; he must have joy of some kind, or he will fall into despair. The company and the joy can best be supplied by the wife to the husband, and by the husband to the wife. If the woman is dull and trivial, then her husband soon begins to neglect her; if she is meek and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... from them in the exercises," he said in effect, "because it would have been useless (as well as cruel) to force you to labour on a subject so uncongenial to you; and for the same reason I have decided that it is to be a tale of adventure, in which the heroine need be little more than a beautiful sack of coals which your cavalier carries about with him on his left shoulder. I am afraid we must have her to that extent, Thomas, but ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... other prisoners are commonplace and rude; He says he cannot relish uncongenial prison food. When quite a boy they taught him to distinguish Good from Bad, And other ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... Hebraism [Greek: meta salpingos phones megales] (St. Matt. xxiv. 31) presents an uncongenial ambiguity to Western readers, as our own incorrect A. V. sufficiently shews. Two methods of escape from the difficulty suggested themselves to the ancients:—(a) Since 'a trumpet of great sound' means nothing else ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... reproduce themselves in sprouts from the upper parts of their roots. These sprouts become independent plants, and continue to tiller (thus keeping the land supplied with a full growth), until the roots of the stools (or clumps of tillers), come in contact with an uncongenial part of the soil, when the tillering ceases; the stools become extinct on the death of their plants, and the ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... and his austerity of tone and manner seemed momentarily to acquire a tint of softness uncongenial with his habitual nature; "Theodora, I am a man of guilt; yea, one who plays his part in this detested world without a feeling of remorse—but I cannot harm a woman—and you less than any other of your sex. She, like you, was innocent and beautiful—like you, unfortunate—like ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio |
