"Excrescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there. Running water, pine trees, sun and moon and stars. All their life, as all their art, seems to be a mood of these. For to them their life and their art are inseparable. The art is not an accomplishment, an ornament, an excrescence. It is the flower of the plant. Some men, some families of men, feeling beauty as every one felt it, had the power also to express it. Or perhaps I should say—it is the Japanese view—to suggest it. To them the branch of ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... no cordiality in the reply. If Mr. Hammond was a sensitive man, touchily conscious of his own obscurity, he must have felt that he was not wanted at Fellside—that he was an excrescence, matter in the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of a tall fig tree—flourishing in one of the corners, its dense, wide branching top making a literal roof for the otherwise roofless hall—an enormous ant's nest was plastered, a black excrescence looking like burnt paper, and which crumbled like soft crisp cinder as I poked it with the barrel of my gun, to the dismay of its myriad little red inhabitants—the only denizens it would seem ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... of sage-brush and silence could, within walking distance of desolation, show such wealth of young timber, such shade and beauty. Her noiseless footfalls scarce startled a sage-hen that, realizing too late her presence, froze to the dead stump—a ruffled gray excrescence with glittering bead eyes that stared at her furtively, the one live thing ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... specific cause, these last two statements express all that we believe to-day. As early as 1851, however, the existence of a specific cause was hinted at by Blaine in his 'Veterinary Art.' We find him here describing canker as a fungoid excrescence, exuding a thin and offensive discharge, which inoculates the soft parts within its reach, particularly the sensitive frog and sole, and destroys their connections with the ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... represented his views better than those who are in favor of immediate emancipation. In explanation of his views on this subject the President said that in his speeches he had frequently used as an illustration the case of a man who had an excrescence on the back of his neck, the removal of which in one operation would result in the death of the patient, while tinkering it off by ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... flowing blood, in the heaving lungs, and chiseled limbs, while the accountable actions of this finely-knit and symmetrical form, especially the loftiest actions for which it was made, the diffusion of good, are exempted from this universal law? Such an exception, how incongruous! It would be an excrescence on ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... are, and God being what He is, there can be no divine message without a side of what the world calls threatening, or what Ahab called' prophesying evil.' I beseech you, do not be carried away by the modern talk about Christianity being gloomy and dark, or fancy that we put a blot and an excrescence upon the pure religion of the Man of Nazareth, when we speak of the death that follows sin, and of the darkness into which unbelief carries ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... critic was able to bring together an anthology of quotations which seemed like a rather forcible indictment of Schiller's literary taste. What Moritz failed to see was that the bad taste was only an excrescence growing upon a very vigorous stock. This was felt by another reviewer who declared that high poetic genius shone forth from every scene of Schiller's works. Many years later Zelter, the friend of Goethe, bore witness to the electric effect of the play ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... along—here dexterously severing the leg of a Chippendale chair, and there hacking a piece off a Louis Quatorze couch—leads the way to an annexe he has just built for the reception of his treasured books. From the outside this excrescence on the Castle has but a poverty-stricken look. It is, to tell the truth, made of corrugated iron. But that is a cloak that cunningly covers an interior of rare beauty and rich design. Arras of cloth of gold hangs loosely on the walls, whilst here and there, on the far-reaching floor, gleams ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... the conscious war between the brain above and the sub-ego below, with the latter's constant reminders that mind is a mere excrescence, often warped or ill-directed, at the apex of the perfect body, is almost negligible. Even, when moral their lack of reticence, their practical logic, their habit of facing every fact pertaining to life, psychical and physical, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... was curious. On cutting down an ash-tree in the neighbourhood of Linton, Cambridgeshire, in 1818, a knob on its trunk was lopped off, and this medal discovered in its core! It was probably the cause of the excrescence, having been, perhaps, thrust under the bark to escape the danger of its apparently political allusion. The Linton carrier purchased it for half-a-crown, and from him it passed in 1820 into hands ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... apparent that these could not affect the freedom and security which, coupled with the natural advantages of the country, afforded the fullest scope and strongest stimulant to industrial activity. The extinction of slavery was the cutting away of an excrescence: the wound under a proper treatment was sure to heal, and even under unwise treatment Nature has been doing her work until only a scar remains. Painful, too, as was the operation, its success has given the clearest proof of the health ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... the absence of the wart, and a bit of surgeon's plaster covering the spot. I laughed over his having undergone such a severe surgical operation, and he seemed to take it in good part, assuring me that HE was the surgeon who amputated the excrescence with a razor. Of course I thought nothing strange of it at ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... fashion with certain critics (especially with those who have read it superficially) to speak of the Second Part of Goethe's Faust, as they do of Paradise Regained, with a certain superciliousness, as a superfluous excrescence, the artistically almost worthless product of a mind that had worked itself out and had exhausted ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... plumes are common with many kinds of birds; we might call the wattle or corrugated skin round the base of the beak of the English carrier-pigeon a monstrosity, but we do not thus speak of the globular fleshy excrescence at the base of the beak of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... allow of the passage, not only of the brig, but of a couple of line-of-battle ships abreast. The island had the appearance of being simply the topmost ridge of a mountain rising with a tolerably even continuous slope from the bottom of the sea; and the barrier reef was merely an excrescence or wall of coral built on to one side of it, and founded at a depth of ten fathoms below the surface of the ocean, as our lead presently told us. The basin thus formed had, during the course of ages, become partially filled with sand, forming ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... of this ponderous censure received Mark in the same room where two and a half years ago the late Bishop had decided that the Third Altar in St. Agnes' Church was an intolerable excrescence. Nowadays the room was less imposing, not more imposing indeed than the room of a scholarly priest who had been able to collect a few books and buy such pieces of ancient furniture as consorted with his severe taste. Dr. Oliphant himself, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... said brain, The stomach, like a belt. like an auger. The pylorus, like a pitchfork. The worm-like excrescence, like The windpipe, like an oyster- a Christmas-box. knife. The membranes, like a monk's The throat, like a pincushion cowl. stuffed with oakum. The funnel, like a mason's chisel. The lungs, like a prebend's The fornix, like a casket. fur-gown. The ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is one thing that they should not do: they should pass no judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear: the eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort, lies upon one side, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... not simple but complex, and what we need to aim at is a character, not an excrescence. Some people's goodness is like a wart or a wen. Their virtues are cases of what medical technicality calls hypertrophy. But our goodness should be like harmonious Indian patterns, where all colours blend in a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... covered over with an excrescence of the bark, in the aged apple-tree, at the juncture of a large bough (the very bough that was lately cracked by the hurricane), and it was here that he had accumulated the spoils of the many expeditions he had undertaken, the loot ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... containing them can be buried so deeply on a dry knoll in a garden as to be below frost. Leaves piled above them ensure safety. Make sure that the boxes are buried where no water can collect either on or beneath the surface. Before new roots can be made by a cutting, a whitish excrescence appears at both its ends, called the callus, and from this the rootlets start out. This essential process goes on throughout the winter, and therefore the advantage of making cuttings in the fall. Occasionally, in the fall, we may obtain a variety that we are anxious to increase, in which ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... whose antiquity and picturesqueness are more popular than the attractions of Whitby, the railway deposits one in some distressingly ugly modern excrescence, from which it may even be necessary for a stranger to ask his way to the old-world features he has come to see. But at Whitby the railway, without doing any harm to the appearance of the town, at once gives ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... finished, looked the same from New Street; and the portico of the Society of Artists' rooms stood over the pavement then. With these exceptions I only know one more building that has not been pulled down, or so altered as to be unrecognisable. The exemption is the excrescence called Christ Church, which still disfigures the very finest site ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... stood eyeing each other. The elephant, although much the larger, knew his antagonist well. He had met his "sort" before, and knew better than to despise his powers. Perhaps, ere now, he had had a touch of that long spit-like excrescence that stood ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... accretion, extension, increase, augmentation, increment, enlargement; excrescence hypertrophy, overgrowth; germination, cultivation, pullulation, sprouting. Antonyms: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... need not blame Gerard when he boldly said that "this excrescence hath not any roote, neither doth encrease himselfe of his seed, as some have supposed, but it rather commethe of a certaine moisture gathered together upon the boughes and joints of the trees, through the barke whereof this vaporous moisture proceeding bringeth ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... by Corn-Laws, even if I could! No, I would fling my Corn-Laws and Shotbelts to the Devil; and try to help this man. I would teach him, by noble precept and law-precept, by noble example most of all, that Mammonism was not the essence of his or of my station in God's Universe; but the adscititious excrescence of it; the gross, terrene, godless embodiment of it; which would have to become, more or less, a godlike one. By noble real legislation, by true noble's-work, by unwearied, valiant, and were it wageless effort, in my Parliament ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... building might be seen the arms of the family; while the tall twisted stacks of chimneys, which appeared to spring from all parts of the roof, were carved and built in such curious and quaint devices that they were rather an ornament than an excrescence. When you entered the quadrangle, you found one side solely occupied by the old hall, the huge carved rafters of whose oak roof rested on corbels of the family supporters against the walls. These walls were of stone, but covered half-way ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... done with his money?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... height of the roof should bear a proportion to the area; so, in the heightenings of poetry, the strength and vehemence of figures should be suited to the occasion, the subject, and the persons. All beyond this is monstrous: it is out of nature, it is an excrescence, and not a living part of poetry. I had not said thus much, if some young gallants, who pretend to criticism, had not told me, that this tragi-comedy wanted the dignity of style; but, as a man, who is charged with a crime of which he thinks himself innocent, is ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... him the smoothest writer of his day; Lay stress upon the fact that he'd to seek In his own mind what others find in Greek; Grant all you please, in turn you must allow, Had fate postponed his life from then to now, He'd prune redundancies, apply the file To each excrescence that deforms his style, Oft in the pangs of labour scratch his head, And bite his nails, and bite them, till they bled. Oh yes! believe me, you must draw your pen Not once nor twice but o'er and o'er again Through what you've written, if you would entice The man that reads you once to read ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... century) in a manner almost catastrophic for continental masonry, yet I observe in anticipation that this kind of rosicrucian expansion is not immediately concerned with the question as to the original relation of freemasonry and rosicrucianism. We must know how to distinguish the excrescence from the real idea. Rosicrucianism died out at the beginning of the 19th century. The rosicrucian degrees that still exist in many systems of freemasonry (as Knight of the Red Cross, etc.) are historical relics. Those who now parade as rosicrucians ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... are the largest on the island, and supplied us with all the timber we used; yet even these would not work to a greater length than forty feet. The top of the myrtle is circular, and as uniform and regular as if clipped round by art. It bears an excrescence like moss on its bark, having the taste and smell of garlic, and was used instead of it by our people. We found here the pimento, and the cabbage-tree, but in no great quantity. Besides these, there were a great number of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... The most remarkable article of dress is one which I have vaguely understood to constitute a part of the equipment of my own fair countrywomen—in a word, the veritable bustle. Among the belles of Axim, there is a reason for the excrescence which does not exist elsewhere; for the little children ride astride of the maternal bustle, which thus becomes as useful, as it is unquestionably ornamental. Fashion, however, has evidently more to do with the matter than convenience; for old wrinkled grandams wear these beautiful ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... time to lose. I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called Earth. Now the part is played, and I am to be withdrawn. That my human heart is torn with insupportable anguish, matters not at all. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... instantly perceive, without the aid of any elaborate illustration, that there must always be an immense disproportion between the objects of federal and state expenditures. It is true that several of the States, separately, are encumbered with considerable debts, which are an excrescence of the late war. But this cannot happen again, if the proposed system be adopted; and when these debts are discharged, the only call for revenue of any consequence, which the State governments will continue to experience, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... digging corpses out of the shallow graves, and devouring bodies. I once came across the body of a child in the vicinity of a jungle village which had been unearthed by one. At Seonee we had, at one time, a plague of mad jackals, which did much damage. Sir Emerson Tennent writes of a curious horn or excrescence which grows on the head of the jackal occasionally, which is regarded by the Singhalese as a potent charm, by the instrumentality of which every wish can be realised, and stolen property will return of its own accord! This horn, which is called Nari-comboo, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... working clothes, he had looked what he was, a strong and honest young farmer. To-day, in his Sunday broadcloth, with a brilliant blue neck scarf, a brass horseshoe pin, and a large bunch of primroses in his button-hole, he looked a blot, an excrescence, on the sunny earth. Personally, he might have been tall, but for a pronounced stoop; fair, but that he was burnt brick colour; smooth-faced, but for the multitude of lines and furrows, resulting from long exposure ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... word, Kamilaroi Dialect of New South Wales. [W. Ridley, 'Kamilaroi,' p. 25, derives it from Kulu, seed, but it is just as likely from Kolle, water.—J. Mathew.] A hollowed knot of a tree, used as a seed vessel, or for holding water. The word is applied to the excrescence on the tree as well as to the vessel; a bush hand has been heard to speak of a hump-backed ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... at the excessive and almost absurd tameness of a fine Mutum or Curassow turkey, that ran about the house. It was a large glossy-black species (the Mitu tuberosa), having an orange- coloured beak, surmounted by a bean-shaped excrescence of the same hue. It seemed to consider itself as one of the family: attending all the meals, passing from one person to another round the mat to be fed, and rubbing the sides of its head in a coaxing way against their cheeks or shoulders. At night it went to roost on a chest in a sleeping-room ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... his "Surgical Observations on Tumors," observes that cancer of the penis begins by a warty excrescence on the glans or prepuce. Walshe, in his work on the "Nature and Treatment of Cancer," says: "The disease may commence in almost all parts of the organ, but the glans and prepuce are by far its most common primary seats. It may originate either from a warty excrescence ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... ants of the Mauritius generally build their nests in trees, where one of them looks like a huge excrescence of the stem. Numerous covered ways approach it along the branches and up the trunk. Not a single insect is seen, though thousands may be employed in bringing to this castle the produce of the tree or the booty they have collected from the neighbouring country. They have a pale, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... one," cried the lad, as with a rushing, heavy beating sound of its wings, a great bird flow directly over their heads, uttering a hoarse cry, and with its huge curved bill bearing a curious, nearly square, excrescence on the top, plainly ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... combination made is to be harmonious, the artist must induce in each of its component parts (suppose two only, for simplicity's sake,) such imperfection as that the other shall put it right. If one of them be perfect by itself, the other will be an excrescence. Both must be faulty when separate, and each corrected by the presence of the other. If he can accomplish this, the result will be beautiful; it will be a whole, an organized body with dependent members;—he is an inventor. If not, let his separate ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... made the passage slowly and miserably, sometimes crying out with pain as his toes struck a sharper flint, once or twice sitting down on a boulder to blow like a whale, once slipping on his knees and wetting the strange excrescence about his middle, which was his tucked-up waterproof. But the crossing was at length achieved, and on a patch of sea-pinks he dried himself perfunctorily and hastily put on his garments. Old Bill, who seemed to be regardless of wind or water, squatted beside him ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest she after a few weeks became numb—no new or strange phenomenon in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably in the company of the unafflicted. In her affliction Susan at least saw only those affected like herself—and that helped not a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... small excrescence or hut on the roof—about ten feet by six in dimensions—which formed—their residence. Behind this, hiding itself as it were and almost invisible, nestled a smaller excrescence or offshoot. It was a mere bandbox of a thing, measuring five feet by four; ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... to be done; and a most melancholy day I passed. For, it inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the whole company, that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And to make it worse, they all asked me from time to time,—in short, whenever they had nothing else to do,—why I didn't enjoy myself? And what could I possibly do then, but say I was ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... party made its appearance in the politics of Coldriver, and Marvin Towne was announced as its candidate for the legislature. It seemed a spontaneous excrescence, but, nevertheless, it caused a visit from that great man and citizen, Lafe Siggins, as well as a call from Mr. Crane, of Crane & Keith. Both astute gentlemen viewed the situation, and their alarm subsided. Indeed, both perceived where it could be turned to advantage. A canvass of the situation ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... by subsequent annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I have sometimes adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant excrescence of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Rowe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shewn ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... civilized world is affected with Psora. I must therefore disappoint any advocate of Hahnemann who may honor me with his presence, by not attacking a doctrine on which some of the disciples of his creed would be very happy to have its adversaries waste their time and strength. I will not meddle with this excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would be dropped, like the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed; time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... catches her small brown hands in a close grip. The new Lady Rylton plants a very shapely little foot against an excrescence in the wall, and in a second has her knee ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... days before the death of Tricot, a very annoying thing happened to him; a small excrescence, a kind of pimple, appeared on ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... Confucian institution. A body of official and literary opinion always strong and often overwhelmingly strong regarded imperial patronage of Buddhism or Taoism as a concession to the whims of the people, as an excrescence on the Son of Heaven's proper faith or even a perversion of it. But the Mongol Court had not this prejudice and Khubilai, like other members of his house[679] and like Akbar in India, was the patron of all the religions professed by his subjects. His real object was ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... inscription—the Latin word EFFODE— which he remembered to have carved in the bark of the tree, with a whole day's toil, when he had first begun to muse about his exalted destiny. It might be accounted a rather singular coincidence, that the bark, just above the inscription, had put forth an excrescence, shaped not unlike a hand, with the forefinger pointing obliquely at the word of fate. Such, at least, was its ...
— The Threefold Destiny (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with the view that criminals are executed because they are above the level of the average. For the most part they are the excrescence of society, just as perverted, though in a different manner, as are those criminal types whom you consider below the level of ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... speech, with its incomparable rhythm! I like to think that he gave the spectators an idea that Valentine's self-sacrifice for Angelica was nothing but a bold device, a calculated effect; otherwise the sacrifice is an excrescence in this comedy, which, popular and broad though it be, is cynical in Congreve's manner throughout. One is consoled, however, by the pleasant fate of the ingenious Mr. Tattle and the intriguing Mrs. Frail, who are left tied for life against their will. The trick, by the way, of a ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... sporting two to one, Jeeves, judging from what you have seen of him, that this chappie is not a blighter or an excrescence?" ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... to move Excalibur once he had decided to remain where he was; so Eileen and the curate agreed to regard him as a sort of artificial excrescence, like the buttress in a fives court. If the ball hit him, as it frequently did, the player waiting for it was at liberty either to play it or claim a let. This arrangement added a piquant and pleasing variety to what ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... what I must And leaving what I can—such points as this. I won't—that is, I can't throw one away. Supposing there's no truth in what I hold About the need of trial to man's faith, Still, when you bid me purify the same, To such a process I discern no end. Clearing off one excrescence to see two, There's ever a next in size, now grown as big, That meets the knife: I cut and cut again! First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last But Fichte's clever cut at God himself? Experimentalize on sacred things! I trust nor hand nor eye nor heart nor brain To stop betimes: they all get ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... that one muscle or limb may acquire excessive strength, and an unnatural size, at the expense of the health of the whole body: I cannot think this desirable, either for the individual or for society.—The unfortunate people in certain mountains of Switzerland are, some of them, proud of the excrescence by which they are deformed. I have seen women vain of exhibiting mental deformities, which to me appeared no less disgusting. In the course of my life it has never been my good fortune to meet with a female whose mind, in strength, just proportion, and activity, I ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... good-sized tree; then divesting himself of his boots, and choosing one of the largest stems he could distinguish, he prepared to mount an old blue gum, whose trunk rose for fully forty feet smooth and straight, and without an impediment or excrescence. Putting his supple vine-stalk round the tree, and firmly grasping each end of the cane by his hands, he placed his feet firmly against the stalwart denizen of the woods, and rose in bounding starts with a celerity astonishing to the uninitiated. Upon reaching ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... attack such as Mr. Gosse makes on Browne's latinisms can possibly be valid. For it is surely an error to judge and to condemn the latinisms without reference to the whole style of which they form a necessary part. Mr. Gosse, it is true, inclines to treat them as if they were a mere excrescence which could be cut off without difficulty, and might never have existed if Browne's views upon the English language had been a little different. Browne, he says, 'had come to the conclusion that classic words were the only legitimate ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Apis was brought and the king told that he was the progeny of a virgin cow and a moonbeam, that he must be black, with a white triangular spot on the forehead, the likeness of an eagle on his back, and on his side the crescent moon. There must be two kinds of hair on his tail, and on his tongue an excrescence in the form of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... just ridden round a contiguous cape of lignum, and now, dismounting and throwing his reins on the ground, joined our unappreciative group. After folding his interminable legs in two places, and clasping his hands round his shins, this excrescence on ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... greatest blessings we enjoy, one of the greatest blessings a people can enjoy, is liberty. But every good in this life has its allay of evil. Licentiousness is the allay of liberty. It is an ebullition, an excrescence; it is a speck upon the eye of the political body, which I can never touch but with a gentle, with a trembling hand; lest I destroy the body, lest I injure the eye, upon which it is apt to appear. If the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... of the 29th we anchored in Holdfast Road, in 4 1/2 fathoms, Mount Lofty,* a slight excrescence on the highest part of the range of hills eastwards, bearing North 80 degrees East; a flagstaff at a straggling village under it pointed out the township of Glenelg. At the foot of this we made our observations, which place it in latitude 34 degrees 58 minutes ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... of this excrescence of speech, where the speaker is the umpire, and feels himself at liberty, unreproved, to say what he pleases. He is charmed with the sound of his own voice. The periods flow numerous from his tongue, and he gets on at his ease. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin |
